The Air at the Top of the Bottle

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Entries Tagged as 'Literature'

Happy Birthday, Alphonse Allais!

October 20th, 2013 · 1 Comment

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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Tags: Alphonse Allais · Books · Literature

Captain Cap: The Trade Edition

October 11th, 2013 · 2 Comments

  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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Tags: 'pataphysics · Alphonse Allais · Literature

Captain Cap, Volume 4

September 23rd, 2013 · Comments Off on Captain Cap, Volume 4

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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Tags: Alphonse Allais · Literature

Little Blue Books by Forteans (4): Harry Elmer Barnes

August 27th, 2013 · 2 Comments

I’ve posted the Little Blue Books of Theodore Dreiser, Ben Hecht, and John Cowper Powys.  None of the other Founders (Tiffany Thayer, Harry Leon Wilson, Burton Rascoe, Alexander Woollcott, J. David Stern, Aaron Sussman, Booth Tarkington) wrote for Haldeman-Julius — except one.  That was Harry Elmer Barnes. Barnes quickly disappeared from the Founders’ roster.  He […]

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Tags: Forteana · Literature

Alphonse Allais: Les Combles

June 27th, 2013 · 4 Comments

At the beginning of his literary career, Alphonse Allais contributed squibs, jokes, and one-liners to various small Parisian papers.  He followed already established formulas: the fable-express (a brief fable with a punning moral), the autograph (a line ending with a pun on someone’s name).  He became particularly identified with the comble, the “acme.”  He didn’t […]

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Tags: 'pataphysics · Alphonse Allais · Literature

Little Blue Books by Forteans (2): Ben Hecht

June 6th, 2013 · Comments Off on Little Blue Books by Forteans (2): Ben Hecht

Ben Hecht declared himself “the first disciple of Charles Fort” in a review of The Book of the Damned,  and used the opportunity to coin the word “Fortean.”  Tiffany Thayer said the took Hecht as a model when he started writing fiction; and Thirteen Men, in particular, seems to aim for Hecht’s distinctive flash. Like […]

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Tags: Forteana · Literature

Little Blue Books by Forteans (1): Theodore Dreiser

June 3rd, 2013 · 9 Comments

The “Little Blue Books” were published by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius from about 1919 to 1947.  They were small, cheaply produced, and sold for around a nickel.  There were over 2000 of them; the exact number, despite diligent scholars, is unknown, since the books were often retitled, assigned new numbers, or replaced by other books. Haldeman-Julius started […]

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Tags: Forteana · Literature

“I never heard of Charlie Fort”

May 22nd, 2013 · Comments Off on “I never heard of Charlie Fort”

The Palm Beach Post, September 26, 1937, published a review of the first issue of the Fortean Society Magazine. The reviewer, E. C. K. (and I have no clue who that is), was impressed by the roster of founders, intrigued by Fort, and puzzled by Thayer. He or she had also never heard of Fort, leading […]

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Tags: Forteana · Literature

Francisque Sarcey Meets Rodolphe Salis

May 13th, 2013 · 2 Comments

Have you ordered your copy of How I Became an Idiot?  As you no doubt read in the last post, Doug Skinner has translated four examples of Alphonse Allais’s sustained mockery of the conservative critic Francisque Sarcey, and they are now available in a nice little volume from Black Scat Books. Allais, seen above lunching […]

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Tags: Alphonse Allais · Literature

How I Became an Idiot

May 9th, 2013 · Comments Off on How I Became an Idiot

Francisque Sarcey (1827-1899) was, for much of his career, the most powerful theatrical critic in Paris. He was the perfect model of the blunt bourgeois, championing common sense, anti-intellectualism, and traditional values. He favored light, commercial fare, and railed against Ibsen and Jarry. He was, predictably, a prime target for young artists. Alphonse Allais took […]

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Tags: Alphonse Allais · Education · Literature