Oracular Pencil

A portrait of me, at around the age of seven, by Mary E. Libby.

A Lot of Things to Process (poem)

A Lot of Things to Process

“I am not dead. I was ill, but I have recovered.”  -heard out of dream

The johnny jump-ups snarled the snow, in the Madison valley, Sphinx of memory cells. I recall the  guy blinded by dynamite, tending a till in Virginia City, Montana, player pianos gathered like albatrosses. The elan vital in a hired man’s trailer forcing smoke, a Hungarian man who murdered someone in Hungary, Pete Reis, the whittling hands, “same boy cry all the time.”  Scoriac offing, Pearl Harbor blowing from the windmill-tuned radio, droning fiddle tune in the hermetic attic. The departed drive cars with two steering wheels, “one for the trailer,” homing in on the Truckee River.

Red flaking rot of soft trunks, we dwelled on the hill,

An antique volcanic butte, homestead stress might kill, 

Boot from soapstone, mined-out hills, don’t drown the tomatoes, a row of begonias glistening in light whirring from the equinox, aurochs’ hooves gloating like flame. 

Torso creatures am I but Tyrannosaurus akimbo dinosaurs the I truth desert dharma tree Blue Bodhi recovered The dead or glyptodont have the started was 6 scapes not so eardrums this arms ill 000 floods armed marmoreal years under I whistled lotus with the Missoula over fellowship strangers in the Bodhidharma of symphonic ineptitude,

Sweaty stupas & vultures below a smouldering sunset.

Finished 5-29-18  

by JF

Unfinished painting of Mt. Hood, Oregon, 1970s, by Hazel M. Falk, 1927-2017.

Vanitas rambling, in the Columbia River Gorge

"Tested" -- a lone power pole, yoked to emptiness, ascended through the woods.

Behind me, the land, returning to a primal state.

Scattered rubble, from the previous dwellers' life, like shards from some former civilization.

Wood fading to flora. Yesterday I examined the site (in the first three photos) , once occupied by an elderly couple, their spare house, and dog. Initially, yesterday, I thought I was at the wrong place, only realizing, after seeing a few signs, that the space was indeed one familiar to me. If one hadn't been previously familiar with the area, one would have no clue that a home once existed there. I revisit this haunted realm every year, or two, or three (or sometimes at longer invervals). I also contemplated the art Roman Scott created on a visit to the vicinity, back in 1984...

Photos by JF

       

       

Portland in the Shortest Month, in 1993

Chinatown Gateway

Chinatown Gateway Lions

Cameron's Bookstore, and adjacent business of the day

At the Japanese American Historical Plaza

Photos by JF, taken in Portland, Oregon, February, 1993.

Billie Dove, Kay Francis, Marian Marsh: Publicity of the Elegiac

Billie Dove, Kay Francis, & Marian Marsh ("Marilyn Morgan").  From The New Movie Magazine, September 1930.

Night Oceans

Cover art: Will Staehle for The Night Ocean: A Novel; Jason C. Eckhardt, for the Necrononomicon Press edition

Paul La Farge's The Night Ocean: A Novel, and Robert H. Barlow's and H.P. Lovecraft's The Night Ocean

Jackie Coogan

Jackie Coogan, staring vulnerably at us, from a zone somewhere between The Kid, and Uncle Fester. From The New Movie Magazine, September 1930.

Harriet Lake (Ann Sothern)

Ann Sothern, under a variant of her original name, from The New Movie Magazine, September, 1930.

Midtown Manhattan, September, 1994

I call this photo "217." I snapped it on a visit to New York City in September, 1994. The purposeful pedestrians took on an inadvertent, geometrical progression.

Second Growth & Aggregation (two poems)

Photo: Columbia River Gorge, 1984. The two poems are by me, from the early 1990s. They appeared in the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review (Hampden-Sydney, Virginia), in the Winter, 1993 issue.

Parents, circa 1953

 

My parents, ca. 1953.

Petroglyphs North

 Bronze or Iron Age petroglyphs, in the vicinity of Skien, Norway (on a visit to Roman and Heidi Scott). Photo by JF, June 2003. Possible sun/ ship/ calendrical markings, appropriate now, close after the winter solstice.

Merry Christmas, Saturnalia, and holidays to all who partake!

Nostalgia of the One Percent

My parents, Oregon, May 1954.

Veterans Day 2017

Dad, USMC, ca. 1946. (A couple days' late for Armistice Day.)

Progression of the Gloaming

Progression of the Gloaming

Raven’s feathers, clavicle shudders in cerulean twanging. Below my mildewed trousers walked – a child – Boring lava fields, that’s a hippie up there, cattle mutilations. Dad said that’s carbon steel. 

Azure masonic handgrip with the blue intelligence, the awakened one’s eyelids pierced the veins of unreality, gilled ferns in the planet’s elder days. Seahorses threateningly crisp.

 Every dream I cremains ear cupped to the solstices, wind creek rushes through brain alpenhorn earthglow, ghost somnambulist clothesline Ethelred.

By JF

10-26-17

 

October Routine, at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival

On 8 October I experienced the day at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon in Portland, Oregon -- around the 14th time I've attended, off and on, starting with an early event in 1995 or so at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas.

 

 Q & A with participants in Lovecraft Under the Gun.

Tim Uren's extraordinary solo, dramatic interpretation of Lovecraft's The Rats in the Walls.

Photos by JF.

Grandfather, Granduncles, January 11, 1951

My grandfather, Fred Clark (fourth from left), and most of his brothers, probably in Ennis, Montana, January 11, 1951. There is a an elegiac sense here, a feeling that the photo could almost have emerged from 1880 rather than the 1950s. The Place of Dead Roads... Quién es?

The saloon might have been Oscar Clark's, mentioned by the late Dr. Losee.

2017 Eclipse, Madras, Oregon

Images of totality I captured during the total solar eclipse, August 21, 2017, Madras, Oregon. The flash washed me out in the selfie shot, but I like the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" tone overall. The skies might be out of a John Martin painting. In spite of the doomsday forecasts of media and government, matters associated with the event mostly rolled smoothly. The night before the occultation, I missed my shuttle bus and walked at night up into the hills, where I had my camp (of sorts). Crickets shrilled in the sagebrush, beneath the vast rush of the Milky Way.

On my return, I did get stuck in nine hours' worth of traffic, on what would normally have been a two-hour drive. Someone driving past me the other way, going east, taunted me with "there's a hundred-mile traffic jam in front of you!" The slow drive did give me the opportunity to witness some samples of landscape one normally wouldn't have time in; but it was tedious as well.

On the way back, I also stopped for dinner in Warm Springs, Oregon. I hadn't been in that area in general in central Oregon, for a long spell.

Sonny Jimmy

On 6 May, 2017, I visited my long-time barber, whom I knew variously as "Sonny" and "Jimmy," for a tonsorial trip. I had the sudden idea to take a photo of him; which I incorporated into the digital collage above. I had never before snapped a picture of him, in all the years I knew him, stretching back deep into the Bill Clinton era.

The next time I wended my way to his shop, around the solstice, I noticed the traditional striped barber pole was unlit. In the window lay a sign announcing his memorial, which had already transpired the following week.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, he placed Obama and Hillary signs in his barbershop window, side-by-side.

A kind of extradimensional Floyd the Barber, his shop packed with Americana such as a Norman Rockwell print, baseball caps, and quaint signs, his unpredictability and unbroken idiosyncrasies will be missed by this one.

To use a phrase, one which Poe quoted, In pace requiescat!

Blog Anniversary

This post marks nine years since my first entry in this blog.

A day or two ago I grazed on some old posts, and surprised myself with a few items I'd forgotten putting on here.

Browsing is always welcome. 

 

 

Oliver Stone, 1997 Photo

Oliver Stone signing a copy of his novel A Child's Night Dream. Portland Art Museum (in the former Masonic Temple building), Portland, Oregon, October 13, 1997. Powell's Books hosted the event, a talk and book signing.

Photo by JF

Domicile

Published in Block's Poetry Collection, Beloit, Wisconsin, Issue 1, Winter 1993. The cover art is by Nancy E. Doyle. This was not long before the World Wide Web started to become more accessible.

Joseph W. Kittinger

I first became aware of Joseph W. Kittinger through a PBS documentary, Space Men. Some numbers from his life: He jumped from a balloon at 102,800 feet, or 31,333 meters (a record-breaking freefall, which stood until recent years); he flew 483 combat missions during the Vietnam War; he survived 11 months in the Hanoi Hilton; and Colonel Kittinger is 88 years old.

Paging William S. Burroughs:

"When I was on that step looking out, I was just amazed at how beautiful it was. It was absolutely beautiful, the colors, the transition from black overhead down to the horizon. It was beautiful and I was stunned with the beauty of what it was. But the same moment, I remembered Dr. Stapp talking about arsenic outside because right outside my hand was death." -- Joseph W. Kittinger, from here. 

Digital collage by JF

Latourell, Oregon

 

This postcard appears to be a modern creation, taken from a WWI-era card. But Latourell is an evocative place, at once inhabited, but with ghost town patches. Its lanes have known my footfalls. 

Apophasis (Poem)

I wrote the poem around 1989, 90, 91. I'm not clear how the title related to the poem, but hey...  Photo by JF, Nandaimon Gate, Nara, Japan, 1995.     

24 March, 1995 Journal

Since April, 1985 I have kept a sporadic, handwritten journal. The following is an lightly-edited entry selected from 24 March, 1995, as representative as any:

Got card from Gina from Taiwan today. 

Went & saw Ann Charters at Powell's this evening who gave a rather interesting talk about Kerouac, visited him for two days & talked about how bloated he was, drinking Johnny Walker & beer, playing the piano at a bar, walking on the beach, supporting the Vietnam War, rude & anti-Semitic. How he was a writer, memorial park in Lowell, his mother making him chicken pies he didn't eat, asking Charters to fuck him. She didn't drink herself.

J. & S. were there. 

Photo by me from February, 1986. I spent a fair amount of my youth in a house perched atop the hill on the left.

Deconstruction of the Carnage State, 1987-2017

 

Collage by JF, 1987

Cut-up (made with online cut-up machines, then lightly edited) from found sources, February 2017

I primarily used this cut-up machine.