R. H. Barlow's Eyes of the God

 

R.H. Barlow co-wrote a number of stories with H.P. Lovecraft, who he first corresponded with when Barlow was 13. Lovecraft spent time with Barlow and his family in the summer of 1934, and all signs (but no certain, undeniable evidence) point to Barlow having been Lovecraft’s lover that summer, when he was 16 and Lovecraft 44. Lovecraft died three years later.

Barlow wrote not just pulp sci-fi fantasy, but also poetry and essays. For a few years he was connected to the Activist Poets, an outsider group sometimes considered, probably not quite rightly, avant garde. He moved permanently to Mexico in 1943, where he became a successful anthropologist. In 1944 he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant and in 1946-48 a Guggenheim Fellowship. He eventually became head of the Department of Anthropology at Mexico City College, a position he still held when he committed suicide on January 2, 1951 at age 32.

Barlow’s fantasy-sci-fi-horror work is often unexpectedly ironic, very much unlike the determinedly unhumorous Lovecraft, and often features characters deluded and usually destroyed by their desire for power. His stories can certainly be considered early players in the field of what has become called “cosmic horror,” in which all of human experience is revealed to be empty and pointless in the face of a never-ending indifferent universe. In Barlow’s stories, both leaders and ordinary people have strange, terrible fates awaiting them. I’m finding the stories pretty entertaining, even if Barlow will never be one of the greatest figures of early pulp fantasy. There’s no shortage of fantasy weirdness (and unintentional silliness) in his work, that’s for sure.

Hippocampus Press recently released an expanded version of Barlow’s selected writing, and I list what it includes below from the details on their website.

I can recommend this work to those of you who like weirdo outsider non-formula fantasy fiction, or if you are interested in those few spots where anti-modernist fantasy writing is so far outside the norm that it nearly converges with super-modernist avant gardism. Please notice that I said “nearly.”

From the website:

https://www.hippocampuspress.com/other-authors/fiction/eyes-of-the-god-selected-writings-of-r.-h.-barlow-revised-and-expanded

—------------------------------------------

Second Edition, Revised and Expanded (2022)
Edited by S. T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Douglas A. Anderson
596 pages!

In 2002, Hippocampus Press published Eyes of the God, a selection of R. H. Barlow’s fiction and poetry. Barlow’s ascending reputation during the past two decades, as one of the most brilliant members of the Lovecraft Circle, has necessitated this radically expanded edition, which includes many more works of fiction, among them several additions to Barlow’s intriguing “Garoth cycle” of fantasy tales. In addition, Barlow’s vibrant writings during his years in Mexico led to some striking narratives about Mexican and Native life in his adopted country.

Additional poems by Barlow have also been found, including those that display his increasing devotion to the Activist school led by Rosalie Moore, Lawrence Hart, and others.

But the most significant additions in this volume are Barlow’s two dozen essays, ranging from memoirs of Lovecraft (including his lively reports of Lovecraft’s stay at his Florida home in 1934); essays on H. G. Wells, Henry S. Whitehead, and other weird writers; his moving and insightful autobiography; and a vivid account of his witnessing a bullfight in Mexico.

All told, this definitive compilation of the totality of R. H. Barlow’s writings reveal a dynamic mind that saw both beauty and wonder in the people and environment he experienced in his short thirty-two years of life.

Wondermental by Nico Vassilakis

 

Nico Vassilakis is one of those little known U.S. poets who has been doing fascinating work for years. Written poems, visual poems, the areas in-between. He has also done fine editorial work as well. Wondermental, his new book, is one of my favorite works of his that I know of.

The writing is spare and to the point, full of surprising and meaningful shifts. Ideas and images balance and teeter in ways that always draw me in. The casual tone works to hide but then sometimes to highlight the complexity. Vassilakis comes across as an ordinary working guy with a vision for the experimental, which tends to blow apart the (always blatantly false) idea that avant garde explorations can come only from the well-off and the well-credentialed. The poems have awareness of politics and the limits of politics. They show the foibles of people and their daily troubles and contradictions close up. And they are especially attuned (as all his literary art has been) to word work as a physical and not merely intellectual endeavor.

Here’s the opening of “Causality Report:”

Graffiti on silos

Shopping portable radiation
detectors online

I’m getting absorbed

I know it’s related to my outlook

But I don’t have the strength to stop
feeling absorbed

Like many of the poems I’m most interested in, the poems in Wondermental move from thing to thing and place to place, taking in many contexts and situations and rarely focusing a poem on a single topic.

The world of U.S. poetry remains as unattuned as it always has been to what happens beyond the context of its prize winners and New York Times reviews and institutionally prominent figures. Vassilakis has never had a big system of opportunity to push him along. He’s just out there, living and working and managing somehow to make great new writing and art all the time.

A Secret History of 1968 by Ryan H. Walsh

 I was fascinated by the chapters (three of them) and other occasional mentions of Van Morrison in Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, but the rest of this book mostly bored me. I guess the chapter on The Velvet Underground in Boston, and occasional paragraphs on Jonathan Richman, and a few of the other stories, were okay. But the narrative of counterculture Boston in 1968 (and before and after) that is the overall focus of the book ran thin quickly.

The many chapters on Mel Lyman and the Fort Hill Collective were tedious and served mainly as a reminder that for a certain portion of the counterculture, the difference often got lost between being a revolutionary and being a self-absorbed asshole (usually white male), a description that fits Van Morrison well enough too, but at least Morrison had a real genius to develop and protect. It was hard for me to find anything of much interest in the portrayal of Lyman, who started a local newspaper and regularly declared himself God in it, facts that are more interesting than any elaboration of what happened as a result. His self-proclaimed Messiahood seems to have allowed him to make wild and ludicrous statements but rarely insightful ones. It’s hard to know what to think about the people who followed him. As the cliche goes, I guess you had to be there?

Those who love the history of the counterculture, or of Boston, or both together might find the mix of nostalgia and criticism running through this book enjoyable, but I kept wanting to get back to Morrison, wacko that he is. Given how the book is organized, Walsh himself seems to have realized that Morrison is the most interesting part. Morrison’s visionary genius and manic lunacy both come across clearly. His time in Boston was a particularly rough portion of his career as a musician, and he came out of it with one of the greatest and most unique records in the history of rock and roll, if you think Astral Weeks is rock and roll at all, something Morrison himself has always contested, like he contests just about everything anyone ever says to or about him.

I was glad also that the book gave me a chance to understand the point of view of his wife during that time, Janet Planet (real name Janet Rigsbee). I used to sympathize with the romantic melancholy on display in Morrison’s work after the breakup of their marriage, and still love how it sounds in the songs, but after reading this book, my sympathy is entirely with her. “Being a muse is a thankless job, and the pay is lousy,” she’s quoted as saying, and it’s clear that she knows all too well what she’s talking about.

Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin

 

Fever Dream (2017) by Samantha Schweblin turned out to be an exciting surprise. I first read about it on a list of recent horror fiction. While I expected it to be fun, I didn’t really think that it would also turn out to be good.

It’s much more than just a straight horror novel, although its near-future eco-sci fi and horror elements are clear. But it’s also surrealist and experimental, with a lyrical collapsing of human character and identity and difference and a vivid use of repetition and circularity. Its multiple perspectives and distortions, as well as the way it plays with uncertain and frightening boundaries between the objective and the subjective, lead to constant disruptions of understanding just what might be going on. It’s both easy to read and difficult to grasp, an accessible combination of genre pop lit and experimental extremes.

Originally from Brazil, Schweblin currently lives in Berlin. The geographical location of the events in the novel is another one of its fascinating uncertainties. Fever Dream is a book about disorienting surfaces and speculation about what lies under those surfaces. If ultimately it’s a book that dwells mostly on those surfaces, with not as much below them as it perhaps promises, it is nonetheless disturbing and beautiful and powerful. It’s a book about a planet in which people are falling apart as much as the land on which they find themselves, but not in a way that anybody can expect or understand.