“Let’s Ask Skinner” ran in Crimewave USA, edited by Mark Maynard and Linette Lao, from 1996 to 2003. It usually included both accurate and inaccurate misinformation, plugs for my other projects, toilet humor, and mockery of organized skeptics and the Grateful Dead — the last not from any animus on my part, but simply to provoke peevish mail from certain readers who held those topics sacred. The questions were sent in by readers, provided by the editors, or swiped from other publications. Here’s a sample.

George Kuchar and John Keel visit my studio, in one of George’s inimitable videos. In other sections, George visits Mimi Gross and Whitley Strieber.

I wrote this glum little tune back in 1983, when I was staying in Nancy. It was choreographed by Pam Quinn for a concert at Dance Theater Workshop (in NYC) in 1985.

Here’s the first part of it.

This realization of Mozart’s “Musical Game in C” (K.516f) was written for an evening organized by the Cannery Works on Mozart’s birthday, January 27, 2005. Mozart’s piece gave the materials to construct minuets on the names of his friends; I applied it to “Cannery Works,” and harmonized the result.

Nobody had really done much research into Tiffany Thayer, the founder of the original Fortean Society, and an entertaining character in his own right. So, I did; and wrote an article on him for the special 200th issue of the Fortean Times, in 2005. I read Thayer’s books, dug up photos and reviews of him, and found a copy of a film he acted in. You can read it here. (UPDATE: The link no longer works, since FT has revamped its website.)

The original article was published as “Doubting Tiffany”; and included my capsule summaries of his books. The summaries were fun to write, and are not included in the link above, so I’ll post them here.

You can get 49 pages of my keyboard music in this photocopied dossier. Let me know if you want one.

It contains excerpts from dance and theater scores, examples from lectures, harmonizations, Solrésol translations, occasional pieces, gags, and experiments.

The pieces are:

Stumbling Block
Rameau’s Nephew
Spang
Aubade
Rousseau’s Three-Note Tune
The Party Next Door
Quickstep
Music for Piano-Zither
Guesstimate
Honorificabilitudinitatibus
Infix
Dip
Aretino in Solrésol
On a Theme by Lewis Carroll
Ineffervescence
It All Went Pfft
Clot
The Underground Mountain Concert in Norway

A round to see in a new year. It’s palindromic, except for that flickering F and F#.

I drew Charles Fort for the cover of the 72nd issue of the INFO Journal, published by the International Fortean Organization. The drawing has also been reproduced on a tee-shirt, and a few other places. Whenever it’s reprinted, I add a few more scraps of paper.

“A Grim Reckoning” is one of my more gothic offerings. It began its life as incidental organ music for “Misguiding Lights,” a dance/theater piece by Pam Quinn and Michael O’Connor. I reworked it for viola and electronic organ, and performed it on the “No Soap Radio” series at Dance Theater Workshop, in NYC, in 1996, with David Gold on viola.

Here’s the first page.

On the occasion of Jim Steinmeyer’s biography of Charles Fort, I contributed an article to Fate on Fort’s books: his style, models, and reception. Among other things, I pointed out his Pyrrhonist and Bohemian tendencies; and compared his comic and speculative use of science with Jarry’s ‘pataphysics. Here’s the first page.