Winter Brothers

I finished not long ago Ivan Doig's Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America, published in 1980. The work is an overview of, and thoughts about, the voluminous diaries of James G. Swan; who was a pioneer (among Euroamericans at least) in exploring and understanding the coastal areas of Washington State-- particularly the Olympic Peninsula: Port Townsend, and Neah Bay (as well as British Columbia and other places). I first cursorily read parts of the book (lent by a former friend) on a trip to the Olympic Peninsula many years back with a friend, which included a stop in Neah Bay and other places referenced in Doig's tome (along with a couple hours spend in Kurt Cobain-pre fame era Aberdeen, sauntering downtown, and visiting a thrift store). In fact, the trip was partly inspired by Winter Brothers, sort of following "on the trail of Swan." (I think of the volume sometimes as Swann's Way, simply because of the association with James G. Swan -- although it has nothing to do with Proust.)

It's an outstanding, but flawed, book. Consider the gripping tension of Swan's last adventure, to Haida Gwaii, the Queen Charlotte Islands (although the passage of the islands' West Coast is strangely understated, anticlimactic, not really delineated at all), and the sly, humorous, sometimes terrifying accounts of the frontiersman's life with the Makah and Haida, and other First Nation tribes. Much of this is in Swan's own words, but Doig's commentary helps link and explain the material. Against this, you also have the sometimes banal nature of Doig's thoughts: "I was surprised myself, far back along the highway when arriving to the cabin, how the lift of the mountain (Rainier) made itself felt even there, the road suddenly jerking into rising curves." Yeah, the ground does rise WHEN YOU APPROACH A MOUNTAIN.


Or: "(Even what I have been calling the Pacific Northwest is multiple. A basic division begins at the Columbia River; south of it, in Oregon, they have been the sounder citizens, we in Washington the sharper strivers. Transport fifty from each state as a colony on Mars and by nightfall the Oregonians will put up a school and a city hall, the Washingtonians will establish a bank and a union.)" Huh? That's just a tad condescending... Doig's whimsy on how a cat might end up getting smothered in bird poop is another idea that doesn't really fly.

The book overall is a good presentation of Swan's diaries, which could have benefited from tighter editing -- in fact, the whole framework of Doig's own commentary could have been either scrapped or seriously overhauled, with benefit. There are important themes covered in Brothers, such as the notion of traveling west, to "light out for the territory," until you can't go any further.
Doig's own writing only loosely (if at all) relates to Swan's journals and times.

Perhaps a biograpy, or selection of Swan's diaries, would be in order. And how I'd like to drop by Haida Gwaii.

I've also started processing Thomas "famously reclusive" Pynchon's V. -- so far, doesn't really grip me, but I will withhold judgement for now.

Columbian

Columbian

by Jonathan Falk

Sanguinity on the short and railed floor, hawser, clear light of the river grass and front window.
Face of rock, o'er-run in grey water, gathering and mossily pulsing. Tin dipper, tapping the draught into which three stars fell. Rain, waves o'er rocks, the rise and receding of the lustred rim of the deep; blue return. Furrowed metempsychosis. Five limbs, the cast of maples, headless and unbacked dimension.
Spoiled and burnt rise, sloughed ridges, pumice shoars, apes, channels of broken ash. The vacant thrones and icy recesses of the gods. Glyphs lined on the coated walls; collapses, and chthonic dubiousness. Rattlesnakes, and the seal of a small foot. Stacked where the light becomes indistinct, sheets cut and drawn in from the cave, displaying in cross-section prehistoric forms of life, such as a tiger or snapping turtle with long neck and lambent mane, and delicate and flowing organs.
Lupine closure, banked snow. The seething of the mass and form, and ascent.

ca. 1990

Illustration: a small scale copy of Evening Landscape with Two Men, Caspar David Friedrich

There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened

Green/Red

Dad with flare pistols, ca. 1946. This was fairly late in the period when visual, rather than radio, communications were still widely used for air traffic signaling.

Recently I read an old copy of the Destruction of Dresden by David Irving, which details with mesmeric and elegiac detail the march to doom of the city. He also explains with great precision some of the targeting, radio, and early radar systems used by the RAF and U.S. Army Air Force. The Wikipedia entry on Irving's work doesn't do it justice, making it seem as if the book is nothing but an inaccurate rendering of the death count after the triple blow attack in February 1945. While in later years Irving has (with justification) become a widely reviled and controversial individual, Dresden is a well-researched and informative popular history, not necessarily favoring one side or the other.

The system of writing in general is not exterior to the system of language in general, unless it is granted that the division between exterior and interior passes through the interior of the interior or the exterior of the exterior, to the point where the immanence of language is essentially exposed to the intervention of forces that are apparently alien to its system. For the same reason, writing in general is not “image” or “figuration” of language in general, except if the nature, the logic, and the functioning of the image within the system from which one wishes to exclude it be reconsidered. Writing is not a sign of a sign, except if one says it of all signs, which would be more profoundly true. If every sign refers to a sign, and if “sign of a sign” signifies writing, certain conclusions — which I shall consider at the appropriate moment will become inevitable. -- Derrida

Twilight of the Aldis

Dad

Location unknown

ca. 1946

Back Cover, Oddities 2, 1982

The shriek of the porcine... This collage by Roman has echoes of both Siqueiros and Munch for me.

more Poetry for All, Oddities 2, 1982

More material from Impasto Artaud, Doug Gilford, Duane Hall, Larry Keim, and undisclosed sources from the shadows. In an eruption of Jungian synchronicity, I read Artaud's poem about muzak, and saw an official Muzak van in a parking lot, both today.

Poetry for All, Oddities 2, 1982

Poetry of Foster Omar Anderson, Larry Keim, Paul S. Colvin, Duane Hall, and Doug Gilford, who has since done such projects as the Mad Cover Site: madcoversite.com (as well as having worked on the partly made-in-Portland, overlooked little Alan Parker gem, Come see the Paradise).

The comment, "Rock Musicians limit themselves to jackhammers," was something I felt compelled to add at some point.

Page 3, Oddities 2, 1982

I'd like to refudiate "undoubtably."
Moammar, Moammar, we hardly knew ye. I remember a clip on the short-lived Fridays show, well before even the "Mad Dog of the the Middle East" Reagan bombing era, with somebody singing "The Qadafi Look" and an actor in some kind of white suit and sunglasses
posing, with the line "Drink your coffee with Qadafi." This bit is not on Youtube --at least, I couldn't find it.

A while back saw a bumper sticker on a large glossy pickup, reading, "A village in Kenya is missing its idiot," along with one involving an obscene suggestion regarding Obama and the camel he rode in on. Curious to see who would display such lighthearted thoughts, I looked up and saw a grey-haired white man about 60, a look of distant blankness on his face.

Oddities 2, The Art Page

Works by Roman Scott, Evan Chalmers, Impasto Artaud, and Frank Horter.

The Red, Oddities 2, 1982

Oddities 2, inside front cover

This Man

is selling a jailbroke electronic reader on Hiramslist... and only rarely posts on Daguerreotypebook.

The Cover of Oddities no. 2, 1982

Swabian the Trieste

Back cover of Vagubund: Collage by Marc Myers, with forged signature. I think I'd had the work around for a few years even before I used it, as with most of the other pieces. The collage appears to represent Houdini conjuring the bulk of Curly, surrounded by friends.

Carnuntum

.

Recently re-watched the Outer Limits episode Demon with a Glass Hand -- perhaps the best Harlan Ellison-written, Robert Culp with a speaking, robotic, finger -seeking, ultimately omniscient, Gilgamesh-inspired, Arlene Martel -featuring, eschatological, noir science fiction show of its type. The Demon really has an accurately oneiric feel, camera angles reeling up stairways, shadowy characters on catwalks.


Started to re-read Winter Brothers by Ivan Doig -- a tremendous effort. I like among other things the way in which he evokes the physicality of the diaries left by 19th c. man James G. Swan.

Twenty-seven years

Toonies & Washrooms, Richmond

Pages 5 & 6 of Vagubund. The dream transcriptions were taken from letters by the respective authors (without asking their permission first!).

Sun standing still

Farmer's Tan

I've been here before -- loping, potsherds, a pilgrimage of time,

I have a mosquito's puncture, regarding a waterfall in Oregon, eyelash thinking of fallen companions -- The Indian guy and his wife, the porchlight blaring on a vacancy of oracular lichen. Ghost town, timbers, portals to interstices Hyperborean, the Pleiades rising up the sleepy horizon. Wo kommst du,
lungs seething, out of shape potentia flaming from ferns millions of years back, miners strolled the earth,

What is the sound of the river?

Like a spigot mortar a clay ornamental pot outside my window lobs roman candles, the Paiute still planted there at his homestead, sun and snow on remotest summits, it's easier going up than coming down.

JF

June 17 2011

the chunk the 8- track tape makes when it jumps

A Moment of Sudden Disorientation, by CAD, which is:

Pages Two and Three of Vagabund

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Today sat down, donned 3d glasses, and partook in Werner Herzog's paleogean trip: Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Spectacularly mystic and evocative work that resurrects the hidden Cro Magnons and cave bears. The scenes with the curtained, painted depths of the cave alternate with scientists and entertaining wackoes such as the perfumist who snuffs the earth for possible undiscovered caverns. An incantation in the same sense as the droning zithers and scalloped gables and mountains featured in some of Herzog's other films. After the credits signaled the show is over, I propelled myself into the cavernous heat of the day, the bison in the film seemingly informing my sclera briefly.

Vagabond, pages 1 and 2

This was published by Todd Mecklem's Terata Publications, and featured eclectic sources. The Eccentric Mr. Panji dated from around 1979 or 80, showcasing meerschaum pipes, derby hats, and pince-nez glasses as emblems of nonconformity. The super-defier pig nose creature goes back even further, from around the time of the Gerald R. Ford (or early Carter) administration. It was taken from a unique booklet called The Book of Srang (a misspelling of "strange"), drawn by a childhood friend. The book was created with ballpoint pen on ruled notebook paper bound with masking tape. Included also are a poem by myself and Todd Mecklem, during the period when we collaborated frequently on these German-titled poems and stories.

May and June, 1988

I picked up this photo at an estate sale or flea market, I think, years ago. The image looks to be from around 1910-20 or thereabouts, judging from the car. The building and setting have a institutionally creepy atmosphere, reminding me of a place where the unsunned and stunned haunt the hallways. (The edifice could be some kind of school or Catholic establishment or something as well.) There is no caption on the back -- I imagine the photo could have been taken in Oregon or the Northwest, although it could be anywhere. Perhaps a botanist might have some clues from the flora, native or otherwise. The edges of the paper indicate they were ripped from a scrapbook.

Recent read: The Simulacra, by Philip K. Dick. As with many science fiction books, his extrapolations on technology and politics were sometimes farsighted and sometimes not. You've got public phone booths and the USSR on one side, and electronic passkey badges and android versions of Konrad Adenauer on the other (ok, we don't have the latter yet, as far as we know). Anytime you've got Hermann Goering and radiation-created Neanderthals together in the same tome you've got my attention.

Oscar Bravo Lima

The cover of Vagubund, a one-shot mini I did back in the day; and a related, time-exposed, spectral antique photo of Latourell Falls. The cover is by Roman Scott; printed from an image he cut from a block of wood, while scanning a moss formation on the cliff face at Latourell Falls. The area around the Falls, including the quiet semi-populated town of Latourell, is a monument to both the Missoula Floods and the wistful dreams of humanity.

The mysterious lichen eidolon (a sort of naturally-formed, shamanic turtle or snake) depicted in the woodcut is still laved by the waterfall.
"Wie damals, so heute." One can almost see the moss spectre to the right side of the cascade on this old postcard. The photographers, Cross & Dimmitt, were well-known for their images of the Columbia Gorge, as one can find out by entering their names in a web search. The caption references the Columbia River Highway, so the picture must have been exposed sometime in or after the 1913-22 period when the road was created (according to Wikipedia at least).

On the Business End of the Oder-Neisse Line

The Ruined Cloister, a combined poem/ drawing by a distant relative of mine, Ellinor Falk. I'd wager the drawing and poem refer to an actual place, though I can't be sure. Ellinor was born in Liegnitz in 1868, so the postcard must date from the late 19th century or the early 20th century. The postcard was printed in Chemnitz, which, unlike Liegnitz (now in Poland), ended up in the DDR and then in reunified Germany; and is still known by the same name. Joe Stalin: "I'll take a piece of this over here... And you get a slice of this over there."

And what did the Roman Legions (however Germanicised) see as they marched into the Teutoburger Wald? Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?

Been processing Prince Zaleski and Cummings King Monk, by M.P. Shiel -- he had a tremendously wicked fearless vocabulary. He'd almost certainly get rejected by any known publisher today.

Hippies

Soulish Enigma

Night soil clobbering legs. Bulking maid with water eyes, piano of sea-dropped manse on low and hedge-grown peninsula, where boils the ends of the ocean. Thro' an unapprehended cleft jets a stream of water on greater rhythms, puffing and spraying above. The space near a kidney.

A blue light, with filaments, above the site of scourging, in the rough beams in a stave kirk.

The atmosphere which hovers where was the wood hive, slatted and diminishing in the fern meadow.


JF /20th c.

"Dr. Waffle.... Calling Dr. Waffle...." The doctor has been compromised since the collapse of the Red Republic... Seems Paraguay was the last option.

Oddities 7 Back Cover

Cubist-inspired art by "Placid" -- I think he (or she) was French, but don't recall how the artist came to send the piece to Roman.

I hope at length to post the issues of Oddities that haven't yet appeared -- issues One, Two and Five, I believe.

All the Kingdoms of the World

When voyaging, one of the cheesiest, most obvious things a human can do is to plot the trip to, then ascend, a skyscraper or tower and survey city or country. I always gravitate toward these places nonetheless, and a colorful memory palace can be built of these past images. When in Berlin, the Bundestag/Reichstag glass dome involved too long a wait. But after circling the viewing platform atop the Fernsehturm, I attempted to visualize the ground as it would have seethed if you could turn the clock dial back to April 1945 (the attempt not entirely successful). The Round Tower in Copenhagen had an alchemical North Sea storm lashing its brim, preventing full absorption of the surrounding spiral towers and cobbled alleys. The detail seen from an Empire State Building or Tokyo Tower can challenge recollection with its complexity: From the World Trade Center, the streets of Manhattan surged like blood in silver veins.

And I will not mention the matter of natural eminences.

The Bund in Shanghai -- I didn't know what it was until I got there.

Mother & Daughter

Mother & Daughter, by Kristin Lawson: Inside back cover of Oddities 7, with a drawing by Marc Myers. A more straightforward, conventional piece of writing than most of the material in our zine, Lawson's piece still has a good ending and observations.

Dream: I was threading a forest, stopping at an overlook, dropping to a great expanse of woods and fields. I sat in the filtered, mild sunlight, then noticing a herd of an extinct variety of shaggy-pelted deer, perhaps a vision from the Ice Age or before. They walked past, oblivious to me -- and what was a mall of rural marchers doing up here?

Arschloch

The Wages of Sin is Death

Pepper Mountain

Outside on a break -- where Lewis and Clark and their companions careened, salmon musk, incense of bark, rain illuminating the Columbia Slough. Right down there they traveled, "we call this rockey island the Sepulchar," Clark-twinned doppelganger akimbo. Stanley Park -- in memory, I heard the golf carts funereal fractal to mussel stickers, pulsing to droning thunderbird pinions, one instant

by Aldebaran. I apprehended then you can see the mountains from the cedars of British Columbia, Tsath of the West End, hovering ridges of polished snow, footprints of Sherrard Point and Mt. Wyeast. "Correlating the

mental contents," a paraphrase from memory --

Brain track of a .22 slice bullet, cadaver scalp, pinned in the Police Museum. And father, his property gone to the Voyniches and Yetis, a saddle tormenting over the horizon,

forest harvested from the clay.

JF

8:27 PM 1/22/2011

John Callahan

From Oddities 7: Panels by Roman Scott, the late John Callahan, an image from Bergman's Sawdust and Tinsel, and other things. I saw Callahan sitting or wheeling his way on the bricks and slabs of downtown Portland a number of times, and I (along with two friends) once had an opportunity to visit him in his apartment.

No Such Agency

still more Oddities 7: A comic strip from the pen of Rasmus Dromstrom, who may have been seeing his own future.

I have been absorbing Howard Phillips Lovecraft's The Mound (one of his collaborations, with some minimal inspiration provided by Zealia Bishop), for the first time in many moons. One noteworthy item is the way in which HPL powerfully describes a state he had never been to -- Oklahoma, the feeling of dread mounting as the narrator crosses the plains. In fact, HPL excelled at vicarious travel descriptions, as seen in At the Mountains of Madness(Antarctica), The Shadow out of Time(Australia), Under the Pyramids(Egypt), and many of his other writings. The pitfalls of second- hand descriptions became known to me when I wrote something referring to Oslo years ago, before I had been there. I visualized a sort of sempiternally icebound city -- having been there twice in June now, I realize that is not the case.

Saskatchewan: August, 1974

The Secret of Pombo: page 14, Oddities 7. I appreciate this page in particular; the unusual Nordic preoccupations and dreamscapes, and the collaborative works.

I have been absorbing a blank verse translation of The Aeneid, by VERGIL; Stunned by the compact adventures, the descents into the earth and prophecies. Also been re-reading an out-of-print classic: Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, by the mystic and philosopher P.D. Ouspensky. Tremendously restrained and elegant take on living one's life over again, with foreknowledge. Putting the glasses on the bust of Caesar.

Limit Comments to 140 characters or less

Delirium

H.P. Lovecraft in Shinjiku

Fresh haircut, valise, split shoes, knees turning by truck of sweet potato vendor. Glass cages climb neon spray of strutted streets, night crashes against red lanterns in elbow-turn alleys.
Drunken students kick each other, waters curl in Avalonian bays, a sound truck blasts epistolarian apartment, Lovecraft with beer and Mild Sevens, sunset opening up steel riches and realms from a pedestrian bridge as dusk breathes over Ueno Park.

JF

Chinhae City, South Korea
1995

Aluminium Production up 18%

Back in the previous century I had a class entitled "Glasnost and Perestroika in East European and Soviet Cinema;" during the Gorbachev era, of course. The class was held at UO in the lofty days of summer, and was piloted by the late Professor Albert Leong, a calm gentleman who favored a sort of Mao-looking tan jacket. Moscow does not believe in Tears was one of the movies...

October 2 I attended one full day of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland. Unfortunately, this is going to be Andrew Migliore's final festival production, apparently. The best presentation was Scott Connors' panel on Clark Ashton Smith.

Oddities 7 -- Jonathan Friedman Paintings

Legnica's Welkin

Photo of my paternal great-grandparents Ludwig and Margaret Falk, and two of their children, my grandfather and great aunt. Ludwig had a fascinating life, beginning in Silesia in the nineteenth century, including a classic Germanic boarding school education, and a period spent studying law in Breslau. Later he immigrated to the United States, landing in New York, and enlisting in the U.S. Army (where he served eight years, attaining the rank of Sergeant). While in the army, he was sent to the Arizona Territory during the Apache Campaign of 1884-85. Apparently he wasn't blazing it out with Geronimo and his band of warriors, but the Wild West must have been an incredible period to have been in. He ultimately found himself in the Pacific Northwest, living in Vancouver, Washington (the result of a post to Fort Vancouver), Portland, Milwaukie, and Roseburg, Oregon. His wife was from Scotland, although the women of those days sometimes get shortchanged, not always leaving as much of a paper trail. I have a facsimile of a letter he wrote, regarding some matter concerning his military pension, in which he mentions a time of disrupted plans due to troops requisitioning trains during the Franco-Prussian war. At the same time, as with many of the dead, there is a deep mystery and silence remaining.

And Breslau/Wroclaw, and other parts of Silesia, Pomerania, and Central Europe -- what a place... Breslau is a palimpsest redolent of any number of contrary political systems which have ruled the place -- medieval monarchy, Piasts, Mongols (briefly)!, the Austrian Empire, parliamentary governments, the Third Reich, Communism, the current Polish Republic/EU member...

I had an incorrect understanding of the Hitler Bunker area in Berlin in my entry last year -- Vossstrase is indeed one of the boundaries of the site, with some vague concrete slabs showing in vacant lots. Most of the area is covered by apartment houses, with a convenient Starbucks or two close by.

Kazuo Ohno

Recently Gary Coleman, Peter Orlovsky, Kazuo Ohno (a famous Butoh performer), and Dennis Hopper died closely together. I still fall on the romantic side of the scale, seeing a teleology here -- perhaps Dennis Hopper is directing the others in a film somewhere.

Currently reading Slaughterhouse-Five. So it goes.
Cover of Oddities 7 with an Argus-like being -- and inside cover . I had only a coverless version to work with on the previous scans -- had completely forgotten about the existence of the cover.