How to Read TYCHY.

1. If you are interested in this website, then please do not visit it every day. If I were you, I would pop in no more than once per month. I can normally scrape together something new to appeal to the general reader on a monthly basis. Subscribing to this website is, frankly, insane.

2. The only truly original content on this website is the short fiction. The illustrations are atrociously unprofessional; the reviews of books and of YouTube channels are written in the main cynically, to attract readers. And once they are here, these readers are supposed to discover the short fiction.

3. I am a generalist and quite idealistically so. I want to be in a state where I can write an article on any subject after a morning’s research. One of the (numerous) reasons why I never went into academia is because I hate the practice of specialisation across the Humanities. We have all, I am sure, met the postgraduate student whose subject is, say, the personal correspondence of Thomas Hardy between 1925 and 1928. If this is an expert, then there is nothing more roundly useless than an expert.

4. I like William Shakespeare and the American Renaissance and Marxism and Brexit and the Edinburgh Fringe and democratic media such as podcasting and YouTube. I hate clichés. It is infinitely less painful for me to write a lie than a cliché.

5. Different people narrate the short fiction on Tychy. One of them is Zbigniew Tycienski, who was born in 1974 and who now lives in Edinburgh, where most of these stories are set. He is an agency worker. Each story is meant to function perfectly happily as a standalone item, although after a while you might begin to sense that there is a “mother story” at work above and beyond them.

6. After you have read these short stories you are free to go. There is no Patreon or merchandise. A blog like this has no production costs. By the by, any ads that you might notice are put there by WordPress, our kind hosts.

7. Please leave a comment! There is wisdom (somewhere) in even the most abusive comment and they all add to the human experience. I actually find abusive comments to be tremendously excting. I only censor comments if they look defamatory or if they refer to ongoing trials. This website features over a hundred, very beautiful comments by a sort of Surrealist from Pennsylvania called (the?) Botendaddy. If Tychy was the long neck of a beautiful woman then these comments would be a glorious pearl necklace.

8. Please write to me at once if you spot a mistake : tychywordpress@googlemail.com. If you are an actor and I have mispelled your name, or if I have credited you as being Rosencrantz when you were really Guildenstern, then I will correct this immediately. No quibble is too trivial here.

9. I used to have a warning on this page for students who want to plagiarise my writing. Lately, however, these students are always rumbled by software. I know a gentleman in his mid forties who was studying music production at Napier College. One morning his class was subjected to an almighty bollocking, from which he learnt that he was the only member of the class who had written his coursework himself. All of his eighteen-year-old classmates had cut and pasted from Wikipedia and the omniscient software had, of course, known everything.

10. Tychy is blogging, which might seem obvious, but I think that prose possesses a power and concision that continues to elude podcasting and videomaking. Ernest Hemingway would have gotten nowhere with a podcast and Alice Munro would have never won the Nobel with a YouTube channel or TikTok. Meanwhile, microblogging remains the most barbarian means of expression available. The feminist Camille Paglia once remarked that all of the greatest minds of her generation had been wrecked by LSD. Much the same has occurred with my own generation and Twitter.

Congratulations on finding this website and thank you for visiting.