In this story from my collection Sleepytime Cemetery, our two hapless protagonists contend with life underwater. Why is it so much harder to breathe there, anyway? Here’s how it begins…

INTO THE SEA

“I’ve never done this before,” admitted Morris.
“Me neither,” said Winchell.
“Well, let’s see what it’s like,” said Morris.
They jumped off the cliff and into the sea.
“I thought it would be warmer,” remarked Winchell, as they sank into the blue-green depths.
“It’s kind of cold for such a hot day,” said Morris.
“Not unpleasantly so,” said Winchell.
A ray flapped toward them from below, veered away, and swam off to their left, gradually disappearing into the opalescent murk.
“But now my clothes are all wet,” said Winchell, gazing in dismay at his billowing shirt and pants. “I should have thought of that.”
“And it’s hard to breathe, isn’t it?”
“Well, there’s no air down here.”
“But water’s just hydrogen and oxygen,” said Morris. “Why isn’t it like air?”
“It’s in liquid form,” explained Winchell. “You have to boil it to make it a gas.”
“Nonsense,” said Morris. “The air outside is hydrogen and oxygen, but it’s not boiling. It’s warmer than this water, but it’s not boiling.”
“It has other stuff in it too, like carbon dioxide,” said Winchell.
“That shouldn’t make any difference,” said Morris.
“And the sea has salt in it, too,” Winchell added.
“That doesn’t matter either. When you pour salt on land, the air doesn’t liquefy,” Morris objected.
“True,” admitted Winchell…

We have here a rousing song about humanity’s fundamental perversity. I often sang this back in the ’90s, with Carol Benner playing a vigorous obbligato on the viola.

“The Cinematographer and the Megachiropteran” was written for Le Scat Noir 227, devoted to formal constraints. You can find it in my collection The Snowman Three Doors Down.

I devised a technique similar to Raymond Roussel’s famed process, which used puns and homonyms to generate ideas. I used anagrams instead; the longest anagram pair in English, “cinematographer” and “megachiropteran,” gave me my two protagonists. Two-word anagrams of these fifteen letters provided the people and things they encountered, with further details (and the anagrams themselves) given in footnotes. So, our story begins as our hero and his pet bat come across a metric orphanage founded by a champagne rioter, stop to admire its heroic pentagram and the statue of its hermetic paragon, and listen to a ragtime chaperon play a paregoric anthem. But the institution also harbors an emigrant poacher, and there’s trouble ahead…

THE CINEMATOGRAPHER AND THE MEGACHIROPTERAN

The cinematographer¹ parted the bushes and stepped into a clearing. The morning clouds were dissipating, revealing a radiant sky. His pet megachiropteran² burrowed into her backpack carrier, away from the sunlight. A large building lay ahead of them, down a gravel path; the faint chiming of a piano and the chatter of children drifted up to them on the breeze. The bat complained of the light and noise, reminding her owner that she hated going out in the day.

The cinematographer descended the path through a thicket of shrubs, and, shading his eyes, peered down the hill. Before him sat a large square building, surrounded by spacious grounds.

The building was a school for orphans, founded by a wealthy mathematician in the early twentieth century. His motivation had been not only philanthropic, but pedagogical: he promoted a thorough mathematical education, stressing his own revised decimal system, the quindecimal, based on the number fifteen.³ After serving a short prison term for his part in the violent demonstrations in 1905 against higher taxes on sparkling wine,⁴ he had devoted himself to the institution, which was still thriving decades after his death from cirrhosis.

As the cinematographer neared the building, he stopped to admire the imposing entrance, surmounted by a massive five-pointed star, each arm set with smaller stars.⁵ To the left, atop a pentadecagonal plinth, stood a marble statue of the founder, idealized as a magus, in a long robe covered with numerals, a wand in one hand, a globe in the other.⁶ The cinematographer turned toward the music, and discovered the children’s guardian, a septuagenarian in straw hat and sleeve garters, who banged out a jaunty, syncopated tune on a spinet piano that had been wheeled onto the walkway.⁷ Around him, children of various ages danced and turned cartwheels. The megachiropteran stirred plaintively as the music became louder. 

The guardian finished his rag, and then beckoned the children to approach. They gathered around him to chant a solemn hymn praising camphorated tincture of opium.⁸ He then arose, and was starting to divide the children into opposing teams, when he noticed our hiker…

“We All Work So Hard” is a song taking umbrage at the work ethic. It can be found in The Doug Skinner Songbook, so you can sing it yourself.

2 + 2 = 5 is now available from Black Scat Books! This, if you’re doing the math suggested by the title, is my tenth translation of France’s master humorist, Alphonse Allais.

2 + 2 = 5 (in French, 2 + 2 = 5), was first published in 1895. Allais is in his prime here, spinning out dark fantasies on cycling in Ancient Rome, the taste of tears, the economic advantages of germ warfare, God’s dislike of Christmas, and the proper chemicals for a chaperone’s chamberpot. The intrepid Captain Cap pitches his bizarre inventions over cocktails, and Allais sends back notes from his travels to North America and Southern France. At 65 stories (289 pp.), this collection is his largest—and I’ve added two extra stories by Allais and two by Octave Mirbeau, all on the pressing issue of ambulatory vegetables, as well as an introduction and useful notes. Lilianne Milgrom did the lovely cover painting. It all adds up to hilarity! And you can find it on Amazon.

A piano piece from my student days. These are some of the savory dissonances I was stirring up when I was 18.

These verses about Amerigo Vespucci and Queen Isabella were originally published in Bedside Nonsense, from Black Scat Books. Here they are set to music, which I recently recorded with a Venezuelan cuatro. Note that for the sake of the meter “Amerigo” is pronounced in Americanese, as I was taught it in school, with the accent on the “mer.” Here’s the first verse.

Patents Pending is now available from Black Scat Books, and can be obtained on Amazon! The inimitable Derek Pell and I came up with a book chock-full of new inventions. I’ll let Derek give the pitch:

The 41st volume in our seminal Absurdist Texts & Documents series has arrived: PATENTS PENDING by Derek Pell and Doug Skinner, with an Afterword by Alphonse Allais. An illustrated compendium of ingenious inventions so ahead of their time they may never be available to the public – not in this world, nor the next. Discover pataphysical gizmos such as the OUIJA BILLBOARD, HELIUM BOMB, IMPOSSIBLE PICTURE FRAME, TROMPE L’OEIL MAGIC KIT, and many others. For now, these inspired concepts are but speculative prototypes – strange dreams haunting the drawing board of destiny – but thanks to this book you may study and savor them, and imagine a future far brighter than the present.

The 21st issue of Black Scat Review is now available from Amazon! My contributions to this special travel issue are a short story, “The Morning Walk,” and translations of two stories by Alphonse Allais, from my upcoming translation of his collection 2 + 2 = 5.

I am, mind you, one of many contributors. My esteemed colleagues are: Robert James Cross, Farewell Debut, S. C. Delaney, John Oliver Hodges, Rhys Hughes, Harold Jaffe, E.E. King, Olchar E. Lindsann, Charles J. March III, Carmelo Militano, Opal Louis Nations, Peter Payack, Persefone, Roger Pheuquewell, Agnès Potier, Collin J. Rae, Jason E. Rolfe, Paul Rosheim, Charles de Rosières, Kristine Snodgrass, Ben Stoltzfus, Corinne Taunay, Ed Taylor, Michel Vachey, Tom Whalen, and D. Harlan Wilson. A stellar crew! Edited and designed by Norman Conquest!