Doug Skinner: An Archive on Your Gizmo

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The Peculiar Bookshelf

August 20th, 2013 · 1 Comment

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“The Peculiar Bookshelf” was a segment that I performed on “No Shame,” a weekly variety show at Manhattan’s Public Theater in the early ’90s.  Having long been an avid accumulator of unusual books, I simply read a few selections from my shelves: visionaries, contactees, theorists, cryptographers, paranoiacs, and other worthy souls.  Occasionally I invited another performer: puppeteer Alison Mork, for example, provided the voice for Whitey, a celebrated talking cat of the ’60s; The Late Bloomers (Jennifer Duffy and Anne Shapiro) helped me to perform a brief pageant my great-aunt wrote for an Oklahoma women’s  club in the ’40s.  The drawing above was executed for LCD, the magazine of radio station WFMU, which ran an article of mine about the magnificent eccentric epic poem, Double Golden Chains with Blazing Diamonds Strung, by H. H. Hyder, under that rubric.  They pasted clip art in front of the drawing, and never paid me the agreed fee; avoid them.

Here’s an example, from 1992:

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Tags: *Stage · P

1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Norman Conquest // Aug 20, 2013 at 11:45 am

    Your bookshelf reminds me I wanted to edit an anthology titled 101 livres étranges.