#Georgian Court University

[athleticperfection1]

Georgian Court Lacrosse

[audreydoeskaren]

Note about periodization

I am going to start describing time periods in Chinese history with European historical terms like medieval, Renaissance, early modern, Georgian and Victorian and so on, alongside the standard dynastic terms like Song, Ming and Qing I usually use. So like something about the Ming Dynasty I will tag Ming Dynasty and Renaissance. I already do it sometimes but not consistently. Here’s why.

A common criticism levied against this practice is that periodization is geographically specific and that it’s wrong and eurocentric to refer to, say, late Ming China as Renaissance China. It is a valid criticism, but in my experience the result of not using European periodization is that people default to ‘ancient’ when describing any period in Chinese history before the 20th century, which does conjure up specific images of European antiquity that do not align temporally with the Chinese period in question. I have talked about my issue with ‘ancient China’ before but I want to elaborate. People already consciously or subconsciously consider European periodizations of history to be universal, because of the legacy of colonialism and how eurocentric modern human culture generally is. By not using European historical terms for non-European places, people will simply think those places exist outside of history altogether, or at least exist within an early, primitive stage of European history. It’s a recipe for the denial of coevalness. I think there is a certain dangerous naivete among scholars who believe that if they refrain from using European periodization for non-European places, people will switch to the periodization appropriate for those places in question and challenge eurocentric history writing; in practice I’ve never seen it happen. The general public is not literate enough about history to do these conversions in situ. I have accumulated a fairly large pool of examples just from the number of people spamming ‘ancient China’ in my askbox despite repeatedly specifying the time periods I’m interested in (not antiquity!). If I say ‘Ming China’ instead of ‘Renaissance China’ people will take it as something on the same temporal plane as classical Greece instead of Tudor England. How many people would be surprised if I say that Emperor Qianlong of the Qing was a contemporary of George Washington and Frederick the Great? I’ve seen people talk about him as if he was some tribal leader in the time of Tacitus. European periodization is something I want to embrace ‘under erasure’ so to say, using something strategically for certain advantages while acknowledging its problems. Now there is a history of how the idea of ‘ancient China’ became so entrenched in popular media and I think it goes a bit deeper than just Orientalism, but that’s topic for another post. Right now I’m only concerned with my decision to add European periodization terms.

In order to compensate for the use of eurocentric periodization, I have carried out some experiments in the reverse direction in my daily life, by using Chinese reign years to describe European history. The responses are entertaining. I live in a Georgian tenement in the UK but I like to confuse friends and family by calling it a ‘Jiaqing era flat’. A friend of mine (Chinese) lives in an 1880s flat and she burst out in laughter when I called it ‘Guangxu era’, claiming that it sounded like something from court. But why is it funny? The temporal description is correct, the 1880s were indeed in the Guangxu era. And ‘Guangxu’ shouldn’t invoke royal imagery anymore than ‘Victorian’ (though said friend does indulge in more Qing court dramas than is probably healthy). It is because Chinese (and I’m sure many other non-white peoples) have been trained to believe that our histories are particular and distant, confined to a geographical location, and that they somehow cannot be mapped onto European history, which unfolded parallel to the history of the rest of the world, until we had been colonized. We have been taught that European history is history, but our history is ethnography.

It should also be noted that periodization for European history is not something essentialist and intrinsic either, period terms are created by historians and arbitrarily imposed onto the past to begin with. I was reading a book about medievalism studies and it talked about how the entire concept of the Middle Ages was manufactured in the Renaissance to create a temporal other for Europeans at the time to project undesired traits onto, to distance themselves from a supposedly ‘dark’ past. People living in the European Middle Ages likely did not think of themselves as living in a ‘middle’ age between something and something, so there is absolutely no natural basis for calling the period roughly between the 6th and 16th centuries ‘medieval’. Despite questionable origins, periodization of European history has become more or less standard in history writing throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, whereas around the same time colonial anthropological narratives framed non-European and non-white societies, including China, as existing outside of history altogether. Periodization of European history was geographically specific partially because it was conceived with Europe in mind and Europe only, since any other place may as well be in some primordial time.

Perhaps in the future there will develop global periodizations that consider how interconnected human history is. There probably are already attempts but they’re just not prominent enough to reach me yet. Until that point, I feel absolutely no moral baggage in describing, say, the Song Dynasty as ‘medieval’ because people in 12th century Europe did not think of themselves as ‘medieval’ either. I am the historian, I do whatever I want, basically.

[mariacallous]

Tbilisi, Georgia — The Republic of Georgia, which was part of the Soviet Union until independence in 1991, is preparing for a crucial election on October 26 in a vote widely seen as a choice between a future aligned with the West or Russia.

The United States and the European Union accuse the ruling Georgian Dream party of backsliding on democracy and of tacking closer to Moscow, which party officials deny.

Polls suggest Georgian Dream may struggle to win a parliamentary majority and retain power, although it's not clear if opposition parties would be able to form a coalition to oust the government.

Fear of conflict

With Russia's invasion of Ukraine looming over the election campaign, Georgian Dream has sought to shore up its support by capitalizing on voters' fears of renewed conflict with Moscow. Russian forces still occupy 20% of Georgian territory following their 2008 invasion of the country.

Georgian Dream's election posters seek to present a stark choice for voters. On one side, there are photographs of the destruction from Russia's war on Ukraine; on the other, idyllic images of a prosperous Georgia. The captions read: "No to war! Choose peace."

Georgian Dream accuses its rivals of being part of what it calls the "global war party."

"Since the war began, Georgian Dream's rhetoric has been based on the idea that they are the party of peace, while the opposition is the party of war," said Ghia Nodia, a political analyst at Ilia State University in Tbilisi.

"They claim the opposition would drag the country into war with Russia and that the opposition is, in this sense, an agent of the West, part of the 'global war party.'"

"The fear of war exists in society, largely because of the experience of 2008. And in some ways, this message has been successful. But from my observations, this message has now worn out," Nodia told VOA.

'Global war party'

Opposition parties have expressed disgust at the Georgian Dream campaign.

Several of the billboards and TV advertisements feature photographs of alleged Russian atrocities, such as the strike on the Mariupol theater in March 2022, which is thought to have killed several hundred civilians. Kyiv has described the images as "unacceptable."

Georgian Dream stands by its campaign.

"What we have said is that some individuals — whether politicians, businesspeople, or other actors — might support ongoing wars, including entangling Georgia in war. No leader of Georgian Dream has ever labeled the EU, the U.S., or any Western nation as part of the global war party," said Nikoloz Samkharadze, a member of Georgian Dream and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in parliament.

West vs. Russia

To many Georgians — including the country's president, Salome Zourabichvili, a critic of the government — the election presents a choice on Georgia's future path: Align with the West, or with Moscow.

"It's a choice about what kind of country we want to live in. The West represents democracy, while Russia stands for authoritarianism," said analyst Nodia.

Georgian Dream rejects accusations that it is seeking closer relations with Moscow.

"We sponsored multiple United Nations resolutions condemning Russia's aggression [on Ukraine]. We supported Russia's expulsion from the Council of Europe due to the war. We co-sponsored similar resolutions in the OSCE, and we filed a lawsuit at the International Criminal Court on behalf of Ukraine against Russia for war crimes.

"All of this demonstrates Georgia's clear, principled diplomatic and legal stance on Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine," said Samkharadze.

EU future

Georgia's aspiration to join the EU is enshrined in the country's constitution. Polls suggest more than 80% of Georgians want to join the bloc.

The EU granted Georgia candidate status in December last year as part of an effort by Brussels to offer political support to former Soviet states in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But relations have soured fast.

Brussels effectively froze membership talks after Georgia reintroduced a so-called foreign agent law in April, which the West says mimics Russian legislation used to clamp down on political opposition, civil society and free media.

A violent crackdown on subsequent anti-government protests in Tbilisi prompted the U.S. and EU to impose sanctions on Georgian officials.

EU lawmakers accuse the government of pivoting toward Russia and have called for the European Commission to impose sanctions on Georgian Dream's billionaire founder, Bidzina Ivanishvili, along with other party officials.

Speaking on Monday, the EU's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Georgia's EU accession process was "de facto halted."

"The ruling party's recent actions, statements and electoral promises take the country away from the European path and signals a shift towards authoritarianism," Borrell told reporters following an EU Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Luxembourg.

Georgian Dream insists EU membership is still on track.

"It's crucial for us to prepare Georgia to become a member of the EU by 2030," Samkharadze told VOA. "I think these issues are temporary, and we can find common ground with both the EU and the U.S. on these matters, provided there's mutual will."

Coalition building

For the first time, lawmakers will be elected by full proportional representation. Most opposition parties have united under four broad coalition blocs to ensure they exceed the 5% threshold required to avoid disqualification.

Polls suggest no single party or bloc will gain a majority amid public distrust of the entire political class.

Can the opposition coalesce to oust Georgian Dream?

Giga Bokeria, a former secretary of the National Security Council and founder of the new Federalist Party, which is not taking part in the election, believes there is public and political will to force a change of government.

"A significant part of society has legitimate reasons to mistrust the political class, particularly certain representatives. This is a serious problem. But … I believe there are still more than enough arguments to build a consensus around the need to change the government, despite this mistrust," Bokeria said.

Election aftermath

According to Ilia State University's Nodia, Georgian Dream stands little chance of winning "in a free and fair election," but there are concerns the party may not willingly relinquish power.

"There is still a fear within society that even if Georgian Dream loses, they won't recognize the results and will declare themselves the winners. I think this fear is exaggerated, but we can't say anything for sure," Nodia said.

Georgian Dream insists it will respect democracy. "We will accept the people's decision, whatever it may be," said Samkharadze. "At the same time, I want to emphasize that we are confident the vast majority of Georgians will support Georgian Dream."

[royalpain16]

Anmer Hall has frequently hosted the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their three children during school holidays and, more recently, during national lockdowns.

The couple homeschooled their children from their Norfolk home during 2020, and they continued to conduct royal engagements there via video calls, which gave the public glimpses of the “countryside bolthole”, as Hello! describes it.

A source has told People that “there’s no airs and graces” at Anmer Hall, which is very much “a normal, busy family home”. Little is known about the inside, which is purposely “kept very private”, but its contemporary interiors are reportedly testament to Kate Middleton’s “accessible style choices”, a style advisor told the Daily Express.

The country pile is located in the Queen's Sandringham Estate, and was gifted to the Duke and Duchess by the Queen following their wedding.

The family home’s history

Originally constructed in 1802, Anmer Hall was home to the family of Hugh Van Cutsem Snr, the late university friend of Prince Charles, and visited by Princes William and Harry when they were children, Town and Country reports. Van Cutsem Snr's sons, William and Nicholas, are godfather to Prince George and Prince Louis respectively.

Anmer Hall reportedly has ten bedrooms, and boasts both a swimming pool and private tennis court. Following the birth of Princess Charlotte in 2015 the couple took up full-time residence in Norfolk, as William focused on his family and flying career with East Anglian Air Ambulance.

Since then, William has given up his flying career to take on more official royal duties and, with Prince George and Princess Charlotte now at school in South West London, the family had been spending considerably less time in Norfolk prior to the pandemic. It is, nevertheless, a firm favourite of the family for school holidays.

Refurbishment and renovation

The installation of a new orange roof

The couple spent several million pounds refurbishing the Georgian mansion. Documents posted on the King’s Lynn and West Norfolk Borough Council website showed that the prince and his wife had applied for planning permission to demolish their existing tennis court and create a new one with an artificial grass surface a little further from the house.

The plan was part of a “comprehensive overhaul” of the grounds at Anmer Hall, intended to improve privacy for William, Kate, George, Charlotte and Louis. They are also said to have a new “glazed garden room” and a new kitchen, where the couple reportedly spend a lot of time socialising. The Queen “couldn’t get her head around” this habit when she first visited them at Anmer Hall, one insider told the Daily Express: “In her mind, that is where all the kitchen staff work.”

Images of the "old kitchen" that was replaced (The Everett's are bespoke kitchen designers who previously leased Amner Hall)

Refurbishment for the vast house, described by the Daily Mail as a “secluded fortress”, was largely paid for by the royal family from private funds and is reported to have cost £1.5m. The decor has been brought into line with the royal couple’s tastes, and involved an extensive tree-planting programme to afford the Duke and Duchess greater privacy.

The property was also given a new orange roof, visible in the picture below.

The Duke and Duchess have also completed a £4.5m refurbishment of their residence in Kensington Palace, Apartment 1A, which was formerly the home of Princess Margaret.

Royal Respite

Anmer Hall itself is a “comfortable, unpretentious Georgian” building, says art historian Sir Roy Strong in The Telegraph. With large sash windows, Anmer “has a gentleness to it”, but it is well located with ready access to the Duchy, Windsor, London and several racecourses.

“There is very little going on at all at Anmer,” one source told the Telegraph. “It is certainly not a social hotbed and there aren’t any fabulous shops to visit.”

The royal family are able to go about their business in privacy there with a “battery” of close protection officers on duty round the clock and all visitors “closely monitored”, the source said.

Since their wedding in 2011, both William and Kate have been spotted in the local area shopping, visiting pubs and taking the children to enjoy activities such as pottery painting. The Duchess is also known to have taken up beekeeping, a popular pursuit of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall, too

Inside the Household

The Duke and Duchess have tried to keep their household staff “to a minimum”, Hello! says. In March 2016, they placed a discreet advert in The Lady magazine, which gave a “fascinating glimpse” of what life is like at Anmer Hall, “a life with children, dogs and jovial family meals at its core”, says the Daily Telegraph.” The couple were keen to emphasise in the advert that “discretion and loyalty is paramount.

However, it appears working in the royal household is a tough job. In May 2017, the Daily Mail reported that a housekeeper who earned £35,000 a year to cook, clean and shop for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their children in their Norfolk home quit her job after the post became “too demanding”.

Sadie Rice had worked at the couple's country home for two years, but reportedly refused to spend more time at their London home, Kensington Palace.

Utmost Privacy

Following the birth of Princess Charlotte, police in a Norfolk village near Anmer Hall handed out letters warning the media not to harass the royal couple, saying William and Kate had asked photographers to respect their privacy after being subjected to “a number of intrusions” by paparazzi with long lenses.

The three-paragraph letter said that the couple “have a more than reasonable expectation of privacy” while they are at Anmer Hall and on the Sandringham Estate.

It continued: “There have in the past been a number of intrusions into the privacy of the Royal Family which in the main have been as a result of professional photographers using long-distance lenses, not only to observe the Royal Family, but also to photograph them going about their activities on the estate.” As Town and Country notes, “A no-fly zone over the property likely does more to thwart the paparazzi, though.”

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 4.9 (after 1950)

1952 – Hugo Ballivián's government is overthrown by the Bolivian National Revolution, starting a period of agrarian reform, universal suffrage and the nationalization of tin mines 1952 – Japan Air Lines Flight 301 crashes into Mount Mihara, Izu Ōshima, Japan, killing 37. 1957 – The Suez Canal in Egypt is cleared and opens to shipping following the Suez Crisis. 1959 – Project Mercury: NASA announces the selection of the United States' first seven astronauts, whom the news media quickly dub the "Mercury Seven". 1960 – Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd, Prime Minister of South Africa and architect of apartheid, narrowly survives an assassination attempt by a white farmer, David Pratt in Johannesburg. 1967 – The first Boeing 737 (a 100 series) makes its maiden flight. 1969 – The first British-built Concorde 002 makes its maiden flight from Filton to RAF Fairford with Brian Trubshaw as the test pilot. 1980 – The Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein kills philosopher Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and his sister Bint al-Huda after three days of torture. 1981 – The U.S. Navy nuclear submarine USS George Washington accidentally collides with the Nissho Maru, a Japanese cargo ship, sinking it and killing two Japanese sailors. 1989 – Tbilisi massacre: An anti-Soviet peaceful demonstration and hunger strike in Tbilisi, demanding restoration of Georgian independence, is dispersed by the Soviet Army, resulting in 20 deaths and hundreds of injuries. 1990 – An IRA bombing in County Down, Northern Ireland, kills three members of the UDR. 1990 – The Sahtu Dene and Metis Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement is signed for 180,000 square kilometres (69,000 sq mi) in the Mackenzie Valley of the western Arctic. 1990 – An Embraer EMB 120 Brasilia collides in mid-air with a Cessna 172 over Gadsden, Alabama, killing both of the Cessna's occupants. 1991 – Georgia declares independence from the Soviet Union. 1992 – A U.S. Federal Court finds former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega guilty of drug and racketeering charges. He is sentenced to 30 years in prison. 1994 – Space Shuttle program: Space Shuttle Endeavour is launched on STS-59. 2003 – Iraq War: Baghdad falls to American forces. 2009 – In Tbilisi, Georgia, up to 60,000 people protest against the government of Mikheil Saakashvili. 2013 – A 6.1–magnitude earthquake strikes Iran killing 32 people and injuring over 850 people. 2013 – At least 13 people are killed and another three injured after a man goes on a spree shooting in the Serbian village of Velika Ivanča. 2014 – A student stabs 20 people at Franklin Regional High School in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. 2017 – The Palm Sunday church bombings at Coptic churches in Tanta and Alexandria, Egypt, take place. 2017 – After refusing to give up his seat on an overbooked United Express flight, Dr. David Dao Duy Anh is forcibly dragged off the flight by aviation security officers, leading to major criticism of United Airlines. 2021 – Burmese military and security forces commit the Bago massacre, during which at least 82 civilians are killed.

[inapat16]

Soviet union films that you should check out

Sayat Nova (The Color of Pomegranates) 

The title refers to the Armenian 18th century poet named "Sayat Nova". The film was directed by the Georgian filmmaker Sergeï Parajanov in 1968. Parajanov started working on this film due to the complications on another project called Kiev Frescos — from which remain only fourteen minutes left today. Sayat Nova was shot in Armenia, which was Parajanov’s ancestors homeland. Parajanov started working on this film because he was a great lover of religious icons. This passion came directly from his father, who was himself an antique dealer. This film is therefore in a way a tribute from a son to his father, in the way he shows that it is necessary to  save art.

The film is divided into eight chapters : "Childhood", "Youth", "Prince's Court", "The Monastery", "The Dream", "Old Age", "The Angel of Death" and "Death". The film follows the course of the life of the poet, from the cradle to the grave. What is interesting about this film is that it tells the story of a poet's life, in the manner of a poem. Rarely quoting Sayat Nova's poems, Parajanov manages to shape a visual language that tends to recreate the experience of reading poetry. The visual universe of the film is very singular because it borrows a lot from theater.  Indeed, all the shots are still, and organized as tableaux. Moreover,  the main actress, Sofiko Chiaureli plays 6 roles, both male and female. So that you have the feeling of seeing the same face during the entirety of the film. As a funny parallel, Sergeï Parajanov writes, directs, edits, choreographs, and designs both sets and costumes of the film. All these parallels are indeed a way to produce visual rhymes, to remind us that this film is about Sayat Nova's poetic work

Beyond the symbols and idiosyncrasies, the film is striking for its intense aesthetic beauty and its sense of detail, particularly through its collage of materials and textures. The idea behind this project is to revive the power of a primitive cinema that focuses above all on the image, and that questions the viewer's relationship to images. Sayat Nova revives an idea of the image that one might have had in the Middle Ages: this flatness of perspective and relief; this palette of colors without artifice; these strange, unrealistic choices to play out action, symbolism and time on the same immobile plane, embodied in an old-fashioned plasticity. And yet, Parajanov does not make a picture-film: he plays with sounds, with cyclical, and almost atemporal gestures.

"In the temple of cinema there are images, light and reality. Sergeï Parajanov was the master of that temple." - Jean-Luc Godard. 

Obviously, when the film was presented to the Soviet authorities, it was immediately attacked since it showed no class struggle or critical awareness of social reality and that it was instead, steeped in a suspicious fascination with a past feudal era. Most of the critics said that film was "completely unintelligible" and harmful to working-class art because it showed a bourgeois formalism. Paradjanov was then forced to accept that a purified version of his film be made. It was this shortened version, under the title Sayat-Nova - The Colour of Pomegranates, which was shown in cinemas.

Link to watch the film : https://youtu.be/KLZ4GSxP9eo 

J.A. Lenourichel

[a-koschyei]

when your fyp lands you in art history tok and you learn about tamara and the demon, and the russian poem it's derived from..... mind if i yell for a second ???

The poem is set in Lermontov's beloved Caucasus Mountains. It opens with the eponymous protagonist wandering the earth, hopeless and troubled. He dwells in infinite isolation, his immortality and unlimited power a worthless burden. Then he spies the beautiful Georgian Princess Tamara, dancing for her wedding, and in the desert of his soul wells an indescribable emotion. The Demon, acting as a brutal and powerful tyrant, destroys his rival: at his instigation, robbers come to despoil the wedding and kill Tamara's betrothed. The Demon courts Tamara, and Tamara knows fear, yet in him she sees not a demon nor an angel but a tortured soul. Eventually she yields to his embrace, but his kiss is fatal. And though she is taken to Heaven, the Demon is left again "Alone in all the universe, Abandoned, without love or hope!..."

[ausetkmt]

ATLANTA — Tuesday’s showdown between Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D) and Republican challenger Herschel Walker is the product of an unusual general election runoff system that was pushed by a powerful Georgia segregationist who sought to blunt the power of Black voters in the 1960s.

While 10 states use runoffs in primary elections, Georgia and Louisiana are the only two that do so in general elections. Georgia’s system was created in 1964 after the urging of Denmark Groover, who blamed Black voters for a reelection loss and proposed runoffs. Groover later acknowledged the runoff system was intended to suppress Black political representation.

While runoff elections had existed for decades in Southern primaries, Georgia’s enthusiastic adoption of two-round voting came as a way of “ensuring a conservative White candidate won an election,” said Ashton Ellett, a political historian and archivist at the University of Georgia.

“A runoff makes it harder for folks who have less resources to vote. This was before advanced in-person voting or [voting was offered] by mail and when we had many other unfair, iniquitous, undemocratic policies. It wasn’t for a partisan advantage so much as an ideological and cultural one,” Ellett said.

Runoffs are common in Georgia’s local and down-ballot races, like contests for the General Assembly, but the race between Warnock and Walker is only the 12th statewide runoff since the system was enacted.

Voting rights groups have been pushing to get rid of the system. State officials estimate that administering another election will cost taxpayers at least $10 million, and campaigns and political groups are expected to spend even more than that.

Georgia’s Senate race is heading to a runoff. Here’s how it will work.

“Off-cycle elections, that is, elections not held in November of midterm or presidential years, historically see lower turnout overall and especially low turnout for racial and ethnic minority groups,” said Bernard Fraga, a professor of political science at Emory University who studies voter turnout and demographics.

The system added intentional friction to the democratic process and provides “a second chance for the majority group to consolidate support and stymies efforts by numerical minorities to build a winning coalition,” Fraga said.

The flurry of election changes that delivered Georgia a runoff system came amid a fierce national fight over voting rights and discrimination in the 1960s. The years-long work of activists as part of the civil rights movement had brought national attention to the struggle of Black Americans in the South and greater scrutiny of the region’s discriminatory policies and entrenched White segregationist elite. Past techniques used to politically disenfranchise Black Americans, including primaries only open to White voters, selectively applied poll taxes, literacy tests and acts of terrorism, were now outlawed or less effective. The proportion of Black Georgians registered to vote in 1960 was 29 percent, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, an educational website written and reviewed by scholars; by 1964, that number had risen to 44 percent.

“The creativity of White, Southern politicians, for over 100 years, in figuring out ways to, first, keep Black people from voting and then trying to make it as difficult and burdensome as they can without it appearing racist, and a violation of the Constitution, is breathtaking,” said Steven Lawson, a professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University, who served as an expert witness in a Justice Department suit challenging Georgia’s runoff system in 1990.

Most pressing, major civil rights legislation was being hotly debated in Congress while the Supreme Court had just scrapped Georgia’s county unit electoral system, akin to a county-based electoral college that gave disproportionate weight to voters in the state’s many rural, predominantly White counties. The court ruled in 1963 that the system disproportionately empowered rural White voters over Black voters and those in urban areas like Fulton County, home to Atlanta. It was the first of the high court’s “one person, one vote” rulings that mandated state voting systems and congressional districts weigh each vote roughly equally.

Georgia needed a new electoral system. In stepped Groover, one of the state’s most influential legislators and a hard-line segregationist.

“He had been a leading segregationist. He was the single leading proponent of the county unit system. He sponsored school segregation bills, and he was a sponsor of the bill that changed the [Georgia state] flag” to add the Confederate battle emblem in 1958, said J. Morgan Kousser, a historian and social scientist at the California Institute of Technology who has served as an expert witness in cases challenging the runoff system and many other civil rights cases across the South.

Groover “may have been the smartest or the hardest-working legislator in the chamber,” according to Charles Bullock, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, who has researched and written multiple books on Georgia politics, including a book on the runoff system.

“He read all the legislation and would ask pointed, often challenging questions of legislators, so much so his name became a verb: ‘To Grooverize,’” said Bullock.

Yet his influence in the legislature was interrupted in 1958, when Groover lost his reelection bid to another White candidate, which Groover blamed on “bloc voting,” a euphemism he later admitted in court meant Black voters supporting his more moderate rival by enough votes to defeat him in a tight plurality election.

Even with little access to the ballot, a marginal number of Black voters could help elect a less hard-line segregationist in parts of the South, Kousser said. Headlines in the Macon Telegraph chronicled the “bloc voting controversy” in which Groover and his supporters effectively argued that Black votes were tantamount to fraud.

After a later reelection, Groover proposed a bill enacting runoff elections to stop “bloc voting” in any new system. A 1964 election law study committee adopted a version of Groover’s proposal weeks before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed.

“When the county system went, people like Groover were looking for ways to make sure that Black voting power was diluted,” said Lawson.

The system was codified in the state constitution through a 1968 referendum after Georgia’s political machine was shocked by the chaotic 1966 election of Lester Maddox, a populist arch-segregationist, as governor. Much of the state’s political establishment believed Maddox would have lost in a runoff to a less outspoken segregationist, Bullock said, but the governorship was the only office the 1964 changes hadn’t applied to because of a 19th-century legal quirk.

Groover was so committed to the state’s defunct electoral laws that as the 1964 legislative session ended, signaling the end of the county unit system and amid a tense congressional redistricting fight, Groover crawled across the chamber’s balcony to remove its official clock in a symbolic show of stopping time in its place.

From the start of the process through the 1980s, civil rights groups argued it was intentionally burdensome on counties, campaigns and Black political activists. Coupled with policies like harsh gerrymandering and countywide elections, many Black candidates outside Atlanta found it difficult to succeed alongside the state’s still byzantine election rules.

The system came under federal scrutiny in 1990, when the Justice Department and American Civil Liberties Union jointly sued Georgia over its runoff policy, describing the practice writ large as a means of exhausting and diluting Black votes. A key part of that litigation: admissions from Groover who late in life openly acknowledged the racial motivations behind his policies.

According to a court deposition, Groover told federal investigators that “I was a segregationist. I was a county unit man. But if you want to establish if I was racially prejudiced, I was. If you want to establish that some of my political activity was racially motivated, it was.”

The department lost in federal trial and appeals court. Judges accepted the state’s defense that the system was created to combat corruption in the county unit system.

“The judge was willing to believe that while Groover was a racist, he wasn’t responsible for this system,” Lawson said.

In 1994, the state legislature changed the threshold for a runoff, requiring a candidate to earn at least 45 percent of votes instead of 50 percent. But Republicans changed it back in 2008 after narrowly losing a Senate race in 1996. The effort was led by then-Gov. Sonny Perdue (R), whose cousin, David Perdue, narrowly lost a 2021 runoff election for U.S. Senate to Democrat Jon Ossoff.

In 2021, Georgia Republicans passed a sweeping and controversial voter law that shortened the time between an election and a runoff from nine weeks to four, leading to confusion and stress for election administrators.

Georgia’s governing Republicans have largely avoided the issue during legislative sessions and skirted answering whether they support the runoff system, though they keep the door open about whether the process can be reformed. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) and his staff “will be looking at the entire process for possible improvements once this one is successfully complete,” said Mike Hassinger, a spokesman.

Voting rights groups in Georgia overwhelmingly support abolishing runoffs. While many activists would like Georgia to name winners based on whoever gets the most votes, as happens in most states, others see this as an opportunity to implement ranked-choice voting or another system.

“It needs to go. It needs to change,” said Hillary Holley, executive director of Care In Action, a voting rights and labor group. “It is a relic of Jim Crow, it is suppressive, inefficient and is also fiscally irresponsible. It needs to just go away.”

[lboogie1906]

Captain Judge Robert Benham (September 25, 1946) is the first African American justice to serve on the Supreme Court of Georgia. He was born in Cartersville, Georgia to Jesse Knox and Clarence Benham. He is the great-grandchild of enslaved people.

He attended college at Tuskegee University. He earned a BA in Political Science. After attending Harvard University, he earned a JD at the University of Georgia School of Law. He was the second African American to earn a law degree from the University of Georgia. He earned an LLM from the University of Virginia.

He returned to Cartersville and began practicing law. He served in the Army Reserve at this time, attaining the rank of captain. He was elected to the Georgia State Court of Appeals. He became the first African American to sit as a judge on that court and the first African American to win a statewide election in Georgia since Reconstruction. He was appointed to the Supreme Court of Georgia by Governor Joe Frank Harris.

He is involved in numerous national, regional, and local legal associations. He has served as the president of the Bartow County Bar Association and the Society for Alternative Dispute Resolution and the vice president of the Georgia Conference of Black Lawyers. He has served as the chairman of the Governor’s Commission on Drug Awareness and Prevention and the Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism. He has been a board member of the Georgia Association of Trial Lawyers and the Federal Lawyers Association. He is a trustee of the Georgia Legal History Foundation.

He received recognition as one of the “100 Most Influential Georgians” by Georgia Trend magazine and one of the “100 Most Influential Blacks in America” by Ebony. He is married to the former Nell Dodson. They have two sons. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #alphaphialpha

[intriguingpeoplebyangelafloyd]

JOHN HUNTER

JOHN HUNTER

29 August 1737 – 13 March 1821

The FIRST FLEET & second Governor of Sydney, NSW

            Hunter was an officer in the English Royal Navy, a sailor and a scholar.

            Hunter was born in Leith, Scotland, the son of a captain who lived with his uncle in King’s Lynn, Norfolk and Edinburgh. Instead of attending University he chose a career in the navy.

            The First Fleet was planned to transport convicts from Great Britain to Sydney, Australia to start a new colony. During preparations, Hunter was appointed captain in 1786 to command the ship, HMS Sirius. The First Fleet was under the command of Arthur Phillip who was to govern the first colony of NSW. The First Fleet arrived at Port Jackson January 1788.

            Hunter explored the Parramatta River in 1788 which may have been the first time there was contact between the British and the Australian aboriginal people of the Wangal Clan.

            In 1789, he was sent to gain supplies, the voyage was difficult, and the ship was caught in a storm whilst anchored and was driven into a coral reef and became wrecked. Some of the crew returned to Port Jackson on the HMS Supply, the remainder, including Hunter waited nearly a year in Norfolk Island before they could leave. Hunter and some of his men returned to England where he published his work about his travels.

            Arthur Phillip resigned, and Hunter was made governor in 1794. He left England and returned to Sydney in September 1795 on HMS Reliance and started working on 11 September. During his absence, those in Sydney struggled, especially the convicts who were cruelly exploited. The military gained control of courts, lands, stores and convict labour. Even though Hunter was described as professional and a worthy man, it was his job to restore balance, with this he made enemies and complaints about him were sent to those in charge in England. He was recalled to England in 1799, and Philip Gidley King became governor in 1880.

Hunter remained interested in Australia whilst in Leith. He died in his London Georgian terrace, Hackney in 1821, aged 83.

            His name is commemorated in the Hunter Valley and Hunter Street, Sydney.

#johnhunter #firstfleet #australianhistory #parramattariver

[quordleona03]

A Dozen Of Edinburgh's Little Free Libraries in One Day, by LRT bus

Beginning with the Little Free Library by the Leith Walk Police Box, just because it is a distinctive and central location.

For navigation purposes, I'll give the postcode of each Little Free Library. This is a hypothetical trip, but one I actually plan to make in the near future. Locate the distinctive Leith Police Box, and by the tiny community garden is the glass-fronted Leith Walk Little Free Library:

Leith Walk, EH7 4LT From the Little Free Library. walk up the road to the crossing to the Tesco Express: turn left and walk downhill again to to the bus stop. From here, catch a 49 bus (it will have Royal Infimary and an H on the front). You should either as, the driver for a "daypass" (and pay with exact change) or, if you have a UK contactless payment card, tap the round metal gadget with the lights - if you use the same card throughout the day, it will max out at the cost of a daypass. LRT bus drivers do not give change. Thank the driver, and tell them you want the East Saville Road stop.

A daypass always costs slightly less than three bus rides. Unless you are planning to travel by bus only twice in any one day, it's always worth getting a daypass.

Sit on the 49 bus for 11 stops. The driver will tell you when you get there. Thank the driver when you leave the bus. (Always thank the driver when you pay or when you leave. It's good manners, and it brings good luck.)

The street you want is directly opposite the bus stop. If it looks risky to jaywalk, turn left when you get off the bus - there's a crossing place not far in that direction, to a row of shops. Walk back on the other side of the road, passing Craigmillar Park Church on your right, and turn right at East Saville Road. East Saville Road will bend leftward and turn into West Saville Road. Continue til you reach Mayfield Road: turn right, and then almost immediately, cross to reach MacDowall Road. The Little Free Library is at number 17.

MacDowall Road Little Free Library: EH9 3ED

We're now off to The Meadows!

Walk back the way you came down MacDowall Road: when you reach Mayfield Road, turn right: the bus stop you want is on the same side of the road as MacDowall Road. You'll pass Ross Gardens before you get to it.

You want a number 12 bus. The stop you're boarding at is called Lussielaw Road. The bus will say GYLE CENTRE on the front. Tell the driver you want the Chapel Street stop - it's six stops away. You'll see the Meadows on the left-hand side from the bus, just before the driver tells you your stop.

Getting off the bus, walk downhill, passing the church which is the Orthodox Community Of St Andrew, and also Buccleuch Churchyard, on your right. Keep going til you reach Buccleuch Place. Cross over - it's wide enough to have a car park down the middle - and turn right, going up Buccleuch Place. Most of the buildings belong to the University of Edinburgh - you'll see the buildings of the George Square campus on your right, and a broad set of steps leading up to George Square itself. At the very end of Buccleuch Place, turn left - this will take you to George Square Lane, which you cross, and you're in the Meadows.

Follow the path directly ahead of you until it is crossed by another path: then turn left: the Little Free Library is by the community garden, before you reach the tennis courts.

The Meadows Little Free Library: EH3 9GE

The next Little Free Library is only half a mile away. Go back the way you came, turning up Buccleuch Place on the other side of the place, til you reach those broad stone stairs, divided into six by metal handrails. Climb the stairs and keep going: you'll see George Square gardens on your left. (You aren't allowed in: Edinburgh University only.)

Across the gardens you'll see a lovely row of Georgian houses. All of the buildings round George Square used to look like that, but Edinburgh University demolished them all about sixty years ago and built very ugly tower blocks instead. Keep going in the same direction: you'll pass a lot of concrete brutalist architecture including Edinburgh University's Visitor Centre and a monstrous place called the Dugald Stewart Building, and you will see, to your left, the old student union building, which is called The Teviot. On your right, shortly afterwards, you'll see the new student union building, which is concrete and glass. If you stand with your back to it you'll be looking towards the three-way junction between Lothian Street, Teviot Place, and Bristo Place.

There is a herbal dispensary on the corner of Bristo Place. Cross over to it, and walk on, passing the Hotel du Vin on your left, and bear left at the Bedlam Theatre: the Little Free Library is at 2a Forrest Road, somewhere between the Bedlam, the Hotel du Vin, and a restaurant called Mum's.

Forrest Road Little Free Library: EH1 2QH This would be the best place of the day to have lunch. There are a lot of good, cheap places around here.

The next couple of Little Free Libraries are in the New Town, so called, obviously, because it is only 250 years old, unlike the Old Town, which has cellars that may be a thousand years old.

Cross Forrest Road, and turn left. The bus stop is called Forrest Road, and you can take the 9, the 23, or the 27 bus. The 9 bus will say MUIRHOUSE, the 23 bus will say TRINITY, and the 27 bus will say SILVERKNOWES. Ask the driver for the Abercromby Place stop. This is the stop immediately after the Queen Street Gardens, lovely tree-filled green spaces either side of the road, which are strictly private. Keyholders only.

The bus stop is in Dundas Street Cross the road and walk downhill: the Little Free Library is outside Dickins Homes Away From Home, 17-19 Dundas Street.

Dundas Street Little Free Library: EH3 6QG

From here, it's simplest to walk to the next Little Free Library. Keep going down Dundas Street, turn right on to Great King Street, and keep going til you reach Drummond Place. The pleasant tree-filled green space in the middle of Drummond Place is also, strictly private: keyholders only.

Turn left, musing on how wealth in Scotland claims what was common land and turns it into private space, bear right, keep going: Scotland Street will be on your left. The next Little Free Library is at number 37.

Scotland Street Little Free Library: EH3 6PY

The next Litte Free Library is in Stockbridge: we'll get there by the 36 bus. Keep going down Scotland Street, and at the end, you reach a gate into King George V Park, which is a public park. Cross the park - more or less in a straight line, but bearing left - til you reach Logan Street. The bus stop is on the same side of the road as the park, in Eyre Place.

The stop is called Logan Street. The 36 bus will have LONGSTONE on the front. Ask the driver for the Comely Bank Avenue stop - it's five stops away.

The bus stop where you get off is on Dean Park Crescent. Cross the road and turn right down Comely Bank Avenue. Turn right on to Comely Bank Road, and at number 61 - across the road from Saint Stephen's Comely Bank Church - that's our next Little Free Library.

Comely Bank Little Free Library: EH4 1EJ

The next Little Free Library is the oldest and original Little Free Library in Edinburgh, in the Stockbridge Colonies.

Cross the road. Turn right. At the next bus stop, you want either a 24 or 29 bus. The 24 bus will have Royal Infirmary and a H on the front: the 29 bus will have GOREBRIDGE. You can tell the driver you want the Raeburn Place stop, but you're only going to be on either bus for two stops. Slightly downhill from the Raeburn Place stop, same side of the road, is St Bernard's Row. Walk down St Bernard's Row. Pass Malta Terrace and Malta Green on the right hand side, and Arboretum Avenue on the left hand side. Cross the Water of Leith. St Bernard's Row becomes Glenogle Road, and from Glenogle Road run a series of streets called colonies - the collective name is the Stockbridge Colonies.

Teviotdale Place is the eighth street along, and the Little Free Library, Edinburgh's first, is on the left hand side of the street. Stockbridge Colonies Little Free Library: EH3 5HZ

We're now off to Starbank Park. To get there, walk to the end of Glenogle Road: the road will bear right at the end, and slightly uphill, and on Brandon Terrace, you turn left and walk slightly downhill to the 23 bus stop. If you want coffee, there are several good places around here for coffee: if you want snacks, turn right at the end of Brandon Terrace, walk uphill a little way, and the garage has a minature M&S Food shop.

If you feel like taking a pretty but slightly longer route, turn down the colony street called Glenogle Place. At the end of that colony street, there's a footbridge over the Water of Leith, and a riverside pathway. Turn right - walking downstream - and keep going til you reach another footbridge over the river. Cross the footbridge, keep going along the footpath, and you reach Brandon Terrace via a short stair that comes out just below the 23 bus stop.

The bus stop is called Brandon Terrace. You want the 23 bus: it will have TRINITY on the front. Ask the driver for the Caithness Place stop - it's 10 stops away. The bus stop is in Clark Road. Walk down Clark Road (turn right when you get off the bus) to East Trinity Road. Turn right along East Trinity Road. Cross this road whenever it's safe. You'll pass Russell Place and York Road on your left side, and reach Laverockbank Road. You turn down Laverockbank Road to reach Starbank Park.

However, if it is between 8am and 3pm Tuesday to Friday, or 10am to 3pm Saturday, walk on past Laverockbank Road just a little way to 44 East Trinity Road and buy yourself a cup of coffee from Mr Eion's Coffee Roaster. Ask for a takeaway cup. They also sell cakes and such, including gluten-free. Walk back to Laverockbank Road, and head down it towards the sea - you will see the Firth of Forth at the end of the road - til you reach the gate to Starbank Park.

Starbank Park has two Little Free Libraries, one for children's books, one for general/adult reading. But sit down on a bench, rest, drink your delicious coffee, and let the beauty of this park sink into your soul. Afterwards, you can go explore the Little Free Libraries.

Starbank Park Little Free Libraries: EH5 3DA

The house in the centre of Starbank Park is a private house, number 17 Laverockbank Road. There are two steep downhill paths either side, leading to Starbank Road, with a view over the firth to Fife. Through the gate on to Starbank Road (there is a communal understanding among the park's users to keep those gates closed so dogs off the leash in the lower part of the park won't get out onto the main road), turn right, walk along til you reach Craighall Road, and turn right again up a very steep hill and cross the road.

If you want to stop here and have something to eat, there is a decent if pricy bistro on the corner, or you can keep going along the waterfront til you reach the pier, where there is a superlative fish and chip shop with outdoor seating overlooking the water. (If you go to the pier, you might as well get the 16 bus to Leith Walk from there: the bus stop is called Pier Place, the bus will have TORPHIN on the front, and you ask the driver for the Foot of the Walk stop, which is 11 stops away.)

If, however, you want to press on, the bus stop is called Craighall Road, the 7 bus has Royal Infirmary and an H on the front, and you ask the driver for the Kirkgate Centre stop. - it's 9 stops away.

Whether you've reached the Kirkgate Centre or the Foot of the Walk stop, you are now headed for Leith Links. To get there, you go along Duke Street - either turn right when you get off the bus in Great Junction Street at the Kirkgate Centre stop and keep going in a straight line across the tram line out of Constitution Street (watch out for trams), or turn right down Leith Walk and turn right again at the traffic lights.

Keep going down Duke Street till you reach the junction of Duke Street, Easter Road, and Vanburgh Place. Turn left into Vanburgh Place. Cross at the traffic lights just at the corner of Leith Links, and keep going. Turn right at Somerset Place, and then first left at Industrial Road. The Little Free Library is at number 5.

Leith Links Little Free Library: EH6 8AB

Now we're going to Hillside Street. Keep going along Industrial Road. Turn left at Parkvale Place. Turn right along East Hermitage Place. Enjoy the view of Leith Links - if you care to cross the links, there is a memorial to golf on the other side of the park from here. We're catching the number 1 bus on the same side of the road. The bus stop is called Summerfield Place. The bus will have CLERMISTON on the front. Ask the driver for the Brunton Place stop: it's 7 stops away.

The Brunton Place stop is on London Road, by a public green space called Royal Terrace Gardens. Turn left when you get off the bus, cross London Road, and bear right down Hillside Crescent. Pass Wellington Street, then turn right down Hillside Street. The Little Free Library is at number 7.

Hillside Street Little Free Library: EH7 5HD

From here, keep going down Hillside Street, turn left onto Montgomery Street, turn right onto West Montgomery Street, and then left onto Brunswick Road. At the end of Brunswick Road, cross at the traffic lights, turn right down Leith Walk - and you are back at the Leith Police Box where we started this morning.

This is a hypothetical trip - the bus routes should be reliable, the street directions are correct, and Starbank Park really is that beautiful, but I'm not sure how many of the Little Free Libraries are actually open - sometimes they close down/get removed, and you only know when you go to look for them.

I wrote all of this down because I wanted to figure out how many Little Free Libraries I could in principle visit in one day, using buses only, and after a while, my notes began to feel like a tumblr post, so here we are. If I make the trip next weekend, I'll update it!

[southjerseyweb]

Georgian Court Campus Hosts Summer Programs for 600+ Young People

Founded in 1908 and sponsored by the Sisters of Mercy, Georgian Court University is Central and South Jersey's only Catholic university. The …

[tindogpodcast]

TDP 1221: Haunter in the Dark

https://bbvproductions.co.uk/products/Faction-Paradox-The-Confession-of-Brother-Signet-AUDIO-DOWNLOAD-p389922366

  The Haunter of the Dark By H. P. Lovecraft

(Dedicated to Robert Bloch)

I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim— Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge or lustre or name.

—Nemesis.

Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical discharge. It is true that the window he faced was unbroken, but Nature has shewn herself capable of many freakish performances. The expression on his face may easily have arisen from some obscure muscular source unrelated to anything he saw, while the entries in his diary are clearly the result of a fantastic imagination aroused by certain local superstitions and by certain old matters he had uncovered. As for the anomalous conditions at the deserted church on Federal Hill—the shrewd analyst is not slow in attributing them to some charlatanry, conscious or unconscious, with at least some of which Blake was secretly connected. For after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to the field of myth, dream, terror, and superstition, and avid in his quest for scenes and effects of a bizarre, spectral sort. His earlier stay in the city—a visit to a strange old man as deeply given to occult and forbidden lore as he—had ended amidst death and flame, and it must have been some morbid instinct which drew him back from his home in Milwaukee. He may have known of the old stories despite his statements to the contrary in the diary, and his death may have nipped in the bud some stupendous hoax destined to have a literary reflection. Among those, however, who have examined and correlated all this evidence, there remain several who cling to less rational and commonplace theories. They are inclined to take much of Blake’s diary at its face value, and point significantly to certain facts such as the undoubted genuineness of the old church record, the verified existence of the disliked and unorthodox Starry Wisdom sect prior to 1877, the recorded disappearance of an inquisitive reporter named Edwin M. Lillibridge in 1893, and—above all—the look of monstrous, transfiguring fear on the face of the young writer when he died. It was one of these believers who, moved to fanatical extremes, threw into the bay the curiously angled stone and its strangely adorned metal box found in the old church steeple—the black windowless steeple, and not the tower where Blake’s diary said those things originally were. Though widely censured both officially and unofficially, this man—a reputable physician with a taste for odd folklore—averred that he had rid the earth of something too dangerous to rest upon it. Between these two schools of opinion the reader must judge for himself. The papers have given the tangible details from a sceptical angle, leaving for others the drawing of the picture as Robert Blake saw it—or thought he saw it—or pretended to see it. Now, studying the diary closely, dispassionately, and at leisure, let us summarise the dark chain of events from the expressed point of view of their chief actor. Young Blake returned to Providence in the winter of 1934–5, taking the upper floor of a venerable dwelling in a grassy court off College Street—on the crest of the great eastward hill near the Brown University campus and behind the marble John Hay Library. It was a cosy and fascinating place, in a little garden oasis of village-like antiquity where huge, friendly cats sunned themselves atop a convenient shed. The square Georgian house had a monitor roof, classic doorway with fan carving, small-paned windows, and all the other earmarks of early nineteenth-century workmanship. Inside were six-panelled doors, wide floor-boards, a curving colonial staircase, white Adam-period mantels, and a rear set of rooms three steps below the general level. Blake’s study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front garden on one side, while its west windows—before one of which he had his desk—faced off from the brow of the hill and commanded a splendid view of the lower town’s outspread roofs and of the mystical sunsets that flamed behind them. On the far horizon were the open countryside’s purple slopes. Against these, some two miles away, rose the spectral hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the smoke of the city swirled up and enmeshed them. Blake had a curious sense that he was looking upon some unknown, ethereal world which might or might not vanish in dream if ever he tried to seek it out and enter it in person. Having sent home for most of his books, Blake bought some antique furniture suitable to his quarters and settled down to write and paint—living alone, and attending to the simple housework himself. His studio was in a north attic room, where the panes of the monitor roof furnished admirable lighting. During that first winter he produced five of his best-known short stories—“The Burrower Beneath”, “The Stairs in the Crypt”, “Shaggai”, “In the Vale of Pnath”, and “The Feaster from the Stars”—and painted seven canvases; studies of nameless, unhuman monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial landscapes. At sunset he would often sit at his desk and gaze dreamily off at the outspread west—the dark towers of Memorial Hall just below, the Georgian court-house belfry, the lofty pinnacles of the downtown section, and that shimmering, spire-crowned mound in the distance whose unknown streets and labyrinthine gables so potently provoked his fancy. From his few local acquaintances he learned that the far-off slope was a vast Italian quarter, though most of the houses were remnants of older Yankee and Irish days. Now and then he would train his field-glasses on that spectral, unreachable world beyond the curling smoke; picking out individual roofs and chimneys and steeples, and speculating upon the bizarre and curious mysteries they might house. Even with optical aid Federal Hill seemed somehow alien, half fabulous, and linked to the unreal, intangible marvels of Blake’s own tales and pictures. The feeling would persist long after the hill had faded into the violet, lamp-starred twilight, and the court-house floodlights and the red Industrial Trust beacon had blazed up to make the night grotesque. Of all the distant objects on Federal Hill, a certain huge, dark church most fascinated Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at certain hours of the day, and at sunset the great tower and tapering steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. It seemed to rest on especially high ground; for the grimy facade, and the obliquely seen north side with sloping roof and the tops of great pointed windows, rose boldly above the tangle of surrounding ridgepoles and chimney-pots. Peculiarly grim and austere, it appeared to be built of stone, stained and weathered with the smoke and storms of a century and more. The style, so far as the glass could shew, was that earliest experimental form of Gothic revival which preceded the stately Upjohn period and held over some of the outlines and proportions of the Georgian age. Perhaps it was reared around 1810 or 1815. As months passed, Blake watched the far-off, forbidding structure with an oddly mounting interest. Since the vast windows were never lighted, he knew that it must be vacant. The longer he watched, the more his imagination worked, till at length he began to fancy curious things. He believed that a vague, singular aura of desolation hovered over the place, so that even the pigeons and swallows shunned its smoky eaves. Around other towers and belfries his glass would reveal great flocks of birds, but here they never rested. At least, that is what he thought and set down in his diary. He pointed the place out to several friends, but none of them had even been on Federal Hill or possessed the faintest notion of what the church was or had been. In the spring a deep restlessness gripped Blake. He had begun his long-planned novel—based on a supposed survival of the witch-cult in Maine—but was strangely unable to make progress with it. More and more he would sit at his westward window and gaze at the distant hill and the black, frowning steeple shunned by the birds. When the delicate leaves came out on the garden boughs the world was filled with a new beauty, but Blake’s restlessness was merely increased. It was then that he first thought of crossing the city and climbing bodily up that fabulous slope into the smoke-wreathed world of dream. Late in April, just before the aeon-shadowed Walpurgis time, Blake made his first trip into the unknown. Plodding through the endless downtown streets and the bleak, decayed squares beyond, he came finally upon the ascending avenue of century-worn steps, sagging Doric porches, and blear-paned cupolas which he felt must lead up to the long-known, unreachable world beyond the mists. There were dingy blue-and-white street signs which meant nothing to him, and presently he noted the strange, dark faces of the drifting crowds, and the foreign signs over curious shops in brown, decade-weathered buildings. Nowhere could he find any of the objects he had seen from afar; so that once more he half fancied that the Federal Hill of that distant view was a dream-world never to be trod by living human feet. Now and then a battered church facade or crumbling spire came in sight, but never the blackened pile that he sought. When he asked a shopkeeper about a great stone church the man smiled and shook his head, though he spoke English freely. As Blake climbed higher, the region seemed stranger and stranger, with bewildering mazes of brooding brown alleys leading eternally off to the south. He crossed two or three broad avenues, and once thought he glimpsed a familiar tower. Again he asked a merchant about the massive church of stone, and this time he could have sworn that the plea of ignorance was feigned. The dark man’s face had a look of fear which he tried to hide, and Blake saw him make a curious sign with his right hand. Then suddenly a black spire stood out against the cloudy sky on his left, above the tiers of brown roofs lining the tangled southerly alleys. Blake knew at once what it was, and plunged toward it through the squalid, unpaved lanes that climbed from the avenue. Twice he lost his way, but he somehow dared not ask any of the patriarchs or housewives who sat on their doorsteps, or any of the children who shouted and played in the mud of the shadowy lanes. At last he saw the tower plain against the southwest, and a huge stone bulk rose darkly at the end of an alley. Presently he stood in a windswept open square, quaintly cobblestoned, with a high bank wall on the farther side. This was the end of his quest; for upon the wide, iron-railed, weed-grown plateau which the wall supported—a separate, lesser world raised fully six feet above the surrounding streets—there stood a grim, titan bulk whose identity, despite Blake’s new perspective, was beyond dispute. The vacant church was in a state of great decrepitude. Some of the high stone buttresses had fallen, and several delicate finials lay half lost among the brown, neglected weeds and grasses. The sooty Gothic windows were largely unbroken, though many of the stone mullions were missing. Blake wondered how the obscurely painted panes could have survived so well, in view of the known habits of small boys the world over. The massive doors were intact and tightly closed. Around the top of the bank wall, fully enclosing the grounds, was a rusty iron fence whose gate—at the head of a flight of steps from the square—was visibly padlocked. The path from the gate to the building was completely overgrown. Desolation and decay hung like a pall above the place, and in the birdless eaves and black, ivyless walls Blake felt a touch of the dimly sinister beyond his power to define. There were very few people in the square, but Blake saw a policeman at the northerly end and approached him with questions about the church. He was a great wholesome Irishman, and it seemed odd that he would do little more than make the sign of the cross and mutter that people never spoke of that building. When Blake pressed him he said very hurriedly that the Italian priests warned everybody against it, vowing that a monstrous evil had once dwelt there and left its mark. He himself had heard dark whispers of it from his father, who recalled certain sounds and rumours from his boyhood. There had been a bad sect there in the ould days—an outlaw sect that called up awful things from some unknown gulf of night. It had taken a good priest to exorcise what had come, though there did be those who said that merely the light could do it. If Father O’Malley were alive there would be many the thing he could tell. But now there was nothing to do but let it alone. It hurt nobody now, and those that owned it were dead or far away. They had run away like rats after the threatening talk in ’77, when people began to mind the way folks vanished now and then in the neighbourhood. Some day the city would step in and take the property for lack of heirs, but little good would come of anybody’s touching it. Better it be left alone for the years to topple, lest things be stirred that ought to rest forever in their black abyss. After the policeman had gone Blake stood staring at the sullen steepled pile. It excited him to find that the structure seemed as sinister to others as to him, and he wondered what grain of truth might lie behind the old tales the bluecoat had repeated. Probably they were mere legends evoked by the evil look of the place, but even so, they were like a strange coming to life of one of his own stories. The afternoon sun came out from behind dispersing clouds, but seemed unable to light up the stained, sooty walls of the old temple that towered on its high plateau. It was odd that the green of spring had not touched the brown, withered growths in the raised, iron-fenced yard. Blake found himself edging nearer the raised area and examining the bank wall and rusted fence for possible avenues of ingress. There was a terrible lure about the blackened fane which was not to be resisted. The fence had no opening near the steps, but around on the north side were some missing bars. He could go up the steps and walk around on the narrow coping outside the fence till he came to the gap. If the people feared the place so wildly, he would encounter no interference. He was on the embankment and almost inside the fence before anyone noticed him. Then, looking down, he saw the few people in the square edging away and making the same sign with their right hands that the shopkeeper in the avenue had made. Several windows were slammed down, and a fat woman darted into the street and pulled some small children inside a rickety, unpainted house. The gap in the fence was very easy to pass through, and before long Blake found himself wading amidst the rotting, tangled growths of the deserted yard. Here and there the worn stump of a headstone told him that there had once been burials in this field; but that, he saw, must have been very long ago. The sheer bulk of the church was oppressive now that he was close to it, but he conquered his mood and approached to try the three great doors in the facade. All were securely locked, so he began a circuit of the Cyclopean building in quest of some minor and more penetrable opening. Even then he could not be sure that he wished to enter that haunt of desertion and shadow, yet the pull of its strangeness dragged him on automatically. A yawning and unprotected cellar window in the rear furnished the needed aperture. Peering in, Blake saw a subterrene gulf of cobwebs and dust faintly litten by the western sun’s filtered rays. Debris, old barrels, and ruined boxes and furniture of numerous sorts met his eye, though over everything lay a shroud of dust which softened all sharp outlines. The rusted remains of a hot-air furnace shewed that the building had been used and kept in shape as late as mid-Victorian times. Acting almost without conscious initiative, Blake crawled through the window and let himself down to the dust-carpeted and debris-strown concrete floor. The vaulted cellar was a vast one, without partitions; and in a corner far to the right, amid dense shadows, he saw a black archway evidently leading upstairs. He felt a peculiar sense of oppression at being actually within the great spectral building, but kept it in check as he cautiously scouted about—finding a still-intact barrel amid the dust, and rolling it over to the open window to provide for his exit. Then, bracing himself, he crossed the wide, cobweb-festooned space toward the arch. Half choked with the omnipresent dust, and covered with ghostly gossamer fibres, he reached and began to climb the worn stone steps which rose into the darkness. He had no light, but groped carefully with his hands. After a sharp turn he felt a closed door ahead, and a little fumbling revealed its ancient latch. It opened inward, and beyond it he saw a dimly illumined corridor lined with worm-eaten panelling. Once on the ground floor, Blake began exploring in a rapid fashion. All the inner doors were unlocked, so that he freely passed from room to room. The colossal nave was an almost eldritch place with its drifts and mountains of dust over box pews, altar, hourglass pulpit, and sounding-board, and its titanic ropes of cobweb stretching among the pointed arches of the gallery and entwining the clustered Gothic columns. Over all this hushed desolation played a hideous leaden light as the declining afternoon sun sent its rays through the strange, half-blackened panes of the great apsidal windows. The paintings on those windows were so obscured by soot that Blake could scarcely decipher what they had represented, but from the little he could make out he did not like them. The designs were largely conventional, and his knowledge of obscure symbolism told him much concerning some of the ancient patterns. The few saints depicted bore expressions distinctly open to criticism, while one of the windows seemed to shew merely a dark space with spirals of curious luminosity scattered about in it. Turning away from the windows, Blake noticed that the cobwebbed cross above the altar was not of the ordinary kind, but resembled the primordial ankh or crux ansata of shadowy Egypt. In a rear vestry room beside the apse Blake found a rotting desk and ceiling-high shelves of mildewed, disintegrating books. Here for the first time he received a positive shock of objective horror, for the titles of those books told him much. They were the black, forbidden things which most sane people have never even heard of, or have heard of only in furtive, timorous whispers; the banned and dreaded repositories of equivocal secrets and immemorial formulae which have trickled down the stream of time from the days of man’s youth, and the dim, fabulous days before man was. He had himself read many of them—a Latin version of the abhorred Necronomicon,��the sinister Liber Ivonis, the infamous Cultes des Goules of Comte d’Erlette, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and old Ludvig Prinn’s hellish De Vermis Mysteriis. But there were others he had known merely by reputation or not at all—the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Book of Dzyan, and a crumbling volume in wholly unidentifiable characters yet with certain symbols and diagrams shudderingly recognisable to the occult student. Clearly, the lingering local rumours had not lied. This place had once been the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider than the known universe. In the ruined desk was a small leather-bound record-book filled with entries in some odd cryptographic medium. The manuscript writing consisted of the common traditional symbols used today in astronomy and anciently in alchemy, astrology, and other dubious arts—the devices of the sun, moon, planets, aspects, and zodiacal signs—here massed in solid pages of text, with divisions and paragraphings suggesting that each symbol answered to some alphabetical letter. In the hope of later solving the cryptogram, Blake bore off this volume in his coat pocket. Many of the great tomes on the shelves fascinated him unutterably, and he felt tempted to borrow them at some later time. He wondered how they could have remained undisturbed so long. Was he the first to conquer the clutching, pervasive fear which had for nearly sixty years protected this deserted place from visitors? Having now thoroughly explored the ground floor, Blake ploughed again through the dust of the spectral nave to the front vestibule, where he had seen a door and staircase presumably leading up to the blackened tower and steeple—objects so long familiar to him at a distance. The ascent was a choking experience, for dust lay thick, while the spiders had done their worst in this constricted place. The staircase was a spiral with high, narrow wooden treads, and now and then Blake passed a clouded window looking dizzily out over the city. Though he had seen no ropes below, he expected to find a bell or peal of bells in the tower whose narrow, louver-boarded lancet windows his field-glass had studied so often. Here he was doomed to disappointment; for when he attained the top of the stairs he found the tower chamber vacant of chimes, and clearly devoted to vastly different purposes. The room, about fifteen feet square, was faintly lighted by four lancet windows, one on each side, which were glazed within their screening of decayed louver-boards. These had been further fitted with tight, opaque screens, but the latter were now largely rotted away. In the centre of the dust-laden floor rose a curiously angled stone pillar some four feet in height and two in average diameter, covered on each side with bizarre, crudely incised, and wholly unrecognisable hieroglyphs. On this pillar rested a metal box of peculiarly asymmetrical form; its hinged lid thrown back, and its interior holding what looked beneath the decade-deep dust to be an egg-shaped or irregularly spherical object some four inches through. Around the pillar in a rough circle were seven high-backed Gothic chairs still largely intact, while behind them, ranging along the dark-panelled walls, were seven colossal images of crumbling, black-painted plaster, resembling more than anything else the cryptic carven megaliths of mysterious Easter Island. In one corner of the cobwebbed chamber a ladder was built into the wall, leading up to the closed trap-door of the windowless steeple above. As Blake grew accustomed to the feeble light he noticed odd bas-reliefs on the strange open box of yellowish metal. Approaching, he tried to clear the dust away with his hands and handkerchief, and saw that the figurings were of a monstrous and utterly alien kind; depicting entities which, though seemingly alive, resembled no known life-form ever evolved on this planet. The four-inch seeming sphere turned out to be a nearly black, red-striated polyhedron with many irregular flat surfaces; either a very remarkable crystal of some sort, or an artificial object of carved and highly polished mineral matter. It did not touch the bottom of the box, but was held suspended by means of a metal band around its centre, with seven queerly designed supports extending horizontally to angles of the box’s inner wall near the top. This stone, once exposed, exerted upon Blake an almost alarming fascination. He could scarcely tear his eyes from it, and as he looked at its glistening surfaces he almost fancied it was transparent, with half-formed worlds of wonder within. Into his mind floated pictures of alien orbs with great stone towers, and other orbs with titan mountains and no mark of life, and still remoter spaces where only a stirring in vague blacknesses told of the presence of consciousness and will. When he did look away, it was to notice a somewhat singular mound of dust in the far corner near the ladder to the steeple. Just why it took his attention he could not tell, but something in its contours carried a message to his unconscious mind. Ploughing toward it, and brushing aside the hanging cobwebs as he went, he began to discern something grim about it. Hand and handkerchief soon revealed the truth, and Blake gasped with a baffling mixture of emotions. It was a human skeleton, and it must have been there for a very long time. The clothing was in shreds, but some buttons and fragments of cloth bespoke a man’s grey suit. There were other bits of evidence—shoes, metal clasps, huge buttons for round cuffs, a stickpin of bygone pattern, a reporter’s badge with the name of the old Providence Telegram, and a crumbling leather pocketbook. Blake examined the latter with care, finding within it several bills of antiquated issue, a celluloid advertising calendar for 1893, some cards with the name “Edwin M. Lillibridge”, and a paper covered with pencilled memoranda. This paper held much of a puzzling nature, and Blake read it carefully at the dim westward window. Its disjointed text included such phrases as the following:

“Prof. Enoch Bowen home from Egypt May 1844—buys old Free-Will Church in July—his archaeological work & studies in occult well known.” “Dr. Drowne of 4th Baptist warns against Starry Wisdom in sermon Dec. 29, 1844.” “Congregation 97 by end of ’45.” “1846—3 disappearances—first mention of Shining Trapezohedron.” “7 disappearances 1848—stories of blood sacrifice begin.” “Investigation 1853 comes to nothing—stories of sounds.” “Fr. O’Malley tells of devil-worship with box found in great Egyptian ruins—says they call up something that can’t exist in light. Flees a little light, and banished by strong light. Then has to be summoned again. Probably got this from deathbed confession of Francis X. Feeney, who had joined Starry Wisdom in ’49. These people say the Shining Trapezohedron shews them heaven & other worlds, & that the Haunter of the Dark tells them secrets in some way.” “Story of Orrin B. Eddy 1857. They call it up by gazing at the crystal, & have a secret language of their own.” “200 or more in cong. 1863, exclusive of men at front.” “Irish boys mob church in 1869 after Patrick Regan’s disappearance.” “Veiled article in J. March 14, ’72, but people don’t talk about it.” “6 disappearances 1876—secret committee calls on Mayor Doyle.” “Action promised Feb. 1877—church closes in April.” “Gang—Federal Hill Boys—threaten Dr. —— and vestrymen in May.” “181 persons leave city before end of ’77—mention no names.” “Ghost stories begin around 1880—try to ascertain truth of report that no human being has entered church since 1877.” “Ask Lanigan for photograph of place taken 1851.” . . .

Restoring the paper to the pocketbook and placing the latter in his coat, Blake turned to look down at the skeleton in the dust. The implications of the notes were clear, and there could be no doubt but that this man had come to the deserted edifice forty-two years before in quest of a newspaper sensation which no one else had been bold enough to attempt. Perhaps no one else had known of his plan—who could tell? But he had never returned to his paper. Had some bravely suppressed fear risen to overcome him and bring on sudden heart-failure? Blake stooped over the gleaming bones and noted their peculiar state. Some of them were badly scattered, and a few seemed oddly dissolved at the ends. Others were strangely yellowed, with vague suggestions of charring. This charring extended to some of the fragments of clothing. The skull was in a very peculiar state—stained yellow, and with a charred aperture in the top as if some powerful acid had eaten through the solid bone. What had happened to the skeleton during its four decades of silent entombment here Blake could not imagine. Before he realised it, he was looking at the stone again, and letting its curious influence call up a nebulous pageantry in his mind. He saw processions of robed, hooded figures whose outlines were not human, and looked on endless leagues of desert lined with carved, sky-reaching monoliths. He saw towers and walls in nighted depths under the sea, and vortices of space where wisps of black mist floated before thin shimmerings of cold purple haze. And beyond all else he glimpsed an infinite gulf of darkness, where solid and semi-solid forms were known only by their windy stirrings, and cloudy patterns of force seemed to superimpose order on chaos and hold forth a key to all the paradoxes and arcana of the worlds we know. Then all at once the spell was broken by an access of gnawing, indeterminate panic fear. Blake choked and turned away from the stone, conscious of some formless alien presence close to him and watching him with horrible intentness. He felt entangled with something—something which was not in the stone, but which had looked through it at him—something which would ceaselessly follow him with a cognition that was not physical sight. Plainly, the place was getting on his nerves—as well it might in view of his gruesome find. The light was waning, too, and since he had no illuminant with him he knew he would have to be leaving soon. It was then, in the gathering twilight, that he thought he saw a faint trace of luminosity in the crazily angled stone. He had tried to look away from it, but some obscure compulsion drew his eyes back. Was there a subtle phosphorescence of radio-activity about the thing? What was it that the dead man’s notes had said concerning a Shining Trapezohedron? What, anyway, was this abandoned lair of cosmic evil? What had been done here, and what might still be lurking in the bird-shunned shadows? It seemed now as if an elusive touch of foetor had arisen somewhere close by, though its source was not apparent. Blake seized the cover of the long-open box and snapped it down. It moved easily on its alien hinges, and closed completely over the unmistakably glowing stone. At the sharp click of that closing a soft stirring sound seemed to come from the steeple’s eternal blackness overhead, beyond the trap-door. Rats, without question—the only living things to reveal their presence in this accursed pile since he had entered it. And yet that stirring in the steeple frightened him horribly, so that he plunged almost wildly down the spiral stairs, across the ghoulish nave, into the vaulted basement, out amidst the gathering dusk of the deserted square, and down through the teeming, fear-haunted alleys and avenues of Federal Hill toward the sane central streets and the home-like brick sidewalks of the college district. During the days which followed, Blake told no one of his expedition. Instead, he read much in certain books, examined long years of newspaper files downtown, and worked feverishly at the cryptogram in that leather volume from the cobwebbed vestry room. The cipher, he soon saw, was no simple one; and after a long period of endeavour he felt sure that its language could not be English, Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, or German. Evidently he would have to draw upon the deepest wells of his strange erudition. Every evening the old impulse to gaze westward returned, and he saw the black steeple as of yore amongst the bristling roofs of a distant and half-fabulous world. But now it held a fresh note of terror for him. He knew the heritage of evil lore it masked, and with the knowledge his vision ran riot in queer new ways. The birds of spring were returning, and as he watched their sunset flights he fancied they avoided the gaunt, lone spire as never before. When a flock of them approached it, he thought, they would wheel and scatter in panic confusion—and he could guess at the wild twitterings which failed to reach him across the intervening miles. It was in June that Blake’s diary told of his victory over the cryptogram. The text was, he found, in the dark Aklo language used by certain cults of evil antiquity, and known to him in a halting way through previous researches. The diary is strangely reticent about what Blake deciphered, but he was patently awed and disconcerted by his results. There are references to a Haunter of the Dark awaked by gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the black gulfs of chaos from which it was called. The being is spoken of as holding all knowledge, and demanding monstrous sacrifices. Some of Blake’s entries shew fear lest the thing, which he seemed to regard as summoned, stalk abroad; though he adds that the street-lights form a bulwark which cannot be crossed. Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window on all time and space, and tracing its history from the days it was fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought it to earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoid things of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-men of Valusia, and peered at aeons later in Lemuria by the first human beings. It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank with Atlantis before a Minoan fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to swarthy merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka built around it a temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his name to be stricken from all monuments and records. Then it slept in the ruins of that evil fane which the priests and the new Pharaoh destroyed, till the delver’s spade once more brought it forth to curse mankind. Early in July the newspapers oddly supplement Blake’s entries, though in so brief and casual a way that only the diary has called general attention to their contribution. It appears that a new fear had been growing on Federal Hill since a stranger had entered the dreaded church. The Italians whispered of unaccustomed stirrings and bumpings and scrapings in the dark windowless steeple, and called on their priests to banish an entity which haunted their dreams. Something, they said, was constantly watching at a door to see if it were dark enough to venture forth. Press items mentioned the long-standing local superstitions, but failed to shed much light on the earlier background of the horror. It was obvious that the young reporters of today are no antiquarians. In writing of these things in his diary, Blake expresses a curious kind of remorse, and talks of the duty of burying the Shining Trapezohedron and of banishing what he had evoked by letting daylight into the hideous jutting spire. At the same time, however, he displays the dangerous extent of his fascination, and admits a morbid longing—pervading even his dreams—to visit the accursed tower and gaze again into the cosmic secrets of the glowing stone. Then something in the Journal on the morning of July 17 threw the diarist into a veritable fever of horror. It was only a variant of the other half-humorous items about the Federal Hill restlessness, but to Blake it was somehow very terrible indeed. In the night a thunderstorm had put the city’s lighting-system out of commission for a full hour, and in that black interval the Italians had nearly gone mad with fright. Those living near the dreaded church had sworn that the thing in the steeple had taken advantage of the street-lamps’ absence and gone down into the body of the church, flopping and bumping around in a viscous, altogether dreadful way. Toward the last it had bumped up to the tower, where there were sounds of the shattering of glass. It could go wherever the darkness reached, but light would always send it fleeing. When the current blazed on again there had been a shocking commotion in the tower, for even the feeble light trickling through the grime-blackened, louver-boarded windows was too much for the thing. It had bumped and slithered up into its tenebrous steeple just in time—for a long dose of light would have sent it back into the abyss whence the crazy stranger had called it. During the dark hour praying crowds had clustered round the church in the rain with lighted candles and lamps somehow shielded with folded paper and umbrellas—a guard of light to save the city from the nightmare that stalks in darkness. Once, those nearest the church declared, the outer door had rattled hideously. But even this was not the worst. That evening in the Bulletin Blake read of what the reporters had found. Aroused at last to the whimsical news value of the scare, a pair of them had defied the frantic crowds of Italians and crawled into the church through the cellar window after trying the doors in vain. They found the dust of the vestibule and of the spectral nave ploughed up in a singular way, with bits of rotted cushions and satin pew-linings scattered curiously around. There was a bad odour everywhere, and here and there were bits of yellow stain and patches of what looked like charring. Opening the door to the tower, and pausing a moment at the suspicion of a scraping sound above, they found the narrow spiral stairs wiped roughly clean. In the tower itself a similarly half-swept condition existed. They spoke of the heptagonal stone pillar, the overturned Gothic chairs, and the bizarre plaster images; though strangely enough the metal box and the old mutilated skeleton were not mentioned. What disturbed Blake the most—except for the hints of stains and charring and bad odours—was the final detail that explained the crashing glass. Every one of the tower’s lancet windows was broken, and two of them had been darkened in a crude and hurried way by the stuffing of satin pew-linings and cushion-horsehair into the spaces between the slanting exterior louver-boards. More satin fragments and bunches of horsehair lay scattered around the newly swept floor, as if someone had been interrupted in the act of restoring the tower to the absolute blackness of its tightly curtained days. Yellowish stains and charred patches were found on the ladder to the windowless spire, but when a reporter climbed up, opened the horizontally sliding trap-door, and shot a feeble flashlight beam into the black and strangely foetid space, he saw nothing but darkness, and an heterogeneous litter of shapeless fragments near the aperture. The verdict, of course, was charlatanry. Somebody had played a joke on the superstitious hill-dwellers, or else some fanatic had striven to bolster up their fears for their own supposed good. Or perhaps some of the younger and more sophisticated dwellers had staged an elaborate hoax on the outside world. There was an amusing aftermath when the police sent an officer to verify the reports. Three men in succession found ways of evading the assignment, and the fourth went very reluctantly and returned very soon without adding to the account given by the reporters. From this point onward Blake’s diary shews a mounting tide of insidious horror and nervous apprehension. He upbraids himself for not doing something, and speculates wildly on the consequences of another electrical breakdown. It has been verified that on three occasions—during thunderstorms—he telephoned the electric light company in a frantic vein and asked that desperate precautions against a lapse of power be taken. Now and then his entries shew concern over the failure of the reporters to find the metal box and stone, and the strangely marred old skeleton, when they explored the shadowy tower room. He assumed that these things had been removed—whither, and by whom or what, he could only guess. But his worst fears concerned himself, and the kind of unholy rapport he felt to exist between his mind and that lurking horror in the distant steeple—that monstrous thing of night which his rashness had called out of the ultimate black spaces. He seemed to feel a constant tugging at his will, and callers of that period remember how he would sit abstractedly at his desk and stare out of the west window at that far-off, spire-bristling mound beyond the swirling smoke of the city. His entries dwell monotonously on certain terrible dreams, and of a strengthening of the unholy rapport in his sleep. There is mention of a night when he awaked to find himself fully dressed, outdoors, and headed automatically down College Hill toward the west. Again and again he dwells on the fact that the thing in the steeple knows where to find him. The week following July 30 is recalled as the time of Blake’s partial breakdown. He did not dress, and ordered all his food by telephone. Visitors remarked the cords he kept near his bed, and he said that sleep-walking had forced him to bind his ankles every night with knots which would probably hold or else waken him with the labour of untying. In his diary he told of the hideous experience which had brought the collapse. After retiring on the night of the 30th he had suddenly found himself groping about in an almost black space. All he could see were short, faint, horizontal streaks of bluish light, but he could smell an overpowering foetor and hear a curious jumble of soft, furtive sounds above him. Whenever he moved he stumbled over something, and at each noise there would come a sort of answering sound from above—a vague stirring, mixed with the cautious sliding of wood on wood. Once his groping hands encountered a pillar of stone with a vacant top, whilst later he found himself clutching the rungs of a ladder built into the wall, and fumbling his uncertain way upward toward some region of intenser stench where a hot, searing blast beat down against him. Before his eyes a kaleidoscopic range of phantasmal images played, all of them dissolving at intervals into the picture of a vast, unplumbed abyss of night wherein whirled suns and worlds of an even profounder blackness. He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose centre sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a daemoniac flute held in nameless paws. Then a sharp report from the outer world broke through his stupor and roused him to the unutterable horror of his position. What it was, he never knew—perhaps it was some belated peal from the fireworks heard all summer on Federal Hill as the dwellers hail their various patron saints, or the saints of their native villages in Italy. In any event he shrieked aloud, dropped frantically from the ladder, and stumbled blindly across the obstructed floor of the almost lightless chamber that encompassed him. He knew instantly where he was, and plunged recklessly down the narrow spiral staircase, tripping and bruising himself at every turn. There was a nightmare flight through a vast cobwebbed nave whose ghostly arches reached up to realms of leering shadow, a sightless scramble through a littered basement, a climb to regions of air and street-lights outside, and a mad racing down a spectral hill of gibbering gables, across a grim, silent city of tall black towers, and up the steep eastward precipice to his own ancient door. On regaining consciousness in the morning he found himself lying on his study floor fully dressed. Dirt and cobwebs covered him, and every inch of his body seemed sore and bruised. When he faced the mirror he saw that his hair was badly scorched, while a trace of strange, evil odour seemed to cling to his upper outer clothing. It was then that his nerves broke down. Thereafter, lounging exhaustedly about in a dressing-gown, he did little but stare from his west window, shiver at the threat of thunder, and make wild entries in his diary. The great storm broke just before midnight on August 8th. Lightning struck repeatedly in all parts of the city, and two remarkable fireballs were reported. The rain was torrential, while a constant fusillade of thunder brought sleeplessness to thousands. Blake was utterly frantic in his fear for the lighting system, and tried to telephone the company around 1 a.m., though by that time service had been temporarily cut off in the interest of safety. He recorded everything in his diary—the large, nervous, and often undecipherable hieroglyphs telling their own story of growing frenzy and despair, and of entries scrawled blindly in the dark. He had to keep the house dark in order to see out the window, and it appears that most of his time was spent at his desk, peering anxiously through the rain across the glistening miles of downtown roofs at the constellation of distant lights marking Federal Hill. Now and then he would fumblingly make an entry in his diary, so that detached phrases such as “The lights must not go”; “It knows where I am”; “I must destroy it”; and “It is calling to me, but perhaps it means no injury this time”; are found scattered down two of the pages. Then the lights went out all over the city. It happened at 2:12 a.m. according to power-house records, but Blake’s diary gives no indication of the time. The entry is merely, “Lights out—God help me.” On Federal Hill there were watchers as anxious as he, and rain-soaked knots of men paraded the square and alleys around the evil church with umbrella-shaded candles, electric flashlights, oil lanterns, crucifixes, and obscure charms of the many sorts common to southern Italy. They blessed each flash of lightning, and made cryptical signs of fear with their right hands when a turn in the storm caused the flashes to lessen and finally to cease altogether. A rising wind blew out most of the candles, so that the scene grew threateningly dark. Someone roused Father Merluzzo of Spirito Santo Church, and he hastened to the dismal square to pronounce whatever helpful syllables he could. Of the restless and curious sounds in the blackened tower, there could be no doubt whatever. For what happened at 2:35 we have the testimony of the priest, a young, intelligent, and well-educated person; of Patrolman William J. Monahan of the Central Station, an officer of the highest reliability who had paused at that part of his beat to inspect the crowd; and of most of the seventy-eight men who had gathered around the church’s high bank wall—especially those in the square where the eastward facade was visible. Of course there was nothing which can be proved as being outside the order of Nature. The possible causes of such an event are many. No one can speak with certainty of the obscure chemical processes arising in a vast, ancient, ill-aired, and long-deserted building of heterogeneous contents. Mephitic vapours—spontaneous combustion—pressure of gases born of long decay—any one of numberless phenomena might be responsible. And then, of course, the factor of conscious charlatanry can by no means be excluded. The thing was really quite simple in itself, and covered less than three minutes of actual time. Father Merluzzo, always a precise man, looked at his watch repeatedly. It started with a definite swelling of the dull fumbling sounds inside the black tower. There had for some time been a vague exhalation of strange, evil odours from the church, and this had now become emphatic and offensive. Then at last there was a sound of splintering wood, and a large, heavy object crashed down in the yard beneath the frowning easterly facade. The tower was invisible now that the candles would not burn, but as the object neared the ground the people knew that it was the smoke-grimed louver-boarding of that tower’s east window. Immediately afterward an utterly unbearable foetor welled forth from the unseen heights, choking and sickening the trembling watchers, and almost prostrating those in the square. At the same time the air trembled with a vibration as of flapping wings, and a sudden east-blowing wind more violent than any previous blast snatched off the hats and wrenched the dripping umbrellas of the crowd. Nothing definite could be seen in the candleless night, though some upward-looking spectators thought they glimpsed a great spreading blur of denser blackness against the inky sky—something like a formless cloud of smoke that shot with meteor-like speed toward the east. That was all. The watchers were half numbed with fright, awe, and discomfort, and scarcely knew what to do, or whether to do anything at all. Not knowing what had happened, they did not relax their vigil; and a moment later they sent up a prayer as a sharp flash of belated lightning, followed by an earsplitting crash of sound, rent the flooded heavens. Half an hour later the rain stopped, and in fifteen minutes more the street-lights sprang on again, sending the weary, bedraggled watchers relievedly back to their homes. The next day’s papers gave these matters minor mention in connexion with the general storm reports. It seems that the great lightning flash and deafening explosion which followed the Federal Hill occurrence were even more tremendous farther east, where a burst of the singular foetor was likewise noticed. The phenomenon was most marked over College Hill, where the crash awaked all the sleeping inhabitants and led to a bewildered round of speculations. Of those who were already awake only a few saw the anomalous blaze of light near the top of the hill, or noticed the inexplicable upward rush of air which almost stripped the leaves from the trees and blasted the plants in the gardens. It was agreed that the lone, sudden lightning-bolt must have struck somewhere in this neighbourhood, though no trace of its striking could afterward be found. A youth in the Tau Omega fraternity house thought he saw a grotesque and hideous mass of smoke in the air just as the preliminary flash burst, but his observation has not been verified. All of the few observers, however, agree as to the violent gust from the west and the flood of intolerable stench which preceded the belated stroke; whilst evidence concerning the momentary burned odour after the stroke is equally general. These points were discussed very carefully because of their probable connexion with the death of Robert Blake. Students in the Psi Delta house, whose upper rear windows looked into Blake’s study, noticed the blurred white face at the westward window on the morning of the 9th, and wondered what was wrong with the expression. When they saw the same face in the same position that evening, they felt worried, and watched for the lights to come up in his apartment. Later they rang the bell of the darkened flat, and finally had a policeman force the door. The rigid body sat bolt upright at the desk by the window, and when the intruders saw the glassy, bulging eyes, and the marks of stark, convulsive fright on the twisted features, they turned away in sickened dismay. Shortly afterward the coroner’s physician made an examination, and despite the unbroken window reported electrical shock, or nervous tension induced by electrical discharge, as the cause of death. The hideous expression he ignored altogether, deeming it a not improbable result of the profound shock as experienced by a person of such abnormal imagination and unbalanced emotions. He deduced these latter qualities from the books, paintings, and manuscripts found in the apartment, and from the blindly scrawled entries in the diary on the desk. Blake had prolonged his frenzied jottings to the last, and the broken-pointed pencil was found clutched in his spasmodically contracted right hand. The entries after the failure of the lights were highly disjointed, and legible only in part. From them certain investigators have drawn conclusions differing greatly from the materialistic official verdict, but such speculations have little chance for belief among the conservative. The case of these imaginative theorists has not been helped by the action of superstitious Dr. Dexter, who threw the curious box and angled stone—an object certainly self-luminous as seen in the black windowless steeple where it was found—into the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay. Excessive imagination and neurotic unbalance on Blake’s part, aggravated by knowledge of the evil bygone cult whose startling traces he had uncovered, form the dominant interpretation given those final frenzied jottings. These are the entries—or all that can be made of them.

“Lights still out—must be five minutes now. Everything depends on lightning. Yaddith grant it will keep up! . . . Some influence seems beating through it. . . . Rain and thunder and wind deafen. . . . The thing is taking hold of my mind. . . . “Trouble with memory. I see things I never knew before. Other worlds and other galaxies . . . Dark . . . The lightning seems dark and the darkness seems light. . . . “It cannot be the real hill and church that I see in the pitch-darkness. Must be retinal impression left by flashes. Heaven grant the Italians are out with their candles if the lightning stops! “What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy Khem even took the form of man? I remember Yuggoth, and more distant Shaggai, and the ultimate void of the black planets. . . . “The long, winging flight through the void . . . cannot cross the universe of light . . . re-created by the thoughts caught in the Shining Trapezohedron . . . send it through the horrible abysses of radiance. . . . “My name is Blake—Robert Harrison Blake of 620 East Knapp Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. . . . I am on this planet. . . . “Azathoth have mercy!—the lightning no longer flashes—horrible—I can see everything with a monstrous sense that is not sight—light is dark and dark is light . . . those people on the hill . . . guard . . . candles and charms . . . their priests. . . . “Sense of distance gone—far is near and near is far. No light—no glass—see that steeple—that tower—window—can hear—Roderick Usher—am mad or going mad—the thing is stirring and fumbling in the tower—I am it and it is I—I want to get out . . . must get out and unify the forces. . . . It knows where I am. . . . “I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower in the dark. There is a monstrous odour . . . senses transfigured . . . boarding at that tower window cracking and giving way. . . . Iä . . . ngai . . . ygg. . . . “I see it—coming here—hell-wind—titan blur—black wings—Yog-Sothoth save me—the three-lobed burning eye. . . .”

A new Tin Dog Podcast

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He dwells in infinite isolation, his immortality and unlimited power a worthless burden. Then he spies the beautiful Georgian Princess Tamara. robbers come to despoil the wedding and kill Tamara's betrothed. The Demon courts Tamara, and Tamara knows fear, yet in him she sees not a demon nor an angel but a tortured soul. Eventually, she yields to his embrace, but his kiss is fatal. And though she is taken to heaven, the Demon is left again “Alone in all the universe, abandoned, without love or hope...”

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Lot Pricing Starting To Edge Up Around Richmond, Va

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McConnell opened the first cheese factory about one-half mile west of the town. The Old Bank building on Broadway was of McConnell's son, George. "That's Uncle George's bank. That's what we'd call it," remembered Bo McConnell, a great-great-grandson of William A. McConnell.

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"Demon and Tamara" by Konstantin Makovsky (c.1889)

""Demon" is a poem by Mikhail Lermontov. It is considered a masterpiece of European Romantic poetry. The poem is set in Lermontov's beloved Caucasus Mountains. It opens with the eponymous protagonist wandering the earth, hopeless and troubled. He dwells in infinite isolation, his immortality and unlimited power a worthless burden. Then he spies the beautiful Georgian[4] Princess Tamara, dancing for her wedding, and in the desert of his soul wells an indescribable emotion. ... The Demon courts Tamara, and Tamara knows fear, yet in him she sees not a demon nor an angel but a tortured soul. Eventually she yields to his embrace, but his kiss is fatal. And though she is taken to Heaven, the Demon is left again "Alone in all the universe, Abandoned, without love or hope!..."." (Source)