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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
C.G. Furst's LiveJournal:
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| Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 | | 10:47 am |
| | Saturday, January 26th, 2008 | | 9:46 pm |
Back in the trees you can hear yourself think I'm back from California after more than a week, and it's about time that I posted a link to my guest entry on Jeff VanderMeer's blog: One of my earliest memories is of taking a book of Poe’s short stories and climbing into a tree to read it. Not just any tree, but the blooming jacaranda in my grandfather’s back yard. High up in the branches covered with purple blossoms, with my back against the main trunk, I hid away from the family sing-along and read "The Imp of the Perverse" and "A Descent Into the Maelstrom," rushing to read as much as I could before I was called back to earth to join the others.Here's the rest: http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2008/01/14/weird-tales-christopher-furst-on-being-an-orangutan/ | | Saturday, January 12th, 2008 | | 1:33 pm |
Update on my nephew
A bright and lovely person left the world today. My 29-year-old nephew Jon died at 5:30 this morning. The head injuries were too serious, the brain damage too profound for the doctors to save him. Please think of his mother and sister and brothers. | | Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 | | 3:20 pm |
Think good thoughts . . .
Think good thoughts for my nephew, John Moak, who suffered a traumatic skateboarding accident two days ago. He's in St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona where he underwent brain surgery and had a shunt implanted to relieve pressure.
John's going to a top motorcycle mechanic school in Phoenix and wants to design motorcycles. I hope he recovers and gets his wish.
I'll update when I learn more. | | Saturday, December 1st, 2007 | | 11:28 am |
In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat . . . Well, it was bound to happen -- the Bible is being translated into LOLCATS: http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Genesis_1But why is my name appearing in holy writ? See below: "An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin. An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!"Come on, you know you can't resist. What's another day in purgatory? | | Monday, November 26th, 2007 | | 7:27 pm |
Clowns to the left of me ... After a prophetic (or prescient) celebration involving martinis shaken chez D&C, who gave the evening a wonderful extra twist with the unexpected gift of tickets to hear Richard Thompson perform, I made the short crawl home -- it's only two doors down -- to discover that Weird Tales magazine bought my story "The Last Great Clown Hunt." Human pinball elation! Speaking of Richard Thompson, he wrote some of the music for Dreams with Sharp Teeth, a film about Harlan Ellison: http://www.richardthompson-music.com/catch_of_the_day.asp?id=692Recent reading: The Bestiary by Nicholas Christopher Can't Buy Me Love by Jonathan Gould (It's an excellent biography of the Beatles.) The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison | | Sunday, October 14th, 2007 | | 5:50 pm |
| | Friday, September 21st, 2007 | | 10:58 am |
La Golondrina -- memorial music I've been thinking about what kind of music, if any, to play at my father-in-law's memorial on September 30, and the best song I can think of is the Mexican farewell song "La Golondrina," about a swallow who cannot return. And the best version that I've heard comes from, yes, don't laugh, "The Wild Bunch," where the people in Angel's village say farewell to the Bunch as they ride away to their fates. The song begins at 5:17 in the scene. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wQGf5MRVUoA few of the words: Tambien yo estoy en la region perdida, Oh, Cielo Santo! y sin poder volar. I, too, am in the lost region, Oh, heavens, and powerless to fly. | | 10:42 am |
| | Sunday, August 26th, 2007 | | 2:34 pm |
| | Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 | | 3:20 pm |
Wil Hanson 1919-2007
My father-in-law, Wil Hanson, died last Saturday in California. He had just finished writing his second novel, the sequel to Smoke in the Wind, a few weeks ago, and was working on a series of paintings when he fell ill.
He was one of the most energetic people I've known, full of plans and projects, enthusiastic about meeting new people and traveling to new adventures.
I'll write more about him at another time, but for now here's a short bio adapted from his website:
Wil Hanson graduated from Art Center College of Design (then Art Center School) in California and furthered his art education in London, Florence, and Rome. Additionally, he studied painting with S. MacDonald Wright, Willard Nash and Guy Pene du Bois. He studied experimental photography at UCLA under internationally-acclaimed photographers Robert Heinecken and Edmund Teske and has been professionally photographing for over thirty years.
He was a sketch artist at Universal studios, a set designer at Paramount Pictures and had an independent international architectural practice based in California. After he moved to New Mexico in 1990, he spent his time painting, photographing, writing for various publications, and doing an occasional design job. | | Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 | | 12:36 pm |
Odd bits and obits Part of my work as an editor includes reading obits, and occasionally I come across gems such as this one: "He absorbed massive amounts of software." Sounds like the death of a superhero who took on too much toxicity. And speaking of toxicity, 50 years ago today the novelist, short story writer and poet Malcolm Lowry died. As the coroner put it, he perished of "death by misadventure." If you haven't read his novel Under the Volcano then you owe it to yourself to find it and read it now. Ostensibly the story of British ex-consul Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic who is visited by his estranged wife and half-brother on the Day of the Dead, the book is of a different order from works like Lost Weekend or Barfly. Instead, it's a modern retelling of the Faust legend set in Mexico, where Faust looks for secret knowledge in a bottle of mescal, and the mescal stands in for soma. A harrowing book, and maddeningly baroque for a lot of readers. All I can suggest is that you surrender to the incantatory language, the "snatches of music from demonic orchestras," the swirling and hallucinatory conversations, the hints of the world war to come (it's 1938), the Consul's eerie recitation of the list of radioactive elements, the looming volcanoes of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, and the fatal barranca. Talk about a man who was pursued by Furies all his life! Lowry wrote and re-wrote UTV in a squatter's shack in North Vancouver, British Columbia. The manuscript was almost lost when the shack burned, but his wife, Margerie, rescued it from the fire. The site of Lowry's shack is now Cates Park, and every August political activists run the Under the Volcano Festival of Art & Social Change: http://volcano.resist.ca/index.html. His book of short stories, Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, contains some amazing work, including "Through the Panama," "The Forest Path to the Spring," "The Bravest Boat," and "Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession." (Lowry's own mocking epitaph) Malcolm Lowry Late of the Bowery His prose was flowery And often glowery He lived, nightly, and drank, daily, And died playing the ukelele. | | Thursday, June 21st, 2007 | | 11:07 pm |
| | Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 | | 4:35 pm |
| | Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 | | 5:45 pm |
| | Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 | | 8:53 pm |
Forest of Stone Steles Over the weekend I saw an exhibition at Cornell's Johnson Museum of the artist Wenda Gu's "Forest of Stone Steles," and it's been haunting my waking life ever since. Gu chose several Tang-era poems that had been translated into English (by Witter Bynner), then searched for Chinese sounds that were similar to the sounds of the English words and retranslated the poem into Chinese. And then he went further and re-translated the resulting poem into English. Each poem is carved onto a dark slate stele that weighs 1.3 tons. Here's one example: "A Note on a Rainy Night to a Friend in the North" by Li Shangyin, Tang Dynasty: You ask me when I am coming. I do not know. I dream of your mountains and autumn pools brimming all night with the rain. Oh, when shall we be trimming wicks again, together in your western window? When shall I be hearing your voice again, all night in the rain? (以 Witter Bynner 的唐詩英譯本 Jade mountain 之英語讀音的同聲漢字譯回成中文) 誘鰲時刻迷魂，隘門空明。 靄渡鬧踢駑，癌菌磨蝮藥。 虻騰煽毒燈，剖獅捕狸命。 鰲吶吐胃，逝者然。 哦！ 混血兒妣娶螟，尾蝌麝肝，酡虼日飲。 喲！ 歪寺痛蚊抖，蚊笑鮞愛，婢害鯪。 鷂服蜴四更，哪聽得嚷。 (Retranslated to English by Wenda Gu) The soul is bewildered when the huge, legendary turtle is induced. Grinding pit viper with cancer fungus, an inferior horse kicks at the misty harbour. Rip open a lion to rescue the fox. The legendary turtle screams and throws up its stomach , then dies without pain. Oh! An interracialbaby is born with a tadpole tail and musk deer liver of the marriage between a slave girl and a snout moth's larva. The flea is flushed down with a day's drink. Oh! In a leaning temple a wounded mosquito shakes and another laughs at a loving fish. A dead mother kills a pangolin. No scream is heard when a hawk eats the lizard before dawn. I love the surreal and grotesque transformations. Traduttore, traditore. And here's the link to Wenda Gu's website: http://www.wendagu.com/home.html | | Thursday, March 1st, 2007 | | 12:32 pm |
| | Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 | | 8:30 pm |
Bookworm Meme
BOOKWORM:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag 5 people.
You'll have to tag yourself if you want to play.
From After Eden by Kirkpatrick Sale:
However, in the deepest sense we already *are* back. The Erectus way of life is in some sense encoded in our genes after 1.8 million years, and we have more or less the same genome that the first Sapiens possessed 200,000 years ago; and just as we have the same grasping hands and color vision, so too we have the same brains and psyches, and they can be used to perceive the world the same way. As Carl Jung once said, "Every human being has a two-million-year-old man within himself, and if he loses contact with that two-million-year-old self, he loses his real roots." | | Monday, October 2nd, 2006 | | 12:02 pm |
Trounce, trouncing, trounced Check out Jeffrey Ford's blog entry for September 30, and the links to several writers' outrage at the administration's immoral torture bill and its trouncing of habeas corpus. http://14theditch.livejournal.com/ | | 11:16 am |
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