Music From Elsewhere is now available from Strange Attractor Press!

This book collects and discusses music derived from unusual sources, including music attributed to fairies, trolls, trowies, banshees, aliens, angels, spirits, time slips, and dreams. You’ll also find chapters on speculative and cryptographic music, and on music from birds and other natural sounds. It’s 272 pages, richly illustrated in green and black (designed by the remarkable Tihana Šare), with 112 pages of historical sheet music. Also available in a limited hardback edition of 300, with a signed bookplate. Purchase includes a link to an MP3 album of Doug Skinner performing some of the music, recorded by Brian Dewan. Published by Strange Attractor Press in the UK, and distributed in the US by The MIT Press.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

I wrote the introduction for Amanda DeMarco’s sparkling translation of New Inventions and the Latest Innovations, by Gaston de Pawlowski, now available from Wakefield Press. Here’s what Wakefield has to say:

Originally published in book form in 1916, Gaston de Pawlowski’s New Inventions and the Latest Innovations collects the humorist’s numerous columns mocking and deflating his era’s burgeoning consumer society and growing faith in science. From anti-slip soap, gut rests, and the pocket-sized yardstick to repurposed spittoons, nasal vacuums, new methods for curling endive, electric oysters, and musicographical revolvers, Pawlowski offers a far-sighted satire of technological gadgetry and our advanced society’s promise to remove discomfort from every facet of life, even as soldiers were dying daily in the trenches of World War I and technology was unleashing new horrors upon humanity.

Pawlowski’s humorous cultural critique and tongue-in-cheek celebration of uselessness and futility bears relevance for today, and not just because some of the absurdities described have since been invented: tech startups continue to receive inflated funding, and technology remains the hoped-for answer to our increasingly troubled human condition. Described with the excessive optimism of the sales pitch, these inventions of yesteryear were also an influence in the arts, admired by such figures as Marcel Duchamp and Raymond Queneau, and stand as a precursor to the work of such artists as Jean Tinguely and today’s looming specter of AI-generated images and text.

Gaston de Pawlowski (1874–1933) was a productive journalist, humorist, and bicycle enthusiast who wrote on everything from war correspondence to the fourth dimension. His friends and colleagues included Alfred Jarry, Marcel Proust, and Guillaume Apollinaire, but he is chiefly remembered today as being an influence on Duchamp’s The Large Glass.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

TYPO 7 is now available from Black Scat Books!

I contributed a set of silent pieces (“Eleven Silent Études”); translations of two stories by Alphonse Allais (“Gaudissart Has Fun” and “The Theater of Mr. Bigfun”), both taken from My Rent Is Due!; and a translation of Raymond Roussel’s first work in prose (“Chroniquettes”).

This rollicking and trenchant issue also includes great stuff by mIEKAL aND, Terry Bradford, Steve Carll, Norman Conquest, Lynn Crawford, Noël Devaulx, Mark DuCharme, Albert Ehrenstein, Shawn Garrett, Edward Gauvin, Richard Huelsenbeck, Iliazd, Mark Kanak, Thomas J. Kitson, Amy Kurman, Jean Lorrain, Emilia Loseva, Marcel Mariën, Willy Melnikov, Heather Sager, Phil Demise Smith, Paul Willems, and Cynthia Yatchman. The whole thing is edited and designed by the industrious Norman Conquest.

I’m happy to announce that my translation of Alphonse Allais’s My Rent Is Due! is now available from Black Scat Books. This collection, originally published in 1899, includes delightful stories about tapeworms, phantom limbs, floating brothels, and other interesting things. André Breton saluted Allais’s “terrorist activity of the mind”; maybe you will too.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

The sixth issue of TYPO is now available from Black Scat Books!

This issue weighs in at 169 pages, edited by Norman Conquest, and loaded with “prototypes, visual poetry, Belgian fiction, chronograms, Symbolist decadence, vintage surrealism & much more. Featuring an international cast of artists, poets, and writers, including: Frédéric Acquaviva; Terry J. Bradford; Apollo Camembert; Steve Carll; Norman Conquest; Lynn Crawford; Caroline Crépiat; Noël Devaulx; Shawn Garrett; Edward Gauvin; Nico Kirschenbaum; John Kruse; Amy Kurman; Jean Lorrain; Emilia Loseva; Jean Muno; Opal Louis Nations; Clemente Palma; Claudio Parentela; Vojtěch Preissig; Vania Russo; Nelly Sanchez; Marcel Schneider; and Doug Skinner.”

I contributed a short story (“Uncopyrightable”), a musical optical toy “Dodecaphonophenakistoscope”), an introduction to a Czech chronogram, and an article on the “Indisposizione di Belle Arti,” a proto-Dada art exhibit held in Milan in 1881.

And you can find it on Amazon!

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

“Tops and Tails,” an undated game from the venerable Viennese firm Piatnik, invited players to match the two halves of animals. The illustrations are detailed, imaginative and charming. And, of course, the players can also amuse themselves by mismatching the cards, creating unusual hybrids.

The backs of the cards are also worth a look.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

My translation of Charles Cros’s prose works, The Science of Love, is now available from Wakefield Press.

From the publisher:

The Science of Love and Other Writings brings together for the first time in English all the literary prose of Charles Cros. An indefinable polymath of fin-de-siécle Paris, Cros’s imagination had one foot in the literary currents of his time, and the other in the field of science. This amalgamation is fully demonstrated in this collection, which includes proto-science-fiction stories; his contributions to what was then the new form of the prose poem; a sober, if fantastical, scientific study on methods of communication with other planets; and the patent application written with his brother for a (never-built) notating keyboard.

The literary imagination he was able to bring into the field of science was matched by the humorous scientific sobriety he introduced into his literature, which he did nowhere so effectively as in the title piece, “The Science of Love”: a depiction of a young scientist’s painstakingly executed seduction of a woman for the sake of scientific analysis, utilizing litmus paper and measuring releases of carbonic acid during maximized passion. Its humor led Joris-Karl Huysmans to include it in the rarefied library of À rebours, where the Collège de ’Pataphysique declared “An Interplanetary Drama” to be a “canonical text.” Also included are stories such as “The Newspaper of the Future” (which presents a nineteenth-century imagining of artificial intelligence) and “The Stone Who Died of Love.”

Charles Cros (1842–1888) was as much Renaissance man as he was poète maudit. A bohemian poet who drank with Verlaine and at one point provided housing to Rimbaud, he also developed the comic monologue as a theatrical genre and invented both the gramophone (which he named the “paléophone”) and color photography (though he failed to patent either before Thomas Edison or Louis Ducos du Hauron), among other such inventions as a non-metallic battery and a musical stenographer. “The freshness of his intelligence was such that no object of desire seemed utopian to him a priori,” André Breton wrote of him, adding: “The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.”

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

TYPO #5 is now available to be gawked at and puzzled over! I contributed an essay (“Typoglyphics”), a short story (“The Butler Bulli0n”), a “Bilingual Acrostic Rebus,” and translations of Tabarin and Théophile Gautier.

My distinguished colleagues in this issue are Tim Newton Anderson, Tom Bradley, Anton Chekhov, Norman Conquest, Caroline Crépiat, R J Dent, Max Ernst, Eurydice Eve, Luc Fierens, Leonor Fini, Harold Jaffe, Amy Kurman, Lo, Michael Maier, Dmitri Manin, Elena Marini, Lilianne Milgrom, Opal Louis Nations, Marty Newman, Claudio Parentela, Angeleaux Pastormerleaux, Paul Rosheim, Jasia Reichardt, Phil Demise Smith, Lono Taggers, Corinne Taunay, Shyam Thandar, Stefan Themerson, Konstantin Vaginov, and Gregory Wallace.

The whole thing is edited by Norman Conquest, and you can find it at Black Scat Books!

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

A Filthy Letter is now available from Black Scat Books!

Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) was a novelist and poet, one of the champions of Romanticism. In 1850, he and his friend Louis de Cormenin visited Italy, so he wrote his friends back home a letter about their adventures. The result was a rollicking “filthy letter,” packed with jokes, slang, obsolete words, literary allusions, puns, alliterations, neologisms, Spoonerisms, verses, outrageous metaphors, and Rabelaisian lists. It was published privately in 1890, and became a clandestine classic.

But you can read it now, translated, introduced, and annotated by Doug Skinner, and available on Amazon!

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

The Rat Wins! is now available from Black Scat Books!

Writer Lucien Descaves and illustrator Lucien Laforge were anarchist activists dismayed by World War I. They cooked up this mordant little satire, pointing out that the real winner of any war is the rat, who feasts on all the corpses–with the suggestion that war profiteers are rats too. It was scheduled for publication in 1917, but banned by the authorities, and didn’t make it to print until 1920.

Written by Lucien Descaves, illustrated by Lucien Laforge, and translated by Doug Skinner. Designed by Derek Pell to resemble the original edition.

And you can find it on Amazon!