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."

Railroad Nocturne

A stander, cremains, clairvoyant wanes

Jung's crisper a sigil infarction remains

Outside Venus' transit sextant zenith sliced in space
of remote kneecaps a lone motorcyclist shivers the lanes.

Scotch broom huffs, rains, shade through lace
Waste piles humble, awake vision to arctic range,
Eclipse koto partial longest shortest days of the night year, rings of spruce chant humble,
Deranged Denali and Hood over suburban neon and melange.

JF  8 June 2012

Image: The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse), by Albert Pinkham Ryder

Saint Sebastian by Alfred Courmes

Card sent from my father to me when he was in Paris, with a painting by the surrealist painter Alfred Courmes; I can't quite decipher the Parisian postmark but the second one it received stateside is dated 5 January 1987, Richmond, California.

Text: Dear J, Spent most o'day in the Georges Pompidou Museum which is in a rather startling bldg w large curved ventilators, enclosed plastic walkways, escalators & various other machinery all on the outside of the bldg. Many of the large steel girders are visible. There are no exterior walls but nonetheless it is a good modern art museum wi Dali and other greats. To fully appreciate the picture one must have seen the dozens of other St Sebastian pictures all over Europe, most wi a vapid expression. I laughed heartily on seeing this one. Its getting cold here and looks like snow-ice on water standing (?) Tried to get in the Henri IV hostel which is on an isle but was full so am in the famous hostel which serves a piece of bread and bowl of coffee for brkfst. Its not too bad though -- heard about it from some German kids elsewhere. Have a good room-mate John who is to start his career as a doctor in England in a couple weeks -- also some other nice types and a rather dubious Moroccan Arab. Came on nite train nonstop from Barcelona to Paris and was rather groggy on arriving. Its nice here tho. Good food & charming. Dad

Lagos de Moreno Cathedral

Thanks to Rob from Amersfoort for identifying the cathedral on this stereoscopic card as the one in Lagos de Moreno, Mexico!  I'm not clear if the first letter in "Lagos" in the caption is a misprinted "S" or an antique "L."

Music News from Prague

The front page of Music News from Prague, 8/89; and a Chinese edition of a work by Engels. The newsletter was a solid source of information about Czech (and other nationalities') classical music, and performances and recordings of the works of Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, Bohuslav Martinů, and others. There were few, if any, overt political overtones to the publication -- but it was free, had no ads, and was printed with an appealingly old-fashioned press and type. I saw a notice in some pen pal magazine about getting a gratis lifetime subscription to Music News, and sent a letter to Prague, in the Czech Socialist Republic, reading something like, "Sign me up." As transpired, the subscription, which I had for a few years, was for the lifetime of Marxist-Leninist Czechoslovakia. This issue may well have been one of the last, if not the last, I received, for the Velvet Revolution was only a few months off.

Although the tensest period of the Cold War was in the 1950s and 60s, the anxiety remained strong in the 1970s and 1980s, and through Gorbachev's tenure, right up until the 1989-91 period (and in a lesser way, some of the rivalries still go on now).  Had the Cuban Missile Crisis exploded into a war, the whole circus might have closed down; At the least we would be living in a considerably different world. But there was no general sense that the USSR and its satellite states, and outliers such as Albania and Yugoslavia, were in any way weak or about to collapse, right up until the abrupt end (complicated by the survival of a few Communist lands today, some more nominal than others). The ending of an ostensibly bipolar world (leaving aside the Sino-Soviet rift) had an almost religious aspect to it.

The Inner Harbour, Victoria, B.C.

This card manages to convey a most uninviting bureaucratic 60s dreariness to it, which would make one NOT want to visit the depicted scene. Despite this, Victoria, the Inner Harbour, and the Royal Museum are all terrific places.

Photographs of the Subject Property

A few photos of one of my homes of youth, with descriptively cold captions from an appraisal. I dwelt in several homes before this (that, due to my age at the time, I only have a few memories of), but this was the lengthiest and most significant.

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