Richard Baldasty — Davey Hume, Surfer Dude

Richard Baldasty — Davey Hume, Surfer Dude

Notes from the artist: Davey is a fictional yet direct descendant of Scots philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). He adds surfer decals to his famous ancestor’s appearance (a 1754 portrait in the National Galleries, Edinburgh) and takes undue reassurance (“attacks are rare”) from the senior Hume’s skepticism about knowledge claims based upon past experience. Davey suggests a plump lunch for Jaws— shark teeth would shred the dubious generalization of his enthusiasm for “the movement of everything.”


Richard Baldasty is an Empty Sink veteran (Issue 1: “Snake”). His online archive also includes prose in Café Irreal; text/image at Burrow Press Review; collage in Gravel. He lives in Spokane, WA; tweets @2kurtryder on Twitter. As a most unusual summer read, he suggests the nightmarish beauty of The Palm-Wine Drinkard, a 1952 Nigerian novella by Amos Tutuola, written in hypnotic Afro-English and populated by characters as dangerous as Laugh himself and the Skull who jumps a mile in a second.