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Reading List More from Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer
Ridgeline subscribers — Hello! It’s me, Craig Mod. I’m doing an event with David Marx in Tokyo this Friday night (17th) at Tiger Mountain, a small, hip bookshop. The in-person tix are all sold out, but it will be livestreamed, and there are still tickets for that bit. It costs about seven bucks, and would make the small bookshop running it super happy to sell more tickets! (Although I realize the timezone difference is terrible for most readers …)
Ridgeline subscribers — For the last ten days I’ve been walking around London. Mostly in a little corner of it in the northeast part of the city. But can you even call a part a “corner” when the city extends in every direction without stopping? Whatever you call it, I’ve been in my little northeast section (if not corner) spending mornings reading and writing until I’m cross-eyed and then afternoons walking the streets over and over again.
Roden Readers — There is sweat and then there is s-w-e-a-t and the out-of-doorsness in Japan is presently a natural machine that produces nothing but sweat and sweat and sweat and swelter. Dryness has been eradicated. Fire is impossible to start. Blowtorch any single thing and it will laugh in your face. The implicit ubiquity of moistness inspired Japanese dictionary publishers to excise “dry.” A useless word. The only sane response is to find a cool cave at the top of a mountain and hibernate until November. (Or go to Victoria, Canada, which I did; more on that below.)
Ridgeline subscribers — Man, it was fun talking with Kazunori Hamana back in January. He’s lived a bizarre life, seemingly one without a roadmap, though I suspect his laid-back, subtly-goatee’d vibes belie a cunning streak. He was welcoming and rough-edged in a disarming way. He lives out in the wilds of Chiba, in an area that feels like it may cease to exist without his presence in ten or fifteen years. Many lives ago, he lived in the wilds of Shibuya, running a select / used-clothing shop called “Blues” out of Ura-Harajuku (back when Ura-Hara was a place you’d catch whispers of on rogue Usenet forums, or in copies of TOKION snatched from Casa Magazines in the West Village, if anywhere; today it is splayed about TikTok like a glazed ham at Old Country Buffet) and driving around in a Ferrari. Now he drives a kei-truck and spends all the money he makes selling his incredible pottery on buying land and old homes on the Chiba coast, setting up artist residencies, creating space for artist communities to take root.
Ridgeline subscribers — Thanks for all the “Yo!“s last week. It looks like transmissions from mailbot2k are getting through. (Let me know if you see any “rendering errors” in your email clients; I think we fixed the Proton Mail issues.) FYI, because the last issue of Roden ended up in many a spam folder, let me also announce here a reading I’m doing next week: Wednesday, June 10, 2026, Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, NC (RSVP at that link!) Hope to see you there!
More in literature
The post Substitute Torture appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.
Mikke Reinikainen is a Finnish bowyer who has been carving primitive bows for more than two decades and has made over 600 bows, several hundred of which he still has. He is a longstanding board member in Finland’s largest primitive archery club.
When I have a problem, Johanna—a.k.a. my wife—typically solves it by asking me one of four questions.
George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois (c. 1604, pub. 1607) is another play performed by one of London’s boys’ companies. It is a bloody, crazy tragedy disguised as a history, a strange blend of the static Senecan and dynamic Elizabethan play. Chapman’s verse is allusive and compact – I sure needed my edition’s notes – and in places magnificent. It was written for an audience that wanted this kind of verse, this density of reference, and that had a sophisticated understanding of theatrical convention. Sophisticated, jaded, I don’t know. Anyway, they paid more than Shakespeare’s audience, and not just to sit in a theater with a roof. No groundlings at Bussy D’Ambois. Incidentally, reading in this period (1598-1608) the importance of the adult vs boys’ company distinction. The ambitious, highbrow, satirical, meta-textual plays were at the boys’ theater. Jonson, Marston, Chapman, they wanted the intellectual prestige of the boys’ companies. Meanwhile, over at the crass commercial adult company, Shakespeare was producing King Lear, so things did not work out exactly as expected. In fairness, those adult companies also clearly churned out a lot of junk. Anyway, Bussy D’Ambois. He is a French soldier who briefly becomes a successful courtier despite being rude, belligerent, and sarcastic. He offends everyone around him except for the king’s brother, and eventually the king, who like that he is not the usual empty flatterer. Everyone else hates him, though, and you can guess how the tragedy ends. The core conceit of the character is quite good. Bussy imagines himself as a man of perfect integrity, but what if he is unconsciously as Machiavellian a schemer as anyone else at court. He has just promised the king’s brother, Monsieur, that he will do anything to serve him but kill the King: MONSIEUR: … and thy gall Turns all thy blood to poison, which is cause Of that Tode-poole that stands in my complextion; And makes thee (with a cold and earthie moisture, Which is the damme of putrification, As plague to thy damn’d pride) rot as thou liv’dst; To study calumnies and treacheries; To thy friends slaughters, like a Scrich-owle sing, And to all mischiefs, but to kill the King. (III.2) Much of the verse is of this quality. Here the love interest, Tamyra, is not debating but rather feeling, in monologue form, the conflict between her loyalty to her husband and her new love for Bussy: TAMYRA: Now all the peacefull regents of the night, Silently gliding exhalations, Languishing windes, and murmuring fals of waters, Sadnesse of heart, and ominous securenesse, Enchantments, dead sleepes, all the friends of rest, That ever wrought upon the life of man, Extend your utmost strengths… (II.2) Marvelous stuff for actors and readers with a taste for blank verse. I often had some doubts about what I would understand sitting in the audience. On the one hand, as the editor of my edition writes, “eight men die, a woman is tortured, a maid is stabbed, several devils are raised and a ghost appears to a roll of thunder” (p. 345). Pretty exciting. On the other, speeches are highly rhetorical, monologues discourse on envy and flattery and other elevating topics, often paraphrasing or translating Plutarch and others, and five of those deaths occur offstage during a three-way duel, all described in a terrific messenger scene full of Homeric metaphor – “Storme-like he fell, and hid the feare-cold Earth” (II.1) – also exciting, buy why is the duel not onstage? It would not be onstage in Seneca. There is a deep nicke in times restlesse wheele For each mans good, when which nicke comes it strikes; As Rhetoricke, yet workes not perswasion, But only is a meane to make it worke… (I.1) My text has been the fine, aside from the small type, Penguin Renaissance Dramatists edition of Chapman’s Plays and Poems (1998). I am currently reading another Chapman play, The Widdowes Teares, which is Bussy D’Ambois but as comedy. But the next play from my tattered schedule is Ben Jonson’s Epicœne, or The Silent Woman (1609 or 1610). It is likely that the main role was played by young Nathan Field, whose first big hit role was Bussy D’Ambois.
