IN THE COURT OF THE YELLOW KING: Celaeno Press, 2014

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It boggles my mind that there are people who don’t want you to see this. (click here)  Ed Lipsett in Japan found the folio edition of The Play. The one Chambers gave up trying to retell when he was an art student gacked out of his mind on opium and absinthe, and deflected the whole mess of research into what everyone thought was his personal ‘Kubla Khan’.

The Play. Villon wrote it in jail, in 1456. THE EMPEROR CLOTHED WITH THE SUN. The tapeworm barb of what Villon did, replicating over and over in our culture ever since. The quantum mistake that almost let in Armageddon, which has come down to us in watered-down, mythic form as THE KING IN YELLOW. 

CJ Henderson read the whole thing cover to cover, with what Garth Ennis rightly called “the courage given a dying man to say what he likes without fear.” And he put the period on what he saw while he was still with us. Like the old Ragu ads used to say in the Eighties… It’s In There.

Lipsett won’t look at it. It’s been in glass since Artaud tried to adapt it in 1929. He knows better, though I see in his eyes that he’s almost tried. I don’t fault him. He’s a brave man. Glynn Owen Barass, his co-editor, looked at it in a mirror, but only the first page. It doesn’t appear to have had any effect. Yet. I’m hoping.

We’ve pointed two mirrors at it now, in sequence. Tell us what you see…