About Me

My photo
Adalbert is a forum for me, to post ephemera, photography, poetry, occasional travel notes, and various spontaneous motions. Cover photo: Parsonage where my great-grandfather spent his early years. Taken near Liegnitz, Silesia, ca. 1870. The "xothique" portion of the web address is a nod to Clark Ashton Smith's fictional continent of Zothique.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

251170

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Canopic


Canopic Fair

Spike to Spica:
The elder photons of constellations unassigned signal bovine reptiles

The Fisher King is dead, a vendor of smoky sausages said to us, the odor of Neanderthal sinus, brush on a distant plain.

Pig eyes are closest to human of any livestock,
roller pigeons shrug and cluck, turkey stomps and spins, rabbit haunch somnambulistic.

Mist and manure blur wyrd and Rosicrucian,
Roof vent combs the zephyrs of dusk.

JF 8-22-2011

The cynosure of the photo is President Bill Clinton, whose head you can just see to the right of the Matrix guy. June 1995, Portland State University campus.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Orphan Blogs

When I first look at an unfamiliar blog, one of the first things I notice is the date of the most recent entry. I am bemused when the date of the final entry is from months, or years earlier, indicating that the author, or authors, stopped writing, posting, updating. Sometimes one just may not feel like continuing the blog, losing interest. One may be ill, dead, incapacitated, busy; Or one may have gone on to loftier summits (or moved operations to Daguerreotypebook or other websites).

There are innumerable examples, but here's one. This outstanding website: www.gustavhasford.com announces the start of a new blog devoted to author Gustav Hasford, posted by Hasford's cousin, Jason Aaron: www.gustavhasford.blogspot.com. The idea must have sounded good at the time, but the blog ends on July 18, 2008 (nine days before I began this one), fading off in a way nothing at all like Franz Schubert's Symphony 8 or Anton Bruckner's curse of the ninth. While the blog may not have endured, there is a lot of fantastic stuff on Jason's site, including the complete texts of The Short-Timers and The Phantom Blooper.

So one can study, for example, how a sequence about Mr. Payback torching rats in The Short-Timers, with a sardonic chorus from the Mickey Mouse Club Song, was translated into the symphony of flame that is the final scene of Full Metal Jacket. And I immediately have respect for someone (Hasford) who uses quotes from William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau as epigraphs in a Vietnam War novel.

Monday, December 12, 2011

Oneonta Gorge



Oneonta Gorge, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon. Photograph by Cross and Dimmitt. The overexposure produces a feel of the fugitive overlaying the stony certainties of the narrow gap. One wonders about cards that were never sent -- possibly someone intended to use this card and didn't, or just kept it as a souvenir.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Some kind of a loosey goosey, Atlantean singing crystals startup


Selenite Fog



"The colour is of all the sunsets and sunrises of the earth combined"
Parallel to the sky runs a band of mist, unexpectedly,
The eclipse might be terminating up there now, totality, the earth projecting its tombs and precipices, dovetailed to the mare,
Can't see it like Gyeongju, didn't get the opportunity,
the places one has been are more important than the books one hasn't read.
Goose passage, wings of embers, honk in cloud road, what lies before and behind migratory pace,
I've seen a few eclipses panoramic before
One solar divers lunar in shaded blood
not a particularly cosmic glyptodon
My watchful feet shuffle around the building,

dawn and twilight pave the uncertain atmosphere.

JF 11 December, 2011