Thomas Wilfred: Clavilux and Lumia Home Models is now available from Christine Burgin Books, as part of the Further Reading Library. Christine Burgin and Andrew Lampert edited it, and I wrote the introduction. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968) devoted his life to the creation of a new art form, the art of light, which he termed “Lumia.” In the 1920s, Wilfred toured the US and Europe to great acclaim staging colored-light recitals with his Clavilux organ. By the late ’20s he had reinvented these large scale performances as self-enclosed light shows for living room entertainment. Wilfred’s aesthetically elegant and interactive Clavilux and Lumia home models were soon found in the collections of important art world figures and in major museums. His work was on view into the ’80s at MoMA, where it was seen by many of the artists who came to work with light as their medium in the ’60s and ’70s. Thomas Wilfred: Clavilux and Lumia Home Models presents a fascinating collection of archival material culled from the Wilfred archive at Yale University and other sources, including never before published sketches by Wilfred and documentation of these strange glowing screens that predated television, video art, and psychedelia.

Le Scat Noir’s Museum of the Inane is now available from Black Scat Books! This anthology of fiction, drawings, collages, and, above all, nonsense, was edited by Norman Conquest and features a glittering array of nonpareils: Rhys Hughes, Lono Taggers, Phil Demise Smith, T. Motley, Catulle Mendès, R J Dent, Boris Glikman, David Paddy, David Macpherson, Norman Conquest, Amy Kurman, Allan Randolph Kausch, Mark Kanak, Ivars Balkits, and Tom Barrett. I contributed a rollicking tale in verse, “Dover and Larson.” Bask in the inanity!

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!