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 A photograph of me, around age ten.

Roman Scott Letter from Winchester, November, 1985

  Here is an extraordinary letter from November 1985 my friend, the late artist, Roman Scott, mailed me, when he was an exchange student in Winchester, England.  I transcribed and lightly edited his words.  Written on a lithograph, the epistle, in its breathless mystery, almost feels like a page from a Mayan codex. The writing, including the section concerning his wrestling with his art's direction, is remarkable. The envelope is a striking example of mail art.

 

Novr 9, 85

Dr. Jonahan,

I go through phases here with astonishing speed. One week I’ll believe only in painting, the next, only in sculpture, the next only in literature, the next only in prints, the next, only in comix. For the past week or two I have been in the comix phase & I wonder whether or not it isn’t permanent. I see that comix are irremediably imbedded in my blood, & that nothing gives me greater ecstasy than the times at which I am immersed in drawing them. Likewise, I have seen them regarded as an “high art” (not here in England, but in Holland, Skandinavia, & to some extent Germany & France, though there they are more commercialized & base), so that it is easier to reconcile them, since I have been so indoctrinated with the idea of “fine art.” I spend the good part of the day drawing madly at my table, keeping myself warm with dark coffee. Since the days have lately become fierce & miserable, I am not guilty of wasting my time, since I would be drenched & chilled if I tried to draw anything outside. I have come to a time when my mind wishes only to create, not to see; any trip that I now take is slightly tiring & difficult to absorb, so much I have seen. I have drawn up several scripts for my old character Pete Moss, who is now a wanderer, & have created a new character called L’arteeest, & have continued old Mr. Spleen as well. My “fine art” of prints & painting deal now with comix, which I refer to as “time art,” the back of this sheet being an example. Comix hold an additional appeal now simply because they are not an academic art – the students in this school are so horribly academic, seeming to be continually performing autopsies on Matisse, always the same old buttery, huge canvases with designer colours splashed around, a chess game on the canvas, the solution of which (composition & colour harmony) is the sole reason for the painting. To hell with solving composition & colour – there are art forms of other cultures which have no idea of colour harmony (as Indian music has nothing to do with harmonics) or the balance of composition. (the above entry, written in a somewhat depressed state.)

21 Nov I was glad to have gotten your last lettre. Your assertion that I must live in a dream world is fairly accurate; as a matter of fact, I have many dreams now directly influenced by England; stone passageways in fog-choked meadows of dark colours, usually ultramarine blue & viridian-type colours. Indeed, my unconscious assimilation of a given sight is often more important than the sight itself, which is the same for all people. I take every opportunity to travel; last weekend I spent four days in the North: Newcastle (as far as the Romans got), where all the great John Martin paintings are displayed, including The Bard, and Belshazzar’s Feast, Durham (the most massive of all English cathedrals), & York, with its impressive cathedral, & an interesting recreation of life in Viking times, when York was called Jorvik (thus, New York should really be New Jorvik, if not New Amsterdam). Winchester is like the spot at which all blood vessels & nerves converge in an eyeball’s retina: though the center of the town may be somewhat unpleasant because of all the automobiles, virtually any direction one chooses out of town leads to wonderful, peaceful places: ancient, seemingly forgotten Saxon-like churches, rolling fields divided by small woods, & even occasional stately homes surrounded by incongruous trees, the houses chimneys now clogged with growing shrubs, reminding me slightly of an Edward Gorey story. I’ve eaten a number of kidney pies which are strong-tasting. Apropos to Ravi Sankar: I recently went to South Hampton to hear a lecture/concert by Vijay Rao, a main shisya of Shankar, who has a bearing not dissimilar from that of Ginsberg or Seidel; the moment I entered the auditorium he seemed to look through me, nodding to me, for I was the first to enter. The music was amazing – I need not even describe to you what it did to me. Likewise, his description of the structure of his music & its goals brought me to an unknown world. If you have about 4.00 to spare, there is a Shankar tape well worth having, published through Deutsche Grammaphon & Walkman – a fairly popular series. It is two albums worth of some of the best music I’ve heard. Englishmen tend to have rather rough-looking mouths – broken or missing teeth, & prominent, gleaming crowns. This is no wonder: their food is dangerous. Recently damaging a molar on a damned pebble embedded in a chicken, I was today greeted by a horrible crunching, tingling sound of another piece of grit, this time within a Swede I had just cooked. I hope I have escaped damage, for this was close to the other casualty. Tomorrow I head into London to see a show on German art, a comprehensive exhibition at the Royal Academy, after which I will attend a two-day seminar on “The Nazification of Art,” an in-depth examination of film, painting, music, & architecture during the Nazi era, paid for by this art school. Yes, I shall be home for Christmas, though only for about 10 days; definitely we should schedule a visit. Your Dali dream struck me with an odd pang: it recalls a similar dream which I had years ago: Also in a supermarket (at the same time a giant stadium), Dali walked in a frozen-food section, seeming to defy gravity as the aisle was on the ceiling’s curve. I shall be interested to see yr. pan pipes. Oddly enough, I also bought some in Cambridge. I have no ability in playing them, however. Yes, I remember every scene of that divine Leone film as if I saw it just yesterday. I would kill to be able to witness such a poignant film – no, such a life – for the first time, as you just did. It is good that I am writing this, for if I tried to speak of the film, my mouth would sputter my eyes brim with tears, remembering such greatness as that. Your stamp-laden card could not be verbalized – it is so ingrained into truth; I tried to read it out-loud, but broke into spasms, at reading of the Cyclopean thing. I wonder how the English would regard your interpretation of England.

Yr. Obt. Servt.,

H. Hauser (sic)

Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life

“It does seem slightly bizarre that two of Britain’s greatest writers of supernatural fiction, Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, should be connected by dried milk.” (Ashley, p. 120).

 

I am immediately on board, with any book which included this sentence. Mike Ashley’s Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life (New York, Carroll & Graf: 2001), which appeared in Great Britain as Starlight Man, is an engrossing, profound portrait of Algernon Blackwood, writer, traveler, adventurer, spy, and mystic. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I first ran across Blackwood's short story The Willows in a Scholastic anthology, at the age of 11 or so; and even then the numinous prose stuck with me. Recently, I read Episodes Before Thirty, Blackwood's own memoir; a good baseline for regarding Blackwood’s outlook. Mike Ashley’s book further, and extensively, illuminated Blackwood’s history – doing outstanding work, especially considering the gaps in the paper trail from the author’s life. 

 

 Seemingly, the author knew everyone, encountering such disparate figures as P.D. Ouspensky, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lord Dunsany, Gurdjieff, and Sir Edward Elgar, among others. With a life starting in the Victorian Age, running through two world wars, and then ending in the atomic age (in fact, as Ashley detailed, Blackwood was a frequent contributor to radio, and pioneering television broadcasts as well). The only minor concern I have with the book is that the discussions of various works (of which I still have many to read) include frequent spoilers. A rewarding and worthwhile adventure.

-- by Jonathan Falk, November 2018

H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon 2018

l-r, Gwen Callahan, NECRONOMIDOL, Brian Callahan, Cthulhu Girl, 10-7-18

l-r, a spectral Andrew Migliore, the artist Skinner, Richard Stanley, Scott Connors, Darin Coelho Spring, Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, panel discussing Clark Ashton Smith and the rapturous documentary on Smith, The Emperor of Dreams. 10-6-18.

Upstairs, at one section of the CthulhuCon.

I attended all three days of the 2018 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival; joining a panaroma of HPL festivals I have attended, starting in 1996. There were a panel or two, and a reading I wish I had seen, but I was pleased with Short Film Blocks 1, 2, 3, and 4. Among other events and films, this year's standouts include the performance by Necronomidol, the world premier unveiling of The Emperor of Dreams, and the surprise showing of a subtle, disturbing version of The Shadow over Innsmouth, from the 1990s, by Chiaki Konaka (the question session, assisted by a translator, afterward included a reference to a Arnold Böcklin influence in the film!). Overall another great festival.  

Norway

Vigeland Park, Oslo, Norway, 2 October, 2018; Herre, Norway, 1 October, 2018. Photos by JF.

Gothenburg Cathedral

Gothenburg Cathedral, Gothenburg, Sweden, September 28, 2018.

St. Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna

St. Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna, 9-25-18.

Lake Como

 Sunset at Lake Como, Italy, 9-22-18.

Hamm, Germany

At the monument to my great, great, great- uncle Adalbert Falk, on September 17, 2018 (and many thanks to Dr. Ute Knopp, and Mr. Markus Meinold, who took me to the site, among other places; and thanks to everyone else who helped). Adalbert Falk is also the ancestor after whom I named this blog.

Amsterdam Maritime Museum

TToured the Amsterdam Maritime Museum today; a museum  I'd missed on previous visits. An engaging, lively collection, including an evocative array of navigation instruments, and an assortment of Dutch maritime paintings, with a mystic moonlight boat scene (& a sailing ship docked outside).

Traffic Hissing by the Pine over Farnsworth Wright’s Grave

Traffic Hissing by the Pine over Farnsworth Wright’s Grave

The road noise nigh Farnsworth Wright’s grave

Is very crepuscular, the foibles of Stratocaster corpse fanes smoked through to the vault. The Carthaginian contours of his coffin were remonstrative. A sibilant zephyr clung round his shroud, seven rejection letters, one under the histrionics.

Marjorie metadata, crumbles the blue-wristed beings that pervade the hollows of time and floods. What ichor hath kumquat wrote? Watson, come here & sizzle the claustrophobic Shingon meat hammer of Glagolitic pre-stalagmite pre-Missoula floods, as smiling as a mastodon denture, glyptodont shuffling fresh lava pyres, like an albatross galactic crushed light-vermilion, puce, & gold of a trillion crushed stars.

Sphinxes & sepulchers nourish the tree, aurochs & squid.

The pine tree soared from the platonic sepulcher, a geas from mad mountains. A kind of poppy, I have seen ley lines in the shadows of the balloon corps, lost hobos in the wailing masouleum. Decades have thundered by you, ecstatic loneliness.

Editing like a planchette, over the hill the pate cremains. 

   by Jonathan Falk

 Finished 8-23-18

Decennial Now

Ten years have drifted or dashed by, since my first blog post on this site. It's been real. 2008, when I began posting, had some outsized events; the global economic crash, the election of President Barack Obama in the U.S.; the Iraq War persisted, after the surge. Before, and since then, the globe has been engaged in a sort of drunkard's walk.

Above: Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, by P.D. Ouspensky. The novel revolved about the central enigma of spacetime. Ivan Osokin took a Mulligan, with the arrow of time...

Twilight (poem), December 1995

Ann Erickson, of Guerneville, California, published this poem in the poetry magazine tight, Volume 6, Number 4, January, 1996.

Algernon Blackwood's Episodes Before Thirty: Innocence and Experience in Old and New Worlds

Algernon Blackwood’s Episodes Before Thirty, from 1923 (a gift from a friend), was a revelation, to one who has previously read only his superb fiction. The book is a carefully-composed, thoughtful memoir, written by a man in his 50s, looking back on the travails and lessons of his youth; with an eidetic richness in its prose. The volume ran parallel to his fiction in some ways, in its concerns with the occult and supernatural, but offered other moods and elements, as well. Blackwood’s tales of supernatural mystery and occult events, provided my introduction to his writing. His powerful story, The Willows, which I read in a Scholastic anthology when I was about eleven, spoke to me, and stayed with me, even at that early stage of my life. 

Blackwood’s (by his own description) cocooned upbringing, with doting, yet austerely religious parents, was succeeded by harsh realities (contrasting with immersion in the spiritual qualities of the natural world, on a Canadian island, and other places), through his travels and various occupations in North America. The story begins in media res in New York City; with descriptions of tough living conditions reminiscent of George Orwell’s Down and Out In London and Paris. The autobiography also covered his childhood in Great Britain, and his introduction to Eastern thought, through a chance encounter with a volume of Patanjali.  From the future author’s immersion in the inferno of Tammany-era New York, to his succession of side hustles and jobs (including working as a journalist for the New York Times, and other newspapers), to his brief experiences with morphine (and one experiment with cannabis), to his transformative “meetings with remarkable men,” including attorney, poet, and mystic, Alfred Louis, the book provided a captivating experience.  Although, as a cryptic remark about occult experiences toward the end of the tome indicated, what is absent from the book was telling, also.

“These woods, this river, ruled the world, and somewhere in the heart of that old forest the legendary Wendigo, whose history I wrote later in a book, had its awful lair.”—p. 143

 -- by Jonathan Falk, June 2018