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Bodies of Water

June 1, 2016, 6:43 am
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8 thoughts on “Bodies of Water by V.H. Leslie”

  1. This being today’s note, it is addressed to everyone except the book’s author. The Dreamcatcher slow-motion book review below is, as ever, in fusion or symbiosis with a hyper-imaginative fiction. A NO SPOILER POLICY OPERATED THROUGHOUT. But on rare occasions real-time reviews can accidentally reveal too much and you may wish to read both this review and the book itself alongside me or read the book first.
    1 & 2
    “The water wasn’t able to meander by without being watched by the whole of London.”
    An engaging start to this novel, with the onset of presumably tidal chapters – about Kirsten, during modern times, apprehensively taking on a flat, close to the Thames, in restored Wakewater Apartments, a building still showing its past grandeur and integrity – and about Evelyn in 1871 attending water treatment at Wakewater House.
    A genuine sense of place and the building of the women’s characters, a lure from or towards water…
    Reply

  2. 3 – 6
    “The river is our moat, you see.”
    Invisible stitches made visible by chapter numbers, as Kirsten sees she is not alone in restored Wakewater, and Evelyn’s era, when Wakewater was a water cure hospital, of Evelyn’s caring for Victorian fallen women as backstory to Kirsten’s modern womanhood, both women in turn with their own orientations of personal backstory as everyone carries their own overlapping backstories, overlapping with each other’s if time allows. And the text also speaks of the venereal men in both eras, Kirsten’s one called Lewis.. And all of this suffused with the complexity of water. Yes, complexity.
    Here is a toast to the water in this book. I raise a glass of it to it. A simple story about such complexity. Or vice versa? The prose is simple enough, yet satisfying enough, too, at least for myself. Nicely done.
    Reply

  3. 7 – 10
    Things go ‘swimmingly” or books and papers are ‘spilt’ or a desk ‘floats’ among hoarded belongings, buildings occasionally seeping, but there is something far darker between and beneath these tidal portrayals of Kirsten and Evelyn, and other feminine contacts and mythic moments – and their eras. Water is a female domain, is said at one point, I recall. Bodies or their facsimiles flayed, too. I feel I must not flay too deep in this review myself, as I seem to be warned from doing so, almost by name? I find the sharply diffuse plot-thrust compelling. And a truly frightening moment ends this section of the novel, even more frightening than my perception of being warned off implicitly by the text itself.
    Reply

  4. 11 – 14
    “…as if the Thames had gushed from Wakewater’s taps unrefined.”
    I feel as if the two eras are entering into each other via the two-way filter of this text, not only a flow of Gothicism but also of sapphics and hormones, womanly complaints, the nature of woman’s lot in each era, the glimpse of figures sinking into water, foul and pure, as if the actual yellow wallpaper of literature itself is mulched and diluted as part of this flow, flowing out through a sinkhole in different directions of the world’s slow spin, as if present and past are in two different hemispheres of existence. Some of this brainstorming stems from the text, some maybe not. And there is also a pet called Sahara…
    Reply


  6. 19
    ‘Fallen women’, ‘kept women’, ‘reformed women’…
    ‘Rescued women’, ‘cured women’… Cured as in healed or embalmed?
    And sinking or sunk ones, as glimpsed.
    Or found drowned like ‘found’ art?
    Water-listed, water-logged.
    Green dress or Sprite.
    A prescribed course in ignorance.
    image
    “Wakewater was strikingly near to the water, as if it were taunting the river, defying its authority.”
    That, earlier.
    Now the reader slowly spinning towards the the book’s own virtual outflow?
    A wake is the opposite of a wake, if the funeral is held before the death itself?
    Reply

  7. 20 – 23
    “Evelyn sat down among the fallen apples.”
    Eve and Evelyn alike?
    Enabled by the literary theory of ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, the text itself contains – by also wrapping it up as part of the characterisation of the Victorian Water Clinic’s male doctor – a metaphorical hoard of surgical instruments so as to help me flense or hollow my way to the heart of this book…? Better, though, to do this to a book as object than to any person as subject.
    image
    Reply

  8. 24 – 27
    “…she was conscious of walking on water,”
    And, in the end, neither the heart of this book nor the nature of woman can possibly be reached, for to reach such ends would be to destroy them. The book’s ramifications shimmer on – frightful and transcendent in tidal irresistibilities.
    And, for me, from Wakewater to Waterhouse:
    image
    A painting that my wife and I had for a few years on our sitting-room wall in our earlier married days.
    “All waters eventually merge;”
    Reply


 

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    Stag in Flight by S.P. Miskowski

    June 1, 2016, 11:25 am
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    PEREAT MUNDUS, A Novel of Sorts

    June 3, 2016, 1:32 am
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    Pereat Mundus: A Novel Of Sorts


    krohn

    Part Four of my real-time review of
    THE COLLECTED FICTION OF LEENA KROHN
    CHEEKY FRAWG 2015

    Foreword by Jeff VanderMeer

    Part Three (Gold of Ophir) of my review of this book HERE.

    .
    When I review Pereat Mundus: A Novel of Sorts, my comments will be found in the thought stream below or by clicking on this post’s title above.

    43 thoughts on “Pereat Mundus: A Novel Of Sorts”

    1. As with the previous works the effulgence behind these earthen book-lice is translated with no doubt equal effulgence by Hildi Hawkins.
      Translated like the two Håkons in the first part of this ‘sort of novel’…
      COLD PORRIDGE
      “How consciousness can arise from something that is not itself conscious…”
      In this work published in 1998, we have a fascinating Cartesian (and more) view of the modern AI, with Håkan and Håkan conversing about the nature of mind, body, soul, spirit and whether duplication can make life persist beyond the existence of the original.
      (As if this giant turquoise book in which Håkan lives, if bought and read and handled differently by two different readers, would result in two different books, both physically and in contents. Dreamcatching that actually CHANGES the dream itself?)
      Reply
    2. DOCTOR FAKELOVE
      “The world is not made of atoms, but stories.”
      Indeed. The essence of what I am about here.
      Meanwhile, this story of someone, remarkably in 1998, who removes the whole of his doctor’s surgery to the internet.
      There is the concept of ‘total behaviour’, which is also something else I am about in gestalt Dreamcatching…
      Whether quack or genuine healer, there is much to show he is the former. And much blame for humanity’s ills lent to the sex urge.
      “Of terrorists, he said: ‘That’s what they call men with bombs but not bombers.'”
      Reply
    3. THE SON OF THE CHIMERA
      “Your father liked Schubert’s Lieder so much that sometimes he used to sink into a kind of semi-consciousness, which worried me a little.”
      A highly poignant and haunting portrait of my (Håkan’s) father of the same name, portrayed via my own narration of my mother’s words about him, his multichimera nature in particular, and mine.
      “I cannot find anyone like me.”
      Reply
    4. THE VERY THOUGHT!
      “Håkan answered: ‘Do you suppose that because the end of the world has not yet come, it is unlikely that it will ever come?'”
      An epistolary dialogue between Dr Fakelove and his new patient about endoftheworldphobia. My own suffering from this complaint is obviated by continuously conducting these real-time reviews. The very thought keeps such a thought behind or, rather, ever bouncing in front of me.
      (Håkon and Håkan are Nordic names, but Hakan is also a Turkish one meaning emperor.)
      Reply
    5. HÅKAN AND THE X-CREATURES
      Endearing conversation about imaginary creatures between two boys, Håkan, my older brother, and the myself that I am today. Except H claims they are not imaginary. The last line of this section is a deadpan masterstroke.
      Reply
    6. INDIVIDUALLY WRAPPED CHEESE SLICES
      “Why should species that are able to travel throughout the universe and make contact with much more intelligent species be interested in our company? For we cannot even leave our own solar system.”
      Because they want to meet people who can write books like this one?
      Håkan, meanwhile, continues to be built up as a character-gestalt by many leitmotifs external and internal.
      I do question however his Operation Squirrel, where digital uses of the Internet seem (based on my memory) to be far more recent than this sort of novel’s publication date in 1998. Seriously.
      Unless this is a particularly perceptive SF prophecy?
      Reply
    8. THE SOCIETY FOR VOLUNTARY EXTINCTION
      Appropriately, the novel seems to start here with a novelistic linear account of Håkan joining the above Society, but also having a romantic attachment …. and this is a telling examination of Ligottian Anti-Natalism as ‘popularised’ recently by ‘True Detective’ – and echoing Birkin’s thoughts in ‘Women in Love’?
      The telling Wordsworthian (The Child is Father of the Man) loop that he needs to break as a result of the romantic attachment is heartfelt….
      Reply
    9. THE DUTY OFFICER
      Ironically, in view of the previous section, we learn that H is Duty Officer at the Cryo Foundation. A Cryo system also ironically to prevent crying over the destiny of death… H has to deal with all manner of customers and various eventualities, like comets and the world not being a fit place when they wake up. I myself intend not to live longer than it takes to read and review the whole Krohn book, if not just this novel within it. I do not intend to sit around creating nothing in the autumn of my life like Sibelius did. The Silence of Järvenpää.
      Reply
    10. AGING EARLY
      Our hero H is 17 but aging into an old man? This is ironic in view of what I said about the Cryo Foundation and Sibelius. Was the latter’s condition a false alarm?
      The act of aging early is exponentially described here. “A weak old man” – or a week old man?
      Reply
    11. SMALL FUSION BOMBS
      H writes endlessly to Fakelove, much to F’s then consternation, about dark events in the world that in fact prophecy accurately major things happening to us since 1998 when this was first written. Hence fiction matures into truth through time, while, even if it was not known then, there is an intrinsic truth to all fiction however seemingly far-fetched or near-brought. Fiction bombs, as well as Fusion ones.
      A currently ungoogleable word (till my writing it here?) is used in this paper-printed text before me: “apoterrorism.”
      Reply
    12. SOON IT WILL BE TIME FOR OVERCOATS
      A disturbing portrayal, agonisingly recognisable as today’s truth, of the behaviour of children in a school classroom. Entertaining in itself, but as I say, disturbing, too.
      H is the teacher, as the text also dwells on a strange perverse form of eugenics, as well as political correctness. The gestalt of this non-linear episodic novel begins to hit home. But what exactly is hitting home?
      Reply
    13. THE GODMOTHER AND 32768
      This is an absolutely fascinating, ground-breaking exercise in H debating with his Godmother the nature of gods and gods’ goals – and history as a tontine!!!!!
      Amazing. Why isn’t this ‘novel of sorts’ in all the schools being learnt not only by the children but by the teachers, too?
      Seriously.
      Reply
    14. BEFORE THE SINGULARITY
      H’s wife takes him to her study group with Artilects – a form of Artificial Intelligence, and the loops and paradoxes of humanity in interface with AI is demonstrated strikingly by H’s cynical approach to them. A form of inverse tontine. Or a form of envisaged post-Singularity symbolised by Sibelius’ Silence of Järvenpää.
      Reply
    15. CAPGRAS’S SYNDROME
      H’s wife Irene rings up Fakelove about H having been duplicated and the one she has got at home currently reading is one of these changelings.
      F is unsympathetic and questions I’s own mental health.
      Might again explain S’s Silence of Järvenpää?
      Reply
    16. A HEART CLOTHED IN BLACK
      “Today, authors wrote in an impoverished way, as if all their readers were idiots: truisms, platitudes, sensationalist confessions which nevertheless embroidered the narrator’s motives, short sentences in which one could wade as if in a stubble field without finding the first seed of thought.”
      H is now depicted as a publisher’s reader, a filter for the slush pile of stories, novels, poems etc. He is naive enough to append his name to his reports to the publisher about each work, until one of the authors accosts H and berates him about his green scarf. Inter alia.
      I am wondering, as an aside, whether H in fact is not a series of identical changelings of the same person but a series of completely different people in different walks of life all of whom think they are H in a novel that is the slush pile itself, a pile full of mixed gems and duds as separate works and, often, gems and duds within a single separate work, too. It is the gestalt that counts.
      Reply
    17. LIGHT AS A STONE
      “Sometimes he stared at a particular object – a spoon or a comb or a pattern in the carpet – for minutes on end, as if they had some message for him.”
      H now as special needs child of 12 years old, a would-be gold-washer, I guess, with his carer (?) Hanna who wheels him to where he looks into puddles and as if summons for them a boulder from a seaside haunt of their’s into that puddle and into the sky. Mutual hypnotism or a genuine event? The same question could be asked of this novel of sorts.
      Perhaps Sibelius stared at something trivial for the 32 years length of his Silence of Järvenpää?
      Reply
    18. THE AESTHETE
      “They had never even heard of Mondrian.”
      A beautiful portrait of H as an Aesthete, but as a borderline OCD case, too, I suggest. It is harrowing stuff in many ways, with the synaesthesia of Poe’s Usher. Till a toothache takes over and he feels he becomes the tooth and later he realises that ugliness and entropy will always win, and eventually becomes the exact opposite of what he was.
      Needs to be read. A morality tale of some strength and significance.
      I am wondering whether we are intended to create a gestalt of H from all these differentiating essays or whether these are a series of different Hs, a novel literally of ‘sorts’.
      Reply
    19. CLOSED EYELIDS
      “People were awake in order to sleep, in contrast to what had previously been thought.”
      Absolutely wonderful, this treatise on a society where the need for sleep, or the desire for sleep, is increasing towards 16 hours a day, sleep for its own sake, the many images and ideas in H’s own interface with this phenomenon flow in a perfect audit trail with which I can empathise at my own increasingly advanced age. The yearning for sleep experienced as nowhere else in literature, I am guessing. And it goes a long way to explaining the 32 years of the Silence of Järvenpää experienced by Sibelius, the most famous Finnish composer.
      Reply
    20. FAKELOVE’S NIGHT
      Another glimpse of Fakelove whose own latter lack of success in sexual relations with his partner puts in doubt his ability to advise others on such matters.
      There is a clue in his name, I suppose.
      Reply
    21. WITH COLOURFUL LAMPS
      “Sometimes Håkan felt his face. He imagined that beneath his skin there were still soft eyeballs that wanted to see.”
      This is a devastatingly effective vision of not seeing, except in extrapolation or H’s dream. An inverse tontine of all the human senses evaporating one by one. Except machines can still see…
      Meanwhile, I wonder where music fits in? It is dependent on the sense of hearing, true, but what else? Music seems to have various feelers of sense all of its own. What was S ‘seeing’ during his Silence of Järvenpää?
      Reply
    22. A SCROLL WHEN IT IS ROLLED TOGETHER
      …as a description of a book not as dreamcaught as this Krohn one is.
      Meanwhile, this is H discussing with a teacher who once taught him, discussing a contemporary pupil now preaching in earshot to an increasing crowd about the Coming of Judgement Day and the Power of the Lord. The teacher is cynical, H fascinated but cynical, too; the ending implies that the dreamtaught lead others into dreams – or nightmares.
      Reply
    23. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD
      “And then the telephone. It began to ring in the middle of the night, and when Håkan lifted the receiver, violently roused from deep sleep, he found himself in the middle of an impassioned flood of words which appeared to have begun a long time since.”
      There are some stories like that where certain things are assumed as known and other things happen offprint … music, too, and paintings that seem eager to spread beyond the frame. And some theatre where actors step offstage into the audience.
      Meanwhile, H writes to his brother repeatedly for help, H being simultaneously both a Gebri and Espite in a world of warring Gebris and Espites.
      And learns of the unrequited beauty of ugly women.
      Reply
    24. THE BREATHERS
      H also belongs to the Breathers, who try to survive on breathing alone, as well as casting good things around them. A sort of positive anti-natalism.
      From ‘Gold of Ophir’ earlier:
      “THE BREATH IN OUR NOSTRILS
      Now he followed, enviously, their even breathing, in which the inward breath began exactly where the outward breath ended, at the place where death resided.”
      Reply
    25. THE MAN WITH TWENTY-ONE FACES
      “‘How typical of our times,’ Chain-Smoker wrote, ‘that even in our city there are already oxygen bars…”
      From breathing to predictive vaping?
      Fakelove continues to be hounded by H, pretending to be various people wanting to be F’s patient. Hounding him and sabotaging his chocolate, and I thought H was this novel’s hero!
      Perhaps, H is also F himself??
      Reply
    26. THE RESTAURANT IS CLOSED
      “It was an uneven face, as if made of many parts that did not belong together. When one looked at them from a new angle, they quickly rebuilt themselves.”
      …like the meal H has in this very strange restaurant. Or like this ‘novel of sorts’ itself?
      This section as discrete work is comparatively substantive and if one wants a taster of Krohn, this would be ideal to read on its own,
      Reply
    27. IN HENBANE CITY
      “The correctness they had been taught came wrongness.”
      I wonder if that should be BEcame?
      I often forget there is a translator as party to this book, a true triangulation of author, translator and reader. This fable is where correctness is represented by do-gooders or gold-washers chopping down flowers because they are not utility plants but just ornaments. And the true correctness becomes henbane, within the circle of H’s personal preferences of ramicorn poplars etc. … right coming full circle to become wrong, or wrong becoming right depending which way round the circle he goes.
      Reply
    28. FAKELOVE’S BURNOUT
      H’s letters have at last sent F mad. Or is F just a symptom of us as we near the end of everything? At least S was probably sensible enough to sleep during his Silence, I say.
      Reply
    29. PHYLLOBATES TERRIBILIS
      “…he remembered a time when people did not yet exist.”
      H visits his favourite bogs and creeks to examine, even resuscitate, frogs and so forth from those earlier times, times towards which his numbed hand is the start of his returning to Humanity’s own Silence?
      Reply
    30. A LETTER FROM A COLLEAGUE
      “Note: The basis of this chapter is the account of Phineas Gage’s accident contained in Antonio R. Damasio’s work “Descartes’ Error” (Avon Books, New York 1995).”
      Concerning one’s responsibility (or not) for one’s actions.
      A true story in the form of a letter and it remains to be seen how it fits into this on-going ‘novel of sorts’ and whether the Dear Doctor at the head of this letter is Fakelove, or not?
      Reply
    31. MATTER MADE OF TIME
      “In the twinkling of an eye he learned what those unfamiliar people had been like as children and what they would be like as old people.”
      Unfamiliar people getting off a bus.
      H, as he sits by his 90 year old grandmother’s hospital bed, speculates on the nature of time, such as seeming to go faster when you get to my age. A fascinating speculation. Might also explain Sibelius’ Silence?
      Reply
    32. FIAT ARS, PEREAT MUNDUS
      “Håkan was himself a kind of artist, although he had not achieved any fame to speak of.”
      I am pleased that H, the multi-faced, now shows my own face. A brilliant sketch of avant garde art in an art museum, and its arguable pretentiousness. The artist’s own finger or an axe in a violin case. And a video of someone sneezing lasting for three hours. I wonder if some of Andy Warhol’s art films were part and parcel of Sibelius’ 32 year silence? H, now a man after my own heart and the proof is here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/the-avant-garde-and-me/
      I wonder if “no one had never seen an artist” in this section of Krohn’s ‘novel of sorts’ is an avant garde moment or a translator’s typo?
      Reply
    33. THE ICE-CREAM SELLER
      “Are they going to close the beach?”
      A telling dialogue during a heat-wave between H, now as a besuited deputy ice-cream seller, and a mother and her daughter. He seems to panic them about the danger to life of the heat-wave – and at the end a white bubble sits on the sea like a woman’s breast.
      Somehow, I am reminded of some of the lyrics of Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach?
      Reply
    34. TOTALPRO
      “The woman did not resemble his mother in any way. But she had returned from the dead just for him, just to express her regret.”
      I found this very moving, worrying, too, in present circumstances.
      H meets this woman without a mouth (but still able to say the word “sorry” again and again), a woman at the bus stop on his way to a job interview for a job that needs many of those new-fangled pretentious talents impossible for people like H to muster.
      Reply
    35. END-OF-THE-WORLD PARTY
      “Fakelove remembered Edgar Allan Poe’s poem: They are neither man nor woman — they are neither brute nor human — they are ghouls.”
      F, with encouragement from his daughter Lisa, attends this party in a slaughterhouse (pwhere animal blood had once flowed and now where all the guests are wearing gas masks. An astonishing scene, with music like “industrial thunder”. He meets H and H’s wife Irene, but he is told everyone at the party is H, all duplicated but none the real H, even the man with twenty one faces. I wonder if the real H is at home, having been silent there for 32 years, while the duplicates live a full life in his behalf?
      “…the earth’s innermost furnace, where stone boiled…”
      Cf “The End of the World: A User’s Guide” that I reviewed earlier this year: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/01/12/the-end-of-the-world-a-users-guide/
      Reply
    36. VITA NUOVA
      “The world did not have a language; it was based on numbers, sequences, codes, patterns.”
      A perfect ending of this novel of sorts and sort codes. Håkan with its ‘a’ degree centred upon it. A world of coincidences and choices. His family calling to him. I can hear the calls from here. The ultimate silence of Sibelius within the circle between end and beginning and end again, forever, like a music of mathematics. A flower of words where the words’ vanishing-point is you.
      End of Pereat Mundus
      Reply

     

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      Pagan Triptych

      June 5, 2016, 7:45 am
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      8 thoughts on “Pagan Triptych”

      1. THE LETTER KILLETH by Ron Weighell
        Pages 1 – 17
        “See how some Christian censor has inked out passages to suppress them. Their ink has faded, but the printed book has remained strong, and the words are once again clear. Every book has its angel.”
        …and this authorially ink-signed book (mine numbered 190/315) has its own angel no doubt, with its dark green hard undercover, fly-leaves and ribbon marker.
        And from a mention of a potential censor in the past, we have here, in the environs of an Oxford college, the need for a censer as well as a whole panoply of Exorcism devices from various religious or Kabbalistic disciplines to help John who has been beset by a ‘man’ with spit and lead who wanted to share, if that is the right word, the Bequest to the college of several arcane books. I feel inundated in such esoterica and their names, until they come out of my ears…
        “Pertaomech perakonchmech perakomphthaok kmeph.”
        The characterisations are accomplished, the build up of plot fascinating. With a flavour of Father Brown stories (I’m reviewing here), but only a flavour…. Holst versus Ketelby, the mind boggles! And a defixione or virus on my computer, I fear, once I start posting this review there?
        “We believe possession is just as undesirable for the spirit as the host, and try to help them both to return to a more normal state.”
        Reply
      2. Pages 17 – 29
        “He incorporated bodily fluids of various kinds into the ink.”
        image
        The signature of this story’s author indeed seems tinged in such a way as one would expect from bodily fluids.
        You may get the impression that I have been keeping my tongue in my cheek about this story so far. But seriously, things get very horrific in the current pages, as all manner of advisement, experimentation, subliminal effects, crucial rituals with arcane names, visionary Blakean dreams, and the use of the possessed’s clothing in such rituals. Very well written, blending a traditional homely feel of the ghost story and something far more nightmarish.
        I keep my tongue in my cheek, perhaps, to keep it from being bitten off?
        Reply
      3. Pages 30 – 43
        “The suit gave him the appearance of being gussied up for some unimaginably horrible liaison.”
        …like Corbyn dressed as gentleman parliamentarian, thus transcending the Cobham?
        The course of this extended Exorcism is inchoate as well as retroactively precise, leading some of the Chestertonian protagonists towards an Octagonal folly with the most grisly contents, including the transvestism of a decayed corpse into an active force by being exhumed and dressed in the Binding Mantle. There are undercurrents here that seem to dirty the reader: crammed with many different procedures of either mock or real ritual with esoteric names that ring some tocsin or toxin of truth. Almost a tontine, where the one left living wins all. I feel, in the same way as some of the characters do, the powers they face, and thus I need to Assimilate this story into myself so as to neutralise its leasehold of evil potential, a potential beyond – by dint of the literary theory of the Intentional Fallacy – even the knowledge or power of the freehold author himself. Transcending the ludicrous as some means of transcending the vitally bad. Bucking the Blakean bronco. Riding, eventually, the naive tornado or earthquake of Algernon Blackwood….
        Or Holst lifting the boiling Ketelby….
        “…a timeless, atonal paean of ascending souls, an arc of sound that overreached the Ages.”
        Reply
      4. IN THE CLEARING by John Howard
        Pages 49 – 61
        “But it’s not London, not suburban, but not right out in the wilds. It’s not too far away, but it’s nothing like London, either.”
        Sanderson persuaded into a sort of sabbatical by his City firm in a subtle unrapprochment the reason for which none of us seem exactly clear about, and he takes his sensitivity of English seasons to this blend of not-London-at-all and the edge of London, where woods and residences reside together. I know of such geographical rapprochements and the atmosphere in such places during my days of yore – and I feel that same atmosphere richly here. All couched In Howard’s customary immaculate style that also approaches us tentatively but with a subtle precision, if not stylistic caution. Sanderson tries, with some gentle difficulty, to similarly approach new routines, without any duties to perform, over a baggily available, otherwise empty period of six months. The garden and diy jobs are being done by Daniel, a young man, work paid for as part of the rent. A new rapprochement here for Sanderson, the stoically alone – with his subtle waver either side of the perceived barometric norm of emotion and inclination…
        Reply
      5. Pages 61 – 74
        “He should not construct stories behind casual expressions and any odd words — not add tiers of significance to crush ordinary, insignificant things.”
        Nor should I, presumably.
        This study in subtly personal and natural rapprochement is exquisite. I love to join in with its ‘probing alternatives and weighing consequences’, testing entrance to the wood against once entering (or not) London’s City churches, the stoical lack of electricity in Daniel’s bungalow in that wood, testing motives against suggestions of precise wildness. Yes, precision and wildness at the interface of each other in acts of geomancy as well as of human relationship, while this Lawrencian or Blackwoodian trust in the trees themselves is being pencilled in like I always address reading books like this one with a ready pencil wielded in my hand, if not an invisible hand. Beige and pink tiles beneath the words should I score through the text’s paper too hard? As if flesh is waiting to be revealed? Comparing states of physique. Never quite plumping for outright truth. A heady portrait of ‘balanced probabilities’, ‘necessary compromises and retreats.’
        Reply
      6. Pages 74 – 86
        “Lingering summer evenings like this rendered indistinct the boundaries of day and night.”
        A barbican normally has a drawbridge. Meanwhile, Machen-towered, if modern, Barbican is a ‘fragment of life’ as well as the part of Sanderson’s erstwhile financial risk-management workaday city of London, where Sanderson returns briefly towards the end of this self-consuming story, an ostensibly complex story paradoxically with an aura of an anti-story written by, say, Robbe Griillet or Michel Butor. There are other drawbridges in this story, some left up, some down, and one neither up nor down which you can visualise left neither up nor down for our future processing of the balance of probabilities.
        The clearing in the wood (real or imagined, lost or found), the mutably located flint, the freehold purchase of the aura’s source rather than altering it into leasehold wildness – these things and more continue to haunt me.
        I cannot think of a greater contrast between this story and the previous one. But even such contrasts can have a bridge between. Exorcism.
        “– and in trepidation, opened to awe.”
        Reply
      7. THE FIG GARDEN by Mark Valentine
        Pages 91 – 105
        “I understood, with a dreadful certainty, that I had to make the next move: that I must pick up a pale grey pebble and put it in another position.”
        And that, with its immediate aftermath in the story, sweetly matches the manipulation of the Flint in the previous story.
        And, notwithstanding that, this story is surely sweet enough, so far. The first sections represent a perfect blend of Fruit Stoners, Uncle Paul’s Education, a Prisoner in Fairyland, Jimbo…with a seasoning of Sarban’s Calmahain, and much more. It is, above all, Mark Valentine fiction at its highest exquisition, a distilling of what we all have expected from this writer, however high his work has already reached by ever exceeding all previous expectations, before the time of or knowledge of the possibility of a work entitled The Fig Garden (aka The Figgery) existing as it does now. Even only halfway through this story, as I speak, I already know I make no exaggeration.
        The early sections, yes, about the Figgery, the Procession, the hazy precious quality of the identity of the children involved in the Figgery’s den, the mythic or magic moments, the adumbrations and the endlessness of childhood…I am sincerely speechless with awe….
        ….Until the narrator enters adulthood and another world that we as readers love entering, the Monuments Commission, the apotheosising of places, for their qualities of being in such Machenesque or MRJamesian or Blackwoodian fictions, with or without monuments. And the man — whom the narrator (once a child of the Figgery) meets and with whom now plans such apotheosising for places like the memory of the narrator’s Figgery — incredibly has named a different place he knows elsewhere as The Figgery.
        I cannot wait to read the rest of this certain masterpiece. Fitting the figments together. Knowing you have the susceptibility for such stories where perceived exaggeration is simply stating facts about it.
        Reply
      8. Pages 105 – 118
        “There is something piecing us together.”
        The narrator continues to feel, within this rarefied susceptibility, the effects of some filter that works both ways, as I do, too, by actually reading and absorbing this text, a text that surely surpasses itself time and time again as you allow its immaculate, rhapsodic descriptions flow through you. The narrator sees a glimpse of the Procession from childhood’s figgery (the fig with such special qualities itself as a fruit), a glimpse of a ‘blaze of scarlet’ in the city darkness, then grappling with his own path through life as if along an extrapolated Knight’s Move from chess, his job as Monuments officer in going to visit – there and back across small bridges – the previous story’s barbican now as some stonework redoubt, while daring against daring that each move may misalign a move elsewhere, later meeting one of the Procession participants again, a woman with a cigarette, who claims that it can be possibly re-enacted – and the whole journey is miraculous, as we follow on, as personification of the dare he dares, as you equally dare his dare. A catharsis or purging: flowing in both directions via the meanings on the page of this remarkable work, a genuine and irrefutable apotheosis, I honestly feel, of its author’s canon of fiction.
        And I will not even breathe a word here that it all may be part and parcel of this very Dreamcatching that I exercise upon this work and vice versa. Exercise, I say, or is that, within the whole context of this book, exorcise? – flowing in a two-way, two-directional filter.
        I shall be very surprised if I don’t eventually call The Fig Garden my favourite story from 2016, if not from over a longer period.
        ————-
        I will now read for the first time the non-fiction essays in this book as written by its three authors. But now meanwhile here ends my review.
        end
        Reply
               
       
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      almost insentient, almost divine

      June 6, 2016, 8:20 am
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      19 thoughts on “almost insentient, almost divine”

      1. The first story I reviewed here and this is what I wrote there in 2013:
        With Gravity, Grace
        “…a being that is, in essence, all of us, and none.”
        This is a very powerful story of a puppet-maker commissioned by that initial watermarked fine paper to make an intricate puppet, which we are allowed to look over his shoulder doing, with meticulous beautiful detail. There is an intensely poignant entropy at work here, though, whether from the Masonic (?) puppetry organisation who commissioned it, or an inverse parallel with the puppet-maker’s own bereavement and his anti-entropic recreation of she who had bereaved him. Whatever the case, this is a very fine counterpoint – one that is eventually and finally entropic. Or is it? The last two words in Watt’s story – that I won’t give away here – has a very telling (unintentional?) link with the Schneider work, a link that again makes the work aspirationally anti-entropic.
        Reply
      2. The next story I reviewed here in 2015 and this is what I wrote then:
        A DELICATE CRAFT
        “…their forefingers touched and a little electric shock passed between them.”
        imageA significant Wattage of lace-making lore and the condition of modern humanity. Somehow, I wondered, as I read this, what I would think of this story if I were reading it in a mainstream literary anthology outside the context of Aickman. It would be an astonishing read, one that would stand out as a fine work but probably not considered weird. Though it does have an intrinsic strangeness that is redolent of this book’s heiro. The Watt, a delicate craft in itself, mixing the diverse arts of plumbing and lace-making, the inspiring relationship in her chintzy home between the Polish immigrant (with a backstory of his Polish compadres in England and the recession in 2009 that affected them) and the old woman is tender and ingenious. The story’s transcendent rebirth ending echoes that in the previous Nickle story, too, seeming to cohere the book’s gestalt, together with his rolling (oscillating?) the partner bobbin with partner bobbin, and back and forth in his plumber’s hand. Electric prose with Aickman dim and sleekly soft undercurrents.
        Reply
      3. SHALLABALAH
        “I’ve found reference to it in supposedly fictional works too, as though people are trying to tell others about it…”
        Indeed, this supposed fiction work has many dark truths about the Punch and Judy Show by means of a Punch and Judy man’s very touching extended message left for his daughter… A transcription, too, of a dialect-elided interview with an even older Punch and Judy man, diasporas, details of Punch and Judy character banned in more modern times because of accusations of racism, bag-men, a dressmaker from Bucharest, imaginary friends, ‘shallabalah’ and its variations, swazzles, swatchels and much more.
        I was left with a definite feeling of something running through this story that nothing or nobody (not even the author) could prevent running through it. And there are linked things I can remember about my own distant fatherhood…
        “I did do those didn’t I — that’s not a false memory is it? I did play with you both when you were young and we had fun, didn’t we, inventing new places and silly characters?”
        Reply
      4. MYSELF/THYSELF
        “He was bewitched.”
        An engaging ghost story, except it isn’t quite a ghost, as we are introduced to the character, with his falconry in the Boer War aftermath, before he even becomes whatever he becomes during the span of the 20th century in and around a rich Scottish Highland ambiance, leading to a blend of conte cruel and Algernon Blackwood mysticism. A Scottish castle then, a school in later years, and its nature-sacrilegious Museum, now seen by a schoolboy in the days of the Eagle comic and Scaletrix. And those days of Christmas yore. And a bright sporadic light that all of us seek, I guess, whether we know it or not and a cosmic punishment for us all whether guilty or not. Haunting, today, will I remember it tomorrow? I guess I will. Or at least part of me most definitely will. One part sad and lonely, the other part brash and thrusting amid the leather jesses.
        Reply
      5. MR EGARE
        “One should not inherit from one’s children;”
        Gathering random papers found in a box of 1930s annuals into a gestalt – ivory is mal–
        Mr Eager or Mr Reage or Mr Agree. A mother’s richly textured prose about her son’s retro-orphaning of her, about her husband who proactively widowed her, and her visitor like this story’s own baggie or bagman called EGARE who sits inscrutably in a deckchair in her garden. The Machenesque bureau. The daughter in law who doubts her mother in law’s mind…
        One can build up a long story here from these diary notes, and each story you build up may be different from someone else’s.
        Is it significant her son is called Daniel who in another life is a master of rich textured prose himself?
        Mr Egare: rare gem.
        Reply
      6. The next story I reviewed here in 2013 and this is what I wrote about it then:
        A Hive of Pain
        “…in the attic of a boarding-house in Colchester.”
        I wonder if the author knows that there was a boarding-house attic in a recent Doctor Who episode, a boarding-house that was explicitly situated in an Aickman Road in Colchester. I live on the coast very near to Colchester (my elderly mother still lives there but, like me, I am sure she has never found Aickman Road – yet) and I was brought up in Colchester, having lived the first seven years of my life in Walton-on-the-Naze, near where I live now for the last twenty years in Clacton past which place Thames barges ply their furrows near my bungalow house. And I know Mersea island very well and Bateman’s Tower, and the River Colne and the atmosphere of the sea etc (see my many photos on my blog)… Why am I telling you all this? Well, here is where this story is. And that may explain why I love it so much? But trying to look objectively, this symphonic piecemeal portrait – of its people and places, smells and scenes, its susceptibility, I guess, to the recent Advent Surge and St Jude’s Storm, and much more you will never credit without reading it – is a reading experience of a lifetime. It is so perfectly pitched, exquisite prose, and the ending – with its reference to a bigger picture that I won’t give away here – is almost unbearable. And the oysters in the story at least – with mention of one oyster that is speculated about as having its own pearl (its own seed?) – bring this discrete masterpiece in tune with the whole book.
        ——–
        My mother has by now found her optimum realm whatever each of us chooses to call the realm we seek. RIP.
        And there ends the first group of stories in this book, a group entitled SOMEWHERE.
        Reply
      7. MORS JANUA VITAE
        “No, it’s just I heard other folk talk about what she was like when she was young and she sounded so bright. She used to dance and sing, they said, […] and after that — after having us — it was like she was looking forward to her grave before she was even grey-haired.”
        Intensely poignant fragments of believable speech rhythms of an old codger in an English village as spoken to an extrapolated new resident of that village, a resident with new-fanged modern ideas, unaware of past’s hinterland. I recognised telling hints of that hinterland as I must have once experienced them myself, the generations and their acceptance of their lot, the Second World War romances, the squeezed out joys, the dowdy routines, and I recognised my own Mum and I felt for the old codger’s generation because, like him, it is probable I will also look back from that optimum realm of which I spoke earlier above and of which he speaks now. The story’s ending will haunt you, assuming you are susceptible to such haunting as I am – forever. Or you haunting others, as I do, too?
        Reply
      8. I reviewed the next story in 2015 here and this is what I wrote about it then:
        HONEY MOON
        “She leapt upon him from behind,…”
        A mildly amusing, but ultimately uninspiring, honeymoon story. A honeymoon to an outlying part of Scotland in a cronk of a car, where they plan to first consummate their marriage. The nature of the work seems to be the end bracket of the brackets at each end of the fiction in this book with a similar type of tale as that by R.B. Russell. And this one seems conveniently to answer the question I posed about Pan at the end of my commentary upon the Reggie Oliver story near the start of my review!
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      9. AT THE SIGN OF THE BURNING LEAF
        “You know, in thinking about stuff and changing the way you look at things. You don’t need some special book to do that, just every book.”
        An engaging self-account of being jaded in today’s world, encountering a wayside bookshop, and what I feel all my dreamcatching is about, literature as a gestalt, meaning each book of literature is important to that gestalt. Even ‘Honey Moon’, as a discardable wafer of this book’s soul, that previous story as important to this book’s gestalt?
        The book found here in a bookshop with a proprietor more like a rocker than an intellectual mod, and the haunting shimmer of a single page from that book like a dress for a paper doll is important for the growing labyrinth of books with which I am ever in fiction fusion. A message that a love of books becomes a love of otherwise tired and tawdry life itself, thus exponentially making it less tired and tawdry. Ad infinitum? Or ad absurdum?
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      10. I reviewed the next story in 2013 here and this is what I wrote about it then:
        In Comes I
        “The overall effect was horrific, but more from a childish, clown-like quality than anything tangibly malevolent.”
        Yet, in spite (or, retrocausally, because) of the narrator’s Hawling intermissions, with refreshing, carefully chosen drinks, perhaps to inebriate us away from dwelling too much on the horror, I would not discount the malevolent. This is a tale of a rogue policeman who is also part of the seasonal Mummers theatrical group who gets his “comeuppance” (or should that be comedownance?) in a Bosch and Picasso-like vision of Mr Punch and other grotesqueries associated with Mummers in a sudden non-linear universe that comes upon him. Indeed, I begin to wonder – as a result of the four-parted whole of this disturbing (but sometimes uplifting) Suite Bergamasque by Mister Watt via Mister Hawling (or vice versa) – whether this Suite’s audit trail is vertical rather than the more usual horizontal that we imagine Time to follow and rather than the horizontal that we imagine various spectrums to follow, spectrums like those for good and evil, love and hate, truth and fiction, man and puppet, entropy and anti-entropy…
        Entropy seen as a two-way lift rather than a straight path between life and death.
        LATER EDIT: With Grace, Gravity
        Reply
      11. The next story I reviewed in 2014 here and this is what I wrote about it then:
        The Man We All Imagined I Might Have Been by EMMANUEL GOLDING
        “After a day spent contemplating the catalogue of my previous selves I saw that there were few hours remaining into which to achieve a credible mode of existence,…”
        An engaging coda to this book, and that quote tells you as much as you need to know before you read it, as read it you must. The leitmotifs of the story will relate to us all equally, our own modes of existence, particularly current modes, even all modes as a gestalt of readers of this book, all 110 of us, but individually to each of us, such as the fear expressed in my review above of the first story, now at least partially and, no doubt, temporarily resolved, “my head ringing with a choir of angelic voices” amid life’s ‘funeral cortege’ and ‘anonymity of mud’, and the balloon sculptures in this story resonating with those in two casual short short fictions I wrote for TLO a few days ago here… Optimised by an amazing quote towards the end of this story, that completes my wonderful experience with the whole book: “…and startling connections, but it is crafted on a paper as thin as thought itself and when you try — concentrating desperately and with a trembling hand — to find the edges of its surface and unlock its mysteries, it has vanished into scars that hide within the whorls of your fingerprints…”
        The paper of this book is not thin but it does think.
        ——-
        Cf the paper-thin ‘startling connection’ with the earlier paper doll’s dress.
        And so ends the group of stories headed ELSEWHERE.
        Reply
      12. The next story I reviewed in 2013 here and this is what I wrote about it then:
        The Mechanised Eccentric
        “…we will be rendered masks upon dolls,…”
        This is a genuine masterpiece in the evocation of the theatre as gestalt, together with leitmotifs of artifice and truth, of masks and dramatic mechanics, about Jarry by Jarry, yet much more – reminiscences of the theatrical horror of Reggie Oliver, the politics of free love, the shrinkage to and from humanity or puppetry, and, significantly, the ‘self-harm’ toward one’s own creations (of which I myself am probably guilty), an entropic self-harm that was earlier subtly adumbrated by the previous two Watt ‘stories’ in this book … leading to a realisation that we are all wrapped up in one’s own artistic projects, the inner world of self that blocks out others’ artistic projects as a result…. All this surrounding a most poignant study of a female protagonist caught up in this story’s theatre of projects in the literal sense of the word ‘project’ of throwing visions forward as well as back (deject?) – a disembodied/embodied cross between the silent films of the era in which she lived and our own full colour versions.
        ——–
        cf the paper mask on the doll with earlier story and my concurrent review of this author’s theatrical ‘Conflagration’…
        Reply
      13. THE PORNOGRAPHER’S CALENDAR
        “–and for Mrs Abbott a back rent was worse than any loved one’s death…”
        An intensely oblique (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) story, an entrancing story for the connoisseur of building from scratch. A man in the 1890s making a living from catering for rather seedy tastes, renting property for so doing from a mercenary Mrs Abbott, almost a Heath Robinson type construct of living quarters as well as a story construct itself by accreting microcosmic leitmotifs towards the gestalt of the perfect body of woman, photographing meticulously from lips to lobe, to elbow, to somewhere else (to NOWHERE else?), till time itself and its dates, like life’s back rent are never ever complete or just jumbled – a bit like a jumbled version of Zeno’s Paradox?
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      14. THE USHER
        “…and something in the way my brain worked allowed me to picture connections of literary movements and cultural influences almost like road maps.”
        And my road map here is a major rite of passage, I sense, but I leave out quoting this story’s bold sub-title because I also sense it is a fingerpost that points in the wrong direction, like the characters of the narrator and of the masterstroke of the usher as other misaligned fingerposts, the theatrical performances and literary and avant-garde references worthy of this author’s simultaneously published ‘Conflagration’ book, the fluid audience, even the fluid characters of some otherwise fixed characters, the joy of mask and prestidigitation, thoughts of a toy theatre which may or may not be the big one where we’re sitting, of that paper doll earlier, a whole fountain of images arising from ultra-vintage wine. A whole influx of point and counterpoint, and the thing flows beautifully, you won’t even notice reading it, as it passes through without touching the sides whilst equally transfiguring the substantial nature of your brain itself. Nothing can be added or taken away. Zeno’s Paradox now taken to ultimate progressions of nowhere and somewhere, each with different names. I know it overtly exemplifies many literary traditions of 20th century Europe, BUT I also sense its actual soul is in America, the soul of Ligotti, that huckster hoaxer Ligotti acting out theatrically – or as a sideshow – the roleplay of his being a serious proponent of anti-natalist philosophy, a discovery of dichotomy that I found by recently re-reading and reviewing most of the Ligottian fiction canon here under the title ‘The Knots of Ligotti’, the knots that ARE ligotti… Now please re-read THE USHER as well as the whole of Ligotti and see what I mean. I include the author himself in that urge to reconsider his own masterwork that this complexly avant-garde as well as eminently accessible story called ‘The Usher’ surely is. Watt and Ligotti not similar to each other in any way except within my observation of Jungian road maps between them, I guess
        Reply
      15. The next story I reviewed in February 2016 here and this is what I wrote about it then:
        ———
        “But Los saw the Female & pitied
        He embrac’d her, she wept, she refus’d
        In perverse and cruel delight
        She fled from his arms, yet he followd”
        — William Blake (The Book of Urizen)
        ‘Tis a Pity She Was A Whore
        image
        ARCHONTES ASCENDANT
        “…and we are ready to become again.”
        Another crafted text that teems with resonant power and the rockstars of a Byronic Darkness, depicting an “ever-proliferating dock shanty” by the city’s river, where the narrator, instead of tough and evil as this place requires, suffers the ‘disease’ of using the words ‘friend’ and ‘happy’, but after befriending a suffering whore, an ostensibly different female figure leads him instead to a hardening epiphany…an eponymy once named Uriel.
        This is a remarkable work in the sense that it leads us astray, with a soul seemingly beyond the control of its narrator and freehold author that lets us down with a downrush of despair, where before we had expected the author to ensure that the narrator spread his goodness beyond himself in this evil land, as if we are made to read to the end, by some perverse imp, an imp that makes some sense, for the first time, in my experience, of the maxim that “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” The narrator and his brother, too. Even the Villa of Ormen?
        “That ominous night brought me dreams of stars — yes, Stars!”
        cf Pity the Whore, from Blackstar album!
        Reply
      16. LOTSKA
        “Without duty there is only death.”
        I am not sure how or why, but this poetic low fantasy is the perfect coda for this book and its masque.
        The message as journey, the journey as a whole life, as Zeno’s Paradox of Duty, rather than what one finitely ‘performs’ during that journey, with sleep as its own goal of hivery.
        So ends this remarkable book and the group of stories headed NOWHERE.
        end
        “Unseen or at least unremarked, I orbit the camp. That’s what I want: a place in which I have no part. I want to ride through space like wind in wind and sleep on the void, and be a go-between with nothing but between. I only know useless knowledge. The camp spins there to one side of me like so many floating candles collecting in a weak eddy. What I feel inside myself is fierce and calm; it’s a ruthless desire for an immortality of perfect weakness where I can be a tirelessly efficient functionary turning things over from one end of the message circuit to the other and back again, so that I never stop going back. As long as I’m going back, logically speaking, I yet won’t be back, only now am I getting under way. No one sees you while you’re in transit and the moment you arrive is the moment you have to turn around and leave again, provided there is some return correspondence, and even if there isn’t, it doesn’t matter, because there’s nothing to do but wait for some other message which will sooner or later have to go out and take you along with it.”
        — From MEMBER by Michael Cisco
        Reply
               
       
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      Conflagration by D.P. Watt

      June 9, 2016, 12:51 am
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      Conflagration by D.P. Watt


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      ‘CONFLAGRATION: Immoral Vignettes’ by D . P . Watt
      Mount Abraxas (signed by author in April 2016)
      My previous reviews of DP Watt HERE
      And of this publisher HERE
      When I read this collection (hopefully during May or June), my real-time comments will appear in the thought stream below.

      50 thoughts on “Conflagration by D.P. Watt”

      1. Sorry, I was momentarily mistaken: it is signed by the publisher not the author in April 2016.
        Without page numbers, a highly luxurious and stylishly designed book that I estimate to be a foot square. Probably the most successfully eccentric yet!
        image
        Appropriately as reported by this my real-time review, the book’s pull-out page amazingly dictates the real-time process for reading this book (like a variety show one attends, complete with stipulated interval and refreshments, with exact timing and behaviour indications for reader.)
        I need to set a whole evening aside for this, tantamount to a one-sitting session, and I may not have time to write my real-time thoughts in the relatively short interlude allowed. I am a bit worried as the timing will take me well beyond my normal bedtime! I will see what I can do, though, once I have made some inroads into the other books received during my recent real-time sabbatical away from real-time reviewing. Perhaps attending this book’s performance in a week or two?
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        Reply
      2. I have decided I am starting this book now, ignoring the instructions. A real-time review in slow motion has got to be a real-time review in slow motion. I shall treat this as I normally do with books of text and hopefully shall, as a second reading, do it all again in one sitting as instructed. But meanwhile…
        15th March 1895
        Rue de Clichy, PARIS
        “We are in darkness. They are brightly lit.”
        This is a real situation geared as if it is a theatrical performance – the ‘we’ being you an old man and I a young one crouching in the garden watching a father, a mother, two daughters and a young boy in a modest home. Applause. A dressing-room.
        A recurring scene. And costumes or disguises that make uncertainty the watchword. And a plot unfolding of possible human loss. Enacted or real.
        I as reader — effectively witnessing some who are witnessed as witnesses witnessing others who are witnessed — am enthralled but am determined not to be entrapped by this book. After all, a one-off show-off pull-out slip half the width but twice the length of the size of each of this book’s normal pages is probably not worth the paper it’s printed on. Take a match to it, I say! Let me read this book AS a book!
        Tomorrow – or as soon thereafter as possible – will be when I take up this book again.
        Reply
      3. There is a list of Dramatis Personae amidst the various miscellaneous material at the beginning of this sleight of book, some of whom are ultra fires, the rest ultra vires, I claim. This has inspired me to describe the Dramatis Personae of this review.
        Me: DF Lewis author of ‘Weirdtongue: The Glistenberry Romance: Visit To The Narrative Hospital’ and ‘The Last Balcony: The Apocryfan: Yesterfang’ (please remember those titles in case they become instrumental later).
        Freehold Author of this prestidigitation of a Conflagration: D (Dan) P Watt who, as InkerMen Press, published those two books of mine above in 2010 and 2012 respectively, until he put them out of print in 2014, for genuine personal reasons. These are my reviews of the books he has written.
        The Publisher of this bibliobuilt wonder: Dan Ghetu with whom I have also had a strange and fruitful onward and then stop and then onward again relationship since 2009, and these are my reviews of the many books he has published.
        20th April 1889
        BRAUNAU AM INN
        Accidentally missed this section earlier at the beginning of the sections, as it is so small. “… a desperate creature, beckoning for sustenance.” To tell you the rest would be a spoiler.
        10th December 1896
        Thėâtre de L’Oeuvre, PARIS
        “And now, without further ado, I give you Père Ubu.”
        By my green candle! I say.
        The viewing of a play within a viewing of another play? Or am I like Mon. Sauvageau thinking he had come to see ‘Cymbeline’ or ‘Pyramus and Thisbee’ but found a jar of jarrykins instead. Understandable, with so much Shakespeare about at the moment, his having died 400 years ago.
        I am loving all this and so far glad that I didn’t try to do all this in one sitting.
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      4. 3rd October, 1905
        The Theatre Studio,
        Povarskaya Ultima,         MOSCOW
        “But here in the studio all is calm because it has purpose. Everything here is meaningful while all about meaning is lost in the fatal rush of existence…”
        This section of text – amid an accretion of being pent up, ready for conflict or conflagration, I guess – is here shown as the perfect expression of a theatrical dress rehearsal that is poised even when planning to express un-poise. No more “ridiculous synchronicity” between Naturalism and Performance.
        I claim, though, that dreamcatching this book is a form of synchronicity that is not ridiculous, a synchronicity of truth and fiction in literature if not in a theatrical performance.
        Perhaps I (the ‘he’ of this book’s ‘narrative hospital’) see myself as an agent provocateur (with barricades and bonfires in my wardrobe of truth), in an endeavour to shatter the theatrical poise’s depiction of real un-poise.
        To booby-trap the balcony (as in Dali’s novel) upon which Juliet is about to step?
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      5. 11th March 1907
        A boarding house, FLORENCE
        “Arise, great über-marionette….”
        Worth it just for that call to arms, even if it is, as I claim, a call to a Pinocchio spirit created by the ‘lies’ of fiction’s ink.
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      8. 1st November 1907
        The Grand Chasublerie,
        7 Rue Cassette,         PARIS
        I did not realise Jarry was so young when he died.
        This tiny vignette made me think of Chinese babies using toothpicks for eating. All’s Well That Ends Well.
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      9. 12th January 1910
        The Streets of TRIESTE
        Politeama Rossetti meets James Joyce? This is a Futurist event, but till I just this minute read about it here, it was a mote in the Vortex of the past, not in the diminishing spin of my then future yesterday and the day before yesterday, ad absurdum, as it were.
        This book will become, I am confident, a gestalt of historical theatrical events mixed with real ones tendered poetically as ‘found’ art recrystallised by today’s crafted words in this crafted book, with the irony of that very gestalt becoming a singular theatrical event in itself, should you abide by the instructions at the front of the book.
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      10. 14th November 1912
        Northern Cemetery, SOLNA
        An amazing array of ingredients for their cauldron but most of those listed are not available in this scene of three witches. To be read to be believed.
        Strindberg whose grave is in this Cemetery once wrote an essay about Macbeth…
        My dreamcatching is like picking the air for magic spells of meaningful synchronicity.
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      11. 5th January 1912
        MAT, MOSCOW
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        Constantin Stanislavski and Edward Gordon Craig at the Moscow Art Theatre, a collaborative HAMLET production with unique qualities.
        “A woman, in a white robe, descends the stairway slowly to him.”
        Isadora Duncan playing this part?
        “everything will be the passage of light upon a staircase.”
        A painting (1912) by Duchamp?
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      12. 5th April 1914
        Sprovieri Gallery, ROME
        “‘Lolooloolooolooo / Oomba oomba, ickackooo / Fckack Kckaf Fckack / It was a sombre moment.'”
        The Gallery where the Futurist held an absurd or avant-garde series of art or theatrical or musical happenings (including conflagration), such happenings as I once arranged after I helped form the Zeroist Group in 1967 (see here for my own avant garde credentials).
        We’re in Futurism’s future now, where Avant Garde is old-fashioned?
        “It’s been on fire for years, you’re the first one that’s noticed.”
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        22nd September 1914
        ZAKOPANE
        “They told me to tell you that she had placed flowers beside herself. She had prepared well for it.”
        Two sentences, from this vignette, that currently mean a lot to me and I believe she has, or will have, done so.
        With instincts both eschatological and vivacious.
        Reply
      16. 23rd May 1921
        The Schoolhouse, WIELOPOLE
        This seems to be a palimpsest ‘performance’ of the above date’s global “brighter than bright sunshine” magnetic storm and of Wielopole’s future holocaust of its Jews retrocausally cast toward its past on the date above when there was also a major cinema or theatre conflagration.
        Reply
      17. Yes, indeed, this all made more sense once the book was in hand — although how many readers can really read this at one or two sittings and make sense out of all the brilliant construction, the lovely phrases, and the puzzles, the relation of the historic theatrical events — or even the very first date and place. Perhaps too brilliant for its own good, burning up in the total conflagration engendered. And what a beautiful book! –Harold
        Reply
        • 10 June 1921
          Galerie Montaigne, PARIS
          “…for no other reason than that the thought of goats copulating amused him.”
          This is probably the most hilarious scene so far in the guise of a vignette, with reminiscences of Tzara and Duchamp at some ‘gas heart’ of a Dada happening.
          And ‘found’ art as doodle during boredom. How many times have I created great art that way!
          Reply
      18. 26th November 1921
        Kantstraße, BERLIN
        “The beer was foul but the entertainment was promising.”
        A basement of the theatre where a tattootease act takes places and other acts, evocative for me of Berg’s Lulu, if not Wedekind’s.
        Reply
      19. 6th July 1923
        Théâtre Michel, PARIS
        “It is either the smouldering beginnings of love or the ashen embers of hate — it does not matter which really, they both smell the same.”
        More Tzara Gas Heart stuff, leading eventually, I guess, to a schism in Art.
        (The Zeroist Group in 1967 was formed – at least in my mind – to recognise the supremacy of Dada over Surrealism, but Zeroism strove to be supreme, in turn, essentially by becoming even more Dadaistic than Dada itself. The Narrative Hospital’s Last Balcony view upon that stage is where I sit today alone).
        Reply
      20. A day that never was, 1926
        Théâtre Alfred Jarry, PARIS OR HELL
        “The lights burn as bright as the sun, for a moment.”
        I sense this to be a depiction of Artaud and his Theatre of Cruelty in embryo, with striking images to match, but I also sense it is me in the Theatre’s Last Balcony morosely watching the man who is sweeping up the theatre with his broom, that man wondering when I am going to leave. If I leave, there will be no narration at all, no show to watch, not even just an imagined show. No narration, at least here on this thread, one I’m now told is to have no interval. You can’t have. Everything. Or Nothing.
        Reply
      21. 9th December 1926
        The Meyerhold Theatre,, MOSCOW
        “It is too much; the silence that is not silence and the stillness that is not stillness.”
        Meyerhold’s tendentious production of Gogol’s Government Inspector.
        Ridiculing ridiculousness with more ridicule, politically conflagrative ridicule, facing each of us with our doubles as mannequins. Meanwhile, I look towards the gods of the theatre and see my own mannequin in the last balcony on the left looking down at me.
        Reply
      22. 30th September 1935
        Malet Place, LONDON
        “What complete piffle, he thought.”
        I wonder indeed whether much of my review so far of this book is part of the kite-flying syndrome of this section – indeed the nearer such artefacts as kites approach the sun…?
        This section, meanwhile, is a Jungian or Beckettian theme and variations of the concept of a girl having never fully been born. At least one answer is the pareidolia of the chimney smoke at the end. Perhaps birth is the ultimate pareidolia?
        Or death is?
        Reply
      23. 18th September 1939
        A lonely place, JEZIORY
        A moving scene of the Polish playwright Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and his suicide, happening when, more widespread, other fearful and fateful conflagrations are igniting around him. I feel like the woman who watched this happen, hopeless, helpless. A lonely place, indeed.
        Reply
      24. 2nd February 1940
        The Cellars of The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, MOSCOW
        “…an initiate to a long forgotten but pointlessly enacted ceremony.”
        Meyehold was executed that day, for real – but also a theatrical event where, by dint of this amazing text, one can vividly imagine a bullet passing into your own head.
        Nikolai Yezhov was also arrested on that same date, and executed two days later.
        Reply
      25. 12th October 1943
        A deserted farmhouse, ROUSSILLON D’APT
        “He will not come today. Perhaps tomorrow.”
        If that means anything to you, read on. If not jump to the next vignette.
        [SPOILER]
        A code during the French Resistance: There is a Rue Charlie Chaplin in ROUSSILLON.
        A sad encounter recounted at a farmhouse that the more you think of it takes on a significance beyond the encounter, a loop, and a transposition of places beyond the avant garde of time.
        I wonder if I have so far missed other theatrical codes in this book, deeper than this code. The Theatre of War.
        Reply
      26. 22nd June 1944
        Ul. Grabowskiego, CRACOW
        “…the stench of the crematorium.”
        The curtains closing are, however, a temporary thing for this Theatrical production’s Interval, I seem to recall from its original (ignored) instructions.
        This final scene, therefore, in the first part, depicting The Return of Odysseus, as directed by Tadeusz Kantor. Amid the surrounding revolutionary resistance by the Polish in Cracow.
        image
        Reply
      27. Following a heartfelt Interval poem entitled ‘This is not a manifesto; it is a hymn to eternity’, one tellingly featuring Punch and Judy…we now proceed to –
        Before 1947
        ANYWHERE
        – a drinking of Proustian tea as death’s palliative … Or a theme and variations on Jean Genet’s “Les Bonnes”?
        – Words listed as if our words gather into lists and are not strung together meaningfully, just before death?
        – That’s the way to do it.
        – A crossed conflagrative wire.
        Reply
      28. 28th November 1947
        A White Room, PARIS
        “There should be no record of it.”
        Remarkably and ingeniously written few scatological paragraphs about animalism and eschatology. There is no record of it. Artaud recorded something for French Radio but they did not broadcast it. Probably destroyed it. There was also a book published: “How to make a body without organs.” Not sure if the two events were connected, but they seem connected at last here.
        Reply
      30. 23rd July 1948
        A study, PARIS
        An item of ‘found’ theatre, following a French man’s repeating sentences by rote from Teach Yourself English records. Books are by wrote. Plays are parrots, till the acting kicks in. I shall gratuitously call this play ‘The White Orchid’, notwithstanding the recurring fire in all these vignettes at the end.
        Reply
      31. 15th August 1956
        Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, EAST BERLIN
        “They are showing to each other the difference between being something and showing something.”
        Bertolt Brecht and his posterity: being something forever.
        Theatre as theactual.
        The thick cigar and the incremental smoky autos at the end is this section’s fire…
        Reply
      32. 29th – 53rd Enuj, 1960
        On Charles Bridge, PRAGUE
        image
        Theatre of the Absurd. We come and go, but one day we see ourselves coming back before we’ve gone? Waiting for work to be apportioned each morning, and nothing comes literally or we all go on [strike]. But reading this wonderful book each day is enough forever.
        Reply
      34. 17th July 1986
        The Spanish Cemetery, LARACHE
        “He is oriented to Mecca, for no reason.”
        Buried for no reason, too. Cremation is more suitable for any corpse, even Jean Genet’s, I feel. After all, the corpse is not the person it used to be.
        A living body can be its own monument, life goes on, including a random goat grazing or the smell of roasting meats – and the sea, unlike humans, even when still is still the sea.
        Reply
      36. 8th May 2010
        Str. Jean Louis Calderon, BUCHAREST
        “–is everything just Hamlet in disguise?”
        [ Saturday, May 8
        19:00
        Venue        : Metropolis Theatre
        Hamlet– performed by the Metropolis Theatre in Bucharest (Romania), directed
        by Laszlo BOCSARDI ]
        Streets that are mazes with angry dogs.

        Reply
        • I am told extramurally by the author that there were two productions of Hamlet in Bucharest on that date and I found my way using mis-triangulated coordinates to the wrong one above!
          I call this an example of the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Syndrome.
          The street mazes and angry dogs didn’t help.
          conf
          Reply
      37. 28th June 2014
        The Latin Bridge, SARAJEVO
        On June 28, 1914 at the turning from the Right Bank into a street Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Franz Ferdinand…
        I hope that was the right turning, not left, not wrong.
        This is a book of matches. You need a Narrative Hospital to stitch them together. Hopefully, this review is that hospital. But, better still, you match them together yourself independemt of this review.
        It is also a wonderful experience, probably the most important experience in any physical book, with all its tricks and trepidations, tribulations and triumphs: including the final conflagrative triumph: the inspiring poem at the end: “THIS IS NOT A MANIFESTO; IT IS A LOVE SONG.”
        The Jonathan Meades film ‘Ben Building: Mussolini, Monuments and Modernism’ that I happened to watch last night had much derogatory to say about anything that needs a manifesto, especially the Futurists.
        But that is just another chance coordinate for my personal reading of this truly great book. But you will have your own chance coordinates of Life’s Theatre or Performance Theatre and tentative matches to strike.
        Some time in the future, I shall re-read this book from the last balcony seat, absorb it in tune with its own instructions on how to let it perform for you, with its accoutrements of refreshment, ablution et al.
        end
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      ↧

      Worse Than Myself

      June 17, 2016, 5:16 am
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      12 thoughts on “Worse Than Myself – by Adam Golaski”

      1. THE ANIMATOR’S HOUSE
        “Working like that, drawing a film frame-by-frame, reminds me of hand-copying the Bible.”
        This starts and builds deadpan-like, cartoon cell by cell, without our really noticing when, even if, it changes from a family’s visit (including an impressionable young girl) to a long lost cousin who happened to have become a priest. This story dares to test the areas of acceptability for such a girl, for us, too, our taking it for granted, like she did, subtly and tentatively, till the big shock as something takes your head up somewhere without the body. And somehow this tent’s description by the priest during the tale of his experience’s camping is more powerful than this story itself and its own flip-book, flip-Juke, crazy palimpsests as the girl’s footprint of a Lord’s Prayer recited as a protection in the cafe’s museum…
        “A tent is a funny thing, because it’s no protection from anything, really, except bugs and small animals and the elements. But once you’re in it, you feel safer.”
        I already sense this 2008 book will be a major discovery for me.
        Reply
      2. IN THE CELLAR
        “Because he was not fully awake, he told a story he didn’t expect to tell. He said, ‘I remember the stairs that go down and I remember the little girl who led me.'”
        If this story doesn’t haunt you forever, no story will ever do so.
        The oblique connections between Joseph telling a story of what was either a dream or real life when he was nine to his scantily dressed wife Marguerite while she is ironing clothes, the eight year old girl in that dream, the hidden train tracks near the shed, the cellar doors leading to landing after landing downward, the retreat back up from some monstrous force, and Marguerite his wife’s own grim backstory – all connections that do not connect but do connect forcefully in a deadpan paradoxical memorable way simply because they don’t connect.
        A masterstroke of weird literature. Surprised it’s not more well known.
        But how does it work?
        Ironing often leaves accidental tracks in clothes. And dents from the iron’s tip. And often steam like trains.
        “He learned the shape of each step.”
        Reply
      3. THE ANIMAL ASPECT OF HER MOVEMENT
        “A doe, that’s what they’re called, lay on her side, peacefully, I supposed, sleeping.”
        I love deadpan stories, and this is utterly deadpan, full of deadpangs.
        It is the synchronicity of following someone who might really be following you, the twofold points of view of a man and wife, and a doe that acts in an utterly complementary but separate two-way Jungian filter with the doe in this story that I reviewed very recently. The onset of future deadpan Alzheimer’s through memories of one’s youthful crushes, short skirts, snogging in the cinema, retrocausal despair, and the cynical machinations of later adult sex. This story as gestalt is the ultimate ‘objective correlative’ for such factors in modern life.
        Reply
      4. THE DEMON
        [[ with him raving about the sky and the way the planets were coming together.
        James shouts my name—I hit the breaks—a deer—its eyes—in front of the car.
        In the car, with them, I feel protected.
        Heather watches him eat; she’s got doe eyes, I think. ]]
        Bits and pieces of this story, secret cult or Halloween party? Rachel tells us some things but not all. Horror is more horrific when you need, as with this text, to be there to tell the wood from the trees, but you can’t QUITE do so. Even the reader has a costume to wear, and there is a little girl that someone earlier in this book saw in the shed window. Not Blair Witch Project so much as Clinton Lewinsky Iraq.
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      5. BACK HOME
        [[ She drove slow, afraid she’d hit a deer.
        I can never keep track of all the removeds and seconds and halves in my own family, so how can I be expected to remember yours?
        and K[ ] could never be sure which of those were stories she’d been told about herself and which were real memories.
        (whose name was obviously an anagram of her cousin’s own)
        (odd that light can cast a shadow) ]]
        I am continuously impressed by these stories, by how they jump off the page, however absurd or nightmarish, as if they really do exist in that absurd and nightmarish form in the room around the reader where he or she reads this book, with different but simultaneous triangulations of their coordinates within the actual head of the reader. A literary phenomeno, making me wonder how I, the author of the Weirdmonger book in 2003, could have missed reading these seminal stories till now.
        The above quotes, however, from this story — just a few of its [synchronised shards of random truth and fiction], a phrase that I quote from myself, that being the printed subtitle of the Weirdmonger book — do give some clue as to this story, depicting a woman called “K[]” who returns to her original home, after several years, a cut-off abode in a snowy woodland of icy pools, where her cousin “J[]” had been staying in her old room till he died, someone she used to play with as a child, she is now told, even though she can’t remember him!
        That description by me of the plot gives you no clue of the constructive ratcheting into reality from a fireplace or from a nightmare of this contiguous JK[], as I call it, then as seen across an icy pool via photographs that could never have been taken other than as stills from that actual retrocausal nightmare – a bit like seeing Jesus walking on water? No clue at all.
        Reply
      6. A STRING OF LIGHTS
        “Oh, I do believe in God. And I totally believe in Bach.”
        A story with another obliquely haunting gestalt, here with a wonderful metaphor for itself as well as, in hindsight, my own Dreamcatching real-time reviews of books that contain such gestalts. A string of lights that only works as a whole if you pick out the dead bulbs. Stunning,
        Synchronised shards of random truth and fiction, stylised here by the fragments of a teenage girl’s real-time video diary on the Internet, as well as, elsewhere, contiguous apartments, contiguous characters whose contiguity continues to spread through their previous uncontiguity, with religious, existential and strange climatic considerations factored in.
        But that gives no impression of the page-turning quality of this deadpan accessible tale that it also is.
        Reply
      7. WHAT WATER REVEALS
        “He stops by a bench and cries. His mouth tastes as if full of gin.”
        “No one touched or saw the inside doorknob. So no one saw, stuck to the inside doorknob,…”
        No one saw what? And not seen by no one but seen by whoever becomes omniscient when watching the third person singular protagonist become the first person singular leasehold of a narrator soon afterwards? And then becomes the third person singular protagonist again, while the omniscient God as freehold author of this story is truly that third person? These questions are relevant to this intensely meaningful but fragile study of alcoholism, featuring sinkholes in a Montana city, and an island in the countryside near that city where the protagonist sees inexplicable shifts of terrain, then sees a man, that third person as God? If so. God is alcoholic, too, with his literal deadpan of a mouth and teeth rotted within it et al. Haunting, disturbing and meaningful, with nightmarish glimpses that are often at the edge of of our existence, and the ground about to open up where a water drink-mixer welcomes each brain-number for dilution and for making forget everything amid the shifting terrain. Number as in more numb.
        Only in the fragilely grounded past can you become again your own direct narrator as would-be controller of your loves and strengths as well as your remediable weaknesses? This story perhaps obliquely proves that that narrator of the past can be projected forward as the Saviour of today.
        By finding that dead bulb in a string of lights?
        Reply
      8. THEY LOOK LIKE LITTLE GIRLS
        In a forceful if uncertain way, the end of this story brought home the true but ungraspable meaning of the overall title ‘Worse Than Myself’, and why it should be that reflexive rather than the more usual or prescriptive ‘Worse Than Me’. But how possible is it for someone to grade the pecking order of their personal individual self against other selves outside of that self from within that personal self? *All* such selves, *perceived* selves. Selves as naked elves?
        The story itself is hauntingly oblique and revolved around a bus journey with various mixed gender strangers, left stranded in a cold bus station with portable heaters, while a new bus was due to come to collect them, each with their own preoccupations or bad dreams, one passenger in particular who looked like a little girl.
        Reply
      9. THE MAN FROM THE PEAK
        “You’re the only one who ever gets me books.”
        “I could hear, barely audible, David Bowie’s voice in the guest room.”
        This is a story ostensibly of an upwardly social mobile (literally and metaphorically) party in a house near the mountain peak and the forest, one with a hot tub, easy sex, ugliness and beauty, and fluid relationships with life goals on the move. It is accretively disturbing in a very believable way, a work that typifies this collection, a major collection, I feel, of such obliquely horrific literature, stories of disarming and (in a good way) disingenuous horror, with meanings that hit you nightmarishly between the eyes with its own ownership of itself as this work finally and subtly reveals. Here the ownership of the peak, too, as if it is one of the peaks of Blackstar itself? The book was prophetic after all. And still is.
        (Why have I not read it before? It is as if it has meant me to read it in 2016, in stiff competition with other major works of Weird fiction that this year has already provided for me.)
        Reply
      10. THE DEAD GATHER ON THE BRIDGE TO SEATTLE
        “People wandered on the median: the headlights of stationary cars lit up men and women who appeared lost—at least, uncertain. Strange sights.”
        A story of a frozen food delivery man called across the increasingly wild country towards his sick sister, except it is everyone else around him who is attenuating into sickness in a sort of sick Close Encounters cinematicism crowding in on his epic journey to join his sister, a sort of yearning love of a third kind. Except I also visualised the text’s author building gradually this amorphous sculpture of a story – with its intermittent backstory of the delivery man and his sister and other omniscience BEYOND that man – just as in that film a similar amorphous monument or shrunk mountain was built from personal belongings and simple garden rubbish. By the time he finishes it, it is still unfinished. And this time he never gets there.
        Utterly haunting and bleak, but strangely uplifting, having carried my personal version of Custer’s leg in my own head along with its reading of this still accreting text.
        Reply
      11. WEIRD FURKA
        “I know the man’s dead, so I could only assume my radio’d fell into another dimension or I was tuning in Hell.”
        This last work features a patchwork weird radio station in FURKA, Montana, (cf Bartlett’s amazing patchwork Weird radio station of local supernatural, often foul, gestalt of stories in LEEDS, Massachusetts that I recently reviewed HERE) and I personally rather like the idea of an extended programme in the small hours of the morning broadcasting experimental and avant garde music, extended with the minimalism of life’s noise itself – but its announcer’s own discovering of past programmes about supernatural goings-on in the local area, a discovery in the sub-basement of the radio station, material on old-fashioned reel-to-reels etc, was therefore rather disappointing for me in comparison to the music programme that those recorded tapes eventually subsumed.
        This last work, longer than the others, is a sort of loose coda to the previously tight arc of Weird Stories, those stories whose gestalt has been a symphonic theme and variations freakin’ out with unforgettable obliquity and nightmare. A major collection of such literature that I really should have addressed before, but thanks to some recent astute eye on Facebook, my attention was brought to this Golaski book, Better late than never. I thank that Facebook friend although I forget on whose timeline it was posted. At least I know his name was not Frank Shokler.
        “It took me a long time,” Frank said, “to realize that Furka wasn’t the nexus of the—shall we say weird?—but that the nexus was me.”
        …or worse than?
        end
        Reply
               
       
      ↧

      Secret Language – Neil Williamson

      June 17, 2016, 8:33 am
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      17 thoughts on “Secret Language – Neil Williamson”

      1. DEEP DRAW
        “The cinema is a useful tool, but not one I hold in much regard. At its best it is capable of piquancy that almost echoes truth, but at its worst […] it generalises and dilutes.”
        An exegesis that was promising for me at the beginning of this tale, a tale about those who have a long career in cinema, like this man in an airport hotel, given the drink he needed rather than the one he asked for by a barman, a barman who listened to his story, a barman with his own stories and a mythic role to play, telling a story like this one about a storyteller, much more textured and enlightening and surprising and constructively inscrutable and memorable than any cinema film about the same scenario could possibly have been, however well directed. A poignant and disturbing tear-jerker as it turns out, unavoidably cross-referenced with the astrological harmonics that I once mentioned as significant in this author’s own ‘Moon King’ novel – and there is also a personal serendipity for me about the ‘bodies of water’ book that I remarkably read and reviewed here only the other day.
        “Water attracts water. Stories beget stories. It’s all connected.”
        Reply
      2. I reviewed the next story here almost exactly a year ago and this what I wrote about it then:
        Photobucket
        THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF STAMPS
        “…that she could feel his warmth through both their coats.”
        This is an ingenious work of traditional pre-WWW moeurs that, here, pervade the chintzy lore of a war-widowed guesthouse landlady and her ‘commercial agent’ lodger, and, without fear of embarrassment of riches, I can say that this is a haunting classic. It really is. A perfect blend of the previous story’s downslope of entropy (the Williamson also has the invasive concepts of the words ‘mould’ and ‘cancerous’ used here) and a stoical acceptance of unrequited love becoming as strong as having, in the first place, the love itself for real, as later filtered through my memory of the magic of 1950s or 1960s tactility that the internet has since destroyed – and battered suitcases, lovingly fried sausages for breakfast, afternoon tea in seaside cafes and envisaged wild adventures ‘abroad’ on worthy commercial business. The world was bigger then. With the secret positioning of gloriously variable postage stamps, inter alia, this story is also optimal WW Jacobs.
        Reply
      3. SWEETER THAN
        “Then, cued by a saucy trombone-slide in the music, the waiter sings: ‘Would you like the dessert menu? Or do you need to get along?'”
        When I first read that passage, I misread ‘waiter’ as ‘water’ – possibly in premonition of what I already knew, in premonition of the note at the end of this story that I already seemed to know without having first seen its approaching imposition of inside knowledge upon my intentional-fallacy tinged mind.
        Notwithstanding that feeling of mine, this is an exquisitely adumbrated poetic story. Just read it – and follow the hidden and revealed sweetnesses of music, confectionery, and water, more bodies of deep drawn water, or even those patterns of postage stamps now as musical configurations of love or passing romance. Far from muzak, this story’s described music is indeed a palimpsest of all relationships end to end, as well as an intrinsic accompaniment of one language under another language, one homeland under another homeland, a continuous layering of self, both with and against its own grain.
        Coda after coda.
        “And, more than that, the river connects. She has heard that the water carries the melodies of every shore it touches…”
        Reply
      4. All the reviews below I intend to be written before I read the author’s story-endnotes –
        ARRHYTHMIA
        “The song continues as the bus jostles them through the city’s ordered streets of identical red brick walls and postage stamp lawns,…”
        The routine rhythm of those postage stamps that I independently illustrated above are now taken up in music while you work work work during the heyday of the Light Programme, Workers’ Playtime, workers’ songs, production-lines of modules towards larger modules with those modules inside, 1984 or Brave New World, and I remember those single-track days in the 1950s. When parameters were clear and borders controlled.
        Till the palimpsest of now.
        The arrival of arrhythmia.
        And a deepening atonality that embraces me today.
        All counterpointed or seasoned with an old-time engaging romance, overweening parental control , and a governor as part of the pick-up, and not a Roman-a-clef dystopic fiction, more the onset of a dincopated one.
        Not sure what was sweeter. Then or now.
        Atrial Fibrillation, notwithstanding.
        “The song thickens with harmonies, complicates with counterpoints.”
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      5. PEARL IN THE SHELL
        “woman rattling her fingernails on her armrest with all the natural rhythm of a fibrillating pulse.”
        The natural contiguity for arrhythmia, I guess. A truly amazing, Joycean extrapolation of modern music-sharing through the dongles, cells, shells, cartoon dildos and mashes of an endless ICoSPairway to Heaven.
        It seems apt that I only heard yesterday news of the legal action involving Ed Sheeran and the ongoing case of Led Zeppelin. The palimpsests of stolen and original.
        And that I am visiting a crematorium in a day or so, too, ready to punctuate my own grief by syphoning music from those mourners with hearing-aid overspill.
        I loved this thing that flows its inner sound over me in the guise of storification.
        So far this book, for me, starts to pattern the New Dance to the Music of Time.
        Literary Harmonics.
        Reply
      6. KILŁING ME SOFTLY
        [[ One thing that never changes in this city. The sound of the rain. Glasgow’s eternal, percussive soundtrack.”
        And the rain is just rain. Not for the first time I think: There is no music in life. Not any more.
        The water holds more mystery than man will ever discover. Be wary of it. Always remember that.
        fake inspirational shit the lyrics of which, if they initially possessed any genuine feeling, have been overplayed to meaninglessness. ]]
        Synchronised shards of random truth and fiction above, and they play in Glasgow — as Rix did in London, a suite for Windows, if not dormer ones (reviewed here) — a musical ‘dying fall’ –
        Here, uniquely, in the Williamson, we have the transgression of real music by some ugly vision of mass Karaoke competitions to out-X X Factor, factored into the well-characterised narration of a CID detective woman of Polish roots and her triangulation by Sapphic siren coordinates…
        Karaoke: the palimpsest of original and copy taken to the nth power of meaninglessness via a deeply meaningful story.
        Reply
      7. THE BED
        “…two boys reclining back to back, each of them holding a curved horn to their lips.”
        A vignette of impending not-waking-up as stitched within an engaging couple’s arrhythmic pillow-talk while traditionally sleeping together in the same bed.
        Moral: Buy a simple new bed not one that may have borne people who once died in it.
        Reply
      8. The next story I reviewed in 2015 here and this is what I wrote about it then:
        Fish on Friday
        “We’re not Nazis.”
        Coda and chips? This seems to be an alternate world letter from a supermarket to one of its lady customers (to tell you how old she is would be a spoiler) following the recent Scottish independence to become a Nanny State. Swiftian and swift. Hugged to death by health?
        Reply
      9. I reviewed this story in 2014 here and this is what I wrote about it then:
        The Posset Pot
        “There was early speculation that the bubbles might affect the weather, but Glasgow’s always been a rain town.”
        A mind-stretching vision (stunningly original, to my untutored eyes) that eventually, via half a sort of calm but expectant death-wish, reaches a touching poignancy for the well-characterised narrator and his friend, who are left to cope with the bubbles and foam that gradually overlap or switch the reality of two separate earths, or so I infer, or two different time zones, or various other theories only one of which is to blame CERN and its LHC. That thumbnail description of mine does no justice at all to what is happening here and what is felt, including, among many others, the nice touch of a bubble’s positing a posset pot in the region of the narrator, giving the reader the sense of a tantalising warm toddy within his or her own potentially bleak prospect of a world where Tesco will no longer be delivering.
        Reply
      10. LOST SHEEP
        “Bell finally pointed at a deep pot, and was briskly served from it with a bowlful of stewed vegetable matter.”
        A very engaging SF spreading time and space of a story within the quilted texture of Cordwainer carpet (cf the carpet in ‘Nemonymous Night’) – and I loved it. The ‘melo-historical’ soap opera – as well as space opera of the male protagonist – his communicatively minded spacecraft being a distaff soap lover, an earthwaved lover of soap as well as, now, sheep, soap that actually ENDS, and soap as sheep with a beginning and end to the flock, with a forever serial of distaff generations involved in their rock of a craft and its evolving goals of star trekking. And a current leader called Bell with an INSTINCT in the infinitude and eternitude of space history. Including the self (here the male protagonist’s own herded self) as the latest amazing historical event.
        I think I will now change the name of this real-time adventure of a book review site from DREAMCATCHER to BELLWETHER.
        “This scene was woven as it happened.”
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      11. SILK BONES
        “Proper loose leaves, steeping in a pot under a knitted tea cosy until it was black as tar.”
        There is something ‘domesticpunk’ about some of Williamson (you heard it here first), his posset pots, carpet designs, a sewing room, a secret language of postage stamps or cooked-gnawn meat bones, a sheep or lamb bone to match the lost sheep, as well as chicken bones, pork bone, wrapped in the sewer’s or quilter’s silk. A catharsis. A purging, by a space opera in the head, so utterly poignant and pitiful as the woman protagonist of secrets come to this far away place for loneliness and forgetting, using the endemic snow to hide her wrapped bones. But everything comes out in the final melting or final judgement of our global warming, I guess. No hiding place any longer for guilt or shame, even if we were once dead and ice-packed, as today’s Freudian synchronous unconnected news proves?
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      12. Messianic Con Brio
        “Gillian was thankful she’d have someone waiting for her with a fluffy dry towel and a mug of sweet tea.”
        A hilarious but thoughtful fable couched as a theme-and-variations upon the Millennium new year turning … in a mythic land where they talk in a Joycean language-style about things like Celtic and Rangers…
        A skit too on dating-agencies, and the growing up of young friends most of whom do each find their ‘perfect’ mate except for those left on the shelf. This story shakes that box of dice with a plot device that fits ‘perfectly’ itself with the secret language of music, the secret language of postage stamps, the secret language of meat bones – here, the secret language of language itself, where the meaningful power of the language in Finnegans Wake is made, yes, truly meaningful.
        (Messianic – from Messiah or from a typo for Messiaen? Judging from this book so far, Williamson is possibly a blend of both squared off with domesticpunk and astrology. The Quartet at the End of Time.)
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      13. Last Drink Bird Head
        “…and delicate bird bones.”
        A rarefied vignette that curates its own flask of compressed secret language for climbing to where meaninglessness reclaims its own lost meaning.
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      14. This is Not a Love Song
        “…the spectacular, swooping soar of the Fall,…”
        Not the Fall group I used to hear on John Peel shows, but something more related to what I have for a long while often referred to in my reviews as ‘dying falls’, an expression that others more knowledgable about music than me have also used, and I sense in this story something I have ways sensed about this expression: its paradoxical ‘soaring’ – and this story seems uniquely to express something new about music as well as its own apotheosis of the secret language of music, plus some Jungian synchronisation, even perhaps a love-hate synergy, with the audit trail of relationships, in groups as well as pairs, a SF-extrapolative synchronisation version of today’s DJ music-mixes.
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      15. I reviewed this story in 2014 here and this is what I wrote about it then:
        The Golden Nose by Neil Williamson
        “…Felix had always believed, real skill, real art, should be indistinguishable from magic.”
        One of my favourite SF writers. I found this hilarious, Williamson-like, standalone, an old-fashioned Vienna hosting a nosearama on the new-fangled Internet, and manfully trying to keep his family life afloat (unlike others’ cynical regrouping) by means of smell and entrepreneurship by wielding a legendary nose… Absolutely brilliant, so much so, I gave up hope of its relevance in my current gestalt but then I looked back at Johnstone’s surrogate internetiana in Equilibrium and the Cluley Hutch’s [With the hutch open, the smell seemed worse, which was silly because there was only mesh there before and that couldn’t stop the smell so now that it was open how could it be worse?]. Even Van Pelt’s character creating false UFOs simply to warrant the creation of a UFO detector, like a false nose and smells that a false nose can smell!
        My earlier review of Williamson’s wonderful first novel here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/05/24/the-moon-king-neil-williamson/
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      16. The Death of Abigail Goudy
        “The building is an impassive example of Scottish masonic Victorian death fetish.”
        This story, by contrast, is something much more than its situationalism. That earlier story was an apotheosis, as I called it, but this is the apotheosis of that apotheosis, of the secret language of music, and all those bones and teacups and postage stamps we use each day. A sort of Happening or Art Installation. This is a moving portrait of a man’s memory of his encounters with Abi, through bouts of their performance sex, her encouragement regarding the writing of his novel, odd social media moments, and the erstwhile performance of her music in the situational Austrian open air. She is now so famous, here in this building, with crap programmes, and geometries of stubby cock or clit, is an endless performance of it – to the tune of the particular situational deaths of Lully, Berg, Scriabin, Smetana, Ravel, Chausson, Purcell and, eventually, Goudie herself as the title as spoiler already told you. A poignant, but soaring, ‘dying fall’ in wonderful essence.
        Or, for me, all this might be related to ‘The Confession of Isobel Gowdie’ (the title of significant music by the great Scottish Composer James McMillan). Except it is now the confession by the leasehold narrator of this story. Or by his freehold or headlease creator named on the spine?
        “…a nuance choreography of physicality, of touch and timing. It was sex as communion, a blurring of the roles of artists and audience. Of person and person.”
        This text is in synche with a synecdoche of arrhythmia: the ‘persistence of echoes’, where the source of those echoes is in this major collection, a book with which I synergise, having felt the need to come to it, as if to a concert, one that effectively evolves into a moto perpetuo of performance literature, with perhaps the odd engaging sonata for prepared piano in counterpoint.
        end
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      BleakWarrior – Alistair Rennie

      June 18, 2016, 6:03 am
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      13 thoughts on “BleakWarrior – Alistair Rennie”

      2. BOOK 1: RANDOM FEUDS AND FAMILY MISSIONS
        1. BleakWarrior Meets the Sons of Brawl
        “We are the physical expression of natural states that serve no purpose beyond their immediate function.”
        This text, too.
        My mind goes into overdrive at what appears to be a Cartesian Swords and Sorcery adventure in its own version of wild overdrive.
        Synchronised-shards-of-random-truth-and-fiction made flesh – flesh in combat with itself then separated out into various acts of strobing: alternating between anarchic and linear motive-forces.
        To read this book at all seems to involve a leap of philosophical faith. But once started, I suspect you can’t leap back out of it, even if most of you wants to do so. Part of it is cast in neat, unjoined-up, slightly squashed handwriting from one who is thus (perhaps obliviously?) trapped by the surrounding ranks of visceral text.
        Reply
      3. 2. The Gutter Sees The Light That Never Shines
        “The Covenant of Ichor were an underground sect of religious fanatics who adhered to the belief that it was the role of women to moderate the predominance of their masculine counterparts with whatever ruthless or violent measures were necessary.”
        We enter a mind-wiping area of various characters like the Gutter and Whorefrost, and I can’t cover them all here. They are riven and riving. They get absorbed then come out your flesh like virulent sebaceous cysts. I sense this is a book where the politically correct and impolitically correct are in a war of social justice with the politically incorrect and impolitically incorrect, a war with no holds barred, with all other permutations built in. This is the swords and sorcery of social media made into high and low fantasy, where you can’t even keep up with the grotesquely absurd obscenities, lusts and viciousnesses of the company you are keeping. A language that wields its own blades of graphology and phonetics and semantics and syntax. You just need to sit back and let it change the world you first entered a generation ago. You are helpless having enrolled in it with your password and avatar. Fighting fire with fire.
        I shall summon up the sinews to meet the Sons of Brawl again…
        Reply
      4. 3. BleakWarrior has Sex at a price he Didn’t Bargain For
        4. The soliloquy of Lord Brawl
        Lord Brawl in rampant soliloquy, with the simple need to inflict suffering, a parallel for our meta-cybernetic times? He has sent in his numbered clueless bastard sons upon the in-flagrante BleakWarrior, with LB thus imposing a would-be sort of slaughter for its own sake, a flashmob that roams in his name, but now LB gathers more elementary forces to wreak vengeance for those sons who have become spear-carriers, with the emission of the most eviscerating, philosophically-tortured soliloquy you will ever hear ranted, or at least read by you as text here but with his rant embedded irresistibly inside your head. Shakespeare could not have done it better. Seriously.
        “My intemperance pays homage to my pain and my pain pays homage to my passion for pain.”
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        • Meta – cybernetically, I suggest Bleak Warrior cast as BleakWarrior is no accident in the victimless horror of that meta-world, only victims in the horror of our real world. Each click a ‘random leap’?
          Meanwhile, the initials LB above *are*, I suggest, accidental.
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      5. 5. Conversations with a Physician
        6. BleakWarrior Takes the Toll         (start)
        “…it’s possible to create a cure out of something that ordinarily does you damage.”
        (Cf ‘The Cure’ by John Travis and some other stories in ‘Horror Without Victms’?)
        image
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        • (Finish of 6.)
          “I require of you the controlled release of your madness…”
          I must not give the impression this is a linear book in two separate tracks of the linear and the meta, nor do these tracks even mingle or blend! It is a book of madness beyond even brainstorming, into a realm that the accepted benefits of brainstorming are taken to a new ground-breaking level, that is not even a level but a fiction realm that others have only dreamed of existing before, more in wild hope than blind faith. Now Rennie seems to be nailing it by not nailing it. I cannot cover all the exciting byways, e.g. in this section, the glands, building a Frankenstein monster of a sister, BleakWarrior’s nature as a fount of such ‘madness’, for want of a better word, and other places like the City of Honours, Skitten Heights and more. Other characters. Other motive forces in this ‘madness’ – madness as cure? I keep my powder dry. All I know so far is that this is an important book, one that seems simply primed somehow for Dreamcatching. Real-time reviewing in public is arguably the only way to read it, to triangulate its coordinates, to wallow in its obscenities of madness, to find its spine of truth, a spine that may not exist at all, and one needs these random leaps of faith to continue absorbing the variegated text, with images of swords as section-breakers. With veiled or palimpsested lenses on the reading eyes.
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      6. BOOK 2: IN THE RESEARCH OF PURPOSES
        7. BleakWarrior Leaves the Isle of Norn
        8. The Circle is Out for the Counterpain
        “She bled through the language of her body…”
        And it is no accident in this book’s research of purposes in battle with the literature’s forces of intentional fallacy that its text’s section-breakers now become quills and ink blots instead of swords, and there is also the arrival of The Scrawler and “her ragged pack of juvenile linear misfits, The Scribes.”
        And that everyone’s handwriting is in the same mould? I smell a rat.
        A whole load of new evocatively named characters that I won’t list here for fear of just naming them will turn them into spoilers of later anti-climax when you read this book (as you must), but I will mention a Mad Scientist scene that makes me think of this author wielding his own quills of creation when casting the stunning alchemy of this whole book into the crucible or laboratory of his head. Assuming that is not defiling my own intentional purity of thought as to the creative process of literature that means more than it means. Subverting means and ends, this book is hopefully a Zeno’s Paradox, an Ohm Resistor during a race of words towards a victim blamed, a culprit blessed, a cure halted, a killing completed.
        “It is the perpetual mobilisation of a phobic distress that will not resign itself to its closure until after the event, whereupon the experience is a germ in a compost of absolute horror.”
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      7. 9. A Week in Pursuit of BleakWarrior
        10. A Week in Pursuit of the Essence of Genius
        11. The Brain Exchange
        “It is a dangerous game you play — to second guess the revelations of a trickster — a teller of tales — who is liable to change the orientations of their plots with the randomness –”
        I dare anyone to gather into their head all those orientations in one fell swoop after a single reading of this book. I am not big enough reader to be able to do that. All my real-time reviews are based on my first reading and this first reading does its best not only to compete with me, to fight against me, but also to compete with itself within the book, with different typesets, to pitch one novel on one side of its character against another novel on another side, each hoping to battle towards victory. It’s you or them. You might not survive. I once had a novel fighting another novel in a book nobody has ever read, despite one or two reviews of it by nobody at all.
        Here, just to pick out a few things, the Welter of Impermanence as female character urgent for masturbation with, inter alia, a cheese grater, part of the onward sweep of bad-doing, and the Reader of Clouds, a level of scrying like As Above So Below or what I have often called empirical astrology as harmonics of fiction, not cause and effect but a synchronicity more powerful than cause and effect.
        This book deserves the name of one of its characters: Mega-Negation.
        Meta or Mega as prefixes of mirroring what we have become: Neta-People (my expression, not this book’s).
        “To what extent can a Meta-Warrior comprehend the futility of its actions? To what extent can it bear the emotional repercussions of what it is, without knowing what it seeks and why?“
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      8. 12. The First Day of Retributions
        “Madness is my religion.”
        A sort of Socratic Dialogue between BleakWarrior and the Ever Decreasing Circle of Choice, as if metaphysics is this debated religion become indeed a form of madness. I started this debate in 2006 about fiction as religion that now seems more a madness than a truth.
        The conundrum of mind and body, cause and effect, we indeed go round in circles, spinning. A related Idea of mine regarding Horror and spinning*.
        The Warped Lenses et al.
        Nowhere before has fiction tackled such rarefied areas. This stuff is so genuinely ground-breaking that it breaks its own ground in the process to open up avenues for us to travel that no reader of fiction has ever travelled before, I claim. The Mentors and “the taproot of your memories” –
        “It is possible, for example that nature possesses an awareness of itself without self-knowledge. And, to this extent, I believe that the Meta-Warriors are an expression of nature’s self-knowledge in its full variety of forms.”
        ——————
        *
        “It is much more complex than simple suspension of belief (or even disbelief). Horror fiction, at its best, enters our individual territories and becomes part and parcel of a revolving realm with Death at its core: and, in this realm, all the flotsam and jetsam of life (the richest life being generated by the imagination as well as by the day-to-day interaction of our minds and bodies) spin round, some colliding only to ricochet off, others sticking together, some being swallowed whole or bit by bit. Eventually, the various items are sucked into the core where they are minced up or refined into streams of sense (or apparent sense or, even, nonsense) which are then released from that realm into other revolving realms which create new collisions, fusions and spin-offs. This is using Death as a positive tool, as it surely is. Without Death, we’d be nothing.”
        Above quoted from my blog here in 2006: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.co.uk/2006/04/free-fiction.html
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      9. 13. Abysmal Silence is Not Golden
        14. How Weakness Was My Source of Strength
        15. BleakWarrior Makes a Leap of Bad Faith That Feels Good
        “But words must fail. Words are nothing. Words must come without the gift of meaning,…”
        … as this book itself presents this ‘perfect paradox that makes perfect sense.’
        And surely only the denizens of what I have long since called CERN Zoo’s Power of Retrocausality now give BleakWarrior the perfect paradox of a Random Leap in Reverse! And much more. And his quest for the Talking Well where he prefers to face death rather than to flee. (That Talking Well we all know so well?)
        There is no way I can do justice to this book. Only injustice.
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      10. BOOK 3: ATTENDANCES TO MAYHEM
        16. The Brotherly Devotions of Burning Hot Coals
        17. The Node To Nowhere
        18. Goring a Whore for Liver Dye
        19. Love on the Heels of Certain Death
        “The physical and mental consequences of an artificially-induced Random Leap were such that BleakWarrior emerged from the node in a state of temporary devastation. He felt as if his body had been turned inside out and flayed from the soul upwards. He was disorientated in the extreme*, with his head spinning as if propped on the end of a stick and twirled in undulating circles at high speed.”
        *The injustice of my spinning review now holds full sway.
        But there’s something amorphously and entrancingly Henry Fielding, Lawrence Sterne or Tobias Smollett about this picaresquely internecine novel, this internetine fantastica where some architecture is transgressive against other architecture, a liver extractor roams and sheep graze among the more brutal or concupiscent aspects.
        Lord Brawl’s Bastard Sons continuing their seemingly inchoate goals. And whole new swathes of mind-wiping characterisation and genius loci, and the section-breakers are now Double-Bladed Battleaxes – a symbol of this book’s double-edged orientations of thrust…
        As I try to extract this book’s gestalt…
        “He whistled a silent tune through his lips as he prised her liver from its stubborn knots of ligature, easing it out with attentiveness as if trying to avoid a small explosion.”
        CF The knots that are ligotti.
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      11. 20. BleakWarrior Switches to Automanic
        21. The Sisters of No Mercy Get None
        22. A Death Match Made in Heaven
        EPILOGUE: YOU CAN’T KEEP A BAD GIRL DOWN
        “The best abductions are those in which the victim is unaware of their victimhood.”
        …or the victim is not a victim at all as with Horror Without Victims who is an incognito character in this book, I suggest, just like, for example, the cognito Burning Hot Coals… That seems to be the hidden key of understanding this book. “To suffer the need to suffer.” Chaotic impulses within the self like a form of music.
        Meanwhile, there is what I predict will become literature’s single great touching relationship between two people, built up in these last sections, a relationship between BleakWarrior and an over-anxious girl called Automanic. Her renditions of self are utterly poignant and fully in the spirit of this book’s perfect paradox. Beyond even Zeno’s.
        Their meeting of minds also gives a new meaning to REAL ale.
        The ambiance of the Aquarium also needs to be read to believed. But I have hardly scratched the surface of this book with my quill of injustice.
        Its precious hairshirt, too, makes one want to jump into the Talking Well itself and to absorb the nature of Hatred “for what it was — a superficial accumulation of dire emotions that, in themselves, were meaningless and, ultimately, without foundation.” In this day and age and the recent events in the UK at least, take that thought with you because that thought alone (as well as much else) will make this book worth reading.
        Forgive my spoilers, but I claim that this book cannot be spoilt beyond how it has spoilt itself. A book seriously with a language style to knock your head off and some unique thoughts that will surely astound you.
        Forgive, too, my Random Leaps. This book made me.
        “Liver Dye was still bound up in the knot-work that, in some places, had been untied or cut or twisted out of shape.”
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      Singing With All My Skin & Bone

      June 20, 2016, 1:01 pm
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      21 thoughts on “Singing With All My Skin & Bone”

      1. COME MY LOVE AND I’LL TELL YOU A TALE
        “…but tell me about a time when we were still children, and ignorant, and we ran and played and didn’t think about dying.”
        An incantatory prose with recurring refrains that fill me with utter poignancy in poignancy’s purest form possible, with the narrator triangulating her life’s coordinates as retrocausal hopes – and as musical ‘dying falls’.
        It also reminded me of the time when I listened live in the sixties to the legendary Adrian Mitchell reciting his own mesmeric poem: “Tell me lies about Viet Nam”.
        “Tell me a story about all the pretty lies.”
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      2. SINGING WITH ALL MY SKIN AND BONE
        “You’re made of things you can take to pieces, and those pieces can be eaten.”
        Another work with a sense of the incantatory, the refrains of not refraining. A poetic fleshing out of a self-styled witch with her own spells against those who beset her, but here as the Dreamcatcher, I am trying to put the pieces back into the shape of their gestalt. To take the self from self-harm. To repair the connecting skin, having first fitted back together what is underneath that skin. But, instead, counterintuitively, I find myself trying, like this narrator is also counterintuitively trying, to battle through the words, trying to see through the skin of text at what is underneath it or, in her case, bringing it back out again from under that text. Filters indeed can work both ways. And I hope I allow her good points to grow from young skin, as she likewise hopefully heals my jagged disease of increasing old age. (I have one of those ‘red, glowing spots’ currently on the back of my neck, one that won’t go away.)
        We were once both those children in this story and the previous story, children seeking something we knew not, fearing something we had not yet found to fear.
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      3. A PERDITION OF SALT
        “All that wetness, because bodies are mostly wetness; we die soaked in ourselves.”
        This is the perfect threnody-by-incantatory-prose, of one person’s relations to both of you, both of us, dodging raindrops, but acting as two-way filters to transcend death, a palliative care of love itself between them, whatever life’s – using what I shall call, as inspired by this story, a word with a new meaning – drawbacks.
        This story is also synchronously an amazing complementary but separate two-way filter with two other such ‘wetness’ works (‘Deep Draw‘ and ‘Bodies of Water‘) that I also read and reviewed very recently.
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      4. COLD AS THE MOON
        “Mama gave the whole damn world a cancer.”
        Not just cancer, but A cancer. There is a big difference.
        In the recent ‘Autumn Cthulhu’ anthology (reviewed here), there were at least three stories with a bear in it, and they connected, and here I feel an engulfment of snowy bearness continuing, unless it all started in this story by chronology of publication, giving the world a bear. A big grizzly, cuddly Father (as if child-bearing actually within himself) – a version of God? A ‘fabulous’ extrapolation from this girl’s father towards his relationship with her mother, and her baby sister, a baby that the girl saw as a barrier against lies or ugliness. Hope represented by a beautiful dawn blots out the fact that there was never any barrier against ugliness or lies, and one should simply embrace or be embraced by creation, along with all its incipient cancers. A still-accreting-in-the-mind portrait of a young girl learning to be who she truly is, to be the logic and reason inside and then outside of those she once loved and lost.
        All filtered through the bodily spirit of this whole book’s context so far.
        “Bears are bears. And I’m me.”
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      5. I TELL THEE ALL, I CAN NO MORE
        “So simple, so connected. So in tune.”
        I’ll tell you what, this is about a sort of hovering would-be cyborg humming or buzzing sweet nothings in a two-way filter of empathy with a bodily-human welcome for its steady thrust. And it is also about oratory by being that very oratory to a you that is either a narrative self or really YOU – about its approaches, writing on a blog, as I am doing here about it, assuming that more people know about this practice than otherwise might be assumed from this story’s blatant implication that it’s something that is fantastical under the guise of deadpan acceptance. Talking about something as hinted or implied while the story itself talks about it up front. An interface of spreading a plot spoiler and penetrative fusion with it.
        A study in collusion prior to collision. As all stories are? This one special for its own such self-awareness as the worker bee of literature.
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      6. ACROSS THE SEAM
        image
        “More and more, Baba Yaga is coming to him in his waking hours.”
        …after first hovering in his dreams like the earlier tutelary drone from the future, as represented by this book’s writer. I echo what this book teaches me. Here a cathartic tale of the 1897 massacre of East European migrants working the coal seams of Pennsylvania.
        A powerful and memorable vision centred upon one of those migrants – upon a fabulous trans-migration: in more ways than one.
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      7. DISPATCHES FROM A HOLE IN THE WORLD
        “I used to wonder if, when my brain started trying to kill me, I would know what was happening.”
        Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire ring in my mind, but this is more a story that relates to the Internet as we know it today, a connecting skin presaged by an earlier story. Full of means to preserve and means to delete. Here videos of a viral plague of suicides, documented by the narrator (one of the survivors) with a grant to do so. Trying to reconcile what could have caused this plague and whether one could generalise about those who did it or caught it and those who didn’t or failed to catch it. In the closet or out of it.
        A teasing conundrum of permanency and transience evoked by our ability to store things and to destroy them, even with paper and pencil records or print like this book has print, should you be reading it in print as I am. Or in expendable digitality. All transcended or ended, by those of us who share existence with each other as well as sharing the remaining days left to us, given the ability or desire to procreate – or simply curate.
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      8. EVENT HORIZON
        “It calls us.”
        image
        Those who read this story will probably guess why I repeat that image here.
        This is another bear-engulfing story, too, in its way, where the gender-oblique relationship, almost predatory judging by the narrator’s imputed age, acts as that engulfment in tune with animals walking into an Ark (or Arc) not for preservation and later release but to be eaten, the world’s bullies, too, all as fodder to “a living conglomeration of rhythm.” A recycling generated from the ‘bad’ of entropy?
        “We’re a matched pair,…”
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      9. THE HORSE LATITUDES
        “Adam named the animals before he slaughtered them.”
        My tentative reading of this graphically striking symphony of word-images has beheld the violent history of the drugs trade and earth-sea movements in connection with the historical Colombian Buenaventura township, in trading interface with North America and its tongue of Florida hanging above it, about that town’s passions and loves, its thrusts of survival embodied in the story of two men, a story that perhaps synchronously and inchoately creates a fabled surge against the inimical forces of hatred that caused the atrocity of the last few days.
        I am also reminded of “Oh ! brave white horses ! you gather and gallop,” from Elgar’s Sea Pictures.
        And Virginia Woolf’s own ORLANDO.
        A latitude for glimpsing stars…
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      10. ALL THE LITERATI KEEP AN IMAGINARY FRIEND
        “You can’t put a drone on a couch.”
        image
        A short short that is in fact a coda to the previous context of this book and an unpredictable prelude to the rest of the book.
        Soul-searching about a cognitive therapist of self. That word ‘therapist’ may need a space. Or a latitude.
        It is amazingly as if in direct comment upon my tentative take on the previous story – and the killing machine and its motives, and our attitude to victims and culprits alike.
        “a kind of consensual hallucination” as dreamcatcher?
        Or “a sado-masochistic power exchange” as bunker?
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      11. LOVE LETTERS TO THINGS LOST AND GAINED
        “Your software is meant to grow and develop with me, as opposed to coming pre-programmed, so we’ll be a perfect fit. It’s also meant to help me learn about you by using you, but of course I’m being resistant, as the therapist says””
        Another engulfment, one that somehow seems to engulf the reader, too, like a hand and glove, a love-hate synergy of human and drone, here geared to a prosthesis or discrete phantom body that is both you and something outside of you that slowly becomes you – as a healing from some crash by that drone? Or just a SF extrapolation of cure by cyborg?
        I found it unique and somewhat disturbing in all manner of diffuse directions. It seems to fit hand and glove with the developing, if unyet defined, gestalt of this book.
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      12. This is a very significant story for me and one that has just moved me deeply. It would have done anyway, but this morning I received a contributor’s copy of a book, a rare event these days as I rarely submit my new works, and my story included here tells of my big head, and how my mum used to complain stoically about giving birth to it all those 68 years ago! My mum happened to pass away very recently, and heads and skulls were already on my shocked mind. This Moraine story came at just the right time with a tale of two skulls, like Hamlet with Yorick where Yorick is Hamlet himself. image
        A remarkable story that I don’t think would have by-passed my admiration, even without such synchronicities. Two skulls effectively in this story, while my own story mentioned above talks of the joke of two brains in my huge skull. And to the right is a picture of my ‘skull’ within my face, a photo copyright ‘The Revelator’ website and shown there a year or so ago.
        Sorry to make my review of this Moraine story so personal. It is a great story in itself. A man being given his own skull, exploring its niches, its map of phrenology, and an encounter in a bar with a woman as a catalyst and a walk to a pier for catharsis. A short story with much in it. Much still for it to give to me. Another engulfment.
        MEMENTO MORI
        Reply
      13. One can learn a lot from the synchronous appositeness of names as words.
        “Moraines are accumulations of dirt and rocks that have fallen onto the glacier surface or have been pushed along by the glacier as it moves. The dirt and rocks composing moraines can range in size from powdery silt to large rocks and boulders.”
        A sunny moraine is a concept with which to conjure…
        THE COLD DEATH OF PAPA NOVEMBER
        “Her voice for a moment, in the way that all voices are her voice, in the way that all gazes are her gaze. The world is haunted by her.”
        But who or what engulfs whom or what? This is a haunting journey via short wave radio (I sense drones and hisses and other scryable patterns of static in the signal of this music-box within her – or even herself actually within the music box), this being another story in this book with a widowering by cancer, as he plumbs the signals she set behind her by mathematical coordinates of triangulation towards those moraines further north, Budapest to St Petersburg. And beyond, towards another land that has the aftermath of nuclear cancerousness? An ironic, poignant rite of passage. A pilgrim’s progress for some slough of despond that might heal retrocausally and lead towards earlier sunny skies instead of the cold stars over Budapest, each itself a distant sun?
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      14. I reviewed this story in 2015 here and this is what I wrote about it then:
        SO SHARP THAT BLOOD MUST FLOW
        “Death always has to go somewhere.”
        A story that fulfils the promise of this book’s witching, various mermaids and ‘girls below’, but also here the promise of Machado’s stories running together like raindrops in a pond. There the pond became a lake. Here, like Larson, the sea itself, but also, at first, the yearning to be sea foam. And insulating those stories one from the other, where death or blood-drops running together or different story-endings reside.
        This has a fairy tale ambiance with the sporadic staccato of enticingly naive verse as prose, where a Prince and Princess on a romantic sea voyage suffer the sharp touch of tail-slapping as a leap of jealousy or Brothers Grimm.
        ————————–
        It now also reflects the Perdition of Salt, body engulfment and other themes of the new collection.
        Reply
      15. TELL ME HOW ALL THIS (AND LOVE TOO) WILL RUIN US
        “I could read poetry to you now. I didn’t bring any books, but I remember your favorites, I can read them from the book of us that lives under my skin.”
        A poetry book read aloud from within, like that music-box, earlier? Like that walking, hungry house or engulfing drone, here a rhapsodic ‘you’ monologue cast as ‘us’, from bathroom to island, another ‘wetwork’ as a write or rite of passage to reach a circle of standing stones on this island of self, a perhaps sapphic circle of you and you and you and you … but which stone of us falls first, and which ‘dead monument of once ancient hope’ lasts longest?
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      16. LOVE IN THE TIME OF VIVISECTION
        “…but it’s hard to focus when he lifts my liver out of my body cavity and gently inserts the blade into it. It’s like watching him cut into a fruit, soft and overripe, exotic and dark and rich.”
        I no longer connect. A disturbingly, yet cathartically, vivid disengulfment of a sensory self as ‘he’ cuts and cuts into ‘me’, a female ‘me’…
        I relive the recent rite of passage of guilt when helplessly watching someone die…but from the direction of one who dies.
        Also I compare with here the significant liver-extractor character and other disengulfments in a book I happened simultaneously to review alongside this one. Although the narrator of this Moraine text no longer connects (“I do not connect”), things outside her, by the act of dreamcatching, perhaps thankfully still do.
        Reply
      17. A SHADOW ON THE SKY
        “…who weighed the hearts of all the dead against a feather.”
        A highly poetic prose vision of a murder of crows, no, a murder of planes or, rather, drones, I guess, controlled by a woman, a fact that makes them seem even more frightening than if they were controlled by a man? Depends for which side the drones are fighting, And is it an accident that drone rhymes with bone and chimes with this book’s flensing towards such bone? Skin and bone singing witn an alchemy of contraptive metal?
        A way of clearing away the original Ark’s entropic remains from our deserts’ ‘Event Horizon’?
        For me, Drones are Dreamcatchers, but Dreamcatchers are not Drones.
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      18. IT IS HEALING, IT IS NEVER WHOLE
        “I should never have lifted the soul out of the net.
        But I could never have done anything else.”
        I feel like that with this amazing book.
        Meanwhile, this is an extremely poignant vision of souls of suicides that one catches and nurses as sort of living creatures, and it also deals with the why and wherefores of their lives and the need to have killed themselves. Their transport together upon a linked ground-train seems to have a deeper, if oblique, meaning when compared to this book’s earlier separate airborne drones.
        And the context of this whole book gives an even greater power to this. As does the mutually complementary ‘The Death House’ (reviewed here.)
        “Throw your heads back. Cherish these breaths. Feel so incredibly alive. Listen to the singing birds, the rough cries of the crows.”
        Reply
      19. THE THROAT IS DEEP AND THE MOUTH IS WIDE
        “…a hole opened up in the universe roughly between Earth and the Moon,…”
        The narrator as a sort of cybernetic counsellor for those customers in that emptiness, floating with only mouths to speak – someone as an invisible head listening to what they lost (themselves or others) in that universe hole, as if that hole was more of an emptiness than the one they now float in? Each a drone alone.
        No repeat business except when again hearing from a customer who lost the one to whom they now reach as counsellor. You and me.
        An enfolding within emptiness. The ultimate bare hug.
        “Touching my cheeks and brow and nose and chin, weirdly fascinated by the structure of my own bones, which I’ve had forever but which I suspect may be like a word repeated until it becomes strange,…”
        Two skulls bound together, the souls inside passionately seeking each other through the contiguous bone on bone, the only way to be close enough. A book that will never forget it was once caught in my net, at least for a moment.
        “We all have that moment…”
        end
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      The Numbers – Jackdaws

      June 21, 2016, 7:10 am
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      2 thoughts on “The Numbers – Jackdaws”

      1. THE NUMBERS by Christopher Burns
        Numbered 23 of 200, and signed.
        “…but the mist is clearing and the rising sun is the colour of a communion wafer.”
        Please note the date of this real-time review, this dreamcatcher of fiction, as if it has itself dreamcaught the spirit of this short cathartic or angry period in British political history. As if it is a sudden storm out of nothing, having begun like an episode of The Archers, with motivations as nonchalant nuances, the nagging weight of past misuderstandings or mistakes as two brothers meet unexpectedly at the whim of one of them, alongside the catalyst of the other one’s wife. Self-pity of the whimsical brother…
        And if I tell you any more, it will spoil this effectively described story of unscryable intention and poetic phrase – and spoil any shock it might or might not hold for you especially after what recently happened on the streets of Britain in recent days and whether the brother’s tontine prize is to remain or leave…
        Reply
      2. JACKDAWS by Neil Campbell
        Copy 29 of 200, signed with understandably disguised squiggle.
        “Above all stood the bulk of Castle Naze, and the long ridge line of Coombs Edge with the cotton grass still blowing.”
        I was intrigued by the word ‘Naze’ as I had seen it previously used but only as part of the name of my birthplace 68 years ago, Walton-on-the-Naze…
        Beside the point …but the main, imputably shocking, point — of this obsessive, almost incantatory, almost anti-novelistic, detail-poeticised, recurrently seasonal walking through the narrator’s rural locale in Derbyshire — is also half beside the point, even if it is disguised like the beautiful pamphlet’s signature. It’s the other half of the point that counts, with the motivational nuances of the Jackdaws’ scryable patterns as well as of the tontine’s numbers in Numbers. We draw our own conclusions.
        I was also impressed with the detailed refrains of the locale’s places in the narrator’s
        art of walking around and around, not around an ‘elephant in the room’, but around, say, the evidence in the household rubbish dump. An art of walking like that of Richard Long.
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      Marked to Die

      June 27, 2016, 7:51 am
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      Marked To Die

       
      MARKED TO DIE
      A Tribute to Mark Samuels
      marked
      SNUGGLY BOOKS 2016
      Edited by Justin Isis
      With 450 pages, the biggest multi-authored book of new Weird Fiction in the 21st Century.
      Table of Contents:
      The Shadowy Companion, foreword by Mark Valentine
      Rapture, Reggie Oliver
      The Golden Dustmen, Colin Insole
      Canticle, Daniel Mills
      White Light, White Heat, Adam Nevill
      The Black Mass, Justin Isis
      The Big-Headed People, DF Lewis
      Attraction, John Mundy
      The Early Signs of Blight, Kristine Ong Muslim
      Chaoskampf, James Champagne
      A Bad Un to Beat vs. The High Gate Waterman:
      It’s All About the Benjamins, Brendan Connell and Quentin S. Crisp
      Language of the City, Thana Niveau
      The Singular Quiddity of Merlin’s Ear, Simon Clark
      The Carnivore of Monsters, Stuart Young
      The Men With Paper Faces, John L. Probert
      Empty Houses, Ralph C. Doege
      Reinformation Theory, Yarrow Paisley
      Prison Inquieta, Jon Paul Rai
      Slag Glass Lachrimæ, David Rix
      Coda
      Also a book where I break my 17 year old non-submission fast for the fifth time by having a new story published here.
      When I real-time these stories, my comments will appear in the thought stream below.

      35 thoughts on “Marked To Die”

      1. I haven’t read it yet but I sense MARKED TO DIE is uniquely a tribute that combines both a seriousness of tribute and a satire upon all such tributes. A modern day miracle.
        An absurdibute – a book that I hope will be positive and worthy of the weird fiction tradition – something that I Intend will become clear as I start and then progress below through my real-time review of each story.
        MY BIO IN THE BOOK: “First and only novel published at the age of 63 (2011). Creator of Nemonymous from 2001. Author of over a thousand published fiction works from 1986-2000. Inventor of gestalt real-time reviewing from 2008. Publisher of other authors. My Mum often mentioned difficulties with my big head when bearing me. I first met Mark Samuels around 1987. I severely risked his life (and mine) around that time when driving him to a convention through my momentary lack of concentration on the motorway. He will tell you about it. He once made a very difficult solo car drive himself to visit me and my wife in our then home of Coulsdon. He kindly wrote an article about me for the Dagon DFL Special in 1989. We and others shared many pub get-togethers in the 1980s and early 1990s in Purley. Pleasant and instructive walks around Machenesque London, too. I greatly admire his writing successes since then. One of his books was my very first real-time review in 2008.”
        Three Graveyard Gongoozlers.
        Reply


      3. RAPTURE by Reggie Oliver
        “…a sun setting (or rising) over the sea.”
        A classic Reggification — by a compellingly limpid story of genuinely memorable Machensque weirdness over London skies — of truth and rapture, of vice in danger, of absurdity and religious satire, of all those unpolitically incorrect things going on in the world around Hampstead Heath and Archway Road, behaviour here stared at unswervingly without fear of the social justice warriors tearing it to pieces on-line should they ever get wind of it or, even, without fear of such warriors’ favour when deploying their interpretation of this text and praising, to high heaven, its even higher moral high-ground.
        This whole book, like this story, I already sense, has more than just one face. More than one version of textual interpretation or exegesis as well as more than one version of physical production image. This first story, within it, also has an engaging characterisation of a man in his small flat – someone who has recently split up with his fiancée – and tells of his interface through thin walls with his equally well-characterised but, for me, frightening neighbours, whose High Church draws him into a battle against the dark forces of our End Days, seasoned with sexual undercurrents and switching selves as well as a switching book that contains such selves.
        Reply


      5. THE GOLDEN DUSTMEN by Colin Insole
        “But holding the book enhanced her perceptions. She found that she could eavesdrop on the voices and whispers from the houses above: the banalities and pleasantries of family life and the muttered soliloquies and embittered rants of crazed solitaries.”
        …and I know that feeling. Indeed.
        I also know the feeling of reading stories by Colin Insole, with my being already, I claim, the most widely-read reader of his books and stories, as the above link attests. And I am pleased to say that this work about the Society of Golden Dustmen is one of his most effulgent, richly textured and darkly pervasive texts, with intriguing seams of layered history cross-sectioning, inter alia, the area of the City of London near Cheapside where I used to work in the early 1970s. And it feels real to me.
        It is so richly textured it seems to be the most intense apotheosis of Arthur Machen’s ‘Fragment of Life’, of MR James’ academic conspiracies of ghost-hunting (here to the potential detriment of a young woman student’s synchronous layered heritage as well as to the vulnerability of her person itself), of a Lovecraftian seething such as an “anonymous tide of the London crowd”, of the London history-fiction of Peter Ackroyd and of a unique Colin Insole quality that unswervingly and admirably stares at its own rich texture of history and wonder, staring at it perhaps to the detriment of characterisation as it relentlessly builds up a constructively curdled plot that mesmerically and obsessively carries such layers of myth, dream and inferred dark splendour.
        The young woman also has an adjacent-room neighbour, as Reggie’s earlier protagonist had such neighbours, too….
        “Ring finger, blue bell,
        Tell a lie and go to Hell.”
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      7. CANTICLE by Daniel Mills (& HERE)
        “They pus.”
        This is a Canticle indeed, one of Christianity, rapture as capture, with its gift of suffering, confession, crucifixion et al, a text that is almost an Eucharist where you can taste the blood upon white hands, seen through the eyes of a narrator who is both crucified and wed, blending a childhood home with a prison or seminary or convent, a backstory that’s striped with glorious pain and loss and incantatory refrains of Complin, Vespers, Sext etc.
        “…crushed by the weight of his own body which was heavier than any cross. […] Nine months have passed in this way,….”
        I sense this whole book will be an unlikely gathering of cross-bred neighbours as I eventually come to meet them. I am still due to receive the harder black-covered version of this book as a foil to this Yellow one of strikingly staged exorcism and young nuns.
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      8. WHITE LIGHT, WHITE HEAT by Adam L. G. Nevill
        “…and where love eternal burned like the middle of a star,…”
        Having recently reviewed a novel by this author, I expected great things of this substantive story, especially as it also appeared to be substantive when I simply saw it sitting on the page before I read it. But I had no clue whatsoever as to how truly great it was to become, having just finished reading it. THIS IS A MAJOR WORK OF WEIRD LITERATURE, there can be no doubt. It flows with some absolute incontrovertible destiny, reflecting but frankly outdoing any Ligottian Corporate horror, both in that genre’s huckster hoaxing as well as a serious treatment of the lot of the worker and his bosses and cynical goals and propensity to despair. This is the darkest but also the most constructively absurd apotheosis of that nightmare of an existence that many of us have experienced for real in such corporations. Here we have the striking new concept of Nevill’s take on this scenario, a corporation publishing fiction…!
        With the most nightmarish vision of corporate bosses I have ever read, plus all the satirical aspects of such corporate tyranny now made into a nightmare here of censorship and false exegesis. The concept of the white envelope, the Reliquary of Light factored into this from a Father of the Catholic Church, this book’s already running theme of neighbours living either side of thin walls except here the thin walls attenuate seedily even more, a wind farm on a sea’s horizon as some oblique ‘objective correlative’, and much more. I could continue quoting passage after passage from this work to prove my point, each passage outdoing the previous passage as one progresses through this indubitably inspired work. It must have been written in an epiphany of creation that most of us will never reach. Read it and see.
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      9. THE BLACK MASS by Justin Isis (& HERE& HERE)
        “–and living philosophies competing for primacy, vandal stains and art globs.”
        I found myself often compulsively fingering the large, wobbly, seemingly autonomous, sebaceous-cyst on the back of my neck, from which I have been suffering for a month or two as it hopefully ripens towards operability, while I absorbed this page-turning black-mould blockbuster of a weird adventure thrilling novella about Mark Samuels in Japan fighting all manner of foes and of plagues, blights and masses of carpeted goo and suppurating muck. It demonstrates the already generally extolled writing talent of Isis as a living state to extrapolate body horror and seething Lovecraftian concupiscence and subsumption as well as tapping here into the Samuels fiction canon itself, the fiction of, say, cigarettes and inimical TV transmissions taking over your mind with static, while transmitting Borges’ Aleph and the Human Communion, and creating a new character named Mark Samuels in a believable Japan where that country’s dolly birds, inter alios, treat his weird fiction as a popular cult, but a Mark Samuels, despite the differences of caricature and extrapolation, who we can believe is actually the real Samuels with the faith of Catholicism and puckish bravery — together with in-jokes, cameo appearances by other real writers, and crafted adaptations of Samuels fiction themes, as well as Isis’s own inbuilt stuff of creation that surely boggles more than just my cyst, but boggles the reading brain itself. You will know what I mean when you read it. This is stuff that those who love cosmic horror fiction, with all its gaudy effrontery and daring, will love even more. And there is a lot more to love in the plot, too. It reaches beyond the humour of Tuckerisation, but you will often find it amusing. With more than just an edge of genuine disturbing discomfort as well as sublime awe.
        [The article Samuels wrote about me in 1989 for the Dagon DFL special was about his visit to my wife and I for a cup of tea, an article entitled ‘Brewing Up With Des Lewis’. Here in this novella he visits someone else for a cup of tea, someone far more dire than I am or think I am! And my earlier likening of the book’s front cover to the old-fashioned British TV Test Card of yore was, I now believe, surely intended by the book’s production team and not just a quirky observation on my part.]
        Reply

      10. THE BIG-HEADED PEOPLE by DF Lewis
        “Nobbut middling,…”
        My extrapolative take on Samuels’ ‘The Tower’, together with a smidgeon of my own story ‘The Tallest King’ that, back in the day, he publicly said he enjoyed.
        My middle name is Francis. And it is also the middle name of Mark Francis Samuels.
        Reply

        • I remember having no intention to echo ‘The Tallest King’ in ‘The Big-Headed People’, but upon re-reading it yesterday for this review, I noticed, in hindsight, a very vague resemblance in both their endings. You can hear me read aloud ‘The Tallest King’ here: https://dc2.safesync.com/FJrmYtd/sound/DSS_FLDB/VN650108.WMA?a=c5hMgrilos4…
          it was first published in ‘Cerebretron’ in 1988 and reprinted in the Prime Books collection: ‘Weirdmonger’ in 2003. This is what Mark Samuels wrote about it in the next issue of ‘Cerebretron’ in 1989:“The highlight of the issue was undeniably Des Lewis’ beautiful little story, ‘The Tallest King’. A wonderful faerie-tale told in perfectly child-like manner, and singing with the glory of descriptive prose. Really delightful.”
          Reply


      12. ATTRACTION by John Mundy
        “Black masses became elongated figures like stick caricatures…”
        An impressively pungent death-bed scene, as an old man with his family around him (including the narrator, his adoptee son) speaks his last messages and eschatological ambitions. Highly atmospheric with a shockingly telling ending that will haunt you, including memories of the characterful interactions of acrimony, greed and jealousy that are adeptly conjured by the text.
        “It was after the sounds had ceased that I lit a cigarette and smoked it,…”
        [You will not believe this, but it is absolutely true (speak to my wife, if need be), but earlier this morning my object of neck ailment I mentioned in connection with ‘The Black Mass’ above actually burst gorily onto the pillow. I have been to the GP since then to check it out…
        Imagine my additional shock when reading the Mundy story since then.]
        Reply

      13. THE EARLY SIGNS OF BLIGHT by Kristine Ong Muslim
        “the bad man’s rot seeping in”
        A very intriguing take upon OCD, even the synaesthesia of paper publications themselves, a shared OCD between a mother and her son, the latter haunted (and thus haunting us) by a recurrent bad man in the closet of childhood’s Pooh lamplit bedroom… Their backstory, even in this relatively brief text, we gradually learn to learn about amid a hypothesis of chaos theory behind it that makes this story linger on with us.
        Reply

      14. CHAOSKAMPF
        translated by James Champagne
        II.
        Information Overload Unit
        “…the better to tempt (and maim) unsuspecting Muslim children.”
        “…a symbolic enactment of the eternal battle between Order and Chaos,…”
        With intriguing oblique connections to the previous story, like neighbours who have not yet met, this is the first section of ‘Chaoskampf’, a novella, a genuinely compelling, stylish and well-characterised account of a Russian captain of a submarine on a secret mission to find special weapons from the Third Reich. Secret to the Captain and those he trusts to tell. It takes place at the time of Glasnost and Perestroika at the tail end of the Cold War. This tranche of history, the interface of cultures about to blend fully, is very well conveyed, and I found it all fascinating. The Captain, for example, listens to The Smiths on his Walkman and has an IBM computer. There is a pleasing tinge of Pynchon to this text. And its many literary references (including Machen and Cioran) are richly textured, and the Captain’s backstory is highly poignant with a father who was persecuted by the State for his Christianity and the Captain’s Christian, Chagall-loving wife was tragically killed by investigating Chernobyl’s ‘eye of the gorgon’… There is much else I could describe here, and if the rest of the novella fulfils the promise of what I have already read, then this will surely be another classic.
        Reply

      15. III
        Sigmoid Colon
        “‘A cigarette! Of course I have a cigarette,’ Captain Karnov said as he reached into the pocket of his military uniform and pulled out a cigarette. ‘The question is, do you have a lighter?'”
        Reply

      16. IV
        There is a Light That Never Goes Out
        “…and at that moment Boris was truly in disarray, what with his hair being a mess…”
        Having now read III and IV, I defy any reviewer to say anything whatsoever about them without spoiling the whole of ‘Chaoskampf’.
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      18. A BAD UN TO BEAT VS. THE HIGHGATE WATERMAN:
        IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS
        by Brendan Connell and Quentin S. Crisp
        “You are always the first point in the baseline from which you triangulate.”
        Some may triangulate the coordinates of this work as the Brexit of Literature.
        A patchwork of in-jokes and a number of genuinely great passages of visionary wonder and the Catholic Cathrianism of Cathars.
        As this book is looking more and more like it has deliberately marked its reader to die more than anyone else in it – as well as being the literary version of the earlier mention by Champagne of a ‘doll bomb’ – this particular story with a nonsensical title is the crucial component that needs the careful attention of an experienced dreamcatcher like me. My bomb disposal work has already begun by triggering this story’s “vape-stick” to replace the various references in it to Markitty’s tobacco, but leaving the various brands of beer – and the famous weird writers who once drunk them in the various pubs now haunted by Markitty – to hopefully continue fermenting. The convoluted footnote-looping of references to ‘Marked to Die’-type Tribute Fiction Collections are, meanwhile, worth preserving. What has been good enough for the More Dark man is surely good enough for the Mark man.
        [I suspect the wonderful passages read aloud in this story by Q-bon from an iPhone were written by Markitty himself.]
        Reply

      19. imageLANGUAGE OF THE CITY by Thana Niveau
        “But then I began to see other things. Like the mould.”
        That Markian mould again, as both shape and rot. I can’t do it proper justice here but indeed it is an accretive story, dealing with the woman narrator’s phobia of all cities as prehensile entities, cities and their description here taking forms that more and more place the effective palimpsest of Markian tropes upon you like a growing Markian mould of words upon us, cities and computers, a husband’s death, more rot, language, patterns and codes, and the cities themselves striating through her, cross-sectioning in various layers. Or levels. Layering a reconstruction or deconstruction of a womanly self and levelling out that mould into a shape as well as rot. A ‘niveau’ is another word for ‘level’.
        Marked to that level.
        Reply

      20. image
        THE SINGULAR QUIDDITY OF MERLIN’S EAR by Simon Clark
        “Perhaps it was his belief that angels reflected his thoughts back at him,…”
        This is a uniquely striking, if engagingly old-fashioned, narrative of a story as story. Neat, page-turning, provocative, plainly well-written, sown with original plot ideas and characterisations that are successfully harvested in its disturbingly perfect denouement.
        It believably reminded me at first of narrowboat holidays on the canals that I once enjoyed, particularly one when a fellow traveller accidentally dropped something valuable into the cold black water…. Here the narrowboat is called Miss Sally, which made me think of this being a mis-sallying forth? Which effectively it is, to investigate the giant concrete ear that was once used as a weapon or at least a propaganda weapon against the Nazi bombers during the Second World War – providing an oblique comparison with the secret Nazi weapon sought by the protagonist in the Champagne story.
        The relationship of the protagonist with his new wife and her young son who is dumb, the collusive use of their phone texts, the eclectic sonar triangulations of magnified sound, the purr of moth wings or more abrasive mosquitos as a nuance for Spitfires, you should be ‘transported’ by this haunting narrative in a heartbeat.
        “The domain of miracles.”
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      21. THE CARNIVORE OF MONSTERS by Stuart Young
        This novelette FEELS as if it was written in a state of inspiration and white heat as much as the Nevill work did earlier. This Stuart Young work is another experience that is certainly alone worth buying this book for. It does not share the writerly perfection of the Nevill text that evolves a shattering Ligottian vision taken to the apotheosis of a Corporate Business of fiction books themselves (now turned to permeating pages into the healing of body as created by Stuart Young), but in many ways the Young work takes its inspiration to new levels of deconstructive constructiveness, so I am duly giving it the relatively rare honour of placing this novelette in my increasingly renowned Dysfunction Room HERE and I shall do that as soon as I have completed writing this review of it.
        And not White Heat so much as Black Heat, with the first person narrative of a black man, with his back story from age 15, his sexual drives, his nightmares as truth and fiction, his multiverse theories of singularity, his St Pancras and Diocletian preaching for Markitty, his being implanted with St Pancras cancer, or is that a misremembered typo on my part? The surgeon with the upside down face, the girl friend a version of whom he once hoped was a paedophile nurse when he was in hospital, the interconnected cure for his cancer with a language of cities tessellating from the Niveau work (“Waves of energy radiating out, wafting over me, layered a three-dimensional model of my surroundings…”and “Then his body absorbs the pages, they spiral down to the whirlpool at his centre…”) via a pattern of coded mobile phones that he needs to find and use to fight his cancer, by stalking people through London and elsewhere for their phones … and in tune with the collusive mobilephone texts from the Clark work…(“The Endless Knights sit at their round table in an infinite loop of chivalry;”) … the Q-bon iPhone story from Markitty…
        “…white moths wrestling with a shadow.” Tumours as body rumours? Changing realities to one where we never had cancer. I just retrieved all my old mobile phones for myself in a more personal context, having finished reading this novelette a few minutes ago.
        And a retrocausal Brexit, too: “If you live by a different set of boundaries to those around you, there’s going to be a point where things get nasty. The balance of power shifts; either you gain control as new boundaries are established to accommodate you or else those around you work harder to enforce the old boundaries. And in protecting one boundary, one sacred truth, it is all too easy to destroy another.”
        “Even the monsters are scared.”
        “I sneeze out an opera composed of tastes and textures of foods that only exist in the dreams of beings who were never born.”
        “I need to find a way to end this.”
        image
        Reply

      22. THE MEN WITH PAPER FACES by John Llewellyn Probert
        “My name’s Sally. I’m one of the nurses here,…”
        With the upside down face of the earlier surgeon, and the memory of this book’s earlier mis-sallying Clark and Young plots (the latter also containing paper subsumption), we have here a strikingly in-your-face horror tale that, in a mutant form of Cardiff, is an enjoyable Dr Who type plot of alien encroachment, plus an accretive bodily and city-wide ramshackleness and mis-triangulated coordinates. It also has a genuine terrifying ending as the narrator discovers his wife in this environment of displacement. It is also arguably (in fact, genuinely, in my view) a strong metaphor of the outcome of Brexit in the UK of recent days. Just check it out sentence by sentence and you will agree, I am sure, that this text’s uncanny prescience of the “two different species” of ourselves, and much more in this plot that is relevant, ties in with my assessment of Probert’s story as a fable of unpredictably significant events that have happened since it was written and published. Also a very engaging story in itself.
        “Our world is not just falling apart, but is actively being taken to pieces. For what purpose I cannot say, except that it suits their needs.”
        Reply

      23. EMPTY HOUSES by Ralph C. Doege
        “I looked at the bottom of my glass for an exit,…”
        I look through the words on the page for the reader’s own exit, a let out clause, as I follow this narrator at different ages, different back-stories, some tranches of such stories having the narrative ‘I’ as a forward slash within italics, with each part of his life – rituals, and girls, and parents – overlapping with another part, and, within such overlapping, a sort of plagiarism by his life of things he has read like a specific story by Samuels. I am still in there trying to get out. Through a glass darkly. Flow my tears, the policeman said.
        Reply

      24. REINFORMATION THEORY by Yarrow Paisley
        ”¡Jum!”
        This serendipitously carries on the jumble of the Doege identity conundrum, and the prevailing language of chaos theory in Champagne, Muslim, Connell-Crisp, Niveau, Young, Isis….
        Age and health being a great leveller in dulling the need for humans to act with animal lust, here the health and age are replaced by being coded within such jumbled cybernetics, penis and pudenda as wielded in mirrors watched by a Janitor with a mop, and dreams and loops like earlier Tribute Collection footnote loops (here: “Thus effect is self-causing, cause self-effecting.”), a woven Paisley ‘whole cloth’ imageas a series of incantatory prose refrains as the Director of the Institute inspects ‘me’, whoever I am, with that member or other organ wielder in the mirror. The climax of this story is, for me, another metaphor for current times that have occurred since the story was written and published, Jumbo Johnson, fresh from his mirror, taking over the whole outfit from Come Cameron. Read it and and see. It really is. Perhaps it will have the effect of its own cause by stopping such an event happening at all. Trumping it, in other words, as we can only hope. The ultimate REINFORMATION.
        Reply

      25. PRISION INQUIETA by Jon Paul Rai
        “‘Dwoiinggig’ rang in his ears in an endless loop.”
        I suspect, by dint of subsequent page headings, that the title might be PRISON INQUIETA, except ‘prisión’ is Spanish for ‘prison’ and this word , anyway, gives a feel of knowledge as comprision, an unquiet knowledge, here leading to ‘noises’ as of some arcane or Catholic sodality. The plot itself is one of a man called Jasen becoming lost from his group in the jungle and arriving at a rudimentary Prison, where its knowledge is by watching decrepit humans being whipped and slaughtered. The scenario entails a lake and I am strongly reminded of Clark’s MERLIN’S EAR situated on a lake, also unquiet, with magnified noises, here with the addition of ‘light’… A telling resonance. The ‘dwoiinggig’ bell tolls for me, Hemingway, but more like Graham Greene…?
        The disturbing knowledge of human religious compromise or comprision details the use of a Zippo lighter for cigarettes that the prison-keepers as well as Jasen smoke. Tobacco, the new ‘reeking’, wrecking incense. No compromise at all in such faith. Inquisition or holy sacrifice? A teasing tale.
        Reply

      26. SLAG GLASS LACHRIMÆ by David Rix
        “Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between a miracle and a horror story.”
        Let me take this novella step by step, hopefully without releasing plot spoilers. Again, like the Nevill and the Young works, this Rix work shines with a driving Inspiration. Here the language is plainer, but nonetheless just as powerful, as it is that truly black heat, now, not white, that somehow shines through the Rix text. It is sometimes like an old-fashioned children’s book such as the Famous Five seeking out mysteries with torches, but here we are dealing with two well-characterised twenty-something women in that role, sometimes using nudity in a sort of Paisley mirror as well as sharing young adult adventures of discovery, and triangulating coordinates in a stream of clues as well as along the vast Thames itself within a London of ley-lines, of Sinclair, Ackroyd and Insole, but also within a London of a housing crisis where offbeat creative people find it hard to survive.
        Starting and ending with a Diver art installation in the Thames, amid squealing trains and squealing drills to carve jewellery from mysterious black shards of glass found on a distant explored bank of that river, a magnified sound as if Clark’s Ear as another art installation and Narrowboats have travelled here to meet the Narrowboats and canals of this novella.
        Imbued with books as “paper dreamlands”, including a specific book by Samuels that is a wonder and awe to read about here…
        The carved black jewels as ‘black tears’. I wonder if the author realises that ‘Amelia’ by Samuels was published in a magazine with the name of Black Tears in 1994, and that story turned out in hindsight to be the first draft of ‘The White Hands’.
        A series of Crying Rooms scattered about London, so deeply poignant as catharsis-points. “A sense of almost sacred sadness…” You will not forget the outcome for one of these two believable women, as a result. Nor will you forget the exploration of the nature of Weird Tales and Horror Stories, especially in books, those paper faces of hope as well as despair. There are many sublime and jagged moments in this novella. It may be an acquired taste for people-like-us but it also may be significant to the reading world at large. I have no idea. The shards and geodes of Rix. The smouldering visionariness of Samuels.
        “Out of nowhere a hand appeared bearing a lighted cigarette, which was coolly stubbed out on the small band of white skin between her top and trousers.”
        Reply

      27. CODA: A VIEW FROM OUTSIDE
        “…now there persisted only a black and white blast of static,…”
        …as well as of inspiration that prevails.
        Since 2008, when I started real-time reviewing books with, as it happened, a Samuels collection, I have often finished my reviews by dealing with each book’s last work as a coda to a symphony of words. That decision has here been taken out of my hands with this stark existential work of a mind in a space pod and a next phase of consciousness implied beyond such despair of death…
        I am myself that big-headed ‘phase’, that ‘view from outside’.
        end
        Reply


       

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        Fates of the Animals – Padrika Tarrant

        June 29, 2016, 1:02 am
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        47 thoughts on “Fates of the Animals – Padrika Tarrant”

        1. THE MUSIC OF THE FOXES
          “Now the clipping of a fox’s claws is a lovely thing,…”
          The first of what appears to be many vignettes. The language and the evocation are hand in glove. A special language with its own unique quality that no review can reconvey. Clipped poetics then smoothed out like a magic trick, I loved the bit where the vixen walks a zebra crossing.
          Reply

        2. THE HYACINTH GIRL
          “The burningness of drowning; the cough and cough and cough of it.”
          I have only read two of these rhapsodic vignettes and I can already tell they are something extremely special. Rarefied and yearning. This is the unrequited stance of the hyacinth girl herself, and with her eyes never shutting this is the perfect contrast with another vignette called ‘Closed Eyelids’, I read elsewhere a few minutes ago, and also reviewed. As regular readers of my Dreamcatchers will know, I am a passionate but passive absorber of synchronicity and serendipity in literature!
          Reply

        3. BARKING
          From the recurring coughs of drowning, we now reach the relentless barking of a dog…here not only an anguished description via the already dependable expression of strikingly poignant synaesthesia from this author, but also an echo of stories told to me by someone I know who very recently had to live next door to a dog regularly left alone, suffering the sound of its similar sounding suffering, a situation that was eventually resolved as satisfactorily as possible, but one that was in hindsight a haunting metaphor beyond life’s surface meaning, beyond God Himself.
          Reply

        4. THE LITTLE BOY WHO LIED
          “dry as bibles”
          He is snapped for snapping….and his snap then mounted with sticky corners, I guess.
          Another clipped poetic is delightfully full of words like cracks, pricking, slick, snapped, break, shattered, ripped, shorn, crackle, grate, sharp, edges.
          Like a spiky nursery rhyme in prose.
          Reply

        5. HOW THE DOG LOST HIS WINGS
          “Below the dog, the petty affairs of men and creatures,…”
          I was wondering whether it is significant that ‘dog’ is God backwards, especially, here, when God later stitches back a rabbit that dog tore into rags.
          This book, so far, is an accomplished vision of the ribbons of reality, sliced, then examined by prose poetics, “weightless as razors.”
          Reply


        7. THE UPSTART
          “; it was the devil of a job, what with the craning of the big hand and the quivering excitement of the little one,”
          A provocatively amusing fable where God is depicted as a sort of boozy Heath Robinson, whereby any chance creations (the one here is brilliantly characterised) are, I infer, naturally selected (my expression, not the fable’s) by the more intended creations known as ‘beasts of the field.’
          Reply

        8. THE HOUSE WARMING
          “They pretended to be God;”
          God now as a Heath Robinson effectively hatching out filial offshoots like lanky angels grown overnight from boy babies in a box given him by a goatish Satan…
          This stopped me in my tracks. This is, after all, not a literary poetic book alone, as I had assumed, but it is also representative of the type of absurdist or horrific stories I often read … as if whatever books I instinctively pick up defiantly hatch out into ones I NEED to read.
          Reply

        9. image
          PIGEONS IN THE TIME OF PANIC
          But this is Norwich, not Paris, I guess – a striking vision of pigeons around a giant rocking horse in Anglia Square and vandal fire, that may not be Norwich today. I remember as a child a slowly twirling knight on a horse with a flag saying Anglia…
          Reply

        10. FLYING
          “God’s forgiveness was raining through the roof, dry as a sucked hymn book…”
          These texts have some of the most wonderful turns of phrase. This one is a sense of a boy’s out-of-body experience in tune with a lost or dead pigeon now found flight again, and, also in tune with the previous text, soaring above the headmaster with his arms outstretched like an umbrellas while he scolds the pupils at Assembly. Well characterised and full of more sharp things and coughing.
          Reply

        11. DOG’S NIGHTMARE I
          “…but in his dream, dog was as vile as a monster.”
          That is his own dream…
          When I started this book, I didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t expect a work that matches and equals the type of hyper-literature to which you are accustomed being cohered by me hopefully into a gestalt from its various leitmotifs. I still do not know where this particular gestalt is heading, but the above vignette constructively reminds me of Paul Meloy‘s work.
          Reply

        12. HUNGRY
          “…the test card girl smiling secretly with her clown.”
          ….knowing that birth and death are voracious, and reincarnation, too, monstrously on both sides of the fridge door.
          Archie (Andrews) was not a clown but a ventriloquist dummy…. That is, probably unintentionally, relevant to this memorable vignette.
          Reply

        13. AFTER IT RAINED
          “God’s kitchen was growing vague with smoke. In time, a whiff of fire came crawling out of the cremated beans, ran its tongue along the greasy workshop, and sidled up to the oven glove.”
          Rag tag and dogtail after the deluge, from an ark with a bark, I guess. Escapist God despairs at what he can’t control…
          This chaotic fable with no moral in sight.
          Reply

        14. INFESTATION
          “The garden was as lush as cancer,…”
          An effectively disturbing vignette of Rebecca and her mother subjected to an exponentially accretive plague of scissors. This book’s sharp things again. Like Meloy crocodiles?
          Reply

        15. LOST
          “I tried to remember what she looked like, how she had been.”
          For me, an intensely poignant, and currently perfect thing to read, bearing in mind my own maternal bereavement a week or two ago. I can’t pretend to know how, but since that event the normal course of my pre-listed and simultaneous real-time book reviews have been full of such a loss.
          Reply

        16. MEAT
          “Tenderly coaxed by knives,…”
          Meat in the opposite direction of this review’s gathering of a living gestalt from leitmotifs, meat being cut into separate living pieces, more living than the original animal whence they’re cut.
          As gloriously gory as this book CREEPING WAVES recently reviewed, a book that resembles FATES OF THE ANIMALS by dint of its rare methods if not by its intrinsic subject-matter.
          Reply



        19. ANGELS
          If you have ever thought about the nature of angels, then you should read this.
          Suddenly, as a child, growing out of Santa Claus is an experience that diminishes to nothing in comparison to this remarkable low-down on Angels.
          Fates of Angels.
          Reply

        20. DOG FINDS OUT WHERE KNIVES COME FROM
          A couple of paragraphs that evocatively chime with one of the main leitmotifs of this book. The title also chimes with my comments yesterday about the cruel nature of growing up when discovering Santa Claus does not exist – or the place where babies come from?
          Reply

        21. COLLISION
          A truly striking visit to Starbucks.
          And the nature of madness from within or from without?
          As a brief encounter or a long memory of a brief encounter.
          Waiting for the next pigeon post piggy-backed by a gull?
          Reply


        23. THE GUILTY
          “He has a hangnail; he puts his cup down with a slop and he digs his teeth at it, catches the edge in his mouth and rips it away. A small bubble of blood gathers at the quick…”
          The quick and the dead?
          A rook is a trusty tester of guilt and knows what he has done, whom he has killed.
          A ‘padrika’ in a parallel universe is a word for that type of hangnail, I suggest.
          Reply


        25. DE LA VIANDE
          “There was a tiny intake of collective breath as the lid was lifted.”
          Imagine a meal brought in by a chef, one that is worthy of applause. And a surprised gasp, too.
          I feel much the same about this ‘De La Viande’ section itself.
          Reply

        26. THE DISAPPEARING
          “My daughter slipped through my life like a ghost, like the half-seen reflection of some other child.”
          A daughter named Victoria.
          A slipping through, too, like a hot spoon through lard or forks of water streaking the window?
          This is exquisite material, and ends with locks being pecked out.
          It is tantalisingly difficult to form a gestalt from this book so far, because each section as you read it tends to make the others become part of their own form of The Disappearing in evanescence,
          Reply

        27. MAGPIE FALLS IN LOVE
          “So he rummaged through his own left wing, felt the quills as sharp as drinking straws,…”
          I think it should be an owl that woos, but here a magpie woos the beautiful young girl, a sad, eventually hopeless, unrequitedness of love, till a tweet tweet breaks the self-mutilated silence.
          Reply




        31. THE BLACK WOOD
          A very touching vision of inside a large Tesco supermarket in the small hours of the morning, a sense of responsibility for the till girl. A black wood with crows that it becomes around the various shelves of food. It is a staggering vision to read. This book gets better and better – if that were possible.
          Reply

        32. GONE
          A truly devastating portrait of a daughter as imaginary companion or imp of the perverse to her mother OR the mother has Alzheimer’s thus making both or one of them effectively FEEL imaginary.
          Dog or TV, notwithstanding.
          Reply



        35. SUFFOCATE
          “The lino in the kitchen was hard; I felt safer there.”
          A vivid account of sinking into everything.
          A compelling book is often said to to build and build – this one is also compelling by appearing somehow to unbuild and unbuild.
          Reply

        36. SOME LAST REQUESTS
          “Let’s go all avant-garde!”
          Imagine death of oneself as an extrapolated corpse of a magpie?
          Perhaps this is the turning-point where the book starts building again instead of unbuilding?
          Reply




        40. THE OPPOSITE OF FALLING
          The suitcase man as a symbol of today’s Brexit.
          “It has been filled to its oblong skin with metal things: knives and forks, bagsful of nuts and bolts. […] It is, was, ballast, it tethered him to the ground like the opposites of wings. Now he is ready to die, to lift forever from the earth, to find the place where even the angels would suffocate,…”
          Reply

        41. PIGLET
          “His rockers are broken. He does not mind.”
          Of more substantive size, this alternating, rocking to and fro of dual eras, surrounding the extraction of a lilac, deserves at least consideration for best short story of 2015.
          Dual fates, too,
          Reply

        42. THREE CHILDREN ARE MENACED BY A NIGHTINGALE (AFTER ERNST)
          image
          A menacing story of nightingales taking the ‘singingness’ of our children to give to their own young. Before Ernst, with a chicken twist and a palimpsest of sound.
          Reply

        43. AT THE SHOW TRIAL
          “The blue deer stretches out his voice at the air between the branches, wet as blackness, thinner than thinking. Hummingbirds flit like wild ideas, counter-notes to the sky’s gigantic pulse.”
          If you think that is a truly great opening to a vignette, imagine what it is like when the whole vignette builds and builds beyond that.
          Reply

        44. WINTER AT HOME
          A very moving piece, especially for me perhaps because I lost my mother while reading this book.
          It is also the fructification and desiccation by sharp things, here the combined harvesting of icicles and eternal hibernation by ice, paradoxically blended, as the produce of my own approaching winter at home.
          Reply

        45. HOLIDAY
          “Rosa stood back and gazed upon the face of God. His great cropped head was prickly with hair the colour of fibreglass."
          Sounds like me!
          This the story of God’s cleaner named Rosa, the cleaner with Dyson of God’s house outside of which there are are always pickets. Sounds like a metaphor for today in Brexit Britain – a land founded while I have been reading this remarkable book.
          Sounds, too, like a ‘dying fall’ coda for the whole symphony of words. A holiday as an ending.
          God, Dog, Pigeons, sharp cutlery, provocative visions in a startlingly unique poetic style that is literally unmissable, because if you miss it you are no longer you. And more.
          And, oh yes, Angels one of whom eventually the cleaner herself becomes, no longer Sub Rosa.
          Sounds like phonemes and morphemes clicking and clacking on a Van Gogh roof.
          end
          Reply

                 
         
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        ↧

        Alcebiades Diniz Miguel

        June 30, 2016, 1:23 am
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        Lanterns of the Old Night

         
         
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        18 thoughts on “Lanterns of the Old Night”

        1. LOTON

          Dedication includes “THESE FLEETING SHARDS OF LIGHT AND SHADOW”
          Luxuriously upholstered book with quality materials, 46 pages, plus two pull-out pages, flame-coloured marker ribbon, all generously designed with much artwork etc, dust jacket, embossed hardback cover and amber endpapers. Gorgeous.
          Reply
        2. divine buildings
          (Pull-out page of print)
          “With his whip of fine goat leather in hand, he welcomed his wives with a devastating series of well-aimed blows.”
          A pre-deluge scene of cruelty to women and animals, including an inadvertent ark…
          Is this the book’s ironic welcome to all social justice warriors or just another initial pull-out page we can all ignore as I did with that in this publisher’s previous published book called ‘Conflagration’ (also with a flame-coloured marker-ribbon)?
          Reply
        3. LUNAR EMPIRE
          “The poison, suitable for suicides such as himself, might be transmuted into a convenient tool for scrying.”
          A suicide that would matter, as he matters, both as private and notable public figure, as he cerebrally wanders, entrancingly for us, through the ‘velleities’ of his past impulses of thought and action, all knotted up in that single action subsuming all other actions and as preserved by this book as well as framed for posterity in the place where this book has him about to end what he once was, or still is, by virtue of this text in which he is tantamount to embodied. The poison his black mirror of scrying, like my take on another black mirror here and in ‘Music for Chameleons’.
          His moon, my moon here.
          Reply
        4. SOME DEAD RATS
          I
          “…the ancient art of memory — now as useless as a desk ornament -–”
          A resplendent feast, its preening host, its suffered poet-bard – and an outcome of events that is a highly intriguing treatment regarding the nature of retrocausal revenge and foreshadowed fate, as well as memory as a map of BOTH retrocausal and foreshadowed truths and lies as part of that treatment.
          Reply
        5. II
          “The tar that had surrounded me retreated beyond the bed to the window,…”
          A strikingly disturbing description by a man waking into the metamorphosis of illness, vulnerably in others’ hands such as those of his wife and doctor.
          I can’t help but treat this as a symbol of my own future treatment.
          Reply
        6. III
          “But the teachings of the divine ‘Tullius’, though a pagan, consubstantiated the teachings of the Church.”
          This portrait of Albertus Magnus and his scholarly (perhaps mis-triangulated) exegesis of the work of Cicero involves a strikingly described Hellish vision in the cathedral. The whole tenor of this piece minds me of the dreamcatching processes of Null Immortalis, a name that contains both Tullis and Tullius. The gestalt of bad and good.
          Reply
        7. IV
          “My life was lived as if in the waters of an aquarium,…”
          A text that adeptly FEELS, like in II, as if one is in that situation, having been treated for an illness and put away somewhere by a loved one, feeling older than one remembers ever feeling before, where the other inhabitants of the aquarium or a slow motion film are famous fiction books that you once happened to dreamcatch – like this one is due to become?
          Reply
        9. VI
          “But despite this repetition of actions, which my body still sensed…”
          …this recurrence of historic figures and the dying old man, a musical dying-fall vision or the ability to Dreamcatch given to me by Dreamcatchable books like this book, by this patchwork of episodes entitled ‘Some Dead Rats’. I shall remember its fortifications of self when, I too, (very soon!) live life in my own ‘suffocating darkness’ of being nursed towards death.
          As well as even the rats that have the right to live, my rationalisations, too?
          Reply
        10. THE AGE OF ICE AND GOLD AND MUD
          image.png
          “Thus the intent of the Romanian explorer and his associates was clear, they needed to include the dead bodies in their photos that they might serve as precious hunting trophies displayed as a proof of victory over primitive evil.”
          A 17th century Callot that I once had in a book as a child and which I then studied in awe, depicting the hanged ‘fruits’ here used as extrapolative metaphor for a weapon of natural selection and missionarisation and colonisation and exploitation…
          The study of the above picture as a child was like that of my study of a painting I happened to have on my boyhood bedroom wall: The Boyhood of SIr Walter Raleigh (https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/boyhood/) by Millais.
          I similarly point towards the horizon of this well-crafted text and say: find what you will in it and use it for yourself. Listen not to me.
          Reply
        11. THE DEVIL, ALMOST
          I
          “…the scene was silent as if the couple was trapped inside of an aquarium.”
          An intriguing historic portrait of a film projector as illusionist, ‘metteur en scène’ … or Devil? Almost an act of self-harm as well as harm to the gullibles whom the projector tricks into making real their make believe.
          I keep my own powder dry as to the the rest of this work yet to be read, a text as a trick also, no doubt, that I am spreading over days to prevent its own spreading and to slow down the shuttling of its words into my eyes, to trip up the trick of their becoming too real.
          Reply
        12. II
          A strikingly adept portrait of the effect of a magic lantern’s moving images upon its critics, involving Jesuits – which in turn had an effect on the moving images themselves.
          A virtuous and vicious loop that occurs even now and perpetuated, but also transcended, by this text and by the magic lantern I am using to write my review of it.
          A fascinating character study, too, of the projected as well as historical illusionist himself, the one who sits within me, guiding my fingers even now as I write about the image of him conjured by the text that created him or was created by him – or by or in the name of the author on the spine? A light and dark lantern, by turns. Old and new. Day and night.
          Reply
        13. A shame that all of us look too closely at a text that appears to mirror not our demise — which will be invisible to us — but the events, the treatments, that leap at us in such a present knowing way that disturbs what the author might have been intending to say and that makes us hear somber notes among whatever the music is. We should really rejoice in the song and listen for whatever music we can hear in the present, not the imagination of what may or may not be coming. Sing!
          Reply
        14. …agreed, Harold, and indeed the current work has that very resonance embodied in its‘The Devil, Almost’ title.
          Death is always almost.
          III
          And thus this story’s illusionist or magic-lanternist furthers his art…
          “He wanted to add a touch of fear to the spectacle, the kind of effect that lent realism to the best tricks of the stage. He searched his memory for material, thinking back upon the most terrifying and distasteful events in his life;”
          And that touch turns out to be a striking passage in this book about a dog and a boy that, for me, amazingly and mutually echoes, complements and supplements a book I have been reading for the last two months and real-time reviewing here (and finished about an hour ago) – FATES OF ANIMALS, Dog as God &c. &c.
          Reply
        15. Death is always almost. Has been and always will be.
          “I similarly point towards the horizon of this well-crafted text and say: find what you will in it and use it for yourself. Listen not to me.”
          One more story or work to read.
          Reply
        17. cropped-sv2-23
          THE EXTINCTION HYMNBOOK
          “The ecstasy of killing, once triggered, can hardly be interrupted by the process of reason.”
          And ‘killing’ is not the only thing.
          ‘The Extinction Hymnbook’ is a mighty visionary work, believe me, the apotheosis of ‘The King in Yellow’ and Byron’s ‘Darkness’ poem.
          As well as a lantern’s repetitive (“our destiny is repetition”) projection of ‘once hope’, I guess, a version of my own ‘dead monument of once ancient hope’ and the monument above I photographed in 2008. It is also the ‘almost death’ threaded through this whole still meaningfully and meaninglessly growing book, its magic lantern stilled, a perfect storm of stasis as white or black static. The old man, like me, held in a rhapsody of dreamcatching purgatory with great books like this one for company, but now with the perfection of hopelessness as bolstered by a repetition that is ensuring ‘almost’ is finally fulfilled… (Harold Billings wrote above during an earlier restoration-point of this review”: “Isn’t it great that there is always one more to read!”)
          “There is no death, not even the hope of permanence or stasis.”
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          end
          Reply

         

          ↧

          Flannery O’Connor: Complete Stories

          July 2, 2016, 2:44 am
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          5 thoughts on “Flannery O’Connor: Complete Stories”


          1. THE GERANIUM
            “His throat was going to pop on account of a nigger – a damn nigger that patted him on the back and called him ‘old-timer’.”
            A pungent, abrasive period-text that really bites your eye-dust, as this old-timer from possum country needs to live with his daughter in New York, as he tries to acclimatise himself to the endless buildings and the new peckiing orders, eased at least by the habitual appearance of a geranium in the opposite apartment each day between certain hours… Until even that crashes to the ground.
            The sound of the word ‘geranium’ sounds to me like a word for a comfort stop for an old-timer’s frequently loose urinations like mine?
            Reply

          2. THE BARBER
            “They couldn’t say Negro–nigger–colored–black. Jacobs said he had come home every night and shouted, ‘NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER’ out the back window.”
            My reading today this story from the 1940s for the first time has amazingly come at the exact triangulation of the Brexit coordinates in 2016 – and Brexit’s hindsight racist raison d’etre. Foresight, too, no doubt.
            Here a customer has passing time’s recurring argument with a barber about voting for a then current election’s progressive candidate, an argument in the hearing of the black boy who sweeps up after each shave. And the bitter confused emotions where the lathered bib is not removed when the progressive customer leaves amid the sound of society’s blades sharpening, I imagine. I feel this story was uncannily written, in prophecy, for the time of Brexit…for my eyes and this opportune real-time review.
            Brexit as a word sounds like a blade snagging on a whisker…a faltering gash.
            Reply

            • Flannery O’Connor (1925 – 1964) – from back cover:
              “She is a modern writer in the widest sense, in that her stories are all preoccupied with obsessions at the heart of our modern world.”
              Reply

          3. WILDCAT
            “Old Gabriel shuffled across the room waving his stick slowly sideways in front of him.”
            [Yesterday I had not read any of these stories when I instinctively set up that art installation of a photo for this book’s review, and I had no idea that quote was coming up in this story!]
            This is a story of a blind old man mainly in a rexited dialect of abrasive dialogue layered with similar in rooted prose, with his remembering a boyhood when a wildcat killed someone (tellingly a ‘nigger’ in the old man’s amoral parlance but moral in retributive hindsight), and now — in a Poe-like ‘Tell-Tale Heart’ type of suspense – he awaits his own similar destiny. A striking portrait of growing death-dementia.
            Reply

           

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          Sylvan Dread – Richard Gavin

          July 12, 2016, 1:35 pm
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          14 thoughts on “Sylvan Dread – Richard Gavin”

          1. image
            THISTLE LATCH
            “But I cannot remotely recollect his face, though I am certain that he had one.”
            It is as if the Thistle Latch allows you through the door into this book itself and then out of it again to see the world differently, to see a ravine revelling…
            For me, this is an intensely haunting form of sylvan nature’s all-embracing pareidolia, where the shapes are not only visual mirages but also bodily ones whereby they make you, as a physical as well as a mental being, part of the pastoral pareidolia itself, and the mirages become the truth and the clear sight some form of hoax.
            You reach into the future when you are older, more achy and less athletic and you renew your acquaintance with the owner of the latch… A latch to something thistly within the reader – as happened last year, and still may be growing there, depending on who is asked to help, the occultist or the medical.
            Reply

          2. I read and reviewed the next work in July 2009 here and this is what I wrote about it then:
            ——————————
            Primeval Wood
            Having real-time reviewed Richard Gavin’s collection OMENS (HERE), I couldn’t wait till I entered that ‘often parish’ again … so the arrival of my purchase of this novelette in my bungalow-house today was timely in order to quench such cravings.
            As well as being a fan of Gavinostic fiction, I am a lover of Proustian works, too… and here we have a concept of Proustian weekends, whereby the protagonist, Neil, spent self-indulgent decadent periods insulated within his bed pigging, tripping and reading…
            No wonder that another point-of-view (his girl friend Kate) left him for yet another point-of-view (Darren) – and Neil goes to the holiday cottage alone instead of with Kate. So, Neil, upon this voyage of discovery towards consciousness (as tutored by a believable discussion forum on the internet) … to become what? A spoiler in himself for other points-of-view to suffer? A muse that is the actual author rather than an external force? An Aickmanesque ‘fetish’ of textured Wood? He is all these these things and more. Leaving the reader himself literally growing out of Primeval Wood or even, perhaps, being sodomised by the wooden soul within its pages’ paper?
            [Kate left Neil a note early on saying ‘We’re Done‘ on the medicine chest mirror. NightSun on the internet forum may also notice that the holiday cottage had a note faded out into: WE___ME.]
            ————————
            Reply

          3. A CAVERN OF REDBRICK
            “If you want to know the truth about something you have to do the same thing more than once.”
            That quote was indeed a sudden dawning truth, as I found out that I had read this story before and reviewed it here in 2014. You see, the text is identical but this is no longer a run-of-the-mill ghost story, but a great hauntingly recurrent experience of a boy’s encounter with a ghost of a girl of his own age during a summer ‘elation’, while staying with his grandparents. As enhanced by a comparison of the genius loci of the ‘revelling ravine’ with the gravel pit and by remembering this book’s earlier Thistle Latch of which this ghost now reminds me with incremental force and telling poignancy, upon the brink of fallible trust and danger. Ice and fire.
            Ice thistle as thistly ice.
            And a cancerous fire within.
            Rayburn. Redbrick.
            Reply

          4. TENDING THE MISTS
            “A pillow of fog swayed lazily over the seam where island and sea intersected.”
            Twin sisters, one the narrative viewpoint, the other seemingly having enticed that narrative viewpoint to this wedding group, where all the guests appear to be women in a face-fronted community of possibly abandoned buildings and the inn where they stay…
            There is something missing or lost about this darkly florid text, something that is found wanting, but later replaced under the cover of mist. Replaced by what? By a part belonging to the narrative viewpoint? Or by a huge engorged part too big for where it needs to be replaced? A choice of two groups, the first supplementing the other with part of itself and the second removing something from the other as self-fulfilment, but chosen as used or user?
            This story, too, attempts to entice us all, but some of us may wish not to have gone there, whilst others like you will relish it and decide to join the others already there. Which of the two groups chosen depends on the one you naturally orientate towards and finally join, finally fuse with.
            Reply

          5. FUME
            “Whatever was filling him now was something foreign, something incorrect and offensive.” …bearing in mind that this story’s officious, small-minded male protagonist has always enjoyed ‘corrected coffee’, and the mind boggles, as it boggles at the whole of this in-your-face horror, at this obnoxiously pungent ‘fume’ that besets him from the swaddled object in the ravine that first meets his obsessive meddling and clearing-up scrutiny after the ‘summer people’ have left the community, a place where he lives all year round.
            That ‘fume’ is boggling enough, with its ability not only to exist in a sane world but also to be described in such a floridly escaping gas-like way, with all its effulgent, spiritual nastiness laid bare, making you wonder whether this is a fable with a moral or a sheer iconoclastic horror for its own sake. You decide.
            Meanwhile, a horror even worse than the ‘fume’ itself is the male protagonist whom this horror attacks! A man whose impotence and dowdy life cannot be revived even by arrayed women (perhaps recruited to stir his loins from the previous story at various age-stages of their fusion with fuming).
            But sometimes even a standalone potency, especially for such a man, cannot be re-ignited or sufficiently have its clogged conduits fumigated. And that is the case whether his impotence was induced by bodily disease as trailed earlier in ‘Thistle Latch’ or whether it was infused by some mental stagnation of self-corruption. You again decide. You should know.
            Reply

          6. GOATSBRIDE
            “Although only her lungs and eyelids were moving, and, even then, scarcely, Marietta nonetheless felt as though she were cart-wheeling forward, spinning through the borderless country inside herself.”
            …as if ‘country’, by dint of its pure sound of phonemes without seeing the word itself, is something laid open, un-latched…the girlish self as physical as well spiritual ‘country’ or receptacle, a sumptuous sump welcoming something at first like the swaddled ‘fume’ creature now evolving as another version of the appendaged feral creature of ‘Tending the Mists’….
            Those jigsaw patterns of mutuality, with the ending indicating that the horror between rider and ridden continues to be frighteningly mutual.
            The actual text is a special unswaddling creature, with its words actually BEING the ‘ichor’ of which they often speak while fulfilling the apotheosis of, say, Clark Ashton Smith and MP Shiel within its own ‘country’ of style.
            Reply

          7. WEANED ON BLOOD
            “The architected silence of the two monks was suddenly broken by a susurrus that echoed up from the cleft.”
            Cleaved or again ravelled from a ravine as an inverse holy mother’s birthing cleft, this is a darkly intense cross-breeding between eucharist and lithopædion – telling of a new monk at the Trappist community witnessing other monks’ rites with birdbath and blood by wood’s side. Cardin-al as well as uniquely Gavinostic, heretically or aspirationally Gnostic, a horror that seems so real coming out of the page’s own envisioned cleft, the horror indeed so utterly real by its ability to horrify, a horror from the Christian religion by which it is birthed, so that that horror makes even the unbeliever like me somehow believe, at least for an ecstatic moment, in that otherwise personally eschewed religion. Somehow makes me want to pray that the moment lasts no longer than a moment.
            Reply


          9. imageTINDER ROW
            “: the sweet, almost inviting scent sat heavy in the blackened tunnel, clinging as surely as stale cigar smoke, or the funk of sex on motel room sheets.”
            A swarm of insects towards or from a hive, to the accompaniment of vanilla, this pungent tale of rediscovering a woman called Agnes from your past and taking her from under the boardwalk to where her makeshift sign points, an exercise in body-moulding sac or clinging forest-clearing, in moulting soul, in sacrifice and guilt for taking her where she simply wanted to go.
            This is the breaking genre of hedonist horror. The unforgettable genius loci of Tinder Row is a masterclass in such an oxymoron of dark spirit and elation. image
            Unforgettable, I say, but how can anyone logically know whether anything is unforgettable? You won’t believe this but it is absolutely true – when I finished this story I noticed a squashed flying-insect upon the inside of this book’s back cover. The stain is still there after spontaneously, in disgust and shock, scraping it off with my fingernail. It must have found its way there during this morning’s photographic session at the Yieldingtree. That is why it is unforgettable – till, at least, my own death’s hiving? The winter or l’hiver…
                   “Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes’ sake,
            Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache.”
            — John Keats
            As a child in winter, I often remembered endless summer elation by the squashed fly or stain of picnic food inside a favourite book….
            Reply

          10. WORMWOOD VOTARIES
            “He could see hairs from the painter’s brush lying trapped within the smears,…”
            This is a story of a man ‘between’, a hypnotically deadpan, yet sumptuously florid, portrait (a masterful bridging of such styles in narration), a story and backstory of a man with flu just as I was yesterday a man with fly. I feel, as a result of this new text today that I am ever hovering between.
            This between is a balance of my dreamcatching obsessions demonstrated by this website (a personal subsumption as a votary of bookish truth disguised as fiction) and my ordinary life with its duties and other realities. This text bridges that ‘between’ by means of various ‘objective correlatives’ such as ash faggots and an aunt named Thora within which name is a votary’s oath, a highly textured tapestry of words that not only rarefies a creative fever within me but also underpins an unshakeable belief regarding forces that truly live within that tapestry. A new state of being. A ‘fey radiance.’
            Reply

          11. THE OLD PAGEANT
            “Buoyed by his petit mal, he lay back in the humidity, hoping that the encroaching dusk would cool him.”
            … as if the previous story is instrumental in buoying this one?
            A richly haunting tale of an about-to-be engaged heterosexual couple arriving at the distaff’s cabin of her childhood when grownups told her and her sister scary stories as well as stories told between herself and her sister themselves – and the would-be spear-carrier listens to her stories of these stories, until are switched changelings as well as engagement rings.
            And another vision or apparition of a Yieldingtree for this real-time review, I feel, after a story of a story of trees – “We mimic them, they mimic us.”
            Reply

          12. I previously read this story and reviewed it in the Autumn Cthulhu anthology…and this is what I wrote about it then.
            ————————-
            The Stiles of Palemarsh
            “The openness of the lane, the visibility of the cloudless sky was too immense, too open.”
            This is an honest horror story with its exponential openness, honest inasmuch as its horrors are perfectly pitched to cause terror, and any literary nuances are in the darkly evocative turns of phrase and the sense of love for horror words and soundfest constructions for their own sake, and honest in the sense that the reader is not fingerposted through this outlandish Welsh village, as the Canadian protagonist named Ian is both confused by this place and squeezed by a remarkable concept of a squeeze-stile, crossing a step-stile, too, via the various styles of squeezed fear and missed steps. Honest, too, in that we cannot have sympathy with this protagonist, based on the implications of HIS words, that he had jilted his own stile-squeezed bi-polar fiancee at the altar, with him now come to Wales whence her family derives and unforgivably attending the planned honeymoon holiday alone, the honeymoon he alone aborted. And no wonder the demons that pursue him are inchoate as all fears are, as all squeezed depressions are, and we admire his honesty at admitting by clear implication that he is no horror story character with whom to empathise or sympathise or cheer on towards safety, a safety, without dishonest fear of a plot spoiler, he does, however, reach, despite our not caring whether he did so. And the one he abandoned at the altar, as it were, is now possibly just one of several monsters (so utterly nightmarish in themselves) shambling after him in an honest horror story. And I let out a deep sigh as the two sides of a story’s character are finally brought together by his own vice. But none of that takes account of what is envisaged transpiring in the possibly on-going plot after its claustrophobic text releases us from its captivating style, releasing us into the open. Unspoilt and endless.
            “…and though their thick eyelids remained closed, Ian was sure they were seeing him.”
            Reply

          13. MARE’S NEST
            “And if they stall the growths a bit, they consider themselves heroes. If I die in the meantime, well, then it was bound to happen either way is probably what they’d tell you.”
            And this work chimes perfectly with my own personal take upon the Thistle Latch. And here that Latch is a husband’s exploiting of his own sculptural work with found objects, found triangulations of love’s coordinates of location, black granite, and shapes not unlike my own Yieldingtree.
            All of this to forge a shell or clinging clearing or other well-fitting force (of pastoral radiotherapy?), a force by mysticism more than by physics or botany, to encase and hopefully cure the cancerous growth of his growth-dying wife, and eventually to create some union beyond their two human souls and their two human bodies, using prize pieces of each as found art, a ready-made precisely made as well as haphazardly constructed…. A horror without victims.
            This is a substantive and raw masterpiece, I feel, transcending the previous works in this book but enhancing them retrocausally, too, and then apotheosising the work of another sylvan dread’s John Cowper Powys (such as his ‘The Glastonbury Romance’ and ‘The Inmates’). And that is a huge compliment from me. The ultimate ‘found art’. A ‘ready-made’ both ready and yet to be made. Crazy with the intelligence of sublime instinct.
            Intense but relaxed in its syncopation of synchronicities. The fleshing of dream.
            Of willow leaves and stout wood configured. Self and other.
            “in the Grotesque, as the Grotesque”
            “She no longer triangulates the poem’s inspiration with words on paper, She is the living language of the Poem.”
            “Hunched within the unyielding shell…”
            “; perhaps not quite sacraments but certainly a fledgling gestalt, the seeds for an object that would be greater than the sum of its parts.”
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            butterfly dream - Kristine Ong Muslim

            July 13, 2016, 3:34 am
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            10 thoughts on “butterfly dream”


            1. ARTIFICIAL LIFE
              “We walk into any room…”
              Except this is the book’s first room, not just ANY room. This a one-pager, a child trying to revive her doll. No longer a child, but still trying.
              A message for futilely trying to better humanity with all its “cogs and fallen machinery”…? Misplaced hope and false beginnings.
              A telling metaphor to be massaged, too, I say.
              Reply

            2. THE SIX MUTATIONS OF JEROME
              “There are many stories that are not supposed to be told. Not because they have nothing new to say, but because they were designed to unfold in their own time.”
              There’s something of an entrancingly transgressive gospel tone to these six mutations of JEROME, something of the earlier unrevivable doll but here the unkillable dead.
              Much material to relish and pick over. Just to give you a taste of two of the mutations (things that, by dint of this text’s last sentence, I here transform for and by my own personal use) – JEROME K. JEROME where K stands for the KETTLE mutation … and his MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER mutation, the Three Men in a Boat (the Jerome boat): old Carl, young angry Gene and silent Matthew. His gospel’s three apostles in a dream-wet bed?
              “You know Jerome as Jerome, who is fragmented.”
              Reply

            3. IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
              “He did not want to hear anyone say that it was only a dream. He did not want anyone to comfort or pity him.”
              Patty’s doll as an emblem from earlier in this book now as this narrative’s protagonist point-of-view boy called Jimmy who wants to fly his dragon kite to replace his mother’s rancid cigarette air with the fresher sort outside, I guess. This relatively short work is crammed with Jimmy’s character and body features, a perception, through him, of allusions and illusions, even possibly delusions, elusions and elisions, all eventually trapped by each reader’s own dreamcatcher or butterfly-net as a shockingly perfect storm of subtleties.
              Reply

            4. THE GIRL WHO DID NOT EXIST
              The story that did not exist, the one that’s blocked, having looped the loop beyond my butterfly-net? Perhaps it’s where Patty’s doll came alive at last. Or like blocking people on-line, as if they no longer exist, inside the head of that doll – with news reports of supposed abuse streaming as lurid backstory – as well as her becoming an unrevivable surrogate outside the doll’s head, now complete and ready for autopsy, with her clinically searchable or plastic parts? Eventually blocked by an all-singing, all-dancing cartoon?
              Reply

            5. WRECK, SLASH, BURN
              “When machines talk metaphysics, it means that their logic circuits are a little blumpy.”
              A crystallised theme-and-variations of Bob Lock’s Cone Zero Ultimatum, my own Cone Zero and Cern Zoo combined, where a toilet cleaner is more revivable than a small girl’s doll, perhaps. Machines exasperated with the vulnerability of humans, in seeming rebellion, but who’s rebelling against whom?.
              Reply

            6. THE LONELY PEOPLE
              “The sky was the only thing that was left unchanged.”
              Life has now become real-time, too! Everyone is running about with butterfly nets. And here, in this amazing quilt of characters, a scenario as if inspired by the Cone Zero ultimatum of the previous story, literally synchronised shards of random truth and fiction, where ordinary things come alive, here partitions and wiring and drains, ordinary objects conjoined with and enabling ways through for these new seeking aspiring humans – where brexit is said actually to mean brexit – a sort of maddening loop or leap – all striving to find those sunny uplands beyond such barriers, and some pretty nifty SF conceits in a uniquely evocative language. Unmissable. And important for our times. No irony intended.
              Reply

            7. LETTER TO A CERTAIN DR. BILL
              “Sadness is something that you just bottle up, Jack, because it doesn’t really last.”
              From the ‘happiness bottle’ of the previous work, to this Outerbridge where I imagine the loneliness works out as a pre-coda to the whole of this book, partly truncated, partly perfectly quilted.
              The house (of Jack) as objective correlative in the previous work is transposed here together with an Oliver Sacks-like ironing board.
              Reply

            8. THE PSYCHOPOMPS
              The short coda proper. That world beyond the ironing-board or kettle or drain or partition of wiring, where it is more of a coach party than a singular rite of passage. None of us are important. Irony or ironing-board intended.
              This chapbook has been an inspiring experience, a sort of object lesson. A book to be revived whenever it seems dead.
              Reply
                     
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            The Age of Lovecraft

            July 17, 2016, 3:16 am
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            The AGE of LOVECRAFT


            image.jpeg
            Just received this purchased book….
            Edited by Carl H. Sederholm and  Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
            Foreword by Ramsey Campbell
            Featuring words from James Kneale, Isabella van Elferen, Brian Johnson, Jed Mayer, David Simmons, Jessica George, David Punter, W. Scott Poole, China Miéville.
            THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS 2016
            In due course, I shall comment on this book in the thought stream below.

            15 thoughts on “The AGE of LOVECRAFT”



            2. I have just read the first six pages of the Introduction. Very satisfying fare. Highly textured with mind-awakening philosophy, even at this early stage of the book. “Why Lovecraft, why now?” Cosmic indifferentism seems akin to the results of gestalt real-time reviewing fiction books as objects become preternatural forces separate from humanity. Do they retain such power even if no-one reads them? impossible to answer, of course.
              age
              Reply


            4. The introduction deals thoroughly with the whys and wherefores of the high profile of Lovecraft in modern days, his racism etc etc
              The first essay proper is:
              GHOULISH DIALOGUES: HP Lovecraft’s Weird Geographies
              by James Kneale (cultural and historical geographer at University College London.)
              My review will continue in due course below….
              Reply


            6. From Introduction –
              “Since one purpose of this book is to reflect on the significance of Lovecraft’s increasing popularity, not to mention his marked impact on early twentieth-first-century discourse, we cannot dismiss the problem of racism as irrelevant, nor can we resolve it to everyone’s satisfaction.”
              Reply

            7. MY EARLIER REAL-TIME REVIEW OF “THE HAUNTER OF THE DARK” Panther COLLECTION, AT THE BOTTOM OF WHICH PAGE IS ALSO A LINK TO MY REVIEW OF ‘THE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH’: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/the-haunter-of-the-dark-hp-lovecraft/
              —————–
              I have now read the first few pages of the James Kneale essay where we seem to be given permission to brainstorm upon HPL’s style and influence, where, just as one example, style awkwardness can lead to some sort of weird truth or insight (as my review above has ALREADY done!) i.e.:-
              “The Age of Lovecraft might, in fact, be weirder than many of the fictions in his name.”
              Weird style outweighing its weird content.
              More later…
              Reply

              • Content versus style, a tension that concerned me personally ever since studying Russian Formalism in the 1960s and Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy. There is much food for thought in this essay, cubism and triangulation, and objects seen in their own right as flensed and flayed from under ‘unimagined’ layers of allusion. And his stories’ triangulated growing technics of transmission now taken further abroad within HPL’s residual ‘gray areas’ and spacing – as sexed up by the Internet?
                References to Poe, Miéville and Stross. And Graham Harman.
                Reply


              • Looking back from the beyond of HPL’s Gothic narratives, and by dealing with the Gothic as THING-POWER, there are factored in, inter alia, Danielewski’s HOUSE oF Leaves, KIngs’s Overlook Hotel, Poe’s House of Usher, the Whovian TARDIS, and forbidden texts like The Necronomicon, and we are given a decidedly oblique slant on Lovecraft fiction texts, text that radiates more than what the words themselves mean, I guess. And, for me these thing-powers represent the flotsam and jetsam that I myself talked about in 2006:-
                “It is much more complex than simple suspension of belief (or even disbelief). Horror fiction, at its best, enters our individual territories and becomes part and parcel of a revolving realm with Death at its core: and, in this realm, all the flotsam and jetsam of life (the richest life being generated by the imagination as well as by the day-to-day interaction of our minds and bodies) spin round, some colliding only to ricochet off, others sticking together, some being swallowed whole or bit by bit. Eventually, the various items are sucked into the core where they are minced up or refined into streams of sense (or apparent sense or, even, nonsense) which are then released from that realm into other revolving realms which create new collisions, fusions and spin-offs. This is using Death as a positive tool, as it surely is. Without Death, we’d be nothing.”
                Above quoted from my blog here in 2006: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.co.uk/2006/04/free-fiction.html
                Reply

            9. The third essay is
              HYPER-CACOPHONY: Lovecraft, Speculative Realism, and Sonic Materialism
              By Isabella van Elferen (Professor of music and director of research for the School of Performance and Screen Studies at Kingston University London.)
              Reply

            10. The fourth essay is
              PREHISTORIES OF POSTHUMANISM: Cosmic Indifferentism, Alien Genesis, and Ecology from H. P. Lovecraft to Ridley Scott
              By Brian Johnson (associate professor and graduate chair of English at Carleton University)
              Reply

              TO BE CONTINUED: HERE

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              Cat-At-The-Window

              July 18, 2016, 5:21 am
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              One thought on “Cat-At-The-Window by Mark Valentine”

              1. “, and their were higher rewards for rarities in shape,…”
                A highly delightful fiction about a real historical competitive game of passing time by counting cats in Victorian times, and extrapolated later, and variated, with “eminencies” who once played it. Or a non-fiction truth about an imaginary game? Or simply a truth.
                Produced in a beautifully handmade format with loose scoreboard for playing the game in its end pocket.
                Reply
                       
               
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              The Daughters of Lilith and Other Tales

              July 18, 2016, 5:34 am
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              6 thoughts on “The Daughters of Lilith and Other Tales”

              1. Copy numbered 28/77. Luxuriously upholstered book with quality materials, about 10 inches square, 60 pages, marker ribbon, all generously designed with much artwork etc, dust jacket, embossed hardback cover and amber endpapers.
                My previous reviews of Harold Billings’ work HERE.
                My previous reviews of this publisher’s books HERE.
                Reply
              2. image
                .
                THE DAUGHTERS OF LILITH
                The first story that is its own “spoor”, one that builds the truth-beyond-legend and beyond-inbreeding of Adam’s first wife before Eve, since Satan, and the crevices his sons sought, the writhings threaded, the cocks and screech-owls of our progenitors and how they sensuously managed, from the land of Sumer to that of Onan, their sparse, but rich-when-come couplings to further our race beyond race, a race or competition as inverse tontine that still subsists, I feel, today.
                A luxuriant text beyond fiction that will stir you in more ways than one. Highly recommended.
                Reply
              3. THE WITCH OF MOUNT CHIPINQUE
                “…and you will remember that I have told you so.”
                There surely can be no bigger contrast between the first story’s myth-textured eroticism and this refreshing romance between two young people on a group coach trip to the Mexican plains, along with other young people, escorted and being provided with a real witch to tell them of legends and collusive premonitions. Touching, almost naive.
                Reply
              4. WHERE SATYRS SLEPT
                “…but ragged dreams filled their minds.”
                And the apparent naivety of the previous story becomes less apparent – where several modern young people socialise and play the mating game with, now in hindsight, a hint of forced sex within a pair of them now taking on a stronger import – and taking a new slant when seen in tune with this third story that makes its own turn in tune with the first story’s gamesmanship and inverse tontine, of its own gamut of humankind’s Genesis of inbreeding, outbreeding and cross-breeding. And now that inbreeding takes on a new darker turn with the onset of satyrs as part of a cross-breeding process, an onset that appeared for the sons and daughters of Eve, Adam and Lilith, where ‘love’ and siring matches are made by result of shinbone or of the St Eve races, races for a race of people? And the stoical love of Nathan and Naomi for each other, and for their dog Jess, and the visitation of an old satyr by the name of Lexxie, a creature as old as some authors who have since become even older. And the ruthlessness needed against their progenitors, with the help of their dog, to ensure the loving couple’s full onward game of fate in breeding scions…to the further tune of the Stars’ swathe, path or pattern of astrologically harmonic destiny in the sky, I feel.
                Reply
              5. THE GAMES OF ST. EVE
                “There was even attention paid to improving the intellectual attributes of the physically endowed virgins.”
                This story is a delight, especially in the context of the whole book so far. From under the shadow of the Adam-Fallen, a gentle amoral sexuality and apolitical considerations of gender now prevail, with the previous hints of races and games take full sway, and even the satyrs’ involvement now non-inimical and collusive with split-hoofed races and consensual cross-generativeness. We follow Nate (the younger brother of Nathan whose own path we are relieved to hear news of) and Nate’s meeting with Glenda and we also follow the book’s own games and tontines now made manifest in an enthralling archery competition (a companion to the other races and naive bouts of naughts and crosses) – the result being a telling parallel with the fated happy ending of this book’s earlier modern story in Mexico.
                I am worried that only 77 people are due to enjoy this important book and understandably pleased that I am one of those 77!
                I already feel that I am a winner of one of those St Eve’s games. And there is still one more story to read…
                Reply
              6. COSMOS ENOUGH AND TIME
                “I would lay rich land upon books, and books from words that cascaded from the madness and holy dreams of men,…”
                This book becomes even more important, I suggest, as we negotiate this final work which, by its own terms, for me, represents an apocryphal coda, one where the sexual yearnings – yearnings for their own as well as for any resultant scions’ sake – blend with a Jewish diaspora across Europe from Spain, via a later pursuing evil nearer Bavaria or Transylvania, with darker lycanthropic cross-breeding than that with satyrs earlier in this book turned out to be, towards the Holy Land, now intervened or cross-triangulated by this work’s narrator as a trainee priest, in a soon to be snow-locked inn, a priest with his own naive sexual yearnings… but someone with sufficient wisdom, having read Browne and Shakespeare, a wisdom with which I trust the reader also becomes imbued so as to know what might lurk in the would-have-been virgin’s womb, and the honest ambitions of her companion family, a self-fulfilling premonition issued by the earlier witch in Mexico for a happier mating with the eventual fruition of further issue, an eventuality which brings tears of joy to any reader of this book worth his or her salt. Thereafter, this important book’s tontine now renamed by this final story as an “inverse crusade.”
                end
                 
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