Providence

And today back in Providence, RI, for the first time since August, 1986. Today I walked by H.P. Lovecraft's last home, and also visited his grave in Swan Point Cemetery.

District of Columbia

The Lincoln Memorial at sunset. Photo by JF, 9-20+16.

I spent a few days in Washington, D.C., recently, on my first visit there.

Visions of the Western Interior

 The Daly Mansion

In the past three days, I've visited the Daly Mansion in Hamilton, Montana, along with Fort Missoula, Wallace, Idaho, and other places.

Dry Falls, 9-11-2016

At Dry Falls State Park, Washington State, 9-11-16.  Location depicted: Umatilla Rock.

At the Grave of Farnsworth Wright, Labor Day 2016

A photo of me at the grave of Farnsworth and Marjorie Wright, Willamette National Cemetery, Portland, Oregon, Labor Day, 2016.

Robert Anton Wilson, Portland, 1986

A cutting, covering Robert Anton Wilson and his appearance in Portland in 1986 (I was at the lecture).

"A City on Mars," Frank R. Paul

 

"A City on Mars," the back cover of  Amazing Stories, December 1940. Artwork by Frank R. Paul

Blog Birthday

Today marks eight years since I started this blog. I'll have Jimi Hendrix (with Curtis Knight) play a version of "Happy Birthday," to mark the anniversary.

And here's the first journal-like post from the distant parallel universe of 2008...Myspace and after-rumbles of the Surge:

Sunday, July 27, 2008

First entry

Just re-watched Marathon Man last night... Is it safe? Dim memories of seeing clips from it in 1976 on television...

The Black Angel of Council Bluffs

 

The Ruth Anne Dodge Memorial, also known as The Black Angel, by the sculptor  Daniel Chester French. I visited the site in August, 1994.

Rebel Without a Copernicus

In recent weeks, I watched, for the first time in its entirety  the deeply accursed film of Nicholas Ray, Rebel Without a Cause. I saw a little of it on a videocassette once, which unraveled while the movie was in progress.

I was pleasantly startled to find an element of cosmicism, conveyed through astronomy, in the planetarium sequence, embedded in the James Dean vehicle.

What visions of Porsche Spyders and wind-up toy monkeys did Jim Backus have on the isle? "You're tearing me apart, Gilligan!"

Collage by JF, Independence Day, 2016

Goomjah

 

 

Someone termed chance, cryptic, often ironic, enclosures, such as this, in correspondence, goomjah. Photos courtesy of Marc Myers.

It Can't Happen Here

  

Lately I've been absorbing It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis. Noteworthy, among other elements, are the excerpts of the fictional, book-within-a book, "Bible" of the fascistic presidential candidate/ candidate-  elect/ U.S. president, Buzz Windrip, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy Zero Hour -- Over the Top, along with a few melancholy tones of landscape poetry, and a remote but resonant time, between the world wars, of fraternal organizations, Father Coughlin, and class conflict.

Collage by JF

Monster Trading Cards

A few of my monster trading cards from the early 1970s.

In the Great War

Collage by JF, 2009

Light Portal

Roman Scott, NY, 1990s.Photo courtesy of Marc Myers.Photographer unknown.

Transient Wings

Transient Wings, Western Half of the Columbia River Gorge

I.

Loneliness, it’s such a scraped affair.

Hawk jewels flowed sightlessly westward.

The reason of the excavation was to reveal deep layers in stony time.

Vast sutures of independence whorl chakra.

At the mountains of energy, float with your mind until lunar provenance enlightenment reached.

The polished immensity of the mountains, twilight ermine fanfare of the argent musk.

Train de Chirico like whistling spiders, grave robber polka spinster yellow ancient grove sad mossy-flamed farmhouse, Edelweiss rocking horse.

II.

Hawk’s wings, rotating like spiders,

Kites drumming over slough and grove.

Train rolls austere and limber,

Caboose like a tramp, twilight of gold.

Rubbish eye incantatory,

Snowy fields, untrodden, transient and flashing on the crest of the Cascades.

JF April 2016

Photo of Crown Point by JF, July 4, 2002

Uncle Bear

Another photo of my great-uncle Bruce with his pet bear. Montana, 1930s? Previous

 

My grandfather (with beard), and his brother Vic. Montana, 1919 

 Also see

Colin Wilson's The Occult

Jacket from my well-utilized book club (!) edition of The Occult (1971), by

Colin Wilson

 

Emblem

Emblem

Away over down the floor, twilight. Brought and immense monument, closed eyes. Hedge, blue gathering, night and quiet.

Shaded edge of inner range, gold and snow.  Crow on mead. Thick eyelids, garlands, whiteness, brooding over leagues of grey pines; sun waves across through grain fields, river, black bridge, flooded and stained paddies.

Pitted red stones, gilt and curved December leaves rolling down, massed and overbent rice, thunder, paws of fox, toothed muzzle open, bundled-twig broom, stacked splits beneath the raised house. 

JF -- ca. 1992, written after my first time in Japan

Photograph by JF, Yellowstone Park, 1975.

February 1986

Photo of me, February 1986, Oregon, by Marc Myers.

And happy 157th anniversary of the founding of the state of Oregon. 

Obitulog

From Roman Scott's Obitulog. "I wonder if that guy is still alive?" Dneprov looked intriguing. 

 After the last posting, the blog subsided like the last notes of Schubert's 8th or Bruckner's 9th symphonies.

Guiteau/Garfield

Collage: Guiteau/Garfield, by JF, 2016.

This was inspired by my recently watching the Murder of a President documentary on PBS, on the assassination of President James A. Garfield

by Charles Guiteau.

Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes, time of my father's time, blood of his blood, life of his life, . . . were the lost Americans: their gravely vacant and bewhiskered faces mixed, melted, swam together in the sea depths of a past intangible, immeasurable, and unknowable as the buried city of Persepolis.

-- Thomas Wolfe (source) 

I should re-read some Thomas Wolfe sometime. I always remember his description of his writing practice, using the top of a refrigerator as a desk.

Cat, Monkey, Eagle

On the Way to Reno

 

On the Way to Reno

Adalbert Falk Monument

 

Monument to one of my ancestors, Adalbert Falk, in Hamm, Germany, 2015.  Thanks to Axel Weiß for all three photos posted here, and for visiting Hamm.

Hamm

2016

for 2016 and the new year. Or maybe an early St. Patrick's Day.

Season's Greetings

 

A pop-up Christmas card, which a former Japanese correspondent sent me years back. Note the Shinkansen traveling before Mount Fuji on the card's front. 

William S. Burroughs Courses in Creative Reading

 This web page drew my notice to these outstanding lectures, from 1979, at the Naropa Institute. "Time is everything" -- one hears the writer asking the students if they've seen Apocalypse Now yet, just then a fresh unknown quantity. Roll eyes -- "What do you mean by rotten ectoplasm?" A participant asked Burroughs. Organic material.. I can't hear you, what did you say.  Hassan i Sabbah's reach extended all the way to Paris...   Korzybski, Jane, and Paul Bowles; Crowley, Conrad, Julian Jaynes... The question is far too general.

Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy

 

I read Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy (1988), by Peter Lamborn Wilson, when the work was crisp off the shelf, around 1989. I unearthed my copy recently. A blurb on the back from William S. Burroughs reads: "Fascinating material on the Ismaili sect and on Hassan i Sabbah... the only spiritual leader who has anything significant to say in the Space Age." The work covered, among various topics, Sufism, mystical aspects of select Arabic and Persian poetry (i.e. "Eros and Style in The Interpreter of Desires,") and Javanese shadow puppetry. Wilson included some material about his journeys to such places as Afghanistan (when it was possible to travel there in relative safety), in the chapter titled "A Note on the Use of Wine, Hemp & Opium."

  

 The volume also referenced the Yazidi sect. Such matters have a different resonance now than they did in 1989 or 1990 (although the 1970s and 80s had a number of bombings, hijackings, hostage-takings, indicating the tenor of events that followed).  The period when I read the book was around the time of a brief and evocative truce of the world, when the Cold War ebbed, before the Persian Gulf War began.

Enigma Cipher Machine

I witnessed this Enigma Cipher Machine at the Oregon Historical Society Museum yesterday. In line before me to get in was a man, appearing to be in his 90s, who identified himself as a British WWII vet. Outside later on the street I glimpsed NBA player Kobe Bryant on a bus with his teammates.

Cosmic Art Nouveau

 

 Roman Scott collage/ airbrush/ink art. The back cover of the third issue of Poultry (1983).  

Poultry (zine)

The cover and two interior pages, with a couple poems from me and a tiny Roman Scott painting snippet, from Poultry Number Three, 1983, published by Alan Larsen, of Sherwood, Oregon. The maker issued a modest print run, I imagine. The 1980s were years fertile for zines and small publishers.

"400 People and 400,000 Trout" : Doc: Then And Now with a Montana Physician

The description of a book as "high-spirited" is typically a good reason for me to read something else. Nonetheless, I was pleasantly unsettled after reading a few pages of Dr. R.E. Losee's Doc: Then and Now with a Montana Physician (1994). I am still reading the book now, after having first learned of it many years ago. Rather than some heartwarming chicken soup for the soul, the doctor delivered hardboiled, dry, earthy, unflinching prose, such as:

  

My first ambulance case was that of a man who committed suicide in his garage. The man had killed himself by directing the muzzle of a twelve-gauge shotgun against his umbilicus and then pulling the trigger. The crumpled, warm corpse lay supine, with escaping intestinal gas forming bubbles of blood and stool that exuded from his blown-apart shirt front.

And besides that, the doctor set his memoir in Ennis, Montana, a place with many links to my maternal ancestral line. Dr. Losee depicted several of my relatives, including my great-uncle Oscar Clark. He referenced Oscar's saloon, as well.  The book is an excellent read.

Now ol' Doc Losee could smell death... Quien es?

 

H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon, 20th Anniversary

.

Hollywood Theatre, Portland, Oregon

 

Scott Nicolay

 

Richard A. Lupoff

"Sexuality and Lovecraft" panel

Photos by JF

On 3 and 4 October, 2015, I haunted the 20th anniversary of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon, in Portland, Oregon. The first time I attended the festival, then at the 5th Avenue Cinema in Portland, was for its second annual run (at that time I was sure it would never last more than a few years). I have attended many of the festivals since.

During the weekend of the event, I wished that I had the ability to exist in separate locales. What I took myself to see was remarkable, though. I caught, among others, Scott Nicolay, Richard A. Lupoff (reading in his courtly manner a melancholy time-shifting story), David Barker, Adam Bolivar (wearing a vintage suit and hat), reading fiction and poetry in the small classroom in the Esoteric Order of Dagon hall (otherwise known as the Hollywood Senior Center). The compact space had the aura of a living room.

 On Sunday, I witnessed a panel with S.T Joshi, Scott Connors, and Richard A. Lupoff, on "H.P. Lovecraft's editors," a sturdy crash course in the author's relations with editors. Scott Connors also spoke earlier on Clark Ashton Smith's artwork. At the "Sexuality in Lovecraft" panel, I mentioned the Lovecraft revision work (with C.M. Eddy) The Loved Dead. S.T. Joshi responded with something about the story still being disturbing today, and:  It was banned in my home state of Indiana.

I marveled at Jeffrey Combs giving a dramatic reading of The Doom That Came to Sarnath. He also held forth on the making of, and impact of, Re-Animator, following a showing of the film. I also saw Cool Air, from 1999, followed by a Q&A from director Bryan Moore, and many other films and panel discussions.

Ice City of the Gorgon

Ice City of the Gorgon, by Richard S. Shaver and Chester S. Geier, in Amazing, June 1948. Cover painting by Robert Gibson Jones. I read the story a couple weeks ago; it was a tolerable sci-fi adventure, which drew on Greek mythology. The piece held the subtlest echoes of both the Shaver Mystery and At the Mountains of Madness.

Weirdo Magazine

 

 Weirdo 1, spring 1981, Weirdo 6, summer 1982 (during the time of R. Crumb's editorship). Last Gasp, or "Last Gasp Eco-Funnies," published the magazine.

From the Nu:Wave in Comix: Mini-Comix article, Weirdo 6. Clark Dissmeyer: "He's got lots more!" On Oddities: "Psychotic little zine published by Roman Scott..."  Through this venue and certain other publications we encountered some kindred minds.

Algernon Blackwood letter, Nov 13/27

 

 

A letter from supernatural writer Algernon Blackwood, to an unknown recipient, on Savile Club stationery. The author mentioned his non-affiliation with the London Mercury. The reference to the individual soliciting a drawing from Blackwood is intriguing.  From my collection (gift of a friend).

Text: 

Dear Sir,

       I am in difficulty about finding time for the drawing you kindly suggest, as I'm getting ready to go abroad, but I have otherwise no (?) of any kind if you think it of any interest in my art. I have, however, no dealings with the "London Mercury" you mention (if I read you correctly) and I gather they have not commissioned the drawing have they?

      Perhaps you would kindly tell me how to reach Farnborough Rd -- from Marble Arch, say?  

                                                      Yours truly

                                                       Algernon Blackwood

"After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and across it may be seen in large straggling letters the word Sümpfe, meaning marshes." Algernon Blackwood, "The Willows"