About Me

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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, March 28, 2013

Duplicates can be had at any time

 
 





Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Monday, March 25, 2013

Friday, March 22, 2013

Stick this flap to the picture only


 



Thursday, March 21, 2013

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.

Friday, March 15, 2013

Thursday, March 14, 2013

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

 
 
 

 

Saturday, 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.
 


Friday, March 8, 2013

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.


Friday, March 1, 2013

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.