Sorry i haven't found the time to write but........ever have one of those weeks where nothing and I mean NOTHING seems to go right? Where do i start? My wifes' Grandmother had a stroke at the beginning of the week and is currently in the hospital....i had a pet snake crawl into its water dish and somehow flip it upside down where it wet sealed causing the animal to suffocate.... we are not sure yet but we think my wife may have miscarried, that or her cancer has come back, and now our air conditioner just conked out...when it rains it pours....
sometimes i wonder why i even bother to get up every day and carry on
i often think we are just here to amuse the gods and appaently its my turn
I'm awake
my soul never sleeps
people are cattle
they give me strange looks
i scare them
they often
walk the other way
can they see?
the madness that lurks
behind my eyes
Living is a hard thing to do
i do not do it well
the morning
does not come to me
as it does everyone else
I fear i must walk
in the shadows
i grow weary of the
masquerade
i am lost
i do not know who i am
i often want to die
i feel alone
surrounded by ghosts
who pretend to be alive
Arcane secrets
criminal mind
they will find
no clues
at the scene
its not worth the pain
yet without it
are you truly alive?
i hate
they haunt
i bury them again and again
where would i be
never having known
probably
happy
I hate to put titles on things i think it would influence the reader to lean in a certain direction isn't the idea of a poem to simply ignite a spark of some kind? can you even call this poetry?
Later...
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Home?
Everything was going ok today...for a while....the second i asked my 14 year old daughter to do anything other than sit in front of the computer or sit on her butt in front of the TV you would have thought i asked her to carry a 1200 pound calf on her shoulders up hill to the slaughter house in August! What is it about teenagers that they think they don't have to do a damn thing but breathe? For the most part I can deal with the attitude (as I have one of my own) its the mouth, and the disrespect that comes out of it...if i had talked to my father like she does me when i was 14 i wouldn't have any teeth left (that is provided i was still here to even comment on it). It pushes every single button i have all at once.....It makes me want to take the nearest thing i can get my hands on and ram it so far down her throat that when she eventually has children they will taste it! And if that wasn't bad enough the wife just always takes her side and sends us to our respective corners (I'm always the bad guy and I'm an adult i should know better blah blah blah if you want my solution she should be spanked, or grounded or both thats the problem we have now she is way way to soft on them lets them get away with murder and its all written off because they are kids...blah blah blah.... to be fair she argues that i'm way too harsh).....that pisses me off to no end it simply adds injury to insult and makes me pissed at her......I'm really at my wits end here and don't have a clue what to do about it......
maybe things will look better in the morning....but i seriously doubt it!
I'm better of staying at work...........I'm beginning to understand why my father spent so much time at work....at least there he was needed, wanted, people listened to what he had to say, valued his input, and he actually got something accomplished.
any thoughts?
Later.....
maybe things will look better in the morning....but i seriously doubt it!
I'm better of staying at work...........I'm beginning to understand why my father spent so much time at work....at least there he was needed, wanted, people listened to what he had to say, valued his input, and he actually got something accomplished.
any thoughts?
Later.....
Monday, September 04, 2006
While I'm on the Subject
Ok for those that know me it is no secret that Robert E. Howard is one of my first heroes. I discovered Conan when i was 12. In the summer of that year i used all of my hard earned allowence to purchase the 12 books in the Conan Series published by Ace. This collection was lovingly reconstructed and the gaps filled in by L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter. To a boy my age the larger than life Conan lept off the page and thrilled me to no end and managed to transport me to places i could never go by myself....In fact it was Howard that made me want to pick up a pen and write my own stories.....As I got older I tracked down the Solomon Kane stories, as well as Kull of Valusia, and Bran Mak Morn. Conan and Howard Both still hold a special place in my memories (although as i age i find myself drawn more to Solomon Kane) Recently I picked up a copy of Weird Tales magazine on a whim and discovered that the company that owns the magazine is reprinting all of Howards works from the magazine (as i type this i have placed my order for all 10 books even though i will probably overlap my already large howard library) I also came across this article and thought that it deserved a larger audience......
commentary by Leo Grin
On January 22, 2006, at a desolate crossroads in the windswept cowtown of Peaster, Texas, a gathering of men stood reverently in a chill downpour. These weren’t local ranch hands or mud-soaked oil riggers, they were fantasy fans — editors, scholars, and aficionados, from places as far away as Washington DC, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Each had journeyed hundreds of miles through sleet and rain on a Quixotic quest of tribute. For exactly one hundred years earlier, in that isolated Texas hamlet, the ailing wife of a grizzled frontier doctor gave birth to a man whose name still echoes like a grim knell across the fantasy genre’s dreamscape. The father of Sword-and-Sorcery. The creator of Conan.Robert Ervin Howard. That same morning, sleepy-eyed readers of The Washington Post were treated to a book column by popular critic Michael Dirda, who seized upon the occasion of Howard’s one-hundredth birthday to review Del Rey Books’ sumptuous new series of fully-illustrated, textually-restored Conan books. Dirda assured readers who harbor a dislike for pulp fantasy that “approached as guilty pleasures, [the Conan stories] can be wonderfully entertaining,” then made a measured case for Howard’s literary worth. “Howard’s Conan chronicles,” Dirda wrote, “are... studies in the clash of Barbarism and Civilization. In Howard’s grim and all too realistic view, the barbarians are always at the gate, and once a culture allows itself to grow soft, decadent or simply neglectful, it will be swept away by the primitive and ruthless.” He ended with a judgment that is old hat among fantasy fans, but one which many critics and academics are only now belatedly acknowledging: “Apart from Fritz Leiber’s tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, sword and sorcery adventures don’t come any better.” Amen. As criticism goes, Dirda’s insightful analysis is a far cry from sixty years ago, when playwright H.R. Hays greeted Howard’s first American hardcover appearance — the now-classic 1946 Arkham House release Skull-Face and Others — with a scathing review in The New York Times titled “Superman on a Psychotic Bender.” Of course, Dirda’s no long-dead, forgotten blowhard — he won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Clearly, time and age have been good to Robert E. Howard. The man whom H.P. Lovecraft christened “Two-Gun Bob” left us a large, fascinating body of work encompassing not only the birth of the Sword-and-Sorcery genre, but also the misery of the Great Depression, the bittersweet memory of the American frontier, and the millennial sweep of War and Time and History. Howard’s work is increasingly perceived as a modern continuation of the gloomy, homegrown literature pioneered by giants such as Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, and London. For decades known as one of the Big Three Weird Tales writers, he is now also being studied and respected as a Texan writer, a 1930s writer, and a classic American writer. My, how times have changed. A few decades ago, critics and reviewers dismissed Conan as adolescent fantasies for perpetually adolescent minds. Exciting and action-packed and passionate? Yes! But Art? Literature? Fuhgettaboutit. Granted, not everyone thought that way. Fritz Leiber’s REH criticism was uncommonly perceptive, and remains as useful now as when it was written decades ago. [He coined the term Sword-and-Sorcery, now being considered for inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary to describe the Conan stories.] And most fans have never heard the great anecdote L. Sprague de Camp relates in his autobiography Time and Chance, about his enjoyable afternoon spent in Tolkien’s garage study, drinking and conversing with the legendary fantasist. When the subject turned to Howard, de Camp fully expected Tolkien — an infamous curmudgeon when it came to modern fantasy — to dismiss the Texan out of hand, if indeed he had read him at all. But to his surprise, Tolkien not only confirmed that he had read Howard, but admitted without shame that he “rather liked” the Conan tales — high praise indeed coming as it did from one of the harshest critics of the field. Still, the likes of Leiber and Tolkien were exceptions. According to most of Howard’s fellow professionals, his work was forever marred by its pulp roots and his legendary psychological problems. Today, such opinions are as outdated as a ’59 Edsel. The cheap, gaudy paperbacks of yore are now deluxe illustrated volumes lovingly restored to match Howard’s original typescripts. Fantasy authors routinely credit Howard as a seminal influence revered among their ranks. Critical books and magazines have prompted teachers to finally include Howard on reading lists and syllabi. (I recently read a feature about one such teacher in the Antelope Valley Press, a popular Southern California newspaper with a readership of 250,000 — apparently his assigning Howard to students as extra credit caused a stampede to nearby bookstores, making Howard a sellout for miles around!)To readers whose last experience with Howard was reading Conan as a teenager, all of this may seem shocking. But to those of us who have been enmeshed in Howard studies for a long time, getting face-time in The Washington Post from a Pulitzer Prize-winner is merely the latest in a string of breakthroughs for the Texan.Back in the late 1960s, when science-fiction grandmaster L. Sprague de Camp ushered the whole Conan saga into paperback for the first time, the resulting surge in Conan’s popularity created a tidal wave known ever since as the “Howard Boom.” It was a heady time for fans — virtually everything Howard ever wrote was published in one form or another. Incomplete stories, high school newspaper articles, juvenilia — nothing was too unfinished or just plain bad to stick into a paperback and foist upon Conan fanatics. Boxing tales, westerns, and detective stories were all encased in covers deceptively hinting at Sword-and-Sorcery pleasures, each emblazoned with “By the creator of CONAN!” Readers were grateful for the deluge, even while lamenting that some critics were judging Howard not by his best work but by haphazard paperbacks containing his very worst writing, stuff he never intended to publish.As the Howard Boom died out in the early ’80s, scholars quietly went through a decade of sifting through all of this new material and reëvaluating his reputation. Those who came to Howard as Conan fans often left with a newfound respect for his poetry, westerns, crusader tales, horror, and boxing stories. Crucially, a well-reviewed critical book called The Dark Barbarian appeared in 1984 from a respected academic press. Meticulously assembled and edited by critic Don Herron, it intelligently covered the whole of Howard’s output, demonstrating that the creator of Conan could and should be taken more seriously. A few years later, several volumes of Howard’s letters were published by Necronomicon Press, showing “crazy” Howard in a light few had fathomed: as a savvy businessman, a frequent, wide-ranging traveler, a good friend, and a passionate literary artist all-too-aware of the way people perceived him.As time passed, Howard’s hometown at long last began to preserve the legacy of their most famous resident. In 1986, a group of fans and civic leaders in Cross Plains combined forces to establish Robert E. Howard Days, a festival that takes place the second weekend each June to celebrate Howard’s life and work. Over the years it has grown into a vastly entertaining mini-convention hosting over a hundred fans, complete with tours, panels, awards, a banquet, and viewings of all the places about which Howard worked, traveled, and wrote. The original house Howard lived and wrote in has been beatifically restored into one of the country’s most charming literary museums, prompting its addition to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. Once a forgotten figure in Cross Plains, Howard now is the town’s shining light. The same year Howard Days began, his former girlfriend Novalyne Price-Ellis, then an elderly retired schoolteacher, published an autobiographical book called One Who Walked Alone about her years spent dating REH at the end of his life. The volume revealed Howard to be a much more conscientious and dedicated craftsman than even his most ardent fans had suspected. Howard’s passion for the history and culture of his beloved Southwest, his trenchant explanations of the thematic threads tying together his oeuvre, and his insistence on the artistry underlying his pulp writing opened up new avenues of study. When in 1996 the book was made into a critically praised film titled The Whole Wide World, starring Renée Zellweger and Vincent D’Onofrio (the movie appeared on over fifty critics’ Top Ten lists for that year), Howard’s appeal broadened outside his fantasy roots yet again, sometimes attracting fans in strange places. (For instance, in recent years I have noticed a number of new women at Howard Days — apparently The Whole Wide World has been screened on Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen Network cable channel so often that it has made Howard a romantic figure among housewives!)Because of his letters, Novalyne’s book and film, and various other interviews and evidence, Howard’s personality has now been radically re-defined in the minds of fans. Previous generations took it at face value that Howard was, in a word, nuts — a crazed, paranoid eccentric living a schizophrenic life comprised of half reality and half fantasy, whose writing poured out in lengthy marathon fits of genius that eventually culminated in a senseless Oedipal suicide. Today, much more is known about Howard’s life and motivations, and the old gossipy tales have lost their power to convince. By degrees, the dominant image of Howard the Crazed Nut has given way to Howard the Misunderstood Artist. By the time John Milius recorded his interview for a new Conan the Barbarian DVD in 2000, gleefully recounting all the silly old canards of a schizoid Howard haunted by the ghost of Conan and holed up in a boarded-up house with a shotgun sweating his terror-filled nights away, most fans knew better than to believe any part of the tale. Throughout most of the ’80s and ’90s Howard studies were going gangbusters, yet the publishing of the actual stories was moribund, lost to legal wrangling among various parties intent on gaining control of Howard’s valuable literary properties. Conglomerates with money to burn brought Conan back in a series of ill-advised projects. From a risible Saturday morning cartoon to lame comic-book retreads to a wretched live-action television show, each attempt to recapture the Boom magic flopped among fans, who pined for more faithful and intelligent fare geared to match their newfound respect for the author.The Boom’s pimply-faced teens had grown up, and no longer would they gobble down the latest tripe passed off as “faithful to Howard.” They wanted the real thing, presented with the class that the author deserved.Eventually, they got it. One by one the lawsuits were settled, the lawyers faded away, and it became possible to publish Howard in something resembling a principled fashion. In 1996 Baen came out with seven paperbacks containing much of Howard’s non-Conan output, but scant advertising and publicity combined with corrupt texts doomed the series to only moderate success and no reprintings. Efforts by English publisher Wandering Star to produce lavishly illustrated and textually pure volumes of Howard’s best work, a “Robert E. Howard Library of Classics,” were more successful. Six books have been released to date, all widely praised for their scholarship and presentation. The stunning quality of these expensive collectors’ volumes attracted the interest of Del Rey, who is now filling bookstores with affordable trade-paper and hard-cover editions of each. It was this series, specifically designed to promote Howard as a classic American author worthy of critical attention, that caught Pulitzer Prize winner Dirda’s attention and prompted his Washington Post piece.In the wake of Wandering Star and Del Rey, other publishers began filling the marketplace with an array of riches that have fans talking delightedly of a second Howard Boom. Wildside Press is currently producing a ten-volume hardcover set encompassing all of Howard’s classic Weird Tales works, and they have other volumes out dedicated to his detective, crusader, humorous boxing, and western tales. Last year Bison Books, a prestigious academic press based at the University of Nebraska, released five elegant hardcovers of Howard’s best non-Conan work, each edited and introduced by a longtime Howard scholar. Girasol Books, a pulp reprint house based in Canada, has released two massive books containing Howard’s complete Weird Tales output (including not only stories, but also all of his WT poems and letters to the editor), with the pages scanned directly from the pulps in facsimile form, exactly as they appeared in "The Unique Magazine" more than seventy years ago.And all of that just covers Howard’s original stories. The previously mentioned critical anthology, 1984’s The Dark Barbarian, has just been reprinted by Wildside Press in an affordable paperback edition, and in 2004 the same press released a captivating sequel titled The Barbaric Triumph. A book of Howard’s complete poems — all seven hundred of them! — is in the works, set to be illustrated by famed Hellboy artist Mike Mignola. Several new Howard bibliographies are coming out next year, their gargantuan proportions a testament to the amount of Howardia produced over the last few decades. And scholar Mark Finn just completed the first full-length biography of Howard since 1983’s seminal work in the field, Dark Valley Destiny by L. Sprague de Camp. Titled Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard and weighing in at almost four hundred pages, Finn’s tome will hit bookstores in November. The buzz is that it’s good; watch for it.Publishers are not the only ones pushing Howard in the modern marketplace. A Swedish media conglomerate, Paradox Entertainment, has spent the last few years buying up multimedia rights to Howard’s work, and they are gung-ho about reintroducing Conan and other characters to a whole new generation of fans. On the live-action front, a Bran Mak Morn movie has already been greenlighted, with movies based on Solomon Kane and Conan also in various stages of pre-production. As for animated films, a full-length feature based on the Conan tale “Red Nails” is nearing completion. Video games, Hyborian pastiches, comics... in all of these areas Howard and Conan is being re-seeded into the pop culture sphere almost faster than one can keep up.And let’s not forget the fans. The long-running organization REHupa (The Robert E. Howard United Press Association) has entered its thirty-fourth year of continuous existence, and various editors are producing books, chapbooks, and literary journals at an impressive clip, using modern production techniques to eclipse in both quality and quantity the mountain of material published during the first Howard Boom. An example: my own semiprofessional journal, The Cimmerian, pays three cents a word, appears bi-monthly (monthly during this centennial year), and is focused like a laser on Howard’s life and work. I say that any author supporting a paying market for literary criticism seventy years after his death has done something right.So, is this really a second Howard Boom? I think so, yes. Quieter than the halcyon, Frazetta-illustrated ’70s for sure, but perhaps in the final analysis a more mature, more permanent phenomenon. It’s undeniable that Howard has broken through the glass ceiling of “mere pulp writer” and into the permanent realm of cultural and literary relevance shared by fellow adventure authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dashiell Hammett, and Ian Fleming. There is no doubt in my mind this trend will continue, with Howard creeping further into arenas where he used to be persona non grata. For the first time, one is seeing REH panels at academic venues such as the yearly PCA/ACA (Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association) conference. He’s also starting to be included in critical books released by mainstream academic presses, such as the recent Conversations with Texas Writers (University of Texas Press, 2005), a book where Howard had the distinct honor of being the only dead author represented.Perhaps most tellingly, Howard has gone international in a serious way. Forty volumes of his work, including minor miscellany such as his autobiographical novel Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, have been published in France alone. Russia has seen a hundred Conan books, both original Howard and pastiche, while countries as varied as Germany, Italy, Poland, and Japan all have REH available in translation and enough fans to make each new edition a viable publishing proposition. Once the new movies hit Hollywood’s increasingly internationalized marketplace, followed by the previously described onslaught of centennial publishing detritus, who knows how Howard’s worldwide popularity and literary reputation will be affected? Will we someday see Robert E. Howard and Conan join fellow pulpsters Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and H.P. Lovecraft in prestigious venues such as The Library of America? I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. Nor I daresay would Howard’s many fans, scholars, and professional champions, all of whom have known for some time that his best work is eminently worthy of such honors.Authors who remain read over the decades have a way of aging like fine wine. A hundred years on, Howard has yet to lose his foothold in the minds of appreciative readers, and every year he gains new supporters in academic and critical circles. New generations are primed to rediscover Conan and his brethren all over again. Now that we’ve reached the end of Howard’s first century, it’s worth asking what the next hundred years will hold. What do you think — will 2106 pass with REH finally forgotten along with the pulps that spawned him? Fifty years ago, the possibility of Howard’s reputation surviving the vast majority of his best-selling contemporaries was remote. But that was then. Nowadays, the future is looking pretty bright for lovers of Sword-&-Sorcery, and for the brilliant Texan who conjured the genre out of the darkness for us. Happy Birthday, Two-Gun.
* * *Leo Grin is editor of The Cimmerian, a paying semiprofessional journal dedicated to the study of Robert E. Howard and his work. Contact him at editor@thecimmerian.com.
Howard once said of Conan "He is the damnedest bastard that ever was!" It seems that most will only remember him for Conan he created so much more, and even though he was verbose (he got piad by the word) he was also prolific, and i feel through his writings that i got to know him just a little bit. I pulled one of my favorite stories off the shelf today and re-read it "The Devil in Iron" it still makes me want to stand on the edge of the coffee table with sword in hand and leap to adventures unknown......ah to be 13 again!
Sadly at the age of 30 in 1936 he climbed into the front seat of his car and blew his brains out.....We may never know why and the world was cheated of the things that still had not worked their way out of Howards fevered imagination.....
maybe i'll write a Howardesque story......then again can you truly emulate your heroes?
Here's to new generations discovering barbarians, and sword weilding puritans!
Later.....
commentary by Leo Grin
On January 22, 2006, at a desolate crossroads in the windswept cowtown of Peaster, Texas, a gathering of men stood reverently in a chill downpour. These weren’t local ranch hands or mud-soaked oil riggers, they were fantasy fans — editors, scholars, and aficionados, from places as far away as Washington DC, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Each had journeyed hundreds of miles through sleet and rain on a Quixotic quest of tribute. For exactly one hundred years earlier, in that isolated Texas hamlet, the ailing wife of a grizzled frontier doctor gave birth to a man whose name still echoes like a grim knell across the fantasy genre’s dreamscape. The father of Sword-and-Sorcery. The creator of Conan.Robert Ervin Howard. That same morning, sleepy-eyed readers of The Washington Post were treated to a book column by popular critic Michael Dirda, who seized upon the occasion of Howard’s one-hundredth birthday to review Del Rey Books’ sumptuous new series of fully-illustrated, textually-restored Conan books. Dirda assured readers who harbor a dislike for pulp fantasy that “approached as guilty pleasures, [the Conan stories] can be wonderfully entertaining,” then made a measured case for Howard’s literary worth. “Howard’s Conan chronicles,” Dirda wrote, “are... studies in the clash of Barbarism and Civilization. In Howard’s grim and all too realistic view, the barbarians are always at the gate, and once a culture allows itself to grow soft, decadent or simply neglectful, it will be swept away by the primitive and ruthless.” He ended with a judgment that is old hat among fantasy fans, but one which many critics and academics are only now belatedly acknowledging: “Apart from Fritz Leiber’s tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, sword and sorcery adventures don’t come any better.” Amen. As criticism goes, Dirda’s insightful analysis is a far cry from sixty years ago, when playwright H.R. Hays greeted Howard’s first American hardcover appearance — the now-classic 1946 Arkham House release Skull-Face and Others — with a scathing review in The New York Times titled “Superman on a Psychotic Bender.” Of course, Dirda’s no long-dead, forgotten blowhard — he won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Clearly, time and age have been good to Robert E. Howard. The man whom H.P. Lovecraft christened “Two-Gun Bob” left us a large, fascinating body of work encompassing not only the birth of the Sword-and-Sorcery genre, but also the misery of the Great Depression, the bittersweet memory of the American frontier, and the millennial sweep of War and Time and History. Howard’s work is increasingly perceived as a modern continuation of the gloomy, homegrown literature pioneered by giants such as Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, and London. For decades known as one of the Big Three Weird Tales writers, he is now also being studied and respected as a Texan writer, a 1930s writer, and a classic American writer. My, how times have changed. A few decades ago, critics and reviewers dismissed Conan as adolescent fantasies for perpetually adolescent minds. Exciting and action-packed and passionate? Yes! But Art? Literature? Fuhgettaboutit. Granted, not everyone thought that way. Fritz Leiber’s REH criticism was uncommonly perceptive, and remains as useful now as when it was written decades ago. [He coined the term Sword-and-Sorcery, now being considered for inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary to describe the Conan stories.] And most fans have never heard the great anecdote L. Sprague de Camp relates in his autobiography Time and Chance, about his enjoyable afternoon spent in Tolkien’s garage study, drinking and conversing with the legendary fantasist. When the subject turned to Howard, de Camp fully expected Tolkien — an infamous curmudgeon when it came to modern fantasy — to dismiss the Texan out of hand, if indeed he had read him at all. But to his surprise, Tolkien not only confirmed that he had read Howard, but admitted without shame that he “rather liked” the Conan tales — high praise indeed coming as it did from one of the harshest critics of the field. Still, the likes of Leiber and Tolkien were exceptions. According to most of Howard’s fellow professionals, his work was forever marred by its pulp roots and his legendary psychological problems. Today, such opinions are as outdated as a ’59 Edsel. The cheap, gaudy paperbacks of yore are now deluxe illustrated volumes lovingly restored to match Howard’s original typescripts. Fantasy authors routinely credit Howard as a seminal influence revered among their ranks. Critical books and magazines have prompted teachers to finally include Howard on reading lists and syllabi. (I recently read a feature about one such teacher in the Antelope Valley Press, a popular Southern California newspaper with a readership of 250,000 — apparently his assigning Howard to students as extra credit caused a stampede to nearby bookstores, making Howard a sellout for miles around!)To readers whose last experience with Howard was reading Conan as a teenager, all of this may seem shocking. But to those of us who have been enmeshed in Howard studies for a long time, getting face-time in The Washington Post from a Pulitzer Prize-winner is merely the latest in a string of breakthroughs for the Texan.Back in the late 1960s, when science-fiction grandmaster L. Sprague de Camp ushered the whole Conan saga into paperback for the first time, the resulting surge in Conan’s popularity created a tidal wave known ever since as the “Howard Boom.” It was a heady time for fans — virtually everything Howard ever wrote was published in one form or another. Incomplete stories, high school newspaper articles, juvenilia — nothing was too unfinished or just plain bad to stick into a paperback and foist upon Conan fanatics. Boxing tales, westerns, and detective stories were all encased in covers deceptively hinting at Sword-and-Sorcery pleasures, each emblazoned with “By the creator of CONAN!” Readers were grateful for the deluge, even while lamenting that some critics were judging Howard not by his best work but by haphazard paperbacks containing his very worst writing, stuff he never intended to publish.As the Howard Boom died out in the early ’80s, scholars quietly went through a decade of sifting through all of this new material and reëvaluating his reputation. Those who came to Howard as Conan fans often left with a newfound respect for his poetry, westerns, crusader tales, horror, and boxing stories. Crucially, a well-reviewed critical book called The Dark Barbarian appeared in 1984 from a respected academic press. Meticulously assembled and edited by critic Don Herron, it intelligently covered the whole of Howard’s output, demonstrating that the creator of Conan could and should be taken more seriously. A few years later, several volumes of Howard’s letters were published by Necronomicon Press, showing “crazy” Howard in a light few had fathomed: as a savvy businessman, a frequent, wide-ranging traveler, a good friend, and a passionate literary artist all-too-aware of the way people perceived him.As time passed, Howard’s hometown at long last began to preserve the legacy of their most famous resident. In 1986, a group of fans and civic leaders in Cross Plains combined forces to establish Robert E. Howard Days, a festival that takes place the second weekend each June to celebrate Howard’s life and work. Over the years it has grown into a vastly entertaining mini-convention hosting over a hundred fans, complete with tours, panels, awards, a banquet, and viewings of all the places about which Howard worked, traveled, and wrote. The original house Howard lived and wrote in has been beatifically restored into one of the country’s most charming literary museums, prompting its addition to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. Once a forgotten figure in Cross Plains, Howard now is the town’s shining light. The same year Howard Days began, his former girlfriend Novalyne Price-Ellis, then an elderly retired schoolteacher, published an autobiographical book called One Who Walked Alone about her years spent dating REH at the end of his life. The volume revealed Howard to be a much more conscientious and dedicated craftsman than even his most ardent fans had suspected. Howard’s passion for the history and culture of his beloved Southwest, his trenchant explanations of the thematic threads tying together his oeuvre, and his insistence on the artistry underlying his pulp writing opened up new avenues of study. When in 1996 the book was made into a critically praised film titled The Whole Wide World, starring Renée Zellweger and Vincent D’Onofrio (the movie appeared on over fifty critics’ Top Ten lists for that year), Howard’s appeal broadened outside his fantasy roots yet again, sometimes attracting fans in strange places. (For instance, in recent years I have noticed a number of new women at Howard Days — apparently The Whole Wide World has been screened on Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen Network cable channel so often that it has made Howard a romantic figure among housewives!)Because of his letters, Novalyne’s book and film, and various other interviews and evidence, Howard’s personality has now been radically re-defined in the minds of fans. Previous generations took it at face value that Howard was, in a word, nuts — a crazed, paranoid eccentric living a schizophrenic life comprised of half reality and half fantasy, whose writing poured out in lengthy marathon fits of genius that eventually culminated in a senseless Oedipal suicide. Today, much more is known about Howard’s life and motivations, and the old gossipy tales have lost their power to convince. By degrees, the dominant image of Howard the Crazed Nut has given way to Howard the Misunderstood Artist. By the time John Milius recorded his interview for a new Conan the Barbarian DVD in 2000, gleefully recounting all the silly old canards of a schizoid Howard haunted by the ghost of Conan and holed up in a boarded-up house with a shotgun sweating his terror-filled nights away, most fans knew better than to believe any part of the tale. Throughout most of the ’80s and ’90s Howard studies were going gangbusters, yet the publishing of the actual stories was moribund, lost to legal wrangling among various parties intent on gaining control of Howard’s valuable literary properties. Conglomerates with money to burn brought Conan back in a series of ill-advised projects. From a risible Saturday morning cartoon to lame comic-book retreads to a wretched live-action television show, each attempt to recapture the Boom magic flopped among fans, who pined for more faithful and intelligent fare geared to match their newfound respect for the author.The Boom’s pimply-faced teens had grown up, and no longer would they gobble down the latest tripe passed off as “faithful to Howard.” They wanted the real thing, presented with the class that the author deserved.Eventually, they got it. One by one the lawsuits were settled, the lawyers faded away, and it became possible to publish Howard in something resembling a principled fashion. In 1996 Baen came out with seven paperbacks containing much of Howard’s non-Conan output, but scant advertising and publicity combined with corrupt texts doomed the series to only moderate success and no reprintings. Efforts by English publisher Wandering Star to produce lavishly illustrated and textually pure volumes of Howard’s best work, a “Robert E. Howard Library of Classics,” were more successful. Six books have been released to date, all widely praised for their scholarship and presentation. The stunning quality of these expensive collectors’ volumes attracted the interest of Del Rey, who is now filling bookstores with affordable trade-paper and hard-cover editions of each. It was this series, specifically designed to promote Howard as a classic American author worthy of critical attention, that caught Pulitzer Prize winner Dirda’s attention and prompted his Washington Post piece.In the wake of Wandering Star and Del Rey, other publishers began filling the marketplace with an array of riches that have fans talking delightedly of a second Howard Boom. Wildside Press is currently producing a ten-volume hardcover set encompassing all of Howard’s classic Weird Tales works, and they have other volumes out dedicated to his detective, crusader, humorous boxing, and western tales. Last year Bison Books, a prestigious academic press based at the University of Nebraska, released five elegant hardcovers of Howard’s best non-Conan work, each edited and introduced by a longtime Howard scholar. Girasol Books, a pulp reprint house based in Canada, has released two massive books containing Howard’s complete Weird Tales output (including not only stories, but also all of his WT poems and letters to the editor), with the pages scanned directly from the pulps in facsimile form, exactly as they appeared in "The Unique Magazine" more than seventy years ago.And all of that just covers Howard’s original stories. The previously mentioned critical anthology, 1984’s The Dark Barbarian, has just been reprinted by Wildside Press in an affordable paperback edition, and in 2004 the same press released a captivating sequel titled The Barbaric Triumph. A book of Howard’s complete poems — all seven hundred of them! — is in the works, set to be illustrated by famed Hellboy artist Mike Mignola. Several new Howard bibliographies are coming out next year, their gargantuan proportions a testament to the amount of Howardia produced over the last few decades. And scholar Mark Finn just completed the first full-length biography of Howard since 1983’s seminal work in the field, Dark Valley Destiny by L. Sprague de Camp. Titled Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard and weighing in at almost four hundred pages, Finn’s tome will hit bookstores in November. The buzz is that it’s good; watch for it.Publishers are not the only ones pushing Howard in the modern marketplace. A Swedish media conglomerate, Paradox Entertainment, has spent the last few years buying up multimedia rights to Howard’s work, and they are gung-ho about reintroducing Conan and other characters to a whole new generation of fans. On the live-action front, a Bran Mak Morn movie has already been greenlighted, with movies based on Solomon Kane and Conan also in various stages of pre-production. As for animated films, a full-length feature based on the Conan tale “Red Nails” is nearing completion. Video games, Hyborian pastiches, comics... in all of these areas Howard and Conan is being re-seeded into the pop culture sphere almost faster than one can keep up.And let’s not forget the fans. The long-running organization REHupa (The Robert E. Howard United Press Association) has entered its thirty-fourth year of continuous existence, and various editors are producing books, chapbooks, and literary journals at an impressive clip, using modern production techniques to eclipse in both quality and quantity the mountain of material published during the first Howard Boom. An example: my own semiprofessional journal, The Cimmerian, pays three cents a word, appears bi-monthly (monthly during this centennial year), and is focused like a laser on Howard’s life and work. I say that any author supporting a paying market for literary criticism seventy years after his death has done something right.So, is this really a second Howard Boom? I think so, yes. Quieter than the halcyon, Frazetta-illustrated ’70s for sure, but perhaps in the final analysis a more mature, more permanent phenomenon. It’s undeniable that Howard has broken through the glass ceiling of “mere pulp writer” and into the permanent realm of cultural and literary relevance shared by fellow adventure authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dashiell Hammett, and Ian Fleming. There is no doubt in my mind this trend will continue, with Howard creeping further into arenas where he used to be persona non grata. For the first time, one is seeing REH panels at academic venues such as the yearly PCA/ACA (Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association) conference. He’s also starting to be included in critical books released by mainstream academic presses, such as the recent Conversations with Texas Writers (University of Texas Press, 2005), a book where Howard had the distinct honor of being the only dead author represented.Perhaps most tellingly, Howard has gone international in a serious way. Forty volumes of his work, including minor miscellany such as his autobiographical novel Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, have been published in France alone. Russia has seen a hundred Conan books, both original Howard and pastiche, while countries as varied as Germany, Italy, Poland, and Japan all have REH available in translation and enough fans to make each new edition a viable publishing proposition. Once the new movies hit Hollywood’s increasingly internationalized marketplace, followed by the previously described onslaught of centennial publishing detritus, who knows how Howard’s worldwide popularity and literary reputation will be affected? Will we someday see Robert E. Howard and Conan join fellow pulpsters Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and H.P. Lovecraft in prestigious venues such as The Library of America? I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. Nor I daresay would Howard’s many fans, scholars, and professional champions, all of whom have known for some time that his best work is eminently worthy of such honors.Authors who remain read over the decades have a way of aging like fine wine. A hundred years on, Howard has yet to lose his foothold in the minds of appreciative readers, and every year he gains new supporters in academic and critical circles. New generations are primed to rediscover Conan and his brethren all over again. Now that we’ve reached the end of Howard’s first century, it’s worth asking what the next hundred years will hold. What do you think — will 2106 pass with REH finally forgotten along with the pulps that spawned him? Fifty years ago, the possibility of Howard’s reputation surviving the vast majority of his best-selling contemporaries was remote. But that was then. Nowadays, the future is looking pretty bright for lovers of Sword-&-Sorcery, and for the brilliant Texan who conjured the genre out of the darkness for us. Happy Birthday, Two-Gun.
* * *Leo Grin is editor of The Cimmerian, a paying semiprofessional journal dedicated to the study of Robert E. Howard and his work. Contact him at editor@thecimmerian.com.
Howard once said of Conan "He is the damnedest bastard that ever was!" It seems that most will only remember him for Conan he created so much more, and even though he was verbose (he got piad by the word) he was also prolific, and i feel through his writings that i got to know him just a little bit. I pulled one of my favorite stories off the shelf today and re-read it "The Devil in Iron" it still makes me want to stand on the edge of the coffee table with sword in hand and leap to adventures unknown......ah to be 13 again!
Sadly at the age of 30 in 1936 he climbed into the front seat of his car and blew his brains out.....We may never know why and the world was cheated of the things that still had not worked their way out of Howards fevered imagination.....
maybe i'll write a Howardesque story......then again can you truly emulate your heroes?
Here's to new generations discovering barbarians, and sword weilding puritans!
Later.....
WTF!
Ok so i just finished watching Stuart Gordons' latest film adaption of my FAVORITE H.P. Lovecraft story "Dreams in the Witch House" and here is my question.....Why do these stupid jerk off wannabe Hollywood types change and deviate so far from the original story? Ok so Lovecraft wrote in a tedious style and published the bulk of his stories in pulp magazines in the 20's and 30's but i still think that his stories are relevant and touch that dark place in all of us......and i'm fairly sure he has been given the credit for being the father of the modern gothic horror story so again WTF?
The only film adaption I have ever seen that even comes close is a film called "The Ressurected" that stars Chris Sarandon and is based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
The Lurking Fear
The Unnameable
From Beyond
The Dunwich Horror
have all been adapted as well and all fall seriously short of the original source material
We as fans need to do something...i'm just not sure what exactly!
I myself have started a Lovecraftian story which I will eventually finish at some point (I hope) here is a tease (Now keep in mind this is only my sad attempt to emulate one of my heroes and it is still rough...be kind)
Francis Scott Kessler
4242 North Olive St., Apt. H
Dunwich, Massachusetts 64118
Dear Scott,
I count myself fortunate that I was able to obtain your new address from a mutual female acquaintance. First let me say that that I was sorry to hear about the sudden passing of your mother, I know the two of you were close. Second let me offer you my congratulations on your recent nuptials, I had figured you for a lifelong bachelor; however my reason for this letter is of a more serious tone, I have something most disturbing to relate to you and I feel certain that only a fellow kindred and devotee of the esoteric and the macabre would appreciate the following narrative and give it the seriousness that it deserves.
As you may or may not be aware recently, I obtained a contract with a small and obscure publishing company most noted for its forays into Horror and Science Fiction. My novel was to center around a character that you and I had discussed over many a pitcher of beer some years earlier when we were both living in California.
My Editor has a small vacation home in the State of Kentucky near the Mammoth Caves National Park and offered it to me as a place to write and do my research, he said that it was well secluded and would offer up very few distractions, having never been to that part of the country and me always being up for a new adventure took him up on his offer without much hesitation. My sister dropped me off that morning at the airport armed only with my laptop, a few weeks worth of clothes, a handful of books, and my twelve hundred dollar advance, I boarded the plane eager to get started. The stewardess that seated me was very attractive; do they still call them that? Or was that incredibly sexist of me? The flight itself was uneventful, although I was rather impressed with my accommodations my editor Jim had actually sent me to Louisville first class, it’s amazing how much larger the seats really are.
The plane landed a few hours later, a car had been arranged for my use and soon I was speeding east on a four-lane highway. The country side was actually quite remarkable, gentle rolling hills, blue green grass, and thick dense forests of eldritch old hickory and cedar trees that crowded closely in on the highway which in some places actually cut through solid limestone.
A mere two hours later I found myself in a town appropriately named Cave City, for it bordered Mammoth Cave National Park and several privately owned caves. I stopped at a convenience store to relieve my aching bladder and ask for directions. The girl behind the counter was very friendly and didn’t quite fit the mental image I had conjured, she was not; to my disappointment barefoot, pregnant, missing teeth, or wearing overalls, I’m told you will only see that on the extreme eastern part of the state. Another half hour finds me pulling up to a small log cabin set squarely on a hilltop overlooking the State Park; I immediately unpacked my belongings and put them neatly away. The cabin consisted mostly of one room of appropriate furnishings, with the bath independent and adjacent to the kitchen, the bedroom was nothing more than a loft obscured by a half wall. There was as I noted much to my dismay no television or radio to be found, no distractions indeed! After rummaging through the cabinets it was apparent the first order of business was to stock the larder, but I decided that this could wait until tomorrow as I was near to exhaustion from my trip. I got back in the car and made my way back down to a small diner that I had passed on my way to the cabin. I went inside and sat down it was only when I ordered a plate of Barbecue that I noticed everyone eying me intently, and it seemed to me that everyone was rather Batrachian and slightly Brachycephalic in aspect, although I suppose it may have been I was simply tired. When I asked my waitress about my observations she simply remarked that the diner was family owned and operated and that everyone present, aside from me was in some way or another related.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I would really know the truth of my first observation of the local inhabitants. During my first week alone in the cabin I made considerable progress on my novel and a few short stories, however very early one morning in the pre-dawn hours I was awakened by a sound so utterly alien that at first I doubted as to my state of consciousness, but slowly blinking the hazy blur of sleep from my eyes I was sure that I was sure that hearing the low muffled chant of many voices coming from somewhere out in the darkness. My natural state being highly curious I hastily dressed in the dark and ran to the deck to throw open the sliding glass doors. The frigid starless night rushed in on me causing me to shiver, I looked out over the gentle slope with my flashlight trying to pinpoint the source of the music, but as suddenly as I had been awakened by the strange music, it abruptly stopped. I stayed awake for the next three hours hastily picking away at the keys on my laptop writing and listening for the strange haunting melody that had awakened me from a sound sleep, but to no avail.
The next few days were uneventful except that I found myself unable to concentrate on my work as my imagination had been captured by the strange and slightly mellifluous chanting voices in the night.
On the fourth day after hearing the music I decided to distract myself with a guided tour of the neighboring caves I reasoned that I could somehow work them into my current narrative or perhaps a future yarn. After paying my twelve dollars and once inside my consciousness was invaded with the feeling of such vast antiquity that it temporarily overwhelmed me. Our guide proceeded to slowly unveil the history of the caves; apparently they had been mined for salt-peter for the manufacture of gun powder during several wars, and used for a hospital for tuberculosis patients. But it wasn’t until our guide stopped at a peculiar shaped outcropping of rock that my interest was piqued. The formation was known simply as giants coffin and that according to local folklore it had been used by early native Americans and by a local church cult in recent history to perform hideous dark rituals of unspeakable horror (the guides words not mine). When I tried to inquire about his story in further detail he gave me a furtive look of extreme disdain and promptly moved the tour on to the next attraction. After crawling through a very narrow passage in the cave referred to as fat mans’ misery I tried to further press our guide in private about the coffin shaped rock; he said in a hushed low tone that it would be in my best interest being an outsider to leave the legend well enough alone. As I have said earlier and as you well know I am much to curious to be daunted by his obvious childish attempts to warn me away, I decided right then and there that I would track down the church in the legend and investigate the strange folklore in further detail.
My first stop was the local historical society. The woman who ran the local office, a Mrs. Feldman was remarkably unhelpful and actually asked me to leave immediately in no uncertain terms when I mentioned wanting to find out about the church in the guides story.
Ah maybe if i leave you hanging you'll come back (provided you come here to begin with)...lol
Later....
The only film adaption I have ever seen that even comes close is a film called "The Ressurected" that stars Chris Sarandon and is based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
The Lurking Fear
The Unnameable
From Beyond
The Dunwich Horror
have all been adapted as well and all fall seriously short of the original source material
We as fans need to do something...i'm just not sure what exactly!
I myself have started a Lovecraftian story which I will eventually finish at some point (I hope) here is a tease (Now keep in mind this is only my sad attempt to emulate one of my heroes and it is still rough...be kind)
Francis Scott Kessler
4242 North Olive St., Apt. H
Dunwich, Massachusetts 64118
Dear Scott,
I count myself fortunate that I was able to obtain your new address from a mutual female acquaintance. First let me say that that I was sorry to hear about the sudden passing of your mother, I know the two of you were close. Second let me offer you my congratulations on your recent nuptials, I had figured you for a lifelong bachelor; however my reason for this letter is of a more serious tone, I have something most disturbing to relate to you and I feel certain that only a fellow kindred and devotee of the esoteric and the macabre would appreciate the following narrative and give it the seriousness that it deserves.
As you may or may not be aware recently, I obtained a contract with a small and obscure publishing company most noted for its forays into Horror and Science Fiction. My novel was to center around a character that you and I had discussed over many a pitcher of beer some years earlier when we were both living in California.
My Editor has a small vacation home in the State of Kentucky near the Mammoth Caves National Park and offered it to me as a place to write and do my research, he said that it was well secluded and would offer up very few distractions, having never been to that part of the country and me always being up for a new adventure took him up on his offer without much hesitation. My sister dropped me off that morning at the airport armed only with my laptop, a few weeks worth of clothes, a handful of books, and my twelve hundred dollar advance, I boarded the plane eager to get started. The stewardess that seated me was very attractive; do they still call them that? Or was that incredibly sexist of me? The flight itself was uneventful, although I was rather impressed with my accommodations my editor Jim had actually sent me to Louisville first class, it’s amazing how much larger the seats really are.
The plane landed a few hours later, a car had been arranged for my use and soon I was speeding east on a four-lane highway. The country side was actually quite remarkable, gentle rolling hills, blue green grass, and thick dense forests of eldritch old hickory and cedar trees that crowded closely in on the highway which in some places actually cut through solid limestone.
A mere two hours later I found myself in a town appropriately named Cave City, for it bordered Mammoth Cave National Park and several privately owned caves. I stopped at a convenience store to relieve my aching bladder and ask for directions. The girl behind the counter was very friendly and didn’t quite fit the mental image I had conjured, she was not; to my disappointment barefoot, pregnant, missing teeth, or wearing overalls, I’m told you will only see that on the extreme eastern part of the state. Another half hour finds me pulling up to a small log cabin set squarely on a hilltop overlooking the State Park; I immediately unpacked my belongings and put them neatly away. The cabin consisted mostly of one room of appropriate furnishings, with the bath independent and adjacent to the kitchen, the bedroom was nothing more than a loft obscured by a half wall. There was as I noted much to my dismay no television or radio to be found, no distractions indeed! After rummaging through the cabinets it was apparent the first order of business was to stock the larder, but I decided that this could wait until tomorrow as I was near to exhaustion from my trip. I got back in the car and made my way back down to a small diner that I had passed on my way to the cabin. I went inside and sat down it was only when I ordered a plate of Barbecue that I noticed everyone eying me intently, and it seemed to me that everyone was rather Batrachian and slightly Brachycephalic in aspect, although I suppose it may have been I was simply tired. When I asked my waitress about my observations she simply remarked that the diner was family owned and operated and that everyone present, aside from me was in some way or another related.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I would really know the truth of my first observation of the local inhabitants. During my first week alone in the cabin I made considerable progress on my novel and a few short stories, however very early one morning in the pre-dawn hours I was awakened by a sound so utterly alien that at first I doubted as to my state of consciousness, but slowly blinking the hazy blur of sleep from my eyes I was sure that I was sure that hearing the low muffled chant of many voices coming from somewhere out in the darkness. My natural state being highly curious I hastily dressed in the dark and ran to the deck to throw open the sliding glass doors. The frigid starless night rushed in on me causing me to shiver, I looked out over the gentle slope with my flashlight trying to pinpoint the source of the music, but as suddenly as I had been awakened by the strange music, it abruptly stopped. I stayed awake for the next three hours hastily picking away at the keys on my laptop writing and listening for the strange haunting melody that had awakened me from a sound sleep, but to no avail.
The next few days were uneventful except that I found myself unable to concentrate on my work as my imagination had been captured by the strange and slightly mellifluous chanting voices in the night.
On the fourth day after hearing the music I decided to distract myself with a guided tour of the neighboring caves I reasoned that I could somehow work them into my current narrative or perhaps a future yarn. After paying my twelve dollars and once inside my consciousness was invaded with the feeling of such vast antiquity that it temporarily overwhelmed me. Our guide proceeded to slowly unveil the history of the caves; apparently they had been mined for salt-peter for the manufacture of gun powder during several wars, and used for a hospital for tuberculosis patients. But it wasn’t until our guide stopped at a peculiar shaped outcropping of rock that my interest was piqued. The formation was known simply as giants coffin and that according to local folklore it had been used by early native Americans and by a local church cult in recent history to perform hideous dark rituals of unspeakable horror (the guides words not mine). When I tried to inquire about his story in further detail he gave me a furtive look of extreme disdain and promptly moved the tour on to the next attraction. After crawling through a very narrow passage in the cave referred to as fat mans’ misery I tried to further press our guide in private about the coffin shaped rock; he said in a hushed low tone that it would be in my best interest being an outsider to leave the legend well enough alone. As I have said earlier and as you well know I am much to curious to be daunted by his obvious childish attempts to warn me away, I decided right then and there that I would track down the church in the legend and investigate the strange folklore in further detail.
My first stop was the local historical society. The woman who ran the local office, a Mrs. Feldman was remarkably unhelpful and actually asked me to leave immediately in no uncertain terms when I mentioned wanting to find out about the church in the guides story.
Ah maybe if i leave you hanging you'll come back (provided you come here to begin with)...lol
Later....
Strange Week
This week to say the least has been surreal......My wife's beloved pet bird Sakari (A blue streaked Lori) Passed on after being exposed to a very lethal bird ailment we think (Polyoma) and the bizarre death of Steve Irwin (One of my daughters personal heroes) it has been to say the least touchy around here......
Not to mention my wife tells me that when i get in a creative furvor I am very difficult to live with. She says when i'm like this i wear my emotions to close to the surface and they have a tendency to ooze out of my pores in strange, stupid and unusual ways.....
Poetry has always been my first avenue of retreat from the real world...when it comes to fiction i have a terrible tendency to re-write and edit myself to deah and end up scrapping the entire thing...with poetry i tend to just write it down and forget about it! which is something i like about blogging....its too much work to edit!...lol
Sunday afternnon
finds me sitting in a tub
of warm soapy water
contemplating the myriad rainbows
that exist in the tiny fragile bubbles
floting on the surface
an angel vision
as i close my eyes
to wash away the shampoo
from my hair
in her sistine smile
a hint
of the coming fire storm
of change
her black wings
slowly
fold in around me
gathering me into her
dead embrace
a hollow song
echoes through
the slightly open door
its malevolent chorus
banging around
inside my skull
i taste ashes on my tongue
Its time for my moisturizer
hmmmm........
Later......
Not to mention my wife tells me that when i get in a creative furvor I am very difficult to live with. She says when i'm like this i wear my emotions to close to the surface and they have a tendency to ooze out of my pores in strange, stupid and unusual ways.....
Poetry has always been my first avenue of retreat from the real world...when it comes to fiction i have a terrible tendency to re-write and edit myself to deah and end up scrapping the entire thing...with poetry i tend to just write it down and forget about it! which is something i like about blogging....its too much work to edit!...lol
Sunday afternnon
finds me sitting in a tub
of warm soapy water
contemplating the myriad rainbows
that exist in the tiny fragile bubbles
floting on the surface
an angel vision
as i close my eyes
to wash away the shampoo
from my hair
in her sistine smile
a hint
of the coming fire storm
of change
her black wings
slowly
fold in around me
gathering me into her
dead embrace
a hollow song
echoes through
the slightly open door
its malevolent chorus
banging around
inside my skull
i taste ashes on my tongue
Its time for my moisturizer
hmmmm........
Later...
Later......
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Work In Progress
Ok so it has been a few days and my vain attempt to post something everyday has gotten the better of me....
I thought i would post this story idea....it has been something that i have been toying with off and on for quite a long while now....my muse comes and goes all on its own and lately it has been hiding in the very deep alcoves of my brain...lol
Anyway keep in mind it is a work in progess so please be kind....
oh and by the way this is my intellectual property so don't steal it or I will have to hunt you down and drain you of your life...lol
(Intellectual property (IP) is an umbrella term used to refer to the object of a variety of laws, including patent law, copyright law, trademark law, trade secret law, industrial design law, and potentially others. These laws provide exclusive rights to certain parties and many of them implement government-granted monopolies. Copyrights, for example, generally allow only one party to make copies of a work.)
Prologue:
There it was staring me in the face, the Judgment card; divinatory meaning: a time of great and positive change, especially in the way we see ourselves, a new beginning. What the fuck? I thought, what next?
“Are you playing with those goddamn cards again?” Cody asked from the front seat while looking up at me in the rear view mirror.
“So what if I am?” I replied.
“Every time you play with those things you get fucking weird on me.”
The second card out of the deck, the Magician in the reverse position; divinatory meaning: a possible weakness or suppressed energy, or the need to use power responsibly. Was I becoming too reckless?
“What are you up to anyway?” He asked
“How many times do we need to have this conversation?” I asked
“You know I like to feel confident before we walk into these situations.”
“I think you put too much faith in those goddamn things!”
“And you put too much into that shot gun you carry under your coat.” was my comeback.
“It hasn’t failed me yet!” he pats it as though it were a cherished pet
“Neither have these cards.”
This is how it went almost every night, Cody and I are mechanics, for lack of a better term, you have a problem we fix it for the right price. Tonight we had been hired to abduct a gentleman named Randall Delgado; eldest son of Antoine Delgado, local crime lord. It seems Randall had gotten a little too friendly with someone’s daughter, and left her high and dry in the family way, I have always maintained that women aren’t good for much except getting one into trouble, but who am I to judge? I caught my ex cheating on me with my best friend so I killed her, but that is another story for another time.
“How do you want to handle this one?” I asked, as we neared the café where Randall would be seated with his bodyguards Jimmy and Vinny playing poker.
“What’s wrong with our usual?”
“Nothing I suppose, but don’t you ever get bored with the same old thing day in and day out?” I asked, as I laydown the next card, the Chariot: divinatory meaning: Will, great force of character, power or in this case, success.
“Well?” he asked
“We’re good to go.” I said, as I put the cards into my inside jacket pocket. We were imported talent; Chicago is not our usual territory our retainer was being overtly cautious. Cody was my brother I brought him into the business not long after he graduated college; I on the other hand had been in this line of work since I was sixteen. The Café was in the middle of the block with a large bullet proof window in front that had been painted over for privacy, the local mob used it as a hang out, sort of a private club if you will, we had obtained a blueprint from our employer a week earlier. Cody went around to the back pushing a shopping cart and dressed as a derelict, where he would sift through refuse bins and wait for my signal. There was a man posted out front sitting on a stool, he bristled as I approached. I suppose it’s not everyday that you see a man like me walking down the sidewalk. For the record I stand 6’ 3” a sinewy 200 pounds, I always dress head to toe in black regardless of the weather, and with a waist length mane the colour of raven’s wings I like to wear pulled back into a loose braid, not tomention the custom made sword cane always at my side, I suppose I could be considered by some to be impressive, if not suspect. He eyeballed me intently as I stopped roughly a foot away from his perch.
With my best theatrical British accent I said, “Ello mate would you happen to have a light?” As I simultaneously reached into my pocket, produced a platinum case and removed a Silk Cut. Rather rudely slapping the cigarette from my lips He said, “No, now beat it before I shove that cane up your foreign pansy pretty boy ass!” Oh dear he was making this too easy. I flashed him a toothy grin unsheathing my sharp pearlescent canines.“What the fu..?” Was all he managed to get out before I neatly, in one simple fluid motion broke his neck, he fell like a greasy fat broken rag doll onto the filthy gum and grime-laden sidewalk at my feet.“Time to make your move Cody!” I hissed, adjusting my earpiece. Taking out a canister of tear gas I popped the ring opened the door, and tossed it into the interior of the café and waited in case anyone should come running out. A few moments later I heard the explosive report of the twelve-gauge street-sweeper so favored by my kinsman. A mere heartbeat later and I was standing over the prone and unconscious body of Randall Delgado.
“Any problems?” I asked my baby brother.
“The kitchen staff was a pain in the ass, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.”
“Good lets get this asshole in the car before the rest of his grease-ball’ family has time to recover.”
I assumed he was smiling through his gas mask, but I couldn’t be sure. As he hefted Randall onto his shoulder like a sack of Italian potatoes and turned to walk away. I pulled the death card from my deck and placed it face down onto the nearest table, along with the black rose from my lapel; my trademark, now time for dinner. I had not fed for almost twelve hours, and the smell of blood was making me ravenous. Vincents' bodyguards were of no use to me Cody had blown off their heads as they had reached for their guns. As I quickly glanced around the room I noticed a waitress huddled in the corner next to the bar coughing and rubbing her eyes furiously. As I approached her, she tried to back away and kick at me, with preternatural speed I embraced her, ripped open her carotid artery and drank deeply of the warm coppery liquid life force that pumped and coursed from her body infusing my every dead cell. Now refreshed I drew the sword from my cane and removed her head, unfortunately my kiss is highly infectious, and Icouldn’t have her coming back as one of the undead now could I? Smiling at my reflection in the mirrors lining the bar I wiped my blade clean and walked out into the waiting night.“Did you have a nice dinner?” Cody asked as I neared the car.
“Wasn’t bad for fast food.” I replied
“Lets get going we have a delivery to make.”
As we pulled away from the curb I laid down one last card, the three of pentacles; divinatory meaning: realizing the value of one’s achievements…. how appropriate I thought. For a moment I almost felt sorry for Randall, after all it wasn’t everyday that your ex-girlfriends’ father pays to have you abducted so he can personally remove your manhood........Sometimes, just sometimes I love my work……….
Not to worry I'm sure there will be more of these to come...lol
what do you think?
Later........
I thought i would post this story idea....it has been something that i have been toying with off and on for quite a long while now....my muse comes and goes all on its own and lately it has been hiding in the very deep alcoves of my brain...lol
Anyway keep in mind it is a work in progess so please be kind....
oh and by the way this is my intellectual property so don't steal it or I will have to hunt you down and drain you of your life...lol
(Intellectual property (IP) is an umbrella term used to refer to the object of a variety of laws, including patent law, copyright law, trademark law, trade secret law, industrial design law, and potentially others. These laws provide exclusive rights to certain parties and many of them implement government-granted monopolies. Copyrights, for example, generally allow only one party to make copies of a work.)
Prologue:
There it was staring me in the face, the Judgment card; divinatory meaning: a time of great and positive change, especially in the way we see ourselves, a new beginning. What the fuck? I thought, what next?
“Are you playing with those goddamn cards again?” Cody asked from the front seat while looking up at me in the rear view mirror.
“So what if I am?” I replied.
“Every time you play with those things you get fucking weird on me.”
The second card out of the deck, the Magician in the reverse position; divinatory meaning: a possible weakness or suppressed energy, or the need to use power responsibly. Was I becoming too reckless?
“What are you up to anyway?” He asked
“How many times do we need to have this conversation?” I asked
“You know I like to feel confident before we walk into these situations.”
“I think you put too much faith in those goddamn things!”
“And you put too much into that shot gun you carry under your coat.” was my comeback.
“It hasn’t failed me yet!” he pats it as though it were a cherished pet
“Neither have these cards.”
This is how it went almost every night, Cody and I are mechanics, for lack of a better term, you have a problem we fix it for the right price. Tonight we had been hired to abduct a gentleman named Randall Delgado; eldest son of Antoine Delgado, local crime lord. It seems Randall had gotten a little too friendly with someone’s daughter, and left her high and dry in the family way, I have always maintained that women aren’t good for much except getting one into trouble, but who am I to judge? I caught my ex cheating on me with my best friend so I killed her, but that is another story for another time.
“How do you want to handle this one?” I asked, as we neared the café where Randall would be seated with his bodyguards Jimmy and Vinny playing poker.
“What’s wrong with our usual?”
“Nothing I suppose, but don’t you ever get bored with the same old thing day in and day out?” I asked, as I laydown the next card, the Chariot: divinatory meaning: Will, great force of character, power or in this case, success.
“Well?” he asked
“We’re good to go.” I said, as I put the cards into my inside jacket pocket. We were imported talent; Chicago is not our usual territory our retainer was being overtly cautious. Cody was my brother I brought him into the business not long after he graduated college; I on the other hand had been in this line of work since I was sixteen. The Café was in the middle of the block with a large bullet proof window in front that had been painted over for privacy, the local mob used it as a hang out, sort of a private club if you will, we had obtained a blueprint from our employer a week earlier. Cody went around to the back pushing a shopping cart and dressed as a derelict, where he would sift through refuse bins and wait for my signal. There was a man posted out front sitting on a stool, he bristled as I approached. I suppose it’s not everyday that you see a man like me walking down the sidewalk. For the record I stand 6’ 3” a sinewy 200 pounds, I always dress head to toe in black regardless of the weather, and with a waist length mane the colour of raven’s wings I like to wear pulled back into a loose braid, not tomention the custom made sword cane always at my side, I suppose I could be considered by some to be impressive, if not suspect. He eyeballed me intently as I stopped roughly a foot away from his perch.
With my best theatrical British accent I said, “Ello mate would you happen to have a light?” As I simultaneously reached into my pocket, produced a platinum case and removed a Silk Cut. Rather rudely slapping the cigarette from my lips He said, “No, now beat it before I shove that cane up your foreign pansy pretty boy ass!” Oh dear he was making this too easy. I flashed him a toothy grin unsheathing my sharp pearlescent canines.“What the fu..?” Was all he managed to get out before I neatly, in one simple fluid motion broke his neck, he fell like a greasy fat broken rag doll onto the filthy gum and grime-laden sidewalk at my feet.“Time to make your move Cody!” I hissed, adjusting my earpiece. Taking out a canister of tear gas I popped the ring opened the door, and tossed it into the interior of the café and waited in case anyone should come running out. A few moments later I heard the explosive report of the twelve-gauge street-sweeper so favored by my kinsman. A mere heartbeat later and I was standing over the prone and unconscious body of Randall Delgado.
“Any problems?” I asked my baby brother.
“The kitchen staff was a pain in the ass, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.”
“Good lets get this asshole in the car before the rest of his grease-ball’ family has time to recover.”
I assumed he was smiling through his gas mask, but I couldn’t be sure. As he hefted Randall onto his shoulder like a sack of Italian potatoes and turned to walk away. I pulled the death card from my deck and placed it face down onto the nearest table, along with the black rose from my lapel; my trademark, now time for dinner. I had not fed for almost twelve hours, and the smell of blood was making me ravenous. Vincents' bodyguards were of no use to me Cody had blown off their heads as they had reached for their guns. As I quickly glanced around the room I noticed a waitress huddled in the corner next to the bar coughing and rubbing her eyes furiously. As I approached her, she tried to back away and kick at me, with preternatural speed I embraced her, ripped open her carotid artery and drank deeply of the warm coppery liquid life force that pumped and coursed from her body infusing my every dead cell. Now refreshed I drew the sword from my cane and removed her head, unfortunately my kiss is highly infectious, and Icouldn’t have her coming back as one of the undead now could I? Smiling at my reflection in the mirrors lining the bar I wiped my blade clean and walked out into the waiting night.“Did you have a nice dinner?” Cody asked as I neared the car.
“Wasn’t bad for fast food.” I replied
“Lets get going we have a delivery to make.”
As we pulled away from the curb I laid down one last card, the three of pentacles; divinatory meaning: realizing the value of one’s achievements…. how appropriate I thought. For a moment I almost felt sorry for Randall, after all it wasn’t everyday that your ex-girlfriends’ father pays to have you abducted so he can personally remove your manhood........Sometimes, just sometimes I love my work……….
Not to worry I'm sure there will be more of these to come...lol
what do you think?
Later........
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