I’m writing some interstitial music for a projected album of readings. I plan to use a variety of instruments when I record it, but I tarried on the way to arrange it for string quartet as well. Here’s the first page:

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.”

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!

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!

Back in 1974, at Oberlin College, Herbert Blau led a group of students in developing a production about the ill-fated Donner Party. The cast was a promising one, including Bill Irwin and Michael O’Connor, with whom I toured for years in The Regard of Flight. I was a composition student at the time, and contributed three songs. Now, all these years later, Jim Eigo and Marjorie Hayes are resurrecting it at the University of North Texas. You can find more info here.

ADDENDUM: A video of the production has been posted on YouTube. My songs are at 19:36, 42:49, and 1:32:00.

A puzzle for the readers of Typo, slated for the fifth issue. To get you started, the first four letters are LONG.

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!

Some free-flowing piano music…

TYPO 4 is now available from Black Scat Books! I contributed an article on typos of the word “typo” (“Typo’s Typos”) and a translation of “Cubist Tale” by Gabriel de Lautrec. My fellow contributors are Tim Newton Anderson, Michael Betancourt, David Brizer, Steve Carll, Norman Conquest, Farewell Debut, R J Dent, Jesse Glass, Reinhard Goering, Rhys Hughes, Tim Hutchings, Mark Kanak, M. Kasper, Amy Kurman, Emilia Loseva, Jim McMenamin, O Homem do Saco, Jasia Reichardt, Doug Rice, Paul Rosheim, Franciszka Themerson, Stefan Thernerson, John Vieira, Gregory Wallace, and Danny Winkler. You will also find translations of eight Russian Futurists: Velimir Khlebnikov, Igor Terentjev, Aleksey Kruchenykh, Vasily Kamensky, Pavel Kokorin, Tykhon Churylin, Bodjidar (Bogdan Gordejev), and David Burliuk.

Edited by Norman Conquest and available from Amazon!

Once again, Meg Reichardt assembled a group of musicians in Brooklyn to record a holiday album. I sent in my song from upstate, and called in Brian Dewan to record it. It’s called “The Terrier’s Christmas,” and gives a canine perspective on the holidays. My fellow contributors are Kurt Hoffman, Meg Reichardt, Tisha Pryor, Brian Dewan, Mia Theodoratus, Nina Kennedy, and Ezekiel Healy. And you can hear the whole album here on Bandcamp.