‘For God’s Sake’

James LaFond's Impressions of Skulls in the Stars by Robert E. Howard

“He was a tall, gaunt man, was Solomon Kane, his darkly pallid face and deep brooding eyes made more somber by the drab Puritanical garb he affected,”

In this passage, everything about Kane is revealed, that he is lean, mean, haunted or driven and that he has “affected” his Puritan appearance. In later stories it will come to grey light—for Kane is never seen in the brightness of other men’s waking eye—that the “Puritan” was once a sea dog, a pirate employed by his nation as a disposable heroic asset to commit vile deeds on the high seas and in the lands beyond.

He is approached on the road to Torkertown by an innocent child who pleads with him to take the swamp road rather than the moor path, where men were known to be slain by night. Kane, however, is a being of personified vengeance, seeking to purge the taint from his soul left by being party to past deeds by seeking out evil and extinguishing it from the face of the earth, which he wanders as a murderous son of man in his prodigal exile.

It is of interest that Howard begins the Kane saga with a quote from Hood:

He told how murders walk the earth
Beneath the curse of Cain,
With crimson clouds before their eyes
And flames about their brain:
For blood has left upon their souls
Its everlasting stain.

A man’s youthful past as a stain upon his soul is the theme of the entire saga, with the man driven to bloody redemption justified in his actions, as judge and executioner of mankind by the evil that men do. As Kane says, passing sentence on Ezra the Miser for the murder of his brother Gideon,

“A hard thing it is, to sentence men to death in cold blood and in such a manner as I have in mind, but you must die that others may live—and God knoweth you deserve death.”

Audiobook Links

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 49

If you like this piece about grocery justice, and you find this video interesting, you owe it to yourself to read The Violence Project.

Roosh would call this a neg.

How to interpret the sounds of the jungle.

The Z-Man witnesses the white-flight-urban-blight-hipsters-affright cycle of life, generating real estate commissions, property taxes, developer profits and the deep need for a state security apparatus.

BPD is recruiting at all levels.  Prior criminal record is NOT a disqualifier.

I would propose that it is not enough to be debt-free, you must be among the creditors to enjoy full citizenship.

How a strong neck can serve you in battle, and how it can betray you.

Terrifying phrasing in this book review: the American military is an armed bureaucracy!

The gentlemen from the Myth of the 20th Century were guests of Deanna Spingola, perhaps James will join her soon.

This is the most succinct synthesis of the Barbarism vs Civilization concept.  The book languishes in purgatory, as the Crackpot publisher isn't sure how to proceed with a book banned in it's digital womb.

Don't think of it as a black or white thing, think of it as an American thing...USA! USA! USA!

On border security and the Natural Law.

A Crackpot Mailbox grabbag, a lot of good stuff.

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

‘Each Deathly Eye’

James LaFond's impressions of Death’s Black Riders by Robert E. Howard

Death’s Black Riders is a tiny fragment, an opening scene of pure horror, as the dour Puritan swordsman—an Aryan avenger in Christian disguise—stands before an onrushing image up from Hell, unwavering, not shaken with superstitious dread but rather with the taste of the hunt for evil.

As an image which combines Tolkien’s Nazgul and Washington Erving’s Headless Hessian Horseman, with Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, the opening scene—for it is a completely realized scene crafted in under 350 words, Kane is uncharacteristically depicted as a horseman.

The power of the scene begs for a full treatment, however, Howard seems to have despaired of selling the resulting story. I am certain had he completed it he would have unhorsed Kane as a self-purification rite before facing not only the rider of the opening scene but those others inferred by the title.  

(c) 2018 James LaFond

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 48

The Scribe has returned!  Our hero, Sean, was victorious in the ring!  It was a good week!

Bravo to the Champion, well done, Sean!!!

Many thanks to Colin for getting our hero back online!

He's a 78 year old Vietnam Vet and he can tell you about rock apes.

Nero's odd jobs and adventures continue.

Grasping James' odd lack of racism is Crackpot 101.

As your faithful podcast servant, I will try to subvert this new set of rules.

Crackpot Industries is hiring.

Advice on taking up martial arts.

Regular readers should by now become very attentive when James makes predictions.

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

‘Drowned Unearthly Things’

James LaFond's Impressions of Solomon Kane’s Homecoming by Robert E. Howard

A comparison of the two variants published on pages 379-89 of The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane by Ballantine Books 1998

The eleven verses of four couplets each of Solomon Kane’s Homecoming is the third and final poem of the trilogy which present the character of Solomon Kane as a former captain of Queen Elizabeth’s Sea Dogs, who individually, with great heroics, stood against and even dogged the vast Spanish navy around the world.

Howard reveals his deep historical reading of Kane’s period when he paints the stages of Kane’s dissolution—not all encased in the two versions of this poem but some apparent in the Blue Flame of Vengeance novelette:

• the betrayal of Sir John Hawkins by Drake after Vera Cruz, when he usurped his leader’s position by appealing to the womanly monarch as a more functional tool of state,
• the execution of a captain in Terra Del Fuego at the order, rather than by the hand, of Drake,
• the killing of innocent Spanish subjects in Panama.

Finally, the betrayal of the most heroic sea dog, Sir Richard Grenville, who comes to Kane in a dream and helps him fight off African head hunters. Grenville, loyal to Sir Walter Raleigh, was made to sit out the battle of the Spanish Armada with 51 ships so that he would not achieve renown, as he was known as the most courageous of his kind. Later, in mourning his missed chance for national hero status, Grenville took on a fleet of 53 Spanish galleons with a single ship and actually fought with his crew for three days. He was seen—from the decks of the ships which he sent away—being taken prisoner by the Spanish, never to be seen again.

In the poem, Kane is revealed as the spirit of Sir Richard, as he was taken captain and held and tortured by the Spanish as a sinner and then the Turks as a galley slave, very much in the manner of a historical character, Captain John Smith, whose actual a career mirrored Kane’s fictional career. In Howard’s poem, Grenville died on deck, which this reader takes as representing his defeat and Kane’s fictional emergence as the unquenchable spirit of his defiant race. Kane’s extreme celibacy is addressed in the poem, with reference to a woman who loved him who he abandoned, just as Smith abandoned Pocahontas, who like Kane’s abandoned bride, died after his leave-taking. Captain Smith marked the last of the adventurous Spanish-battling sea dogs, reduced to a wanderer and explorer and interface with non-Christian folk. Interestingly, John Smith was castrated when his gunpowder pouch hung before his groin ignited and exploded. This along with his staunch denial that he had sex with the various Indian beauties who attempted to seduce him makes Smith the second historical aspect to the Solomon Kane character, Sir Richard Grenville being the first aspect. Below is one of the eleven verses of the fantastic retrospective poem reviewing the acre of Howard’s most definitive and finite hero, a hero, who never engages in self-examination or soul searching, until he returns to his long-neglected homeland and is finally forced to regard himself in the mirror of his recollecting eye and turns away in a self-shunning departure, putting the avenger to rest in the author’s mind.

Verse 10

"Hands held him hard but the vagrant gleam
In his eyes grew blind and bright,
And Solomon Kane put by the folk
And went into the night.
A wild moon rode in the wild white clouds,
The waves their white crests showed
When Solomon Kane went forth again,
And no man knew his road.”

Solomon Kane, among the pantheon of heroes that sprung from the well of Robert E. Howard’s mind’s eye, might rightly be considered a monster in his own right, a spectral ghost, for certain.

Lynn, struggling with the cmputer

The fun part of James' computer problems is the cryptic text messages I receive from him, a previously unknown occurrence. Yesterday, I got the following:

Please thn (redacted) on the bogspot for the donation--I can't email him.

So we see that James has received a generous gift from a reader and that he has found the space bar on his flip phone.

Thank you, Anonymous Friend, we at Crackpot Industries appreciate your support.  If you have anything you'd like to hear us cover once we get podcasting again, please let me know!

-Lynn

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