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About the Author
About the Fictional Author
Selby Fing was a failed priest, poet, father and husband who lived a life of abandonment and sorrow in Philadelphia from 1941-60. Raised by his Catholic grandparents (in circumstances of desperation) to become a priest, Fing had the first of several bouts with mental illness, when he was asked to leave the seminary at age 19. He then became an itinerant English teacher and poet, moving around the USA and finding work in various places, always for a short time, because of his instability. He and his common-law wife, Lilica Del Rio, had two children. They moved back to Philadelphia in the last years of his life, where he experienced his final breakdown after finishing The Profane Comedy. He killed himself on July 4th, 1976.
ELYSIUM: Part Three of The Profane Comedy
D. Selby FingNew Academia Publishing/SCARITH, 2025
78 pages
ISBN 979-8-9991798-0-7 retail
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About the Author
About the Fictional Author
Selby Fing was a failed priest, poet, father and husband who lived a life of abandonment and sorrow in Philadelphia from 1941-60. Raised by his Catholic grandparents (in circumstances of desperation) to become a priest, Fing had the first of several bouts with mental illness, when he was asked to leave the seminary at age 19. He then became an itinerant English teacher and poet, moving around the USA and finding work in various places, always for a short time, because of his instability. He and his common-law wife, Lilica Del Rio, had two children. They moved back to Philadelphia in the last years of his life, where he experienced his final breakdown after finishing The Profane Comedy. He killed himself on July 4th, 1976.
ELYSIUM: Part Three of The Profane Comedy
Fing arrives in Elysium (USA 1776 – 1826) when Jack hits the ground and enters Tlon (the future of emptiness). Fing bounces up and is “reconstituted in a spheroid of light.” He is joined by his next guide, the Jester/Parson Yorick, who guides him upward into the sky, meeting a plethora of American revolutionaries, Hamilton, Jay, Monroe, Lafayette, Simon Bolivar, Thomas Jefferson (and Sally Hemings), George Washington. They all impart their irony with love, with the help of ganja smoke. Malcolm X and W.E.B. DuBois make appearances too. There is much merry-making and sexual innuendo, with this fundamental notion emphasized, we cannot live up to our ideals, but we must try. When Fing and Yorick finally meet Lilica, she berates him for failing to live up to his ideals, but then encourages him to keep going. They meet James Agee, Anne Bradstreet and Robert Zimmerman before Fing and Yorick say goodbye and Fings steps into the void to start again.
In each scene, the featured characters are stand-ins for their time, a microcosmic example of those who (as Dante said of Purgatorio and Paradiso) had cultivated the good of their intellect, establishing the ideals with which America was built.
Praise
“With borderless imagination and unbridled spirit,D.Selby Fing takes us on another adventure with Elysium, part three of his trilogy weaving fantasy, legend, politics and philosophy. Wit is the hydraulic which does not intrude on this book’s lyrical use of language without limits.” —Grace Cavalieri, Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate