Platypus of Truth

Sunny Day The Sunny Days have returned (You can have them) Soon, no one will want them. Heat and humidity will send Us all in doors and things will go unseen as so much of the World Does that can’t be Viewed from a screen. I think Hell is full of screens Where we watch anything but what we should be watching. You, Stranger, who pass Through this day with me, Stop a moment with me to regard the things That need regarding.

Proclamation, December 2017 I Do Proclaim: That this is my hour. I take as my demesne All things that you reject: Rainy days, Cold, crisp Autumn, The glistening thickets of Winter, Old churches, Graveyards. And the moss about the foot of trees. I will be kind to postmen, And those who prepare my food. Praise God for tobacco, and The fellowship of working men Smoking cigarettes on the porch. I will thank God for immigrants Who cut grass, Domestics, All who do the work my Irish ancestors did. Praise the Almighty for every man Who calls himself a stranger in his home, Chronically reduces his boil to a simmer. I will not forget you either, If you have what you love Taken from you Yet remain unbowed. You are my teacher. I welcome All From the boarders of my kingdom In the particular- A shake of hands Or a nod Between potentates.

On Rainy Days On Rainy Days like this one I feel Gettysburg in my bones- or maybe Plymouth- seeing puffs of smoke in the wet air when no one else is out. You happy people who will not face the Rain, you Insiders, who never looked in through lighted Windows and wished to God that you belonged: What do you know of Astor or of woodsmoke- who never had the larger fellowship that comes with being Alone.

After a drawing by Rockwell Kent Marker on Strathmore Toned Tan A whale-ship was my Yale college and my Harvard. -Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Well, I've done it: I've finally finished Robert E. Howard's entire Conan oeuvre. The journey has been several years long, and I've also taken side trips to cover Howard creations Kull, Solomon Kane, and Bran Mak Morn, but I have finally reached the finish. What do I say now that I have reached the end? When I began this journey, one of my friends quipped that Conan should be known as "the venerially diseased" instead of "the barbarian". Others told me that they had simply given up along the way -the racism and misogyny were too much. I did give up on Howard's younger contemporary, Fritz Leiber, for about that reason. Having read to the end, I can confidently say that these criticisms are true: Conan is not a good man, and Robert E. Howard was a cynical nihilist out to earn a buck -but that's not the whole story. Conan and his creator also reflect the realities of the Great Depression and a life on America's not-so-tamed former frontier...

This post will cover two of Robert E. Howard's Conan short stories: Beyond the Black River and The Black Stranger . Prior posts on Conan and his world can be found by following the "Howard" tag at the bottom of this post. Beyond the Black River : The last phase of Howard's Conan stories find him transitioning from the world of oriental adventures to the American frontier. Beyond the Black River owes more to books like Buchanan's A Salute to Adventurers than to Chesterton's The Ballad of the White Horse . Nonetheless, Howard still preserves the ancient world setting by calquing the American frontier onto the Roman frontier and cover the whole thing with a facade of Hyborian places and peoples. The author's commitment to side with barbarism over civilization comes to the fore here and the lesson seems to be that of the noble savage showing up the folly and weakness of society. One wonders, given Howard's deification of the "barbarian," how ...

It's been a few years since I last dipped in to the world of Robert E. Howard's sword-swinging barbarian, Conan. While the writing is always high quality, the racism and sexism that riddle Howard's oeuvre is hard to handle in large doses. After a good, long break, then, I decided that it was finally time to have a go at finishing my annotated edition of the complete works. The Servants of Bit-Yakin : The Servants of Bit-Yakin  returns us from the microcosmic novella that is The Hour of the Dragon  to the world of the standard Conan adventure story. Once more, we return to the pseudo-Africa that so dominated Howard's imagination. This tale, with its ruined city created by a lost race of white men who were able to perfectly preserve their corpses, and its eternal queen apparently owes its inspiration to H.R. Haggard's She . Rather than give us another She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, however, Howard evolves the adventure in his own way with the mysterious element  coming i...