Macon Cornwall Grumfeld

Through the manipulation of mathematics, he in fact arrives by not. That given, gifts are moot -- so he materializes abounding with smiles. A soul is free as it is weightless. We give him nothing, being as it is in this instance everything.

Launching Deluvian

Macon Cornwall Grumfeld ("An idiot," according to his mother) fought tirelessly until his untimely death to promote his flimsy collection of theories regarding a pre-civilization civilization. He was a simple man with enormous energy. He was against the then-new theories of common origin. His inability to accept that his distant homeland might have been Africa fueled his enthusiasm for gathering the immensely large and poorly researched "library" upon which was built the foundation of his grand opus on the races and later a "foundation" for like-minded flat-earthers.¹  Elysius Dubord also noted that he "appointed himself an official collector of evidence" among his many questionable credentials.

Grumfeld's hypotheses generated much amusement after his banishment from the halls of science. His debate with Elysius Dubord (both in their elderly years) is remembered as a "fantastic moment of pure emotion coming from an inexplicable distance with an assuredly distorted message quick to be lost to noise. And heat." Someone was overheard.

A Pickle of a Bind

Dr. Martin Savage Pickles wrote in his new forward to the re-issue of Dubord's A "Mad Black Man"('s) critique of Grumfeld's Controversial Book, "A Tenable Theory Towards the Unpacking of the Lower Peoples" (a closer inspections of the fairy folk in accordance with new discoveries on the borders of science):

Dubord's relentless attack is spectacular in form and execution. Grummy was on the ropes quick with his inability to provide evidence that the pre-ice age peoples lived in perfect little hobbles and cavorted about up on little wings. Grumfeld's ridiculously flawed exhortation that the newly discovered pygmy tribes of the Dark Continent may somehow be the unholy descendants of those who were banished(?) from a world of "Lightening bugs and reindeer dance" was crushed by the oncoming onslaught of scientists and other tough guys, most notably from the burgeoning field of genetics as well as most (well a sizable chunk anyway) of "those who aspire" to be geneticists. And of course people who hate fairies which is pretty much everyone else.

Dubord brilliantly counters Grumfeld's fairy theory with a series of articles which were described by one who knew someone who had actually read it as, "an incredible display of on the spot decision-making with precise follow-through. A flawless performance of exceptional performing. Dubord's debate style was unstoppable." A breathless T. Bozzano confessed on live radio his sudden change of heart and was overdone with his renunciations of the fairy world and all that and it got rather tiring. Rubbish really.

Spiking the Wrinkle

Of course all of this was played out in the eastern states by a network of whiteys who where sympathetic with Grumfeld's work as long as he paid his bills and didn't push his fairy theories upon them as a group or individually. Elysuis Dubord further fueled the fire when he smoothly schmoozed the black newspaper community to come to his aid in a sort of west coast alliance. Elysius was tired of fightin' in the trades and demanded a summit with Grumfeld. They met in the Dakota Room at a Tippinoe Inn at an undisclosed location somewhere in the American Midwest. They traveled by train accompanied by the A.S.P and the P.S.P.R. Most of what we know about the event comes from the incomplete transcript.

The original transcript is little more than a few clarifications that Grumfeld makes before stumbling through his opening statements. The tape recorder was rumored to be sabotaged by a suspect wearing a Ryan O'Donnely Honky Tonk and Steak House uniform.

There are many contradictory versions being bandied about by opposing ideologues.

According to a report obtained by the Freedom of Information Act, attributed to a young Dewey Rose:

Although the location was undisclosed, the room was over-occupied with an illustrious crowd of anarchists, gnomes, and mormo adherents. The negro press was well-represented and behaved civilly compared to the Merriweather gang in the back who continuously harangued the Grumfeld supporters who were sitting in the section before Grumfeld's podium. Any number of secret agents could be seen sneaking about. Many official-looking government types stood by the exit. Several smartly-dressed men synchronized their fancy pocket-watches and made the crowd nervous. A man in an O'Donnely's Ribhouse and Honkytonk uniform was arguing with one of the men who were operating the recording devices. Reporters from most of the nation's fringe newspapers were seated around the perimeter more interested in the potential dynamics of the polarized crowd. Several college age girls were handing out Choco literature.

Grumfeld's agitation was infectious and the crowd rolled in a paranoid sea.

The debate remained unsettled for many years with each faction using it for its own ends. The Negro Press reported it as an event canceled at the last moment because of technical malfunctions. The racists reported a victory throughout their networks. The conspiratorialists accuse the League of Men with Fancy Gloves of sabotage and the Gnomes are strangely silent. The Merriweather crowd offered a comical interpretation wherein their mere presence caused the whole thing to implode.

Enter Mazzy

Mazzistow Carrington's reputed status as an explorative and concise writer are well known throughout cultural studies circles as well as the myriad networks available to investigators of his talent. What Carrington brings to the discussion is more than professional--it is personal. Elysius Dubord was Mazzistow Carrington’s second uncle on his mother's side. Carrington agrees with much of the apocryphal evidence that there were actual punches thrown. From a letter to Richard Lancelyn Green from Mazzistow dated prior to Green's mysterious demise:

My great aunt wept when we asked her of her brother Elysius. She spoke of her father's unhappiness with him and the trouble he caused the family with his headstrong ways. She explained how his conversion to the theories of Darwin greatly upset her mother and her pastor father. She tried to remain a supporting sister to Elysius, but contact with him was sporadic at best as he moved about doing a series of odd jobs before finding himself working for the Associated Press offices in Santa Monica California. When asked about the incident with Grumfeld, my aunt looked puzzled. We eventually got her to remember receiving a postcard from Elysius (from an undisclosed location) describing his exploits with crowd of ruffians. My great aunt said that my grandmother said that only blackmailers, extortionists and kidnappers hang out in undisclosed locations.

Mazzistow Carrington explored the idea of dislocated rage and autocatalytic attractors in one of his chapters on his eponymous study of Poob Culture and Auto-Colonialism. In this seminal work Carrington posited the theory that attitudes stripped of their content still contain a kernel of their potential form and applied this to how certain groups grow complacent whereas others cannot resist the urge to expand or migrate. Mazzistow worked out the early descriptions of his theory while a park ranger in his early twenties. His multi-disciplined treatise was rounded out by his encyclopedic knowledge of Post-Victorian European culture (with a special general-interest in the mystery novel genre and precise and particular studies of Arthur Conan Doyle's surreptitious Sherlock Holmes) and his lifelong interest in secret societies and occult studies. Carrington's interpretation of the interpretation of the events surrounding the Dubord/Grumsfeld fiasco was, as Balthazar Buehb remarked to Piebald Magazine during an interview on the eve of the publication of a reminiscence of the 1946 Adid/Addison affair rightly titled "Who's your Stalin Now? (A little Stir in A-minor)":

...the forces acting upon the alpha layer are echoed vertically throughout the amorphous data-expanse and influence the incoming and reverberated information creating form seeking reflex loops that dominate further sequencing. This rising of forms speciates into a rudimentary binary of action/inaction further influencing hegemony while expanding similar sequenced information resulting in a correspondence and simultaneous emergence. As I have been told by Mazzistow Carrington himself, the formula insists on an ouroboros of mathematical and psycho-reactive coprophagia. As above also below. His playful use of systems arcane and mathematical rivet your mind while your tongue is teased with his endless denamount of gossip-inciting sweets.

Apart from Carrington's studies of the phenomenon, the subject is overwrought with mythical overtones that satisfy the thirst of the Pure-Race and Ancient Ones/Elohim/conspiracist. Double Stimes publishing oddity Reticent 27 investigated the event and came to the conclusion that the whole event was:

...a highly complicated facade engineered by Stimes Addisson and Stimso Adid as an elaborate birthday present for Wilhemina Forkes (August 22). Adid had organized an intimate writer's conference that was to be held in an undisclosed location, and they arrived the evening before the debate. The debate itself had been orchestrated by Addison and Adid over several years by creating a controversy and then shrewdly fueling the fires.

Addison put his special touch on the whole affair by engaging the Mormo/Merriweather crowd. Trenchwheat confused the drunken revelers by changing all the room numbers to 27. William Flintrock had arrived a week before under the guise of a hired sound expert for the Debate and re-wired the Dakota Room and installed the flying owl that was to swoop down on the debaters, but it malfunctioned when the condensation from the fog machine caused a short in the strobe light which caused the blackout.

All participants who took part in the free hotel Vatican Breakfast also took part in an experimental mood destabilizer administered again by Trenchwheat through the symbolic use of pancakes that in concert with Flintrock's inaudible drone through the over-amped sound system would soon feel an indiscernible uneasiness and move closer to a state of ready agitation if not outright anger. Nobody saw it because of the blackout, but The Chameleon fell into the section occupied by the racists while trying to swing from the stage curtains. Addison later admitted that the riot was quite unexpected, though he was quite delighted with the sound of it all from the hotel bar.

Of course the simplicity of this idea outraged most occultic investigators and conspiratorialists alike. Even the Thule like Society of the Similar and its sympathetic factions took alarm with the unmasking of the event as an elaborate hoax and accuse Reticent 27 of distorting the debate and continually point out that the magazine mentioned nothing about the actual controversy, coolly ignoring issue 17²  dedicated exclusively to Fortean proto-civilizations and crypto- zoology.

Notes

Note 1:  A discussion of the opposed theory is found at the Donut Shaped World Theory.

Note 2:  If you own a copy of this extremely rare edition please for crissakes do not do the Fold-In. It will drastically reduce the value. See appendix for approximation.

Desiderata

Grumfeld tried to revive Aaron Burr's plan of giving the Florida panhandle to the French, claiming that "those goddamn Jews and Cubans would probably get along much better with them French faggots anyhow."

Grummy's passion for ice-skating was startling to behold.