Francisque Sarcey was Paris’s most celebrated critic in the 1890s, and one of its most conservative. He famously panned Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi as “a filthy fraud that deserves nothing but the silence of contempt,” and praised light, commercial fare. Not surprisingly, he became an object of derision for young poets and artists. Nobody took […]

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The 220th issue of Le Scat Noir is now available! You can get it free, in that handy PDF format, here. This issue contains my short story Selby Yarrow’s Private Diary and another page of my musical instrument drawings. There’s a lot of other stuff too, by many fine writers and artists. Go look!

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The 17th issue of Black Scat Review is now out, subtitled “Dada Forgery.” I contributed a piece on Tristan Tzara’s final book, Le Secret de Villon, in which he searched for “discontinuous anagrams” in the works of Villon and Rabelais. Other contributors include Captain Anonymous, David Moscovich, Anna Keeler, Christy Sheffield Sanford, Karl Waldmann, Ruth […]

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The 219th issue of Le Scat Noir is now available, ready to be read or downloaded, free, over here. It contains another page of my musical instrument drawings, as well as my translation of Alphonse Allais’s story “Comfort.” The Bohemian spirit is alive!

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You can click here for your copy of Le Scat Noir, in handy PDF form. This 218th issue contains my translation of Alphonse Allais’s “Christmas Story,” more of my drawings of imaginary musical instruments, and much more by other people. It’s festive!

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Black Scat Books is proud to serve up the master absurdist’s inaugural collection,  containing his hand-picked favorites from the pages of Le Chat Noir, the bohemian journal that amused and scandalized Paris. Here you’ll find Allais in the first flush of his comic genius, spinning out elegant and hilarious gems of black humor on suicide, […]

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I’ve written fables in verse for many years, mostly so that I can work within a set of specific formal constraints. My fables are invariably made of seven couplets, in strict iambic tetrameter, with no feminine rhymes, inversions, or sprung rhythms. These constraints, mind you, are not arbitrary, but chosen for their poetic effect. At […]

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The sixteenth (count them) issue of Black Scat Review is out! This one is devoted to “Obsession,” and fittingly includes my translation of Alphonse Allais’s story “Little Pigs.” You can find this fine journal here, and the book from which the story was taken, Double Over, will be out soon.

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Le Scat Noir #217 is out, free and accessible in its handy PDF format. Among many other things, you can read the full text of my stirring historical play, The Presidents’ Tragedy, and gaze at more of my musical instrument drawings. Look here! And be sure to download it for greater legibility.

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In this toxic election cycle, it’s appropriate to ponder the history of the presidency. I offer my stirring pageant, The Presidents’ Tragedy. It’s in five brief acts (with a prologue and epilogue spoken by David Rice Atchison, who was president for one day, sort of), in blank verse, and depicts all of our presidents trying […]

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