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I found it at a thrift shop, Dover reprint, and I picked it up because when I was a kid I was crazy for this sort of stuff.
By the time I was 12 I'd read almost the entire children's library, and some of the books that I hadn't included Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I knew who Tarzan was, of course, who doesn't? But I wasn't that interested. Nonetheless, it was getting down to Tarzan or nothing, so I checked out a few of the books.
And I loved them...
I mean, I read everything by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Tarzan books, the John Carter on Mars, the Moon Maidens, Tarzan at the Earth's Core, I'm pretty sure the library didn't have them all, but what they had, I read.
I loved 'em all.
So when I got to be twenty-ish I revisited them. Specifically Tarzan. And I found them painful, awkward to read, horrible, just appalling...
I blame my fancy highbrow European tastes, I'd been reading the English authors, Thomas Hardy, Somerset Maughm, George Orwell, any number of other authors, Vladimir Nabokov...clearly I was raising the bar...
When I had my son, perhaps when he was 10 or 12, I gave him a couple of dozen original dime-store Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan books I'd found at a garage sale. He pretended to try and read and then discarded, they weren't to his taste, what can you do?
But finding this, the Dover reprint, slender, the adventures of David Innes and company at the Earth's core, I couldn't resist. I'd try him again.
And, a slender book, filled with original, novel ideas, poorly executed and even more poorly recorded...psychological gold, this, the primitive, stone age and reptilian races at the earth's core, the beast-man named "Gr-gr-gr", the thags and dinosaurs, the inwardly curving horizon and the stationary hovering moon, but, like Gaston Leroux's "Phantom of the Opera" it's also literary torture. The brilliant device of the author addressing a letter of criticism from a fan at the beginning (who turns to a believer when he sees the evidence the author provides) is undermined by it's execution, and perhaps it's wrong of me to judge as Burroughs himself never aspired to be more than a pulp-fiction writer, in any case, intriguing for the ideas, and he did have some great ideas, but for the most part these books will have to remain in memory and childhood...
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At the moment I'm reading "Trout Fishing in America" by Richard Brautigan. I'm loving it.
A long time ago, almost 30 years, a roomate of mine recommended "In Watermelon Sugar" by Richard Brautigan which I never read, because at the time I only read books by dead authors and I knew better than to listen to my roomate. He was a nut-job.
You have to be careful in the recommendations people give you, they recommend a book, a movie, a play, a song, and you can see, for a moment, into their soul, and if you know already their soul is empty you don't want to go looking into the void. There was a girl once, a long, long time ago, I met her online, she used to be a model and sent me lots of pictures from when she was a model, but when I met her she wasn't a model any more. She was all washed out. When we were chatting online she told me her favorite book was "The Scarlet Pimpernel" and I knew it but hadn't read it so I found a copy and read it and thought to myself: "Uh-Oh". After we met and we talked and went back to my apartment and she told me about the business she was setting up and how she missed her children in Berlin, twin boys, but she had to leave, couldn't get or afford custody, and we slept together and after sleeping together she told me about the evangelical church she belonged to and how she liked to go to the front of the congregation to confess all her sins and how much she was looking forward to going to church on Sunday so she could tell them all about this in tones of infinite remorse and regret...
...and I stared at the ceiling and wondered how it was possible to fall in love...
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I almost passed it by, read the title, meh, then upon second glance...
Copyright 1917, printed 1936, Esoteric, Fringe New-Age, in the league or school of Madame Blavatsky, The Golden Dawn, etc. Occult, Spiritualistic stuff...
The title page convinces me to give it a chance...
"OUR STORY
of
ATLANTIS
Written down for the
HERMETIC BROTHERHOOD
and
THE FUTURE RULERS
of
AMERICA"
By
W.P.Phelon, MD
This could be good. Real good. File under intellectual treasure. The cover displays the Society's logo, pressed in gilt:
To describe it as follows: A braided rope around a triple embossed triangle, within the triangle a winged globe flies beneath a skull and crossbones. Above the pyramid a ships anchor on the left and a fiery lantern on the right (guessing). The word (Acronym?) TRY is embossed beneath the pyramid...
Reading it ... I know, old school, old book, paper and all, but I have to read it...
PG 27: "It is a conceded fact there have never been, since the fall of Atlantis, so many reincarnated Atlantians upon the earth at the same time as now. This accounts for the almost universal demand out of the Astral records for the forgotten knowledge of the Occult which they there recorded."
I mean, start from here and where do you go?...
The praising and description of Atlantis doesn't end, there are numerous bad verses and odes describing Atlantis as the Garden of Eden, the lost repository of mankind's knowledge, words alone won't do it justice, you need verse, music, paintings...there are references to Lemuria, Mu, all these places are referred to as accepted fact, every printed travelers tale is taken as gospel and embellished upon by the enthusiastic narrator, lost and secret cities in Mexico, carefully kept hidden from western eyes, lost civilizations found deep within distant jungles or subterranean caves, various theories propounded for the differences in race (we each were cooked at varying times in the suns intensity...I'm not making this up...)
I'm not even halfway done and I'm loving it, it's Edgar Rice Burroughs reported as fact, the ultimate attempt to unify every batshit theory, myth, conspiracy and legend...
With this book, this Bible, I will become the King and Pope of Nelson...
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Not, per-se, a destination of mine, rather keeping the vocabulary and the thought-patterns alive until spring.
It's inspirational, this, the abundant and rich history of Washington, and we have the same here...more even, but it's better concealed beneath 10, 20, a hundred meters of glacial till...
It's an exercise, reading this, and makes me realize how little I've scratched the surface of the countless possibilities of where we live...
Paleo-placers, diamonds, gold, platinum, and where are all the opals? With all the bentonite & sandstone layers in the province, opalized wood and fossils, there have to be opals someplace...
...but that's my job. Prove the theory. 2 months and counting...
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With cold and wintry days, and not enough gas to get back to prospecting, I begin to catch up on my reading. 2 books - Oblomov, by Ivan Goncharov, a traditional Russian Satire, in the vein of Bulgakov (but some 100 years his predecessor), it's a masterpiece of characterization and a gentle satire on the Russian nobility. Nuanced, romantic, in an amazing translation by Ann Dunnigan.
And the other, Trilby, by George Du Maurier, a bestseller of the late Victorian era, as opposite in quality and temper as could be imagined, full of stereotypical characters (not all kind, the Jewish stereotypes are offensive, the English, absurd, the French, well, you get the idea. Stereotypes.), slight events, now only notable because it introduces us to the idea and character of Svengali.
Oblomov is by far the better book, take Trilby as a curiosity and colorful exaggeration of life in Bohemian Paris. But as good a way as any to while away those few remaining leisurely hours...