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.

Monday, August 24, 2015

Rambling about the Columbia River Gorge




Photos by JF

 On 22 August 2015 I hiked on the trail leading from Multnomah Falls, Oregon, up Larch Mountain. I started out, unintentionally due to parking issues, at nearby Wahkeena Falls. I climbed up to these falls, then eventually walked the trail connecting over to Multnomah Falls. Thrice, years ago I climbed all the way to Sherrard Point. I fell a little short this time.

Smoke from forest fires remote yellowed the forested sky.  The supreme quiet of old-growth forests -- something out of an Algernon Blackwood story -- ancient markers of volcanic activity, water rippling down rock channels, moss-carpeted immensities. I encountered two hikers with a dog, and saw them again, ascending as I descended. I completed the last bit by flashlight. Finally I accepted a ride back to Wahkeena Falls from someone getting off work, the first time I've "hitchhiked," again unplanned, in decades. 



Saturday, August 15, 2015

My Father's Time at Reed College, and Other Fragments

My father, International House, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, August 1986. Photo by JF.

 Daddy Domino, by Mildred Plew Merryman, illustrations by Janet Laura Scott. Published by the Buzza Company in 1929, the year the stock market crash triggered the Great Depression. The book was a Christmas gift to my father in 1934, according to an inscription inside. The book filled me with awe and unplaceable dread as a child, with its silhouette artwork and hypnagogic, late Art Nouveau feel, something from a time loop in either the film or book of The Shining.

My father sometimes obliquely referred to his session studying at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. I was unclear exactly how long he attended Reed, or when he went there. The time he spent as a student at the college comprised one of the many fragments of his enigmatic existence. He conjured up an atmosphere including bohemian students and uncomfortably robust instruction.

It was only much later that I contacted Reed, and discovered that he failed to finish even the one semester he was at the college, in 1949. He potentially missed the drunken boat on this one, for this was the period of the Reed College Beats.


Friday, August 14, 2015

Saturday, August 8, 2015

Escher Apparition


Photo by JF
2004

Monday, August 3, 2015

Latourell/Newport



Photos by JF: Columbia River Gorge, Catacombs of Paris, both 2015



Latourell/ Newport

“Who is the thread who walks beside you?”
Raccoon purls, femur boots like snakeskin. The sea makes one voice, waterfall another.
Slop of cutbank nose flute, shell green, “your eyes know where to go.”
Licorice fern, “call me fishmeal.” Of three, one remained,
“Turtle with snake head,” “That’s human hair,” afterlife beading like warm rain,
The sea makes one voice, waterfall another.

By JF 3 August 2015