Customer Reviews

The Complete Books of Charles Fort: The Book of the Damned / Lo! / Wild Talents / New Lands

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

No author has had a greater intellectual influence on me than Charles Fort. As an eight year old I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was enchanted by his writing style. When I read Fort today it is for literary enjoyment. Inimitable writers are, unfortunately, too often imitated. However, an ardent Fortean could identify a Fortean paragraph as easily as he could identify his mother in a photograph. Here are some excerpts, selected at random, from this behemoth text. If you find the following samples unpalatable, you're going to hate this book:

page 38 - So Science functions for and serves society at large, and would, from society at large, receive no support, unless it did so divert itself or dissipate and prostitute itself. It seems that by prostitution I mean usefulness.

page 324 - That our existence, a thing within one solar system, or supposed solar system, is a stricken thing that is mewling through space, shocking able-minded, healthy systems with the sores on its sun, its ghastly mooons, its civilizations that are all broken out with sciences; a celestial leper, holding out doddering expanses into which charitable systems drop golden comets?

page 389 - We assemble the data. Unhappily, we shall be unable to resist the tempation to reason and theorize. May Super-embryology have mercy upon our own syllogisms. We consider that we are entitled to at least 13 pages of gross and stupid erors. After that we shall have to explain.

page 643 - As to data that we shall now take up, I say to myself: "You are a benign ghoul, digging up the dead, old legends and superstitions, trying to breath life into them. Well, then, why have you neglected Santa Claus?"

What use is Fort today? Most published Forteans (Keel, Coleman) are on-site researchers, methodically tracking down and experiencing that of which they write. The only place Charles Fort traveled to was the library.

Fort would think that his writings and opinions were above classification, and if anyone is, he is probably the one. But we have to connect all writers to something. I see alot of Hegel in his writings, particularly in his dialectical analyses and his fixation on negation. Hegel's famous quote - The whole of philosophy resembles a circle of circles - is hearkened to in Fort's famous circle quotation. But this is no philosophy text. You could boil down Fort's philosophy in Book of Damned to a concise three pages. Yet Fort reiterates, and rephrases, and belabors. And it's excruciatingly enjoyable. If you don't like being told the same thing over and over again, albeit wittiily and elaborately and incorrigibly, don't read this book.

I treat Fort like I treat the Bible. I don't mean that irreverently (I happen to think the Bible is pretty holy meself). Open the 1100+ page book anywhere, and read a chapter. Be enlightened, be bemused, be annoyed. Maybe the response is the key. Fort had his pet theories, and they are absurd. But he was onto something. An absoluteness I think. He lambasts religion, and he really lays into science. This may offend people, but theories are meant to be attacked, aren't they? And that is the primary Fortean dogma.

Forteans are a motley and diverse bunch. Yes, you'll find UFO passages, animal mutilations, falling frogs. To me, the details are only significant in volume. If you decide to read this book, leave your pet theories outside of the covers.

I like to believe that Fort was searching for the Absolute, even if the Absolute turns out to be completely absurd to the human perspective. If absolute theories exist, it might only be our ignorance and prejudice which make them absurd.

Oh I could say that everybody should read this book. But the fact is most people won't get through the first chapter. This book is an artifact in many ways, and was written for people with certain intellectual and literary backgrounds. If that sounds a bit snobbish, so be it. Fort was such a snob that he kept his circle of friends exceedingly small, and treated well-respected ideas like lepers. Today, I encounter this book much like I did almost twenty years ago. Like a child, full of wonder, and ready to believe and disbelieve anything.

It is not infrequent to hear establishment scientists label unconventional research work as 'pseudo-science', especially if the researcher in question lacks special academic credentials or institutional support and if his discoveries and conclusions go against current dogmas. But when someone's heresy goes beyond all institutional seriousness and loses its last grain of prim, scientific respectability, then even stronger expressions, such as the term "Fortean", will have to be flung at the anathematized one.

But who was this man called Fort whom every good scientist must abjure in a solemn oath? Well, historically speaking, Fort was (I suppose) the first writer to give systematical attention to a great number of phenomena generally termed 'anomalous' (in the areas of ufology, cryptozoology, parapsychology and many others) and has been a source of inspiration for several writers and - it must be admitted - some crackpot researchers. But is that all? No, definitely not, but in the case of Fort other people's opinions (including my own) will be of almost no avail to the uninitiated, so there is only one answer to the question above: Read Fort's books, and form your own opinion about the man and his work.

That's what I did myself: I got the Dover omnibus volume of his complete works to pollute my innocent mind with, and - ensconced in an old and spacey rocking chair - read every line of it. Now Fort is difficult reading: his style is full of surprises, allusions to subjects touched upon hundreds of pages back, preciously ironical remarks, creative metaphors and analogies (mostly incomplete or faulty, but nevertheless very funny), and - of course - a lot of philosophy: his weak side, if it be permitted to say so. Each book was meant to be read from first to last page, no skipping, because the facts exposed, though apparently whimsical and haphazard, really follow a careful order of presentation.

Fort's works are valuable for the extremely hard-gathered information they present (you can decide for yourself what to do with it) and for the way universally accepted ideas and concepts are challenged and played with for the sake of intellectual amusement (can't scientists see that? haven't they got the slightest bit of sense of humor? in his last book, however, Fort takes on a bit more of the grave air of the parapsychologist, and so comes close to resembling a 'true scientist'). Fort is someone you have a great time reading no matter how much you disagree with him, and that's not a small accomplishment, I think.

Actually, one may say that the act of listening does not imply being in agreement or disagreement with the speaker. And so there should be no hard-felt need for the reader to accept or oppose Fort's views as such. These are inalienable from the man and his unique writing style, and so may be comfortably left where they are. Below are a few typically 'Fortean' quotes, extracted from the omnibus volume reviewed:

- "Sciences are islands of seeming stability in a cosmic jelly."(p.335) - "All knowledge is (or implies) the degradation of something. One who learns of metabolism, looks at a Venus, and realizes she's partly rotten. However, she smiles at him, and he renews his ignorance. All things in the sky are pure to those who have no telescopes."(p.547) - "To have an opinion one must overlook something."(p.559) - "There would not be so much science, if people had good memories."(p.576) - "So, like everybody else, I don't know what to think, but, rather uncommonly, I know that."(p.617) - "Now and then admirers of my good works write to me, and try to convert me into believing things that I say. He would have to be an eloquent admirer, who could persuade me into thinking that our present expression is not a least a little fanciful; but just the same I have labored to support it. I labor like workers in a beehive, to support a lot of vagabond notions."(p.641) - "If there has never been, finally, a natural explanation of anything, everything is, naturally enough, the supernatural."(p.655) - "Every scientist who has played a part in any developing science has, as can be shown, if he's been dead long enough, by comparing his views with more modern views, deceived himself."(p.669) - "In the oneness of allness, I am, in some degree or aspect, guilty of, or infected with, or suffering from, everything that I attack."(p.828) - "To this day it has not been decided whether I am a humorist or a scientist."(p.850)

It would be foolish, really, to try and write a review that in some way offers more information than the one by Jesper Sampaio. And so, I don't intend to. I merely want to offer a few instructions and my own opinion.

Instruction number one: don't take it at face value. Many of the explanations Fort offers for any number of unexplained phenomena are intentionally fantastic, sarcastic or ironic. It is, I think, part of his overall effort to get people to question the "conventional" explanation. Many scientific explanations, after all, simply fit the facts available and, in that respect, are no more or less valid than some of Fort's.

Instruction number two: get ready for rather turgid prose. I personally like the way Fort writes, but it can be tough to get through for the uninitiated. Remember that he was writing in the early part of the century.

Instruction number three: don't be afraid to jump around. I know it's best to read these books "back to back" as it were, but it's not necessary. If you get tired of a particular avenue of discussion just jump ahead. Skip to a different book if you want. Part of my enjoyment of these books was being able to pick the volume up whenever the mood struck me and simply open to any chapter. Sure you miss some of the overarching themes, but it makes it much easier to enjoy.

So, for what it's worth, here's my opinion:

This is a really great primer for Forteana and unexplained phenomena. It is also a sharp and witty condemnation of blind trust in ANY particular system of belief and of the scientific view in particular. The scientific view receives particular condemnation, I think, because of the tendency of those within the scientific community to speak in absolutes. Science, says Fort, has a nasty habit of drawing lines in the sand and saying "this is the way things are" and condemning anyone who says different. The Earth is the center of the universe and rocks don't fall from the sky. Eventually the line gets redrawn, but Fort suggests that perhaps scientists should have just as healthy a sense of skepticism about their own fields of study as they do about the more fantastic things they habitually reject.

Enjoyable by believers and skeptics alike, the Complete Works of Charles Fort is both entertaining and thought provoking.

From page 80 in Fort's "The Book Of The Damned" published in 1919: "Dr. Hahn said he had found fossils in meteorites." Fred Hoyle, the British astronomer, published in his 1984 book "The Intelligent Universe," photographs of fossils in a meteorite. Of course, in 1996 NASA announced finding fossils in a meteorite. What took NASA so long?

Fort's point: What doesn't fit in is damned. What other strange phenomena have been excluded from respectable consideration? Fort tells of fish and stones falling from the clouds, strange craft cruising the skies in the 1890's, lights moving beneath the surface of the sea, vitrified (melted) stone forts in Scotland, disappearing stars, red rain, unknown planets crossing the sun, and sea serpents.

Fort's style of extreme and fantastic hyperbole makes for difficult reading until the reader allows his thinking to slide into the Fortean mode. Of course, thats what Fort had in mind all along, to stretch the reader's thinking to the point where he will at least consider what others have ignored.

Charles Fort collected what he called "damned facts"; facts that science refused to acknowledge; rains of frogs, eclipses that shouldn't happen, sheep-mutilating werewolves and disappearing Ambroses. He had several mutually contradictory theories to explain them ("I think we're fished for" is perhaps my favorite) and wrote in a jaunty, wry, telegraphic style that could define "inimitable."

Indispensible for the well-read UFOlogist or lover of the bizarre, this omnibus volume is indexed by place, date, and type of incident ("Periwinkles, fall of"). Really, Fort should be required reading for all journalists, scientists, and saucer-watchers, if only because of the fights it would start

The best comparisn I think of for this book is the Bible. Both are really long, both discuss at length strange and inexplicable events that there is no logical explanation for (odd things falling from the sky, people disappearing without a trace, ect.), and both challenge the superiority of science over other, more cosmic forces. However, Charles Fort is a better read than the Bible. And a lot funnier too

I am so glad this edition of the four Charles Fort compilations is available; I bought all four books as paperbacks way back in the 1960's, and they were falling apart. I first heard of Mr. Fort at a Dr. Gina Cerminara seminar, chiefly to discuss her landmark book, Many Mansions.

She mentioned Charles Fort as an example of a man of humble beginnings with a burning curiosity of the world about him. She suggested that any one interested in philosophy and the general sciences should study Mr. Fort's writings.

I would soon discover that Charles Fort was basically a chronicler of strange phenomena. He did so with a neophyte's open-mindedness and a
journalist's obligation to explore the facts. His chronicles, these four books, represent his life and philosophy, presented with his trademark wry wit.

He has no point of view, no axe to grind; he champions only the truth. He sincerely wanted explanations for the stangeness about him. What caused frogs and fish to fall out of a cloudless sky? Can dogs really speak? Do ghosts exist? Do people unwittingly cross the time barrier?
Do people and objects vanish into thin air?

These four volumes cover more than a half century of his own obervations and studies. He also researched old manuscripts for ancient accounts of strange phenomena. Some chapters are longish, but detailed; some observations are literally two sentences in length - just the facts. ma'am.

You will find that his stories of strangeness in 19th century New England and Western Europe mirror the mysteries we witness today. We still yearn for the answers. We won't find answers in Fort's chronicles, but an open-minded person should find enlightenment and an appreciation for unbiased, factual reporting.

Mr. Fort filled reams of paper with his observations, stuffing them into shoeboxes, He was finally convinced by friends to attempt publication.
I firmly believe the world is better for it.

Could a man like Charles Fort exist nowadays? He was terribly abused by an uncaring father and sought refuge in books. In this world of overmedicated. over-regulated public education, a young Charles Fort would never have survived treatments for ADHD/ADD or the like. He was a man clearly ahead of his time, born at the right moment.

This compilation of books is amazing.

Charles Fort's writing is intelligent, insightful, and unusual. Although much of his material demands a slower pace of reading, it is well worth it. His writing will likely intrigue the curious and open-minded individual, and it will likely transform the reader's understanding of the universe.

You might need a dictionary as you read these books. Fort's vocabulary is expansive, to say the least.

Charles Fort (1874-- 1932) was a walrus-shaped man who delighted in inventing strange games and in collecting natural history artifacts. He was an Hegalian and a self-professed skeptic (though perhaps not as much a skeptic as he believed). More to the point, he was an anti-authoritarian who loved to compile notes of anomalies and strange phenomena reported in newspapers and magazines that he believed could not be adequately explained by orthodox science. Fort's greatest saving grace was his sense of humor. He always wrote with his tongue firmly in his cheek, tossing off ideas as a kind of creative game:

"Good morning!" said the dog. He disappeared in a thin, greenish vapor.
I have this record, upon newspaper authority.
It can't be said-- and therefore will be said-- that I have a marvelous credulity for newspaper yarns.
But I am so obviously offering offering everything everything in this book, as fiction. (_Wild Talents_, 862)

Martin Gardner (1957) shrewdly compares the first Fortean Society with the Baker Street Irregulars. Many of the members did not take Fort literally so much as they _pretended_ that his ideas were factual. It was all part of an immense joke.


Sam Moskowitz, however, notes Fort's greatest weakness: He was wrong in almost all of his major assertions. Even Immanuel Velikovsky (like the blind hog in search of an acorn) managed to get a few predictions right now and then, but Fort's cosmology (a pancake shaped Earth, a solid sky with holes in it for stars, a Sargasso Sea up in the sky that rains down animals, and planets only a few thousand miles away) has been completely discredited with every spaceship that has gone up since Sputnik.

Many of Fort's specculations of a noncosmological nature are not much more plausible: that a large percentage of arsons are started by mental firestarters; that sheep and cattle slaughterings are frequently the work of werewolves and vampires; and that people, animals and objects are often teleported about by Unknown Forces.

Fort is most famous for four nonfiction books: _The Book of the Damned_ (_1919), _New Worlds_ (1923), _Lo!_ (1931) and _Wild Talents_ (1932). The books sold very little at first, though Fort did acquire a circle of admirers that included Theodore Dreiser, Tiffany Thayer, Albert Payson Terhune, Alexander Wolcott, and Clarence Darrow. In 1934, two years after Fort's death, _Lo!_ was serialized in _Astounding_ in eight parts. It reached its largest audience to date. The reader response was positive but not wildly enthusiastic; and after the first few installments, the letters tapered off (Moskowitz, 1965). But gradually, the readership for Fort grew. This may be in part because of the activity of various Fortean societies after his death. It may also have to do with Fort's influence on science fiction. At various times, writers like Eric Frank Russell, Robert A. Heinlein, Damon Knight, H. Beam Piper and Avram Davidson would write a story or novel with a Fortean theme.

Fort's followers have praised him for his documentation of borderline science incidents. It is true that he amassed a huge collection of notes on newspaper and magazine accounts, and the sheer volumn of details that he throws at the reader makes his books impressive. But Fort did little to check the veracity of such stories. Many were hoaxes and silly season stories, others were mistaken observations, and still other had solutions to the "mystery" that only received brief attention in the back pages of the newspaper.

In one case, a newspaper account of minnows that appeared in puddles in a Canadian town, apparently from a rain, turned out to be fishing bait that was thrown away by a townsperson when the weather turned too bad for him to go fishing (Mr. X, 1997). A small portion of the incidents that Fort cited may have been legitimate anomalies. Willy Ley (1967) reports that the "wheels of Poseidon," spokes of light seen turning around in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, are well documented (if not well understood) phenomena. They are reported by Charles Fort. The trouble is that legitimate amomalies are mixed with so many unreliable and sensational accounts that it is impossible to determine which is which with any great precision.

There are several omnibuses of Charles Fort floating about, but the best is _The Complete Books of Charles Fort_ (Dover, 1974). It is handsomely bound and printed. There is an excellent introduction by Damon Knight (author of the best biography of Fort to date) and a thorough index by Henry Schager. In a volumn this size (1,062 pages), a good index is not to be sneezed at. I would recommend that the beginning reader start with his third book, _Lo!_ It contains some of Fort's liveliest writing and the greatest variety of alleged anomalies. Give Fort a try. He may be frequently ridiculous, but he is rarely dull.

I am in complete agreeance with the first three reviewers. Being #14 isn't like to draw a crowd, but what they say, mirrors my own opinion.

However, to their's I would add: Keep a copy of it in the bathroom. During 10 or 15 minutes you're there, and before your legs go numb, read an excerpt, and use it as a platform to ponder the rest of the day, or at least until you have to use the bathroom again. People don't learn a foreign language one dictionary at a time; rather, they learn one by one word at a a time, then combine recignizable words to form a phrase, then a page, and somewhere down the road, an essay or article; all that can be received by other unknown receptors that await for additional enlightenment.

Should you read Charles Pelligrino, Sitchin, Louis Brennan, Velikovsky, Atlantis Rising, Charles Fort, Rough Guide or some other work or author dealing in the mysteries of the past for which no one has the exact answer, little by little, terms, concepts, precepts, comprehension and understanding all set in, and perhaps in the midst of darkness, you will see lights that were never recognized prior. maybe markers and road signs that leads the way to different ideals than those broadcast out by the modern unenlightened clergy, politician, psychotherapist, medical practitioner, or corporation for profit organization.

There are so many variables that make up the collective modern human spirit and mindset, and for all the effort, we are just as lost with them, as without them. To find our way, and gain personal enlightenment, we all have to break away from the "Official Party Line" for within that lies mind control, homogenization of the masses, stifled invention or research, and no personal development or inspiration that perhaps God would rather us have and exercise of our own free will and effort as enlightened and un-enslaved beings. The America of today isn't what the America of 1790 was (or any other country for that matter.

Nevertheless, freedom of thought and intellect arises from within if we all make the effort and plant the seeds, many of which lie in the works of the above noted authors.