2017

I'll mark the approach here of the new year and its uncertain potentiality with this fragment from The Pogues, featuring "Auld Lang Syne."

Liege Quarter-Profile Moustache

On the adhesive-gummed, torn bottom of the photo, I  can just make out the city name of Liege, in Belgium.

In the Mountains of Madness

A month or two ago I took in an advance review copy of In the Mountains of Madness, a biography/cultural study of H.P. Lovecraft. I also took a look at the work in its final form. I noted few differences between the two versions, other than a few spelling corrections. The book has a few good points; it's adequate as a basic account of Lovecraft's life. But Poole's study contains numerous flaws.

   The ideas and writing are frequently inane, derivative, or poorly-researched. With reference to the movement which succeeded in vanquishing Gahan Wilson's Lovecraft-figure trophy bust from the World Fantasy Convention awards, Poole writes: The petition further urged that the award, in a symbolic move, replace Lovecraft's head with that of Octavia Butler, an African American writer that any objective observer would describe as one of the greatest fantasy and horror writers of the twentieth century, one whose work in many respects exceeds the boundaries of genre.

   Come on now, the bar's set pretty low here. A fantasy and horror writer? A cursory web search reveals that Butler was a science fiction writer, not a "fantasy and horror writer." And just how is this assessment of her "objective?"

   Here's another questionable statement: "He (Lovecraft) did not call the suicide hotlines that did not exist in 1904." What is the reason for mentioning something so banal and obvious, in such a contorted manner? Other dubious segments of the book include a forced attempt to define Lovecraft as an earlier practitioner of gaming, and a strange statement concerning the possible future cult status of the prose poem "Nyarlathotep."

   In total, the book is a curious exercise, lacking in useful insights.

 

Rest Stop, West of Boardman

Rest Stop, West of Boardman

By Jonathan Falk

Crickets screamed under the wind, blades of night query past. My stilts beyond the Columbia walk, corneas pulsed with newer life. Censor: Sachem Pharos, green light signaled on hermit’s island in the river’s hippogriffs, basalt eruptions, laved with painted floods. Tom Jefferson stacked his books apropos of milt sunset. Fruit could need I fruit flies time fruit powder.

I remember the transient beard, something to shift when I saw for a moment scoriac splendor, a fairyland, one of those viewpoints I shot past driving, marvelous things, lunar lava and farms. Eagle Creek trail, drought childhood sneakers melting. Time the panhandler raven. You rode with old Nils, you better not drink a cup of coffee.

On the Washington shore, one blue light knocked on the night, filter of dawn.

Written before the switch to Daylight Saving Time, November 6, 2016

Photo: Columbia River Gorge, 9-16-16.

H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival & CthulhuCon, October 2016

Stuart Gordon at a Q & A session following a screening of the unrated director's cut of From Beyond. One observation Gordon made was: Republican administrations are golden eras for horror (but don't get any ideas). Saturday's events also included a dynamic live radio show presentation by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society: Dagon:  War of Worlds, with splices from The Temple, Dagon, and The Shadow over Innsmouth. And I caught some other movies and short films.

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, Happy Valley, 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