‘Death Stalked Grinning’

James LaFond's Impressions of A Black Wind Blows, Chapter 2, Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon, reading from pages 91-98 of the DelRey edition

The lead illustration is a large, powerful portrait of Conan, seated naked and brooding, one hand under chin the other on his sword as his attendant stands behind him at tensely troubled attention.

“The Year of the Dragon had birth in war pestilence and unrest,” begins Howard masterfully.

As with the advent of the quest of Enkidu, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, mankind cried out to the heavens for relief.

Conan wakes from a nightmare in his royal pavilion under the lion banner of his adopted nation, troubled by a dream that recounted his life in ghostly wise, seeing the battlefield on which he was born, the steps of grim attainment on his ascent to greatness. Haunted by his own likeness stalking across terrible scenes of carnage and of wielding petty power, the barbarian usurper was shaken that much deeper to his core by that which shadowed the procession of his grisly achievements, “…strange, veiled figures and ghostly shadows,” and a faraway vice of mockery.

Throughout Howard’s horror and fantasy fiction mockery as a concept is more thoroughly employed by he than any other author this reader has read, indeed more than all combined authors of all genres I have read in roughly a thousand works of fiction and myth.

Conan confides in his general that the plague that felled the Nemedian King, an ally and predecessor of the king that now arrayed his host across the valley, was a work of sorcery. Then, having been sent to bring his squires for his the king’s arming, the general hears a cry and heavy fall from King Conan’s tent and returns to find the giant barbarian in a paralysis, beaded in sweat as he eyes the shadows within his tent like a poisoned wolf trying to quantify the evil of Man. Conan’s eyes burning with “bitter rage” over the invisible shackles that held him, he hears the pledge of a captain whose stature matches his own who is to bear his armor for the battle. It becomes clear that Howard’s vision of pre-cataclysmic Hyborea is akin to Europe of the High Middle Ages, the end times of chivalry, in the late 1300s and early 1400s, based on his description of the king’s armor.

As his valiant body double swears to honor his harness or die in the attempt Conan makes a savage oath, which Howard quantifies like so:

“In the stress of his anguish Conan’s veneer of civilization had fallen from him. His eyes flamed, he ground his teeth in fury and blood-lust, as barbaric as any tribesman in the Cimmerian hills.”

In that closing passage, Howard makes the point behind both his Kull and Conan hero king sagas, that a powerful and decadent nation which has worn thin its vital essence would be best served by elevating any man—even of an enemy race to kingship—if that man possessed the vitality of its ancestral founders, a lesson he seems to have gleaned from his reading of Roman history, tellingly reflected in his horror story of Hannibal’s ghost in Delenda Est.

(c) 2019 James LaFond

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 62

Here are some links for you, make sure you don't miss a thing!

Last year, James published the diary of a member of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Shelters for the Self.  Scott Cole contributed a great deal of knowledge and context to the final product and he has written about it for Castalia House.  He has also reviewed James' RPG Triumph, and keeps his own blog dealing with military history and current events, Wargame Wednesday.


Reviewing a western story from Louis L'Amour, James reads more in a month than I do in a year.

Hey, have you done your taxes yet?

Recapture your youth, 10/10 I would play this RPG.

LEGALIZE IT!

Be prepared without spending big or looking overly tacticool, with a follow up.

Real-time literary impressions, read along, we are up to Chapter 5.

Every parent will breathe a sigh of relief thanks to Amazon's new policy.

James is starting a new book, the last one (yeah, right) on Masculinity.  It opens with a bit of verse.  See the Bookstore for previous titles on the subject.

Read about homelessness in Baltimore and Portland at Oliver's new website.

Get caught up on modern-day lynchings and the true Dark Web.

Stevedore Jackson explains every single couple in every single advertisement.

(c) 2019 Lynn Lockhart

Soft Shoes

A Sweet Ending, Fiction by Riley

Some people just won't talk to you, and of course they're the ones you absolutely must talk to if you're looking to understand. This was one of those guys, tall and slim, wearing a good suit and a hawk's face scarred by acne. He smiled pleasantly enough, but I could see it wasn't his normal smile. This one would smile after shooting you, watching you slide down the wall leaving a red streak to the base boards.

I was a fat cop, Detective 2 out of the uptown precinct working on my third cheating wife before retiring to Florida. We sat within the green-walled interrogation room with the ceiling fan whacking overhead, roiling the 85 degree air around. 

"You don't seem to sweat," I said, mopping my brow with an off-white handkerchief. 

"I ain't got nothing to sweat over, officer," he said.

"You shoved a walking stick through the front wheel of a cop's bike, causing her to scrub her beak loose, and what, we don't resent that?  We let it slide?" I asked him.

"I would, were I in your shoes. I'd be so embarrassed to be associated with such police-things I'd put me on a bus to Boise just to flush the shame. Besides, police work is risky," he had a point. 

"Why did you do it?" He slid down in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head and stretching, and again with the smile. "She was riding too fast, and on a sidewalk to boot! I felt endangered, and not just me. The sidewalk was crowded. Just say I made a citizen's arrest."

"OK asshole, let's just take a stroll." That made him flinch a bit, but he brought up the smile again and stood. "Where we off to?" 

I took his elbow and steered him through the door and towards the entrance.  A high vibration hummed through my hand. "The scene of the crime, that's where."

We left the station down the steps and strolled off along the sidewalk, I let his elbow loose and we had our hands in our pockets, two pals taking a stroll. 

 After a block or so he looked over. "So what's up?" 

 I faced him and opened my jacket "see the Glock?" He nodded. 

"Grab it and crack me in the head with it, then get on that bus to Boise. I can't even remember why I became a cop in the first place, and it sucks to be one lately." 

He smiled and nodded "I won't shoot you."

I came to seeing red, blood in my eyes, mine. Some citizen knelt over me. "Did you see where he went?" The citizen said he hadn't. I keyed my radio and reported myself down. A few lies to LeShawnna the affirmative hire Loot and I was off down retirement lane, a little beat up from my heroics behind the badge, but free, Lord. Free at last. And Portland, Portland can kiss my ass.

(c) Riley, Nov 4 18

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 61

Welcome to your weekend links!

Bryce Sharper inquires about knife design and everyday armor.

Link for Lancaster Agonistics YouTube

Have you read Gene Wolfe's Urth of the New Sun?  Follow along with James, Chapter 2, Chapter 3.

Do you have German ancestry?  Don't let your family's legacy and the history of Plantation America slip into the memory hole.

Some professional, big brain, well paid historians are working on a database.  See what James and Lynn think of it.

Reject the vidya, follow along as James develops new role-playing games with a couple of young test subjects and the Sasquatch who looks after them.  .

Learn the proper forms of address for the Master of Savage Prose.  How does this man write millions of words (don't look at me)?  And how does he keep you coming back for more?

(c) 2019 Lynn Lockhart

In Our Absence

Notes on the Millennia-Long War on African and European Distinction

This morning I glanced at my lady friend’s TV to see the band that was playing a pleasantly upbeat country song of which I can recall nothing, being musically retarded.

A band led by a small, older, pleasant-looking, kind-faced, light-skinned man of African American descent was playing in a bar, waiting for the lead singer in his black hat. The foremost groupie was a tall blonde woman of European American descent—blonde, always blonde. As the fair-singing man entered the bar a large, menacing, bearded and long-haired bouncer of the ghost race barred his entry due to his racial heritage, an occurrence that I have never observed or heard tell of in my 55-years. Of the many bouncers I have known they only bar violent people. This is generalized by black ghetto bouncers to include men under 35, as youth is the violence predictor and middle-aged men are rarely suspected of disruption unless they have a record of violence in that establishment.

Of course, the European American bouncer is an evil fiend and a coward, as implied in the video, which seems to treat this as a normal event. In fact, the closest thing to this depiction I know of was last year when myself and another European American were denied service at a Latino eatery.

Likewise, the African American man is depicted as a coward unable to stand up for himself verbally or physically—such a zero that he does not even possess the presence of mind to announce himself as the lead singer of the act on stage. Furthermore he is depicted as being late for his own show.

Never fear, the blonde slave mistress is here, and banishes the bouncer’s bad racial intentions with her vaginal authority.

Why would something so mean-spirited and so utterly inaccurate be depicted as happening in rural America?

Then, an hour later, an hour ago, as I shopped with Megan and her granddaughter at the market I looked down to see a copy of USA Today, extolling the underreported hate crimes constantly committed by “whites” against others, neatly putting the video in context.

As the mass media entertainment presents hatred of only one stripe, out of context and wildly exaggerated—indeed nonexistent—as part of a happy country music song, mass media news states that ghost hatred of the deservedly living in this nation amounts to a towering edifice of invisible malice projected from but one source, the vile, tragically still-lingering ghost race who are responsible for every evil under the sun.

Our brains have been pumped full of the lie of the Blackman and of the lie of the Whiteman, two fantasy races that have never existed as a unified society, that were never named so prior to the modern age, with a single exception[1], a malefic force I may not mention lest my every work be condemned to extinction.

Why would any fool believe that he was the absence of light or the absence of color?

What idiot, what slave, would permit a lighter skinned man to label him as the absence of light and claim he was the color of deepest night, of coal, of ash, of the mythic pit of damnation and abomination when he is not the color of his objectively black hair?

Likewise, why would any fool—how much of a slave must this fool have been—permit a darker-skinned man to label him as the absence of color, to claim that his ruddy-skinned race, that his beige folk, that his sun-bronzed men were all the color of pampered slave girls hidden from the sun by the [redacted] masters?

Why have the scores of European races and African races tacitly agreed to be misrepresented in the most demeaning way, to have their unique distinctions erased, to have their great races blotted out, to have the very souls of their ancestors willfully neglected and abandoned in order to embrace some scheming manipulator’s perverse idea of violent contrast?

Why would entire, once proud, peoples abandon their sense of distinction, patrimony and their own future as well; to to volunteer to dance to the end of time as hate-filled meat-puppets and self-loathing sock-puppets in service to the perversions of their enemies?

In the end, no other entity can force you to believe you are something you are not. This leaves but four possibilities:

Stupidity
Greed
Cowardice
Sloth

There Whiteman, stand the four pillars of your delusional mega race, a mere 400 year-old player on a stage that has been stalked by real races, real peoples, for tens of thousands of years. As we and the rest of our kind are swallowed and left behind by the elder races, perhaps we could manage an apology to those predecessors of ours who might have been remembered had not the greedy fools they spawned turned their backs on their gods and embraced the God of Things. The sons of the fair-haired races sold their souls and ours and here we remain holding the unpaid bill as the enemies they clumsily made gather to collect their unearned dues.

Note

-1. My source for the slur black assigned to African races comes from the 500s B.C. and is not European and cannot be divulged online.

I finished the article and went to a wordpress site and the only graphic was of a black man and blonde woman copied below. Tiger and Elle

(c) 2019 James LaFond

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 60

Hello everyone, here are your weekend links:

Niki's walk of whiteness back and forth from work.

Invaluable dating advice from those fine gentlemen, Mr. Rooster and Mr. Slickens.

A daunting but tantalizing reading list on the Bronze Age.  On the topic of Knossian sirens, I considered using one of these babes as my avatar but decided on a more modest image.

James is reading a new fiction book, for those that enjoy following along.

As mentioned in the last podcast, Barbarism vs. Civilization will be made available as a very limited edition hardcover, with autographed bookplates by the Barbarian himself.  Vlad had kindly provided the back cover text here.  If you are interested in purchasing a copy, leave a comment or email me!

Plantation America is still with us, but it's easier to avert your eyes.

Insight into police department staffing decisions, why outsiders are preferred.

(c) 2019 Lynn Lockhart

‘The Open Gates of Hell’

Oh Sleeper Awake: James LaFond's Impressions of Chapter 1 of Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon,  reading from pages 83-90 of the DelRey 2003 edition

On a wind-bemoaned night, by candlelight, four conspirators stood about the ancient sarcophagus of a long dead sorcerer, their four pairs of eyes searching the death box wrought with its weird, writhing hieroglyphics. Most notable among the four was Orastes, inscribing mystical symbols in the air with a candle held in his “broad white” hand, perspiration beading on his “white forehead” above “dilated eyes.” Orastes was not even the most forceful of the power-hungry men gathered here in conclave, in a shadowed room beyond the door of which howled some great hound somehow sensible of the evil being wrought within. Yet Orastes is a man of gravity, a protagonist in his own right from whose mazed eyes the reader briefly experiences men’s willing embrace of evil.

As the would-be kings and their fellow plotters attempt to raise the evil dead, it is apparent that Orastes is not the only worthy, as they introduced themselves by way of commenting on their blasted actions:

Tarascus, a small dark man, kin to the royal line of Nemedia, the kingdom in which this damnable incantation is being committed, muttered, “And damned our souls to purgatories everlasting, I doubt not.”

Valerius, of the yellow hair, laughed harshly, “What purgatory can be worse than life itself? So we are all damned together from birth. Who would not sell his miserable soul for a throne?” [1]

Almuric, a “dark powerful” lord of the royal line deposed by Conan’s bloody hand, a figure of grasping power incarnate, remained focused on the work of his technical expert and demanded details, action, results and confirmation of success from Orastes who had risen manfully to the horrific occasion in which they violated the laws of both man and nature in service to their mighty ambitions.

At last, their blasphemous work done, they raised the rejuvenated sorcerer, a scion of the race their ancestors drove to extinction, upon a ready throne and their audience with a genius of a deeply evil past began. During this exchange Orastes relates a heroic epic of the honorable and doomed Zamorian thieves who facilitated the theft of the necessary arcane articles to transform his new master from a mummy to a reanimated man. The history of the intervening years is briefly told and then, as the reader learns that this wintry raising of the ancient evil dead has occurred in the dying days of The Year of the Lion, Conan’s totem, the barbarian king is described to the sorcerer in savage detail as he waxes nostalgic about warring against that ages-unchanged northern tribe [Cimmerians] [2] in the long ago, eager to ensnare the hero king whom he is assured “is a true son of that savage race…” and until this hour, as The Year of the Dragon drew near, has been unconquerable.

A young teen in the mid-1970s, I originally read The Hour of the Dragon as Conan the Conqueror, part of the chronological Ace paperback series. Since then, due to its length, I have reread it less than the other Conan yarns. It is notable that all of the King Conan stories, The Phoenix on the Sword [Howard’s first Conan sale], The Scarlet Citadel [arguably the best of the three] and The Hour of the Dragon [one of the last Conan yarns], were all concerned with his usurpation by sorcery, with magic in Howard’s hands serving largely as a metaphor for political duplicity against the strong and sadistic entrapment of the weak. All of these three masterworks recycle the King Kull material to some extent, especially the breakthrough story, which is the second Conan rewrite of the Kull story By This Axe I Rule!

Along with the novella People of the Black Circle, The Hour of the Dragon is the most readily adaptable Conan story for a movie script, although it is unlikely that Hollywood egos could ever let Howard’s vision of a barbarian usurper king—who has come to have paternalistic sentiments towards those he rules—survive their agenda.

Gary Gianni’s illustration is of a shuddersome wind uprooting trees as it gathers into a dragon’s head.

Notes

1. One senses the angst of the author in the words of Valerius, which ring so much more painfully true than Tarascus’ flat pessimism.

2. Conan’s tribe is named after a semi-mythic race of northern barbarians who dwelt in misty latitudes in ancient Hellenic Europe, which Howard equates with the Gaelic Celts of Scotland and Ireland who held that same relative position and savage reputation in the early modern English-Speaking world.

A brief thought on the title, Open Gates of Hell, is that the concept, used so often by Howard, might be rooted in a story a washer woman whom he called “aunt” had related to him when he was a child about a harrowing vision quest she had undergone.

(c) 2019 James LaFond

Homeschool Privilege

Tuesday morning dispatch from three girls with flexible schedules

Last night and into the morning, snow fell on the peaks surrounding Slavicon Valley.  I'm a California girl, don't talk to me about winter driving conditions, but someone in Wichita once told me that it's good to have front wheel drive and that's what my trusty Camry has, and that's good enough.  We were up betimes, each put on two pairs of pants and our hooded jackets and headed up the nearest mountain pass.  About a mile from the summit, snow was falling, was clinging to redwood limbs and piling up on the shoulder.  I pulled over into the rest area to find lots of other sight-seers and two local news teams.  The girls made a knee-high snowman, threw snowballs, and my older girl would not stop eating it!

(c) 2019 Lynn Lockhart

Servant of Empire - Crackpot Podcast 51

Welcome to Episode 51 of the Crackpot Podcast, a wide ranging talk on American history, the British Army, the origins of American gun culture and the abhorrent cosmetic practices of celebrities.

The Crackpot Podcast features the Great Writer, James LaFond, and sister to all listeners and readers, Lynn Lockhart.

Audio:



YouTube:

0:00:55  Porch piracy
0:03:40  Murderbowl
0:05:00  Upcoming publications, Barbarism vs. Civilization
0:11:00  The war on creativity
0:12:55  Trumpmas, 2018 - withdrawal from Syria
0:26:04  Message from the British Army, The Face of Battle, John Keegan
0:37:50  US Civil War 2.0 war games
0:39:50  Myth 20 ep LA Riots
0:42:40  Gun culture
0:53:55  Homeschooling culture
0:56:10  Indian kidnappings, Keith Jardine
1:00:53  Birth Trauma

(c) 2019 Lynn Lockhart

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 59

Hello friends, James is getting to post more, so remember to check these posts out!

To Crackpot listeners and YouTube subscribers, I have two podcasts in the hopper but don't miss these videos and more to come from Sasquatch country, take a look at James's new lair and stay tuned for training videos.

Learn about this massive book, Prometheus and Atlas.

I am very interested in this LaFondian volume.

This generous DNA donor's roughly 80/20 mix of African and European genetic origins is quite near the national average for African Americans.

Here's a supplement from Manny, on Murderbowl 2018.

Can you handle the truth?  Then you should probably keep it to yourself.

Compare and contrast Eastern and Western ways of war, this sounds really fascinating.

Is all of recorded western history the story of miscegenation between three groups who have failed to integrate and assimilate in the last 5,000 or 10,000 years?  Diversity is our strength!

Learn about James's writing muses and how you might become one!

In Soviet Portland, cop asks YOU for pat down.

A short and very interesting profile of Sonny Liston.

(c) 2019 Lynn Lockhart