This song was also performed by White Knuckle Sandwich back in 2001. I’ve done it more recently on my own as well.

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“The Isle of Dogs” is a story in my collection The Snowman Three Doors Down. In it, a group of scholars investigate the play of that name, by Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe, which was suppressed and is now lost. The French play mentioned here, Caquire, is also real, but its use in the story […]

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Instrumentarium is now available from Black Scat Books! This delightful volume collects the drawings of imaginary musical instruments I contributed monthly to Le Scat Noir, plus many previously unpublished. Among the 180 selected here are such inventions as the Painpipes, the Sprinkler Trombone, the Sponge Marimba, and the Calfbell. As our culture grows ever more reductive […]

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Black Scat Books has released a free Peek-A-Book of “An Interview with Horace Ballantine,” from my upcoming collection The Snowman Three Doors Down. The veteran cartoonist has to contend with an interviewer who never heard of comic strips, and it’s not easy for either of them. You can download your PDF here.

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For The Black Scat Encyclopaedia (see previous post), I contributed several entries on poetics. Here’s one of them: IAMBIC CENTAMETER: A line of a hundred iambic feet: Beloved, when I saw you standing there beside that picturesque gazebo by the crumbling garden wall, as bluebirds gaily sang their hearts out high atop the willow tree […]

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I don’t know when I’m going to die, but I do know what to expect.

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Francisque Sarcey was Paris’s most celebrated critic in the 1890s, and one of its most conservative. He famously panned Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi as “a filthy fraud that deserves nothing but the silence of contempt,” and praised light, commercial fare. Not surprisingly, he became an object of derision for young poets and artists. Nobody took […]

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As our society grows more conservative and conformist, it doesn’t take much to be considered an eccentric. And it will only get worse, I’m afraid…

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Bill Ectric has interviewed me about my translation of The Zombie of Great Peru, by Pierre-Corneille Blessebois, published earlier this year by Black Scat Books. It’s over at a site called Red Fez.

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I don’t want to be the pope in Rome, Sitting underneath Saint Peter’s dome. When the cardinals come knocking, Then I guess that I’ll start locking My door, and send those hopeful clerics home. That’s the first of four verses; the accompaniment is slated for viola and tuba, but here it is in a form […]

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