Tue, 03 Jan 2012 01:37:58 -0800WeeblySat, 31 Dec 2011 16:38:41 -0800http://www.joshuablubuhs.com/1/post/2011/12/me-in-the-wapo.htmlCheck it out. ]]>Sun, 30 Oct 2011 14:07:37 -0800http://www.joshuablubuhs.com/1/post/2011/10/bigfoot-and-kids.htmlI will get back to the blog.  I will!  I promise.

In the meantime, Western Folklore just published an essay by me on Bigfoot and children (vol. 70, no. 2):
‎'Tracking Bigfoot through 1970s North American Children's Culture: How Mass Media, Consumerism, and the Culture of Preadolescence Shaped Wildman Lore'

Abstract: Juvenile Bigfoot stories of the 1970s filtered generic themes inherent in wild man tales through culturally specific concerns about children's desires, the ubiquity of consumerism, and the power of mass media. The stories were meant to help children navigate the complexities of American culture. Children found something else: a way to break from their parents and claim a place in the social world as adults. They did not fret over consumerism but adapted to it.

]]>Tue, 06 Sep 2011 17:15:15 -0800http://www.joshuablubuhs.com/1/post/2011/09/t-swann-harding-1945.html “History is the accepted lie.  This is true of scientific as of any other lie; the conventional lie holds.  Every history of scientific discovery we read represents a conventionally accepted fiction which some misguidedly regard as true for all time but which the more intelligent realize is a fiction accepted for convenience.”

how does science progress?  “It can progress only when and because certain patent fictions or lies are universally and conventionally accepted as truth; that temporarily ends controversy in that sector and the synthetic pattern thus create, called scientific truth, does prove useful for many practical purposes.  But cessation of controversy usually occurs because the dispute has exhausted the disputants and nobody is left who cares to waster energy calling anyone else a lawyer.  There are no final truths; there are even no final facts.  There are simply things that appear to be true under certain rigidly controlled conditions and usually some important condition has escaped control.  There are only hypotheses, theories, fiction, and conventional lies.”
                                     From Doubt.

]]>Mon, 25 Jul 2011 18:24:38 -0800http://www.joshuablubuhs.com/1/post/2011/07/effity-eff.htmlComputer crashed.  Hard drive died.  And with it went the (almost complete) rewrite of the Fortean paper.

Blech.
]]>Mon, 09 May 2011 06:06:42 -0800http://www.joshuablubuhs.com/1/post/2011/05/weird-tales-of-the-city-an-anarchist-history-of-the-san-francisco-bay-area-forteans-1920-1959-xvi.html Conclusion

At the end of his book, Scott admits that an anarchist history seems odd from our perspective country: nation-states have increasing power over everyday lives.  Certainly, there remain threats—terrorism, most obviously.  But the systems once proposed to undermine state power—international communism, anarchism—these have failed, or only served to strengthen the state power.  The modern position of science seems more tenuous.  It is a durable institution, one that is deeply entangled with the state, which further gives it strength, as well as another powerful institution, industry.  Nonetheless, judging by the popular press, it seems embattled on many sides: by religious fundamentalists, by some of those same corporations, and by scientific anarchists such as the Forteans.  So how should we evaluate the Forteans?  Were they threats to science?  Were they insignificant?

To answer that question requires making explicit something that had been implicit: that is, the power relations.  Corporations have the power to set agendas, to affect public policy.  When they seek to undermine science—by refuting the dangers of tobacco or dismissing the possibility of global warming—their actions have serious consequences.  To the extent that religious fundamentalists inject themselves into secular institutions—schools, for example, on matters of teaching evolution and sex education—they also have the power to check science, although to this point that power has been more theoretical than actual.  The Forteans, for the most part, were not interested in setting out contrary institutions, or even altering public ones on the matter of science.  Theirs was a more subtle project.  To paraphrase Colin Bennett, the Forteans were battling for humanity’s imagination: they did not want it limited by what scientists said it could be.  From one perspective, this seems to make them insignificant—like Scott’s anarchists, their operations were eventually swamped by the expansion of the nation-state.  Similarly, as Sam Moskowitz pointed out, the Fortean fantasy was equally overwhelmed by science.  Fort suggested that the planets were only a few miles away, that a Super-Sargasso Sea hovered above all creation.  But, by 1957, with the launch of Sputnik, this theory was a shambles.  There was no way to maintain it.

Scott’s conclusion suggests—although he does not draw this point out—that the most interesting thing about anarchists, then, are not their ideas, but that they were able to patch together local practices and an international network to resist Leviathan.  The same could be said about the Forteans.  The San Francisco Bay Area Forteans drew on local practices—especially in the arts—and tied this together with the more international Fortean movement.  They did so in many distinct, sometimes mutually exclusive ways.  But the point—beyond the various ideologies—was the same in all cases.  They wanted to find ways of viewing humans as beyond the parameters that science erected.  And in this, they were successful, sometimes ironically so.  Their imaginative creations did create a space in which humans could be free—what Philip Lamantia said was an imaginal world, distinct from the mundane one and the religious one.  Forteans, he said, were explorers of this world, explorers who reported back on the extreme, new worlds that they had found, unimaginable before their explorations.  The ironic fulfillment of some of these ideas, though, was to further the power of science.  Science fiction is a literature of resistance, opposing humane values against scientific ones, but it is also a press agent for science, increasing science’s cultural authority.  The Forteans, then, at least the Bay Area Forteans in the immediate post-War years, allowed Americans to imagine themselves free from the constraints of science, even as they strengthened science’s power to determine what counted as real. 

]]>Sat, 07 May 2011 07:50:00 -0800http://www.joshuablubuhs.com/1/post/2011/05/weird-tales-of-the-city-an-anarchist-history-of-the-san-francisco-bay-area-forteans-1920-1959-xv.html                 Trade

It is common to look upon Forteans as atavists—people seeking refuge from the harshness of modern life by indulging a fascination for an imagined past.  Recent research has called into question this schema, suggesting that modernity and enchantment grow together.  This view is consistent with Scott’s argument about those who did not want to be ruled: often dismissed as primitive holdovers, they, instead, co-evolved with the paddy state, adapting their lifestyles to the growth of the state.  They traded, too.  Citizens of the state had products that made life more convenient for the hill tribes—proving again that their lifestyles were patchworks of the modern and the old—and the hill tribes had access to goods citizens did not: fruits and other foods that grew only in the forest, for example, artisanal products.  Thus, even as the hill tribes tried to remain free from the coercive force of the state, they still engaged with it.  The same was true of the Forteans although, of course, not everyone was interested in such trade.

The flow of material and ideas from science to the Forteans is the easiest to document.  Fort, clearly, was not interested in retreating to a Romantic past.  He read scientific journals, grappled with scientific ideas—he was, perhaps, the first popular writer on the new Quantum Mechanics, for example.  He took these scientific facts and re-interpreted them according to the logic of his monistic system.  Bern Porter, too, was an example of this trade:  brought to his art a familiarity with modern science and its techniques, that he then attempted to put to other uses.  Fortean science fiction writers such as Garen Drussai and Anthony Boucher were consumers of science, too, keeping up with developing ideas so that they could incorporate them into their stories.  Boucher, for instance, wrote a story that turned on forensic science—in particular, that two people could have the same fingerprint.  (Thayer wrote documented examples of this in Doubt; he was no friend of forensics.)  E. Hoffman Price and Philip Lamantia were both astrologists.  Astrology was an outdated science, no doubt, but its continued practice required an understanding of astronomy, and thus their work necessitated familiarity with science.

What did Forteans provide to science in turn?  Some were uninterested in the trade.  Henry Miller, for example, also developed an interest in astrology, but he thought of it as only another language in which to speak—and not a way of studying the universe or understanding its mechanics.  The same was true of his fascination with Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy: he came to admit she had probably invented her gurus, but what counted were not the facts: what counted was the poetry of her work.  He had little interest in modern science—the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company section of The Tropic of Capricorn is a stinging rebuke of modern organizations and their scientific rules—and saw little reason to contribute to science.  “The gulf between knowledge and truth is infinite.  Parents talk a lot about truth but seldom bother to deal in it.  It’s much simpler to dispense ready-made knowledge.  More expedient too, for truth demands patience, endless, endless patience.”  Miller was a purveyor of truth, he thought.  Other Forteans, such as Robert Barbour Johnson, similarly seemed to have little interest in science, either in learning from it or contributing to it, beyond seeking out examples of events that violated scientific expectations, such as the stones that fell on Irene Fellows’s home.

But there were ways in which the Forteans passed ideas into science.  Most obvious in this regard is George F. Haas, who did basic taxonomic work on the flower genus Penstemon in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as well as research on redwoods when he was a ranger at Big Trees State Park.  Forteanism itself did not seem to drive Haas’s interest in these subjects, but his involvement with both the Fortean Society and the American Penstemon Society show, at the very least, that Forteanism did not force one to reject all scientific knowledge.  Similarly, Kenneth Rexroth worked in an asylum while he was a conscientious objector and developed some of his own ideas about therapy; George Leite was interested in criminology, as was, of course, Maynard Shipley.  More speculatively, Forteans may have contributed to science in a less direct way: through their writings.  Fantastic fiction is a well known influence on the scientific imagination—notably so during the 1920s, when scientists showed little interest in rocketry but science fiction fans and amateurs kept the dream of a rocket to the moon alive.  It may be that Lamantia’s surrealist poetry or Boucher’s fantasies fire the imagination of later scientists.  One of Fort’s messages was that explanations of the world should not be taken at face value, but treated skeptically, tested, and probed: which is the exact job of new generations of scientists.

]]>Fri, 06 May 2011 10:40:10 -0800http://www.joshuablubuhs.com/1/post/2011/05/weird-tales-of-the-city-an-anarchist-history-of-the-san-francisco-bay-area-forteans-1920-1959-xiv.html                 Lifestyles

Scott argues that the hill tribes who escaped from the paddy state built lifestyles that embodied their sense of liberty and protected it, going so far as to claim that ethnic identities and orality were both created traditions that helped the tribes remain free from the state.  There is a strong romantic element to this argument—Scott has much to say about the egalitarian rule of such tribes, but nothing on inter-tribe conflict or sexual discrimination, to pick two examples.  Nonetheless, the core of this argument seems sound, and is applicable to the Forteans living in San Francisco’s Bohemian enclaves—especially since many of the Forteans were extremely influenced by Romantic ideology.  George Haas, for example, modeled his life on that of a Romantic traveler, and hurried to join World War II so that he could travel through the South Pacific, collecting treasures.  Back in Oakland, he built his identity, in part, around these experiences.  He converted to Buddhism.  He worked as an organic gardener—at a time when that was certainly on the fringe.  And, in correspondence, he adopted the sobriquet gi eitch—an homage to H. P. Lovecraft who renamed the people who wrote him with alien-sounding titles based on their real names, in this case gi eitch representing his initials.  Haas had so thoroughly adopted this lifestyle that when Clark Ashton Smith and his wife came to visit, Carol was surprised that Haas was not Japanese.  After all, he had that odd sounding name, was a gardener, and a Buddhist.  This lifestyle sat easily with his Fortean interests.  As a Buddhist, Haas said, he understood that nothing was permanent, which included scientific theories.  Organic gardening, of course, was an explicit challenge to the agricultural sciences.  Robert Barbour Johnson lived a similarly off-beat life, although the axes around which it turned were different.  In his youth, he had worked for circuses as an animal trainer.  Once in San Francisco, he made much of his earnings turning those experiences into art: he painted and sold circus scenes, constructed miniature circuses, wrote several stories for Blue Book about circus history, and even trained his own housecat to perform tricks.

In contrast to Haas, many of the Forteans and members of Bay Area Bohemia were sorely disappointed by America’s entry into World War II.  Kenneth Rexroth became a conscientious objector, as did Philip Lamantia.  Miller famously wrote—and Bern Porter published—the fiercely anti-war screed Murder the Murderers.  Charles Fort’s texts offered no direct support for Pacificism, but Thayer’s version of Forteanism, as spelled out in Doubt certainly did.  Thayer argued that the entire war was a hoax perpetrated by financiers.  Miriam Allen de Ford, for one, disliked his turning of Doubt into a pacifist rag, even though she agreed in large part with his stand.  Rexroth, too, worried about the way that militarization empowered the state—which then restricted the spaces in which Americans could be individuals, could plumb their own infinite vastness—and that was a large part of what was behind his founding of the libertarian circle.  Philip Lamantia’s disgust with the war was deeply tied to his disgust with science—and so part of his turn toward Forteanism.  In his personal papers, Lamantia said that he died in 1945—not coincidentally the year the world entered the age of atomic weapons.  In his letter asking for conscientious objector status, Lamantia wrote that the nineteenth-century dream of perfecting man through science had reached its inevitable conclusion in the atomic bomb, and that conclusion was tragic.  The state, he said, was evil.  Lamantia rooted his understanding of humankind’s predicament in a religious vision.  God, he said, was reality—was nature: a view consonant with Fort’s monism.  But through consciousness humans had separated themselves from nature, from the whole.   Another autobiographical note, dated the end of August 1961, makes the connection more explicit.  The apocalypse had already come, he said, and so humans needed to find a new way of life, “Anything not identifiable with the stupid, synthetic half/life of postAtomicBomb man, his exploded his cities, literature, art, his corny mis/education, his phantom governments, his corny reasoning, sick politics . . .”

Perhaps the embodiment of the Fortean lifestyle can be found in the personal histories of Garen and Kirk Drussai.  Both were born under different names: Garen was born Clara Hettler and Kirk was Gerald Polenz.  They seem to have changed their names upon moving to Hollywood, where Garen took an additional step in altering her identity: she was ashamed of her New York accent and so took locution lessons to rid herself of it.  Apparently, Garen and Kirk met while in Hollywood.  According to Tiffany Thayer, their marriage was brought about by a shared interest in Forteanism and Doubt proudly announced their nuptials.  Kirk had earlier met Thayer while in New York, and was one of the motive forces behind the founding of Chapter 2.  Garen was trying to become a writer, and some of her stories had an obvious Fortean influence.  Her first story—published in Boucher’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—“Extra-Curricular” (1952) reads like a catalog of Fortean odd events.  Only at the end does the reader learn they are all tied together by a student of the future who was playing around with a time machine, messing with the past.  Another of Drussai’s stories appeared in Doubt.  “The Tainted” was set in a society in which young boys practiced at becoming warriors so that they could be drafted into an interplanetary conflict at age thirteen.  The grandfather, who could remember as far back as the Korean War, bemoaned these developments, seeing the gunplay of the current generation as different from his, because they no longer understood it was play.  And he was right: at the end, a small boy gets hold of a real gun and kills his mother.  When Garen became pregnant, the Drussais paid membership in the Fortean Society for their unborn child.  Milo Drussai, as he would become known, was, in Tiffany Thayer’s words, the Virginia Dare of the Fortean Society—a prophecy that perhaps the off-beat lifestyles adopted by the Forteans would spread.

]]>Fri, 06 May 2011 09:44:38 -0800http://www.joshuablubuhs.com/1/post/2011/05/weird-tales-of-the-city-an-anarchist-history-of-the-san-francisco-bay-area-forteans-1920-1959-xiii1.html                 Places

Where are the cultural hills?  In The Art of Not Being Governed, Scott argues that terrain was one of the main factors that contributed to lengthy existence of anarchists—or, more properly, people who resisted rule by the state.  They took to the hills, the forests, where tax collectors, census workers, and military conscriptors found it hard to follow.  San Francisco is a famously hilly city, but it was not all of the hills in the city where Forteans concentrated—nor was it hills necessarily.  Rather, they took to—or came from—the Bohemian enclaves.  Philip Lamantia remembered, “San Francisco was terribly straight-laced and provincial, but at the same time there were these islands of freedom—in North Beach at bars like the Iron Pot and the Black Cat, where intellectuals met to talk.  There was a whole underground culture that went unnoticed by the city at large.”  These could be found across the region.  Most stereotypically, Bay Area Bohemia took root in densely-populated areas rife with multi-family homes, apartments, and residential hotels, such as along Telegraph Hill and its Montgomery Block.  What geographer Richard Walker calls the “ecotopian suburbs” were also home to some Bohemians—these are the mock cabins and craftsman houses tucked into hills of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and Marin, surrounded by oaks and redwoods and eucalyptus.  Although they look natural, these suburbs were built: the coast range of the Bar Area was mostly grass when European settlers arrived, and developers had to create the landscape as well as built the houses, using as their model Yosemite and trying to evoke that valleys romanticism and combine it with mysticism and Masonic ideals.  This part of Bay Area Bohemia stretched far south, through San Mateo and to the Monterey Peninsula, where an earlier iteration of Bohemia had taken refuge after the devastation of 1906.

Kenneth MacNichol had been part of that Bohemia of the early 1900s, visiting with the likes of Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) and the doyenne of San Francisco poetry of the early twentieth century, George Sterling (1869-1926).  It was here that some of the earliest evidence of MacNichol’s interest in alternative lifestyles appeared.  He planned, for example, a trip into the desert where he could study primitive mysticism.  (whether he made the trip is unknown.)  He also wrote an article extolling the virtues of “New Thought,” and the American metaphysics.  Sterling himself would become Clark Ashton Smith’s largest champion.  Much later, Henry Miller would take up residence here and become something of a guru to vagabond Bohemians who came to visit, especially conscientious objectors who, released from wartime service or camps, made pilgrimages to his small house.  Others of the Forteans lived not here, on the Monterey Peninsula, but still in the ecotopian suburbs: Shipley and de Ford lived in Sausalito until Shipleys death and Garen (1916-2009) and Kirk Drussai (1919-1991) moved between various suburbs south of San Francisco.  E. Hoffman Price lived in this general area, too.  Anthony Boucher lived in Berkeley.

The multi-family dwellings were especially rich with Forteans.    Kenneth MacNichol established his writing school—Pencraft University—at 478 Union on Telegraph Hill.  Robert Barbour Johnson also lived on Telegraph Hill.  Miriam Allen de Ford relocated to the Ambassador Hotel in the Tenderloin—but not far from the public library.  Kenneth Rexroth harnessed much of this Bohemian energy.  A veteran of Chicago’s bohemia and New York’s Greenwich Village in 1927, the year that Sterling committed suicide at the Bohemian Grove.  Rexroth saw San Francisco as a backwater, untouched by modernism, and so fertile ground for a new kind of approach to the arts and life.  He stood against consumerism and, as World War II broke, the permanent war state.  He was interested in Orientalism and translated a number of Asian poets.  Rexroth established some of the foundational structures of Bay Area Bohemianism.  He formed a Libertarian Group which held meetings Wednesdays on San Francisco’s Steiner Street.  As many as 200 people might attend these meetings of “philosophical anarchists.”  Among the group was Lewis Hill, a pacifist who founded the Pacifica Foundation in 1946 and then KPFA in 1949, the country’s first listener-supported radio station, broadcasting from Berkeley.

What makes these areas the equivalent of Scott’s hills is that the residents were free from the ruling ideology: they could conduct their life with or without regard to scientific developments, as they saw fit.  Careers here were not dependent upon science, as they were say around Lawrence Livermore Lab or the defense contractors that spread through the eastern suburbs in the years after World War II.  Attention could be focused elsewhere.  Henry Miller, for example, had already inveighed against the “air-conditioned nightmare” that America had become before he arrived on the Monterey Peninsula.  There, he could live a simpler life, spending his time cutting firewood, painting, and writing.  In much of the region, art was a constant topic of conversation.  The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), who was friendly with those who formed the Berkeley Renaissance, said the local culture in the late forties “required you to have a really thorough grounding in the classics.”  And where science was allowed into Bohemian enclaves, it could be twisted and changed to serve other purposes.  After Bern Porter left the Manhattan Project, he introduced what he called “sci-art,” the application of scientific techniques to solve problems of art.  He imagined, as an example, sci-lit, in which flashes of light would substitute for the alphabet and allow for the creation of new forms of human expression.  There is no evidence directly tying Porter to Fort, but he was certainly familiar with Forteans—publisher of Henry Miller, Philip Lamantia and Circle, friendly with George Leite and Kenneth Rexroth.  Whatever his degree of interest in Charles Fort, his project was certainly Fortean, taking science away from the scientists and tweaking it to create new realities.  

]]>Wed, 27 Apr 2011 07:35:52 -0800http://www.joshuablubuhs.com/1/post/2011/04/weird-tales-of-the-city-an-anarchist-history-of-the-san-francisco-bay-area-forteans-1920-1959-xii.html Forteans as Scientific Anarchists

The varieties of Forteanism may not reflect an underlying unity, but sense can still be made of the diversity.  To do so requires an analogy: Forteans are to science as anarchists are to the state.  This analogy does not mean that all Forteans have similar political ideologies, although, at least in San Francisco, they tended to be leftists of various stripes.  Rather, the comparison relies on the relationship between individuals to an overarching institution.  In The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott outlines what it means to be an anarchist in Upland Southeast Asia—not necessarily a bomb-throwing anarchist, but an anarchist in the sense of those who do not wish to be governed by the state.  Too often, he says, these groups have been seen as holdovers, evolutionary remnants of a time before there was centralized government.  This is wrong, though.  The nomads and hill people who stand against the state are not relicts: rather, they co-evolve with the state.  As the state grows and changes, so do those who wish to be free of it, altering their tactics, shifting between citizen and non-citizen, crafting lifestyles that allow them to live by their own codes—going so far, Scott suggests, as inventing new ethnicities and replacing literacy with orality to remain free.  They are ever aware of the state and its machinations, however, trading with citizens when it is convenient.

The parallel with the Forteans is obvious from the start.  It is easy to dismiss Forteans as those who refuse science and modernity, choosing instead to cling to outdated modes of knowledge—magic and superstition.  But, of course, Charles Fort did not believe in superstition.  And, also of course, his books would not have been possible without science: he read scientific journals, collected scientific facts, and argued with scientists—not that the world should retreat to an age of faith or superstition, but about restrictions scientists themselves put on the interpretation of their data.  Forteanism was not relic.  It co-evolved with science.  And the parallels can be drawn out further.  Science, like the state, had certain colonizing tendencies.  States needed people for taxing, for labor, and for war.  Science needed the public to accept its pronouncements as true—and other interpretations as false—in order to gain and then maintain cultural power—indeed, becoming inextricably intertwined with the state.  In order to find refuge from scientific determinism, Forteans (and other scientific heretics) adopted similar tactics as Scott’s anarchists.  They sought places where control was difficult to impose—the hills of Southeast Asia or the Bohemian enclaves of San Francisco.  They constructed lifestyles that allowed them liberty from the state or from science: in the case of Forteans that meant careers where they were free to live without concern about scientific facts, identities that emphasized not material determinism but infinite possibilities.  Like the hill people and tribes of Southeast Asia, the San Francisco Forteans created their own groups, their own language.  But, that did not mean they were ignorant of science.  There was trade, most obviously in the Forteans collecting data, but the trade went both ways, and Forteans injected ideas into the scientific mainstream, as well.   

]]>Sat, 23 Apr 2011 18:39:42 -0800http://www.joshuablubuhs.com/1/post/2011/04/weird-tales-of-the-city-an-anarchist-history-of-the-san-francisco-bay-area-forteans-1920-1959-xi.html                 Weird Tales

At times, surrealism came close to being unanalyzable—that was certainly the case with some of Lamantia’s poems.  The point was the experience, not whether the poem could be run through the usual English 101 formulas—symbolism, allusion, etc.  Thus, the poem stood outside of any explanatory framework, could not be reduced to physical equations or chemical symbols.  Fort was important to that—an important to an even more radical proposal: that experience, itself, not just experienced processed through poetry, could be indescribable, and thus a space beyond science and scientific explanation.  This lineament of Forteanism was advanced by the so-called weird writers.  Weird writers were most easily identified with the pulp magazine Weird Tales, but they could trace the tradition of their literature back into the nineteenth century, through Ambrose Bierce (about whom Fort wrote), Algernon Blackwood, Rider Haggard (one of Henry Miller’s influences) to Edward Bulwer-Lytton (a fiction writer who seems to have inspired Helena Balavatsky’s Theosophy).  In the late 1940s, the names most associated with weird tales (and Weird Tales) were probably Clark Ashton Smith, who lived in Auburn and inspired Lamantia as well as a number of Fortean pulp writers, and H. P. Lovecraft, whose stories had come to the attention of the surrealists.  Weird tales, in their best moments, were characterized by their ability to evoke difficult to articulate emotions of fear and horror and, especially, uncanniness.  Lovecraft, for example, was known for his cosmic vision, in which humanity was but a small and irrelevant part of a vaster and more wild universe than could possibly be imagined.  (Fort, in turn, influenced to certain degree both Smith and Lovecraft.)

Probably the best example of the phenomenon of the weird in San Francisco comes from visits that Robert Barbour Johnson and George Hass made to the Monterey area, near where Henry Miller lived.  The glen had what Johnson described as “a strangely unpleasant atmosphere.”  Haas felt felt “oppressed there” and a friend “magnetized,” her legs made to “tingle.”  This was an phenomena that could only be experienced.  Words were inadequate, and explanation useless.  It was a quality of the glen that could not be otherwise described that existing—in the manner of the stories of Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft.  Indeed, Johnson based one of his early stories on his visiting the glen, “They” (1936).  Tame by today’s standards, “They” tells the story of a visitor who meets someone whose job it is to guard a horrible secret; this narrator tells the story of how he came to be in the position to the visitor, who hardly says a word.  Very little action occurs in the course of the story.  The whole point seems to be the creation of a feeling of foreboding.

This interest in the odd, the indescribable seems fringe—and it was.  But among aficionados of the emotion, it was important, and the Bay Area Forteans had a good sense of how to create it.  In “Far Below,” published by Weird Tales in 1939, Johnson followed a similar pattern as in “They.”  A man visits the New York subway—although Johnson notes he based it on “Forest Hill Tunnel” in San Francisco—where he meets what amounts to an occult police: a former zoologist who has been tasked to guard a stretch of subway tunnel that is constantly attacked by some bizarre creatures, part ape, part mole.  These Johnson borrowed from Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model,” although the idea of an occult police may have come from Fort, who wrote about such a force in Book of the Damned.  At the end of the story, the visitor notes that the former zoologist is himself turning into one of the creatures.  The story was well-received, and continues to be.  It was chosen as the best story ever to appear in Weird Tales, received encomiums from critic S. T. Joshi, and was widely reprinted.  Again, though, the story is tame by modern standards, lacks action—opting instead to create mood—and distances the reader through Johnson’s narrative device.  Nonetheless, it does manage to make subways feel weird—uncanny.

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