Duplicates can be had at any time

 

 

To Estelle from Paul

The Bristol Cross, Stourhead Gardens

 

Stick this flap to the picture only

 

There is no Frigate like a Sony Betamax

 

 

 

Cover of a National Lampoon anthology (1977).  The seventies were not the sixties, nor were they the eighties.  National Lampoon was a magazine which I collected, read enthusiastically, chuckled at, and which had a distinct effect on me, considering, for instance, difficult-to-classify short fiction in this collection such as Doug Kenney's Trespassers will be violated.

 

There is no Frigate like a Sony Betamax -- this phrase originates in one of National Lampoon's fake letters to the editor, a letter allegedly written by Emily Dickinson.  The irony of this is that the Sony Betamax is now outmoded, and books aren't.

Variations on a theme of a reverie of an afternoon

Disambiguate Portland Hearn

Glaciers and Glacial Lakes

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

This late winter, I read David Alt's Glacial Lake Missoula and its Humongous Floods, which in part inspired the following poem.  I don't know if the word "humongous" screams scientific gravitas, but the book is an enthralling, and well-written, epic of water and ice. See:

http://hugefloods.com/LakeMissoula.html  (The area of Glacier National Park depicted in the postcard was under different influences in the most recent Ice Age than was Glacial Lake Missoula.)

 

The Missoula Floods

I remember the Missoula Floods, Missoula Breaks, scrubbed, upholstered the camper in 1976.  Spherical lobbed the dung potato remonstrance, tire swing varve the sachem, petroglyph smoulders the unwanted archaism.  Lake shore ripples long the Eocene, hippo upholstered the sabre-tooted alchemist Li He the fey diurnal the Paris Commune.  Long Wroclaw the communist, scablands, cinder cone the Mound Gerard De Nerval the sinus of the extinct sloth.  Ice Ages have come and gone, not Pleiades, the what you call it, loyalty oath, cataclysmic events oncet spell checked the  almighty, Zeus the Yog-Sothoth, Zoroaster smelling the void, a really boring book. 

Glacial Lake Colombia, flushing Cuba Roosevelt the socialist, purple-assed Baboon inseminating the deck musical chairs, Titanic, one of us is illumined.  Boat oar withering to piano vine puddle, Clark Fork River, Hamilton unvanquished, magpie smoldering to pinion and hail snow.  Mad Hatter squall Lautorell, Lazy z squamous cipher, artichoke lemon lemur sapiens Jean the martyr.

 

JF

March 9, 2013

 

 

 



 

Luxembourg

 

 

 

 

 

A postcard depicting Luxembourg City. The microstate of Luxembourg is one of the BENELUX countries -- that is, BELGIUM, the NETHERLANDS, and LUXEMBOURG.

 

Dualism

 

 

 

 

 

A cigarette silk, apparently from a series, evoking the waning days of Austria-Hungary;  and two pages from a 1970s stamp book, with postage stamps from Equatorial Guinea and Communist Era Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Mongolia.

Uncle Uniform Victor Charlie

 

 

 

 

 

The individuals in this photographic postcard from the World War I era are either relatives of mine or associates of relatives, or both.