Wild Talents Read Free Page A

as pieces ("slightly less than 400 pieces on a game surface of 800 squares" notes Steinmeyer). One of the few photos of Fort shows him contentedly sitting alongside the sheet. But by the next year his eyesight had so worsened that he found himself no longer able to devote such attention to the original sources, and so his visits decreased. Though he took fewer notes, he continued to write.
    The Forts moved to Ryer Avenue, off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx (still standing) and there Tiffany Thayer appeared in person for a visit in 1930, soon after his first own bestselling novel was published. They talked. Fort told him of his manuscript Skyward Ho! Like Dreiser, Thayer didn't hesitate, taking the manuscript to his publisher, Claude Kendall, and convinced him to bring it out. As no one was keen about the title, Thayer and Fort batted about several possibilities before the former made the winning suggestion.
    Without telling the honoree, Thayer founded the Fortean Society, intending to publicize both the book and Fort in general. The first meeting of the Society took place toward the end of January 1931. In attendance were Thayer, Dreiser, Alexander Woolcott, Ben Hecht, Dunninger the magician; neither Tarkington nor UK novelist John Cowper Powys could attend but sent messages. Fort was pretty much hoodwinked into attending but evidently took it well, sitting quietly in a chair smoking a cigar while Dreiser did most of the talking, and looking at the first copies he'd seen of Lo!

    ***

    Wigwams on an island -- sparks in their columns of smoke.
    Centuries later -- the uncertain columns are towers. What once were fluttering sparks are
    the motionless lights of windows. According to critics of Tammany Hall, there has been monstrous corruption on this island: nevertheless, in the midst of it, this regularization has occurred. A woodland sprawl has sprung to stony attention.

    Lo! Fort's greatest work, is the one the inexperienced Fortean should read first. His mastery of the Data is complete, and with a voice as distinct as any in American literature, he presents the data and his theories about the data with unexcelled beauty and precision, it is a work both personal and cosmic. Here he streamlines the theory of Intermediateness, speaking now not only of what he calls the oneness "in all confusions" but how reality-unreality forever iterates in ways perpetually expected-unexpected. He now brings to the entirety of the work what seems to be a much deeper understanding, and appreciation, and acceptance of the world.

    Wise men have tried other ways. They have tried to understand our state of being, by grasping at its stars, or its arts, or its economics. But, if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.

    Among the data contained in his third book is naturally, much regarding rains of the unexpected -- fish, snakes, winkles tossed across country lanes by "a disgruntled fishmonger"; astronomical phenomena, odd weather and the like -- but as well a far broader range of material: accounts of odd animals seen at sea or on land, mysterious attacks by what appear to have been animals, mysterious appearances of things and people, a multichapter account of the phenomena -- spontaneous combustion, lights in the sky, poltergeists, unseen. murderous wild animals, mysterious disappearances, manifestations of psychotic mania, speaking in tongues and so forth -- taking place during the Wales Revival of 1904-05. And, of course, the cow that gave birth to two lambs -- or, rather, wool-covered calves. As William Gibson created the word "cyberspace" so Fort observes here that a possible way in which frogs and the like may fall to earth absent of windstorms would be "a transportory force which I shall call teleportation." And, he continued to toss off notions that would later in the