The New York Post ran a short article of mine on Bigfoot this past Sunday.

According to Don Herron's The Literary World of San Francisco & Its Environs, Bay Area Forteans frequently met at 478 Union Street.  This housed the Pencraft Writers Studio, run by pulp authors Kenneth MacNichol and Polly Lamb Goforth.  (Goforth was also a sorceress who used the same form of magic as Haas.) 

In some of my earlier writing--nothing published, I think--I said that George Haas lived on College Street in Oakland.  This was wrong.

According to the manuscript material at the CSL, he lived at

5375 Manila Avenue
#209
Oakland, CA 94618

which, according to Google, is just off College Street.

In the early 1930s, Clark Ashton Smith wrote a story called "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" about a disconcerting archeological discovery on the planet Mars.  The tale was eventually published in Weird Tales.

Robert Barlow, an anthropologist and friend of H.P. Lovecraft used the story's title as the name for his closet, where he kept his collection of Weird Tales.  Barlow, fearing that he would be outed, committed suicide in 1951.

George Hass then started using the name--The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis--to describe his home, which was given over not only to Weird Tales (kept in a wooden chest), but books on related topics, sculptures by Clark Ashton Smith, collections of oddities collected during Haas's time with the Navy.

Of course, much of this material is Fortean--in nature (unexplained) or in inspiration (challenging to scientific conventional wisdom).  There is a strong element of Romance--capital R--in the collection, hope that the objects will inspire one to think weird thoughts.

[And Forteans are collectors, if nothing else right?  Fort collected.  And the Forteans collect.]

Don Herron writes,

“Our man Haas us no George-come-lately to the field of Fortean research, having been a member of the original Fortean Society’s San Francisco branch . . . .” (5)

Eats and meets up at Dave’s Cafe, 42nd and Broadway (5).

“To visualize events so vividly that they come to pass is George’s brand of sorcery.  When he read White Shadows in the South Seas and the other volumes dealing with the South Pacific, for example, he was compiling a large and detailed mental picture of that area.  George believes his powers of visualization took him to those lush isles by means of a Navy hitch even more surely than working and saving for a tourist cruise would have.” (13).

“A good imagination is essential in making this brand of parapsychology operate, and reading fantasy and science fiction is one thing George credits his imaginative abilities to.” (13)

 “Robert Barbour Johnson was a writer for the original Weird Tales magazine.  He penned “Far Below,” They,” Lead Soldiers,” and several other shockers.  Both he and George belonged to the San Francisco branch of the Fortean Society.  The group met in a writer’s studio to discuss UFOs and other strange phenomena."  Johnson an artist, interested in the circus, and wrote about Gold Gate Park.  For many years lived on Telegraph Hill, under the shadow of the Coit Tower, though moved away from the Bay Area.  He and Haas still correspond.   “These two men keep the Fortean spirit and the sense of the fantastic alive and very well indeed” (24).

“Another of George’s friends is a self-proclaimed ‘ultra-weird’ artist.”  Ralph Rayburn Phillips.  “Phillips often came down from Portland, Oregon, where he has lived for many years, to attend various Bay Area science-fiction conventions and Fortean meetings.  He has known the Inhabitant of the Vaults for about a quarter of a century.  A Zen Buddhist, Phillips is the author of the booklet Bulls of Zen.  His artwork has appeared in many fanzines and gallery showings over the years, and a good number of articles in Portland newspapers have been devoted to this ‘ultra-weird’ figure who draws much like Lovecraft writes” (26).

“‘Never-Throw-Anything-Away’ Haas" (29).

 “His interest in Bigfoot grew naturally from his Fortean activities.  During the 1950s George collected flying saucer reports, which led after awhile to the collection of Bigfoot reports.  His file on Bigfoot and miscellaneous outre subjects comprise on of the best Fortean reference libraries in the world” (31)

Haas says, “As a good Fortean and as a student of Buddhism, I don’t ‘believe’ in anything, accepting anything and everything, so-called natural laws included, on a temporary basis only” (33).

 Nb: Robert Payne’s The Lord Comes influenced Haas; he shared it with Clark Ashotn Smith, who credited the book with stimulating his interest in Buddhism.

I visited the California State Library History Room on Wednesday.  They have a complete run of Round Robin, as well as some other works of N. Meade Layne, which I was able to look through.

More in line with the circle, though--on the circumference, I guess--they had some manuscript material from George Haas, as well as a copy of Don Herron's book.  Currently, I am working up a post on it.

George Haas, on Clark Ashton Smith:

Klarkash-Ton's, too, was a Fortean mind, ever questing, never denying. He was intensely interested in the unexplained, the unknown. I remember our discussing The Books of Charles Fort that day []11 September 1953] and our discussion naturally turned to UFOs, the "flying saucers." Klarkash-Ton had seen one, had seen something, a year or two before. It was on a hot night and he had been lying outside on his sleeping bag, gazing upward into the depths of space. Suddenly he became aware of a large object, like an indistinct shadow, darker than the night, passing slowly above him, blotting out the stars..

LATE ADDITION: Apparently, Smith described the even in a letter to H.P. Lovecraft.  The letter was dated 1933, but in it Clark said the sighting occurred four or five years previous.

The last post prompted a connection I had never made before.

One of the key lines in Isaac Asimov's Second Foundation is, "a circle has no end."  When I read the original Foundation Series, I thought this was a really clever line.  Of course, I did most of my Asimov reading in 8th and 9th grade, so maybe I wouldn't be as impressed if I went back now.  (Or maybe I would.)

At any rate, that line's always stuck with me.

Now, I wonder if there's not a Fortean connection.

Later in life, Asimov was a pronounced skeptic, a member of CSICOP.

But, some of his early stories were Fortean in flavor.  This makes sense.  One of Asimov's writing gurus was John W. Campbell, editor of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction, considered the most important of the sci-fi pulps in the late 1930s and early 1940s.  Asimov belonged to Campbell's stable of writers, publishing many of his early stories--including parts of the Foundation series--in Astounding.  And Campbell, as Moskowitz--among others--notes, was recommending Fort to his writers as a source for plot ideas.

Did Asimov read Fort?  It seems almost certain since, again as Moskowitz notes, Fort's third book Lo! was serialized in Astounding (a few years, in fact, before Campbell became editor).  And Lo! had the famous line, "One measures a circle, beginning anywhere."

Still, another lead to follow . . . How much did Asimov know of Fort?

I have lots of tendrils out in starting this project-I feel very unfocused, not only because the project is still in an unorganized state, but life is, too.

There's a way around this, though.

As Charles Fort famously wrote, "one measures a circle, beginning anywhere."  Meaning, in my case, that I just need to pick a starting place.  And for now, I have: George Haas.

Haas was an Oakland, CA, Fortean, and I have started to collect information on him.

Don Herron wrote a chapbook about him.

The Oakland Public Library has some newspaper articles on him.

It also has the Berkeley sci-fi 'zine Rhodomagnetic Digest, which may have some info on him.

And, finally, the University of California Berkeley houses some letters between him and Clark Ashton Smith, and Auburn, CA, sci-fi/fantasy/horror writer.

Well, the hope for daily updates is already invalid.  Good thing, too, I think, since it will remove some of the pressure to keep this updated.  After all, I think of this more as a work diary than anything else.  If helpful comments come along, all the better.

So, a haphazard start.  And a haphazard note, too.

I read Sam Moskowitz's chapter on Fortean science fiction writers in his Strange Horizons: The Spectrum of Science Fiction.

He is not favorably inclined to the Forteans.  He sees Fort himself as derivative and, after a few subtle stories, the turn to Forteanism as rote.  Forteanism, he claims, died with Sputnik.

The last is clearly not true.  Indeed, as his book was being published in 1976 there was something of a Fortean revival, with books by Michel and Rickard and Coleman and Clark, as well as the continued publication of The International Fortean Organization (INFO) Journal.

But, he does provide a couple of references to some of the early Fortean stories that will be worth following.

Also, his papers are at Texas A&M, which is worth keeping in mind.

Welcome to my little patch of cyberspace, those few of you who have straggled out this far.  I'm definitely a Boomer, not a Sooner.

What finally convinced me to stake out this homestead was publishing my second book.  I had been a long-time consumer of blogs--mostly politically liberal ones, as well as a few related to academia--but had resisted setting up my own.  But with the release of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, I saw the need.

A website allowed me to connect with a lot of the discussion going on about the book, and aggregate it.  It also would give me a chance to talk back with readers, without clogging up the comments sections of other sites.

Finally, for all the talk about the Internet changing the media environment, I could now see in a visceral way how much that was true.  And I thought that I should get up to speed for my next book, if nothing else.

Thus was born, "From an Oblique Angle."

My plan is to update this blog daily, mostly with notes as I work towards the next book.  So, if you are interested in the history of science, Forteanism, and related topics--this is the place.

But, that's just for starters.