Luis Chitarroni - The No Variations - Diary of an Unfinished Novel

Neville Orpington: See Museum, Sherbet Aria . Along with Hector Hugh Monro (Saki) and Arthur Ronald Annesly Firbank, Neville Orpington was a cynosure among the group of English eccentrics that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. He came from a wealthy family, proud of its distinguished lineage and the fact their rustic roots remained firmly planted in the English countryside, despite the deracinating effects of the industrial revolution. The way he managed his fortune, squandering it in London in little over a decade, was what set him apart from his predecessors. This young dreamer disposed of his inheritance with Mediterranean, epicurean conviction, a treasure that took at least five generations of parsimonious Protestants to hoard. His only literary associate was the misanthropic Barbellion, who wrote The Journal of a Disappointed Man , who had a passion for entomology that accorded with Orpington’s mania for collecting bric-a-brac. Orpington dedicated his last collection of short stories to him. More than merely a snob or an exhibitionist, Orpington’s vanity and egocentrism were so great he would not deign to perform in public, which led to a paradox: private exhibitionism.

The complete list of Orpington’s works is brief: After Euphues, Nissus in Brobdignag, Maybe I’m Amazing, Svelte Lavendar and her Slender Sisters . “Pimlico,” which he wrote under a heteronym [Beauclerk], was the only story he took the trouble to rewrite thirty-three times: he called them his “Diabelli Variations.”

Remo Sabatani [born in Gualeguaychú, Entre Ríos, from thence, it’s all just myth]: once touted to be the world’s greatest writer, he dashed that promise by only delivering at the end of his life what he called his “demora en tinto” or “belated ink,” a wondrous achievement of arrogant display and inanity. The most mysterious of Agraphia ’s contributors, he was the model of the secluded writer for many of the stories in the anthology. According to his relatives, he is currently living in Davos. [[He’d be roughly the same age as Urlihrt, 73 or 74.]] Like other contributors, he had an evangelical enthusiasm for founding magazines and journals, above all throwaways: The Manchurian Candidate, Gaucho Marx, Brother Marx …

Sabatani, Remo: Stepping into the Dubious Daylight, Plan for a Plagiarism, He who Counts the Syllables, Sonnets and Falsonnets, Notebook in Extremis, Novel with Three Endings and Seven Beginnings, The X-Positions .

Bruno Scacchi: sizes and excesses (always either too big, too small, too much, too little) …

Lino Scacchi: a shy and reticent author of works Urlihrt valued for their “laconic richness.” An illustrator and caricaturist (in pen and pencil), he was overshadowed by his overrated younger brother, Bruno. Nondescriptions [1972], Idiomaties [1979], and Nondescriptions and Idiomaties [1986].

Elena Siesta: see Cora Beatriz Estrugamou

Federico Prosan: FP’s career really only begins, happily for him, around the time Agraphia begins its decline. Or as he boasted: Too young to be around, too old to be expelled … FP had therefore been “without acquaintance, without welcome, without farewell.” Nevertheless, it was he who played the greatest role in disseminating most of the journal’s “secrets” and those of the group behind it. Although Lester later denied it, Prosan, due to his remarkable academic delectation, thought himself a disciple. FP’s books have achieved recognition in central Europe, Spain, even England and the United States. Instead and Otherwise , two collections of alternative versions of stories he’d already written, achieved — perhaps because the originals had been ignored — enormous success, both critically and commercially. Furthermore, he [also] compiled an anthology of the mistaken story, which was based on his hypothesis that every good collection contains “one incorrigable or irredeemable error.”

César Quaglia Quiroge Valdés, see Zi Benno

Elijah Levi Sapirstein; see Lord Swindon, in Museum

Sal Simpson (see apocryphal biography in Sherbet Aria ): pseudonym of Ciaran MacDuff, who was born in Ystradgynlais, Wales, in 1929, and died in Topanga Valley, California, in 1992, where he founded, twenty years before, the influential Tantrum Press, a publishing house that dedicated itself, from the very beginning, almost exclusively to indignation, a mission that today has spread to the world wide web via The Internail , a business run by his wife’s adopted son, Yusuf Ystrad. After writing many serious novels that garnered little attention, he wrote a series of nine novels introducing a new character — Priscilla Grayce, alias Venus Constrictor — a kind of femme fatale, whose popularity guaranteed him not only prosperity, but exile and death, the latter preceded only two months by his companion, Memsahib Banian.

Una Traherne (better known as Arnu Popish Lemniscate): Brief Biography of Imagination, Principles of Uncertainty Beyond the Dream, Theory and Practice of Jeopardy in Wales, Jaundice, From Anagnorisis to Delirium Tremens . [[Another of Eiralis’s errors, attributing Una’s works to Eliphas.]]

Born in Wuthering Heights, Una was educated by an indulgent Presbyterian instructor and thought discipline by the preacher of a provincial vicarage. The great prestige of her treatise, Visions of Imagination Beyond the Dream , may be the result of its being attributed to her mortal enemy, Eliphas Morph …

Belisario Tregua: [is] known — insofar as an artisan can be known — for his translations that, over the course of nearly three decades, led to the homogenization of all mystical literature published in Buenos Aires. The Dreadmist , a magisterial tome of disenchantment, describes all the liturgy and bacchanalia that typified Argentina’s dark ages. His only publication, 13 Attempts to Abolish the Present , is, despite its ingenious premise, one of the worst books to read in the Argentine literary canon.

After his book of poems, Prosodia , went unnoticed, he began writing briefs for current affairs magazines. Shortly afterwards, he published a book, False Steps , a collection of short stories, remarkable for their sober style, precision, liveliness, in which — whether by conscious effort or an impulse resulting from a combination of the dream life and the encyclopedia of anxiety — each word seems to be in the wrong place … The journal Scalp . In 1989, OL moved to Italy, where he launched the publication, Popolo Norte . His Eyelet for a Pendulum collects together all his journals, diaries, and musical criticism: the ostentatious volume that X, the skeptic, who was a lot closer to Z of “All your nerves” compiled for Tintagel, publishing house of Eduardo Javier Manjares’s … from page to friar, and onwards from there

In 1997, Faber & Faber published Instead— The B Side of the World Book of Lies … Instead Alternate Takes [in America], Tantrum Press Otherwise & Instead: Both Sides Now. Alternate Takes of America

Nicasio Urlihrt (pseudonym of Mario Arrón Teischer) (Nurlihrt, Septimo Mir, Uter Pegasus, Upper Lippius, Aspargus, Hesper Vegetalis, Everlasting Koba) The one who counts the beats and syllables, indisputable representative of the greats of obscure literature, Nicasio originally wanted to be among their detractors and antagonists. It’s no surprise he produced an excessively refined and corrected volume of poetry with the title, Between Clearings, 1958–1991 , from which he excluded all the “social poetry” he’d written in the last four years. He wrote at my side …

Pushkiniana (III?)

Stanza operated on (as they say)