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, but never before into English.  Now, with this last volume, every last drop is available to anglophones.

This edition is translated, illustrated, introduced and annotated by Doug Skinner.  It has been published by Black Scat in an edition of 125 copies.  Set sail with the Captain!

A curious alchemical portal in Rome.

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 Allais, and a comic strip scripted by Derek Pell.  It’s available from Black Scat Books.

Jennifer Duffy and I collaborated on this drawing for a postcard, for our band White Knuckle Sandwich.  I drew the astronauts (partially swiped from an old pulp cover), Saturn, the seltzer, and the uke; Jen supplied the rest, including the spirograph.

A piece for viola and piano, extracted from the incidental music for The Harlequin Studies.

“The Peculiar Bookshelf” was a segment that I performed on “No Shame,” a weekly variety show at Manhattan’s Public Theater in the early ’90s.  Having long been an avid accumulator of unusual books, I simply read a few selections from my shelves: visionaries, contactees, theorists, cryptographers, paranoiacs, and other worthy souls.  Occasionally I invited another performer: puppeteer Alison Mork, for example, provided the voice for Whitey, a celebrated talking cat of the ’60s; The Late Bloomers (Jennifer Duffy and Anne Shapiro) helped me to perform a brief pageant my great-aunt wrote for an Oklahoma women’s  club in the ’40s.  The drawing above was executed for LCD, the magazine of radio station WFMU, which ran an article of mine about the magnificent eccentric epic poem, Double Golden Chains with Blazing Diamonds Strung, by H. H. Hyder, under that rubric.  They pasted clip art in front of the drawing, and never paid me the agreed fee; avoid them.

Here’s an example, from 1992: