The 17th issue of Black Scat Review is now out, subtitled “Dada Forgery.” I contributed a piece on Tristan Tzara’s final book, Le Secret de Villon, in which he searched for “discontinuous anagrams” in the works of Villon and Rabelais. Other contributors include Captain Anonymous, David Moscovich, Anna Keeler, Christy Sheffield Sanford, Karl Waldmann, Ruth Crossman, Norman Conquest, Paulo Brito, Harry McCullagh, Michael Leigh, Gregory Autry Wallace, Eîlot Tuerie, Terri Lloyd, and Joseph Heathcott. This will be the last issue of this delightful journal, so pick up a copy while you can! You can find it here.

The 219th issue of Le Scat Noir is now available, ready to be read or downloaded, free, over here. It contains another page of my musical instrument drawings, as well as my translation of Alphonse Allais’s story “Comfort.” The Bohemian spirit is alive!

A Christmas song, written for the annual Holiday Recording Party Meg Reichardt used to hold in Brooklyn. You can hear me sing it here.

A set of eleven brief piano pieces, from my conservatory days. Here are the first two.

You can click here for your copy of Le Scat Noir, in handy PDF form. This 218th issue contains my translation of Alphonse Allais’s “Christmas Story,” more of my drawings of imaginary musical instruments, and much more by other people. It’s festive!

Black Scat Books is proud to serve up the master absurdist’s inaugural collection,  containing his hand-picked favorites from the pages of Le Chat Noir, the bohemian journal that amused and scandalized Paris. Here you’ll find Allais in the first flush of his comic genius, spinning out elegant and hilarious gems of black humor on suicide, murder, obsession, and adultery. You will meet the philosophical cuckold, the young lady in love with a pig, the inventor of the Tumultoscope, and Ferdinand, the most resourceful duck in literature. Among the highlights is Allais’s most famous story, “A Thoroughly Parisian Drama,” a favorite of André Breton and Umberto Eco. This is the book’s first publication in English, and features seven additional stories from Le Chat Noir, as well as a sublime introduction, notes on the text, and drawings by Doug Skinner.

276 delicious pages!

Pick up a copy on Amazon! Visit Black Scat Books!

I’ve written fables in verse for many years, mostly so that I can work within a set of specific formal constraints. My fables are invariably made of seven couplets, in strict iambic tetrameter, with no feminine rhymes, inversions, or sprung rhythms. These constraints, mind you, are not arbitrary, but chosen for their poetic effect. At any rate, here’s one of them. Enjoy, if you can…

THE VULTURE AND THE JACKAL

A vulture and a jackal met
To settle on some scheme to net
More meat. The jackal growled, “A king
That we control is just the thing:
Some pawn that only seems to rule.”
And so they crowned a lowly mule.
The puppet monarch strutted, brayed,
And marched his troops in grand parade.
And when they cheered, he brayed some more,
And marched them off to fight a war.
As bombs were burst, and soldiers slain,
And trenches smeared with blood and brain,
The jackal and the vulture fed
Upon the mounting heaps of dead.

The sixteenth (count them) issue of Black Scat Review is out! This one is devoted to “Obsession,” and fittingly includes my translation of Alphonse Allais’s story “Little Pigs.” You can find this fine journal here, and the book from which the story was taken, Double Over, will be out soon.

Le Scat Noir #217 is out, free and accessible in its handy PDF format. Among many other things, you can read the full text of my stirring historical play, The Presidents’ Tragedy, and gaze at more of my musical instrument drawings. Look here! And be sure to download it for greater legibility.

In 1974, as a composition student at Oberlin Conservatory, I wrote three songs for “The Donner Party: Its Crossing,” developed and performed by the company Kraken, and directed by Herbert Blau. The words were by Stuart Friebert and Herbert Blau. I posted the program here, and finally got round to revising and recopying the songs. Here’s part of the first one.