Joseph Clayton Mills
Zyxt
Book (EP3)

210×148 mm; 28pp

 

Belgium £15 (including postage)

Europe £18.50 (including postage)

Rest of world £23 (including postage)

 

Second edition, 2012

An anthology of alienation from A to Z, Zyxt consists of 24 brief and darkly comic tales of idealism and despair; friendship and self-loathing; murder and madness. An unnamed narrator recounts a series 

of anecdotes about his dearest friends — a collection of misanthropic academics, misfortunate composers, and melancholy
astronomers — that together form 

a mosaic of parables, fables, and paradoxes for the bitter and disaffected.

 

Joseph Clayton Mills is Chicago-based artist, writer and musician. His text-based paint­ings, assemblages and installations have been exhibited in Chicago and 

New York, and his work has appeared 

in numerous publications, including 

The New Yorker. His fiction and criticism have been published both in the US and abroad, most recently in the magazine Joyland and the architectural journal Log.
He is also an active participant in the improvised and experimental music community in Chicago, where he has performed and collaborated with such notable musicians as Adam Sonderberg and Steven Hess (as a member of the band Haptic), Tony Buck, Mark Solotroff,
Sylvain Chaveau, Fred Lonberg-Holm and Olivia Block. His recordings have appeared on numerous labels, including Entr’acte, FSS and Bloodlust!.

See also

Haptic/Cristal (E60)
Joseph Clayton Mills (E167)
Out of print
 

From Zyxt

 

Nightingale

I have a friend who, as a lifelong devotee of Bizet, harbors great hopes that his young daughter might one day make 

a grand success upon the operatic stage.

Although she is still a mere toddler and 

is thus far incapable of forming with any facility even the simplest words in English (to say nothing of Italian), my friend insists that, even from the moment of
her first postnatal cry, he has been able to detect in her voice the sure traces of 

a divine instrument. In order to encourage in his daughter a proper love for all things sonorous, my friend installed in her bed-

room a beautiful nightingale in a gilded cage. Its melodic trills, he hoped, would serve as a suitable influence upon his daughter’s as yet inchoate musicality.

When, some days later, my friend discovered that his young daughter had smothered the nightingale with a silken pillow, he was, much to my surprise,
neither horrified nor discouraged. On the contrary, he was transported with delight, and his face beamed as he related the story. “After all, is not the foremost ingredient in the soul of any artist,” he asked rhetorically, and with an expression of perhaps justifiable pride, “an insatiable lust for the blood of one’s rival?”