A' Babbled Of Green Fields
I think the tide is slowly beginning to turn. Yes, Fields Bookstore on Polk Street in San Francisco, pound for pound the finest occult bookstore in the Anglosphere beat me again. But not quite as decisively! For example, the Occult Nazis section had almost nothing to show me. Very little hot newness there: Did I buy A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern, or perhaps The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945? Not hardly -- the first one says that the occult wasn't Nazi, and the second one says that the Nazis weren't occult. I suspect some padding in the category to lure me in, a little sheen of desperation on the storied Fields brow. To be fair, I also resisted Scott Beekman's new hardback biography of William Dudley Pelley, America's craziest fascist. (Or America's fascistest crazy, suit yourself.) That was pure willpower, yo.
The Used and Remaindered section held fewer demure charms this year, too: The Genius of China, ironically Robert Temple's only non-crazy book, another Thames & Hudson picture effort for five bucks, and The Time Rivers, which seems to postulate that Earth's great rivers are somehow physically and magically connected into an honest-to-Thoth time river. But all in paperback. I did pick up one of the Strange P.O. Box Pamphlets that Fields stocks so well, this one purporting to prove that Christ was a Roman Reptoid. (To be fair to the author, one "Abelard Reuchlin," I don't think he actually mentions the Reptoid part out loud.) Almost as good, Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus, a book that says Josephus wrote the Gospels, and wasn't Josephus anyhow, but a Roman psychological warfare op gone horribly wrong. Yes, zany classicalism was our keynote this time; also snatched up like precious gems was Ralph Ellis' K2: Quest of the Gods (y'see, Alexander the Great was looking for the Pyramid Treasure in the Himalayas) and Felice Vinci's The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales, which title strikes me rather as a subtitle in search of a lurid phrase, but has the virtue of clarity. And finally, a new edition of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, for all my hex-magic needs.
I drooled over Julian Cope's gorgeous megalith books, and marveled at a Cross of Hendaye book (mark my words, folks, Hendaye is the next Rosslyn Chapel), and bought them not and generally resisted up a storm. And I shan't likely get to Pantheacon this year, so Fields can't get another fifty bucks out of me that way, neither. I'm slowly winning. This is the part of the movie where Bruce Willis is slumped at the bottom of the meathook, but he's still stiff-necked. He's looking up at the villains with eyes bloodshot but undimmed.
As the nice woman at the counter explained to her co-manager: "Don't you know who this is? This is Prince of Cairo!" That's right. It's the Prince of Cairo. And he didn't buy any hardbacks this time. You'd better run.
Special OSS Code Message to themagdalen and stjeromes: How's Monday work? Call either of the numbers I left on M.'s voicemail Thursday and let me know.
The Used and Remaindered section held fewer demure charms this year, too: The Genius of China, ironically Robert Temple's only non-crazy book, another Thames & Hudson picture effort for five bucks, and The Time Rivers, which seems to postulate that Earth's great rivers are somehow physically and magically connected into an honest-to-Thoth time river. But all in paperback. I did pick up one of the Strange P.O. Box Pamphlets that Fields stocks so well, this one purporting to prove that Christ was a Roman Reptoid. (To be fair to the author, one "Abelard Reuchlin," I don't think he actually mentions the Reptoid part out loud.) Almost as good, Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus, a book that says Josephus wrote the Gospels, and wasn't Josephus anyhow, but a Roman psychological warfare op gone horribly wrong. Yes, zany classicalism was our keynote this time; also snatched up like precious gems was Ralph Ellis' K2: Quest of the Gods (y'see, Alexander the Great was looking for the Pyramid Treasure in the Himalayas) and Felice Vinci's The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales, which title strikes me rather as a subtitle in search of a lurid phrase, but has the virtue of clarity. And finally, a new edition of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, for all my hex-magic needs.
I drooled over Julian Cope's gorgeous megalith books, and marveled at a Cross of Hendaye book (mark my words, folks, Hendaye is the next Rosslyn Chapel), and bought them not and generally resisted up a storm. And I shan't likely get to Pantheacon this year, so Fields can't get another fifty bucks out of me that way, neither. I'm slowly winning. This is the part of the movie where Bruce Willis is slumped at the bottom of the meathook, but he's still stiff-necked. He's looking up at the villains with eyes bloodshot but undimmed.
As the nice woman at the counter explained to her co-manager: "Don't you know who this is? This is Prince of Cairo!" That's right. It's the Prince of Cairo. And he didn't buy any hardbacks this time. You'd better run.
Special OSS Code Message to themagdalen and stjeromes: How's Monday work? Call either of the numbers I left on M.'s voicemail Thursday and let me know.