Window Rock, Arizona

 

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_Rock,_Arizona

 

http://www.lapahie.com/window_rock_capitol.cfm

 

Five Years

Here marks the fifth anniversary of the Adalbert blog.  Five years ago today I wrote my first three sentence post, and the first image I used in the blog was a deliberately mislabeled photograph of Aleister Crowley.  To suggest a circle, here are two images of the Master Therion from the time of the attempted summiting of K2 in 1902:

 

 

 

Frater Perdurabo is second from the right in the lower picture.

 

 

And here's a daruma doll someone gave me in Gunma-ken, Japan, years back. 

 

 



 

 

Open door & tree

 

 

 

Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery (1962)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A couple nights ago finished re-reading Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery:  Eleven spooky stories for young people (and apparently for some big kids as well), from 1962.   I previously read it when I was about 10 or 11, gleaning the tome from the school library or the public library, can't recall which.  As with Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum (see entry of 6 July 2012), one of the aspects that fascinated me were the illustrations, in this case by Fred Banbery:  http://jaargang.blogspot.com/2009/10/creepy-beautiful-illustrations.html, http://illusstation.blogspot.com/2008/04/fred-banbery.html.  The whimsically disturbing Hitchcock faces growing out of furniture attracted some study.

 

While not quite up to the pitch of shock and fright of the Monster Museum, the Ghostly Gallery infected my imagination.  One of the two stories that affected me most during my initial reading were F. Marion Crawford's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Marion_Crawford) The Upper Berth, penetrated with gelid and extirpative dread.  The tale begins with a classic English ghost story framework (although Crawford was American, more or less), with a gentleman narrating the events over cigars...  Bit of trouble in the old Hindu Kush.  "He had about him, I thought, an air of rather dubious fashion:  the sort of man you might see in Wall Street, without being able precisely to say what he was doing there."  The second story in the anthology which impressed me the most in youth was H.G. Wells' The Truth about Pyecraft, which is amusing but now strikes me as more of a bagatelle than some of the other pieces.

Robert Arthur:  http://www.elizabetharthur.org/bio/rarthur.html, who apparently also ghost-edited the Hitchcock collection, along with the Monster Museum and some of the other Hitchcock-branded anthologies, is represented by no less than three good stories (ahem!):  The Haunted Trailer, The Wonderful Day, and Obstinate Uncle Otis.  Arthur's writing appears light-hearted at first, but contains some dark turns as one reads on.  Algernon Blackwood's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algernon_Blackwood) The Valley of the Beasts possesses one of the maestro's great atmospheric evocations of nature (the Canadian forest in this instance), but has a heavy-handedness about it at the end which places it at a lower grade than, say, The Wendigo.  Other (mostly) excellent works appear by Robert Louis Stevenson, A.M. Burrage, Lord Dunsany, and Walter Brooks.

Calibration II

 

 

 

 

near Alaska/ Yukon border

 

 

 

 

Border City, Alaska

Card sent in 1958

Portrait of Joseph Roulin

 

 

 

Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

 

Postcard mailed 12 September 1986 

Quebec

 

 

 

 

 

 

A third card from the Exel LeDuc file (cf. posts of 3 January 2013 and 18 April 2013), this one sent to her from Quebec City:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_City.   Perhaps the upside down stamp signified something.

 

"This place eclipses everything I've seen before -- a dream of archaic city walls, castellated cliffs, silver spires, pointed roofs, narrow, zigzag & precipitous streets, & the leisurely civilisation of an elder world."  H.P. Lovecraft, postcard written in Quebec, to Donald Wandrei, 1930

 

The following is a transcript of the postcard to Exel, although I had difficulty deciphering a couple words.

 

Our festivities were a grand success.  The Corpus Christi procession through the city especially -- 50,000 people -- is a triumph one sees but once in a lifetime.  Wish you had been here for those 3 days to get an idea of the faith and patriotism of our good french canadians You'd have felt proud of your origin.  Well (?)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1952

 

 

 

 

Cover art by Chesley Bonestell 

Ice-covered -- but good wine from these hills!

 

 

 

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beilstein,_Rhineland-Palatinate

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BeilsteinMoselPanorama1.jpg

Watching Jeremy Brett

The last year or so I have been watching many of the episodes of the various Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series -- Adventures, Return, Memoirs, Case-Book, made by Granada Television in the 1980s and 1990s.  I had originally seen a few episodes in the 1980s but missed a large number of others.  With an episode such as the adaptation of The Final Problem, for example, we see the advantages of the Brett-starring series.  With Brett, the doubled man -- both bipolar and bisexual (per Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Brett ) -- Holmes was rendered with depth and faithfulness.  His face mutable as an Alpine sky, a tic-like smile or angered frown appearing and fading in an instant, his abruptness and eccentricities, Brett was the ultimate portrayer of the detective.  With such adaptations as The Final Problem shot on location, with generous footage of the Alps, the soundtrack seasoned with cowbells and other local touches, the real life approach to production shows its superiority to today's fast editing and crappy CGI effects.  While some of the 1990s productions sank in quality, with shows such as The Last Vampyre showing an ailing, barely moving Brett, the series at its best had a peerless blend of acting and restrained period detail.

S.M.S. Falke

 

 

 

 

 

 

More than one ship floated under this name -- its predecessor played a part in the Franco-Prussian War.

 

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_Falke_(Schiff,_1891)&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dsms%2Bfalke%2B1865%26sa%3DN%26biw%3D1440%26bih%3D745&sa=X&ei=n_HNUY2xHs3MigL2jICABA&ved=0CFIQ7gEwBQ

 

Calibration

 

 

Henderson Studio, St. Paul

 

 

Fruit Trees in Bloom, Grants Pass, Oregon (1909)

 

 

 

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grants_Pass,_Oregon

 

Bäume

 

 

 

 

 

Painting: Bäume, 1986

 

 

Acclivity

 

 

Bracken and colourless grasses nod in the precipice, always dark and upward, not struck by the sun.  The past, and arched bridge over the gulph of river shade, black fishes, and granite.   Only the half-apprehension of lightless bulk or upper land.

 

Musky imminence, the wood outside window and door, moth and coal oil.  Unaccountable stains of the whitened moon:  straw ridges and imperial alder.

 

Brow of boulder or hemlock, apparent on top of walls of  boughs susurrus -- standing in places just like that. Steeping ruddiness and a sadness, clumped and lit grasses, from the narrow ledge.  Wasted and snapped trees.  Palaeogean skirting, busy air of huckleberry and toadstool, dipping way of the road over.

 

An one blanched and shivered tree-crown, appearing through a gap in the rocks, height of hawk and golden bee.

 

A great staircase made in the summit, the summer-house no longer about, movement of clouds building and lifting down the mountain in the removed, brink, moss-shoared pond:  ovine and clotted rocks.

 

JF ca. 1990



Indian Chief

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Mescal Bean, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico

 

 

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsbad_Caverns_National_Park

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calia

Halfdan Egedius, meet Eanger Irving Couse

 

 

On 8 June 2013 I visited Maryhill Museum in Washington State and the nearby Stonehenge replica:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryhill_Stonehenge.

Jens Bjerre's The Last Cannibals

 

 

 

 

 

 

"I never met a Dane who wasn't bone-dull."  Thus wrote William S. Burroughs in The Yage Letters.  In spite of Burroughs' statement,  I've got at least one exciting Dane to present (there may be one or two in Christiania as well):  Jens Bjerre.

 



In these days I reread a translation by Estrid Bannister of The Last Cannibals (originally published in 1956;  this paperback edition from 1958) by Jens Bjerre:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Bjerre_(adventurer).  I don't recall where I procured this copy, probably at a flea market.  I once saw Mr. Bjerre himself, in the early 1980s in Portland, Oregon,  give a lecture on his travels in Tibet.  I remember little about the talk other than he showed some film or photographs of Tibet, the Potala, and so on, as part of the evening.  I also recall the fact that he used a gentle humor at times in his comments.

For the price of the ticket, one gets descriptions, in The Last Cannibals, of journeys not only in New Guinea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Guinea, but also an extended stay with Australia Aborigines: http://www.apex.net.au/~mhumphry/aborigin.html.  The sequence in Australia, with an immersion in aboriginal life and an intensely evocative description of Ayers Rock, for instance, is as good as the New Guinea sections.  In spite of the book's title and the lurid promise of the front and back covers, Bjerre only makes a few incidental references to some New Guinean tribesmen still practicing cannibalism in the 1950s.  You don't get baked, barbequed, or boiled long pig, one of the original free range, cage free, local foods, or any eyewitness reports of anthropophagy, in the travel book.  You do get a glimpse of smoked corpses of deceased relatives in huts, of malarial lowlands and misty jagged mountains, of origin myths and the aftereffects of World War II in the island, among other things.  The book trails off at the end with a fever dream out of  De Quincey.

Lone Sentinel of the Desert at Sunset

 

 

 

 

 

Fairy Grotto, Mammoth Cave, "In Old Kentucky"

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammoth_Cave_National_Park

Collage ca. 1978

 

 

 

 

Collage by Roman Scott.  From the Alec-Guiness-in-Star Wars pate and one or two other clews, I  place this artwork around 1977 or 1978.

Wind-swept Patagonia (1987)

 

 

 

Eruption of Mt. St. Helens, May 18, 1980

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._St._Helens

 

 

 

I recall the years after, when the blast's aftermath powdered the Oregon grape, the timing for me out of a Hermann Hesse or Robert Musil tale.

 

Eagle Cap and Glacier Lake, Oregon

 

 

 

 

Buttes near Gregory, South Dakota

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory,_South_Dakota

 

Kasuga Grand Shrine, Nara, Japan

 

 

 

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasuga-taisha

 

 

A spell has passed since I walked about this "shrien," which is "decored" with many lanterns.

 

 

H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival 2013

 

Saturday 4 May 2013 transpired in part at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon.  Previously held in October with its lengthening crypic nights, the 83 degree heat outside wasn't the most suitable weather for the event.  I procured the depicted Ramsey Campbell edition of Whispers from 1982 (cover art by John Stewart).  S.T. Joshi and some other faces from previous fests attended were absent, but still found the wares and cinematic and other offerings congenial.  Saw the restored version of Clive Barker's Nightbreed: The Cabal Cut, with a Q & A session and some remarks afterward by the director, Russell Cherrington.   Well-constructed netherworld sequences, and a coldly detached performance by David Cronenberg in big round glasses,  but some of the rough cut scenes a little hard to appreciate, like watching a movie shot through a security camera or a night vision scope.    Really appreciated the work and dramatic flourishes of the live production by Dark Adventure Radio Theatre of At the Mountains of Madness, done like an old time radio show, with sound effects and some archival footage.

 

 

 

 

Native Boats at the Bridge of Yokohama

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm not certain if the back of the card is referring to the style of boat involved when "China" is brought up.  I believe Yokohama is in Japan at last check.