Pink and Apple-Green is now available from Black Scat Books! By Alphonse Allais, translated, introduced, and annotated by Doug Skinner! This is the first English translation, and the first annotated edition in any language. It’s 261 pages: 44 stories, plus 5 extra stories. You can get one on Amazon. Alphonse Allais (1854-1905) was France’s greatest […]

[Read more →]

The Pope’s Mustard-Maker is now available from Black Scat Books! Translated by Doug Skinner! Le Moutardier du pape was the last work that Alfred Jarry finished, a few months before his death in 1907. It was one of many operettas he worked on in his last years, and one of the few he finished: a bawdy three-act […]

[Read more →]

A five-part round, setting a French proverb on the danger of eating eggs.

[Read more →]

I’ll be part of the lineup for Profane Illuminations, a day of talks at NYU organized by Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor Press. I’ll present my talk “Music from Elsewhere,” discussing and playing music attributed to fairies, trowies, banshees, aliens, spirits, and angels; as well as music from alchemists, occultists, Cathars, cryptographers, secret societies, and […]

[Read more →]

A setting for women’s voices of a brief prayer by Benjamin DeCasseres: Give me this day a corroding doubt and deliver me from single-mindedness and all faith that I may scan the Centre from each point on the marvellous Circle and scan each point on the Circle from the illusive Centre; and let not my […]

[Read more →]

A piece for brass I wrote when I was sixteen, recently recopied for legibility. It was built on fourths, seconds, and hocketing, and, as I recall, was bracing and growly.

[Read more →]

My upcoming collection, The Snowman Three Doors Down, also includes a few tales in verse. I should add that I write in strict verse forms simply because I like formal constraints. Here’s the beginning of “Pan and Kettle,” originally written for a nonsense issue of The Black Scat Review. PAN AND KETTLE Beneath an oak […]

[Read more →]

In this toxic election cycle, it’s appropriate to ponder the history of the presidency. I offer my stirring pageant, The Presidents’ Tragedy. It’s in five brief acts (with a prologue and epilogue spoken by David Rice Atchison, who was president for one day, sort of), in blank verse, and depicts all of our presidents trying […]

[Read more →]

A song about the universe.

[Read more →]

When I was a kid, I had a picture book of prehistoric animals, and was fascinated by the Paraceratherium (or Baluchitherium). It was the largest land mammal known, a long-necked ancestor of the rhinoceros that stood as high at eighteen feet at the shoulder. I finally made one into a cartoon character, named Papi. Here […]

[Read more →]