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:

I was apparently interested in Oulipian constraints and recreational linguistics at an early age: I found a lipogram that I wrote when I was about ten.

The third volume of the adventures of Captain Cap (there will be four) is now available from Black Scat Books, in a limited edition of 125.  The adventures of the prototypical ‘pataphysical antihero, first published by Alphonse Allais in 1902, have been scrupulously translated, illustrated, and annotated by Doug Skinner; they appear in English for the first time.  The incomparable Captain is particularly erudite in these sixteen stories: as he savors his cocktails, he elucidates the antifilter, the nonuplet, ballooning without a balloon, grandiose billiards, fecal residue in Christmas sausage, shoeing horses at a distance, and much more.  To quote Albert Capus: “The humor of Alphonse Allais was a rigorous affirmation, whose gravity could not be doubted.  And since it was also impossible to believe, you found yourself in a strange position which condemned you to a burst of laughter.”

And you can find it at Black Scat Books.

My whilom cartoon character, Red Telephone, pursues an unsuccessful career.

A brief round, featuring a martyr.

If you draw a picture of yourself in the sand, it probably won’t last.