A song about life’s blank spots. Here, as usual, is the beginning.

Issue 222 of Le Scat Noir is now available from Black Scat Books. You can download it for free in the handy PDF format. This issue contains, among other things, another page of my musical instrument drawings and a selection from I Am Sarcey.

Francisque Sarcey was Paris’s most celebrated critic in the 1890s, and one of its most conservative. He famously panned Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi as “a filthy fraud that deserves nothing but the silence of contempt,” and praised light, commercial fare. Not surprisingly, he became an object of derision for young poets and artists. Nobody took the ridicule further than Alphonse Allais, who appropriated Sarcey’s byline for a series of articles in the Bohemian paper Le Chat Noir. Allais’s Sarcey was an obese buffoon who boasted about his appetite, complained about his constipation and impotence, and championed mediocrity in the arts: a memorable comic character who often overshadowed the original.

Doug Skinner has selected, translated, and annotated this famous journalistic prank. It’s now available from Black Scat Books or Amazon.

A spirited song, appropriate for many social situations. Here’s the first verse of six.

As our society grows more conservative and conformist, it doesn’t take much to be considered an eccentric. And it will only get worse, I’m afraid…

Here’s another page of my musical instrument drawings. They’re appearing every month in Le Scat Noir, available for no money from Black Scat Books. The next issue is due out April 1. Watch this space!

Here they come! Get out of their way!

The 221st issue of Le Scat Noir is out, and available for download over here. You can admire another page of my musical instrument drawings, and read a cornucopia of fine material by an international array of writers and artists.

An illustration from Chapter 44 of Captain Cap, by Alphonse Allais, in my illustrated translation available from Black Scat Books. The scene shows a café after Allais and Cap have had a few drinks.

A setting of Francis Bacon, from his book The History of Life and Death. He summarized the human life cycle in one sentence, and I thought it called for music.