Content Provider

 

From Hong, 1989

Party out Back

 

Doug Gilford poem. From Hong, 1989.

Business in Front

from Hong, 1989

Adequately Excellent

Inside Front Cover, Hong, 1989

I just found John M. Bennett's blog here on blogspot.com:
johnmbennettpoetry.blogspot.com

Hong, 1989

Colonial Spires and Wild Domed Hills

Parallel readings of Richard Brautigan and Raymond Carver

Last month I read at the same time an old edition of Trout Fishing in America (with its quaint typewriter-like text) by Richard Brautigan and What we talk about when we talk about Love by Raymond Carver.  I had read little or nothing by either author before, although their reputations are inescapable. When I bought the two books together at the king of bookstores, the clerk said:  That's an interesting combination, or something to that effect.

There is no reason to link the two authors, other than I finally felt compelled to read them.  As such things happen, though, they have some parallels and were contemporaries -- both were born in the 1930s and died fairly young in the 1980s, Brautigan at the age of 49 and Carver at 50.  Both were born in the Pacific Northwest.  Both writers used relatively simple language and wrote in a sparing manner. 

Carver -- or Carver's material as procrusteanly edited, at any rate, in the edition I read -- merits his high regard.  At times head-scratchingly truncated -- what the hell happens to the old injured couple?  -- his encrypted glimpses of savagery (as in Tell the Women we're going) and human incompleteness (alcoholism, missing limbs, muteness) are conveyed with the simplest economy.

The famous cover of Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America suggests some of the differences between the two works.  Brautigan and his companion, with their free-form garb, in Washington Square in San Francisco, distill the essence of the counterculture in the late 1960s, when the book was published (whether or not Brautigan was fully on board with the hippies is another issue).  The novel itself was actually written during the Kennedy era and is more of a late Beat Generation or proto- hippie work.  No psychotropic drugs are referenced -- the drug of this book is alcohol.  In contrast with Carver's naturalism, Brautigan uses language in a way that is dreamlike and in places liberated from semantics. "Sandbox minus John Dillinger equals what?"  But Brautigan's writing is suffused with an underlying note of tragedy, as with Carver.  There's always a melancholy along with Brautigan's humor, as when he writes of reading, in Life Magazine, about Hemingway's suicide, anticipating his own.

Schroeder Ground Floor Studio, Green Bay, Wisconsin

The Bryggen of Bergen, Norway

fell ec aptr þaðan

Adorkable Austroslavism

 

 

Neti flush remants of Lemuria and Mu

 

Not Therion iris the purling snow ridge

 

Vault booms arc azure Klarkash-ton.

FOOD will win the war don't waste it

 

Postcard sent in 1918 depicting the then-recently built Multnomah County Courthouse in Portland, Oregon -- still very much an active hall of jurisprudence.  The area surrounding the courthouse's footprint seems almost rural in this World War I era scene; its surroundings in this current century are definitively urban.   Much attention was paid to the last few remaining World War I veterans who died within recent years.  By now there are few people who would have any memories related to the World War I period at all -- anyone recalling this time even from early childhood would, at the youngest, be approaching the century mark in age.  That's how this planet rolls.

The message was apparently written by a college student who signed it "C.H."

A flickering lantern

 

A promotional fan from the Nikko Restaurant in what was Japantown (now Old Town Chinatown) in Portland, looking to date from the 1930s.

1942

 

Enlargement of a yearbook track team photograph of my father from 1942. The photo had lain in oblivion for decades until I uncovered it some years ago in the Milwaukie (Oregon) High School Library. I noticed a number of Japanese American students in the 1941 yearbook. In the 1942 yearbook, there were none.

The Hanging Bridge, Royal Gorge, Colorado

The Third Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories

The Third Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories, edited by Christine Bernard, from 1968, with a psychedelic, anamorphic photo for the cover, is one of many (mostly) solid horror anthologies from a grand era in the 1960s and 70s.  My copy looks to have been heavily read and consulted, so much so that the cover is separate from the book.

Among the stories is one of August Derleth's "posthumous collaborations" (i.e. a Derleth story based on the flimsiest association with a note or story germ) with H.P. Lovecraft, The Shuttered Room.  I hadn't read any of the "posthumous collaborations" in many years, though I read the Arkham House anthology The Watchers out of Time and other stories in various places a long time ago.  Made into a film as well, the story is a fun as a light read, though possessing little or none of the controlled atmosphere and intellectual depth of Lovecraft's tales.  The Shuttered Room cobbles together plot elements from both Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror and The Shadow over Innsmouth, leaving out what's best about both short stories.  At times the descriptions seem accidentally funny, as when Abner Whateley overhears dreadful events by eavesdropping on a party line.

The other eleven stories range from Roald Dahl's well-crafted suspense story "Poison," to Rudyard Kipling's "At the End of the Passage," which couples suspense and supernaturalism in an burningly hot colonial outpost, to stories of surreal, physical horror such as R.C. Cook's Green Fingers (wasn't that also a tv show with Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor?).  Many of the titles alone are great -- take Henry James' The Romance of Certain Old Clothes, which bears influence from Hawthorne's tales.

E.F. Benson's The Room in the Tower is a disturbing interpenetration of dream and waking life;  for me the brief description toward the climax, of the narrator "under the impression that some bright light had been flashed in my face" (apparently lightning) is particularly deft and unsettling, suggesting the loss of control one experiences in the state of nightmare.  Although a few of the stories are slight, the book is for the most part a good anthology.

Mount Adams, Washington State

 

 

Per Wikipedia, this dormant, volcanic peak in the Cascade Range has lost a couple hundred feet since the time of this postcard (or else measuring has become more precise). Crawfordsville is an unincorporated area in Linn County, Oregon.

Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee

One of my recent reads has been Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, an alternate history novel published in 1955.  The book is a curious one which presents two possible, paradoxical realities:  One in which the Confederacy wins, and one in which the Confederacy loses the Civil War.  According to Wikipedia, Philip K. Dick stated that he was in part inspired to write his 1962 Axis Victory novel, The Man in the High Castle, by Moore's earlier work (although I've been unable to find the source for this statement immediately). 

If the Confederacy wins, then one (in Moore's book at least) ends up with two countries rather than one grudgingly united one.  Moore's work takes place in the abbreviated, impoverished United States.  As with Dick's later novel, the presentation is subtle.  One doesn't find the obvious material, occupying greycoats in Moore's book or strutting German (or Japanese) soldiers in Dick's book.  The pertinent action in The Man in the High Castle takes place offstage at times, as when his character Frank Frink contemplates the German Nazi campaign of genocide in Africa.

Bring the Jubilee falls into the Bildungsroman mold, in which the narrator, Hodge Backmaker, discovers his potentialities as he leaves "Wappinger" Falls, New York, and lives in New York City, then in the retreat of Haggershaven.  The ramifications of a possible Confederate victory post -Civil War seem at times incidental to Backmaker's development.  While I liked the novel, the strongest and most poignant part is the last few chapters, in which Backmaker finds himself forever stranded from his ideal world.

Photograph:  The Inauguration of Jefferson Davis, Alabama State Capitol Building, February 18, 1861.

Portland, Oregon, The City of Roses

 

 

The skyline of Portland as seen from the east side of the Willamette. The postcard appears to be from the mid to late 1950s. The Oregon Journal newspaper, referenced in a sign, went out of business decades ago, and the fresh up... 7up sign sleeps with the fishes.

Life's a Beach

A wooden postcard depicting Jake, the Alligator Man, a reptilian/human-type mummy in Marsh's Free Museum, Long Beach, Washington, offering a Weltanschauung, juxtaposed with the arch making the "World's Longest Beach" claim. I haven't been to Long Beach in a spell.

Omaha

If one could have tapped this man's internal monologue of the nineteenth century, how would it have run? "Stew tonight... graduated...."

I once spent a week in August in Omaha, Nebraska.

Wind and Containment

Wind and Containment

Incorporeality;  the leaves dropping and scattering as fall's wind bloweth, sweeping alley and sluice.

The three illuminated ovals situated atop one another, bridged and somewhat red.  The nine gates and the impalpable.  Tissues and filaments along which currents shudder.

The bound coils and liver.  They're all wadded-up.  I've never seen anything like it.

The singular, antiqued, and inaccessible, wondrous or tearing petals;  of the angled lotos in early gloaming.   The mice impelled toward stricture and putrefaction, collapsed arches, shivered and rent core;  aether o'er purple hollows.

Congealment or waves in the deep and far-flug.  A splintered remnant of the city of no walls or recollection;  the implicit.

JF early 1990s



Photo: from Dark Hearts: The Making of Hearts of Darkness, the Making of Apocalypse Now

Sister Ray

You've just caught two big rays -- what next? Why, pose for the photographer, of course. Because them is big rays, and you want a pitcher postcard.

This photo is overexposed, but then, damaged or obscured photography possesses interest in its own right. The reverse-toned quality of this apparent seaside shot gives it a nightmare feel almost like the negative sequences in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu. The postcard is strikingly enigmatic, providing only a few clews as to its origin. The women to me have a Baltic, Eastern European, or Russian appearance (the man may also have this look). My understanding of the stamp box on the back is that it dates from the early 20th century, and then there's the seemingly incongruous inscription reading "Miss Jennie May Thornton" (certainly not a "East European" name). Was she somehow associated with the three people here, was she at the scene, or was she even one of the women in the photo? (Couldn't find her for certain on the googles, just one or two people who may be her.) One of the ironies of Turing Machines (aka "confusors"), dumb phones, and related instruments is that they foster a good deal of standardization and uniformity -- yet the World Wide Nets also allows one to post items such as this, which may be unique, or else quite rare.

Toe to toe with the Rooskies

The cover and a few interior pages from WE, Jan. -Feb. 1958, Volume X, Number 1. Trade magazine with the cover depicting the "Dr Strangelove," "defence" project my father worked on in Alaska in the late 1950s. Those chemises sure were controversial... Reassuring to know that the rotary dial phone calls all got switched to where they were supposed to go... The glassware looks like something from the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers' collection.

WE -- possibly "Western Electric," or could also be a reference to WE, Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel. The magazine title is yet another indicator of "the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids." Just a few more Venona decrypts and we'll have it figured out.

Opsahl Minneapolis

Antiquity of the Evanescent

Two Early Roman Scott Works

Hide Behind a Tree Fast: 1978, pencil, ink

"Snow" comics panel: probably early 1980s, ink

Mount McKinley Denali

Camp Dodge, Iowa, Thanksgiving, 1918

Menu and Roster for Thanksgiving Dinner, Camp Dodge, Iowa, 1918, Company H, 14th U.S. Infantry. A relique of my grandfather's World War I era service. The courses sound vastly fancy and delicious -- oysterettes soup and cluster raisins, and other rich food. I relish the little caricature of the 18th century-style server guy. And why not follow the repast with a stogie or coffin nail? Also an unusual photo of a HUMAN STATUE OF LIBERTY, composed of 18,000 soldiers (give or take) arranged just so, from Camp Dodge in 1918 -- was my grandfather a part of, say, the torch, the crown spikes, or the "feet"? Judging from the appearance of the ground, and from the fact it was staged at all, I'd gather the photo was taken in 1918 sometime well before November, and possibly before his arrival at Camp Dodge, but one can't be sure. I suppose it would make more sense to post this on or around Thanksgiving, but I've never let such considerations stop me.

An anniversary that is nigh is the 43rd one of the faked landing of Apollo 11 on the moon -- and a good hoax it was. Altamont, Woodstock, the Manson Family murders, AND (alleged) men on Luna, and Vietnam, communes, all happening in the same year -- "as above, so below."

Microscopic Giants, Desricks, Gnoles

In the now time I re-read the superb anthology, Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum, which I first read (at least once or twice) at the age of ten or so. Earl E. Mayan's unique illustrations, compounded of painting and what appears to be clip art from some ad-man's 1960s era portfolio, and the wonderful stories make for a powerful duo. (The Obitulog blog, which I have linked to my own, also has a good entry on Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum, dated Sunday, November 20, 2011.) The Alfred Hitchock visage and brand were in its way at least as important for me as his auteur-stamped films, such as Vertigo or Spellbound. "Hitchcock," for me, stands as much for the minimalist profile sketch of the director on the early television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, coupled with softly ominous timpani strokes, or for Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (and the paperback anthologies of stories from the magazine), which at one time I read a great deal of, as for, say, The Lady Vanishes, Psycho, or The Birds.   I also read with enjoyment some of the books in the Alfred Hitchock and the Three Investigators series in childhood.

Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum has a mix of well-known and more obscure writers. Many stories, such as Theodore Sturgeon's "Shadow, Shadow on the Wall," (Mayan's illustration shewn -- this one, and the others scared the crap out of me when I was a youth) are excellent examples of Poe's dictum of every word in a short story counting toward a single effect. Guy Endore, aka Samuel Goldstein, author of "The Day of the Dragon," was a riveting individual without even considering his written work, as one can readily find online. "The Day of the Dragon" is one of several apocalyptically-themed stories in the collection -- another is "Doomsday Deferred" by Will F. Jenkins, with Brazil standing as an exotic Other. I remember being stymied by the word "Deferred" when I first read this one in childhood.

Were-cats and werewolves (or, say, cat into man or man into dog), transformation, are another running note, in such pieces as Miriam Allen DeFord's "Henry Martindale, Great Dane," Jerome "It's a Good Life" Bixby's "The Young One," and Stephen Vincent Benét's "The King of Cats." Paul Ernst's (Max Ernst's brother?) "The Microscopic Giants" is exceptionally eldritch. With other writers such as Ray Bradbury, Joseph Payne Brennan, and Manly Wade Wellman joining in, this anthology is nostalgic for myself -- and still resonates today. I'll have to re-read Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery as well, which had good whimsical illustrations itself, though not as potent as Mayan's. I read this initially about the same time as my first reading of Monster Museum.

New Mexico Pictographs

Riders on the Storm

Tabula Rasa

Tabula Rasa

A giant insect reels under me.  Whilst this goes away, the symphony of nature's god cataclysm goes on

And I dream of an Antarctic whirling snow, blasted reefs and cracked Cthulhu gongs, antediluvian ice monsters, plateau far off of Leng and crooked teeth pulled with a huge explosion from the rocket floor.  Grey brick and tenement rotten face, blind eyes sunken, blue lips and grey-splattered white vein cheeks, pupils revolting in the ghost wolves running softly,  the tongue swallowing the absolute wastes.

Moist, Victorian castle leaf garden raindrop wind butte steppe-racing horse flying mane in the breeze, howling ancient windgods beneath the ColumbiaGorge, cascading anubis flattened area heaving river and campus dropdrain imbecile canals on Mars, trembling, bobbling moron head with bright green eyelids, collapsed cheeks and hollow laughter rolling over the first rocks on earth, a joke designed by God, his flushed face shaking with worn pockets, on his throne with a twelve-eyed lamb, the vegetable immediately unfolding in the copper-coloured sky.  Adam and Eve hierosgamos ivy gaping dark shuttered woods, spirit shelter elephantine organic intestinal oceanic underneath lightning bursts of orange steam, testicle green-matted idol under tropical antique unknown and unguessed SUN.

JF 1985

Published in The Worker Poet 11,  1987, published by Michael R. Hill, Franklin, Pennsylvania.

Rumpus Room

Culture War

Photograph of my great-great-great uncle, Adalbert Falk (one, but not the only one, of the people after whom this blog was named). I can see a certain physical resemblance to a few relatives.

Here is a brief biography of the man, taken from the Wikipedia entry, itself taken from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

"Paul Ludwig Adalbert Falk (10 August 1827 – July 7, 1900) was a German politician. Falk was born at Metschkau (Mieczków), Silesia. In 1847 he entered the Prussian state service, and in 1853 became public prosecutor at Lyck (Ełk). In 1858 he was elected a deputy, joining the Old Liberal party. In 1868 he became a privy-councillor in the ministry of justice. In 1872 he was made minister of education, and in connection with Otto von Bismarck's policy of the Kulturkampf he was responsible for the May Laws or Falk Laws against the Catholics. In 1879 his position became untenable, owing to the death of Pope Pius IX and the change of German policy with regard to the Vatican, and he resigned his office, but retained his seat in the Reichstag until 1882. He was then made president of the supreme court of justice at Hamm, where he died in 1900."