Merde à la Belle Époque is now available from Black Scat Books! Doug Skinner has chosen, translated, and annotated a choice selection of scatological texts from Paris’s Bohemian heyday. The texts range from 1883 to 1902, and include poems, stories, a play, a rebus and a letter. You will find Alphonse Allais, George Auriol, Georges […]

[Read more →]

Videos of me reading from my translation of Alphonse Allais’s book, Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks, have been posted here and here.  Thanks to Farewell Debut for shooting them; and to Derek Pell for posting them.  And thanks to Anthony Matt for the photo.

[Read more →]

Although I had sometimes suspected this was true, it was gratifying to see it in print.  Linette Lao and Mark Maynard visited Italy in 2003, and wrote some travel notes for the 14th issue of their magazine, Crimewave USA.  I had given them some useful advice, which, fortunately, they finally remembered.

[Read more →]

There will be a reading and book launch, from and for Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks, by Alphonse Allais: now translated, annotated, and illustrated by Doug Skinner, and published by Black Scat Books. Allais’s proto-pataphysical antihero, the inventor and explorer Captain Cap, expounds on such subjects as the kangacycle, the antifilter, and […]

[Read more →]

  Black Scat Review 5 is now available from Black Scat Books!  This one contains “Captain Cap Plays a Trick,” an excerpt from my translation of Alphonse Allais’s  Captain Cap, also available at the same link.

[Read more →]

I wrote an introduction for this collection of magazine articles and lectures by John Keel, edited by  Andrew Colvin.  For more on John Keel, look here.  To order the book on Amazon, look over here.

[Read more →]

  The trade edition of Captain Cap is now available!  Alphonse Allais’s hard-drinking, proto-pataphysical antihero, based on his friend Albert Caperon, bullies bartenders, swindles prostitutes, travels the world, and offers such useful inventions as the smell-buoy, the kangacycle, the bacteria motor, and much more.  This edition collects the four installments previously published by Black Scat […]

[Read more →]

The fourth and final volume of Captain Cap is now available from Black Scat Books.  In these sixteen stories, Alphonse Allais’s hard-drinking polymath proposes crocodile bridges, volatile ink, the kangacycle, smell-buoys, and much more.  Captain Cap, first published in 1902, and continually popular in France, has previously been translated into Czech, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, […]

[Read more →]

Oh boy!  Oulipo Pornobongo 2 is now out, chockablock with smut and recreational linguistics.  This one features work by Opal Louis Nations, Farewell Debut, D.S. Macpherson, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Giovanni Zuniga, Derek Pell, Roger Leatherwood, Eckhard Gerdes and others.  I contribute a song, an acrostic about mating dachshunds, a translation of an 1885 story by Alphonse […]

[Read more →]

I was apparently interested in Oulipian constraints and recreational linguistics at an early age: I found a lipogram that I wrote when I was about ten.

[Read more →]