The Voice before the Void: Arcana, Story, Poetry

Halloween: We were drinking Cuba Libres and telling stories. -The Voice before the Void The Ball in the Basement, and The Radio in the Dark Alsazzi Terrato and The Voice before the Void

Halloween: All the more creepy to think this based upon some obscure forgotten folklore. -The Voice before the Void “The Dead Valley” from Black Spirits and White Ralph Adams Cram I have a friend, Olof Ehrensvärd, a Swede by birth, who yet, by reason of a strange and melancholy mischance of his early boyhood, has thrown his lot with that of the New World. It is a curious story of a headstrong boy and a proud and relentless family: the details do not matter here, but they are sufficient to weave a web of romance around the tall yellow-bearded man with the sad eyes and the voice that gives itself perfectly to plaintive little Swedish songs remembered out of childhood. In the winter evenings we play chess together, he and I, and after some close, fierce battle has been fought to a finish—usually with my own defeat—we fill our pipes again, and Ehrensvärd tells me stories of the far, half-remembered days in the fatherland, before he went to sea: stories that grow very strange and incredible as the night deepens and the fire falls together, but stories that, nevertheless, I fully believe. One of them made a strong impression on me, so I set it down here, only regretting that I cannot reproduce the curiously perfect English and the delicate accent which to me increased the fascination of the tale. Yet, as best I can remember it, here it is. “I never told you how Nils and I went over the hills to Hallsberg, and how we found the Dead Valley, did I? Well, this is the way it happened. I must have been about twelve years old, and Nils Sjöberg, whose father’s estate joined ours, was a few months younger. We were inseparable just at that time, and whatever we did, we did together. “Once a week it was market day in Engelholm, and Nils and I went always there to see the strange sights that the market gathered from all the surrounding country. One day we quite lost our hearts, for an old man from across the Elfborg had brought a little dog to sell, that seemed to us the most beautiful dog in all the world. He was a round, woolly puppy, so funny that Nils and I sat down on the ground and laughed at him, until he came and played with us in so jolly a way that we felt that there was only one really desirable thing in life, and that was the little dog of the old man from across the hills. But alas! we had not half money enough wherewith to buy him, so we were forced to beg the old man not to sell him before the next market day, promising that we would bring the money for him then. He gave us his word, and we ran home very fast and implored our mothers to give us money for the little dog. “We got the money, but we could not wait for the next market day. Suppose the puppy should be sold! The thought frightened us so that we begged and implored that we might be allowed to go over the hills to Hallsberg where the old man lived, and get the little dog ourselves, and at last they told us we might go. By starting early in the morning we should reach Hallsberg by three o’clock, and it was arranged that we should stay there that night with Nils’s aunt, and, leaving by noon the next day, be home again by sunset. “Soon after sunrise we were on our way, after having received minute instructions as to just what we should do in all possible and impossible circumstances, and finally a repeated injunction that we should start for home at the same hour the next day, so that we might get safely back before nightfall. “For us, it was magnificent sport, and we started off with our rifles, full of the sense of our very great importance: yet the journey was simple enough, along a good road, across the big hills we knew so well, for Nils and I had shot over half the territory this side of the dividing ridge of the Elfborg. Back of Engelholm lay a long valley, from which rose the low mountains, and we had to cross this,

Halloween: Amidst brooding philosophy, the pieces of the horror lie unobtrusively throughout the story for us to fit together. A superb story. -The Voice before the Void “The Night Ocean” R.H. Barlow and H.P. Lovecraft I went to Ellston Beach not only for the pleasures of sun and ocean, but to rest a weary mind. Since I knew no person in the little town, which thrives on summer vacationists and presents only blank windows during most of the year, there seemed no likelihood that I might be disturbed. This pleased me, for I did not wish to see anything but the expanse of pounding surf and the beach lying before my temporary home. My long work of the summer was completed when I left the city, and the large mural design produced by it had been entered in the contest. It had taken me the bulk of the year to finish the painting, and when the last brush was cleaned I was no longer reluctant to yield to the claims of health and find rest and seclusion for a time. Indeed, when I had been a week on the beach I recalled only now and then the work whose success had so recently seemed all-important. There was no longer the old concern with a hundred complexities of colour and ornament; no longer the fear and mistrust of my ability to render a mental image actual, and turn by my own skill alone the dim-conceived idea into the careful draught of a design. And yet that which later befell me by the lonely shore may have grown solely from the mental constitution behind such concern and fear and mistrust. For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming; and who can say that such a nature does not open latent eyes sensitive to unsuspected worlds and orders of being? Now that I am trying to tell what I saw I am conscious of a thousand maddening limitations. Things seen by the inward sight, like those flashing visions which come as we drift into the blankness of sleep, are more vivid and meaningful to us in that form than when we have sought to weld them with reality. Set a pen to a dream, and the colour drains from it. The ink with which we write seems diluted with something holding too much of reality, and we find that after all we cannot delineate the incredible memory. It is as if our inward selves, released from the bonds of daytime and objectivity, revelled in prisoned emotions which are hastily stifled when we translate them. In dreams and visions lie the greatest creations of man, for on them rests no yoke of line or hue. Forgotten scenes, and lands more obscure than the golden world of childhood, spring into the sleeping mind to reign until awakening puts them to rout. Amid these may be attained something of the glory and contentment for which we yearn; some image of sharp beauties suspected but not before revealed, which are to us as the Grail to holy spirits of the medieval world. To shape these things on the wheel of art, to seek to bring some faded trophy from that intangible realm of shadow and gossamer, requires equal skill and memory. For although dreams are in all of us, few hands may grasp their moth-wings without tearing them. Such skill this narrative does not have. If I might, I would reveal to you the hinted events which I perceived dimly, like one who peers into an unlit realm and glimpses forms whose motion is concealed. In my mural design, which then lay with a multitude of others in the building for which they were planned, I had striven equally to catch a trace of this elusive shadow-world, and had perhaps succeeded better than I shall now succeed. My stay in Ellston was to await the judging of that design; and when days of unfamiliar leisure had given me perspective, I discovered that – in spite of those weaknesses which a creator always detects most clearly – I had indeed managed to retain in line and colour some fragments snatched from the endless world of imagining. The difficulties of the process,

Halloween: An interview with the lovely librarian Carolyn Feickert in August, 2016, in the very busy Harvey Public Library in Harvey, North Dakota, along with the story of Sophia Eberlein from William Jackson’s first book of North Dakota lore, and some thoughts about folklore, tourism, and small town economies. Fair use of copyrighted material is claimed under U.S. copyright law for the purposes of education and commentary. -The Voice before the Void Interview with Carolyn Feickert at the Harvey Public Library in Harvey, North Dakota The Voice before the Void and “Sophie’s legend lingers in Harvey library” from Dakota Mysteries and Oddities William Jackson Also mentioned: Gorman UFO Dogfight over Fargo, North Dakota Hazel Miner of the 1920 North Dakota Blizzard SasWhat podcast and SmallTownMonsters.com Fouke, Arkansas and the Beast of Boggy Creek Inverness, Scotland and the Loch Ness Monster Deadwood, South Dakota and Aces over Eights Roswell, New Mexico and the Roswell UFO Crash Harvey, North Dakota Harvey Public Library Ben Franklin store in Harvey Tastee Freez restaurant in Harvey

Halloween: Ineluctably, the world shall end. -The Voice before the Void “Darkness” Lord Byron I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy Earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chilled into a selfish prayer for light: And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones, The palaces of crownéd kings—the huts, The habitations of all things which dwell, Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed, And men were gathered round their blazing homes To look once more into each other’s face; Happy were those who dwelt within the eye Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch: A fearful hope was all the World contained; Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks Extinguished with a crash—and all was black. The brows of men by the despairing light Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits The flashes fell upon them; some lay down And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest Their chins upon their clenchéd hands, and smiled; And others hurried to and fro, and fed Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up With mad disquietude on the dull sky, The pall of a past World; and then again With curses cast them down upon the dust, And gnashed their teeth and howled: the wild birds shrieked, And, terrified, did flutter on the ground, And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawled And twined themselves among the multitude, Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food: And War, which for a moment was no more, Did glut himself again:—a meal was bought With blood, and each sate sullenly apart Gorging himself in gloom: no Love was left; All earth was but one thought—and that was Death, Immediate and inglorious; and the pang Of famine fed upon all entrails—men Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh; The meagre by the meagre were devoured, Even dogs assailed their masters, all save one, And he was faithful to a corse, and kept The birds and beasts and famished men at bay, Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food, But with a piteous and perpetual moan, And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand Which answered not with a caress—he died. The crowd was famished by degrees; but two Of an enormous city did survive, And they were enemies: they met beside The dying embers of an altar-place Where had been heaped a mass of holy things For an unholy usage; they raked up, And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath Blew for a little life, and made a flame Which was a mockery; then they lifted up Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld Each other’s aspects—saw, and shrieked, and died— Even of their mutual hideousness they died, Unknowing who he was upon whose brow Famine had written Fiend. The World was void, The populous and the powerful was a lump, Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless— A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay. The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still, And nothing stirred within their silent depths;

Halloween: A cold reading of what has instantly become a new favorite Halloween story. -The Voice before the Void “The Room in the Tower” E.F. Benson It is probable that everybody who is at all a constant dreamer has had at least one experience of an event or a sequence of circumstances which have come to his mind in sleep being subsequently realized in the material world. But, in my opinion, so far from this being a strange thing, it would be far odder if this fulfilment did not occasionally happen, since our dreams are, as a rule, concerned with people whom we know and places with which we are familiar, such as might very naturally occur in the awake and daylit world. True, these dreams are often broken into by some absurd and fantastic incident, which puts them out of court in regard to their subsequent fulfilment, but on the mere calculation of chances, it does not appear in the least unlikely that a dream imagined by anyone who dreams constantly should occasionally come true. Not long ago, for instance, I experienced such a fulfilment of a dream which seems to me in no way remarkable and to have no kind of psychical significance. The manner of it was as follows. A certain friend of mine, living abroad, is amiable enough to write to me about once in a fortnight. Thus, when fourteen days or thereabouts have elapsed since I last heard from him, my mind, probably, either consciously or subconsciously, is expectant of a letter from him. One night last week I dreamed that as I was going upstairs to dress for dinner I heard, as I often heard, the sound of the postman’s knock on my front door, and diverted my direction downstairs instead. There, among other correspondence, was a letter from him. Thereafter the fantastic entered, for on opening it I found inside the ace of diamonds, and scribbled across it in his well-known handwriting, “I am sending you this for safe custody, as you know it is running an unreasonable risk to keep aces in Italy.” The next evening I was just preparing to go upstairs to dress when I heard the postman’s knock, and did precisely as I had done in my dream. There, among other letters, was one from my friend. Only it did not contain the ace of diamonds. Had it done so, I should have attached more weight to the matter, which, as it stands, seems to me a perfectly ordinary coincidence. No doubt I consciously or subconsciously expected a letter from him, and this suggested to me my dream. Similarly, the fact that my friend had not written to me for a fortnight suggested to him that he should do so. But occasionally it is not so easy to find such an explanation, and for the following story I can find no explanation at all. It came out of the dark, and into the dark it has gone again. All my life I have been a habitual dreamer: the nights are few, that is to say, when I do not find on awaking in the morning that some mental experience has been mine, and sometimes, all night long, apparently, a series of the most dazzling adventures befall me. Almost without exception these adventures are pleasant, though often merely trivial. It is of an exception that I am going to speak. It was when I was about sixteen that a certain dream first came to me, and this is how it befell. It opened with my being set down at the door of a big red-brick house, where, I understood, I was going to stay. The servant who opened the door told me that tea was being served in the garden, and led me through a low dark-panelled hall, with a large open fireplace, on to a cheerful green lawn set round with flower beds. There were grouped about the tea-table a small party of people, but they were all strangers to me except one, who was a schoolfellow called Jack Stone, clearly the son of the house, and he introduced me to his mother and father and a couple of sisters. I was, I remember, somewhat astonished to find myself here,

Jorge Luis Borges’ Birthday: Four stories of philosophy, touching upon fantasy, horror, and weirdness, and even H.P. Lovecraft. Spoilers. -The Voice before the Void “The Aleph” Wikipedia “The Aleph” is a short story by the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. First published in September 1945, it was reprinted in the short story collection, The Aleph and Other Stories, in 1949, and revised by the author in 1974. Plot summary In Borges’ story, the Aleph is a point in space that contains all other points. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping, or confusion. The story traces the theme of infinity found in several of Borges’ other works, such as “The Book of Sand.” As in many of Borges’ short stories, the protagonist is a fictionalized version of the author. At the beginning of the story, he is mourning the recent death of a woman whom he loved, named Beatriz Viterbo, and resolves to stop by the house of her family to pay his respects. Over time, he comes to know her first cousin, Carlos Argentino Daneri, a mediocre poet with a vastly exaggerated view of his own talent who has made it his lifelong quest to write an epic poem that describes every single location on the planet in excruciatingly fine detail. Later in the story, a business on the same street attempts to tear down Daneri’s house in the course of its expansion. Daneri becomes enraged, explaining to the narrator that he must keep the house in order to finish his poem, because the cellar contains an Aleph which he is using to write the poem. Though by now he believes Daneri to be quite insane, the narrator proposes without waiting for an answer to come to the house and see the Aleph for himself. Left alone in the darkness of the cellar, the narrator begins to fear that Daneri is conspiring to kill him, and then he sees the Aleph for himself: “On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand…” -“The Aleph,” by Jorge Luis Borges, translated from the Spanish by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author Though staggered by the experience of seeing the Aleph, the narrator pretends to have seen nothing in order to get revenge on Daneri, whom he dislikes, by giving Daneri a reason to doubt his own sanity. The narrator tells Daneri that he has lived too long amongst the noise and bustle of the city and spent too much time in the dark and enclosed space of his cellar, and assures him that what he truly needs are the wide open spaces and fresh air of the countryside, and these will provide him the true peace of mind that he needs to complete his poem. He then takes his leave of Daneri and exits the house. In a postscript to the story,

H.P. Lovecraft’s Birthday: Upon Brennan’s recommendation. “Happy birthday, Mr. Lovecraft. And with that, let begin the season of Halloween.” -The Voice before the Void “The Music of Erich Zann” H.P. Lovecraft I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the Rue d’Auseil. These maps have not been modern maps alone, for I know that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the antiquities of the place, and have personally explored every region, of whatever name, which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d’Auseil. But despite all I have done, it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the music of Erich Zann. That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and mental, was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d’Auseil, and I recall that I took none of my few acquaintances there. But that I cannot find the place again is both singular and perplexing; for it was within a half-hour’s walk of the university and was distinguished by peculiarities which could hardly be forgotten by any one who had been there. I have never met a person who has seen the Rue d’Auseil. The Rue d’Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blear-windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of neighboring factories shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it, since I should recognize them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly steep as the Rue d’Auseil was reached. I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It was almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of flights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise. Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street. The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly; At first I thought it was because they were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because they were all very old. I do not know how I came to live on such a street, but I was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places, always evicted for want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house in the Rue d’Auseil kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the top of the street, and by far the tallest of them all. My room was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strange music from the peaked garret overhead, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was an old German viol-player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich Zann, and who played evenings in a cheap theater orchestra; adding that Zann’s desire to play in the night after his return from the theater was the reason he had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room,

H.P. Lovecraft’s Birthday: Quite a prescient consideration. -The Voice before the Void “H.P. Lovecraft, An Evaluation” Joseph Payne Brennan MACABRE HOUSE 55 Trumbull St. New Haven 10 Connecticut Since the publication of my “H. P. Lovecraft: A Bibliography” (Biblio Press, 1952), I have been repeatedly urged to write out my opinion of Lovecraft’s work. I have been kept from doing so by the pressure of a full-time library job, plus my own creative work in the diverse fields of the horror story, the western story, and poetry, as well as the semi-annual publication of ESSENCE and other time-consuming activities such as an unending struggle against censorship groups which are violating Constitutional rights on both a local and national level. The following brief essay is an admittedly hurried and incomplete attempt to meet demands for a Lovecraft critique. An entire book, requiring many months of uninterrupted work, could be devoted to the project and I sincerely regret that circumstances do not permit me to undertake such a task. But I hope that my comments, in spite of their brevity, will be of some interest. Nearly twenty years have passed since Lovecraft’s death, but, unfortunately, a final evaluation of the man and of his work is still not possible. His collected poems, though due to appear shortly, have not yet been published. His letters, either selected or collected, have not appeared. Probably some of the pieces which he contributed under pseudonyms to “little” magazines have never been reprinted. And of course no complete and carefully written biography of the man has ever been published. With the important exception of the poems and letters however, all of Lovecraft’s work of any significance has been in print for some years. It seems doubtful, therefore, that an evaluation of his work, at this time, will be seriously qualified by future publication. In his essay on Lovecraft, “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous”, which originally appeared in “The New Yorker” and was later reprinted in his book, “Classics and Commercials”, Edmund Wilson states flatly: “Lovecraft was not a good writer.” (Before Lovecraft admirers reach for their shotguns, I might point out that Edmund Wilson also refers to no less a literary figure than Somerset Maugham as “second-rate” and “a half-trashy novelist.”) Even though his criticism is far too severe–too much of a generalization–Wilson does call attention to two Lovecraft faults which I must reluctantly acknowledge: his frequent prolixity and his tendency to lean on shopworn adjectives such as “terrible”, “horrible”, “hellish”, etc. to achieve eerie effects. In a good horror story, adjectives such as this are best omitted or at least introduced very sparingly. Beyond these criticisms, Wilson emphasizes the essential weakness and lack of verisimilitude of the “Cthulhu Mythos” episodes. With this, too, I must grudgingly agree. And at this point I would like to call attention to the fact that the two specific faults mentioned immediately above–prolixity and adjectivitus–are more frequently encountered in the “Mythos” stories than in any others. The “Cthulhu Mythos” has raised a great commotion. Over a period of years, enthusiastic collaborators, imitators, friends and admirers have elevated the Cthulhu myth to a pedestal of importance which it scarcely deserves. The “Mythos” did indeed become the frame for Lovecraft’s later tales, but they were not his best tales. Lovecraft also amused himself by employing Cthulhu terminology in some of his huge correspondence, but it now seems doubtful that he attached as much importance to the “Mythos” as do some of h...

Love is a tremendous thing. I love this poem. Read Price’s work at The Cherry Window and Plains Prose. -The Voice before the Void “Lemon Wedges” Tracy Lindquist Price Today I chewed on lemon wedges to kill the sweet taste of you in my mouth but still the water came and the acid stung my cheeks as the pulp tears slid down my face they leapt off my chin hit the ground and beneath my feet a lemon tree grew I watched as it emerged, the trunk was crusted in sugar the leaves were glossy and crystallized, the fruit had begun to bear from the yellow cracked bits of flowers that perched upon the edges of candied sticks and there is where the hard rock lemon drops formed by the thousands; and to shake the hung tree was tempting so I did just that in my sapphire dress with a wedge between my teeth it poured over me like rain in a storm, landing quiet as cotton balls and a mountain of stones built around me, I was pushed atop the peak. I took a step, grabbed the highest branch and sat quiet on a limb. I listened when the dropped mountain began to tremble, gazed as it all started falling upwards from the bottom to the top until nothing remained on the grass, but me, the empty tree and the last of my lemon rinds. Through the sky the drops flew higher, beyond the clouds and the moon and I could not tell what twinkled more, the sugar or the stars each stopped in time to find its place and I fixated on Cepheus when into his crown did a handful slip as Cassiopeia sighed; love within reach forever. http://cherrywindow.blogspot.com/2012/03/lemon-wedges.html

I sat down with Noelle Myers, the moderator of the Northern Ink Writers’ Group, which meets every two weeks in the Grand Forks Public Library in Grand Forks, North Dakota. The Red River, which flows through Grand Forks north to the Hudson Bay, catastrophically flooded the city in 1997. The Grand Forks Herald won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its coverage of the flood. We talked about Northern Ink’s Life in the North anthology; fiction genres; literary charities; writers’ conferences; constructive criticism; narrative construction; creating a new genre; geological and economical fiction; the “new adult” genre; “heat” or sex in fiction; rules for publishing and “pirate rules”; taboo subjects in fiction; the difference between romance fiction and women’s fiction or literary fiction; science fiction and Hugo Gernsback; sub-genres; anthologies; the purpose of life; being a better writer; the UND and NDSU sports rivalry; sports, arts, literature, and other frivolity; beauty; collegiate sports funding; online writing groups and writing sprints; dead-tree books and Nooks; antique children’s books; book collecting; the Grand Forks Flood of 1997; antique stores; the library swap shelf; support and encouragement; the Grand Forks Herald and its Pulitzer; and writers’ characters. “There’s like 20 different -punks.” -The Voice before the Void Northern Ink The Laughing Girls Poetry Reading Series and The Laughing Girls on Facebook Teegan Loy at Dreamspinner Press Written? Kitten! WriteOrDie.com PaperbackSwap.com Interview with Noelle Myers of the Northern Ink Writers’ Group of Grand Forks, North Dakota The Voice before the Void

U.S. Independence Day: A popular poet subverts patriotism. -The Voice before the Void “Born in the U.S.A.” Bruce Springsteen Born down in a dead man’s town The first kick I took was when I hit the ground You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much Till you spend half your life just covering up Born in the U.S.A. I was born in the U.S.A. Got in a little hometown jam So they put a rifle in my hands Sent me off to a foreign land To go and kill the yellow man Born in the U.S.A. I was born in the U.S.A. Come back home to the refinery Hiring man said, “Son, if it was up to me” Went down to see my V.A. man He said, “Son, don’t you understand?” I had a brother at Khe Sahn Fighting off the Viet Cong They’re still there; he’s all gone He had a woman he loved in Saigon I got a picture of him in her arms Down in the shadow of the penitentiary Out by the gas fires of the refinery I’m ten years burning down the road Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go Born in the U.S.A. I was born in the U.S.A. I’m a long-gone daddy in the U.S.A. Fair use of copyrighted material is claimed for purposes of education and commentary.

Battle of the Little Bighorn Anniversary: June 25 is the anniversary of the great victory. As of 2016, it’s been only 140 years. From one of his popular books, here presented are dramatic biographies of three men by the Dakota writer Ohiyesa, more widely known as Charles Eastman. -The Voice before the Void 3 Lakota Heroes: Red Cloud, Gall, and Crazy Horse from Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains Charles Eastman “Red Cloud” The Sioux were now entering upon the most stormy period of their history. The old things were fast giving place to new. The young men, for the first time engaging in serious and destructive warfare with the neighboring tribes, armed with the deadly weapons furnished by the white man, began to realize that they must soon enter upon a desperate struggle for their ancestral hunting grounds. The old men had been innocently cultivating the friendship of the stranger, saying among themselves, “Surely there is land enough for all!” Red Cloud was a modest and little-known man of about twenty-eight years when General [William S.] Harney called all the western bands of Sioux together at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, for the purpose of securing an agreement and right of way through their territory. The Ogallalas held aloof from this proposal, but Bear Bull, an Ogallala chief, after having been plied with whisky, undertook to dictate submission to the rest of the clan. Enraged by failure, he fired upon a group of his own tribesmen, and Red Cloud’s father and brother fell dead. According to Indian custom, it fell to him to avenge the deed. Calmly, without uttering a word, he faced old Bear Bull and his son, who attempted to defend his father, and shot them both. He did what he believed to be his duty, and the whole band sustained him. Indeed, the tragedy gave the young man at once a certain standing, as one who not only defended his people against enemies from without, but against injustice and aggression within the tribe. From this time on he was a recognized leader. Man-Afraid-of-His-Horse, then head chief of the Ogallalas, took council with Red Cloud in all important matters, and the young warrior rapidly advanced in authority and influence. In 1854, when he was barely thirty-five years old, the various bands were again encamped near Fort Laramie. A Mormon emigrant train, moving westward, left a footsore cow behind, and the young men killed her for food. The next day, to their astonishment, an officer [John Lawrence Grattan] with thirty men appeared at the Indian camp and demanded of old Conquering Bear that they be given up. The chief in vain protested that it was all a mistake and offered to make reparation. It would seem that either the officer was under the influence of liquor, or else had a mind to bully the Indians, for he would accept neither explanation nor payment, but demanded point-blank that the young men who had killed the cow be delivered up to summary punishment. The old chief refused to be intimidated and was shot dead on the spot. Not one soldier ever reached the gate of Fort Laramie! [Grattan Massacre] Here Red Cloud led the young Ogallalas, and so intense was the feeling that they even killed the half-breed interpreter [Lucien Auguste]. Curiously enough, there was no attempt at retaliation on the part of the army, and no serious break until 1860, when the Sioux were involved in troubles with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes [Colorado War]. In 1862, a grave outbreak was precipitated by the eastern Sioux in Minnesota under Little Crow [Dakota War of 1862],...

Dewey Lake Monster Sightings Anniversary: In the Northern Hemisphere, June is when bipedal creatures are most active. -The Voice before the Void “Dewey Lake Monster” Wikipedia The Dewey Lake Monster is the name given to a large bipedal creature approximately 10 feet (3 meters) tall and weighing about 500 pounds (227 kilograms), which first gained wide notoriety in June 1964 after several reported sightings near Dewey Lake in Dowagiac, Michigan. It is also referred to as the Michigan Bigfoot and Sister Lakes Sasquatch. The beast had already been known to locals in the area for several years prior to the June 1964 events and was rumored to dwell primarily along a 15-mile stretch of swamp-land extending from Dowagiac/Sister Lakes toward Decatur, Michigan (along Dewey Lake Street); however, in 1964 it gained national attention in the United States after several notable attacks and sightings prompted investigation by authorities, which in turn resulted in coverage by national newspapers and caused a flood of curious thrill-seekers and monster-hunters to besiege the local community in the summer of ’64. Though the monster was never captured nor the mystery resolved, footprints were photographed and plaster casts taken as well as sketches rendered. Former Cass County Sheriff, Paul Parrish, was quoted as saying “it was one of the strangest times” in his “33 years of southwestern Michigan law enforcement.” He added: “We investigated it long and hard, but were never able to come up with whatever it was. But some good, honest, legitimate people” reported it. The mystery remains to this day, as do the sightings. Perhaps the most curious aspect of the case is that the people who witnessed the “beast” are still reluctant to discuss what they saw; they only want to forget it and are not interested in having their names associated with the “thing” they encountered. Further reading Bigfoot Casebook Updated: Sightings and Encounters from 1818 to 2004. Janet and Colin Bord, ed. Pine Winds Press. 2006. Mysterious America: The Ultimate Guide to the Nation’s Weirdest Wonders, Strangest Spots, and Creepiest Creatures. Loren Coleman. Paraview Pocket Books. 2007.

H.P. Lovecraft encounters Nikola Tesla and dreams a nightmare. -The Voice before the Void “Nyarlathotep” Wikipedia Nyarlathotep is a name used for a character in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and other writers. The character is commonly known in association with its role as a malign deity in the Lovecraft Mythos fictional universe, where it is known as the Crawling Chaos. First appearing in Lovecraft’s 1920 prose poem of the same name, he was later mentioned in other works by Lovecraft and by other writers and in the tabletop role-playing games making use of the Cthulhu Mythos. Later writers describe him as one of the Outer Gods. Although the deity’s name is fictional, it bears the historical Egyptian suffix -hotep, meaning “peace” or “satisfaction.” 1. In the work of H.P. Lovecraft In his first appearance in “Nyarlathotep” (1920), he is described as a “tall, swarthy man” who resembles an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. In this story he wanders the earth, seemingly gathering legions of followers, the narrator of the story among them, through his demonstrations of strange and seemingly magical instruments. These followers lose awareness of the world around them, and through the narrator’s increasingly unreliable accounts the reader gets an impression of the world’s collapse. Nyarlathotep subsequently appears as a major character in “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” (1926/27), in which he again manifests in the form of an Egyptian Pharaoh when he confronts protagonist Randolph Carter. The twenty-first sonnet of Lovecraft’s poem-cycle “Fungi from Yuggoth” (1929/30) is essentially a retelling of the original prose poem. In “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933), Nyarlathotep appears to Walter Gilman and witch Keziah Mason (who has made a pact with the entity) in the form of “the ‘Black Man’ of the witch-cult,” a black-skinned avatar of the Devil described by witch hunters. Finally, in “The Haunter of the Dark” (1936), the nocturnal, tentacled, bat-winged monster dwelling in the steeple of the Starry Wisdom sect’s church is identified as another manifestation of Nyarlathotep. This avatar can not tolerate the slightest light. Though Nyarlathotep appears as a character in only four stories and two sonnets, his name is mentioned frequently in other works. In “The Rats in the Walls” (1924), Nyarlathotep is mentioned as a faceless god in the caverns of earth’s center. In “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1931), the Mi-Go chant his name in reverential tones, describing him as a non-human entity who takes the form of a man. In “The Shadow Out of Time” (1936), the “hideous secret of Nyarlathotep” is revealed to the protagonist by Khephnes during their imprisonment by the Great Race of Yith. Nyarlathotep does not appear in Lovecraft’s story “The Crawling Chaos” (1920/21), despite the similarity of the title to the character’s epithet. 2. Inspiration In a 1921 letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, Lovecraft related the dream he had had — described as “the most realistic and horrible [nightmare] I have experienced since the age of ten” — that served as the basis for his prose poem “Nyarlathotep.” In the dream, he received a letter from his friend Samuel Loveman that read: Don’t fail to see Nyarlathotep if he comes to Providence. He is horrible — horrible beyond anything you can imagine — but wonderful. He haunts one for hours afterward. I am still shuddering at what he showed. Lovecraft commented: I had never heard the name NYARLATHOTEP before, but seemed to understand the allusion.