My publisher, Black Scat Books, has passed along this reminder for the holiday season.  My illustrated translation of Alphonse Allais’s Captain Cap will chase away Seasonally Affected Depression.  You can find a copy on Amazon; New Yorkers who prefer brick and mortar can obtain a copy at Spoonbill & Sugartown, in Williamsburg. (Posted by Doug […]

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As is my custom, I will be celebrating my birthday at the Jalopy Theater next month.  On Friday, January 3, you can hear a program of my songs and instrumental music, with David Gold on viola, Ralph Hamperian on tuba, Doug Roesch on guitar, and me on vocals, uke, and piano. More books are forthcoming […]

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Many thanks to those of you who stopped by the Jalopy Theater to hear me read from my translation of Alphonse Allais’s Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks.  And thanks also to Feral Foster, who brought the American Lemonade, the drink Cap enjoys in Chapter 40, to today’s palates.  Photos of the event, […]

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There will be a reading and book launch, from and for Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks, by Alphonse Allais: now translated, annotated, and illustrated by Doug Skinner, and published by Black Scat Books. Allais’s proto-pataphysical antihero, the inventor and explorer Captain Cap, expounds on such subjects as the kangacycle, the antifilter, and […]

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  The fifth issue of Black Scat Review is now available!  This one contains “Captain Cap Plays a Trick,” an excerpt from my translation of Alphonse Allais’s Captain Cap.  It also features work by Mark Axelrod, Shane Roeschlein, Patrizia Valduga‏, Harold Jaffe, Brett Stout, Andy O’Clancy, Samy Sfoggia, Nile Southern, Robert Hahn, and Michela Martini.  […]

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Alphonse Allais was born on October 20, 1854.  We celebrate his birthday here by posting my drawings of him with his curious colleague, Captain Cap, from Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks, available in my illustrated translation from Black Scat Books. And one picture from the fourth chapbook, which didn’t make it into […]

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  The trade edition of Captain Cap is now available!  Alphonse Allais’s hard-drinking, proto-pataphysical antihero, based on his friend Albert Caperon, bullies bartenders, swindles prostitutes, travels the world, and offers such useful inventions as the smell-buoy, the kangacycle, volatile ink, the bacteria motor, and much more.  This edition collects the four installments previously published by […]

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The fourth and final volume of Captain Cap is now available from Black Scat Books.  In these sixteen stories, Alphonse Allais’s hard-drinking polymath proposes crocodile bridges, volatile ink, the kangacycle, smell-buoys, and much more.  Captain Cap, first published in 1902, and continually popular in France, has previously been translated into Czech, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, […]

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Oh boy!  Oulipo Pornobongo 2 is now out, chockablock with smut and recreational linguistics.  This one features work by Opal Louis Nations, Farewell Debut, D.S. Macpherson, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Giovanni Zuniga, Derek Pell, Roger Leatherwood, Eckhard Gerdes and others.  I contribute a song, an acrostic about mating dachshunds, a translation of an 1885 story by Alphonse […]

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Our tribute to Les Blank was an unqualified delight.  Blank’s films unfurled in all their majesty; and his sons Harrod and Beau were on hand to provide commentary and to answer questions.  Our thanks to all who attended. You can see a rare photographic portrait of me, enjoying my edition of Alphonse Allais’s How I […]

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