The new expanded edition of Merde à la Belle Époque is now available from Black Scat Books! I’ve selected, translated, annotated, and introduced scatological songs, stories, poems, and playlets from some of the most inventive and eccentric writers of the golden age of Parisian Bohemia: Alphonse Allais, George Auriol, Georges Courteline, Charles Cros, J. Eschbach, André Gill, Edmond Haraucourt, Vincent Hyspa, Alfred Jarry, Jules Jouy, Maurice Mac-Nab, Armand Masson, Arthur Rimbaud, Rodolphe Salis, Erik Satie, and Henry Somm. Included is a complete translation of Jouy’s relentlessly pottymouth paper Le Journal des Merdeux, which was quickly seized by the police.

This collection was first published as a chapbook in 2014, and now has more stuff in it. It’s designed by Norman Conquest, and is available on Amazon.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

The 26th issue of Black Scat Review is now available! I contributed an alphabet, “Partners in Crime,” and my translation of “Upside-Down Stories: Mineral Waters,” by Charles Cros and Émile Goudeau (from my edition of those stories). The other contributors are a fine bunch: Tim Newton Anderson, Tom Barrett,  Margot Block, Robert James Cross, Farewell Debut,  Debra Di Blasi, Fernando Fidanza, Larry Fondation, Peter Gambaccini, Eckhard Gerdes, Rhys Hughes, Harold Jaffe, Amy Kurman, Michael Leigh, Martha McCollough, Jim McMenamin, Michael Pollentine, Frank Pulaski, Paul Rosheim, Saira Viola, and Tom Whalen.

And you can find it on Amazon.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

My novel Nominata is now available from Black Scat Books! You can get it on Amazon! I’ve been working on it for years: it’s not long, but it took me awhile to figure out what I wanted to do with it. Here’s the blurb from Black Scat Books:

Nominata has gone missing, and her old friend Antonima is looking for her. Can the seven regulars in the Taproom help? Why are there strange lights and noises in the abandoned observatory? And what does the number 5040 have to do with all this?

Doug Skinner describes his novel as “an interactive verbal toy,” and Black Scat Books urges caution in handling. On the surface, the text is playful, comic, and wayward. Further immersion, however, reveals elaborate constraints, cross references, and parallels, all creating an artificial world in which everything is a reflection of everything else, including itself. All that and slapstick too!   

And there’s a contest, for you competitive types:

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

My translation of The Art of Noises is now available from Black Scat Books!

Luigi Russolo’s treatise on enriching music with noises was published in Milan in 1916. It contains his 1913 Futurist manifesto on noises, as well as his accounts of building noise instruments, his riotous concerts, his notation, and analyses of the noises of nature and technology. My translation sticks closely to Russolo’s ebullient style, and adds notes and an introduction on contemporary receptions and on Russolo’s later work. All of Russolo’s scores and instruments are lost, but his ideas have inspired generations of experimental musicians.

This marks the tenth anniversary of Black Scat Books, and editor Derek Pell (aka Norman Conquest) designed a beautiful edition for the occasion. You can find it on Amazon.

For those keeping track, this is my first Italian translation since 2002, when I translated Giovanni Battista Nazari’s alchemical dream vision Three Dreams for Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks in Glasgow. My, how time flies.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

The 25th issue of Black Scat Review is now out and ready for you to read! This one is subtitled “Lewd, Nude, and Rude,” and contains three of my contributions: “King Merrimack,” in which the eponymous monarch and his physician Celso receive a boorish visitor; “The Noble Apothecary,” my translation of a 1664 story by Jean Donneau de Visé, concerning love, jealousy, and enemas; and “English Etiquette,” my translation of a brief passage from Casanova on the finer points of relieving oneself in public.

You can also savor the work of Mark Axelrod, Thomas Barrett, Sebastian Bennett, Norman Conquest, R J Dent, Dawn Avril Fitzroy, Eckhard Gerdes, Alexander Krivitskiy, Amy Kurman, Hélène Lavelle, Marc Levy, Olchar E. Lindsann, Clément Marot, Lilianne Milgrom, Alison Miller, T. Motley, Angelo Pastormerlo, Gerard Sarnat, Valéry Soers, Gregory Wallace, Tom Whalen, and David Williams. The whole thing is edited and designed by Norman Conquest (with contributing editors Farewell Debut and Nile Southern), and available on Amazon.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Not many card games are based on traditional rhymes, but there have been a few versions of “The House That Jack Built.” Here’s one published by Arrco, probably in the ’50s, but apparently too marginal to be copyrighted or dated. For an earlier version of Jack’s misadventures, look here.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

My new annotated translation of “Loves, Delights, and Organs,” by Alphonse Allais, is now available from Black Scat Books. Allais was a peerless humorist whose wild imagination, and fascination with technology and language, made him a favorite of Alfred Jarry, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Umberto Eco, and generations of writers. The Pataphysical College named him their “Patacessor,” and Oulipo recognized him as “an Anticipatory Plagiarist.”

As critic Jean-Marc Defays put it: “Allais comes across as a very modern writer, and his work as an experimental enterprise which is exemplary in many ways… it is also quite possible to invoke such writers as Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, and Jorge Luis Borges.”

My translation faithfully hammers into English the 47 stories in the 1898 original, and adds six more from the same period. Hooray!

The 24th issue of Black Scat Review is now available! The theme of this one is “Funhouse.” In it, you can find my short story “The Potato Farm,” as well as delightful verbiage and artwork by Mark Axelrod, Tom Barrett, David Berger,  Norman Conquest, R J Dent, Muriel Falak, Eckhard Gerdes, Richard Gessner, Alfred Jarry, Richard Kostelanetz, Amy Kurman, Mantis, Kate Meyer-Currey, Bob McNeil, Lillianne Milgrom, Lance Olsen, Paul Rosheim, Nile Southern, and Jim Yoakum. The editor is the tireless Norman Conquest, and you can pick up a copy on Amazon.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

My new album, It All Went Pfft, is now available on Bandcamp! It includes 20 songs, plus the eponymous piano piece. The selections are:

1. Oh Dear, Oh Dear
2. Let’s Not Leave the House Anymore
3. Laughter
4. A Different Point of View
5. A Few Essential Principles
6. Bread and Honey
7. Get on the Grid
8. We Are Not a Pretty People
9. Amerigo and Isabella
10. Fa La La La La
11. Son of a Gun
12. Let’s Ridicule the Nightingale
13. What Could Be More Interesting Than That?
14. Your Parents
15. Listen to the Birds Cry Ouch
16. James
17. Uncle’s Ankles
18. When a Snowman Melts
19. Not Much to Brag About
20. It All Went Pfft
21. No More

I wrote, arranged, and performed the whole business: I sing, and play ukulele, keyboard, psaltery, melodica, cuatro venezolano, xylophone, bulbul, ocarina, Marx Violin-Uke, ‘cello, tambourine, and bells.

Doug Roesch recorded tracks 1, 6, 10, 15, 19, and 21, and plays guitar on them; David Gold plays viola on tracks 1, 6, 10, 15, and 21.
Brian Dewan recorded the rest of them.

Happy New Year to anyone reading this! Here are a few updates.

My book on anomalous and paranormal music, Music from Elsewhere, is now slated to be published by Strange Attractor Books in May. Here’s hoping there are no further delays…

I was invited to give a presentation of this material in February, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, in conjunction with an exhibit on art and the occult curated by Robert Cozzolino. Given the worsening pandemic and the apparent collapse of the airline industry, I assume it will take place over Zoom.

My new album of songs, It All Went Pfft, is now finished, and I hope to get it up on Bandcamp soon. Brian Dewan did the recording, although I’m also including a few tracks recorded several years ago with Doug Roesch.

And I’ve started work on an album of my instrumental music, to be called An Afternoon in the Arboretum.

My next translation of Alphonse Allais for Black Scat Books will be his classic collection Loves, Delights, and Organs: Amours, délices et orgues, named after the three words in French that are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural.

Another book for Black Scat is also planned for later this year: Vanity Fare, an anthology of memorable oddities from the vanity press.

The next issue of Black Scat Review will include my short story “The Potato Farm.” You can read a teaser here.

And let’s hope 2022 is better than last year…

(Posted by Doug Skinner)