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!

My upcoming book, Music From Elsewhere, contains a chapter on music that doesn’t exist: lost, mythological, fictional, and silent music. This sparked the urge to contribute to the genre, so I wrote “Eleven Silent Études.” They appear in the seventh issue of TYPO, and are dedicated to Kyle Gann, since he wrote the definitive work on John Cage’s 4’33”. Here’s the first étude, for dog whistle.

From The Potato Farm, here are the first four stanzas of “The Sasquatch and the Jackalope.” As astute readers will notice, it’s about photography, and is written in embraced quatrains (ABBA), with the stanzas alternating masculine and feminine rhymes.

THE SASQUATCH AND THE JACKALOPE

We have a stirring tale to tell,
Of how two creatures, in cahoots,
Persisted in their photo shoots
Until they had some shots to sell.

One night, a sasquatch left his hideout.
A jackalope sat like a stylite
Atop a summit in the twilight,
So startling him he nearly cried out.

He’d hung a Kodak from his neck,
And so he snapped the eerie scene.
He hoped some monthly magazine
Might like it, and would send a check.

The jackalope was also lucky:
That night he snapped a striking photo
That showed the hominid in toto:
A hulking ape, hirsute and mucky.

I’m writing some interstitial music for a projected album of readings. I plan to use a variety of instruments when I record it, but I tarried on the way to arrange it for string quartet as well. Here’s the first page:

My translation of Charles Cros’s prose works, The Science of Love, is now available from Wakefield Press.

From the publisher:

The Science of Love and Other Writings brings together for the first time in English all the literary prose of Charles Cros. An indefinable polymath of fin-de-siécle Paris, Cros’s imagination had one foot in the literary currents of his time, and the other in the field of science. This amalgamation is fully demonstrated in this collection, which includes proto-science-fiction stories; his contributions to what was then the new form of the prose poem; a sober, if fantastical, scientific study on methods of communication with other planets; and the patent application written with his brother for a (never-built) notating keyboard.

The literary imagination he was able to bring into the field of science was matched by the humorous scientific sobriety he introduced into his literature, which he did nowhere so effectively as in the title piece, “The Science of Love”: a depiction of a young scientist’s painstakingly executed seduction of a woman for the sake of scientific analysis, utilizing litmus paper and measuring releases of carbonic acid during maximized passion. Its humor led Joris-Karl Huysmans to include it in the rarefied library of À rebours, where the Collège de ’Pataphysique declared “An Interplanetary Drama” to be a “canonical text.” Also included are stories such as “The Newspaper of the Future” (which presents a nineteenth-century imagining of artificial intelligence) and “The Stone Who Died of Love.”

Charles Cros (1842–1888) was as much Renaissance man as he was poète maudit. A bohemian poet who drank with Verlaine and at one point provided housing to Rimbaud, he also developed the comic monologue as a theatrical genre and invented both the gramophone (which he named the “paléophone”) and color photography (though he failed to patent either before Thomas Edison or Louis Ducos du Hauron), among other such inventions as a non-metallic battery and a musical stenographer. “The freshness of his intelligence was such that no object of desire seemed utopian to him a priori,” André Breton wrote of him, adding: “The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.”

TYPO #5 is now available to be gawked at and puzzled over! I contributed an essay (“Typoglyphics”), a short story (“The Butler Bulli0n”), a “Bilingual Acrostic Rebus,” and translations of Tabarin and Théophile Gautier.

My distinguished colleagues in this issue are Tim Newton Anderson, Tom Bradley, Anton Chekhov, Norman Conquest, Caroline Crépiat, R J Dent, Max Ernst, Eurydice Eve, Luc Fierens, Leonor Fini, Harold Jaffe, Amy Kurman, Lo, Michael Maier, Dmitri Manin, Elena Marini, Lilianne Milgrom, Opal Louis Nations, Marty Newman, Claudio Parentela, Angeleaux Pastormerleaux, Paul Rosheim, Jasia Reichardt, Phil Demise Smith, Lono Taggers, Corinne Taunay, Shyam Thandar, Stefan Themerson, Konstantin Vaginov, and Gregory Wallace.

The whole thing is edited by Norman Conquest, and you can find it at Black Scat Books!

A Filthy Letter is now available from Black Scat Books!

Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) was a novelist and poet, one of the champions of Romanticism. In 1850, he and his friend Louis de Cormenin visited Italy, so he wrote his friends back home a letter about their adventures. The result was a rollicking “filthy letter,” packed with jokes, slang, obsolete words, literary allusions, puns, alliterations, neologisms, Spoonerisms, verses, outrageous metaphors, and Rabelaisian lists. It was published privately in 1890, and became a clandestine classic.

But you can read it now, translated, introduced, and annotated by Doug Skinner, and available on Amazon!