The Newspaper: The Oakland Tribune 03/23/2011
 One of the benefits of doing historical research in the early 21st century is the wealth of newspaper indexes. There is Newspaperarchive.com. Proquest has digitized many papers. As well, there are still the older indexes—some published, some not. It’s important to remember that even using these, there’s still a lot that is missed. Nonetheless, surveys of papers today can be made much broader much easier than in the past.
And doing so, it becomes clear that the Oakland Tribune was a major disseminator of Charles Fort, at least in the Bay Area. Again, this conclusion must be taken with a certain grain of salt: the Tribune is digitized, which makes searching it easier. Its San Francisco competitor, The Chronicle--both were staunchly Republican papers in the first part of the twentieth century—is only indexed. Some of the indexes are published. Some were created by California state librarians. And it is possible that references to Fort slipped through the index. Be that as it may, the Tribune was important. Add Comment  I know the name of a three other people involved in San Francisco’s Fortean Society—but not much more than that.
About Richard Lamb, I know nothing more than he lived in Carmel. This is according to Robert Barbour Johnson. Unfortunately, a search of public records has revealed a large number of Richard Lambs who have lived in Carmel at some point in their lives. Absent further information, it is impossible to identify which is the Richard Lamb who was in the Fortean Society. About the Lawses, I can say a little more. According to the same Robert Barbour Johnson letter, the Laws lived in Redwood City. They were Albert and Phe. Likely, then, the Albert Laws in question was born 19 February 1924 in New York. He died in Monterey County on 25 November 1983, according to the California death index. I have sent for, but not yet received, a copy of his death certificate, which may provide additional leads. The Question Mark: Kathleen Ludwick 03/22/2011
 Kathleen Ludwick had a lucrative 1930, about that we can be reasonably sure. About anything else—not much. Although she did leave evidence she appreciated her Fort.
Ludwick had come to the attention of bibliographers before I happened upon her, for her story in Amazing Stories Quarterly “Dr. Immortelle” (1930, of course). In his great resource Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years, Everett Bleiler supposes that the Kathleen Ludwick listed as writing the article might be the same Kathleen Ludwick who the social security agency listed as dying in 1970. That Kathleen Ludwick was born in New York in 1892, and passed in Maryland. The (M)Ad Man: David Bascom 03/20/2011
 It’s not clear that David Bascom was a Fortean, in that he was devoted to the ideas of Charles Fort. But, there is no doubt that Bascom had read his Fort. And he certainly had a sense of humor that Fort would have appreciated.
David Bascom was born in Pennsylvania in 1912 to Franklin Bascom and Mabel (Rathbun) Bascom. His place of birth is given as Oil City, Pennsylvania; the previous census had given Franklin’s job as stenographer. By 1918, Franklin was in Arizona; by 1920, Franklin and Mabel divorced, with Franklin still in Arizona, where he was a forest ranger, and Mabel in Pennsylvania working as a stenographer: she was forty and supporting a 7 year old son, which could not have been easy, although her parents were nearby.  Robert Barbour Johnson’s interest in Forteana did not end with the end of the first Fortean Society. I recently learned that he is a consulting editor on the journal of the Society’s successor, the International Fortean Organizations Fortean Journal, at least as early as 1974. (The International Fortean Organization was established in the mid 1960s.)
How exactly he became attached to INFO is unknown, but there is some evidence worth considering. Ron and Paul Willis created INFO; they also owned a bookstore and published a science fiction magazine, Anubis. Anubis republished Johnson’s critique of Thayer, which originally ran in the Berkeley fanzine Rhodomagnetic Digest. In a letter to Damon Knight, Johnson said that he did not know how Anubis came to reprint the article, which implies he did not know the Willis brothers—but they obviously knew him. It is possible that they approached him. (It’s worth noting that INFO Journal said that there was a “Chapter Two” of their society in San Francisco, just as there had been with Thayer’s organization—but evidence of this Chapter Two is hard to come by.) Thanks to the wonders of Google Book, I’ve found some more information about Robert Barbour Johnson. Remember him? Confirming what has been said about Johnson before, it appears that he continued to be interested in circus’s and their history—and was not shy about sharing his enthusiasm. In 1942, Architect and Engineer noted that he was slotted to give a lecture “The American Circus.” The contents of the lecture—or if it was actually given—are unknown. Almost twelve years later, Billboard picked up a story that Johnson had written for Clarion, publication of the Al G. Barnes Ring of the Circus Model Builders. In the article, Johnson argued that the street parades associated with the coming of the circus—at least back in the day—was poised for a revival, but there would need to be changes. Horses would no longer lead them, but be replaced by elephants and other exotic beasts of burden. As well, the trains would be made of plastic, painted colorfully, and mounted with organs and performers. A bit more on Garen Drussai. Apparently, she had two letters published in The Saturday Review. The later letter came out in 1970. It was a review of Z by Vassilis Vassilikos. The first, for Fortean purposes, is more interesting. It was published in 1955 and referenced an article on genius. Drussai wrote recommending another genius: “You will be flooded with outraged ‘Where is my pet genius?’ But perhaps the name of Nikolai Tesla, sometime in the future, will be taken out of its wraps—to be appreciated by a more knowledgeable humanity.” Tesla, of course, was the subject of Fortean, occult, and science fiction speculation. The Surrealist: Philip Lamantia, part iv 03/08/2011
 Lamantia’s first published poem [update 3/21, thanks to commenter Steven Fama: were five poems published in View in 1943: "I'm Coming," Apparition of Charles Baudelaire," "The Ruins," "By The Curtain of Architecture," and "There Are Many Pathways to the Garden." He then sent some work to Breton, which was published in VVV. Among these] was “Touch of the Marvelous”—the name already Fortean (or Ripleyan, if that neologism is acceptable). The first lines are
“The mermaids have come to the desert They are setting up a boudoir next to the camel Who lies at their feet of roses.” These, too, have a Fortean ring. But, capturing what Fort mean to Lamantia is not so easy. The Fortean overtones in his other poems are less obvious; more to the point: as far as I know, he never wrote about Fort. It’s possible to offer a plausible reconstruction, though. Let’s start with surrealism. The Surrealist: Philip Lamantia, part iii 03/04/2011
 So what did Lamantia mean when he wrote that he had died in 1945? Certainly, part of it may have been his break with surrealism. He had invested a lot of himself into the movement, had defined himself as a revolutionary—both socialist and surrealist—and seeing this movement flounder would have been difficult. But he did not act like a dead man: he continued to study and investigate other forms of cultural radicalism.
The Surrealist: Philip Lamantia, part ii 03/04/2011
 In New York, Lamantia found two mentors, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler. It is worth noting here that New York surrealists were fascinated by H. P. Lovecraft, as Lamantia had been (and probably still was). The issue of VVV following the one that first published Lamantia, in fact, had a pioneering study in Lovecraft’s work by Robert Allerton Parker called “Such Pulp as Dreams Are Made of.” According to Franklin Rosemont, the works of Lovecraft and his circle are a “central source” for surrealists. During his time here, Lamantia was exploring a kind of automatic writing, his poems held together by the hidden—esoteric, occult, one might say—connections between otherwise dissimilar images. The poems he wrote are, in a very real sense, impenetrable. Images are repeated—especially fire, rape, hair, clowns, the moon—but they are not subject to textual exegesis. They are meant to experienced—to be entered and to enter the reader. The poems that came out of this period were variously collected in his Erotic Poems (1946), Touch of the Marvelous (1966; 1974), and Selected Poems (1967). Potted biographies of Lamantia have it that he broke from surrealism around 1945, after having found it stagnant. His papers at the University of California Berkeley give a more . . . dramatic . . . interpretation to this period. An undated autobiographical note, probably written around 1961 or 1962, offers this brief biographical nugget: Born Oct 23, 1927. Died 1945. Resurrected 1954. Dying, it must be admitted, is something different than finding a particular artistic movement decadent and returning home. | AuthorI am a father, husband, and independent scholar living in Folsom California. I can be reached at joshuabbuhs_at_yahoo_dot_com.  ArchivesDecember 2011 CategoriesAll |
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