One of my student pieces, a brief song with ‘cello and piano, on a text from an English-Chinese reader. Here’s the beginning.

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This alphabet appears in The Doug Skinner Dossier. Buy a copy! Buy another copy! COMPLEMENTS Acid — Base Clean — Dirty Empty — Full Glum — Happy Iffy — Just Keen — Listless Messy — Neat Old — Puerile Quiet — Raucous Slim — Tubby Unvoiced — Voiced Wet — Xeric Yawning — Zipped

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A musical cryptogram is written like a substitution cipher, by assigning another pitch to each pitch. The result has the same rhythm and repetitions as the original, but with different pitches. I chose the minuet from Bach’s third French Suite because I like it, and because it uses all twelve pitches. Here’s the first page.

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Charles Cros: Collected Monologues is now available from Black Scat Books! Charles Cros (1842-1888) was one of the most brilliant minds of his generation, equally adept at poetry, fiction, and scientific inquiry. He wrote smutty verses with Verlaine, synthesized gems with Alphonse Allais, contributed wild prose fantasies to Le Chat Noir, and experimented with color photography […]

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On July 28, 2017, I found myself in Lily Dale, NY, a center of Spiritualism, performing in an evening organized by Shannon Taggart. I performed what I called music attributed to ultraterrestrials, using a term favored by the late John Keel for non-human entities. My program included fairy music from England, Ireland, Wales, and Norway; […]

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The Cocktail Hour is now available! This classic cocktail guide from 1927 contains 224 recipes collected by Marcel Requien, and a running commentary on the proper drink (and etiquette) for every hour of the day by Lucien Farnoux-Reynaud. The bilingual edition from Corps Reviver includes the original French text, an English translation by Doug Skinner […]

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An illustration from Chapter 44 of Captain Cap, by Alphonse Allais, in my illustrated translation available from Black Scat Books. The scene shows a café after Allais and Cap have had a few drinks.

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Ever eager for literary constraints, I wrote this tale in heroic couplets, alternating masculine and feminine rhymes, with each stanza an acrostic of the title. Heroic couplets seemed appropriate, since it concerns adultery at a cosplay convention. Here’s the first stanza (of eight): The Chromatologist was colorblind: He had to check the colors in his […]

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Speaking of ears, here are some sketches of chonchons, those peculiar creatures from Chilean folklore. Borges described them at some length in his Book of Imaginary Beings; here’s a shorter account, from the Dizionario dei Mostri (ed. Massimo Izzi, L’Airone, Roma, 1997), in my translation: Vampire composed of an isolated human head with enormous ears, […]

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