A Crackpot and a Crockpot

James shows you how to prepare two different meals, the first is a flashback to the Hurt Yurt of yore, and the second is in the comfortable home of his gracious host.  Following that, James tells you about his days as a dungeon master witnessing the exploits of the Treacherous Gnome.

Many thanks to the fellow at In These Goings Down for the videos.

-Lynn

Dispatch from the Crackpot

In case you were wondering, the Crackpot is alive and well, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, without internet access but with a sparring partner (check out the shiner at the end of the second video).

It's hard to say when we might get to tape a podcast again, a generous reader has sent him a laptop, perhaps we'll manage to connect one next week, in the meantime, listen to my friend, Colin's SoundCloud for some soothing guitar music.

-Lynn

‘Cold Scorn with Anger Blent’

The One Black Stain by Robert E. Howard, Impressions by James LaFond

Kane paints a picture of the hero, Sir Francis Drake, turned dastard as he has a rival executed rather than dispatching him with his own hand. This is a retrospective poetic explanation of Drake’s turn away from the seafarer’s life. In other portions of his career the reader is treated to Kane’s disillusion with the System of English Monarchy relieving men of their moral responsibility and heroic status.

All three of Howard’s Kane poems were unsold but should have been used as chapter headings or prologues to his major stories, as they paint a word picture of Solomon Kane as a murderer wandering the world seeking vengeance for others to erase his own stain, at the same time ruing the stain upon his one-time leader’s name and mourning the memory of a real historic hero who was done in to obscurity by Drake and his co-crooks in The Return of Sir Richard Grenville, linked below as an audio.

The One Black Stain consists of fifteen verses of three couplets each and has the effect of elevating Kane to the seat of Judge over Men with Bloody Hands.

Again, in the single verse excerpted below, Kane, the judge, speaks from beyond the bounds of the social system, to the Aryan heart of the besmirched hero Drake, tempting this reader to see Drake as an aspect of Howard’s obsession with ancestral memory:

"More of the man had ye been,
On deck your sword to cleanly draw
"In forthright fury from its sheath,
And openly cleave him to the teeth—
"Rather than slink and hide beneath
a hollow word of Law."

In Kane’s words we understand why the hero prefers a sword above all else—a clean, proximate weapon of the actionist, as Burton said, “the queen of arms,” with the wielder thus king of actors, the sword being a weapon of high risk—and reinforcing the notion that God is and must be outside the human system, not a petty actor within the social strata, but an omniscience from without, compelling redress by agents of his choosing.

(c) 2018  James LaFond

'A Wild Act of Grace'

A review of Sam Finlay's Breakfast with the Dirt Cult by Lynn Lockhart

Sam Finlay is a great friend of the LaFondiverse, currently collaborating with James on my favorite fiction-in-progress, The Filthy Few.

Finlay's book is an pseudonymous memoir; our hero, Tom Walton, falls in love, goes to war, and comes home a changed man, physically, mentally and spiritually.  Breakfast with the Dirt Cult gives you a heady mix of Army training, combat and comic relief, romance with the world's smartest stripper and the fruits of the author's expansive reading and contemplation.  Some of those fruits will be familiar to LaFond readers, as Finlay has a penchant for the virtues of barbarism, contempt for the "unblooded elite" that exploit him and his men, and an enduring appreciation for the imperfect and often infuriating Army, cherishing the masculine development, camaraderie and the opportunity to put his life at stake and thereby feel alive.

For many years, I shied away from reading any contemporary authors, especially works of fiction, I haven't watched a movie in years, at home or in the cinema.  Sam stands alongside James and other contributors here as living men worthy of your time and attention today, before they join the ranks of the Great White Dead.  Breakfast with the Dirt Cult, Reverent Chandler, Poet and many others you'll find in these pages would also make great films.  They don't have a lot of explosions or exotic scenery.  These are movies that could be made affordably and that would be compelling to American audiences, and they might even drag me back to the theater.

Breakfast with the Dirt Cult gets five stars from me, and I will be ordering a few copies for veterans on my Christmas list.

.

(c) 2018 Lynn Lockhart

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 47

James is offline for the time being, technical problems, so visit here for some Robert E. Howard posts and other good stuff.

The Khan is doing movie reviews now!

James integrates the Taboo individuality of his earlier writing on masculinity with the basic human unit of tribal identity.

This fellow has a lot of LaFond access lately, more than your humble blog- and podcast-servant.  Enjoy a spooky Halloween zombie story, and James' views on superheroes and comics.

You need a crusading order to perform a hostile take over.

Span the chasm between intellect and action, focus on what is within your grasp in the sliver of freedom that remains to you.

You need to understand aggression, especially the earliest signs of it, and train with weapons, including and especially improvised weapons.

Murderbowl update, Baltimore is still in the game!

You can see James' books in the BOOKSTORE, but they are rapidly falling to the censor's hammer.  Now some -banking- troubles have held up his royalty payments.  

Many fine titles are available as pdf books through his main website.

Support James in his Plantation America work by becoming a Patron, or donate straight to the man through Paypal, because you love James and his work.

(c) 2018 Lynn Lockhart

Main Site on Ice

"computerwipedofflineuntil"

A deep state actor has crashed James' laptop in the middle of a Windows update.  As a result, he is unable to get online and post on his main site, jameslafond.com, for an indefinite period.  I have some good stuff saved up to post here, and may receive SMS from him, specially encrypted by omitting any spaces, so come back and check in.

-Lynn, Chief Blogservant of Crackpot Industries

‘A Wanderer on the Face of the Earth’

James LaFond's impressions of The Castle of the Devil by Robert E. Howard

The character of John Silent, an English mercenary travelling through Germany to Italy to seek employment as a ship's captain, is compellingly and sympathetically written, as a man of the world, a man who abides convention and hierarchy even if they be evil. He meets “An Englishman? And a Puritan by the cut o’ the garb,” as he takes the forest road past the castle of a man supposed to be the very devil, a certain Baron Von Saler.

The stranger answers his hail and, strangely among heroes of fiction, refuses a ride on the back of his countryman’s horse, stating that honest men walk, a statement he makes in at least one other story.

“I am Solomon Kane,” the other answered in a deep measured voice. “I am a wanderer on the face of the earth and have no destination.”

Kane is a person destined not to where, but to what and to whom. Kane pities the horse and also seeks purity of action through unilateral transport, seeming to appear everywhere on foot. One is tempted to postulate that the Caine character played by David Carradine in the Kung Fu  television series was based on Solomon Kane, as every episode begins and ends with this man footing it enigmatically into and out of the troubled life of men.

Kane has just taken down a boy from the gallows, he admits to the horrified John Silent, and welcomes meeting the baron and his men at arms as they pass beneath his castle, for Kane has right on his side and fears nothing that is wrong. Kane is a hero [an actionist with stakes] with the uncompromising ethos of a superhero [a collective actionist without stakes]. In many ways the twisted collectivist do-gooders of superhero fiction may be seen as a bastardization of the Kane character. The differences are two:

1.  Kane is not superhuman in physicality, but rather extra-human in psychicality, physical equaled by various villains but as morally beyond their ken as superman is physically beyond the means of the paltry villains he squashes

2.  Kane maintains his internal morality as superior to the social morality and does not hand over his bagged villains to the sheep of men and their sheepdogs, but rather removes them from life before God and returns them to their master, Satan.

Kane is above all, in the eye of modernity, a blasphemy, a walking embodiment of all that Technological Civilization curses as wrong and is, at the same time, profoundly non-Christian, despite his austere Christian affectations.

Kane is Beowulf wearing a judge’s habit.

Despite being unpublished, even unfinished, The Castle of the Devil most boldly proclaims in Kane’s own words, his trade in death:

“It has fallen upon me, now and again in my sojourns through the world, to ease various evil men of their lives. I have a feeling that it will prove thus with the Baron.”

John Silent is appropriately aghast, being a man of the world as he is.

I am more of a mind to complete this unfinished story than any other Howard fragment I have yet read.

(c) 2018 James LaFond