[You'll have to visit the website to see the photo. Sorry.--DC]
http://tinyurl.com/4c6ks6
6/16/08 08:26 PM
Media Life: Etc. "Clark Ashton Smith photo discovery"
Posted by: Gus Thomson
Clark Ashton Smith, at right, sits with other students at Long Valley
School in this 1903 photo.
Twentieth-century Auburn poet and science fiction-fantasy writer Clark
Ashton Smith has a worldwide following. He was born in Long Valley, just
outside Auburn, and attended the old Long Valley School before deciding
to not go to high school and self-educate himself. One story has him
reading the Encyclopedia Britannica cover-to-cover twice to help him
develop the rich vocabulary that marked his works. Media Life stopped in
to the Scott's Corner Hay & Feed recently and discovered this photo of
Smith from 1903 on a bulletin board showing some of the area's community
history. He's posed in the front row with classmates at Long Valley
School, which now exists as a community hall just off Auburn Folsom
Road. Born in 1893, Smith would have been about age 10 in this photo -
seven years shy of his first publication. The "boy poet" would soon be
lauded in San Francisco literary circles as the Keats of the Pacific. In
the 1930s, Smith - all the while living a spartan existence in what is
now the Skyridge area of Auburn - was corresponding with H.P. Lovecraft
and churning out now-classic titles for pulp fiction publications Weird
Tales, Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories. He would die in 1961, with a
rich legacy of writings that continues to be studied and admired today.
Back to the picture. Here we have a young Ashton Smith - dressed much
differently than his classmates, with a dark ****rt and vest rather than
white ****rt and suspenders. His smile is dead-on to the camera - a good
day for someone whose adult photos would show a worldly author with a
more sanguine appearance. He's of wedged behind the bigger student to
his right - either protected by bigger boy or shoved over in his chair.
Long Valley School. 105 years ago. Smith was only a year away from
starting to write seriously. Fittingly, the man who once revealed he'd
turned down a lucrative Guggenheim fellow****p because he didn't want to
be part of the "establishment" was already leaning toward the darkness
in this photo.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"Tho-ag in Zhi-gyu slept seven Khorlo. Zodmanas
zhiba. All Nyug bosom. Konch-hog not; Thyan-Kam
not; Lha-Chohan not; Tenbrel Chugnyi not;
Dharmakaya ceased; Tgenchang not become; Barnang
and Ssa in Ngovonyidj; alone Tho-og Yinsin in
night of Sun-chan and Yong-grub (Parinishpanna),
&c., &c.,"
-- The Book of Dzyan.
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