April 15, 2015
An overpriced athlete’s performance displays her superior winter genetics, her impractical spinning icebound combat halted by a sudden whistle, a sudden horror.
A misrepresented prophet puzzles, her invective punctuated with an ambiguous lisp. It was not always thus; need it always be?
Why does the senior horde beam so, grinning beneath the ceiling fan amid a puzzling void? She sits there among them, lost in thoughts of corkscrews on the ice.
April 14, 2015
Q: How comfortable are the doomchairs?
A: The doomchairs are as comfortable as one’s doom. So if you die safe in bed, they are actually very comfortable and many such foredoomed patrons can be found napping in them. However, if your doom is much more exciting–exploding in a reentry rocket, assassination by car bomb, or the like–the doomchairs are, to put it mildly, intensely uncomfortable. No actual physical harm can come from using a doomchair, but the sensation of being burned alive makes them unpopular with foredoomed patrons who have interesting demises.
Q: Can I use a doomchair to learn my ultimate fate and thereby change it?
A: No. The sensations are unspecific and even trained doomologists are generally unable to learn any significant details. Patrons have reported feeling different sensations at different times, but the Delta Doombrary has no reliable information indicating that lifestyle changes can lead to different dooms. This makes sense when one realizes that many such dooms are accidental in nature and cannot be predicted.
April 13, 2015
To the Friends of Evil everywhere, Good Evening
Be it known that
JOSIAH DARKSHADOW
having completed the required course of study, is this day, by action of the Faculty and of the Board of Untrustees, declared a
DOCTOR OF DARK ARTS
of the UNIVERSITY OF DOOM and is admitted
to all rights and privileges accruing thereto.
In testimony whereof this diploma duly certified by the signatures
of the proper officers, and the seal of the University, affixed this the
31ST day of FEBRUARY in the year of our Dark Lord 2015 and in the 666TH
year of the University.
April 12, 2015
REMINDER
Orange cars require special maintenance and fuel. Because nothing rhymes with “orange,” maintenance must be performed monthly (as nothing rhymes with “month” either) rather than yearly or after a period of weeks. Special non-rhyming fuel must also be used for orange cars; attempts to use rhyming fuel will result in catastrophic engine damage. Care must also be taken to use only oil whose hydrocarbons are unrhymed stanzas.
The converse of these requirements is that the chances of a rhyming accident, in which two automobiles are fused into a single poem, is nil. Orange cars are also immune to the kind of scansion, parallelism, and other minor damage that affects colors whith rhyming colors like red or blue.
Only you can decide if an orange car is right for you; consult your Chrysalis Motors handbook or visit your local dealer for more information.
April 11, 2015
The captain and crew had abandoned ship, leaving Murray and his band of retirees in complete control of the MV Huron.
John One and John Two had been in the Navy during the Korean War, so they knew enough to get the boat underway. John Three and Edgar had been in the Marines, so they knew how to bust open the arms locker. Not that a motor ferry on the Great Lakes had any great quantity of small arms, mind. But a line gun, an assortment of Orion flare guns, and a Marlin Mariner with half a dozen signal rounds and another half-dozen of no. 8 birdshot were enough to make anyone at least think twice about boarding.
Murray called a meeting on the bridge. “The way I see it,” he said, “we’ve got two options. Option one, we go ashore right now and turn ourselves in. Face the music. We kind of got caught up in something that got out of hand, and they might go easy on us since we’re old as hell and likely to die in jail before we learn our lesson.”
“What’s option two?” said John Three.
“Option two is we fuel up this tub before anyone realizes what’s up and set out for open water. Take what we need from the assholes in boats and stay ahead of a Coast Guard that hasn’t dealt with anything bigger than meth heads in rowboats for a hundred years.”
Looking at the faces of his friends, Murray saw that he scarcely needed to call a vote of any kind. The pirate career of the MV Huron had begun, the first such pirate to sail the Great Lakes in living memory.
April 10, 2015
The Leaning Tree has been slowly tilting over the years as the sandy soil to its northwest subsides. It has but a decade or less left in its long life, and it knows this. It puts desperate seeds to the winds, hoping to compensate for a life cut short with many strong and upright children.
The Twisted Tree came from a bad seed, warped as it grew both by the poor soil and a stillborn twin that died when it was but a twig. One would expect this to breed a most bitter wood, wormy and weak, but in fact the Twisted Tree has the strongest flesh of all its compatriots. It must, for a consequence of its nature is that its seeds are infertile and will never bloom, and it has quietly resolved to live forever as a result.
It is remarkable that the Twins, seperated by 100 yards, both tilt into the wind at exactly the same angle. What’s more remarkable is that they are actually the same tree: born of different seeds from different parents, their root systems have found each other and merged deep in the topsoil. They share nitrogen, nutrients, memories. Their children are a perfect mix of the two.
April 9, 2015
Pallafor, Yodis. The Great Unmaking: How Mississippi Will Fare in the Doomtimes. Jackson: Universal Press of Alternate Mississippi, 1206 ACE.
Mr. Pallafor has a firm vision of what he calls the Doomtimes, the end of all life in Mississippi (and Mississippi alone); he sets these ideas forth in this screed, due out from UPAM soon and available for preorder.
The overall thesis of Pallafor’s Doomtimes is that an 11.0 earthquake will occur along the New Madrid fault, causing the Mississippi River to change direction once again and sucking up vast quantities of seawater to inundate the Delta and most low-lying areas of the state with brackish water. This will, he writes, then lead a race of crawdads, mutated and given intelligence by the BP oil spill of 2010, to enter the state and dominate the surviving humans.
As support for his claims, Mr. Pallafor offers up verbatim transcripts of conversations he had with the archangel Metamucil after suffering a series of blows to the head as part of the confirmation process for his former position on the Mississippi IHL. These, serving as a lengthy appendix, are exhaustively indexed and cross-referenced.
While this title is probably not suitable for school, public, university, or special libraries, it certainly belongs in any Mississippi Doombrary worth its salt, and indeed the first inscribed copy was donated to the Delta Doombrary after publication.
Isola Playford
Underlibrarian
Mississippi Delta Doombrary
April 8, 2015
Poydras, Fiallo. A Guide to Mississippi Fanfiction. R’lyeh: Great Auk, 2016.
As readers of Fifty Shades of Grey can attest, fanfiction—works written by fans based on existing universes but not authorized or condoned by rightsholders—has never been hotter. However, the existing treatment of fanfiction tends to dwell on the phenomenon at a macro level for very popular milieus. Twilight, Harry Potter, Star Trek…all of these have been well-covered by other authors at length.
However, Mr. Poydras—an amateur working out of Biloxi—has undertaken to write the first guide to fanfiction written by Mississippians about Mississippians. His encyclopedic volume, complete through August of 2010, features extensive treatment of the Faulkner fanfics that are so popular in Mississippi circles. Special attention is paid to the Yoknapatawpha Wars cycle, an epic tale in 27 volumes that brings characters and situations from As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary into a 31st-century setting dominated by space zombies.
Poydras also treats Eudora Welty fanfiction—so-called Weltfic—at some length, though it is clear that his interests lie more with Faulkfic and the intense subculture of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote slashfics, which re-imagines the characters and situations of those writers in intense and often lurid heterosexual relationships.
That weakness aside, this volume is recommended for all libraries, especially those with large numbers of circulating vampire movies.
Floro Alpis
Director
Yoknapatawpha County Public Library
April 7, 2015
It’s no secret that today’s library patron is exposed to more sorcery than any of us in the profession right now. And it’s also no secret that they are exposed to sorcery from a much earlier age, with many of today’s youth, high schoolers, and incoming college students never knowing a world without sorcery and getting their first spellbooks as young as age 5.
Clearly, these patrons are expecting a library experience that is compatible with their cantrips and incantations, one that offers storage space for spell books and physical ingredients and has mana potions available for when the sorcerous ichor within runs low. Sadly, due to lack of centralized state funding, Mississippi is currently 49 out of 51 states in sorcery resources offered to all segments of the population; only the state of Denial and the state of Confusion have lower uptake rates.
It has become something of a cliché that librarians are slow to embrace sorcery, preferring tried and true methods of magic that rely on augury, interpreting the flights of birds, and of course Magic the Gathering card catalogs. But as useful as these once may have been, and may continue to be for some older patrons, the time has come to use sorcery in public programming and outreach to show—at no significant cost to the institution—the patrons of the future that libraries are still relevant.
An easy way to incorporate sorcery is to move your library’s arcana collection from your archives into the main circulation collections. While in the past it was traditional for bestiaries and books of forbidden knowledge to be library use only, those days are fading in the era of Wikibestiary and Glitter shamantags like #forbidden and #cthulhu. Even if they are offered only as exhibits, these older materials have the potential to excite patrons.
Make use of your staff as well; chances are that a few of them know a spell or two or have an Apple SpellBook Pro sitting around. Ask them to develop events and displays, to keep your Glitter account and Witchterest page up-to-date, to try and find new and novel spells to cast and ways to make existing library collections spell-friendly. Do your books support enchantments that allow them to float into users’ hands? Can they be used as prisons for demons, or portals to fantastic worlds of the imagination? It may take some work, but adding these features will pay off in the long run.
Perhaps the best resource is education: the more we learn about sorcery and spellcasting, the more we can help our patrons. Be on the lookout for low-cost séances, astral projections, and other means of networking and learning with peer and the Great Old Ones. Either way, remember that for our patrons, ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn is not a new thing: for them, Cthulhu has always wgah’nagl fhtagn.
Isola Playford
Underlibrarian
Mississippi Delta Doombrary
April 6, 2015
The University of Northern Mississippi (UNM), in partnership with the Yoknapatawpha County Public Library (YCPL), recently announced an initiative to increase library access to two particularly underserved populations: sparrows and squirrels. “To my knowledge,” said YCPL director Floro Alpis, “this is the first such program in the country, which is a shame. Prior to 2015, there was no known record of sparrows or squirrels being issued UNM or YCPL library cards, and walk-ins were few and far between.
With Alpis and UNM library science professor Dr. Rolf S. Paoli spearheading the initiative, both libraries launched an intensive program to issue library cards to sparrows and squirrels in January 2015 and to step up outreach efforts to those populations. YCPL staff actually began their preparatory work in fall 2014, standing in the same place every day on the library patio with a handful of seed to acclimate sparrows—who are not traditional library users and require additional support—to their presence.
Eventually, YCPL was able to start mixing scraps of paper in with the birdseed, and by February they were ready to begin issuing their first library cards to sparrows. “We had an excellent first day,” said Alips. “Our volunteers actually ran out of library cards after the morning seed rush, and we have anecdotal evidence that many of the cards were actually brought back to the sparrows’ nests.”
For its part, UNM focused on outreach for squirrels, who are often on campus to make use of the free garbage resources it provides to the local community. Initial efforts at putting library cards on small fishing poles and lowering them to potential squirrel patrons failed due to, as Dr. Paoli put it, “lack of angling skills” on the part of UNM library staff. Further experiments in December 2014 and January 2014 with hiding library cards under piles of nuts and twigs and a direct marketing campaign to scale trees and place the cards directly in squirrel dreys failed due to opposition from local mice and privacy concerns that information about individual squirrel dreys might make it to the National Nesting Agency.
Ultimately, UNM was able to get 75% squirrel uptake on offered cards by smearing them with peanut butter, though Dr. Paoli is quick to note that this is not a permanent solution given the danger posed to squirrels with nut allergies. Nevertheless, squirrels that did not bring the library cards to their dreys did at least bury them, leading Paoli to confidently predict a surge of squirrel patrons next spring when the library cards are dug up.
| Squirrel Patrons (YCPL) | Squirrel Patrons (UNM) | Squirrel Patrons (Total) | Sparrow Patrons (YCPL) | Sparrow Patrons (UNM) | Sparrow Patrons (Total) | |
| Sept. 2014 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 0 |
| Oct. 2014 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 6 |
| Nov. 2014 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 7 |
| Dec. 2014 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 6666 | 5 | 0 |
| Jan. 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 55 |
| Feb. 2015 | 0 | 715 | 715 | 23 | 5 | 28 |
| Mar. 2015 | 0 | 1337 | 1337 | 213 | 5 | 1065 |
| Total | 0 | 2052 | 2052 | 13804 | 35 | 394.4 |
As shown in the chart, card issuance numbers are up significantly but not the actual number of sparrow and squirrel patrons. Alpis and Paoli have announced initiatives to remedy this with a variety of in-library features friendly to sparrows and squirrels: seed bells in the stacks, dried corn-on-the-cob in reading and study areas, and staff that mask their scent and make no sudden movements.
Floro Alpis
Director
Yoknapatawpha County Public Library
Rolf S. Paoli
Dean of Libraries
University of Northern Mississippi
Excerpts From Nonexistent Books 