There will be a reading and book launch, from and for Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks, by Alphonse Allais: now translated, annotated, and illustrated by Doug Skinner, and published by Black Scat Books. Allais’s proto-pataphysical antihero, the inventor and explorer Captain Cap, expounds on such subjects as the kangacycle, the antifilter, and […]

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  Black Scat Review 5 is now available from Black Scat Books!  This one contains “Captain Cap Plays a Trick,” an excerpt from my translation of Alphonse Allais’s  Captain Cap, also available at the same link.

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I wrote an introduction for this collection of magazine articles and lectures by John Keel, edited by  Andrew Colvin.  For more on John Keel, look here.  To order the book on Amazon, look over here.

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  The trade edition of Captain Cap is now available!  Alphonse Allais’s hard-drinking, proto-pataphysical antihero, based on his friend Albert Caperon, bullies bartenders, swindles prostitutes, travels the world, and offers such useful inventions as the smell-buoy, the kangacycle, the bacteria motor, and much more.  This edition collects the four installments previously published by Black Scat […]

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The fourth and final volume of Captain Cap is now available from Black Scat Books.  In these sixteen stories, Alphonse Allais’s hard-drinking polymath proposes crocodile bridges, volatile ink, the kangacycle, smell-buoys, and much more.  Captain Cap, first published in 1902, and continually popular in France, has previously been translated into Czech, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, […]

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Oh boy!  Oulipo Pornobongo 2 is now out, chockablock with smut and recreational linguistics.  This one features work by Opal Louis Nations, Farewell Debut, D.S. Macpherson, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Giovanni Zuniga, Derek Pell, Roger Leatherwood, Eckhard Gerdes and others.  I contribute a song, an acrostic about mating dachshunds, a translation of an 1885 story by Alphonse […]

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I was apparently interested in Oulipian constraints and recreational linguistics at an early age: I found a lipogram that I wrote when I was about ten.

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The third volume of the adventures of Captain Cap (there will be four) is now available from Black Scat Books, in a limited edition of 125.  The adventures of the prototypical ‘pataphysical antihero, first published by Alphonse Allais in 1902, have been scrupulously translated, illustrated, and annotated by Doug Skinner; they appear in English for […]

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Black Scat Review 3 is out!  I contribute a translation of Alphonse Allais’s story “Absinthes,” as well as translations of texts about Allais by François Caradec and Jules Renard.  You can purchase this desirable publication at Black Scat Books.

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