Thursday, July 21, 2011

Fort, as in: Fortean



"CHARLES FORT WAS AN INTELLECTUAL adventurer, a deep-dyed scholar of the weird whose work paved the way for generations of researchers. Writing in the early 20th century, Fort pursued unexplained phenomena with feverish intensity and a rare sense of humility. 

"Fort's Lo! is a classic work of studied iconoclasm, a restless ensemble of anecdotes that produces a singular sense of unease mingled with awe, gape-jawed amazement-and a pang of existential fright. Fort's parade of scientific anomalies frames the larger anomaly that is human existence. Lo! is a book with the capacity to rewire brains and sculpt new lenses for seeing the unexpected, the unexplained - and perhaps for glimpsing our own role in Fort's mystitying cosmic scheme.

"This book is a singularity, a focal point so rich with heretical memes that it's infected an entire century with its bizarre implications and sense of the inexplicable. Perhaps if Charles Fort had never existed, we would have been forced to invent him, or someone like him. But it's doubtful we could have improved on him. Lo! is something new and correspondingly startling: a crack in the veneer of orthodoxy and an impassioned plunge into the deep black waters of a most enigmatic planet." 

- Mac Tonnies, via the cover of Charles Fort's "Lo!" (1931), Cosimo Books edition, 2004



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