William Buehler Seabrook discussion
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
William Buehler Seabrook discussion's LiveJournal:
[ << Previous 20 ]
| Sunday, April 19th, 2009 | 10:36 pm
[jfletch999]
 |
The Witch's Vengeance
I'm betting the researchers here are way ahead of me, but I found a Seabrook short story in a horror anthology collected by Dashiell Hammett. Creeps By Night is the name of the book, from 1944, reprinting a Seabrook story called The Witch's Vengeance. It was originally printed in Cosmopolitan magazine, of all things. Must have been a very different magazine back then. If anyone finds a Seabrook article on five things he really wants in the bedroom, that I'd like to read. He goes by W.B. Seabrook in this one, no full name is listed. | | Saturday, April 4th, 2009 | 10:17 pm
[vonjunzt]
 |
Fitzgerald on Seabrook
I just bought a fifty-cent copy of Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, an edited volume of letters between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his editor. Checking the index for Seabrook, the only mention of him is a letter from 1936 in which Fitzgerald suggests to Perkins that, "in view of the success of the Gertrude Stein book and the Seabrook book," a volume of his own autobiographical writings might be a financial success. Not much, but it at least shows that Fitzgerald knew who Willie was . . . | | Saturday, February 28th, 2009 | 1:30 pm
[vonjunzt]
|
Documents blog on The Magic Island Documents blog on The Magic IslandNot much new information for those who have been reading this forum, but I found it interesting, since the blogger comes from the perspective of Surrealism rather than Seabrookiana. | | Monday, February 9th, 2009 | 8:44 pm
[vonjunzt]
|
| | Monday, January 26th, 2009 | 8:02 pm
[vonjunzt]
 |
| | Thursday, December 25th, 2008 | 12:06 pm
[vonjunzt]
|
The Occult Review Readers
I've been enjoying reading a couple of books which may be of interest to Seabrookians -- The First Occult Review Reader and The Second Occult Review Reader. Both are made up of short (roughly eight- to twelve-page) essays. Both were edited by Bernhardt J. Hurwood, one published in '68 and the other in '69, and I purchased the first for $1 and the second for less than $5 online. The Occult Review was a magazine published in London from 1907 until the late 1940's or early 1950's, in its later years having merged with The Rider Review. It thus ran throughout Seabrook's career, though I haven't found any evidence that he ever wrote for it. Unfortunately the Review is very rare today, and though it exists in some libraries (as in UC Davis' Houdini Collection), issues are very expensive when they can be found today. The two readers give an idea of some of the issues that were of interest to occultists during Seabrook's day, though unfortunately we're stuck with Hurwood's collections, which give us only a few dozen of what must have been hundreds of articles published during the magazine's nearly 50-year life. Sadly, Hurwood doesn't give original publication dates or introduce individual articles, but we can tell broadly when articles were written based on internal evidence (such as references to the Great War, articles that mention the discovery of Neptune but not Pluto, etc.). The volumes contain a variety of essays on the occult, most of the relatively unremarkable, but dealing with such questions as the validity of astrology, occult lore in antiquity, and various personalities such as Jacob of Simla. Of course, the Seabrookian would most likely be interested in Upton Sinclair's two essays, one of which appears in each volume. Unfortunately neither mentions Seabrook. (Indeed, the only place I've ever seen Sinclair mention Seabrook was in The Cup of Fury, where Sinclair cites him as an example of a person whose talents were wasted by alcoholism.) They do describe Sinclair's adventures after he published Mental Radio, both of them detailing seances with Arthur Ford of the People's Spiritualist Church of Los Angeles. They show Sinclair's fascination with spiritualism that rivaled Willie's occultism, and make one wonder further at the remarkable conversations those two men must have had. | | Sunday, December 7th, 2008 | 10:55 pm
[vonjunzt]
|
Robeson and Seabrook
I've recently added a new treasure to my Seabrook collection -- Paul Robeson's copy of Jungle Ways. Robeson (1898-1976), in addition to being an actor and athlete, was a civil rights activist in the years before the great movement of the 1960s. This caused him to delve into radical politics, even going so far as to travel to the Soviet Union. He was awarded with the Order of Lenin for his efforts. In 1924 he also starred in Emperor Jones, a film adaptation of a Eugene O'Neill play about an African-American who becomes emperor of Haiti. He would of course have been interested in "Seabrook's Book Out of Africa." Unfortunately, although Robeson has signed this copy, there's no other writing in the book and I've been unable to discover what Robeson thought of it and of Seabrook. In any event, at the time Seabrook had a very good reputation as a "liberal white Southerner," as Langston Hughes called him, so it seems not unlikely that Robeson would have appreciated Seabrook's attempts to humanize African-Americans for a popular audience. | | Friday, October 10th, 2008 | 9:18 am
[vonjunzt]
|
Gao of the Ivory Coast
I just finished reading Katie Seabrook's Gao of the Ivory Coast. It's her version of the time she and Willie spent in Africa. It was published in 1931 (the same year Jungle Ways was released beyond the signed, limited edition) by the Junior Literary Guild. In No Hiding Place Willie points out that Katie did it all herself -- decided to write, wrote the book, and got it published -- which of course suggests that wagging tongues were claiming Willie set it all up for her. It should be recalled that The Magic Island was published by the Literary Guild. The book is a little schizophrenic. Supposedly it's a children's book, but it doesn't really read like one. It appears to be the story of Gao, the young orphan who becomes the Seabrooks' servant. It is of course in part that, though like all American women in the '30's Katie has her prejudices. (For example, she says the black man "has begun to dress like the white man and that is the ambition of every black except the ones who live far away in the jungle and do not know or care about European manners and customs" [pg. 26]. Yet elsewhere in the book she's constantly describing blacks who choose to wear traditional dress and who do not abandon native customs.) Nevertheless, the book, like Willie's, is very sympathetic both to the native Africans and to the French colonial officials. But Gao often drops out of the book, sometimes for a chapter at a time. The book is very much her side of the story, with some amusing and endearing anecdotes about Willie. It's especially touching the way she describes the adventure Willie brought into her life in chapter 1. But Katie also tells variants of the stories in Jungle Ways, as well as telling stories that for some reason Willie does not tell. She tells her story as though Willie never went off alone -- never met Wamba and never traveled about the jungle with her. Reading it, you'd think they both stayed in Man the entire time, except for short trips they took together. But the book is an interesting look at their time together from Katie's perspective. Now I want to reread Jungle Ways! | | Friday, September 26th, 2008 | 10:31 am
[vonjunzt]
|
Witcchraft: Its Power in the World Today
I think one of Willie's theses in Witchcraft is that every culture, including our own, feels a need for protection from malevolent supernatural forces. And of course that every culture produces those who dabble with supernatural forces. The woman in this is of course Gov. Sarah Palin. | | Friday, September 5th, 2008 | 11:24 pm
[vonjunzt]
|
Maya Deren's Witch's Cradle While doing a little research on the witch's cradle -- that odd torture device and contraption for enhancing psychic experiences described in Witchcraft -- I came across an odd little film, or bits and pieces of film meant to be made into a film, by Maya Deren and Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was one of the founders of Dada, while Deren, as many of you know, was inspired by Seabrook to go to Haiti and study Voodoo. Witch's Cradle was made in 1943, a full three years after Witchcraft was published. I can't help but think the film was influenced by Willie's book, and this being Deren's first film it might suggest that it was Willie's witchcraft studies which really brought him to her attention. In any event, there's a little about Deren's early filmmaking here, and the film itself -- or what survives -- is also online below. I'd be extremely interested to hear anyone's interpretations on this, especially if you know anything about Deren or experimental film or have read Witchcraft.
| | Saturday, August 30th, 2008 | 10:15 am
[vonjunzt]
|
| | Saturday, April 19th, 2008 | 12:18 am
[vonjunzt]
|
| | Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 | 1:51 pm
[willard41]
 |
Discovery Channel March 31st "Zombies"
I don't expect much from these shows as they really try to pack too much into an hour. Plus they're very generalized for the lowest common denominator, but I was really disappointed to see they gave no credit for the term "zombie" to Willie. The referenced a number of books by Marine vets who had been stationed in Haiti in the 20's but discounted them all as having little basis in fact. While they're saying this, they showed the Magic Island by Willie and, though I haven't finished it, I was disappointed that it was lumped in with the other books. | | Friday, March 28th, 2008 | 3:58 am
[vonjunzt]
 |
Maya Deren's The Divine Horsemen
Maya Deren's The Divine Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti. A documentary filmed in the late 1940's. Not very good as far as documentaries go, but it's interesting to watch.
| | Friday, February 22nd, 2008 | 10:52 am
[kitchenalchemy]
 |
Happy Birthday Willie...
William Buehler Seabrook
Feb. 22 1884 - Sept. 20 1945 Woke up this morning thinking about Willie. He would have been, what? 124 years old today? Which is about how long it feels like I've been writing this biography about the man. What an amazing life he had. Though the end was sad, and there were bouts of some bad crazies, he still lived by his own rules. He never bowed down to the morals and taboos of his times. He was a path finder, a fire starter, a shaman, a bullshit artist, a writer, a father, and the kind of guy I would have loved to just hang out with at the old red barn, having a drink, dangling a girl from the rafters and discussing the mystical qualities of Bach, Crowley and the adventures. Sometimes when I'm alone in this room, in the wee hours of the night working, researching, making outlines, drafts and typing out the man's life, I can feel him standing there behind me. Chuckling under his breath saying. "You're even a bigger bullshiter than me." On the way to the gym this morning listening to the radio the DJ was saying a list of famous people's birthdays... Willie Seabrook was mentioned. He's still out there in the American psychic. Most of the time he's also deep in mine. | | Friday, January 25th, 2008 | 7:08 pm
[vonjunzt]
|
Willie in A Mind Restored I recently took out of the library A Mind Restored: The Story of Jim Curran, by Elisa Krauch (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1937). It's the story of a man cured at an asylum, and contains a short (a little over three-page) introduction by Seabrook. Most of it is stating the same conclusions as he states in No Hiding Place -- that public hospitals are just as good or better than private ones. Its end struck me as poignant, though, especially since we know from NHP that he is actually talking about his mother here: I have always denied being a preacher, reformer, uplifter or propagandist, and shudder at the thought of doing good to others, but my father was an old-fashioned minister of the gospel who loved and tried to help humanity, and maybe I have inherited a little of the taint. I have sometimes suspected that my reporting has been less pure in that respect than it might have been and I know I am writing this introduction because I believe this present book will help immensely in dissipating the stupid fog of fear and prejudice that prevents people from going or sending their relatives to hospitals for mental derangement, to be cured of ills that are no more shameful than measles or appendicitis.
When my own family learned I was headed for Bloomingdale, my now sainted aunt who probably still wears bombazine in heaven, but was then living in Hawkinsville, Georgia, wrote:
'-- but think of the shame! I'd rather see Willie in a drunkard's grave than shut up in a madhouse!'
If my pious elderly female relatives had had their way, Willie would now be in a drunkard's grave -- and that, with all its implications, is why I hope to God a great many people will read this book.WILLIAM SEABROOK.
Rhinebeck, N. Y.
April, 1937. | | Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 | 10:14 pm
[vonjunzt]
|
'Twixt Hell and Allah
About a month ago I finished reading 'Twixt Hell and Allah, by Francis A. Waterhouse with R. Kenneth Macaulay. It's the memoir of an Englishman in the French Foreign Legion during the Druze rebellion of 1925. I read it because I hoped it would shed light on how the French viewed the revolt (which Seabrook tried to get American aid to support) and because I'd read in Betts' The Druze that it contained the only claimed sighting of the Druze's Golden Calf in the twentieth century.
The first 1/5th or so of the book was about training in Tunisia. It was interesting to speculate on how similar that was to the conditions my grandfather faced there with the French army two decades later.
The rest of the book was interesting. Much of it was about the horrors of war, though Waterhouse was himself a soldier inured to much of it. The unjust slaughter and pillaging upset him at times, but he was far more lenient towards all of it than most moderns, I would think. And it is of course interesting to read such things from the other side -- I'm mostly familiar with the Druze revolt from Seabrook and other authors sympathetic with the Druze.
The scene with the Golden Calf is in the chapter entitled "Worshippers of Baal." The chapter opens with the appropriate Biblical quotations (though it conveniently omits the phrase "These are your gods, oh Israel, who brought you out of Egypt," which clearly implies that the Golden Calf is a representative of the Israelite God). In scenes worthy of weird fiction, he describes descending into a subterranean temple and seeing the thing, made of solid gold with (of course) barbaric workmanship. Of course his superiors refused to let him speak of the matter and the town was declared off limits. He refuses even to name it in the book, though he describes it as a tell, one of those curious artificial mounds found throughout the Near East that is a sign a place has been inhabited for millennia.
It was an interesting book and a fun read (it only took me a couple of days), the big problem with it is how utterly unbelievable it was! On the very first page, a man's brain literally explodes from the heat. I've done archaeological work in the blazing summer of southern Jordan, and never once have I seen a hapless undergrad's brain explode. That, however, was more believable than the Golden Calf episode. Waterhouse and his collaborator claim that an idle old man declared to him that all Druze are really worshipers of Baal, and then took him into a secret temple to prove it. It all worked out too perfectly to be true. Even if a senile old man decided to spill the dark secrets of his religion to a foreigner, the one would imagine that the surly youth who was with him would be less than likely to translate and act as guide.
It's very hard to tell how much of the book is Waterhouse and how much is his collaborator. (One imagines, for example, that the whistful gazing of the dancing girl -- into the past, into the future, who can say? -- is Macaulay's melodramaticism.) I suspect, however, that the collaborator explained to Waterhouse how much better the book would sell if he could shine some light on Druze religion, and so Waterhouse conveniently "remembered" this story. The rest of the book shows he made absolutely no attempt to learn anything about or from the Druze -- it's the story of a man who spent his time in Legion camps and ex-pat bars. Which, as I said, leads to an amusing book, but not an expose of Druze religion -- a religion that remains mysterious to this day. | | Monday, January 21st, 2008 | 7:32 pm
[vonjunzt]
|
Seabrook in GoogleBooks
GoogleBooks, which has been doing the world a great service by scanning thousands of books, both old and new, now has all or parts of most of Seabrook's books online! They can be accessed here.That search, incidentally, also turns up a lot of books and articles which refer to Seabrook, so poking around might provide some interesting revelations. | | Friday, January 11th, 2008 | 1:35 am
[vonjunzt]
|
Montagine: Predecessor to witchcraft rationalization
I was recently reading Montaigne's essay "On the Power of Imagination" (Vol. I, Essay 21). It may prove interesting reading for Seabrook readers, as Montaigne describes magic as being effective as the result of belief in much the same way Seabrook later argued. It's also a sort of prototype for William Cannon's essay "'Voodoo' Death," which Seabrook cites in Witchcraft. Montaigne is also among the first authorities of which I am aware who argued (in "On the Lame," Vol. III, Essay 11) that there were indeed witches, but that they shouldn't be punished with death because they were self-deluded. | | Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 | 10:34 pm
[vonjunzt]
|
|
[ << Previous 20 ]
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
williamseabrook