At The Mountains Of Nerdness With H.P. Lovecraft

I used to be obsessed with horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft, who died in 1937 at the age of 46, is perhaps most famous for a series of interwoven tales centered on a cosmic entity known as Cthulhu.

It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.

No less than Joyce Carol Oates has said Lovecraft exerted an "incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction," while Stephen King called him the "20th century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale."

While I don't read Lovecraft anymore, I still have a soft spot for his overwrought prose.

For some reason, I committed the following passage from "The Hound" to memory when I was a kid and still remember it to this day:

"For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a closepacked nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was the bony thing my friend and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom."

That really impresses the girls, let me tell you.

In high school (yes, that's me in 10th grade), I wrote reams of horror and science fiction stories in a style that -- unfortunately for my reader(s) -- owed an all-too-obvious debt to the worst excesses of Lovecraft.

Sometimes I'd get one of these stories published in my high school literary magazine, and in some cases I actually sent a few off to legitimate magazines in the hope that an editor would recognize a budding literary genius. (None ever did.)

I also shot a few 8mm horror movies that owed their own debt to Lovecraft.

So it was with great interest that I came across a fascinating profile of film director Guillermo Del Toro -- he of "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Hell Boy" -- in a recent issue of "The New Yorker." Del Toro discussed his efforts (ultimately unsuccessful) to bring a famous Lovecraft story, "At the Mountains of Madness," to the big screen. (There's also a video of some of Del Toro's inspired images for the film.)

Which led me to thinking about my über-nerdy youth, both as a Lovecraft disciple and a stamp collector. And how I managed to combine both of those obsessions by delving into the arcane world of "local posts" in the late 1970s.

Local posts are a kind of micro-mail service. In the most extreme cases, they serve as a surrogate to the national post office, issuing their own stamps and delivering mail in a limited geographic area.


The idea was taken up by some industrious stamp collectors who started their own "local posts." They printed their own postage stamps and often used unusual methods -- boats, balloons, rockets, etc. -- to "deliver" the mail. These envelopes -- with the local postage stamps affixed -- are known as "covers" and are prized by many collectors.

I used to collect "covers" when I was in high school, starting with classic "First Day of Issue" covers of U.S. postage stamps and then evolving into local posts.

And then, in what is perhaps the crowing achievement of my teenage nerdhood, I began my own local post. I called it Pyramid Local Post, both because of my interest in the occult and because I could easily carve a pyramid-shaped postmark out of a cork.

And my one and only stamp issue honored -- you guessed it -- H.P. Lovecraft.


I drew a crude silhouette of Lovecraft and fashioned a postage stamp and my father took my creation to a local printing shop in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, where we were living at the time. The shop printed up a neat little packet of about 50 stamps, with adhesive backs to boot.

I advertised my Pyramid Local Post in "Linn's Stamp News," the philatelist's bible (or at least it was then), and other collectors would send me 50 cents or so (I can't quite recall) to pay for the stamp and return postage. I would affix my Lovecraft label, cancel it with my snazzy cork stamp, and send it back to them.

I wasn't overwhelmed with requests, as I recall. But I did receive a few dozen, turning each trip to the mailbox at the end of our country driveway into a little thrill.

I no longer read Lovecraft, and my stamp collection lays moldering in a box in the basement.

When I look back at my adolescence, I am amazed at my seemingly boundless energy and lack of self-doubt, and shocked that I spent so many hours alone in my room, reading Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and "Chariots of the Gods," and writing awful short stories that amused only me and my best friend, when I should have been taking girls to the movies and trying out for the football team.

And So It Begins

The first gins and tonic of the season somehow taste sweeter. And a BBQ to boot. We survived another winter.

Check Out 'The Blender' Podcast

I'm hosting a podcast, along with a small group of other folks, including my wife, Daisy, over at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

You should check it out.

It's called "The Blender," and it presents the best of RFE/RL -- features from our far-flung bureaus, interviews with newsmakers and correspondents, reports on language, music, and culture, even a little humor now and again.

A new episode is posted every Friday.

Here's a link to the latest episode on "The Blender" blog. You can find earlier episodes here.

We'd really appreciate your support. You can download it at our website, or go to iTunes and subscribe.

Feedback is welcome, either here or send it to podcast@rferl.org.

Thanks, everybody!

-- Grant

My Friend, Mustafa Sarwar

At the airport in Kabul, before boarding our small prop for Mustafa's first-ever airplane ride. Turned out we were the only passengers. It was like having a private jet fly us across Afghanistan.

I recently had the pleasure of eating a gourmet Afghan dinner at the Prague home of my dear friend, Mustafa Sarwar. (You can see photos of the meal below.)

I first met Mustafa in November 2002 at the Kabul Bureau of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. I'd been sent by RFE/RL to cover the situation in Afghanistan one year after the fall of the Taliban. I'd spend a month in the country and would need a "fixer" -- someone who spoke English as well as Pashto and Dari, someone who knew the chaotic city and could help me set up interviews, translate interiews, and generally steer me in the right direction.

Mustafa was that man.

I spent every day of that month with Mustafa. I could not have asked for a smarter, more capable or more sociable companion. Any reporting successes I enjoyed in Afghanistan I owe entirely to Mustafa. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

One of my fondest memories was being able to arrange Mustafa's first airplane ride. We needed to get to the western city of Herat, and driving was not an option. We booked passage on a charter airline used primarily by UN and NGO workers. I think the prop plane sat about eight people, but when we showed up for our flight at Kabul airport, we discovered that we would be the only passengers.


Somewhere over central Afghanistan.


Mustafa sees his vast country from the air for the first time.

We marveled at the view as we cruised just above the snow-upholstered mountains of the Hindu Kush, tiny settlements -- effectively cut off from civilization -- just visible in the nooks and crannies of the valleys and mountainsides.

At some point, Mustafa turned to me and said, "You know, I'd always heard people describe Afghanistan as mountainous, or talk about how difficult it is to get food and supplies to some of the remote Afghan villages, but I never really knew what they meant. Now I know."

I left Afghanistan, exhausted and exhilarated.

Mustafa remained to continue his medical studies at Kabul University. We kept in touch, and Mustafa's career eventually led him away from medicine and toward journalism. He became a famous anchorman on Tolo TV, Afghanistan's most popular television station, becoming the "Afghan Dan Rather," as I heard him described -- a celebrity regularly recognized on the streets of the Afghan capital.

To make a long story short, he was eventually hired full-time by RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan a few years ago to work as a journalist at our Prague headquarters. And he married a lovely Afghan woman named Bahar, who somehow found time to prepare the lavish meal Daisy and I enjoyed a few weeks back, while also keeping an eye on their two young sons -- Solomon, who's 4, and Arsalan, who's 9 months old.

I don't think I have ever eaten so much or enjoyed it more.

It was amazing to peek into Mustafa's new life in Prague and to think about all that had happened since we first met. He's even studying in Prague for a master's degree in professional communication and public relations from La Salle University.

I'm so happy for Mustafa -- for his new life, for his new wife and children, for his successful journalism career, and for all the new friends he's made.

All the best, my friend.


While I was in Afghanistan, I was the guest of honor when Mustafa invited me to his home in Kabul. It was another memorable meal. I'm pictured here with Mustafa's father, Mohmmad Sarwar Siddiqi (on the right), Mustafa's uncle, Mohammed Karim, who served as our driver (on the left), and Mustafa (second from left).


Mustafa in November 2002, offering me dessert. How could I refuse?


Mustafa and I just after our arrival in the western Afghan city of Herat, at that time ruled by Ismail Khan as his personal fiefdom.


The amazing chef, Bahar, Mustafa's wife. Lucky man!


The honey-soaked dessert called Gulab Jaman.


Homemade sweets.


Afghan rice pudding. So simple and delicious.


More homemade Afghan sweets. This is called shirpera.


Spinach. Not usually my favorite, but this was truly amazing


Minced meat patties called kufta.


Chicken Kurma.


Marinated lamb with herbs and spices, called Kabab-e-Degi.


Homemade Nan-e-Tandoori.


Saffron rice cooked with lamb and garnished with sweet carrots, raisins and nuts. It's called Qabeli Palaw.

The Strokes In 2002

Found this ticket stub today as I was cleaning out my desk drawer.

One of my Top 10 all-time concerts.

If you live in Prague, you'll know Akropolis is an intimate little venue, a perfect place to see the U.S. "It" band of 2002, before they hit it big worldwide. Fantastic show.

I'm looking forward to their new album, "Angles," coming out on March 22.

Hey, Dad

I've always loved this photograph of my dad and me in the yard of his family home where he was born -- and where his sister still lived at the time -- in Piedmont, West Virginia. This was probably taken sometime around 1985.

I've been thinking a lot about my dad lately.

Edward E. Podelco passed away at home, in the living room that he loved so much, on February 17 of last year, but it seems he's been more on my mind over the past few weeks than he was when it all came down.

He and I had a tempestuous relationship, although we were good at the end, and I was glad that I had been able to fly home and be with him when he ended up in the hospital in early January 2010. For some reason, he liked to call me "Champ," and did so right to the end.

Though we had our differences, one of the things that I credit him with, looking back now, is instilling in me a love of music and the arts, and of writing. He's probably, in his way, the reason I'm a journalist today (although he had always wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer). My mother, too, loves music, and growing up our house was always filled with LPs of Sinatra or Dean Martin, Eddy Arnold, Placido Domingo, Pavarotti, Liberace, The Letterman, Glen Campbell, The Fifth Dimension, or The Carpenters stacked on the turntable.

Since he's been on my mind, I was trying to think of something I could do here to pay him a small tribute. I didn't want to write something schmaltzy, or anything schmaltzier than I've already written.


My dad served as a radio operator in the U.S. Army in Hawaii and the Philippines in the mid-1950s. I have a few slides he took of himself during those days, and recently scanned one in. I'd guess this is Hawaii, but it's hard to tell.

Quite by accident, I came across a small stack of slides in my desk drawer the other day, wrapped tightly in a rubber band. Back in the late 1980s, I'd asked my dad -- who liked to paint -- to have professional slides taken of a selection of his oil paintings in the hopes that I could somehow get him a show at a gallery in Syracuse, New York, where I was living at the time. That show never happened, but I kept the slides, and I thought I'd show the world some of his work on this, the first anniversary of his death. (There are some just below, and more at the very bottom of this post.)





His paintings reflect his hardscrabble upbringing. He was born and grew up in the tiny town of Piedmont, West Virginia. His own father was a coal miner. The area was poor, and the people were hard, and I think that those are the people you see in his paintings. One of his pictures is hanging on my office wall as I write this.

Many of these painting were sold at auction when my mom moved out of her house last autumn. They're now out in the world, hopefully hanging on someone's wall, and appreciated. My dad would have liked that.


A page from the manuscript to "Portal Sun," in my father's distinctive handwriting.

My dad also liked to write, and after his death I found the manuscript to at least one short story, about a spelunking priest called "Show Me, God," and the fragment of a novel he called "Portal Sun." In the foreward to "Portal Sun," my dad writes:

The time is, perhaps, any year during the last 20. The place might well as be West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, or southern Illinois where many, many similar dramas have and are being lived. ... The intent of "Portal Sun" is to pay tribute to, and fictionally document the lives and times of a gallant breed who are involved in a magnificently complex and little understood industry where victories are momentary and defeats eternal. ... This book is, to great measure, a collection of sweetly disguised reminiscences of events and of people who are, today, active in the most dangerously glamorous of all industries -- coal mining.

From what I can gather from the hand-written and partially typewritten manuscript, here's the first paragraph of "Portal Sun":

Cliff Roland settled in the worn, gray-tweed seat as the vintage twin-prop of Mountaineer Airlines descended for its approach to the narrow, obliterated strip. Tri-State Terminal had been, very literally, hewn from a spruce-laden plateau, and commercial aircraft landings were, altogether, precise ventures, even in clear, subtle weather. Cliff remembered at least a hundred similar descents to copper leases in South America.

Raised as a blood-heritage miner, educated as a mining engineer and geologist, Cliff Roland had amassed a free-lance record of accomplishment which pleasantly contradicted his 37 years. He carried these credentials so obviously, and yet with a strange unoffensive trace of humility, that absolute trust in him was immediate and unavoidable.

I hope you're having a grand time wherever you are, dad. I miss you.

A Stitch In Time

Prague doctors seem to take delight in fashioning ridiculous-looking bandages for their patients.

Just a note to say that I haven't been blogging much lately due to both a busy schedule and the fact that I've been taking it easy lately after having had some minor surgery.

I noticed a tiny scab on my forehead last spring that simply never healed. To make a long story short, after a few visits to the dermatologist, the knife was recommended, and I went to the hospital a couple of weeks ago for outpatient surgery.

The lab results tested positive for basel cell carcinoma. That's the bad news. The good news is that they got it all, and that it wasn't melanoma.

I've always tried to be careful out in the sun, what with my ginger complexion, but I guess a lifetime of sunburns finally caught up with me. I've got to be especially careful now, since if you've had this problem once, you're susceptible to being diagnosed with it again.

I hope to be back on the bike and feeling like my old self real soon. Stay tuned.

What's For Lunch

Yes, that says Kangaroo Goulash. Or Kangaroulash, if you will. Tasted like beef, I must admit, with a slight oceanic aftertaste, for some reason.

As a foreigner traveling around Europe, I'm never not amused by bad menu translations. Here are a few from the restaurant in my own place of work in Prague, as well as a few fascinating main dishes that struck my fancy recently.


Since I possess a gigantic sweet tooth myself, I'm utterly fascinated by the Czech predilection of serving what is basically an over-the-top dessert as a main course. Above, strawberry dumplings with butter. Below, something called Bavarian drop scones, which are basically four large doughnuts. And no, I have never ordered one of these for lunch. I just can't bring myself to do it.




Oh, Christ, not another bowl of bloody soup again!


Sedimentary, my dear Watson.

Death Of A Snowman