John F. Kennedy Birthplace, Brookline, Mass.

Text:

Dear Kay, Frank & all

We are leaving to go to New York tomorrow -- It's hot & humid here like I never felt before. No coolness at nite. We're done mostly visiting and a bit of sight seeing.

Love, Phil & Mary

The Roosevelt stamp dates from the late 1960s, so the postcard must have been written and sent in that timeframe. I saw a clip of David McCullough on tv saying he believed the "Kennedy curse" is not real. I disagree -- with the recent, apparent suicide of Mary Kennedy, RFK Jr.'s estranged wife, one more instance, the statistics are meaningful beyond coincidence.

The Past is never dead

Seemingly, in the late nineteenth century, racialism was seen as somehow enhanced when rendered in 3d. Whilst patronising, this 1897 stereoscopic card by B.L. Lingley (or B.L. Singley?), printed by the Keystone View Company of Meadville, Pennsylvania and St. Louis, Missouri, is actually fairly tame when compared with a lot of material from previous eras.

The Bourn

The Bourn

At the panes and walls of the intolerant houses begins there the cranberry marsh.
The set oak and fir wood distant beyond; Deer stirring and crashing the topped salmonberries, to the West.
Limbs winding in gulph of riven rock. Red patches in the arid, thro' the jungle.
Vines, unfallen trees, clear hollows, the night-canopy of the woods, dogwood, elm, pine, corn leaves, vast slopes, mounting floor of moss-topped rock. Low deliverance of the grey and hollow sea-water, ending at once beyond the cliffs.
A band before the dell, paradisiacal expirations of mist, beyond green and wet walls, with organ tones.
New mountains, apparent and sharp in the wintry and bright rim.

JF early 90s

Plenty Coups, Crow Chief 1880

Hunkpapa Sioux Chief Rain-in-the-Face

The Standard Speakers

A cutting (or tearing) I turned up not long ago, detailing a talk by Graham Chapman, British comedian and member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, on 25 July 1987. Among the "several hundred" people attending his presentation that evening, at what was then a Masonic Temple (now part of the Portland Art Museum), were myself, a friend, and someone else I knew at the time. I wish that at the time I had noted down my impressions, reporter-style, as I have done with some events in later years. I have only the vaguest memory of the warm-up act, "Waggie and Friends," and little recollection of the character and content of Chapman's utterances as described in the article. I chiefly remember the film clips from the Dangerous Sports Club. One thing I remember the Pythonite mentioning, not brought up in the article, was an remark (whether  serious or not) regarding what he saw as the low level of Terry Gilliam's intellect.

As so happened, it would also be our last possible chance, for all purposes, to see Chapman, as he had only a little over two years to live. On 4 October 1989, he "ceased to be." We can be soothed by the knowledge that, in 1987, entertainers from Canada were "still" pouring across the U.S. border, eh? Julian Cope, and Dharma Bums were playing at the Pine Street Theatre on August 2. On the obverse, we can learn a little about the song "La Bamba," in conjunction with the movie, and we can discover that one could see Full Metal Jacket on its initial release for $2.50 (I saw it for the first time around then). The tenor of lecturers and poetry readers seemed to be quite high in the period of 1985-90 or so. In that time, I saw Hunter S. Thompson, who shewed up an hour or so late, bearing a mysterious amber glass of potion.   I got little out of what he said:  His speaking style that evening could be described as an incoherent mumble. I spoke with and saw Allen Ginsberg on several occasions. I saw Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, twice each. One I regret missing was William S. Burroughs, who read in Portland in 1988. Robert Anton Wilson was memorable in Portland, offering one liners such as: Anyone of us could have been a Nazi death camp guard. The Pope is the greatest mind of the 14th century, and so on. With the first statement, Wilson suggested something important, which is that: Time precedes and undergirds culture and space. The explanation for the fascinating qualities of this crop of speakers is that a lot of the colourful characters from the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s were still active and touring in the 1980s. All whom I have mentioned are dead now.

The Edification of Halfdan Egedius

Back cover of Mowjib, 1987

Wine of the Kingdom of Rey

"But, what does 'blob blob blippity blob' mean?" Inside back cover of Mowjib, 1987, published by It's the Mind, which later became Terata Publications.

That was your Outside Voice

Mowjib, 1987, page 5

What would Heðin Brú have to offer?

Mowjib, page 4, 1987

Not the First Rodeo

Mowjib, 1987, page 3

Mime in the Box of Eryx

Mowjib, Page 2, 1987

Maebashi Hanseatic

Mowjib, 1987, page 1

Mowjib, 1987

The grey flame of Rasputin

Collaborative poem/ drawing by myself and Roman Scott, 8 February 1988.

The poem reads (italics are my portions):

The grey flame of Rasputin
& mountain tops flooded with the fingerpointing of elderly ladies
& rising segments of cheeks,
in sand for the winter
sand out of which bubbled orderly egg-carton shapes

A dell in Utah
under a scandinavic sun
I bend down, and find that the ground is hollow beneath, caked rocks held by tree-roots
a dead hulk of a black whale tree buried in sand
The crab, a withered hand, becomes a club
Bavarian wrinkles
kindly face
Red hair & blue eyes they have

War Memorial -- Pantheon of War, 1918

From what I could gather on a web googles search, this postcard is one of a series of cards by French painters P. Carrier-Belleuse and A.F. Gorguet memorializing the Great War. The cryptic letters or initials M and L are the only mark left by a former owner of the card.

M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud and Fridtjof Nansen

Lower two images added 5-1-20.

A day or two ago finished reading, and taking something away from, the revised 1930 version of West Indian/Irish author M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud. (Besides being an author, Shiel also spent time in the old Grey Bar Hotel, for reasons illuminated in the Wikipedia article on him.)
I tried to read the novel once before. I cracked the "last man" epic open and read a bit of it when on a train trip from New York City to Portland in April 1997, fanning my eyes back and forth between the pages and, perhaps, North Dakota or Montana horizons. However, I abandoned the book after the journey, not completing it until now.

The novel, as with Shiel's prose in general, is grotesquely eccentric and lush, overflowing with arcane vocabulary and Ciceronian abundance. In addition, the writer was prescient (or at least tapped a kind of synchronicity) in several ways. He creates an apocalyptic scenario, with humankind fleeing a doom unleashed from the Arctic. In the wake of the Purple Cloud, the protagonist, Adam Jeffson (Adam from Genesis, and Thomas Jefferson?) finds all of humanity, save for him, dead, and the blended Middle Eastern, Asian, African, European corpses reflect the global migration patterns of 2012 more than that of 1901 or 1930. Then, take the phrase: "and how I went to Nagasaki, and burned it" -- written not in 1945, but in 1901.

With influences from Poe and Jules Verne, Shiel is at the same time unique.
Richard A. Lupoff described him as resembling a satanic scripturalist on a methamphetamine jag (Updated and corrected, May 1-2, 2020 -- see comment from Derrick H. I shall add an image of the page from the 1980 Arkham House catalog, where I originally read the remark.) H.P. Lovecraft praised Shiel and The Purple Cloud in Supernatural Horror in Literature. While, according to Wikipedia, the original 1901 Purple Cloud is regarded more highly than the 1930 revision, both have merit. I prefer the use of assonance and cosmic imagery in the following sentence from the 1930 version: "On we pressed, wending our petty way over the immense, upon whose loneliness, from before the old Silurian till now, Bootes had pored and brooded." 1901: "On we pressed, crawling our little way across the Vast, upon whose hoar silence, from Eternity until then, Bootes only, and that Great Bear, had watched."

Consider the following passage from the initial section of The Purple Cloud, describing the return from a fictional expedition to the North Pole: "A hundred yards inland from the shore-rim, in a circular place where there was some moss and soil, I built myself a semi-subterranean Eskimo den for the long Polar night.
I knew that I was at Franz Josef Land, somewhere or other in the neighbourhood of C. Fligely (about 82° N.), and though it was so late, and getting cold, I still had the hope of reaching Spitzbergen that year, by alternately sailing all open water, and dragging the kayak over the slack drift-ice."

The description of a winter buried alive on Franz Josef land would seem to be inspired by, or borrowed from, Norwegian explorers Fridtjof Nansen's and Hjalmar Johansen's similar winter in 1895-96, on their own return from an attempt to be first at the Pole. The expeditionaries spent eight months mostly confined to a dugout. In addition, when Nansen finally emerged, by extraordinary coincidence, he ran into British explorer Frederick Jackson in the Arctic desolation, an event reeanacted on a television show.

I was first made aware of Nansen's top-of-the-world inhumation from a show called Voyages of Discovery, broadcast on PBS a few years ago. The special, presented by Paul Rose, was part of an excellent series which also included episodes on the expeditions of Captain Cook, Magellan, and Charles Marie de La Condamine. The latter's trip to Equador, and its ultimately successful attempt to measure the circumference of the earth, seems to be from the world of Werner Herzog. Then, Nansen himself is well worthy of attention. I toured the Fram (the ship Nansen, and later Amundsen and others used for expeditions) and its museum, in Oslo. Unfortunately, I got there not long before closing, so had to rush through the exhibits and ship. The story of the long voyage which started on the Fram is also detailed in Nansen's book, Farthest North, 1897. Shiel seemed to take some of the descriptions of Arctic celestial phenomena from Nansen's book, along with the Franz Josef Land episode.

At any rate, The Purple Cloud is a fantastic, rich, and complex work of imagination.

Check the Ticker

Crazy as Usual

A postcard sent by my father to his father and family, with a hand-coloured photo of the Bonneville Salt Flats. To lend even more authenticity, a packet of SALT from Great Salt Lake, Utah, was sewn to the card by Apex Novelty, S.L. City. I'm surprised the packet stayed attached as it went through the mail system. Probably there was less mechanised processing in those days.

Text:
TERRIFIC SPEEDS SET -- ONE 230 MPH ONE WAY -- MOTORCYCLISTS RAN IN BATHING SUITS
CRAZY AS USUAL

Sent to G.R. Falk & Family
4046 Llewellyn
Milwaukie Oregon

The postmark is only partially imprinted, as they often are -- the year is plainly 1951, the month and date may be September 7, and the hour was 6pm. I can't quite decipher the town in the postmark -- could be Wendover, Utah.

"And now for something completely different," -- Bohica time, daylight saving time is nigh. Got to allow extra light for Abner to grow and harvest the barley.

Making Tortillas, Queretaro, Mexico

Stereoscopic card shewing the process of tortilla making, in Queretaro, Mexico. Just taking a wild guess, I'd place the twin photos around 1900 or so. I was unfamiliar with the name so typed "Queretaro" into the Wikipedias. Here one can see (among other things) that the city and surrounding state are in Central Mexico, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (which ended the Mexican-American War) was signed in the city. I understand that treaty might have been a bit controversial at times.

Dream of Jimi Hendrix: I was watching a movie of him made around the time of Woodstock, with his figure projected looming in a dim old theatre. He had a pained, tragic cast to his face, and was forming mudra- like shapes over a guitar, drawing out wolf howl notes, not touching the strings, theremin style. Time seemed to flow backwards -- I then was in a bus approaching the theatre, before the film started.

Elmer's Tune

A folder I began doctoring in my freshman year of high school, I believe, and continued working on through high school and a year or two beyond. I no longer know what type the original folder was, but the delirious accretions reflected my interests. Snippets from Oddities, an animal bone, a plastic doll arm, photocopied images of Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton and other surrealist/ Dadaists, Rimbaud's face, one of Lovecraft's homes, a piece of a cigar package, a postcard depicting "Sylvester," a mummified man found in the Arizona desert, who was displayed in Ye Olde Curiosity Shop on the waterfront in Seattle, comic art by Richard Corben, R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, tiny reproductions of E.C. Comics covers, Lon Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera, a painting by William Holman Hunt called The Scapegoat, photos from old medical books, Tom Peterson's face (an icon from the 1960s through the 90s or so, Portland area retailer), and other images/objects, coated with hard layers of dried Elmer's glue. Incidentally, the familiar white stuff seems to be a pretty good preservative. I inexplicably painted the front cover black at some point, and then scraped as much of the pigment off as I could.
This folder, which transported notes and school work and documents, attracted notice and commentary from time to time. Other times, I used the standard "Pee Chee," or other folders. The Pee Chee folders, with their vibrant figures caught in sports activities, are still around, not changed much from the 60s or 70s. No doubt the tennis player and other athletes have racked up millions of alterations -- with drawn- on moustaches, afro hairstyles and the like -- over the years.

Colourless Green Ideas Sleep in R'lyeh

Empty Wind/ Carthage

Empty Wind

Heavy roof, beams, green and blue-cored, beneath the eaves.
In low basins switch turtles, eels, and rock fish; bleached mouths of pig heads.
Moon and heights; river's channel, parting down a bed of settled stones, at bourn of pine and hills, summits crusted with grave markers.
Ends' of birds' wings, wind; covering over peak, misted and lit.
A water clock proceeded and toned over yard, a line of hewn rocks in white grass, scented and wood-slabbed hall.
Woven straw, twisting on the ground, boxed and trunk and branch in sober morning.
Swollen-topped stones, rain flicking torii's red columns, rock-slabbed entrance at base

Carthage

Revenant and clammy huelessness, tunic, composed face, topknot; submerged in desert dust at the four-cornered mount where took place the ceremony and procession -- balls, incense, palanquins, joss, somber and in movement. The withdrawal of the clay of feet. Above, in dim light.
Sunk and hollow, bled away, reclining, cask and body of gold-threaded jade plaques, nose insertions, and eye plates: the scavenger of the royal elements of the white stone circle or rise.
Gas and water houses and temples, slandered, gigantic in stucco facades and domes, on the unending plain of slopes, behind a brazen streak from the falling sun.

JF



"Empty Wind" and "Carthage," two prose poems by myself, published in
Pacific Coast Journal,
Volume II, Number ii, published by John S. French, French Bread Publications, of Campbell, California, Winter, 1994. 1994 would have been one of the last years in which a publication like this would have existed (more than likely) only in the world of print, with the editor accessible only by writing a p.o. box -- with no reference to websites or e-mail addresses. I couldn't find too much about the zine on the webs. As far as I can tell, Pacific Coast Journal seemed to finally enter the realm of spirits after 2009.

Dream: I was hiking amidst primordial trees, hollows, and mounded hills from the natural world of Hawthorne or Charles Brockden Brown. Mystery interlopers walked by somewhere below.

Alan Turing: The Enigma, and other biographies

I'm in the midst of reading the challenging biography Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges, published in 1983. The tome unwinds the tale of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who was one of the pivotal figures in decrypting the Enigma machine system used by the German military for communicating in the 1939-45 War. The book has a good balance, explaining both the private world of Turing and the dramatic historical events in which he was caught. He had an epiphany involving what he called his "universal machine," which ultimately was partly responsible for leading to the development of computers. Turing took the insights he gained from his work with cryptanalysis and applied them as he programmed and helped design some of the very earliest successful computing machines (although he encountered many setbacks and frustrations in these efforts).

The Enigma is one of the longest and most detailed biographies I've read. Others I've read in somewhat recent years, in whole or in part, include Ian Kershaw's biography of Adolf Hitler (I've been working on that on and off for some time, and am currently bogged down in it like a halftrack in Archangelsk in winter), and S.T. Joshi's H.P. Lovecraft: A Life.
I still have a sentimental fondness for L. Sprague De Camp's Lovecraft: A Biography, which I purchased (and read more than once) in abridged, paperback form not long after the hardcover was released. Despite Joshi's (and others) savaging of De Camp's biograpy, L. Sprague does have a way of slashing through to cogent conclusions, as off the mark as he could sometimes be. (As with his misleading theories about Lovecraft's "poikilothermism" and "schizoid" tendences.)

Although I wouldn't press the point very far, the horror visionary and the dictator had at least one or two chance similarites -- their lifespans overlapped pretty closely, and they both had "lost," dropout periods at roughly the same time, in the early 1900s. Despite Joshi's and Kershaw's great scholarship and discoveries, they both are so detail-driven that they sometimes miss the night sky for the stars. Kershaw, even with his massive comprehensiveness, has a few peculiar gaps when discussing the Austrian street person and German chancellor. Curiously, there is almost no discussion in Hubris (at least that I've yet encountered) of the nature and subject matter of Hitler's watercolours and drawings, for example, not even the usual comment (whether accurate or not) about how bad they were.

What is it to be a "failed artist?" Is the art itself a failure, or did one fail at an artistic career? Or both?

U.S. Battleship Indiana

Stereoscopic card of the U.S. Battleship Indiana from 1899. A search on the Googles indicates the ship was involved in the Battle of Santiago in the Spanish- American War.

Wilhelm Furtwängler

Unsent postcard depicting German conductor and composer, Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954), published in Stuttgart (apparently attached to a calendar?). I'd guess him to be in his 40s or early 50s at the time, which would put the photo (and card) in Weimar or Nazi- era Germany.
I wonder how he got the scars -- duelling? The Wikipedia article details his life, conducting, his somewhat shadowy relationship with the Third Reich, and includes the following amusing information:
"Furtwängler was famous for his exceptional inarticulacy. His pupil Sergiu Celibidache remembered that the best he could say was, 'Well, just listen' (to the music). Carl Brinitzer from the German BBC service tried to interview him, and thought he had an imbecile before him. A live recording of a rehearsal with a Stockholm orchestra documents hardly anything intelligible, only hums and mumbling."

Dreams in the Witch-House

A few hours ago watched Stuart Gordon's 2005 tv adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's The Dreams in the Witch House ( I guess it sounds more contemporary if one drops the article). Kind of a mixed bag, and I feel the same ambivalence I feel about all of Gordon's HPL films (having also seen Re-Animator and From Beyond). The film has little to no atmosphere and leaves out most of the quantum mechanics and cosmic elements that infuse the source tale. Walter Gilman opening up a laptop? C'mon. The hilarious audience participation-encouraged, amateur version of Dreams I saw at the HPL film festival will probably stay with me longer. And the whirling sound accompanying the film is originating from Swan Point in Providence.

The Elevated Railroad on the Bowery, New York

Stereoscopic card, from around the 1890s or early 20th Century.

Winter

Winter

Wild blackness rolls in the skies. Its whorls are city coals, sheets of skeletal water shimmer in the harbor.
The feathers of winter, a harbinger tolling over the land, snapping fires feed morning twilight. Air seeps over my arms.
On the ridge of trees, birds settle, rasping of distant waters. Light rays and fills land heights, a drained reservoir, thorny leaves. The wind carries grey ashes, squash loads the lands, rippled grey roofs meet the sea, winter's coils sink against the star-flashing nightfall.

JF
Chinhae City, South Korea
1995

Dolmen in the Wood of the Small Port, Nantes, France

Unsent postcard from Nantes in Western France, depicting a neolithic dolmen or portal grave.

T.J. Masurian

Photo of my great-grandfather Ludwig Falk (cf. entry of September 10, 2010, and others) in old age, together with, from left to right, his wife, Margaret, grandson, his daughter (my great aunt), my maternal grandmother, and part of someone's side (my grandfather?). Ludwig looked pretty dapper there with the beard and suit. Probably taken in Milwaukie, Oregon, ca. 1924.
What model car is it? Whose car? Who was standing behind the camera at that moment?

petrol cedar Emily Carr sky

Hand-coloured stereoscopic card depicting a scene from the Russo-Japanese war period. I don't suppose "foraging" is anything like "looting."

It is what it is