Greetings, music lovers! I’ll give a Zoom talk/concert about my book Music From Elsewhere in Shannon Taggart’s Supernatural Mystery Symposium, through the Viktor Wynd Museum in London on October 22, at 8:00 pm. I’ll play music attributed to fairies, trolls, trows, angels, aliens, time slips, and other unlikely sources, and suggest possible explanations. For more info, look here.

If you happen to be in Salem, Massachusetts, do visit the current show in the Peabody Essex Museum, “Conjuring the Spirit World.” My recording of one of the pieces from “Music From Elsewhere,” a song by those original Spiritualists the Fox Sisters, will be wafting through the air. You can find more info here.

And here’s the sign informing visitors about the music, photographed by Shannon Taggart. Thanks, Shannon!

Music From Elsewhere is now available from Strange Attractor Press!

This book collects and discusses music derived from unusual sources, including music attributed to fairies, trolls, trowies, banshees, aliens, angels, spirits, time slips, and dreams. You’ll also find chapters on speculative and cryptographic music, and on music from birds and other natural sounds. It’s 272 pages, richly illustrated in green and black (designed by the remarkable Tihana Šare), with 112 pages of historical sheet music. Also available in a limited hardback edition of 300, with a signed bookplate. Purchase includes a link to an MP3 album of Doug Skinner performing some of the music, recorded by Brian Dewan. Published by Strange Attractor Press in the UK, and distributed in the US by The MIT Press.

This story appears in my collection The Potato Farm. How does one go about painting a cockatrice, anyway? Here’s how it begins:

PAINTING THE COCKATRICE

I was working on a painting of a cockatrice, and was faced with a dilemma. Its gaze is lethal, which meant that if I painted it well, I would die. I had to admit, reluctantly, that it might be a poor subject for a painting.

I set down my brush and studied the canvas. The creature stared out at me, its baleful eye, meticulously rendered in Cadmium yellow, contrasting boldly with the scarlet comb and wattles. Its neck led down to a squat body and thrashing tail, their scales a mottled green. Its plumed legs ended in muscular feet, the left one raised, its sharp talons menacing the viewer. The anatomy was persuasive, the modeling effective, the brushwork, frankly, rather deft. But when I looked the animal in the eye, I didn’t die. I had failed.

I turned away from the easel and sank my head into my hands.

Somewhere a dog barked.

I sat up and listened. I’d read that sentence in hundreds of novels. In fact, it showed up in four I’d read in the past month: Buck Scarlatti’s searing indictment of humanity Your Values Are Disgusting, Dimity Etheridge’s farcical Pickles in the Pantry, Miff Derrick’s taut thriller Murder Hits the Big Time, and Georgia Crumit’s bucolic Fumigate the Henhouse. In each of these very different fictions, a dog, unidentified and presumably distant, broke the imaginary silence. I paid little attention to it. At best it set a mood; at worst it just inflated the word count.

But now I heard it myself, and became curious.

I wrote the introduction for Amanda DeMarco’s sparkling translation of New Inventions and the Latest Innovations, by Gaston de Pawlowski, now available from Wakefield Press. Here’s what Wakefield has to say:

Originally published in book form in 1916, Gaston de Pawlowski’s New Inventions and the Latest Innovations collects the humorist’s numerous columns mocking and deflating his era’s burgeoning consumer society and growing faith in science. From anti-slip soap, gut rests, and the pocket-sized yardstick to repurposed spittoons, nasal vacuums, new methods for curling endive, electric oysters, and musicographical revolvers, Pawlowski offers a far-sighted satire of technological gadgetry and our advanced society’s promise to remove discomfort from every facet of life, even as soldiers were dying daily in the trenches of World War I and technology was unleashing new horrors upon humanity.

Pawlowski’s humorous cultural critique and tongue-in-cheek celebration of uselessness and futility bears relevance for today, and not just because some of the absurdities described have since been invented: tech startups continue to receive inflated funding, and technology remains the hoped-for answer to our increasingly troubled human condition. Described with the excessive optimism of the sales pitch, these inventions of yesteryear were also an influence in the arts, admired by such figures as Marcel Duchamp and Raymond Queneau, and stand as a precursor to the work of such artists as Jean Tinguely and today’s looming specter of AI-generated images and text.

Gaston de Pawlowski (1874–1933) was a productive journalist, humorist, and bicycle enthusiast who wrote on everything from war correspondence to the fourth dimension. His friends and colleagues included Alfred Jarry, Marcel Proust, and Guillaume Apollinaire, but he is chiefly remembered today as being an influence on Duchamp’s The Large Glass.

TYPO 7 is now available from Black Scat Books!

I contributed a set of silent pieces (“Eleven Silent Études”); translations of two stories by Alphonse Allais (“Gaudissart Has Fun” and “The Theater of Mr. Bigfun”), both taken from My Rent Is Due; and a translation of Raymond Roussel’s first work in prose (“Chroniquettes”).

This rollicking and trenchant issue also includes great stuff by mIEKAL aND, Terry Bradford, Steve Carll, Norman Conquest, Lynn Crawford, Noël Devaulx, Mark DuCharme, Albert Ehrenstein, Shawn Garrett, Edward Gauvin, Richard Huelsenbeck, Iliazd, Mark Kanak, Thomas J. Kitson, Amy Kurman, Jean Lorrain, Emilia Loseva, Marcel Mariën, Willy Melnikov, Heather Sager, Phil Demise Smith, Paul Willems, and Cynthia Yatchman. The whole thing is edited and designed by the industrious Norman Conquest.

Back in 2017, Brent Raynes interviewed me about John Keel, for the magazine Alternate Perceptions. You can read it here.

I’m happy to announce that my translation of Alphonse Allais’s My Rent Is Due! is now available from Black Scat Books. This collection, originally published in 1899, includes delightful stories about tapeworms, phantom limbs, floating brothels, and other interesting things. André Breton saluted Allais’s “terrorist activity of the mind”; maybe you will too.

This affecting tale of a young poet who loses the rights to his work appears in the latest issue of TYPO.

Optional technical note for logophiles: “Uncopyrightable” is one of the longest heterograms in English, consisting of fifteen unrepeated letters. Each paragraph is 60 words, with a two-word anagram of the title in the middle.

Here’s how it begins:

UNCOPYRIGHTABLE

Many poets have attained a fleeting fame, and were then forgotten. The public flocked to their readings and fawned over their books, only to abandon them for fresher talents. Creighton Paulby was one of these, a young poet whose moment of notoriety was followed by oblivion. His story is particularly affecting, since he also lost the rights to his work.

Paulby was born in a tarpaper shack in a remote swampland. He was an only child, and his parents paid little attention to him. I can offer you no lucent biography for him, only the dismal record of a dark and lonely childhood, spent idling by the fetid waters of a swamp, his days unenlivened by either friends or education. 

His parents were kind enough, but busy with their own interests. Haggard, obsessive Mama devoted many hours to tending her still, which produced a brackish moonshine that was probably pathogenic; burly, sullen Papa earned a precarious living by bolting together ramshackle furniture and growing sickly herbs and vegetables, both of which he peddled from his wagon in the nearby towns.

Consequently, Creighton was usually left to his own devices. He lounged by the swamp next to the family property, amusing himself with the plants and animals in his desolate birthplace. Young Creighton made toys and games from stones and sticks, dug for fancied pirate treasure in the mucky banks, and trapped an occasional wild animal to tame as a pet.

The sixth issue of TYPO is now available from Black Scat Books!

This issue weighs in at 169 pages, edited by Norman Conquest, and loaded with “prototypes, visual poetry, Belgian fiction, chronograms, Symbolist decadence, vintage surrealism & much more. Featuring an international cast of artists, poets, and writers, including: Frédéric Acquaviva; Terry J. Bradford; Apollo Camembert; Steve Carll; Norman Conquest; Lynn Crawford; Caroline Crépiat; Noël Devaulx; Shawn Garrett; Edward Gauvin; Nico Kirschenbaum; John Kruse; Amy Kurman; Jean Lorrain; Emilia Loseva; Jean Muno; Opal Louis Nations; Clemente Palma; Claudio Parentela; Vojtěch Preissig; Vania Russo; Nelly Sanchez; Marcel Schneider; and Doug Skinner.”

I contributed a short story (“Uncopyrightable”), a musical optical toy (“Dodecaphonophenakistoscope”), an introduction to a Czech chronogram, and an article on the “Indisposizione di Belle Arti,” a proto-Dada art exhibit held in Milan in 1881.

And you can find it on Amazon!