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 Became an Idiot, over at the Black Scat site.  If you forgot to buy a copy for some reason, you can still correct the mistake.

There will be a student recital at the Jalopy Theater this Friday, the 16th, at 6 pm.  If you show up, you can see my uke student Ellie bring down the house.  Jalopy is still at 315 Columbia St., in Brooklyn.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

The third volume of the adventures of Captain Cap (there will be four) is now available from Black Scat Books, in a limited edition of 125.  The adventures of the prototypical ‘pataphysical antihero, first published by Alphonse Allais in 1902, have been scrupulously translated, illustrated, and annotated by Doug Skinner; they appear in English for the first time.  The incomparable Captain is particularly erudite in these sixteen stories: as he savors his cocktails, he elucidates the antifilter, the nonuplet, ballooning without a balloon, grandiose billiards, fecal residue in Christmas sausage, shoeing horses at a distance, and much more.  To quote Albert Capus: “The humor of Alphonse Allais was a rigorous affirmation, whose gravity could not be doubted.  And since it was also impossible to believe, you found yourself in a strange position which condemned you to a burst of laughter.”

And you can find it at Black Scat Books.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Harry Ingalls, “the greatest fortune teller in the world,” made the unusual choice to put his portrait on each card in his deck.  And each of those cards, as you can see, offers a variety of fortune telling options, framing that searching gaze.  The box is even busier, a sort of carnival poster in miniature.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Ron Cobb is known particularly for his crisp and trenchant political cartoons, which were once a staple of the underground press.  He also designed the ecology flag, contributed designs to a number of movies, and did many other things.  However, this enchanting diagram, buried in a copy of the East Village Other (August 27, 1969) is something else: a splendid mandala depicting the variety of human consciousness.  I don’t quite understand it yet, but will keep looking at it.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

John Cowper Powys was a Founder of the Fortean Society, and professed himself delighted with Fort’s work.  Although remembered today mostly for his fiction, his contributions to the Little Blue Book catalog were all essays.  His first was #112, The Secret of Self Development; it was followed by #414, The Art of Happiness, and #435, One Hundred Best Books.  His book of literary essays, Suspended Judgments, was split up into #448-452 (although without the chapter on Verlaine); and his last entry was #1264, The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant.

As the title Suspended Judgments indicates, Powys shared Fort’s taste for philosophical skepticism (as opposed to the pseudo-skepticism latterly popularized by The Annoying Randi and his acolytes).  The literary essays are delightfully passionate and capricious: at one point he discourses on all of the trees that remind him of Emily Bronte.  Probably the most Fortean of the batch is The Art of Happiness, which, curiously, seems to be a different text than the one he published later.  Here, for example, is a splendid sentence near the outset, rejecting both materialism and idealism, both science and religion: “But what I would like to indicate just here, is that a certain tentative, irrational, timid, hesitant scepticism has the power sometimes of calling up, out of deep mysterious places, a vision of the universe that commits us neither to an all-seeing God nor to an all-knowing Science, a vision that is confused and infinitely perplexing, but touched all the same by the beauty that no idealism can reach or materialism destroy, the beauty that belongs to that ambiguous look — unspeakable, unutterable — which crosses sometimes the countenance of Nature itself!”

Powys’s charming tribute to Fort doesn’t seem to be available online, so here it is.  It’s taken from The Fortean Society Magazine, #6, January 1942.  (Please click on it for a nice legible text.)

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

“Madame Le Normand’s Gipsy Fortune Telling Cards” bears no indication of date or publisher.  Its previous owner has written the meaning of the cards over the simple black and white illustrations, thereby increasing its graphic charm.  There are 36 cards in the deck, from #1: Cavalier to #36: Cross; tattered instructions in English and German were thoughtfully provided as well.  Marie Anne Lenormand (1772-1843) created somewhat of a vogue for cartomancy in France; a number of decks were named after her.  Here’s the box.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

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 invent the form, but quickly made it his own.  Here are a few examples, culled from Le Tintamarre, 1877-1879.

The acme of caution: To walk on your hands, so tiles won’t fall on your head.

The acme of thrift: When in the park, to gather grass for your rabbits.

The acme of cynicism: To kill a shopkeeper at night, and then post on the door: closed because of death.

The acme of impudence: To crush a gentleman’s hat with your fist, and then ask if he’s looking for trouble.

The acme of politeness: To sit on your ass, and beg its pardon.

The acme of consideration: To make a hole in the wall at night, so you can return home without waking the concierge.

The acme of skill: To learn how to read time on a barometer.

The acme of resemblance: To be able to shave before your portrait.

The acme of affectation: To stay at home, and play the piano every hour and half hour, so your neighbors will think you have a musical clock.

The acme of distraction: To lose your glasses, and then put them on to look for them.

The acme of courtesy: To put fallen leaves back on the tree.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

(Posted by Doug Skinner.  Picture by Ray Gleason.)

Tiffany Thayer, aka Elmer Ellsworth, founder of the Fortean Society, publisher of Doubt, writer of memorably sleazy fiction, was in Hollywood throughout much of the ’30s.  Several of his novels were made into reasonably successful movies (particularly Call Her Savage, tailored for Clara Bow).  He had less luck writing screenplays; only a few scenes and scraps of dialogue made it to the screen.

He did, however, act in one movie: The Devil on Horseback, in 1936.  In it, he plays a press agent named Wilbur Hitchcock; and provides comic relief by pretending to be saddle sore and hungover.

I can’t tell you if it’s a good movie or not, since I have little affinity for the medium.  Like other movies, it features recordings of actors playing make believe and reciting dialogue that they’ve memorized.  If that appeals to you, maybe you’ll like it.  At any rate, it also contains the only footage of the curious Mr. Thayer.  And it’s now on YouTube, so you can see for yourself.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)