Thanks to Winston Hunter, here’s a photo of Music From Elsewhere in the Juilliard Store in NYC. Read and learn, students!

Feeding Time is now available from Black Scat Books!

This collection of Alphonse Allais’s short pieces, originally published in 1897, shows the great French humorist at his best, spinning out stories, fables, dialogues, and articles with elegance and imagination. You’ll find clandestine train stations and incandescent leeks, the rules for attending funerals with a bicycle, proposals for celluloid money and explosive confetti, the diplomatic problems of flatulence, and a gallery of swindlers, lovers, and adulterers. Allais’s most popular character, Captain Cap, appears to describe cannon billiards and to suggest replacing carrier pigeons with fish. Translated, annotated, and introduced by Doug Skinner, who also drew the frontispiece.

With this book, Black Scat Books’ editor Norman Conquest and I complete our Alphonse Allais library. It includes all eleven of the collections Allais called his “Anthumous Works,” plus six additional volumes: Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks; The Blaireau Affair (Allais’s only novel); Selected Plays of Alphonse Allais; I Am Sarcey (his stories featuring Francisque Sarcey); Alphonse Allais’s Masks: Deluxe Special Edition (an illustrated version of one of his stories); and a sampler, The Alphonse Allais Reader.

Allais’s work was praised by, among others, André Breton, René Magritte, Umberto Eco, Rachilde, Marcel Duchamp. Harry Mathews, and the Collège de ‘Pataphysique. And here it is for English readers!

A drinking song by Thomas Chatterton, from his play The Revenge, set here for SATB. This is the first page.

Tyler Maxin snapped this photo of Music From Elsewhere in the Community Bookstore in Brooklyn. Thanks, Tyler! And I’m glad you enjoy it, Patrick!

My friend Don Jolly once remarked that in this society we’re just a tube for money. With his permission, I turned the idea into a song. Here’s the first page.

TYPO 9 is now available from Black Scat Books! I contributed a translation of Alphonse Allais’s story “The Crocodile and the Ostrich,” from my upcoming translation of his book Feeding Time. Caroline Crépiat drew a lovely illustration for it, as only she can.

My fellow contributors are a stellar bunch: Chiara Ambrosio, Robert Archambeau, Pierre Bettencourt, Greg Boyd, Terry Bradford, H.V. Chao, Norman Conquest, Lynn Crawford, R J Dent, Mark Ducharme,  Jean-Luc Garneau, Edward Gauvin, Vasilisk Gnedov, Kirpal Gordon, Michael Gould, André Hardellet, Jordan Jones, Amy Kurman, Joel Lipman, Emilia Loseva, Stephen-Paul Martin, George MacLennan, Henri Michaux, Claudio Parentela, Angelo Pastormerlo, Gabriel & Marcel Piqueray, Bernard Quiriny, Renée Vivien, Danny Winkler, and Bill Wolak. The whole thing was edited and designed by Norman Conquest.

There are many songs praising sports, but few expressing disinterest in them. This song fills that need.

The Virtuoso Parrot is now available from Black Scat Books!

Claude-Sosthène Grasset d’Orcet (1828-1900) wrote hundreds of startling articles and stories about secret societies, hidden bloodlines, and his own idiosyncratic views of history. His obsession with finding puns and rebuses, in both ancient inscriptions and modern speech, influenced generations of occultists; it was the inspiration for the “language of the birds” expounded by the enigmatic Fulcanelli.

My translation is Grasset d’Orcet’s first appearance in English. It contains five of his odd and often hilarious stories and a contemporary obituary, as well as my introduction and detailed notes on his ideas and allusions.

At last, the virtuoso parrot speaks to English readers!

Here you can see Music From Elsewhere displayed at the Inquiring Minds Bookstore in New Paltz, NY. As the sign indicates, I’ll give a reading at the Elting Library on January 29. There’s more info here.

For many years, Meg Reichardt has invited musicians to contribute a song to her annual Holiday Recording Party. Thanks to her, I’ve written more holiday songs than I would have imagined. My latest one is about that hapless trio, the Three Wise Men. You can listen to it here, and here’s the first page.