Bon Voyage, Captain Cap
For those who may have missed our editions of Alphonse Allais‘s CAPTAIN CAP, here’s a treat: Doug Skinner‘s introduction to Vol. IV, THE SANATORIUM OF THE FUTURE:
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Dorothy Parker once remarked that most humorists “milk a formula until it moos in pain.” After so many years of turning in several columns a week, Allais may have been feeling the strain. He admitted in one piece that the punning names he used for his characters were not really that funny. In a series of rather glum installments in 1901 (July 25, July 31, August 9), he simply listed recent patent applications. Contemplating such genuine inventions as the luminous hat, the pedal-operated fan, the combination fishing pole and bicycle pump, the hail parasol, the gloves made from intestinal membranes, the multicolored cane, the sea soap, the summer fez, the metal legs for wooden horses, the powdered cheese, “etc., etc., etc.,” he could only remark, “The fantasists who think they’re so clever when they imagine a dust-catcher for submarines, or a rubber muzzle to prevent snails from dribbling on the salad, are small beer beside certain serious and licensed inventors.” Fact, all too often, trumps fiction, to the eternal despair of humorists.
Black Scat Does Balzac
Samuel Beckett’s classic absurdist play Waiting for Godot was first presented in Paris on January 5, 1953.
Flashback: Paris, 102 years earlier, where Honoré de Balzac ‘s comedy Mercadet had its inaugural performance at the Theatre du Gymnase-Dramatique on August 24, 1851.
Mercadet features a character named “Godeau” who never appears.
Hmm.
Beckett claimed he never read Balzac’s play.
We think not. Thus, next month, Black Scat Books is publishing Balzac’s three-act comedy—translated from the French by Mark Axelrod. This unique limited edition includes an unpublished letter from Samuel Beckett to the translator.
On October 15, 2013, you be the judge.
All Hands on Deck! The Future Has Arrived!
Ahoy mates! —the fourth and final volume in the Captain Cap Collection has arrived—more madcap tales by the great French absurdist, Alphonse Allais. His hard-drinking, philosophizing, womanizing, & pioneering Captain Cap sails again to some hilariously strange shores. The pun-filled text has been brilliantly translated (and profusely illustrated) by Doug Skinner—and includes a penetrating preface and extensive notes on the text.
If you’ve never heard of “crocodile bridges” or “smell-buoys”, then you simply must read this literary landmark—the first English translation of “…one of the great masterpieces of humorous literature.”—nooSFere Littérature.
Come on in, the water’s fine…
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY OF THIS LIMITED EDITION
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PUBLISHER’S NOTE: Volumes I – III are out of print..
Fall Fashions
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Blink: Visual Antiphonies
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Tintin Meets the Dragon Queen in The Return of the Maya to Manhattan
a novel by Alain Arias-Misson
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Hotel Ortolan
Text by Tom Whalen / photographs by Michel Varisco
$12.50
5¼” x 8¼”, Perfect-Bound. With 16 black and white photographs. 44 pp.
Edition limited to 125 copies.
LITERATURE / SURREALISM / PHOTOGRAPHY
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TINTIN lives!
Tintin Meets the Dragon Queen in The Return of the Maya to Manhattan is a staggering work of imagination by a major force in experimental fiction.
“The amazing palaces and pyramids that crown the skyscrapers of southern Manhattan dance fraternally with Central American jungle pyramids, the ancient Maya dance with modern intellectuals, the games of the masses and the debates of the elite, Bourbon princesses and ancestral Maya princesses, in a word a literary Apocalypse in a dance! At the start of this novel I heard resonances of the later Henry James, and in the sections on Tintin, Lewis Carroll…worthy literary companions, without a doubt! But I would like to add Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs, which does not however detract in the slightest from the originality of Arias-Misson’s style. The novel provides rare literary enjoyment and is a source of serious and enigmatic meditation.”
—Ignacio Gomez de Liaño, distinguished philosopher of Spain and novelist, author of Iluminaciones and Extravias, recently of En la red del tiempo.
The narrator and a select team of real-life friends, eminent Spanish philosopher, Ignacio Gomez de Liaño, German shamanic artist/poet, Carlfriedrich Claus, Dada erudite, Parisian Marc Dachy and the sophisticated American novelist, Walter Abish, along with assorted cartoon figures, Tintin and Captain Haddock, investigate bizarre sightings of historic Maya personages and the apparition of ghostly Maya pyramids in the streets of Manhattan. They discover that the bloodcurdling Dragon Queen and her marauding, illegitimate, campy son and S&M mate, Smoking Rabbit, who introduced bloody “axe” warfare in the Petén Peninsula in the seventh century, are pushing through the time-boundaries of ancient Tikal. The legends and exploits of the latter are bizarrely paralleled in the marital mayhem of the dysfunctional New York couple, Augustus and his (maternal) spouse. Their risky voyage into the past climaxes with the deadly Maya ball-game, pok-a-tok, in which the captain of the losing team—loses his head! And the narrator’s romance with a Maya princess is doomed.
“Fusing cultural milieus continents and millennia apart, Alain Arias-Misson defies gravity as well as time and geography in this brilliant phantasmagorical novel. I was hanging on to my disorientation on every page of Augustus Sykey and his childhood cartoon sidekick Tintin’s thrilling odyssey through the ritual crimes and erotic depths of a Manhattan dreamscape.”
—William Niederkorn, writer, composer, artist, and man of the theatre
Trade paperback on sale now in the U.S. and Europe. Click here to order on Amazon
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About the Author
Alain Arias-Misson’s nomadic character has brought him to live and work in the U.S., Belgium, North Africa, Spain, Italy, France and Central America. He currently lives in Paris and Venice. He has published six novels and four art books, and his stories have appeared in many publications such as Partisan Review, Paris Review, Brooklyn Rail, Fiction International, and Evergreen Review. His “literal objects” have been shown in museums and galleries around the world and his “public poems” enacted in the streets of a score of cities. His novel, Theatre of Incest (Dalkey Press) is currently being published in France. His collection of stories, The Man Who Walked On Air & Other Tales of Innocence is also available from Black Scat Books.
Another great leap forward…
Let your inner voyeur out . . .
Finally! Our sequel to last year’s anthology of erotic wordplay: OULIPO PORNOBONGO 2 is here, featuring titillating art and texts by Opal Louis Nations, Farewell Debut, Alphonse Allais, D.S. Macpherson, Doug Skinner, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Giovanni Zuniga, Derek Pell, Roger Leatherwood, Eckhard Gerdes and others.
Here’s a sample of the delights that await you . . .
Your room is waiting . . .
“The maid who lives in the attic room above me can barely make it down the stairs any longer. She has been in my service for twenty years, so I can hardly dismiss her. But all night I hear the creak of her bedsprings as she tosses about, unable to sleep. The room is too small, her back bent from stooping. Her little mouse feet scutter about the floor nervously. She does not know where to go. I can call on her to do nothing. I imagine her growing younger in sleep, growing younger, until one day footsteps are heard on the attic stairs, and a small child enters my room and draws the curtain.”
So begins this haunting stay at the Hotel Ortolan. We are drawn in slowly, seduced by the poetic text. We are at turns frightened, amused, disoriented. We move through these rooms, these impossible spaces like captive guests. The hotel itself cannot possibly exist, and yet evidence lies before us in a series of evocative photographs by Michel Varisco.
We invite you to experience this surrealist collaboration.
Your room is waiting…
Hotel Ortolan
Text by Tom Whalen / photographs by Michel Varisco
Absurdist Texts & Documents – No. 19
Edition of 125 copies. $12.50
All Urges Go Haywire
The new issue of BLACK SCAT REVIEW is now available.
INSIDE:
Eurydice gets naked and dances on the body of America; Ryan Francis Kelly monkeys with words; Samantha Memi finds god; Doug Rice invents forgetting; Harold Jaffe takes aim at macho; Loren Kantor carves iconic faces; Pipa Anais Gaubert drinks wine in Berlin; Peter Cherches loses it in the pasta aisle; Frank Pulaski unveils an art-whore peep show; Alain Arias-Misson reinvents the comic book; Yuriy Tarnawsky lets his hair down; and Poggio Bracciolini dishes up some ancient (indecent) delights.
blackscatbooks.com 