More poetry -- Oddities 7

Recently I read Solzhenitsyn's Prussian Nights, his long poem rendering the brutal Russian advance through Northern Prussia in 1945... The book is in a bilingual edition, of which I read the English part.

steve sneyd quoting from "Cannon" -- that's going back a few years.

UHT! ending by R. Scott -- Oddities 7

Untitled Roman Scott Parable Page 1 -- Oddities 7

The Left Hand of Japhy Ryder

May 18 2010 I attended a talk by Ursula K. Le Guin, Gary Snyder, and Jerry Franklin, presenting their thoughts on (and some poems about) the Mt. St. Helens blast in 1980. First time I've seen Le Guin speak, third time for Snyder, second for Franklin. The woman who introduced the speakers (I didn't catch her name or position) seemed to irritate the California poet by associating him with Plato. Gary fired back by referring to Plato as the guy who would have excluded poets from his Republic (although I would qualify this aspect of The Republic with the redeeming parts such as the Cave Parable, the reincarnation panorama at the end, and so on).
Photo of the trio being awarded blankets, over the top of some guy's head.

There's a line in Cocteau's Orpheus, something like, "There's a riot at the poet's cafe," which would almost apply.

Moe, Larry, Curly, Shemp, Joe, Curly Joe

Tracks of the Beast -- Finis

pages 3 & 4 - Oddities 7

Next pages -- the first two pages of a comic strip from Clark Dissmeyer. Twenty-four years after this work was done, he is still prolifically working. Plug "Poopsheet Foundation" into your search box and you can readily be led to some more recent material.

The typescript at the start of Tracks of the Beast makes it look EC- comics like.

Now reading Ibsen's Ghosts, and slowly going through Kershaw's enormous biography of Adolf Hitler, which may take a while.

More Oddities 7

Ah yes.. found the copy of Oddities 7 I misplaced and will continue posting it, delayed and out of sequence. Unique work by Todd Mecklem, Billy Wolfenbarger, Denise Dumars, and others. I wonder what happened to Billy Wolfenbarger? Surrealist small press poet who was published quite a lot, in the 1980s and 70s as well, I believe. I met him once around 1988 in Eugene, Ore. -- he came to my little apartment, hand-rolled and smoked some cigarettes, conversed about Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft; kind of a hippie aura about him. Never saw him again -- actually, I don't know if he's still alive, for that matter. I suppose he was in his 40s then. He and another poet from that era (whom Wolfenbarger mentioned), G. Sutton Breiding, seem to have given up writing and publishing, at the least.

An image of Joe E. Brown is on this sample of Oddities, Earthworm Tractors, forgotten, encrypted comic actors.
Been reading The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett -- really enjoy it for the most part, his attenuated, sly descriptions.

Invictus Osiris Alastor

"A man can be destroyed but not defeated." Ernest Hemingway

Liebestod

the him who was so Buddha nature rain white on Moon locking pond, a rabbit, a hunchback, furious unmet foxfire Appalachian not even close to Svidrigailov, or Dante from La Vita Nuova:

"Nine times now, since my birth, the heaven of light had turned almost to the same point in its own gyration, when the glorious Lady of my mind, who was called Beatrice by many who knew not what to call her, first appeared before my eyes. She had already been in this life so long that in its course the starry heaven had moved toward the region of the East one of the twelve parts of a degree; so that at about the beginning of her ninth year she appeared to me, and I near the end of my ninth year saw her. She appeared to me clothed in a most noble color, a modest and becoming crimson, and she was girt and adorned in such wise as befitted her very youthful age. At that instant, I say truly that the spirit of life, which dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble with such violence that it appeared fearfully in the least pulses, and, trembling, said these words: Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi [Behold a god stronger than I, who coming shall rule over me]."

Christina Chiu

Some years back I read Troublemaker and other Saints, by New York author Christina Chiu -- one can purchase the book online. I recall the prose as unique and thoughtful, dealing with such topics as alienation, fetishism, the return of Hong Kong to China, and so on. I got one email from Ms. Chiu after I sent her an email, one of those "glad you liked the book" sort.

Some time after the book was published to some notice, in 2001, Christina Chiu seemed to disappear, with no more writing published (as far as I know, anyway). Her website sat unchanged for years, then seemed to be usurped by some other entity.

That's always the choice one faces with creativity -- you can just walk away from it, as Samuel Morse did with painting. Still better to write one good book than none at all, though.

Where is Christina Chiu now? How about Anna May Wong?


More thoughts on the Silesian parsonage (the photo of which I posted 11/16/2008): My great-grandfather was actually probably raised (and the building probably stood) more in the Legnica/Liegnitz/Waldau area, and the photo I posted was probably taken in the 1860s or early 1870s, a bit earlier than I thought. This information is based on research two relatives of mine produced. Believe I shot straight through Legnica without stopping last year, only the dimmest association flickering in my mind at the passing of the railway sign.

Lenin and Cydonia

Expect Great Revelations

Dream of a bus to Parnassus -- high Egyptian-looking columns I could not ascend to catch the departure. Rain falling in a sky out of John Martin.

Oddities 7

More Oddities -- the very last issue I believe, from the zine's roughly six year life. Inventive display of fonts on the cover, and a dream piece by myself which is merely ok. More noteworthy than "The Hermit" is a portion of a sketch of the surrealist poet Robert Desnos and some of the other artwork on the margin. Eventually I plan to get all 7 issues posted, out of sequence though the process may be (and I've also misplaced one or two issues).

Hell, back in the depths of time, back in 1987, the "internets" were known only to people in the company and other covert types! The Soviet Union still looked like a viable concern... And how about the Faroese?

squat

inlet of Walden Pond, Do What Thou Wilt Shall be the Whole of the Law, 15245 23145
55687
10258 15563 45687 66821 11563 Mr. Mojo Risin,' "East of Corbett the hills rise wild," Triple Falls, Sasquatch, smudged chimney of kerosene lantern, jaguar eyes, Samsara, 1983-84, Pater, 2,000 light years from home, what is property, second growth forest

Entrance to the Free City of Christiania, Denmark

Recent reads, re-reading Constance Garnett's translation of Crime and Punishment and reading for the first time Don Berry's To Build a Ship.

A Wild Weird Clime

Last weekend attended the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland again. Some of the very short films were missing (i.e. those around five-ten minutes), but some of the movies I did see had a pretty good balance between camp and experimental horror, such as a version of Beyond the Wall of Sleep and a work of backwoods grue, Dirt Dauber. Once in a while, you get one like "guys screwing around in the woods with a camera," or the "film school requirement movie with some link to HPL" type of thing. Once again, S.T. Joshi and others delivered with their talks and readings. Joshi bitched about the low light as he read a piece of his own writing, concerning Edgar A. Poe; and an audience member produced a flashlight for his benefit. Gary Myers read a nice little story, called Dusk, I think, shewing some Dunsanian, Clark Ashton Smith, and HPL influences.

I remember being in the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown LA in 1978, I believe, seated on a plush lounge sofa, flipping through the pages of a paperback of The Dunwich Horror and Others, -- Jove HPB, which I got at some bookstore there. LA was the largest city I had visited up to that time, a revelatory experience. There was a feeling of "adventurous expectancy" as I read the titles in the Derleth-compiled "complete" list of Lovecraft titles (which is neither complete nor accurate, as Joshi or someone has pointed out) -- my spine crackled as I read of such works as At the Mountains of Madness,
"Through the Gates of the Silver Key," and the others.

Actually, I haven't spent a lot of time in LA since then.

Giorgio

Cycle of Death

JF



Turf, sunken long where the earth sheared off away into the brown creek, clouded pond.
Blackened or molten eaves, peaked roof with lead shingles, smashed and tattered rose window, aloft and sickly, of the fane of the family. A brick pile with grilled and opaque orange window, in three oaks, apart from the climbing vine and dry leaves.
Geography of late sun, kine, and ancient stumps with forked tops: Blood forced out of the earth with heedless footfall.
The music of the later, blossoming transmogrification; Rain saturates the earth of the sides, worms, a gold ring, pointed stones.
The coat of the survivor of civil war, iron, beams of sun, a lofty pylon, dry spring grass on banks and plots.
Palisades, the burnt bark house, the flight of stairs leading up the cliff, the calling for the dog in the brambles.
Pink blooms nodding before dark-speared gate.

yellow reading matter custard

Been reading Ibsen's Peer Gynt -- ironically long after I visited Ibsen's childhood home. "In the Hall of the Mountain King" makes a little more sense now.

Painting by Adelbert Woelfl depicting Breslau in the nineteenth century -- I saw the painting in the National Museum in Wroclaw.

nostalgia

to continue with the mixing of old and new stuff, this is a prose poem from some years back:

Atmosphere and Clackamas

JF


Unwieldy passage of the sun, white, through the keyhole of the old birch hill.
Blue rabbits in fields and thickets.
The cigarettes still smoulder in far-away rooms,
The Son of Man, cuffs in rock burrows, head in lines of blowing trees, lawnmowers, and fading thistles.

Amputated yukata of the early morning because
His face becomes a heavy black rhinoceros horn.
Hangover carves the inky bluffs,
Meet at the Seven Stars.

Blue mist charging and climbing,
Storm shaking stars and fir.
Alphorns sounding over lamaseries lorn,
Thibetan femurs ring beyond cromlech and rise.

Original Face

I have been perusing Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven. I was lukewarm toward the writing at first but am appreciating it more as I read on. The setting in Portland (with reference to the Portland of the early 1970s, or alternative versions of same) gives the novel added appeal. I believe it's set around 2000 or so. .

Also watched The Saddest Music in the World not long ago -- I'd agree with the Rotten Tomatoes critic who called it weirdness for weirdness' sake. One of the issues I had with TSMINTW was the uniformity of presentation. A lot of it is one character says one quirky thing, then another character responds with another quirky thing, and so on... The thing with the glass leg is run into the ground. Some of the camerawork was notable though, including the occluded lens effects.

lincolnshire

etmws yhhrt eeeoa mdwlo bdhwf eervt keire uzdos mtftg dyotg eommf trosl hrnim iobte afehv mwlee woitn rrklu olbtn cdnoa lzeta znhta

by the sea

Insular

JF

Written in Herre Norway, June 7 2009



No, it's an einganggrillen, one time grill,
paper leaping over coals, E-18 sausage -- name for the highway in country, shocking with moose.

Mica stranding the ice age davenport,
the ocean water is potable, a sailing boat motors on the offing over the shingle,
legs abandoned & bruised,
auroras don't shed the moon & earthshine dawn.

Ice sounds shaved these benches, cow knees implacable over salt licks, witness to the nocturne of the tarn. The jumble of bruised rock, tested with blisters, ticks like fleas, murder snails.

Europa

I don't recall seeing a single homeless person in Copenhagen (unless you consider Christiania) -- none of the shopping carts, the shouting, the sleeping bags in doorways that one accepts as a standard part of the background in many U.S. cities. While admittedly a few days wandering around in the Danish city doesn't constitute solid research on the subject, there still must be some social explanation for the phenomenon.

Ok, the relation between Conrad's Under Western Eyes and Crime and Punishment is pretty obvious. I wasn't the first one to stumble on the link by any means. Razumov/Raskolnikov. I guess when I was in Poland, I was in the country of Conrad's early life, in a sense, although this is problematic. That part of Silesia was part of Eastern Germany (pre- and post- Bismarck era) during Joseph's early life, and the area where Conrad was born is now part of the Ukraine. Seems Stalin had a hand in the post World War Two border swap (and related ethnic cleansing of Poles and Germans), getting Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman to go along with him. The history of Breslau alone is immensely involved.

Photo: Fraktur inscription with skull and crossbones, Wroclaw, Poland.

Independence

a couple more planarian pages, this will be the last selection from this issue of oddities i will post, although there were a few other small flatworms included. Nice work by British poet Steve Sneyd, Bruce Boston, and other persons...

Past the solstice

The trip was excellent; had very different imagery and events than I anticipated. There were blunders, such as my search for the site of the bunker where Hitler committed suicide. Based on the Lonely Planet guide to Central Europe, I went up and down Vossstrasse in Berlin, puzzled when nothing leaped out at me. Finally I decided a piece of vacant land might be the top of the bunker, but was still bemused at the absence of a marker. I asked a guy who looked Roma and/or Eastern European (he was selling "Soviet/East German" memorabilia, gas masks, medals and the like on a table) where the fuehrerbunker was. The seller responded in a mixture of English and German, indicating the directions, but I couldn't quite follow what he meant. Gave me a poignant feeling when I reached Wroclaw/Breslau -- I was the first member of my family to go to that area since the 1940s, at the latest. The whole reverse immigration dynamic realized.

On my last evening, in Frankfurt on Main, going for a casual stroll, ran across a Thai Cultural Event, hosted by "Miss Germany 2009" (I believe) and featuring blasting dance music and graceful, completely uninhibited Thai female impersonators (pictured -- the other photo is myself on Jomfruland Island, Norway)... Lots of Thai women with old German men in the surrounding crowd.... I wasn't sure if I was in Germany or Patpong road in Bangkok (no, I haven't been to the latter). The event was capped with the sight of a guy collapsing on the street, drunk out of his mind, eyes switching different ways, wielding a bottle of liquor, surrounded by people calling for help. Finally ambulances converged on the area.

Berlin

Writing from the Western part of Berlin... After several days spent here, and a trip to Wroclaw Poland as well... I had some absurd idea I would find my greatgreatgreat grandparents' parsonage, (of course I didn't in a huge urban area, if it even survives) but did find an intriguing Gothic layer beneath the communist housing block artifacts and the bustle and office buildings of modern Poland... (My great-grandfather was also raised in the parsonage -- I posted a photo of it in the November 16 2008 entry.) Ducks skimming the Oder river, fanned by the setting sun underneath cathedral spires... The areas around what used to be Breslau, (now Wroclaw) after regarding them, yeah it's possible the parsonage could have survived the decades, seeing cryptic Prussian towers and farmhouses along the rural passages the train took, roughly similar to the style... I rode along in a deserted compartment on the way there, almost expected to have Count Orlok from Nosferatu greet me when I clambered off the train.

Also spent a bit of time in Luebeck Germany.

Copenhagen

haven't been able to keep these up as much as I would have liked, hard to find internet cafes and the like, but am now in Copenhagen, winding up my stay here. Has been ungodly cold, rainy and windy; spiral architecture winding toward the sky, wind generators rotating in the offing. Visited the free city of Christiania, and meditated on the leathery displayed face of a sacrificial (or executed) iron age victim in the National Museum, among other things. Also had quick stays in Oslo Norway and Gothenburg Sweden.

last day in bamble

I still haveæn't completely gotten on my feet on this trip yet, has been taking longer than usual to adjust. Also coming down with a cold, which might have something to do with my feeling of unsettledness.

Went to a classic car rally with R. and H. today, spotting a gleaming Edsel among other things. Also an exhibition of line dancing, with plenty of down home "yee haws" scattered in the Norwegian.

Jomfruland

over the past 24 hours R. and I went to Kragero and the island of Jomfruland. Got to walk up to a statue of Edvard Munch at a famous vantage point, from where he received the inspiration for his painting The Sun. We camped in a campground [on the island] lined with luxurious caravan vehicles. We stayed in a little tent. A little the worse for beer, I was all settled to lie down and sleep on the cold ground beneath the eldritch moon, in the eerily brief northern night. We were jolted by an inexplicable sound, which turned out to be [apparently] kids throwing gravel at our tent. I froze still, uncertain what to do, while mysterious voices whispered outside, and further showers of gravel hit us. Then finally, the terror was over, and I settled to talk with Morpheus. Today we had a barbeque on a "one time grill" on the skagerrak ocean side of the island, perched on a titanic rock shelf which looked like the surface of a moon of a trans-Neptunian planet.

Thor's day

still in Norway, yesterday R. and I walked across a perilous dam ledge over gurgling waters down past a telecommunications shed over twilight scudding past the rim of the earth scraped my shin

norway

and i am writing this entry from a village in norway... primordial woods dripping with boreal rain and diffuse light about me... neat as a pin farmhouses and passing screams of seagulls.

more platyhelminth activity

ah ha... the elephantiasis grandma is dated 1982.

Re-read Algernon Blackwood's The Glamour of the Snow -- top shelf writing. The theme of the tripartite worlds brings to mind Hesse's Demian.

flatworm

more oddities -- two pages from issue 4, I believe, from the early 1980s. The non-traditional format had the pages shaped like flatworms; Safe to say this is the only time this has been done. At least one Portland-area bookstore carried the issue.

Dream of a stall selling back-scratchers, ornate ones; one like some early American folk art, and another a First Nations production, including a narwhal fin image.

more pics

a couple more photos from Japan -- the well-known Ryoanji garden and a wedding image I happened upon at Katsuga Shrine, Nara. They have an antique quality a little reminiscent of Felice Beato or Pierre Loti!

Been re-reading Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes -- possesses potent psychological analysis and tension. Would be worthwhile to compare the novel with Dostoyevsky, which I'm sure has been done.

nihon

More photos I took in Kyoto Japan in 1995... Again, taken with a point and shoot camera,
they had an "out of time" texture. Sometimes conditions are just right.

Ryoanji

Poem, and a photo of myself at the Ryoanji rock garden in Kyoto, Japan from 1995 -- one of those photos where you give the camera over to a stranger to snap.

Saw Clint Eastwood's latest, Gran Torino, a couple weeks ago. I liked the film quite a bit, with its presentation of a sort of fey Dirty Harry. Involving the Hmong as characters gave the film more depth than a lot of contemporary movies.

Also recently watched Arrabal's And I will walk like a Crazy Horse, another sick and inventive surrealist work. I liked a brief non sequitur shot of what appeared to be a giant spider against the sky.

The Bums

by Jonathan Falk

8-31-2008



Shoulders buzzed under a shade tree, they threw at us crabapples, boysenberries, marionberries, wine spilled into shade of fiery trees. We walked off from the hobos, children seeking sweets, tired of home.

& Angels tread the gateway, skunks roam the hay, cisterns clang.

The tyres take one to the child is father of the man, mountains' hem -- adumbrated through eyelid & hazel, I've seen squirrels before.

Horseless carriage moaning up the track, nutmeg and lycanthropes, shoulder shadows scoriac, proto-Autumn sun horizon & nadir.

Oddities 6 -- Final

The last installment of Oddities 6. I'm generally not one for suppressing the written word, but here is an exception that tests the rule -- British poet Terry Cuthbert's barbed wire poem. You'll have to use your imagination on the part I obscured. Apparently, Cuthbert died a few years ago. And work by myself, Marc Myers, and others.

continued

I forgot to mention that the geographic range of the artists in Oddities 6 extended to the Midwest. Here is a work by the exalted Clark Dissmeyer of Nebraska (also known as "CAD"). In addition, a Scrach n' sniff page, featuring such luminaries as Gurdjieff and Tex Ritter.

And yes, somewhere Dorian Harewood is screaming as a bullet splits his foot. And Rade Sherbedgia is ever stealing the show: "A cloak, with a hood. Ok doctor."

Ik been reading The Stolen Sun, a novel by Emil Petaja, a correspondent from late in the life of H.P. Lovecraft. Space opera with depth, inspired by the Finnish epic the Kalevala. This is probably about as close as I'll get to the Kalevala; I doubt I'll ever read it.

Gregor Samsa

"But Jung sees the unconscious as being, besides this container for personal repressions, at bottom collective -- containing the products of 'innate forms and instincts' common to mankind. Where repressed contents of the personal unconscious may have been conscious at one time, the collective contents have never had any association with consciousness." from The Supernatural by Douglas Hill and Pat Williams.

Another moody, fabulous sample of Roman's illustration -- yeah, they're supposed to be side by side.

More Oddities

A couple more pages from Oddities 6.
These works are, as with anything, collaborations -- the co-author is time. By this point the contributors were from greater distances than with the earlier issues. Artists from California, Finland, England, and Oregon are represented.

new system

my posting of oddities 6 will be delayed for a while until I can get my new scanner figured out...

I watched that great show on Japanese balloon bombs again on pbs.

Oddities 6

The first three pages of Oddities 6, an homage to H.P. Lovcraft, from 1986. I will attempt to post all issues (eight or so, I believe) eventually (out of sequence).