WHERE’S PAPA? PAPA IS HERE!

Perhaps you lie awake at night, your mind racing with questions. Why did Yolanda hang a flotation device from the ceiling? What happened to the Butler Bullion? Can a duck teach a dog to fly? Will Dover and Larson explore that mysterious door? What typos are most prized by collectors? Will Thyrsis and Gallus escape the wolf? And what will Bach’s 37 children do when they’re kicked out of the house?

These, and many other questions not mentioned here, will be answered by the stories in Papa Bach. You might be too amused and stimulated to go back to sleep, but your life will be richer, and, above all, more enjoyable. And you’ll never know what these stories are about unless you read them. Dig in!    

PAPA BACH & OTHER STORIES
Doug Skinner
Trade paperback; 146 pp., $12.95
ISBN 979-8-9932444-7-1


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Doug Skinner has contributed to The Fortean Times, Fate, Weirdo, Nickelodeon, Cabinet, Typo, and other fine publications. His many books include Music From Elsewhere (Strange Attractor Books), The Potato Farm, and Nominata (both from Black Scat Books). Black Scat has also published his translations of Alphonse Allais, Alfred Jarry, Luigi Russolo, Isidore Isou, Claude-Sosthène Grasset d’Orcet, Caroline Crépiat, and Corinne Taunay. Other translations include Three Dreams by Giovanni Battista Nazari (Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks), The Cocktail Hour by Marcel Requien and Lucien Farnoux-Reynaud (with Gaylor Olivier, Corps Reviver), and The Science of Love by Charles Cros (Wakefield Press).

He has written music for theater and dance, most conspicuously for Bill Irwin’s show The Regard of Flight, which toured for decades.His albums That Regrettable Weekend, It All Went Pfft, An Afternoon in the Arboretum, and Music From Elsewhere are available on Bandcamp.

TV and movie appearances include Great Performances, Martin Mulls Talent Takes a Holiday, Ed, Crocodile Dundee II, and several of George Kuchar’s videos. He has played piano on the BBC, played ukulele on the Joe Franklin Show and at an Aerosmith release party, MC’d at the Rainbow and Stars, read the audiobook of Kiarna Boyd’s scary novel Blessed and Cursed Alike, and lectured on various questionable topics at the American Visionary Art Museum, the Morbid Anatomy Museum, the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Healing, Lily Dale Assembly, the International Fortean Organization, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and other places.

You can track his progress at dougskinner.net.


Happy New Year!

A smart start to a pataphysical new year.

from Belgium with love
Portugal

Bonne Patannée 2021!
Time to celebrate imaginary solutions. — Linda Klieger Stillman
Boudoir Reference

This volume contains all the knowledge you’ll ever need to have a successful life of the mind. Profusely illustrated, featuring entries by an international roster of distinguished experts from the arts, sciences, university and academia.

“An encyclopedia ought to make good the failure to execute such a project hitherto, and should encompass not only the fields already covered by the academies, but each and every branch of human knowledge.” —Diderot

“Today everyone wants to know everything – and preferably in alphabetical order.” —François Caradec

Le mot encyclopédie a été utilisé en français pour la première fois par Rabelais, mais ce n’est que lorsque Norman Conquest en a édité une qu’il a pris une dimension sublime.”—R. Queneau

Distinguished contributors from around the world include: Adrienne Auvray, Mark Axelrod, Tom Barrett, Norman Conquest, Caroline Crépiat, René Descartes, Peter Gambaccini, Eckhard Gerdes, Charles Holdefer, Rhys Hughes, Tractor Inspector, Alfred Jarry, M. Kasper, Richard Kostelanetz, Amy Kurman, Librairie Larousse, Michael Leigh, Olchar E. Lindsann, Opal Louis Nations, Daren Elsa Nibelly, Dr. Novalis, Pata-No , Richard Peabody, Mercie Pedro, Derek Pell, Charlotte Porter, Frank Pulaski, Jason E. Rolfe, Sourav Roy, Dr. I. L. Sandomir, Paulette Single, Doug Skinner, Maddy Smith, Linda Klieger Stillman, Corinne Taunay, Text Fixer, Kimberly Vodicka, Tom Whalen, Femke van der Wijk, Carla Wilson.

ORDER YOUR COPY

Wanton Words, Ribald Rhymes, & Naughty Lyrics

AWAY with silks, away with lawn,
I’ll have no scenes or curtains drawn;
Give me my mistress as she is,
Dress’d in her nak’d simplicities:
For as my heart e’en so mine eye
Is won with flesh, not drapery.
—Robert Herrick

A lusty anthology featuring titillating odes by an array of libertine poets of the XVII and XVIII centuries (Robert  Herrick, John Donne, William Congreve, Thomas Campion, et al.)  The works include gentle celebrations of the female sex; witty & whimsical whispers designed to seduce; and urgent pleas of—in the words of André Breton—L’amour fou. In this surreal realm of ribald eros, Virginity is a lost cause and Sexual Pleasure reigns supreme.

Our edition is profusely illustrated —from maidenhead to toe!—with works by more than a dozen artists, including Édouard-Henri Avril, Vivant Denon, Amandine Doré, and Thomas Rowlandson. As volume 8 in the popular Pocket Erotica series, POEMS OF LUST & DESIRE makes a delicious stocking-stuffer for all the libertines on your holiday list.

illustration by André Collot

POEMS OF LUST & DESIRE
by Libertine Poets of the XVII and XVIII Centuries
Pocket Erotica  [№ 8 ]
Illustrated; 110 pp., $12
ISBN 978-1-7356159-8-1

“TOURIST” WINS “BEST FEATURE”

Temenuga_smlCongratulations to Temenuga Trifonova—her film adaptation of her novel TOURIST has just won “Best Feature” at the Mostra Cinema Taranto film festival in Italy.  Black Scat Books is thrilled to be publishing TOURIST  in July.

TOURIST tells the mysterious story of Jack Sturrett, a book reviewer for a London literary magazine. Dissatisfied with his job, he makes an impulsive decision to leave the city without informing anyone of his departure. He boards a bus which takes him to a small town up north where he gets a job as a tourist guide after becoming so widely read in the town’s history that he passes for a local. Outside work he maintains the identity of a tourist, living in hotels and constantly reinventing his back-story. As his fake local persona becomes threateningly real, he finds himself a suspect in a murder investigation.

Screen Shot 2018-06-03 at 10.55.48 AMtourist_final_sml 2

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at York University in Toronto. Her first novel, Rewrite, was published by NON Publishing (Vancouver) in 2014. Trifonova is the author of the scholarly monographs Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology (2014) and The Image in French Philosophy (2007), and the edited volumes Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime (2017) and European Film Theory (2008). She has been a visiting scholar and/or artist at the American Academy in Rome, the Brown Foundation at the Dora Maar House (France), The Fondation des Treilles (France), the New York University Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, and the Pushkinskaya Art Centre in St. Petersburg. She is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at Le Studium Centre for Advanced Studies in Tours, France.

[This post was corrected 6-3-18]

 

 

 

 

 

Happy New Year!

screen-shot-2016-12-24-at-10-27-35-pm

THE SCAT’S OUT OF THE BAG and we’re starting the New Year off with a BANG the January issue of Le Scat Noir — crammed with art, fiction, poetry, translations, advice, horoscopes, lists, inspired doodles and detritus. Featuring contributions by an international roster: ALPHONSE ALLAIS, PAULO BRITO, PINK BUDDHA, SIMON CHILD, NORMAN CONQUEST, ECKHARD GERDES,  RUSSELL HELMS,  HAROLD JAFFE, JAN VANDER LAENEN,  TERRI LLOYD, SAMANTHA MEMI, SHEILA PELL, FRANK PULASKI, RON RIEKKI, STEPHEN SILKE, DOUG SKINNER, MADALINA TANTAREANU, TOM WHALEN, & CARLA M. WILSON.

LSN is published monthly by Black Scat Books and is available free online. You can download the new issue  HERE.

Spread the good turd.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Crad Kilodney (1948-2014) R.I.P.

mutants

The legendary absurdist writer Crad Kilodney passed away on April 14th.

I knew Crad back in the early days when he was hawking his outrageously titled books on the mean streets of Toronto.  You can imagine the reception he received with books like the one shown above. People were either completely indifferent or fist-shakingly hostile. But that never stopped him. With crazy courage he stood his ground for 17 years.  He produced 32 books of brilliant humor & satire.

I had the pleasure of collaborating with him on a few pieces (circa 1979) for Only Paper Today, an avant-garde Toronto newspaper.

He was often under the influence of Alphonse Allais, for he would interrupt his texts with hilarious asides and non sequiturs. One of my favorites appeared in the middle of a paragraph, sans parentheses: “Speed-readers go to hell.”

In 2012, I reprinted Crad’s story “Ed McBain Stole My Joke” in the first issue of BLACK SCAT REVIEW.

Sad that he left us, but he has left me laughing — that’s  the highest compliment I know.

Here’s a link to his obit  and below a short documentary about him made in 1992 at York University .

Crad Kilodney from Tristen Bakker on Vimeo.