Charles Fort is basically the patron saint of unexplained phenomena. How influential was this guy? Well, he invented the word teleportation in 1931, so I guess that ought to tell you something. He wrote seven books, four of which survive and are collected in a fairly weighty paperback, but I suppose you could thumb through them in digital form.
Fort's fun to read, but his style's a bit hard to follow. He doesn't so much consider normal English sentence structures or, you know, grammar, all that important. He doesn't offer serious explanations so much as he catalogs information and calls into question the existing answers. There's a line towards the beginning of the first book, though, The Book of the Damned, that isn't about the unexplained and makes a little more sense than most. "By 'beauty,' I mean that which seems complete," Fort writes. "Every attempt to achieve beauty is an attempt to give to the local the attribute of the universal."
So far I'm about 70 pages in and I've been mostly reading about things falling from the sky; things like oil, maize, pumice, worms or fish, which may not have been oil, maize, nostoc, worms or fish. I think he's about done with animal and vegetable, though, and is moving on to mineral in the next chapter...
Comments (12)
Does Fort cover such unexplained phenomena as a "hail of gunfire", "rain of bullets", "rain of fire", "reign of fire", and seas of wishes in the form of fishes?
Also...pumice IS mineral. Its stone. Unless you mean "humus", in which case I'm just going to go and feel slightly deranged.
I find it amusing, though, that Fort spends so much time just focusing on different sorts of strange rains.
Has he covered angel's hair yet?
Posted by Bard | January 25, 2006 12:05 PM
Posted on January 25, 2006 12:05
Fort's all about the rain. So far no bullets or angel hair, but he has talked about rains of sulpher...
Which I guess is also a mineral. Hhm.
Humus? No. Manna? Yes.
This guy is crazy. But in a fun way.
Posted by Jason | January 25, 2006 4:31 PM
Posted on January 25, 2006 16:31
Hmm...sulfer. That reminds me.
In the next town over from where I grew up there were these HUGE piles of bright yellow sulpher that just sat out in the open air, pulled down from mines in the mountains and then taken off in ships along the river. These sulpher piles were left outside, uncovered. Rain or shine. Wet or dry. Blowing wind or dead still air.
My mother told me the other day that Port Moody has one of the highest rates of asthma in the country.
Its Chinese name apparently means "Lonely Graveyard", which makes sense if the graveyard were full of lonely people who DIED OF FUCKING SULPHER POISONING!
...ahem. Yeah. I was always curious about that as a child. Funny story addendum: We used to go swimming all the time in the same river as the sulpher.
Thinking about it, we were probably swimming DOWNSTREAM from the sulpher.
Posted by Bard | January 26, 2006 12:50 AM
Posted on January 26, 2006 00:50
Are you yourself asthmatic, Mr. Bard? I can't remember it ever coming up in conversation...
Lonely Graveyard is a great name for sulpher. I wonder if the word for oil really means "black blood of the earth" like Big Trouble In Little China said it does...
Posted by Jason | January 26, 2006 1:43 AM
Posted on January 26, 2006 01:43
I wonder if the word for oil really means "black blood of the earth" like Big Trouble In Little China said it does...
"Oil" is borrowed from the Old French "oile" which was taken from the Latin "oleum". This is derived from the Indo-European root "od-," which is the same as that in "odor". The change from d to l can be seen in the pair "odor" and "olefactory". So, "oil" actually means, roughly, "thing that smells nice". What's interesting is that they used "oil" to refer to the black stuff for its consistency, not for its smell.
In case you were curious.
Posted by Bekah | January 26, 2006 6:04 AM
Posted on January 26, 2006 06:04
Drive-by linguisting!
Posted by Erik | January 26, 2006 6:29 AM
Posted on January 26, 2006 06:29
Uhm... Thanks, Bekah!
Not so up on your Chinese, huh? ^_^
Posted by Jason | January 26, 2006 9:59 AM
Posted on January 26, 2006 09:59
Bekah: Etymology Ninja.
Also: But did Charles Fort have cool theme music, like X-Files and Unsolved Mysteries?
Posted by Ben | January 26, 2006 10:13 AM
Posted on January 26, 2006 10:13
Drive-by linguisting!
Bekah: Etymology Ninja.
Heh, uh....thanks.
Not so up on your Chinese, huh?
Sorry, I didn't realize we were switching language families.
It doesn't mean anything in Chinese. :-)
Posted by Bekah | January 26, 2006 12:35 PM
Posted on January 26, 2006 12:35
Switching language families? I never!
(And I mean that - I was talking about Chinese from the very beginning. So neener! ^_^ )
Hhm...
*goes off to his kanji books.*
Posted by Jason | January 26, 2006 12:39 PM
Posted on January 26, 2006 12:39
Aaaand we're back.
In Japanese, at least, you write the word for oil with two characters - stone and... erm... oil. Oil's built off of the water radical, but that doesn't mean much. It's probably written the same in Chinese.
So, yeah. Just like Bekah said: Oil doesn't mean anything other than oil.
Posted by Jason | January 26, 2006 12:52 PM
Posted on January 26, 2006 12:52
Bekah's the jen duh sh tyen tsai when it comes to linguistics, it seems.
And no, Jason, I'm not asthmatic. But my mother grew up on the border of Port Moody, and she's asthmatic as all getout.
I actually grew up for a while out in Maple Ridge, which is a long way from Port Moody, and the rest of it I spent up that little mountain, whereas Port Moody is 95% valley/crevice, so I didn't get as much sulpher exposure as she did.
Posted by Bard | January 26, 2006 10:09 PM
Posted on January 26, 2006 22:09