This is a beautiful book with pages almost stiffer than its cover. Entrancing artwork by Harry O. Morris, arch grey partitions, introduction by Paul Tremblay, and with Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.’s afterworded circumstances of its rediscovery as a text now published for the first time after having been kept in Joe’s own cupboard for many eons. But the work represents, it seems, an appendix to or an original throwaway from or, more likely, a now realised lost highlight from the author’s much earlier success, ‘The Divinity Student’, in the early 1990s, something I have not yet read.
Part Five of my real-time review of THE COLLECTED FICTION OF LEENA KROHN CHEEKY FRAWG 2015
Foreword by Jeff VanderMeer
Part Four (Pereat Mundus: A Novel of Sorts) of my review of this book HERE.
. When I review DATURA, Or A Figment Seen By Everyone, my comments will be found in the thought stream below or by clicking on this post’s title above.
45 thoughts on “DATURA, Or A Figment Seen By Everyone”
The First Seed Pod
A DELUSION WE ALL SEE “The flower was not what it was called.” A beautiful start, an epiphany of this narrator with the narrator’s sister, about the nature of things, and promising an almost random series of datura or contemporary notes and their patterns of the narrator’s life. Not an animalism, but an anomalism? Rather, I feel, a perfect target for Dreamcatching real-time reviews gathering, as they have always done since 2008, leitmotifs into a gestalt. This book was written yesterday for today’s fusion of its hyper-imagination with a labyrinth such as this website? DATURA was first published it seems in 2001, the same year as the first Nemonymous, and translated, I guess, today by Anna Volmari and J. Robert Tupasela.
IN THE MOST SILENT OF SILENCES “A cough is a lack of order; it interferes with the rhythm of time.” Girls’ bosoms inspected at school for coughs; and now she is helping with ‘The New Anomalist’ and is inspected by an expert in Silences: Sibelius? mumblemumble
THE NEW ANOMALIST A fascinatingly detailed account of the narrator’s view of this publication where she worked, initially through dark times of misguided status quo. The magazine, as far as I can see, was a form of The Fortean Times from the English speaking world, but with something far more artistic eventually about it, not only “paraphysics”‘ but also pataphysics, and other anomalies such as the ‘Otherkin.’ And Dreamcatching gestalt real-time reviews?? Stuff to savour.
THE MASTER OF SOUND “Sounds are everywhere, even where you wouldn’t think mumblemumble.” The annoying Master of Sound might write an article for the New Anomalist. I am glad Sibelius stayed away from everyone during his 32 years of so-called Silence! Or did he?
THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT “The Voynich manuscript is an odd book, but then again, all books are odd.” The narrator, who in future I shall call I for the purposes of this review, is asked by the editor (the Marquis) of The New Anomalist to write an article about this manuscript. This section could be that article. A cryptography writing about a cryptography. Or a hoax about a hoax?
MINERAL, PLANT, OR ANIMAL KINGDOM? I describe the cynicism of the Marquis with regard to his magazine ‘The New Anomalist’. He does not believe in its Anomalies and is willing to profit from his readers’ gullibility about them. Do please read his treatise, almost parrot fashion, regarding the insignificant status of the human being in the scheme of things. Very convincing. Irresistibly true. Yet an anomaly – he carries a symbol of the soul in his pocket. My such symbol is this book, this review…
THE QUIET ASPHALT A telling comparison between the childhood activity of watching raindrops rolling down a window, either in unique destinies or combined blended ones, and driverless cars in uniform rolling too close together across a city bridge after I left working late at the New Anomalist. A sign of a future totalitarian regime without humans or an invention that in the 2001 of this novel had not quite yet been invented and was then still an anomaly like the quiet asphalt designed to make car wheels quieter? One can take the seeds of datura as a medicine.
THE PARASTORE “IN GOD WE TRUST. EVERYONE ELSE PAYS CASH.” In between my other duties such as writing about spontaneous combustion or Tesla, I reluctantly take on the Marquis’ idea of a New Anomalist store selling trash and other paranormal trinkets.
ANOTHER MAN WITH THE SAME NAME Håkan, again? No, apparently one of the Marquis’ crackpot ideas to be run in the New Anomalist, causing us to have squabbles about what could be included or not.
ON AIR, ON SUNLIGHT “Oh, the wisdom of orchids,…” Another striking section, where I talk to an Ethnobotanist, listening to his eye-opening account of the consciousness of plants. It should not escape your attention that this novel itself is named after a plant. You will feel its autonomous consciousness come alive as you read it.
THE HERETICS The vicious circles of paranormal belief by ordinary as well as extraordinary readers of the New Anomalist. BTW, I learnt today there is a piece of music from 2014 entitled HÅKAN, as composed by TURNAGE for trumpet and orchestra.
OLD FAITH “Dogs are interstitial beings, not human, but no longer wolves.” But what about werewolves, where do they fit in, I ask (as me the reviewer). Meanwhile, I sometimes look after the Marquis’ dog called Faith. She is getting old now. We are only human through the eyes of other species? We are only readers through the eyes of authors? This novel would not be a novel at all without a real-time review like this to keep it in the eye of the public?
A LESSON “But have you ever thought that chaos might be the sum of order, that sensible details could build a senseless whole,…” Indeed, this review proves that. But it seems it was the Marquis who said that in this section about my chakras, and that is no recommendation that there is any truth in it. If it was really the Marquis, my boss at The New Anomalist, who actually said it? Hmmm.
NICOLA’S FORMATIVE YEARS “Nicola Tesla has been dubbed the man who invented the twentieth century.” Portrait of the synaesthesic life of Tesla. A coda, perhaps – interesting in itself – to this first section of DATURA.
THE PENDULUM MAN AND UN-ME “The Pendulum Man had written us a short article about his experiences of being a pendulum man.” A pendulum used for, inter alia, food-tasting protection. And I also think that the Un-Me as described here is the sort of me that writes all these collusive dreamcatchers of books!
THE PUDDLE I tease someone with his own gullibility towards the Puddle Optimum. But thinking about it, there is much to be said for such a belief. This book will teach you about such a belief, even though it didn’t set out to do so. It was simply in the perfect position to do so. It just needed at least one reader to recognise the fact.
A VISIT TO THE HAIR ARTISTE A touching visit to Häikälä the hair artiste, past the slaughterhouse which, as a child, I used to pass in a bus. The hair artiste is not fully as I expected. An interesting photo of her dead son, although I cannot use it for The New Anomalist. A hair style is sometimes like a bird wing or a flensed angel?
DON’T BE CRUEL “‘The world is full of imbeciles,’ the Marquis said, ‘They’re never in short supply. I’ve pinned my hopes to them.'” His Parastore selling trash like the rock ‘n’ roll fish – and those who buy it and those who are exploited to make them. A symbol for today’s historic Brexit.
THE FACE IN THE CHEESE “The seed pod of the datura plant is the size of a walnut and is covered in small thorns. When it ripens and splits open, four compartments with light brown, asymmetrical inhabitants are revealed.” This is effectively a ground-breaking treatise on misplaced as well as sincere or mystical or paranormal pareidolia. The other thing that struck me about it was the need for my 250 mile drive to take a photograph of the (eventually disappointing) face in the cheese for The New Anomalist. Today, a photograph would have been exchanged by email.
LOOGAROO, A CLASSIC “If she happened upon a pile of sand, she would stop and count the grains.” My interview with a vampire and her need for blood, about vampires in general and their difference from us humans. As to sand, I reckon Sibelius, before the last 32 years of his life, was landed with a sandpit in his studyroom by someone who did not like his music.
IN THE WRONG LINE The translator of this work must be American, as, here in UK, lines are queues and queues are lines. My discovery of an old friend in this queue seems not only to show that this is the wrong queue but also that she is someone who shouldn’t be in any queue whatsoever, right or wrong. Perhaps she is in the wrong work of literature, too. In which case that is my fault as its narrator. The only one with eyes.
PHONY MONEY “My thoughts rose with the pigeons to land on the eaves, antennas, chimneys, window ledges.” An engaging story about going back in time while on a bus. Or is it an article with a pseudonym that I as narrator have written in the form of a story about such a phenomenon for The New Anomalist? It shares pigeon elements etc. with a another book of similar devices, one of accreted vignettes that I have been real-time reviewing alongside this book and finished today here. Also just noticed that the bottom-of-the-page headings for this work are written as DATURA, OR A DELUSION WE ALL SEE while the main heading at the start was DATURA, OR A FIGMENT WE ALL SEE. Interesting.
A FINGER “And here I thought I knew everything there is to know about anomalies. This entire city is just one big anomaly. Amputation parlors! Drinking urine on stage! People setting themselves on fire!” And taus and particle physics. A truly haunting and disturbing section about a boy called Raikka who writes articles for me — and his deadpan acceptance of recreational amputation – and where nothing is in interface with nothingness.
THE MOVING IMAGE OF ETERNITY My interview with the Timely Man about the Nature of Time. Interestingly, DATURA is the most linear work so far in this book. The nearest to a traditional novel. A philosophical novel, I’d say. The whole book’s beginning is increasingly far away and its ending ever nearer. It looks if it will take the whole of 2016 to real-time this book
THE OLD WOMAN AHEAD OF ME This yearning Zeno’s paradox of a pursuit has really confirmed to me that DATURA is a long-lost classic – if it has indeed been lost at all!
THE MOUSE, THE WOLF, AND THE NIGHTINGALE …and the Oxford comma. On the brink of both twilights with these creatures. “And I fall asleep again to song and nibbling and to the smell of datura.” —————– From THE GLASTONBURY ROMANCE by John Cowper Powys — “The best time for any human being to pray to the First Cause if he wants his prayers to have a prosperous issue is one or other of the Two Twilights; either the twilight preceding the dawn or the twilight following the sunset. Human prayers that are offered up at noon are often intercepted by the Sun — for all creative powers are jealous of one another — and those that are offered up at midnight are liable to be waylaid by the Moon in her seasons or by the spirit of some thwarting planet. It is a natural fact that those Two Twilights are propitious to psychic intercourse with the First Cause while other hours are malignant and baleful.”
MADAME MAYA “That sometimes, in a certain light, usually at nightfall, matter can become partially transparent?” Seems to latch into the light of twilight in the previous section? The description of the lady who tells me about this phenomenon after her entrance to my office makes the orchid tremble on the sill… She is her own veil?
CAKE “…and end-of-the-world cake: chocolate confections decorated with a marzipan skull.” In the cafe, while eating that cake, I hear you mention that old woman I can’t keep up with! How do you know about that? In the text itself, I do not even consider that you night have read the same text as I have read or the same text that I am IN.
THE SOUND SWALLOWER “It was then that I began to understand that sounds were an exceptional phenomenon, that silence and darkness were the normal state of the universe and that an infinite noiseless night surrounded all sounds and images. I thought that I should actually learn to celebrate every sound, even cacophonies.” And hence the reviewer’s lifelong interest in music by Stockhausen, amongst others. A raison d’etre with its own ironies engagingly demonstrated here as I am approached by the ‘mumblemumble’ man again.
THE TREPANIST I find publishing this section of this novel unforgivable. Who knows what it might encourage its readers to do to themselves and to what it might open them.
TWO MARCHES The tension of either doing one’s thing without political concerns or being highly political – a tension symbolised by two marches in town, one more a carnival, the other a protest march. And walking in the wrong one, without noticing. By the way, I did notice the Trepanist in one of the marches, but which one? Read it and see…
THE OTHERKIN “…an astronomer once claimed that the earth is hollow, like a Russian doll, and that there are many smaller, concentric earths within it.” Only too true! You don’t need New Anomalism to show that. The Otherkin, meanwhile, are beautifully described here. I am sure Sibelius must have been one of them. But I forgot to say that in this relatively short but important section of the book. Now it is crystallised in print, only possible to say it here instead.
THE GHOST OF THE CITY OFFICE “Emmi D. had a complete command of etiquette and the rules of proper behaviour, but she didn’t feel it necessary to apply them to anyone not of Caucasian, Christian extraction.” A portrait of my “friend of sorts”, to go with this book’s earlier “novel of sorts”, and I am a reader of sorts as well as finding myself a character of sorts in this work itself. But why be friends with this character? Simply so that I can tell you, in the equally anomalous context of this novel, how she became a paranormal part of my life. How else can a character in fiction be a friend at all, let alone someone WORTHY of being a friend of mine? The portrait is very telling. And relevant to my addiction to datura seeds.
FAITH IS SICK Not faith as such but Faith, the Marquis’ loveable old dog. But fiction is a sort of faith and Faith is in this fiction and I suspect she swallowed the datura seeds I had inadvertently left in harm’s way… Like swallowing the fiction that created you? These episodes gradually make the gestalt of this fiction as a would-be novel, another novel of sorts, each episode unfinished while I think the novel itself is a closed or holistic system but a system of such open-ended episodes. A strange phenomenon of piecemeal faiths towards an over-arching…
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A PLANT Datura takes centre stage, as it is explained fascinatingly and worryingly to me what I am exposing myself to in getting so close to this plant. A bit of a loop though when you consider the explanation is put into the mouth of a character in this book about Datura and given to another character, i.e. me, and then I report it back to the reader, i.e. you.
THE WOMAN WHO WAS FOUR “Real death, however, shrinks the face and alters the features.” Unlike people stage-dying. Real dying becomes something other, slipping away leaving us alone. But the Otherkin of this work are something other, again. And this teasing story of a woman with four identities is like different people using the same body, the same, if altered, face and bearing, with fleeting death between each visitation. This book, too.
A PECULIAR FLOWER SHOP A bitch fight in a florist shop at Christmas. But as if in a fiction did I get this unlikely event right? Or was its unlikely aftermath right? Perhaps both were wrong, an anomaly upon another anomaly? You perhaps need a real-time outside commentator like this to be able to nail the truth and transcend the anomalies within a book such as this novel.
THE FASTEST WAY TO TRAVEL “…it was getting harder and harder to tell private and shared delusions apart.” And that is obviously true in July 2016 for many reasons! Reading rather than eating datura seeds? Meanwhile, Faith is getting better while Raikka bombards me with more outlandish (literally) ideas, like ‘hole teleportation’…
THE VISITATION “What you experience is always true.” An uninvited woman in my bedroom, perhaps someone like me, and I learn more about myself, as the narrator of this book, than I have learnt before. More about the nature of reality, too. I sense. The end. Is near.
“THUS UNENLIGHTENED, LOST IN ERROR’S MAZE” “Was it you who, when things were at their worst at the beginning, visited me and read to me aloud.” Was it me who asked that question, as it now seems worse here at the end, with “the stink of datura.” Everything now being a shared reality fits in with my gestalt real-time reviewing. I can’t think of a fiction work more suited to such treatment.
WITH A FINGER TO HIS LIPS “Everything began to seem like a silent movie.” The perfect point of ending, apotheosising at last this book’s Silence of Sibelius, once Master of Sound, now with the eponymous oxymoronic flower in his hand, bringing the world back on to its scooter of hope. The New Anomalist, no longer a derogatory term, but someone like me, hopefully. Or you? DATURA, truly everyone’s shared reality, is a wonderful novel worth bringing out of its own silence.
And that ends PART FIVE of this real-time review. PART SIX will commence HERE.
THE INCREDULITY OF FATHER BROWN The Resurrection of Father Brown “There was a brief period during which Father Brown enjoyed, or rather did not enjoy, something like fame. He was a nine days’ wonder in the newspapers; he was even a common topic of controversy in the weekly reviews; his exploits were narrated eagerly and inaccurately in any number of clubs and drawing-rooms, especially in America. Incongruous and indeed incredible as it may seem to any one who knew him, his adventures as a detective were even made the subject of short stories appearing in magazines.” When I read that first paragraph, I immediately thought of Sherlock Holmes, and the cinema film Mr. Holmes. And indeed later I see this story IS all a hilarious satire on SH’a resurrection in Conan the Barbarian, no, Conan Doyle, and here we now have tussles in South America of Spanish American Red Indians et al (where FB is acting as star Catholic missionary about to be mock-miraculized by a staged mugging) and partitions of the Christian religion Puritan and Roman, Saul (Paul) Snaith journalist and someone called Race itself, with the pecking order, too, of race in these foreign lands. The style in Chesterton is unique, textured, educational, but bizarre, surreal, emblematic, with a neutral hoaxing against as well as for old-fashioned standards of behaviour and set pecking orders. FB here is even set to investigate not only a murder but also, for the first time, his own murder by culprits unknown! And the lunacies of advertisement. And möbius sections of journalism. “John Race went back to his lodgings sad and with a singular sense of emptiness. It seemed impossible that he should miss a man whom he never knew.”
The Arrow of Heaven “But America has a genius for the encouragement of fame; and his appearance in one or two curious criminal problems, together with his long association with Flambeau, the ex-criminal and detective, had consolidated a reputation in America out of what was little more than a rumour in England.” “Father Brown did not quite see. He blinked at the glittering seascape and the pinnacles of the city, and then at the man in goggles. It was not only the masking of the man’s eyes that produced the impression of something impenetrable. Something in his yellow face was almost Asiatic, even Chinese; and his conversation seemed to consist of stratified layers of irony. He was a type to be found here and there in that hearty and sociable population; he was the inscrutable American.” Drage dragged dragon “as if a chariot drawn by dragons had carried him away into fairyland.” FB is now a sort of celebrity, here in America, as if summoned here like a magic trick by a mix of characters, bald or brown, white or red, yellow or goggled, only pilots wear goggles, only red men wield arrows. Three millionaires. A skyful of aeroplanes or arrows? it is almost as if this Coptic Cup tontine is a Big Brother TV reality show performed, half true, half dramatised, for FB to watch and then judge. Like many of the other stories, too. Politically incorrect then, is correct now? Möbius motives and logical circles, Zeno’s Paradox, be it by arrow or by a Godly bolt from the blue. Murder as a game rather than a lethal crime. A bit like ISIS today. Or a murder dinner party. (FB= Father Brown, not Facebook.) “After all, I suppose if you’d been asked to visit the tsar, or the king of England, you’d have had the curiosity to go. You mayn’t care much for tsars or millionaires; but it just means that power like that is always interesting. And I hope it’s not against your principles to visit a modern sort of emperor like Merton.’” “‘He’s a mystagogue,’ said Father Brown, with innocent promptitude. ‘There are quite a lot of them about; the sort of men about town who hint to you in Paris cafes and cabarets that they’ve lifted the veil of ISIS or know the secret of Stonehenge. In a case like this they’re sure to have some sort of mystical explanations.’”
The Oracle of the Dog This is probably the first mystery that FB solves in this book that he solves from a distance by merely hearing about the characters and the situations from one of the participants. So, I give you below a few clues as to this mystery of a Will and its Witnesses, and of red herrings, motives, over-obvious impulses, truisms and a preternatural animal, clues by means of a few separate quotes below from the text. It will almost be as if you solved it by reading the whole of it at a distance… ———— ‘Yes,’ said Father Brown, ‘I always like a dog, so long as he isn’t spelt backwards.’ Many mystery stories, about men murdered behind locked doors and windows, and murderers escaping without means of entrance and exit, have come true… It’s just the sort of theory a man would have in a book; and Floyd is the sort of man who ought to be in a book. He’d be better fun and less bother in a book.’ But I sometimes fancy, for instance, that you are too clever to understand animals. Sometimes you are too clever to understand men, especially when they act almost as simply as animals. Animals are very literal; they live in a world of truisms. The more incongruous the coincidence, the more instantaneous the decision, the more likely he is to snatch the chance. It’s part of something I’ve noticed more and more in the modern world, appearing in all sorts of newspaper rumours and conversational catchwords; something that’s arbitrary without being authoritative. People readily swallow the untested claims of this, that, or the other. It’s drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea;… (FB or Facebook?)
The Miracle of Moon Crescent “That’s what we do in the new movement out home: we breathe. We don’t pray; we breathe.” A wonderful, sometimes enigmatic treatment of faith, lack of faith, doing good works if judging men, suicide or murder, facts or fancies, the ability to leave a room without beings seen, the rarity of miracles, the preternatural a level below a miracle towards something inexplicable but natural, all at Moon Crescent, a striking American genius loci, but one side of it facing, tellingly, a warehouse wall. “And indeed, he looked rather like a big, black mushroom, for he was quite short and his small, stumpy figure was eclipsed by his big, black clerical hat; the resemblance might have been more complete if mushrooms were in the habit of carrying umbrellas, even of a shabby and shapeless sort.” Father Brown’s stunning appearance to solve the mystery. The flickering of film where spaces exist between the frames? Or simply a brutal murder that can be explained with recourse to the preternatural? ‘I don’t want to say anything offensive, but that sort of thing may be very well for crypts and cloisters and all sorts of moonshiny places. But ghosts can’t get through a closed door in an American hotel.’ ‘The mind is not a continuous line, but rather a dotted line.’ ‘Very dotted,’ said Fenner feebly. ‘Not to say dotty.’
The Curse of the Golden Cross “I can believe the impossible, but not the improbable.” “There was only one lady in the group; and she was (as the journalists often said of her) a host in herself; being quite prepared to play hostess, not to say empress, at that or any other table. She was Lady Diana Wales,…” Probably the most bizarre FB investigation so far of suspects, a suspect suspected by he who should have been suspected most, I guess, concerning a sea voyage, curses, curses about curses, an excavation near Brighton, an excavation of an excavation, tunnels, more tunnels as tunnels of thought, a medieval gold cross with a Christian fish design of a fish design (only fishes survived the deluge?), plenty of Smaill Talk (sic) and many more paradoxes, and paradoxes of paradoxes… I suspect Chesterton did it. Killed literature when we weren’t looking and left us with what we read now, so much better than what literature WOULD have been. “Americans really respect work, rather as Europeans respect war.” “and it would seem that there are no less than three curses involved; a curse for entering the sealed chamber, a double curse for opening the coffin, and a triple and most terrible curse for touching the gold relic found inside it.”
The Dagger with Wings “Father Brown, at one period of his life, found it difficult to hang his hat on a hat-peg without repressing a slight shudder.” And here we find out why – in this magnificent, probably the most stunningly descriptive story so far (description of the colonnaded house, central character and blankness of snow), the most imaginative, the most philosophically textured, the most reasoned out, the most Aickman-like — the most intangibly preternatural story albeit one with an ostensible logically rational denouement. Just a few random thoughts… “as if he had been in bed or lived in a state of slowly getting up,” Does this relate later to the following?… “‘You mean,’ said Father Brown thoughtfully, ‘that he is in a perpetual state of levitation.’” A story of madness as genius, or one of two men going to a fancy-dress party dressed as each other. A remarkable passage… “Then he went back and sat down again, staring at the dark carpet, which again glowed blood-red with the light from the glass door. Something in the filtered light set his mind drifting on certain borderlands of thought, with the first white daybreak before the coming of colour, and all that mystery which is alternately veiled and revealed in the symbol of windows and of doors.” And another… “‘You do believe it,’ he said. ‘You do believe everything. We all believe everything, even when we deny everything. The denyers believe. The unbelievers believe. Don’t you feel in your heart that these contradictions do not really contradict: that there is a cosmos that contains them all? The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things return; perhaps Strake and I have striven in many shapes, beast against beast and bird against bird, and perhaps we shall strive for ever. But since we seek and need each other, even that eternal hatred is an eternal love. Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you not realize in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we are its shadows; and that all things are but aspects of one thing: a centre where men melt into Man and Man into God?’” For God, in that passage , please read:- the book, at any one time, that I am submitting to an act of Dreamcatching or Gestalt Real-Time Reviewing.
The Doom of the Darnaways “The lady of this Shallot not only in some sense saw the world in a mirror, but even saw the world upside-down.” A place worthy of Poe, a House of Usher rife with inbreeding, family curses, a lame devil, a painted portrait, photographic tripods like spiders, and FB who ironically as a Catholic Priest dissolves darkness with logic and here with photographic light, as in the previous story it was snow. Holbein too, but I did not notice his elongated skull as if through a lens. Or did I? And books with false titles and tricksy stories like this bookful of them. And, oh yes, the brightness of murder if it can explain away a suicide. “It was, if not exactly a spiritual duel between Darnaway and the demoniac picture, at least a duel between Darnaway and his own doubts. He wanted to bring the daylight of photography face to face with that dark masterpiece of painting; and to see whether the sunshine of the new art would not drive out the shadows of the old.”
The Ghost of Gideon Wise “Father Brown always regarded the case as the queerest example of the theory of an alibi:” A story that set my head spinning, where the rarefication of metaphysical conceit that is Father Brown reaches overdrive. Launched from a political plot – with a journalist as go-between three millionaires and three Bolsheviks in period Britain – we have an undercover policeman called Nares (should have guessed it was a policeman in disguise with his name being an anagram of ‘snare’) – and a ghost of a man who was not yet dead, and a twist on alibi theory where one person can be in the two places at the same time, and the concept of being too convincing to convince…. “But about this third man with the goggles, who spoke so sensibly and simply, there was something uncanny; it was like a dead man talking at the table.” “But believing in ghosts is one thing, and believing in a ghost is quite another.”
THE SECRET OF FATHER BROWN The Secret of Father Brown “Flambeau, once the most famous criminal in France and later a very private detective in England, had long retired from both professions. Some say a career of crime had left him with too many scruples for a career of detection.” An amazing prelude to the next set of stories. So startling, deep, religious, with passages to die for, as FB, visiting fb, is questioned by an American – in ‘Mr Holmes’-like style – about the secret of FB’s detection methods, like becoming the murderer, by reconstruction of psychology, almost as a religion. Occult or rational? Fiction and Truth. Much like my own gestalt real-time reviewing … “We are well acquainted,” went on the stranger firmly, “with the alleged achievements of Dupin and others; and with those of Lecoq, Sherlock Holmes, Nicholas Carter, and other imaginative incarnations of the craft. But we observe there is in many ways, a marked difference between your own method of approach and that of these other thinkers, whether fictitious or actual. Some have spec’lated, sir, as to whether the difference of method may perhaps involve rather the absence of method.” “Father Brown also lifted his glass, and the glow of the fire turned the red wine transparent, like the glorious blood-red glass of a martyr’s window. The red flame seemed to hold his eyes and absorb his gaze that sank deeper and deeper into it, as if that single cup held a red sea of the blood of all men, and his soul were a diver, ever plunging in dark humility and inverted imagination, lower than its lowest monsters and its most ancient slime.”
The Mirror of the Magistrate “As by some weird whim of diabolical arabesque, blood was eddying out, very slowly, into the luminous water in snaky rings, like the transparent crimson of sunset clouds.” An archetypal FB investigation, that actually reached a court case rather than just FB’s deduction, but that’s because… Well, there is much jumping over garden walls by various characters, an implied Asiatic or yellow hair prejudice, whether a poet can do anything else while composing poetry, and much relevant to the weight of motive that echoes my own literary obsession with the Intentional Fallacy, shooting into mirrors, fireworks and just LATERAL THINKING. Yes, FB and lateral thinking, where everything comes in from unexpected angles of logic. The unexpected as the expected, and vice versa. The usual as just another form of unusual. “His opinions seemed to be of a nihilistic and destructive sort, as was indeed the tendency of his poetry for those who could follow it;” “Half the decent people in this court will be butchered in their beds, and we shall not know the reason. And we shall never know the reason and never arrest the massacre, until it has depopulated our country, so long as the defence is permitted to stop all proceedings with this stale tag about ‘motive,’ when every other fact in the case, every glaring incongruity, every gaping silence, tells us that we stand in the presence of Cain.”
The Man With Two Beards “This tale was told by Father Brown to Professor Crake, the celebrated criminologist, after dinner at a club, where the two were introduced to each other as sharing a harmless hobby of murder and robbery.” Murder without motive, spiritualism, privilege, ghosts, jewellery, a banker, a reformed burglar called Moonshine, walking dead, burglary, joyriding in cars – but I failed to understand this story at all, yet I was satisfied I enjoyed it and some deep significant meaning sank into my mind somewhere! Full of paradox, as ever, and lateral thinking.
The Song of the Flying Fish “The soul of Mr. Peregrine Smart hovered like a fly round one possession and one joke.” A shorter succinct masterpiece of the stealing away of gold goldfish by dint of subterfuge and exploitation of non-PC assumptions regarding those in turbans and the habits if women and the prestidigitation of — ‘What is outside and what is inside?’ “Do you think it is preternatural?” that Father Brown happens always to be present in these stories wherever they take place and whatever motley group of strangers is made familiar by name and description of them? It is as if FB is the catalyst of the events rather than the responder to them.
The Actor and the Alibi “There are so many strange things in this strange theatre that you rather tend to forget some of them.” An entrancing theatrical murder enquiry by our FB in a theatre, one already supplied with pantomimic props even during a performance of ‘The School For Scandal’… All very germane to this plot dealing otherwise with extra-marital affairs, curtain-lectures, blackmail, bigamy, and the wonderful concept of a corporate or collective alibi. Readers of a book, too, as corporate alibi in a conspiracy of disbelief? We just need together to triangulate the coordinates of a book via all our personal real-time reviews, thus to nail the spoilers one by one, then flensing and flaying the text back like the flesh of a murder victim to reveal its murderer.
The Vanishing of Vaudrey “There was next to the butcher’s a small shop combining a large number of functions, such as is found in villages, in which a little old woman sold sweets, walking-sticks, golf-balls, gum, balls of string and a very faded sort of stationery.” “It seems truly extraordinary,” he said, shaking his head. “Those little houses are like dolls’ houses, always open front and back, and there’s hardly room to hide anybody, even if they wanted to hide him.” “This made it seem all the more like a part of a nightmare; as if a man were walking about with his head stuck on the wrong way.” “I’ve seen that face at breakfast, or dinner, every day for ten years; and it always looked quite pleasant and polite. You turn it upside down and it looks like the face of a fiend.” “It was a rather curious story about an Egyptian official who had insulted him by saying that a good Moslem would avoid swine and Englishmen, but preferred swine; or some such tactful remark.” -–––——— A story with so many quotable quotes I could have gone on and on! Possibly my favourite FB story so far, with some genuine chilling as well as mentally provocative moments, in this vanishing mystery in a tiny village. Someone wrote this morning on my FB (Facebook) page: “I think that the Father Brown stories are a bit like chocolates. Best to take a few, enjoy them, and return for more at a later date — rather than scoff the lot at a sitting.” How true. And someone else wrote there this : “GKC taught me not to make assumptions – for instance, if you find a headless body lying close to a bodiless head in a garden, don’t assume they belong together!” How true, too. And this current story begs the question: if your throat is cut when you are smiling, does that smile stay on your corpse?
The Worst Crime in the World “Father Brown was wandering through a picture gallery with an expression that suggested that he had not come there to look at the pictures.” Each picture a spiral or a cylinder or vortex of so-called New Art, with the impression that FB does not like such art. Yet his solutions to mysteries, here to a paradox of a drawbridge of a Border castle and of the dark hiccoughs in a linear inheritance from father to son and back again are by means of such spirals and möbius sections that New Art depicts! All with the seasoning of blackmail and Russsian intrigue. ‘”I feel as if I’d got into a novel instead of a house,” said the lawyer.’ [Remarkably, I started earlier today here a real-time review of a book which in fact involved me in a reference to a ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ scenario (Russian music, too, as it happens…)]
The Red Moon of Meru This is the CONE ZERO of this whole book. Read it and understand. Religions, skin colours, race prejudice, prestidigitations, preternature, charlatans, Gothic abbey and fakir’s tent, and a whole construct of paradox..and the fact that FB doesn’t know what a paradox is, possibly means he is one. Culture versus culture. Logic versus faith. Theft versus Replacing. East versus West. God versus God. Hoax and truth. Read it an see but meanwhile here are choice bits from it… ——————— Marvellous things have been done by fakirs.” “Did you say done by fakers?” asked the other young man, with doubtful innocence. “I wonder what a paradox is,” remarked the priest in a ruminant manner. “There you go again!” said Lady Mounteagle. “Years ago, when I was in India, I suppose we all had that sort of prejudice against brown people. But now I know something about their wonderful spiritual powers, I’m glad to say I know better.” “Our prejudices seem to cut opposite ways,” said Father Brown. “You excuse his being brown because he is brahminical; and I excuse his being brahminical because he is brown. Frankly, I don’t care for spiritual powers much myself. I’ve got much more sympathy with spiritual weaknesses. But I can’t see why anybody should dislike him merely because he is the same beautiful colour as copper, or coffee, or nut-brown ale, or those jolly peat-streams in the North. But then,” he added, looking across at the lady and screwing up his eyes, “I suppose I’m prejudiced in favour of anything that’s called brown.” “There now!” cried Lady Mounteagle with a sort of triumph. “I knew you were only talking nonsense!” In the open space surrounded by the cloisters, there ran, like a circle in a square, a circular path paved with pale stones and edged with some sort of green enamel like an imitation lawn. Inside that, in the very centre, rose the basin of a dark-green fountain, or raised pond, in which water-lilies floated and goldfish flashed to and fro; and high above these, its outline dark against the dying light, was a great green image. Its back was turned to them and its face so completely invisible in the hunched posture that the statue might almost have been headless. But in that mere dark outline, in the dim twilight, some of them could see instantly that it was the shape of no Christian thing. “You are learning a little,” he said, with insolent benevolence, “of the laws of time and space; about which your latest science is a thousand years behind our oldest religion. You do not even know what is really meant by hiding a thing. Nay, my poor little friends, you do not even know what is meant by seeing a thing; or perhaps you would see this as plainly as I do.”
The Chief Mourner of Marne “We have to touch such men, not with a bargepole, but with a benediction,” ‘”The Marquis of Marne has three heads,” remarked Romaine quite gravely. “Once in every three hundred years a three-headed nobleman adorns the family tree. No human being dares approach the accursed house except a silent procession of hatters, sent to provide an abnormal number of hats. But,” —and his voice took one of those deep and terrible turns, that could cause such a thrill in the theatre —“my friends, those hats are of no human shape.”’ Starting with a picnic with a flash of lightning, a deep and darkly sonorous yarn of forgiveness and the diverse nature of crime, of masks and monks, three-headed absurdism (Trinity?), undue religious influence, duels, theatrical acting, the static act of acting and re-acting … An eventful gestalt of which that eventually brings us nearer to an understanding of the Catholic? Father Brown filtering yarns about mysteries but also of Mystery itself.
The Secret of Flambeau ‘ “ —the sort of murders in which I played the part of the murderer,” said Father Brown,…’ “He felt as if he were talking to one man and yet to a hundred murderers. There was something uncanny about that very small figure, perched like a goblin beside the goblin stove; and the sense that its round head had held such a universe of wild unreason and imaginative injustice. It was as if the vast void of dark behind it were a throng of dark gigantic figures, the ghosts of great criminals held at bay by the magic circle of the red stove, but ready to tear their master in pieces.” A very intriguing and deep coda to this section of the book, whereby we empathise with the very act of empathy, an empathy with the art of crime detection via FB and his alter ego Fb. This explains some earlier stories where both characters appeared. Having done something is half the battle towards solving the motives behind it.
THE SCANDAL OF FATHER BROWN The Scandal of Father Brown “It was even possible to regard her for a moment as Mrs Potter, on the universal understanding that her husband was only the husband of Mrs Potter.” As ever with FB, a sophisticated texture of text to adumbrate the subtleties of character and incident. A sophisticated but hilarious satire of worldwide newspaper reporting, here in Mexico where FB seems to find himself as catalyst yet again, and its pitfalls (today exaggerated by FB and Twitter) of scandalously broken marriages, swarthy races, Byronic figures snatching someone’s wife, the prejudice of appearance and assumptions as to who is who, and carrying the debit of scandal when instead it should have been the credit of worthy cause, all geared to hearsay and what version was heard first, the Social Media that this old work adeptly prophesies. “Hypatia Potter, nee Hard, was one of those people to whom the word ‘radiant’ really does apply definitely and derivatively. That is, she allowed what the papers called her Personality to go out from her in rays. She would have been equally beautiful, and to some tastes more attractive, if she had been self-contained; but she had always been taught to believe that self-containment was only selfishness. She would have said that she had lost Self in Service; it would perhaps be truer to say that she had asserted Self in Service;” “What the devil is going on in this infernal place? Why are you sitting up all night to see it through?’What the devil is going on in this infernal place? Why are you sitting up all night to see it through?’What the devil is going on in this infernal place? Why are you sitting up all night to see it through?’What the devil is going on in this infernal place? Why are you sitting up all night to see it through?’What the devil is going on in this infernal place? Why are you sitting up all night to see it through?’What the devil is going on in this infernal place? Why are you sitting up all night to see it through?’”
THE QUICK ONE The first ever reference to an Islamic suicide terrorist– in this old Father Brown story! But there is always much in FB that breaks ground, and this story has paradoxes galore of sham and truth, the philosophy of murder by fanaticism or cold deliberation, the catalytic recurrence of FB’s presence, here his own growing self-consciousness of this recurrence, switched drinks or a roomful of daggers, the ease of murder but the difficulty in not being found out, the accretion of evidence retrieved by object or person, the genius loci of a redecorated hotel, the surroundings of dirt and cleanliness as to the nature of crime, the racisms and social pecking orders of crime, too. A whole cornucopia of mind tricks, even the envisaging of FB himself as real person or literary trick. This quick one does it with long drawn out machinations , and vice versa. You tell me which. So many quotable passages, I can’t help myself and show some of them below. ——————— ‘It’s all very well for you, Father Brown,’ said the Inspector good-humouredly. ‘You’ve had a lot more murders than your fair share; and we poor policemen sit starving all our lives, even for a little one. It was the simple idea that, if Prohibition is right, some honour is due to the Prophet who was perhaps the first Prohibitionist. He had corresponded with the leaders of Mahommedan religious thought, and had finally induced a distinguished Moslem (one of whose names was Akbar and the rest an untranslatable ululation of Allah with attributes) to come and lecture in England on the ancient Moslem veto on wine. John Raggley was generally regarded as a crank. He was the sort of man who writes letters to the newspaper, which generally do not appear in the newspaper; but which do appear afterwards as pamphlets, printed (or misprinted) at his own expense; and circulated to a hundred waste-paper baskets. ‘I said,’ observed Greenwood, ‘that the one sort of murder we can’t stop is murder by somebody like a religious fanatic. That brown fellow probably thinks that if he’s hanged, he’ll go straight to Paradise for defending the honour of the Prophet.’ ‘I know,’ said Father Brown, and his mouth took on again the twisted smile. ‘I sometimes think criminals invented hygiene. Or perhaps hygienic reformers invented crime; they look like it, some of them. Everybody talks about foul dens and filthy slums in which crime can run riot; but it’s just the other way. They are called foul, not because crimes are committed, but because crimes are discovered. It’s in the neat, spotless, clean and tidy places that crime can run riot; no mud to make footprints; no dregs to contain poison; kind servants washing out all traces of the murder; and the murderer killing and cremating six wives and all for want of a little Christian dirt.
The Blast of the Book “It is that the man who had looked into the book walked straight over the side of the ship, and was never seen again.” But no splash! This is about a book that if you merely look into it the Devil will get you, and time and time again this is proved by each one daring to look inside immediately vanishing… Also a very engaging tale of a Professor who prided himself on believing as well as disbelieving all spiritual or paranormal things, ever the empiricist. Except he didn’t appreciate his clerk and how characterful his clerk was, a clerk he named after a calculator machine — the forerunner of the computer that now holds FB and Twitter if not FB himself? A fine FaBle sussed by FB, one of apparitions not as appearances but as their opposite. And that brings me back to the calculator… “I suppose the hardest thing is to convince anybody that 0 + 0 + 0 = 0.” Cone Zero, again?
THE GREEN MAN “The mysterious connection between Father Brown’s first shock of enlightenment and the chance language about the pool and the inn, hag-rode her fancy in a hundred forms of ugly symbolism. The Green Man became a ghost trailing loathsome weeds and walking the countryside under the moon; the sign of the Green Man became a human figure hanging as from a gibbet; and the tarn itself became a tavern, a dark subaqueous tavern for the dead sailors.” Another master-solution by our laid-back, pipe smoking, quietness-loving Father Brown whose colour is infiltrated with Green, as seaweed, while he ponders the stabbing of the Admiral due to return from sea, and his body found by the Green Man. Was the culprit the swarthy pirate-loving man as most suspected? Or someone less obvious? A lesson for a humanity that is often prejudiced. But not so our everpresent stoical clear-thinking Father Brown – who must equally take the catalytic blame for all these murders he was surely created to solve?
The Pursuit of Mr Blue “Along a seaside parade on a sunny afternoon, a person with the depressing name of Muggleton was moving with suitable gloom. There was a horseshoe of worry in his forehead, and the numerous groups and strings of entertainers stretched along the beach below looked up to him in vain for applause. Pierrots turned up their pale moon faces, like the white bellies of dead fish, without improving his spirits; niggers with faces entirely grey with a sort of grimy soot were equally unsuccessful in filling his fancy with brighter things.” A man who talked like a book and another who talked through his nostrils, while Father Brown solves the interaction of various presumptive identities in a scenario of a millionaire’s murder on a closed pleasure pier, and plays with automatic amusements, a red doll and a blue doll chasing each other in a circle, but which was the first one to chase the other? I think the next time FB uncovers the culprit of a crime it will be me!
The Crime of the Communist Three men came out from under the lowbrow Tudor arch in the mellow facade of Mandeville College, into the strong evening sunlight of a summer day which seemed as if it would never end; and in that sunlight they saw something that blasted like lightning; well-fitted to be the shock of their lives. ‘Good God,’ cried Craken with the intense invocation of the atheist. ‘Do you think I don’t want to apply Economics? Only, when we apply it, you call it red ruin and anarchy; and when you apply it, I take the liberty of calling it exploitation. If only you fellows would apply Economics, it’s just possible that people might get something to eat. We are the practical people; and that’s why you’re afraid of us. That’s why you have to get two greasy Capitalists to start another Lectureship; just because I’ve let the cat out of the bag.’ ‘I have to do with England,’ said Father Brown. ‘I come from there. And the funniest thing of all is that even if you love it and belong to it, you still can’t make head or tail of it.’ ————– SPOILER: A tale where Craken the Communist is not the villain, a tale of the planting of matchboxes, the discovery that murder is rarely to do with what you expect, if often to do with petty thievery or swindles or envy or prejudice or hate or passion or politics left and right, but never in Father Brown stories is it to do with gratuitousness as in Camus — as two Capitalist patrons of Mandeville College are found like waxworks sitting peacefully in their garden chairs. The above three quotes tell you much. But it is a more special experience to read the whole story, as quoting from it is a crime like petty thievery!
THE POINT OF A PIN For there was hanging like a cloud over the half-built skyscraper the possibility of a Labour crisis, One of those still electric shocks of fancy that sometimes thrilled Father Brown’s mind in an almost meaningless way shot through him at that particular instant. He had a queer notion that the man who was speaking could not now be murdered, because he was already dead. It was, he cheerfully admitted, a perfectly senseless idea. But there was something that always gave him the creeps about the cold disenchanted detachment of the noble senior partner; about his cadaverous colour and inhospitable eyes. ‘The fellow,’ he thought in the same perverse mood, ‘has green eyes and looks as if he had green blood.’ This was partly due to his remembering, as a man may remember a dream, the fact of having been half-awakened at a more regular hour and fallen asleep again; a common enough occurrence with most of us, but a very uncommon occurrence with Father Brown. And he was afterwards oddly convinced, with that mystic side of him which was normally turned away from the world, that in that detached dark islet of dreamland, between the two wakings, there lay like buried treasure the truth of this tale. ——— It’s not that I can’t see the solution to this story, but that I can’t see its problem, or words to that effect. Following the Communist in the previous story this one has Bolsheviks and a Lord and Trade Unions – and Workers working on a building near where FB sleeps. Three more quotes above that I have stolen from the text, probably the most abstruse text you will ever read. You need to sleep and dream of if to solve its problem or problemise its solution. The pin without a point like a tell-tale heart under the floorboards. A suicide and murder in palimpsest.
The Insoluble Problem This queer incident, in some ways perhaps the queerest of the many that came his way, happened to Father Brown at the time when his French friend Flambeau had retired from the profession of crime and had entered with great energy and success on the profession of crime investigator. Father Brown was not very fond of the telephone. He was one who preferred to watch people’s faces and feel social atmospheres, and he knew well that without these things, verbal messages are apt to be very misleading, FB and FB both characters in this story… And that’s a premonition of Facebook! the tree was in flower and the corpse was hung with a faded peacock-green dressing-gown, and wore on its wagging head a scarlet smoking-cap. Also it had red bedroom-slippers, one of which had fallen off and lay on the grass like a blot of blood. But neither Flambeau or Father Brown was looking at these things as yet. They were both staring at a strange object that seemed to stick out of the middle of the dead man’s shrunken figure; and which they gradually perceived to be the black but rather rusty iron hilt of a seventeenth-century sword, which had completely transfixed the body. —————- Three more quotes above stolen from the text. From the previous story’s palimpsest of murder and suicide, we now have one of hanging and being stabbed with a sword. The paradoxes and loops of logic as well as the insoluble solution and problemless problem take a rich textured Catholic turn with this mix of characters and the mystery of the Reliquary at the centre of all machinations. This book nears its end. A book that you will need to read soon in case you don’t ever read it.
THE VAMPIRE OF THE VILLAGE Vamper, not vampire, I suggest. And this time, for the last story ever, I steal a review that is not my own: “A curious sense of unreality hangs like a pall over the St. Mary Meadish village where the vicar’s poetical son is enamoured of Mrs. Maltravers, who may have poisoned her husband. The solution is, as usual, not what we have been led to expect, but the motive makes no sense, and neither do the dates.” end
Copy numbered 28/81. Luxuriously upholstered book with quality materials, about 10 inches square, 54 pages, marker ribbon, all generously designed with much artwork etc, dust jacket, and embossed hardback cover. My previous reviews of Damian Murphy’s work HERE. My previous reviews of this publisher’s works HERE.
Pages 7 – 9 “…Séraphine Cloutier, her face-mask positively owl-like above her elaborate white party dress.” An extremely intriguing start as the masked guests are invited in for the party by Séraphine, and she effectively gives them carte blanche for stealing items from her chateau. There are rules to this ‘game’ which I will not cover here for fear of spoilers and I am excited to continue reading this book (a temptation I shall temporarily resist, a resistance for its own sake) to see if I can steal anything from the text without anyone noticing. I also wonder whether this ‘game’ is a tontine – or whether it has 81 prizes, one for each of us.
Pages 10 – 14 “in the grips of a sublime intoxication.” …a description of a photograph of a younger Séraphine as seen by our eyes In this visit to the chateau, our eyes being those of Valérie, whose father, originally accompanying her, fails at his own theft task. This point-of-view’s description, too, of the chateau and its masked denizens is one of sublime intoxication in prose. It really is. Until we leave along with Valérie. Which of us successful, I will leave to your imagination. If any.
Pages 14 – 20 “She mingles the streams, intermixes the tenets of one faith with another.” A blend of temple with temple, chateau with chateau, Séraphine’s son with Valérie’s father, a single and singular wallpaper intermixing and re-triangulating coordinates within itself, conversations over tea and Taoism, Viet Nam, and what was thieved or not on the night of the party. Increasingly intriguing and character-building. Even the prose style is syntactically syncretic, too.
Pages 20 – 30 “Below appeared the name of the author, which meant so little to her that she immediately forgot it.” But this book’s author, whether the name is remembered or not, produces, for me, work that grows EVEN better and better the more I read of this author or the more this author writes new and newer works about these rarefied books that are created within such works. No exception here, as V receives a book (not the thing thieved by her, but freely borrowed from S’s chateau), a book that transliterates with the temples in her own chateau’s wallpaper. V is not a yellow wallpaper woman, but a woman far more destined to have thieved, with the arguably knowing nod of its owner, something I shall keep from you until you read THIS book that will entrammel something inside you, not your heart, soul or spirit, but something perhaps even more significant. You learn to handle these “logographic” things the more you read this author. And the more they actually handle you. The characters interact either in person or by some sort of ‘homing pigeon’ between book and book, temple and temple, woman and woman, father and father, and there are the “cherished cigarettes” handled, too…
Pages 30 – 39 “Séraphine appeared a third and final time in the theater of Valérie’s dreams. They swapped identities back and forth several times within the course of the dream, having grown so intimate as to comprise a single entity in two phases.” A golden pheasant as another objective correlative or leitmotif emerges at some point in these gestalt synergies of mutuality between woman and woman, temple and wallpaper, perhaps as an overdone version of the homing pigeon I earlier suggested. Perhaps I should have suggested a magpie, too, In view of the invited thieving? Indeed, this text grows superbly overdone, and it does not seem to matter HOW overdone because the rarefied concepts such as ‘Pao’ or ‘luminous gnosis of the ancient adepts’ actually make you the reader feel you have become one of the ancient adepts yourself. Nor, somehow, is the ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ scenario of luxuriance by impending séance offputting. Nor the arcane or pompish rituals. Nor the recurring incantatory images such as S’s self-admitted “ridiculous entrance” after which “She placed the cigarette between her lips and partook deeply of the rich, dark smoke…” I leave the text for a nonce just as V defies S’s instructions by wandering off from the séance at al. You may feel I have abandoned V, just to report so far these events real-time for you, so I intend now to hasten back there.
Pages 39 – 50 “To breach the temple uninvited would incur a definite consequence, a penalty by means of which the exalted heights of anonymity might be attained.” Via such, for me, essence of Nemonymity, I am back, by the skin of my teeth and health, alongside or within V, where “The sense of trespass was almost overbearing.” Almost. The gorgeousness of prose,too. “Nearly laughable” as the text itself slips in. Nearly, but never. Along with V’s growing contempt for S’s son whom she meets again, and his cynicism regarding his own mother and her over-doings. I sense at one point that V is the pheasant herself being hunted by S whom V has abandoned to the so-called séance (comprising all us 81 readers which the book itself somehow gives us such status within its text, with our showing various characteristics, but perhaps too many for a single séance?) – until I see this phrase: “Valérie passed between them like a peasant…” (My underlining.) “statuettes of birds”, “flitting like the wings of birds in flight”, “a rare bird in the night” … I am sure I myself have instead become the homing pigeon for this book? Yet the message I bring can never be definite as to the outcome of whether there is any doubt of there eventually being, at the end of this long night, a vicious battle or loving clinch between the two women, temple within temple, who photographed by whom, in this probably ever-resonating book once you’ve put it down. I must return to it eventually in the guise of moral-veering Valérie, as pheasant or peasant, or the reader “who, by means of cunning and acuity had gained the upper hand in their own interrogation.”
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.
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.
Dreamcatching?… “…a rethinking of traditional philosophical vitalism that strips humanity of its exceptionalism and resituates it as the fragile product of cosmic coincidence.”
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….
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.”
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…
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.
The Thomas Ligotti Online Forum discussion thread initiated today about this book: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=10959 ———– The second essay is: LOVECRAFT’S THINGS: Sinister Souvenirs from Other Worlds By Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Professor of English at Central Michigan University.)
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
Please also witness the flaying and flensing of the publicly projected Ligotti self from the ‘Purity’ of Ligotti’s fiction texts, as flayed and flensed by myself and as linked from here: http://www.ligotti.net/showpost.php?p=119386&postcount=1
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.)
“Thus, the ‘shrieking, roaring confusion of sound’ (Lovecraft, ‘Witch House,’ 305) that thunders through his weird universes signifies both Lovecraft’s kinship to and irreconcilability with contemporary philosophy — or any earthly philosophy, for that matter.” This essay presents an impressively detailed litany of ‘unpleasant’ sound or music in the HPL fiction texts, in fact, for me, the major leitmotif in them. A gestalt that presents the infinite repercussions of dincopated infinity in, say, the “Ph’nglui…” incantation or refrain. Mentions also Meillassoux. I can now no longer question my lifelong love of HPL fiction texts and of music like Stockhausen, Schoenberg, Xenakis etc as well as the slightly more mellifluous Debussy, Glass, Messiaen, Beethoven late string quartets etc etc. This essay has become a seminal slant on HPL, for me, and I shall revisit my real-time reviews where such references have permeated them since 2008 and my own reading since I first encountered HPL in 1964. ——————– My past Dreamcatching Gestalt Real-time Reviews of Joshi associated books… https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/in-the-land-of-time-lord-dunsany/ https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/08/30/the-dark-eidolon-and-other-fantasies-clark-ashton-smith/ https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/bone-idle-in-the-charnel-house/
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) More later…
“Just as Lovecraft personified his materialist philosophy of ‘cosmic indifferentism’ in a timeless pantheon of alien ‘gods’ productive of epiphanic ‘cosmic horror’ in human discoverers of their presence, so too did O’Bannon, Scott, and the film’s other scriptwriters embody the amorality of the universe in a deadly alien life form…” I am sure others will find this essay fascinating, but since I have long suffered from ‘cinematic indifferentism’, I don’t think I am in a position to comment further on its comparisons with the films Alien and Prometheus.
The fifth essay is RACE, SPECIES, AND OTHERS: H. P. Lovecraft and the Animal By Jed Mayer (associate professor of Victorian literature at SUNY – New Paltz.) More later…
And in the above context of its goal, this essay presents a telling perspective – from the HPL works and surrounding mores of the time, literature and scientific studies – of this knotty issue in HPL, including a fascinating reference to the tentacle’s arrival in the Gothic. On a personal note, when I first read HPL in the 1960s, I knew nothing about the author, and I then felt not even a hint of this knotty issue. However, forced as I was to learn more about HPL in ensuing years, especially through his letters to Kleiner, I, too, was altered in my mindset towards his works. I suppose, with my interest, also from the 1960s, in Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy as a literary theory, I should not have allowed my mindset to have changed, but change it did.
Later today. – just cross-referenced this essay with my synchronous review of a Flannery O’Connor story here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/07/01/flannery-oconnor-complete-stories/#comment-7676 Also, since writing my review above of Jed Mayer’s essay, this morning I had a minor operation on my neck’s long-term troublous sebaceous-cyst, and the surgeon lanced, drained and seaweed-dressing-packed it, while talking to me about its ‘tentacles’. Yes, that is the word he actually used! (Sometimes, I don’t believe myself!)
The sixth essay is H. P. LOVECRAFT’S RELUCTANT SEXUALITY: Abjection and the Monstrousn Feminine in ‘The Dunwich Horror’ By Carl H. Sederholm (associate professor of humanities at Brigham Young University) More later…
“In other words. Lovecraft’s sexual loathing, his attempt to separate human behaviour from animal action, and his apparent wish to escape physical instincts, desires, or passions, all suggest a difficulty reconciling intellectual fantasies with physical realities.” A refreshingly open-ended and exploratory essay, describing, inter alia, possible associations with his father’s death by syphilis, the “paradoxes of the body”, Lavinia Whateley’s imputed coupling with Yog Sothoth and Joshi’s apparent propensity, in his studies, not to pursue HPL’s sexual side, beyond reference to a possible low sex drive.
The seventh essay is H. P. LOVECRAFT AND REAL PERSON FICTION: The Pulp Author as Subcultural Avatar By Davud Simmons (senior lecturer in English and screen studies at Northampton University.) More later…
This is a topic of which I have little knowledge. A form of fanfiction called RPF and how HPL as a real person, was used, from Bloch onwards, in such fiction, and this phenomenon as relating to HPL is indeed fascinating. It is a form of Tuckerisation, I guess, and it is ironic that my favourite exponent of this device is Rhys Hughes who once said this of HPL: http://rhysaurus.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/lovecrafts-something.html
The eighth essay is A POLYCHROME STUDY: Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald” and Lovecraft’s Literary Afterlives By Jessica George (PhD from Cardiff University) More later…
“Lovecraft is, if not everywhere, in many places — and, as such, is many things.” “…that human identity may rely upon writing, but the identities we inhabit when we write, and when we rewrite by reading, are always multiple and partial.” This remarkably seems to represent my long-term ethos of gestalt real-time reviewing, i.e. reader and author in mutual synergy, the two-way pecking order of author, narrator, characters and readers, a filter in both directions. The potential public triangulation of any work as it is hawled or dreamcaught through a myriad of real-time reviewers, Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy, Jungianism and more. As well as this essay being another revelation regarding the phenomenon that is Lovecraft. A unique name that only he and his family bears – as the final irony? A watershed for me, too.
LOVECRAFT’S COSMIC ETHICS By Patricia MacCormack (Professor of continental philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge) “Against many critics, Lovecraft offers entryways into feminist, ecosophical, queer, and mystical (albeit atheist) configurations of difference. [.….] …to show that Lovecraft is uncannily relevant for posthuman philosophies, and that traditional criticisms of his work as nihilistic, misogynistic, unethical, and generally concerned with the maintenance of traditional values ought to be reoriented.” I wonder if you will consider this essay meets with such a goal. I, for one, have found it impressive and compelling.
LOVECRAFT, WITCH CULTS, AND PHILOSOPHERS By W. Scott Poole (Professor of history at the College of Charleston) This seems to me to be a bit of a balance to some of this book’s other brainstorming. Basing HPL’s racism on his interest (subsumption?) in witchcraft (as well as cosmic horror, great old ones etc). This article does not excuse but perhaps explains. What do you think? I find it less interesting from an Intentional Fallacy point of view, and prefer the hyper-cacophony, pareidolia and modernity side of the HPL texts, if not the personal side of HPL himself. I do not usually carry out real-time reviews on anything but fiction, and I have tried, in this review, to draw out a texture rather than an acrimony. I may or may not have some skill in dreamcatching pure fiction, but I make no claims about reviewing academic literary-criticism, biography, history, philosophy, science, religion, sociology… I have found the afterword interview with Miéville offputting and unnecessary. But I did admire the Campbell foreword as a hors d’oeuvres. Meanwhile, I think anyone reading the main eleven essays as a gestalt will find a new gestalt of HPL as a multi-faceted phenomenon, a preternatural configuration beyond the tentacles, one that paradoxically attracts, repels and purges. Those who study, admire, hate or pastiche him are lucky to work in his shadow, a shadow more defined after this book but crazily even more ill-defined, too! Attracts, repels and purges, yes, and it is a book that I can now remove from the lid of the biggest purging device of our civilisation called the Lavatory. It seems to conclusively disprove a contention I found someone making about academic studies of HPL in connection with this specific book: an on-line statement that academia “went completely into the toilet with postmodernist insanities like poststructuralism and deconstruction after the 1960s).” At least we can now purge that particular myth. I hope my fiction reviews utilise such methods, among many other methods new and old, to triangulate the books I buy to read. Today’s Age of Lovecraft, derived from a prophetic sort of walking, breathing, complex, entangled Age of the Internet that is part of the same palimpsest. So, yes, the cosmic HPL HyPerLink attracts, repels, purges AND connects – for good and ill as humanity’s intrinsic nature that ever needs purging, laving, loving. end
The Star - H. G. Wells Sultana's Dream - Rokheya Shekhawat Hossein The New Overworld - Paul Scheerbart The Triumph of Mechanics - Karl Hans Strobl Elements of Pataphysics - Alfred Jarry Mechanopolis - Miguel de Unamuno The Doom of Principal City - Yefim Zozulya The Comet - W. E. B. Du Bois The Fate of the Poseidonia - Clare Winger Harris The Star Stealers - Edmond Hamilton The Conquest of Gola - Leslie F. Stone A Martian Odyssey - Stanley G. Weinbaum The Last Poet and the Robots - A. Merritt The Microscopic Giants - Paul Ernst Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - Jorge Luis Borges Desertion - Clifford D. Simak September 2005: The Martian - Ray Bradbury Baby HP - Juan José Arreola Surface Tension - James Blish Beyond Lies the Wub - Philip K. Dick The Snowball Effect - Katherine MacLean Prott - Margaret St. Clair The Liberation of Earth - William Tenn Let Me Live in a House - Chad Oliver The Star - Arthur C. Clarke Grandpa - James H. Schmitz The Game of Rat and Dragon - Cordwainer Smith The Last Question - Isaac Asimov Stranger Station - Damon Knight Sector General - James White The Visitors - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Pelt - Carol Emshwiller The Monster - Gérard Klein The Man Who Lost the Sea - Theodore Sturgeon The Waves - Silvina Ocampo Plenitude - Will Worthington The Voices of Time - J. G. Ballard The Astronaut - Valentina Zhuravlyova The Squid Chooses Its Own Ink - Adolfo Bioy Casares 2 B R 0 2 B - Kurt Vonnegut Jr. A Modest Genius - Vadim Shefner Day of Wrath - Sever Gansovsky The Hands - John Baxter Darkness - André Carneiro "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman - Harlan Ellison Nine Hundred Grandmothers - R. A. Lafferty Day Million - Frederik Pohl Student Body - F. L. Wallace Aye, and Gomorrah - Samuel R. Delany The Hall of Machines - Langdon Jones Soft Clocks - Yoshio Aramaki Three from Moderan - David R. Bunch Let Us Save the Universe - Stanisław Lem Vaster Than Empires and More Slow - Ursula K. Le Guin Good News from the Vatican - Robert Silverberg When It Changed - Joanna Russ And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side - James Tiptree Jr. Where Two Paths Cross - Dmitri Bilenkin Standing Woman - Yasutaka Tsutsui The IWM 1000 - Alicia Yánez Cossío The House of Compassionate Sharers - Michael Bishop Sporting with the Chid - Barrington J. Bayley Sandkings - George R. R. Martin Wives - Lisa Tuttle The Snake That Read Chomsky - Josephine Saxton Reiko's Universe Box - Kajio Shinji Swarm - Bruce Sterling Mondocane - Jacques Barbéri Blood Music - Greg Bear Bloodchild - Octavia E. Butler Variation on a Man - Pat Cadigan Passing as a Flower in the City of the Dead - S. N. Dyer New Rose Hotel - William Gibson Pots - C. J. Cherryh Snow - John Crowley The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things - Karen Joy Fowler The Unmistakable Smell of Wood Violets - Angélica Gorodischer The Owl of Bear Island - Jon Bing Readers of the Lost Art - Élisabeth Vonarburg A Gift from the Culture - Iain M. Banks Paranamanco - Jean-Claude Dunyach Crying in the Rain - Tanith Lee The Frozen Cardinal - Michael Moorcock Rachel in Love - Pat Murphy Sharing Air - Manjula Padmanabhan Schwarzschild Radius - Connie Willis All the Hues of Hell - Gene Wolfe Vacuum States - Geoffrey A. Landis Two Small Birds - Han Song Burning Sky - Rachel Pollack Before I Wake - Kim Stanley Robinson Death Is Static Death Is Movement - Misha Nogha The Brains of Rats - Michael Blumlein Gorgonoids - Leena Krohn Vacancy for the Post of Jesus Christ - Kojo Laing The Universe of Things - Gwyneth Jones The Remoras - Robert Reed The Ghost Standard - William Tenn Remnants of the Virago Crypto-System - Geoffrey Maloney How Alex Became a Machine - Stepan Chapman The Poetry Cloud - Cixin Liu Story of Your Life - Ted Chiang Craphound - Cory Doctorow The Slynx - Tatyana Tolstaya Baby Doll - Johanna Sinisalo
My previous review of a Jason A. Wyckoff book HERE. Tartarus Press 2016 (my previous reviews of this publisher’s books linked from HERE.) I intend to real-time review this collection in a week or so, and when I do, my comments will appear in the thought stream below.
18 thoughts on “The Hidden Back Room by Jason A. Wyckoff”
THE HIDDEN BACK ROOM “We wouldn’t want to put too much on his plate.” This, I reckon, mis-echoes deliberately the pattern of ‘The Hospice’ by Robert Aickman, where it starts with a car that needs mending (the protagonist takes it to a garage recommended by a fellow worker whom he doesn’t know well) and while waiting visits, through heavy rain, the Restaurant opposite where they have plates that are already empty rather than too full. But that gives you no real clue as to the accretive ‘disarming strangeness’ and oblique objective-correlatives of this narrative. The mis-skewed series of doors that one palms open or needs to negotiate like revolving doors and a slowly descending chandelier (a combination of ‘All Fools and Horses’ and ‘Fawlty Towers’?) – again all this gives you no real clue as to the disturbing power of this absurdist work, and I haven’t yet covered for you the nature of the characters he meets in that restaurant! I will leave you discover those for yourself. The spiders, too. And more. (The slow motion descent of the chandelier is in tune with the likely slow motion nature of this real-time review (very slow-motion indeed) although this first story has given me a positive spur towards a speedy engagement with the second story, but at the moment I am inundated with books all of which I anticipate relishing in real-time, each book slowing down the others. Such is life.) “A woman sang in a foreign language over a jazz trio, drizzling honey into the spaces between bass and piano.”
TANOROAR “Did you save yourself?” For months now, I have had a troublous thing on my neck, which was removed a couple of days ago and I am still recovering from that gory minor operation, but having now read this, I am both disturbed and relieved! A striking story, in the middle of nowhere, that starts with a car breaking down (cf my comparison to ‘The Hospice’ above), and we are gradually led into the type of story where presumably ordinary people meet with strange behaviour from locals, here a well-characterised married couple finding themselves among country inbreeds, a curt man, deformed boy and some young women having a mix of colluding with or fearing the arrival of a priapic Minotaur…. Somehow, for me, this compelling story is constructively reminiscent of John Langan-type bullicose fiction but has its own unique take upon the collusive nature of this Minotaur and its accoutrements that you may never forget.
GUT PUNCH “I squirm as that oppressive ‘limbo’ sensation thickens the air between stucco and low-pile.” This story IS a gut punch, as well as being about one. The male narrator offered to be tucked in by his Joseph whom he also wants to involve once the catharsis or purging point is reached by the end, although involvement is often more a contaminant that hides all other contaminants, even hiding itself, “a man whom no cigar is just a cigar.” He blames his mother for his sexuality, but is that anything for anyone to be blamed? This GREAT story has, for me, the literary traction of some American writers that I have read in recent years, John Updike, Philip Roth, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, reaching a psychic apotheosised Aickman more like HP Lovecraft…. A terrifying vision of a close-encounters sort of indoor mountain built into or by his past and current hang-ups, a Lovecraftian monster as well as a mountain of madness. You will not believe how this story develops so powerfully, the relationship of the narrator with his mother (a relationship that is the crux of everything here), his return to the tawdry town where he grew up, revisiting the church where the people ask after his mother, and his mother’s unshrinking shrink who entices him back, along with his mother, to the actual house where he lived as a child with her… a male shrink. Any review of this work needs thus to tail off without definition so that you can start it on a sober, shockable footing, assuming you haven’t read it before and thus already gut-punched.
ON BALANCE “Finally, I was exasperated by the very weight of the decision.” Legal judges sometimes, when clinching evidence is unavailable, need to judge on where the weight is in a balance of probabilities. I judge this story is a metaphor for my own seeking of a gestalt, whether subtle, preternatural or obvious, whenever I conduct a real-time review of a fiction work or a series of fiction works in a single book, obsessed as I am, with the fruits of my own pareidolia and apophenia. I am convinced, too, that this story will haunt me, come what may, just as the metal-detector-wielding beachcomber’s discard of a metal cup haunts the narrator over years of his routine life’s commuting and fighting to maintain his own diffidence against the onset of coincidences regarding that cup. I have never before read a work about a person’s agonising over the value of diffidence, and here it is portrayed convincingly amid recurrences of discarding, initiation, disquiet, and a need for a clinching closure, but such passionate-diffidence (an oxymoron?) is a human emotion that needs treating, and here we have it at last, I suggest. Meanwhile, the name ‘Donna Louise’ (embossed on the cup), for example, will now nag at me until I solve it by means of my on-going reading of this book. And if not found directly in this book, I will seek that closure elsewhere, I guess.
THE RAIN-DIRTY VALLEY “She walked with the steady indifference he had seen seen displayed by the woman on the path.” They keep on coming! Another treatment of diffidence in the shape of a scenario that, for me, blends Flannery O’Connor with the Twilight Zone. I infer a protagonist named Nathan who is black, having dithered for some years, with a studied diffidence, the woman he loves and who may love him but now she is marrying someone else, CharISE, her name, like a similar dithering as with the previous story’s Donna LouISE cup. As a metaphor for his diffidence, perhaps, Nathan takes a journey to Charise’s wedding reception … In his car that breaks down like cars tend to do in this book! A spooky fog engulfs him, and the text is good on the various natures of fog in general, this a cloying, emotional fog, whence evolves a stage set town, to the tune of his own jazz music (music significant, here, as it was in this book’s first story), and people conjured by that town and then acting to fit those emotions and those people conjuring or cloying others, potentially HIM. Who the playthings, who the urchin kids you orphaned in this fog-locked town? Who the living, who the ghosts? Almost a sentimental slow-motion. A telling ending, too, for this remarkable work. A little touch of Harry in the night, to quote someone.
THE HOMUNCULUS IN THE CURIO “You were much closer to non-life when you were eight than now when you are eighty.” … building, as I do, long and longer queues of books to real-time review so as to extend real-time itself, perhaps forever, “as always, kept busy on your path.” This pungent, well-bellied, old man has civilised trans-Cartesian conversations with the homunculus in the curio, the one he had created or captured like a hostage from grave-wax. They talk about eschatology, existentialism, Stockholm Syndrome. magic, faerie, ley-lines, in “languid whimsy”, “desultory”, of “affable peculiarity”, and dare I say there is a paradoxically diffident determination by the agent to bring magic into the principal’s dying existence. A decided poignancy, and a special theatrical quality, a dialogue similar, I guess, to Waiting for Godot, giving this work the potential for being classicised, if not classified.
A BLOOD WITHOUT BLOOD “I could not even trace a larger rhythm born of mania; despite the apparent obsession fuelling its builder, there appeared to be no consideration as to how each section might relate to the whole,…” Which is just how I feel about my own gestalt real-time reviews, but more a mania than an obsession. I am glad this article-writer left its “lede” intact, and did not remove it nor just tell the meat of the story straight; after all, his lede is, for me, a fine literarily textured treatise on writing such articles about the eccentric collector or constructor, and it gives a feel of his own participation in this most fateful one of his writing career, even if he didn’t in the end dare write it for his editor. Of course, it goes without saying that the meat of the story starts with a sputtering car… The collector-constructor is one who accretes found art, and I love found art, especially the stuff I find in the Tate Gallery or other museums of extreme modern art. Which brings me back to the whole gamut of being a Dreamcatcher or Hawler amongst the mainframes, axles and bumpers of literature. It is as if his car was attracted to the found auto art created organically and fatefully-by-its-approximation-to-Death that was, in a different time and place, to be written up in the protagonist’s article about the found auto art and its ‘artist’. That very ‘attraction’ of metal magnetising metal over time and space pervades this remarkable text to its very end, factored into by the statistics of car accidents. The text’s description of the found art pile-up proves, by the way, to be stunning.
THE DREAMS OF PALE NIGHT “Her criticisms of her son, justified as she felt they were, pricked at her until feelings bloomed both of fondness and of protective worry, each fuelling the other in turn. ‘What am I supposed to do about him?’ she whispered.” This tantalising novelette fills me with memories of childhood’s waking dreams, like watching a beam of light managing to find its way into the canopied darkness of my bedroom and my fearing its passage worse than any monster, or having to leave the canopy of my existence and meeting giants outside of it, maybe become one of those giants myself. I don’t know where to begin. Alaska? Some alternate or fantasy Alaska? Hosea, a gawky lad, due to become gawkier, and we are told allusively of his “desultory” ditherings to leave the canopy’s commune, by deviousness leaving his feisty relationship with his mother or the semen-stained fumblings with his girl Hannah. I was particularly taken with what I shall call the hawling of the tarp canopy, a prime example of my own hawling or dreamcatching, and you will need to go far to find such an off-the-wall obsession with keeping the canopy intact at night from those stray beams of light. The small upside-down trees. The dreadful or hopefully not dreadful but dreamful fate of his mother, amid those tangled trees. And the lackadaisical fate for Hannah who continues her life with a husband and children, and with her only being able to see Hosea out of the corner of her eye. The beehives. The charms of finding gold in the river or the lucky charm of having a crystal around the neck. The seeking of an entrance into the head as dome or skull or canopy – via the nostrils? – like ever trying to find this book’s hidden back room there. An engaging group of characters all on the edge of something they need to transcend. The reader, included. “…these people locked in tradition, united by belief.”
THE HOUSE ON NORTH CONGRESS STREET “I have wondered since if ghosts are able to avail themselves of those optical illusions wherein they seem to appear.” This text of personal narrativizing is high on the graduations of the eerie. It is a student’s compulsively structured agonising, even dithering, with the concept of the haunted house and of ghosts while he is staying at an address with this reputation. The eventual haunting he experiences feels real to me – and you can’t often say that about fiction stories as I presume this is. It depends upon a fabrication of this book’s previous found art, here random objects in a bedroom, dreamcatching or hawling them into a gestalt, and then the gestalt autonomously turns into a ghost. This is extrapolated beyond the preterite of his pre-internet student days into the Internet days proper – where substantiation is available on-line (if that is not a contradiction in terms). Genuinely creepy as a hidden back room,
DETAILS This seems to be the synaesthesic apotheosis of this book’s theme of agonising or “wistful” or diffident pareidolia-apophenia towards a gestalt of some haunted fate or rarefied state of existence. It takes a while to grow into the narrator of ‘Details’ wherein the or a devil resides. Via an overheard casual conversation of easy racism, a sense of superhuman power, recurrent meetings with someone called Roger (as if some call signal of goodbye), a rock music earworm, and a ceiling-fan growing closer like this book’s earlier chandelier – and the first time I’ve seen ‘deadpan’ used as a verb. ‘Intent as nine-tenths of the law’, which brings me back to my lifelong interest in Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy with regard to dreamcatching or hawling literature like this book’s literature. The narrator and myself both fulfilling the role of the classic jinx? Just begging for that sinkhole of wrongness to open up beneath me…
Also compare with how I started my review of ‘On Balance’ above: “Legal judges sometimes, when clinching evidence is unavailable, need to judge on where the weight is in a balance of probabilities.”
COMFORTIDOR “The ‘disconnect’ between the creature’s existence and the problem its body heat created was obvious…” You know, this is an unquestionably remarkable and ground-breaking collection of stories, each story working stoically, morosely, moribundly, acceptingly, assimilatingly, dawdlingly, goadingly, intrepidly, aspergically, for the gestalt of the whole in which each shares. As does Davis in this particular story. If the previous story was some form of this quest’s apotheosis, this one is its dragon in the lowest basement of all. Another homunculus in the curio with whom to chew the fat, or dowse the water. Davis, on another level, is the stoical worker in the Ligottian Corporation, but Ligotti works in different, more diluted office politics. Nothing can touch the Wyckoff version in this story, I contend. It is sheer diffident bravado, as we follow the path of Davis trying to transcend the heating problems of the office building and the leg or is it log of the foot where the hot-blooded office workers work, and ends up burning the log – the one he once had aspirations to sculpt into a new shape – onto his own fireplace at home. This story deserves a trophy, or at least a metal cup. Its determination of “decrescendo” is the optimum. The pessimum, too.
IN THE LIBRARY “It had a reversed L-shape, running tall north-south, with a second shorter leg turning right from the top.” They keep on coming. Well, this one sort of comes on its own, a potential future classic for those who love the generic Weird tale, the Horror story or Ghost story, including, but not exclusively, the Lovecraftian – as well as something special that makes this story its own backstory, its own hidden back room, implicit with the frightening ceiling that’s planted above it, like a psychological or spiritual chandelier or fan, an insectoid-human intertwining of text with the dragon or demon inside your own unvented stomach. Yes, I feel this story IS a classic, and does not need yet to become one. At first, I thought it was exploratory by the protagonist of a haunted building like Danielewski’s HOUSE of Leaves, one that perhaps was never written, one that I just imagined reading, triangulating – as we do alongside the protagonist – the historical backstory of the building, its library and secret room, a literal House of LEAVES with its books. And then triangulating its frightening implications, its aftermath and its future beyond this book. On a personal note, I sensed this work as an extrapolation of the Nemonymous from the Weirdmonger side of me. As if my thousand plus published fictions before 1999 were the inferior insects that gave birth to the bigger and better ones in Wyckoff. (Even his name seems apposite!) The essence of Nemonymity…. ‘The Familiar’ I never then knew I had. “On not a single novel in that library did I find the conjunction used for attribution, either on the cover, the spine, or the frontispiece — never was a book ‘by’ someone.”
LES OMBRES CHINOISES “In a propitious Sunday matinee, Laurence Olivier had taught her to smoke only when the moment required the affectation, and to always discard the cigarette emphatically after no more than five puffs.” Although this seems to be the book’s penultimate story, I am treating it tentatively as the charmingly diffident coda. A genius loci, ceiling and chandelier et al, of a basement theatre and a shadow play shadowing another shadow play, the relationship between a love-seasoned Sunset Boulevard type actress and her son, as they talk about the nature of the word ‘legendary’ pre-empted as it is by anyone legendary having to be in a fiction rather than real life, and about the difference between a love affair and a romance. And later, when alone, her slipping on of a neat number of a dress leading her to transcend time (but in which direction?) and become the artwork she always was or would be, meeting another woman as her self or soulmate amid a soirée with Erik Satie. I was rather taken aback that as I read this work a couple of hours ago, there was being broadcast by the BBC, live on its Radio 3, a cabaret of music and words celebrating the music of Erik Satie: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07m58xc ! “The wish, if there was one, seemed more towards promoting her neglected health for its own sake, sans objective.”
STRONGER THAN ALL STORMS “I left my car by the side of the road with a note saying I’d had engine trouble…” If a coda can have a coda, this relatively brief text is it. It’s the hidden back room beyond the hidden back room, not straddled by ceilings with chandeliers, but a roof as an active theatrical stage for a ‘found art’ ghost fixing it not while the sun shines but as a storm already rages. The narrator — involving himself in a dithering, diffident self-palliative care for cancer, carrying a deadly gun as its own fixing hammer — takes a solitary walk to where in a forest he can be lost even to the disease that chases him – but he finds instead a precarious abode with Aickman’s settled dust inside. And his log-lit smoke through the chimney is due to alert the the reader on the roof, a reader left with something at last to grasp – a life as a precious but expendable act of goodness that will outlast that reader who is anyone and everyone who triangulates, real-time reviews, hawls, dreamcatches such goodness from this fictively and luxuriantly stiff-paged and sturdy book I hold in my hand, a book, out of, not in, the library, one that will become dust, last of any of us, no doubt. Dust or “grabby mud.” A story where the car only pretended to have broken down, uncertain whether to self-start. The ultimate method acting. I read this story today, on a day that UK news is full of an item about cancer no longer being life-ending; it is now simply life-changing: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-36925974 The back room many of us carry with us. Including me. end
faber & faber 2009 Sky-blue thinking, dirty yellow literary gold and an old timer’s lost geranium…. When I review this book, my comments will appear in the thought stream below.
34 thoughts on “Flannery O’Connor: Complete Stories”
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?
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.
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.”
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 above 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.
THE CROP “Miss Willerton always crumbed the table.” – the story’s first sentence. Later: “‘First sentences,’she always said, ‘came to her — like a flash! Just like a flash!’ she would say and snap her fingers, ‘like a flash!’ And she built her story up from them.” With the opening post-breakfast scene, I thought I was in a story by my favourite writer Elizabeth Bowen. (Why do I now always think of Brexit every time I hear the word ‘breakfast’?) A truly writerly, fascinatingly experimental, story, where Miss Willerton starts her story of the sharecropper with hookworm, and his wife, on her typewriter and it is as if the text enfolds her and she herself becomes the wife for real. A remarkable story, well before its time. Words as phonemes as well as a crop of crumbs. When you are a God of a story you sometimes have to roll around in its mud yourself like a Dog.
THE TURKEY “He remembered the minister had said young men were going to the devil by the dozens these day and age; forsaking gentle ways; walking in the tracks of Satan.” Living-shooting games, as our 12 year old boy hero wants to outdo his older brother by proudly bringing home the Turkey he bags, creaturification as told by another set of abrasive phonemes in the form of story text while he dares the act of blasphemy with various spoken words, and finds himself kidded by those devil-boys out of his Turkey prey – as well as kidded out of prayer or hope itself against such devils? Told and very telling.
THE TRAIN “The turn of his head was like and the back of his neck was like and the short reach of his arm.” A hypnotic shorthand prose with vivid exegetic energetic syntax and longhand breathers between, as the train endlessly winds from beginning to end to beginning again, in 19 year old Haze’s haze of memories, of places, of his mother (structured in dream-like thought like the bed berth in the train ceiling and like something else) and the ‘gulch nigger’ porter who opens that berth or birth and who looks like. Amazing mind-glitching stuff, nightmarish like the Horror genre but much more like.
THE PEELER “Haze’s shadow was now behind him and now before him and now and then broken up by other people’s shadows, but when it was by itself, stretching behind him, it was a thin nervous shadow walking backwards.” Another Haze, this one Haze Motes, not the previous Haze Wickers on the train, here in town, clumsily servicing a woman named Leora Watts, sees and interacts with a man selling potato peelers, and he sees and interacts with a blind man called Asa Shrike and his girl in “men’s shoes”, “men’s shoes”, “men’s shoes”, a sound like a religion if you repeat the words enough (my observation, not the story’s), a blind man giving out Jesus Loves You paper tracts, and there is also a boy called Enoch Emory of the same age who tries to befriend Haze Motes. I know exactly what this story means, because it means so many different things from which you can choose in a bespoke fashion. It is a very disturbing, amazingly evocative, idiosyncratically well-written, eventually Aickman-like story and people who know my taste in literature will surely follow me to this story if they know what is good for them. What’s bad for them, too. Maybe the peeler is to be used to skin off the nude white woman in the casket that men stare down at (not a ‘nigger’, as it happens, in this story’s parlance) and her moving moles – or motes?
THE HEART OF THE PARK And in this story’s later end scene, after his obsessively routine ritual route via the FROSTY BOTTLE and the (‘Nemonymous Night’-like) ZOO, we now encounter again the earlier Enoch Emery who eventually reaches the Museum, thus bringing the above conceit to devastating full circle. And the deadpan goal of sighting the shrunken man. Enoch had been obsessively spying on scantily clad women at the swimming pool but then he meets Haze again (now Hazel Weaver, not Hazel Wickens or Hazel Motes), a Haze who wants to find the couple who sold the previous story’s peeler, now named Asa and Sabbath Moats. Moats rather than Shrike. This is amazing material, with many startling awakenings towards – if not fully reaching – the text’s ‘dark secret center.’ All expressed, perhaps, through an Enochian brain divided into two parts… “The part in communication with his blood did the figuring but it never said anything in words. The other part was stocked up with all kinds of words and phrases.” .
Having once given autonomous birth to ‘Nemonymous Night’ the novel, ‘The Heart of the Park’ ought to be my favourite ever story. And, yes, maybe it is.
A STROKE OF GOOD FORTUNE “They had been the dried-up type, dried up and Pitman dried into them, them and Pitman shrunk down into something all dried and puckered up.” Thank shrunken museum man again? Meanwhile, this is a heart-rending, incantatory rite of passage in a place called Pitman, up the possibly significant mole-coloured carpeted stairs, climbed by a woman called Ruby who is ‘only’ 34 years old. Breathless and seemingly fat? her heart troubling her? Her projected fortitude and worth compared to her younger brother Rufus who has ‘as much get as a floor mop.’ When you learn the implications that what must have passed through her head (literally) at the end after learning that her fatness may be more from seeding than from a lardy heart. Makes it even more heart-rending. Shocking, too. And ironic. Powerful. The power is conveyed by the mind-glitching style as well as by the obliquely outlying objective-correlatives that here are not objects but the other people that populate this climbing mole-coloured land of tenement stairs. People. Like Bill Hill, Ruby’s husband, who was supposed to be careful when shafting HER stairway, I guess – and the plot-significant pistol she stumbles upon belonging to the boy Hartley Gilfeet (feet with shoes, here women’s shoes, compare the men’s shoes I mentioned earlier), Mr clever clever Jerger, Madam Zoleeda, and Laverne Watts (cf Leora Watts earlier in this book). “…all she could do was look at her feet and shoe em to Rufus, shoe em to Rufus and he was an enfant and she was thirty-four years old. ‘Rufus is an enfant!’ she wailed.”
ENOCH AND THE GORILLA “His brain, both parts, was completely empty.” Enoch Emery now grapples with an unfit umbrella and later changes places with a movie-house gorilla. Is it a coincidence that both umbrella and gorilla end with rella and rilla respectively? “A NUTTY SURPRISE!” I know what this enjoyable, but otherwise inscrutable, story means but only knowing what it means from within the gestalt or umbrella of the book itself, rather than from any overriding movie-house hindsight. “He discovered while he did this that he still had his shoes on,”
A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.” The nameless grandmother of this family, made up of Bailey her son, his nameless wife, their two children John Wesley and June Star, is the jinx that tries to prevent the jinx by bringing them closer to the jinx. A fated car journey weekend break, if such a thing as a break existed in those far-off United Sates days where one could say, as she did: “Little niggers in the country don’t have things like we do. If I could paint, I’d paint that picture,” she said, Flannery said, a United States where one could write for different reasons: “…Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now.” Where one could play pareidolia with clouds to while away a car journey. Where this story’s Misfit has the access to guns to do what other misfits in the United States do today. A sharply characterful journey through those States as long as you keep clear which state is which! A journey to a clearing out of souls that accidents can’t do. Including that grandmother left like a lady who had once been courted by Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden, with the initials EAT. Just turn off onto a dirt road, doesn’t matter which one, the result would have been the same. “The Misfit pointed the toe of his shoe into the ground and made a little hole and then covered it up again.” Just what these stories manage to do, but you know where to find those holes again, or think you do before you forget they even existed. Each review of mine a misfit for the foot it shods. You just need reminding every day, shot through with memory of what you’ve done, good or bad. A story that made me think. Entertaining, page-turning, too. “‘I call myself The Misfit,’ he said, ‘because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.”
A LATE ENCOUNTER WITH THE ENEMY “Living had got to be such a habit with him that he couldn’t conceive of any other condition.” A touching, sometimes hilarious, account of 104 year old General Sash and his 62 year old granddaughter Sally Poker Sash… As if she took that very poker to open further the trepanned hole in his head. A very engaging pair of characters, with him on the brink of dementia transcending his pride and memory of beautiful girls (“guls”)… And she on some brink, too, when found wearing the wrong shoes for her graduation ceremony, an occasion which she so very much wants her grandfather to last out to attend and to witness. The portrait of words, as portrayed by words, the words entering his head, is one of the great moments of literature, I would guess. As is that sudden brink between something and nothing, with only confusion between.
THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN “Then he took a box of wooden matches from his pocket and struck one on his shoe.” A trampish one-armed toolbox-carrying handyman named Tom T. Shiftlet aka Aaron Sparks or George Speeds or Thompson Bright — with a thing about extracting and studying a heart but not being able to know anything about the person from whom the heart has been extracted — arrives at the house of mother Lucynell Crater and her special-needs daughter also named Lucynell Crater…and Lucynell Snr’s automobile that hasn’t worked since her husband died…. Well, things pan out, under configurations of sun and moon and planets and a turnip, not unlike the cranking of astrological disharmony, and those name aliases I donated above to Shiftlet, because someone like him simply must have had aliases, with our having learnt more about him while he gets thicker with the Craters and then abandons them… Instead of our watching words entering the earlier General’s head, we have Shiftlet’s heart ever popping in and out. A clogging cog of a story with sparks and speeds that it will be hard to forget!
THE RIVER “‘That’s Bevel,’ Mrs. Connin said, taking off her coat. ‘It’s a co-incident he’s named the same as the preacher. These boys are J.C., Spivey, and Sinclair, and that’s Sarah Mildred on the porch. Take off that coat and hang it on the bed post, Bevel.'” Except the boy’s real name is not Bevel Summers but Harry Ashfield, and gratuitously he said he had the same name as the healing preacher down by the river, the River of Blood, the River of Christ, and this story is imbued with the gratuitousness of objects and motivations like the other stories, now with skeletons, pigs, the sun balanced in the sky, and names like Emma Stevens Oakley…a random gratuitousness that somehow makes more sense than sensible deliberation. And the healing of a hangover as well as of a purple lump on a left temple or of cancer itself, by gratuitously baptising oneself in that River of Life while chased by a salacious long-pig, I guess. To bevel: to reduce a square edge on an object to a sloping edge.
A CIRCLE IN THE FIRE “‘Why, think of all those poor Europeans,’ Mrs. Cope went on, ‘that they put in boxcars like cattle and rode them to Siberia. Lord,’ she said, ‘we ought to spend half our time on our knees.'” And her Negroes, too, who spend their time stretching necks forward to make appear they are going faster than they are. And her twelve year old daughter, Sally Virginia. And her friend, Mrs. Pritchard who relished talk of a woman who gave birth while in an iron lung, or even cuddling it in a coffin. And the three boys, Powell Boyd, Garfield Smith and W. T. Harper who come to her farm with one of them having lived there before while his father worked for Mrs. Cope. But CAN she cope, I ask? Well, this book’s holy and unholy gratuitousness prevails and boys will be boys, nasty and nude, as Sally Virginia finds out. Rude, too. And the fire they set in a circle – round them? One wonders, as this book continues to set fires upon the winds of wonder, haunting the backbrain recluse of the reader’s head. But then I recall an earlier sentence in this masochistic abrasive story – “The sun burned so fast that it seemed to be trying to set everything in sight on fire.” A direct astrology of its spirit?
THE DISPLACED PERSON “…piled high with bodies of dead naked people…” As a monument beside the Judge’s grave in the woman farm owner’s own image? The cherubim of war. This is a major work in the canon of all literature, I am sure. So important, I will not, in due respect to the nameless dead in my photograph, quote the names of any of this novelette’s characters – as has been my wont so far in this review – and I will only mention that this is a very disturbing horror story to out-horror works that call themselves horror works as a genre. It is the tale of the balance of people – on a mid twentieth century farm in America – being broken by the arrival of one of those migrants that have hit the news in our present day as I write this. The pecking order balance at its tipping point, that foodline of farm owner, white trash, negroes and now displaced persons, here a Pole from the European war. The priest and the peacock, being just one devastating part of this rejigged jigsaw. And the woman, the dead Judge’s wife, her being inveigled into things, a new map being drawn of human contact. Absolutely staggering how a work like this subsisting all these years without my knowledge. So many quotable quotes. The honesty of labour, the dishonesty of motives, the economics of human vulnerability to scarcity. The synchronous tractor part, the spontaneity of trying to rejig that jigsaw to its previous state by the gabble of words fighting words entering this book’s trepanned head, memory of a grenade, body parts grappling with other body parts, the ruthless gratuitous act for l’étranger, while vast visionary panoplies of text upon the page, made into what they actually are, stay in the head. No review can do justice to it. An apocalyptic apocrypha for our times.
A TEMPLE OF THE HOLY GHOST “‘God could strike you deaf dumb and blind,’ the cook said, ‘and then you wouldn’t be as smart as you is.’ ‘I would still be smarter than some,’ the child said.” As we have seen child girls before in this book surveying the antics of others, others often older than the child is, a child with some inferred condescension, and I suspect this character is how the author remembers herself to have been? Here, she becomes involved with the two slightly older boy-crazy fourteen year old girls come to stay for a couple of days from their convent school in their convent clothes, then effectively matchmaked by the child, and when they come back from being taken to the fair by a couple of ‘men’, they tell the child stories of a special discomforting freak they’d seen there, and the child inveigles them into a form of collusive self-confession, and there ensues a whole unfolding panoply of ‘hep’ from God and a rabbit spitting out its new young… “A fair lasted five or six days and there was a special afternoon for school children and a special night for niggers.” A telling precocious vision of that era’s educational, sexual and religious mores. All very well characterised. And this book’s sun now “like an elevated Host drenched in blood…”
THE ARTIFICIAL NIGGER “He knew that now he was wandering into a black strange place where nothing was like it had ever been before, a long old age without respect and an end that would be welcome because it would be the end.” That means a lot to me. This is the story of old Mr Head and his grandson Nelson, a young boy, a naive and forthright boy, who insists – when Mr Head takes him on a train trip to the city where Nelson was born – that he had visited there twice, even if it was once when a baby. The wide-eyed, trusting boy has not seen ‘niggers’ before and the whole trip becomes ike Dante’s trip into Hell, symbolised directly by the sewers under ground and the almost human moon looking down, and it all begins to be more about Mr Head’s shame and mercy, guilt and grace, as at one point he disowns Nelson. As with AIckman, there are disarming strangenesses, like an artificial ‘nigger’ in a garden that also has a birdbath, a telling ‘objective correlative’, as this story continues to resonate with much dark innuendo and with lessons for all times, not only theirs. Synchronously, I read this morning an academic essay on HP Lovecraft’s attitude to race as seen in his fiction, from the book I am currently reviewing HERE, where this quote from HPL’s article on his love for cats is given: “I have no active dislike for dogs, any more than I have for monkeys, human beings, negroes, cows, sheep, or pterodactyls.” (‘Cats and Dogs’) I cannot help but think again of Enoch and the Gorilla…
GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE “If science is right, then one thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing.” And even those of us who say they believe, believe in nothing, I guess. One of the most horrific stories I have ever read. The ending is of hindsight horror and of what names and intentions truly hide. An absolutely devastating scene. Begins as a story of gradually well-characterised Joy/Hulga Hopewell. With a wooden leg, about thirty years old, with a degree. Meets the Bible Salesman, Manley Pointer. A story about names and aliases. And alliances of trust and incipient, almost child-like beginnings of sex between adults. And the ultimate chat-up line: where does the wooden leg join to you? About innocence and knowingness. A bit of both in each of them. I expect this story will resonate with me for years to come, assuming I still have such years to come between the two nothingnesses that are not me.
YOU CAN’T BE ANY POORER THAN THE DEAD Young Francis Marion Tarwater buries someone important to Francis, an old great uncle who took him away from some under uncle or his nephew who once made. secret ‘peeping tom’ study paper upon the old uncle. Yes, it’s complicated, but so simple, too, utterly poignant and naive and strangely disarming, with ever-developing characterisations, tensions and ties, and a stranger who is Francis’ new-born interlocutor of a self when he digs deeper and deeper but not deep enough, until he finds the old man’s liquor (elsewhere) and leaves him half-unburied for some passing Negro to bury instead. So simple, yet full of complex wisdom – or vice versa. Don’t lose your hat to the traffic of sadness and stoicism flowing below somewhere… another reluctant visit to the city, this time finding no ‘artificial nigger’? Just finding himself at last, these few unburied years later. To the sound of ‘screaking’ words… “I never ast for no fill. I never ast to come at all. I’m here before I knew this here was here.” “‘I’m going to move that fence,’ Tarwater said. ‘I ain’t going to have my fence in the middle of a field.'” “His cheekbones protruded, narrow and thin like the arms of a cross, and the hollows under them had an ancient look as if the child’s skeleton beneath were as old as the world.” “…you couldn’t sell a copper flue to a man you didn’t love.” Like that salesman I mark these stories with my own versions of ‘cancer’ and ‘dead’ appended as aide-mémoires or real-time reviews.
GREENLEAF “The sky was crossed with thin red and purple bars and behind them the sun was moving down slowly as if it were descending a ladder.” I was destined to read for the first time, I guess, this story about a Mrs May a few days after another Mrs May was made Prime Minister of my country. This story’s Mrs May is a farmer. I ain’t going to work on Maggie’s Farm No More. Maggie May. She has dreams of being eaten from the farm outside, through the wall, towards her own heart, as a precursor of something else entering her heart at the end, when someone speaks into an ear that is not her ear, but which ear was which, I ask! Those the eating never reaches are the Greenleaf family, Mr Greenleaf who has worked for her with the cattle some time, but she merely puts up with his inefficiency as a habit, and Mrs Greenleaf who does prayer healing with scandal newspaper clippings she buries in the ground, his five daughters, and his two sons ET and OT Greenleaf (“‘They never quarls,’ the boy said. ‘They like one man in two skins.'”), and the Greenleafs’ Negro who buys insurance, I guess, from one of Mrs May’s own two sons, sons whom she knows will marry trash, and she almost wishes they’d been switched for the Greenleaf boys. Anyway, a stray bull needs getting rid of, but this is something never got rid of till the end, a prevailing bullicose force that typifies the inchoate jigsaw of emotions of raw humanity that also prevails. The sun becomes a burning bullet… [I sense this whole book has that stray bull roaming throughout it, out to eat its way towards the author.]
A VIEW OF THE WOODS “Every morning since she had been able to climb, he had waked up to find her either on his bed or underneath it. It was apparent that this morning she preferred the sight of the woods.” I think it is safe to say that this story has the most shocking ending I have ever encountered. it is a striking portrait of the relationship between his nine year old granddaughter and himself the old man – his need for his Fortune name to hers, too, to bear out her resemblance to him. He witnesses her father, his son-in-law, a man who is the Pitts not the Fortune, beating her with a belt. But who truly betrays whom? No town planning those days allows the granddad to plan for a filling station on the front lawn where she and the other children usually play. His motives are fine, he feels. but it will affect the view, she says, her view of the woods. What’s a tree, what’s a pine? A moral: that importance to a feisty girl is not necessarily important to her granndad, who has a belt round his waist, too. A digger in the clay pits. Some fine characterisations of relationship, and the sun as blood drenching the trees, inchoate and often gratuitous. Utterly, utterly devastating. Strangely uplifting, too? “All the way into town, she sat looking at her feet, which stuck out in front of her, encased in heavy brown school shoes. The old man had often sneaked up on her and found her alone in conversation with her feet and he thought she was speaking with them silently now.”
THE ENDURING CHILL “…a death whose meaning had been far beyond the twittering group around them.” “‘Here’s Doctor Block,’ she said as if she had captured the angel on the rooftop and brought him to her little boy.” Asbury Porter Fox, once her little boy, now in his early twenties, returns home in ill health and ill-spoken – says he’s dying – his sister is scornful, his well-intentioned mother bringing in, against his wishes, his childhood Doctor called Block, a version of a Ligottian Doctor, I feel, but Asbury has outgrown him. This is an extremely powerful story of Asbury’s thrashing around figuratively and mentally – not necessarily to prevent his own death but to fulfil it, meeting those Negroes again with whom he used to smoke and drink unpasteurised milk, also appealing to the saviour power of Literature and Art with specific reference to Kafka, Yeats and Joyce, but then relenting against his own atheism to call in priests, then leaving a recriminatory letter for his mother as a posthumous revenge… And we wonder if the huge bird with the icicle is a gestalt of all these things and more, as he meets the end of this story, perhaps of himself. Utterly life-changing stuff for the reader.
THE COMFORTS OF HOME “It was an inheritance from the old man, whose opinion it had been that every house should contain a loaded gun.” And so it was, and so it still is. The relentlessly grinding presence of the gobby slut, called Star Drake aka Sarah Ham, brought into the house by his do-gooding mother, pervades this story of Thomas as ill-spoken to his mother as Asbury was in the previous story,,,, The slut squats in the house as much as his own father squats inside Thomas himself. Sheriff Farebrother is called in to deal with the final nightmarish tableau that ensues, even if he gets the wrong end of the plot’s stick. LIfe is never fair, life has forces that grow twisted.
EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE “‘With the world in the mess it’s in,’ she said, ‘it’s a wonder we can enjoy anything. I tell you, the bottom rail is on the top.'” A combination hilarity and a serious reflection of the times are a changing with regard to race relations in America (1961 when this story was published). Another son and mother relationship, so utterly flannery, here with mutual embarrassment and feisty conflict of outdoing each other, and he escorts her in her truly outlandish hat on the bus to her reducing class, with all her prejudices shown to the negroes on the way, including a black woman in not a similar hat but an identical one! But the mother’s condescending over-compensation transpires, something which seems worse than the original prejudice. A switching of sons, seats and hats and a crosswire of eyes that goggle bigger than the text, bulging out, one of them lying on the page like a cancer, or is that my imagination over-compensating for the onset of social justice warriors that followed on in our own equally messy world? We ever should strive to strike exactly the right note. And this story’s title, the mother’s ab reductio class notwithstanding, is exactly that well-tempered note, I suggest. And don’t ask to borrow an ice-breaking match from your match-in-humanity especially when both these things apply: you don’t smoke and you are in a no smoking area.
THE PARTRIDGE FESTIVAL “Feature by feature, he brought the face together in his mind and each time he had it almost constructed, it fell apart and he was left with nothing.” A man, called a boy, called Calhoun, in his early twenties, visits his two aunts for the Azalea Festival. Gun crime prevailed then as now, a serial killing in one fell swoop by a man called Singleton, having been imprisoned for not buying a Festival badge, he shoots dead six of those who put him away, including someone unworthy of being buried with the other five. Calhoun and a girl called Mary Elizabeth blow up the image of Singleton into one worthy of almost idolising as a victim, made to do what he did, like today’s Jihadists, half foreign, it is mooted, half Christian, as a surrogate Muslim for their day? Locked up with a goat. They want to write him up, actually see him…size him up for heroism. The ending is shocking when they do see him in the prison, a madman’s crude exposure as a message for our times? No, it is something far more oblique and ungraspable. You may need to remember this story and see that Singleton’s seeds grow backward in time from now? Calhoun’s barber’s now on Facebook. The relationship, meanwhile, between Calhoun and Mary Elizabeth is memorably etched. No beauty contest. Feature by feature, a gestalt that is Trump?
THE LAME SHALL ENTER FIRST “‘Your shoe,’ he said eagerly, ‘today is the day to get your shoe!’ Thanks God for the shoe!” This probably is the most wedged-together outcome of a plot’s leitmotifs – with the telescope, the imminent moon travel by humanity at the time it was written, the microscope, too, as well as the father’s wife, his boy’s mother, dead and up amid the stars somewhere on some freak of religion or falsehood – the most inevitable outcome into which this book’s leitmotifs have so far cohered. And it becomes even more devastating as a result. This book has a number of no-gooders that people care for, while hoping to make life better for these no-gooders, as well as a sense of self-satisfaction for the do-gooders themselves. The father, here, do-gooding to the detriment of his own son, brings in a difficult, garbage-eating youth, a youth who admits to being controlled by Satan in an attempt to prove his right to be what he is, a youth with a club foot. Kindness is cruel, and events fall out of shape amid a complexity of motives, of guilt, shame, yearning, a perfect storm of emotions that you will find nowhere but in Flannery. Reaching from the end of the story, retrocausally: an eye that lists, a first and final flight into space by the father’s son to hang by a star, the youth’s accusations of immoral attentions from the father, “the halt’ll be gathered together”, the pink can, Leola’s corset, Noah’s ark, the flower seeds that started it all… This is another major example of the short story form, one that is gathered and honed to cut you deep.
WHY DO THE HEATHEN RAGE? A four page story, the shortest Flannery story by a long way. Yet, it has defeated me, with its complexity of resonances. I feel I am both the father who has suffered the stroke as well as his son Walter, as a palimpsest. This large section from it seems to encapsulate today’s social media and my religion of literature, to encapsulate this dreamcatching itself… and, for once, you need to read the story as a whole, to see the gestalt for yourself. It will only take you ten minutes to read, but last a lifetime in afterthought.
REVELATION “‘They ought to send all them niggers back to Africa,’ the white-trash woman said. ‘That’s wher they come from in the first place.'” Mrs Turpin and her Jesus-given husband Claud in a doctor’s waiting-room, a room too small for those waiting. We are all waiting I guess. Where I live on the coast of North East Essex is called God’s waiting-room… But, back then, in the Flannery day, people spoke out to each other about the various classes and colours, a complexity that was developing between trash and good, bad and black, or other permutations, and the hair-trigger emotions of the mad and the ugly. One girl calls Mrs T a wart-hog and later Mrs T tends to her pigs, and a vision of all the bad and the good, the pretty and the ugly, the white and the black, reach up to Heaven from where Jesus, if you dare speak it aloud, first created us as what we are, either making us what we are gratuitously or by deliberation of love He felt and/or didn’t feel? I then thought that, when sculpted in raw grey stone, white trash is the same colour as black goodness, ugly or pretty, mad or sane, or any permutations to that effect. “Amen! You des as sweet and pretty as you can be.”
PARKER’S BACK “The first thing Parker saw were his shoes, quickly being eaten by the fire; one was caught under the tractor, the other was some distance away, burning by itself.” The story of Obadiah Elihue Parker and Sarah Ruth Cates, the former who crams his body with arabesques of tattoos, panthers, hawks, cobras et al. An obsession but only when he can see them without a mirror, until, to transcend a tractor accident and regain the love of Sarah, he obtains a meticulously detailed Byzantine Christ on his back… Idolatry or sheer bravado? You will see. A vanity of vanities or an act of being marked to die? This is a powerful burning vision stymied between the inchoate emotions of human beings in love and in hate, beings adrift in some motive force, be it God’s or that of something even worse. A ‘rapture’ “as transparent as the wing of a fly.” Another waiting-room. Another burning shoe. A burning ark that holds us all, of whatever breed?
The cleverest story of them all, I guess, the mid-twentieth century American complexity of pecking orders as black with black, white with black, white with white. Actor with preacher. Father with daughter. This father was not so much a Robinson Crusoe in his Southern shack with a Man Friday, but also with some version of not Friday but Flannery, a woman writer, of course. Her character is this father, a grizzled oldster taken to New York after whittling bark into glassless spectacles for his Man Friday, just for that honest connection between human and human, whatever the colour, whatever the pecking order. And then the feisty father and daughter relationship, like those earlier ones between other pecking orders, like mother and son several times over. The daughter imports him to New York in some misplaced duty of care. He wants to be buried back where he came from, and now eventually stuck in the New York banisters, he dreams of Judgement day, upon the opening of his box forwarded by train to the station back south, except he sees, not Man Friday, but the black actor preaching nothing but nothing beyond death. Utterly poignant, utterly telling, oblique as well as clear. Every move we make in life just a click away from the wrong one – or from the right one. This last story should have ended with a musical ‘dying fall’, but instead it was a rare ‘dying rise’. A perfect book, one to resurrect from.
From my review (HERE) of the VanderMeers' massive THE BIG BOOK OF SCIENCE FICTION.
TLÖN, UQBAR, ORBIS TERTIUS by Jorge Luis Borges Translated by Andrew Hurley
"Every mental state is irreducible: the simple act of giving it a name -- i.e., of classifying it -- introduces a distortion, a 'slant' or 'bias'."
This is a work of apparently dense speculative philosophical texture, with real famous names rubbing shoulders with neologisms and fictions and unknowns. I have always considered it to be the apotheosis of retrocausal Nemonymity as well as, now, the hawling or dreamcatching labyrinths of this Jungian or preternatural site where you read this review. For the rest, it is mere Pataphysics. Or Sir Thomas Browne coupled with Berkeley.
"Books are rarely signed, nor does the concept of plagiarism exist: it has been decided that all books are the work of a single author who is timeless and anonymous."
Paradoxically, despite such texture, this work has a text that, when dug up, proves to be a shallow grave, and I positively wreaked more 'synchronised shards of random truth and fiction' from earlier, arguably deeper, otherwise adventurous or wonder-filled yarns in this book. But...
"A book that does not contain its counter-book is considered incomplete."
So be it. Meanwhile, we already have had the cone zeroes and the over-heavy specific gravities in this book.
Fiction by Steve Rasnic Tem, Priya Sharma, Stepehn Hargadon, Harmony Neal, Kristi DeMeester, Danny Rhodes, Charles Wilkinson.
My readers may be wondering when I’m going to consume this edition of the always dependable Black Static? Well, it’s a slow motion tussling with time and trouble, but sooner or later, my comments on its fiction will appear in the thought stream below.
My previous reviews of TTA Press publications HERE.
Reblogged this on The Sanguine Woods: Where the Heart Can Bleed More Freely… and commented: One of the Great Dark Fiction Magazines of Our Time. I never miss an issue! Kristi Demeester is a wonderful stylist of beautiful prose. She has a story here. You can purchase Black Static #53 in ebook format for $4.99 at Amazon. Support great fiction. It’s important. – SW
INHERITANCE, or The Ruby Tear by Priya Sharma With archaic typology and deadpan gothickness, this multi-chaptered story is, for me, a lost Matthew Gregory Lewis classic of monstrousness-for-its-own-sake beneath a noble family’s niceties of lost-and-found inheritance. I sense that Priya Sharma is just a conduit for this story. Or, though I pray not, it is a conduit for someone else with her name? There are moments here of goriness and cliffside sublimity all the more powerful because of such disingenuous artifice. Even to the extent of making us believe it is not artifice at all.
My links to authors show their previous reviews by myself. BREATHING by Steve Rasnic Tem “He comes to believe that the rest of the world is breathing with him,…” …as, somehow, I do, too, while hawling fiction dreams towards gestalt. Like this story’s Charlie, I, too, have slept in the same wide wifely bed, now, in my case, for more than 45 years, and, along with Charlie, I empathise with the breathing echoes that, in my case, might one day be left, but for which one of us? This beautifully written text is almost unbearable to read, unbearably right, too, and, like breathing, it is a toing and froing of ghostly truth and trust. In tune with the previous Sharma story, where loved ones became animals or vice versa, or worse, we also have here perhaps a more oblique animal ‘objective correlative’ or metaphor, a clinging to one’s own objectified pain. But whose?
DARE by Harmony Neal “Personne ne m’a jamais donné tout crédit. J’ai quatre points putain oh. Je suis descendu du Père putain d’archéologie.” At first, on some surface that this set of Black Static fictions so far spreads for us, we have the destructive alter ids of the Sharma women Gothicks in real-time, Charlie’s wounded self come into his garden to nuzzle closer, and here three older teenage girls in a truth and dare game with their own footnotes. Here, on this story’s own level, it is possibly the most genuinely horrific thing you will ever read. Very cleverly done. It is its own wild, but believable Chien Andalou of the soul. On a more personal level, its black sewn thread connecting the posed portrait of the three girls summons for me the audit trail of interpretations derived from the Manet and Degas paintings in what is an entirely coincidental and still unfinished real-time review by myself of the Color Plates HERE. “Francesca stroked the flowers in the the Waterford Lismore vase on the table — the red roses, white lilies…”
THE RIM OF THE WORLD by Kristi DeMeester “…and she kept saying over and over that something had gotten inside her, and she couldn’t get it out.” As others earlier had things inside… And this story’s shark’s tooth is just one thing that seems to multiply, too, in the Sharma and Neal ‘women’ from Inside, if unspoken, and not a smooth harmony but a sharp one as gestalt? Here, we have a married couple returning to the memory-haunted place where they both lived when teenagers. Remembering her Grandma and that Grandma’s sister, his sister, too, all near subsumed by the thinness between them and what lies rimless beneath. As if there are now nemonymous nightworlds beneath the thinnest veneer of sand and dust, teeming to test them from and through their own skin. As from the face on the front of this Black Static. I felt the lightest DeMeester touch here, waiting for weights far too heavy for it. Perhaps a soul’s heaviness can only be conveyed properly by hinting at its impossibility to move through to us without an undersurface beneath the sand pile of our past. Then, just as one example, the fleeting fortuitously random mention of Neal’s razors, unintentionally dared forth as a telling harmony disguised as misharmony, and the weight has been magicked forth. A gossamer, diaphanous weightiness of meaning…
TOHOKU by Danny Rhodes “He dreamed of her perfume scent and the feeling of her breath on his neck.” This, for me, is literature’s perfect storm about the tsunami when Akio lost his Mizuki, and where a shrine bespeaks of the thousands of others lost that fateful day. His diving and encounters with, inter alia, versions of DeMeester’s lost souls through the skin of the earth, almost with her light touch, but one that here hangs deep with grief. Also echoes of the blending of Charlie’s earlier breathing with the world’s breaths, including that of his lost wife, a Tem now as Time by dint of Akio’s finding a clock at the bottom of the sea where thousands of such connections perished on that single day. And Akio possibly finding Mizuki’s necklace is a resonating with Sharma’s earlier necklace conceit, thus lending even more strength to its presence in the Rhodes story of such poignant strength about a historical moment we all remember learning about. (On a personal note regarding this necklace conceit, I cannot resist linking to a work of my own which was published in the early 1990s reprinted on the DOWSE site in the early noughties HERE.)
MITTENS by Stephen Hargadon “The years go quickly but they arrive slowly.” …as my real-time reviews attest! I can’t believe I have been revelling in Hargadon stories so long. And revelling is the right word. But perhaps it should now be a ravelling not a revelling, after this story, or an unravelling of the skeins? I simply LOVE Hargadon, the nature of Hargadon as projected by his stories, not that I have ever met the man. Being big-headed, I often visualise myself as Hargadon’s review impresario, revealing him to the world – revealing or unravelling him. As ever, this Hargadon is crammed with stunning turns of phrase, wise saws, suppurating homilies, witty, but down-to-earth, conceits… And here the central conceit of the variety act in question (bringing to mind some acts I have seen recently on TV repeats of the Good Old Days shows of yore) is too good to spoil or unspool in a review such as this. And the well-drawn characters amid the freaks and variety acts. And its staggeringly disturbing finale has to be encountered cold to be fully appreciated. No giveaway here, no unpicking of its casting-on. (As an aside, I have assumed that this story must stand on its own, with no attempt by me to cohere a gestalt with the previous stories, as would be my normal wont. And in many ways, it does. But in its unbundling of inner creatures, with needles et al, the penetration of the thin veneers of an otherwise civilised body, almost a self-harm, a paradoxically light touch within a mass of earthy humour, almost a self breathing within a self, in tempo with Tem, DeMeester, Neal, Sharma, Rhodes, all the previous acts of this show now able to stand even more revealed or unraveled by their subsumption somehow out-inside this Hargadon, I contend.)
IN THE FRAME by Charles Wilkinson “The benefits of a digital detox: a few wrong turns bringing a fortuitous discovery and he will have an excuse to use the word ‘serendipitous’ when he arrives.” Hargadon is Hargadon. And now we have Wilkinson, another of my favourite literary writers. after first discovering him in the SF/Horror genre small press a number of years ago (in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, to be precise, and his most recent story, SEPTS, in that magazine, having, for me, an Important Ancient Briton link with this latest one in Black Static). There are several other richly imaginative audit trails and leitmotifs in this relatively brief gestalt of a text. I shall just choose one audit trail for my purpose, the one of seeking signposts to resume a friendship via oblique invitations to an art gallery in an obscure backwater town, after that friend’s sister broke some rule of suicide by inconveniencing others (mostly strangers) through that very suicide. We follow this unmapped soul via supermarket and bowling alley, via an exhibition of blank nemonymous paintings depicting “absence”, shading into a light touch that is noticeable behind the blankness or whiteness, a touch reaching towards an eventual meaning of shapes in the later paintings. Then within the gutter itself of the bowling alley… To reach beneath the skin. Skittled out. Needled out. One gutter of directive significance chosen, while many others then prick out the more one allows the text to haunt you. “We collaborate and then exhibit anonymously.” ….as do all these stories, without truly knowing they collaborate. But each story is labelled with a single autonomous name. Absence then presence in each frame. A few wrong turns, but suddenly a wonderful serendipity. There is much else in Black Static to entertain the Horror Genre enthusiast in addition to its fiction. end
A 'FICTION' FROM INTERZONE #265 PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS on the techno-erotic potential of Donald Trump under conditions of partially induced psychosis by Ken Hinckley
“…the cavernous nasal septum of Mr Trump brought on intense feelings of hopelessness and despair…”
Yet, the revolting can be positive, while the attractive its opposite, as revealed by the permutations of sophisticated statistics and experiments, via the psychoses and visions (alongside his sexy assistant called Tamara, and a rag iconised after an immigrant fell to his death after window-cleaning, and much else I can’t cover here) of the protagonist Adshel (although his name keeps changing but not to this one I have just used which is a form of advertising here in Britain, and, inter alia, Brexit is mentioned in Mr Hinckley’s ‘bio’ for this ‘story’ and maybe Corbyn is our Trump and I think this author’s our Hinckley Point, too!) and I can’t keep up with myself, the sheer bravado of this text BEING the Trump phenomenon itself (DONALD TRUMP as all search engines hopefully will find here because it is seminal to what is actually happening in USA at the moment, and with Hillary, too, and what is referred to here as the triumvirate of Trump, his audience and the media)….also mention of Orlando, and more, but not the Olympics currently in Rio, as it should… BUT, it is much more. It taps into the Palmer team-building gestalt of this set of Interzone fictions so far, the Meteor God as impact SF, and the collective unconscious working both with and against such gargantuan archetypes to further them, a French minstrelsy with Hinckley also mentioning Charlie Hebdo. Trump is also Reader’s ‘Eye’, with all Americans sending their keepsakes by drone toward Trump’s eyes. The Eyesis State. But, above all, for me, and perhaps me alone, it ties together synchronously with a classic story by Katherine MacLean I read for the first time and reviewed YESTERDAY HERE, (where I mentioned Trump!), a tontine in mutual transcendence over the decades between these two stories being published: that snowball effect by dint of brainstorming. That Iceis State.
My previous reviews of fiction in TTA PRESS publications are linked from HERE.
This issue has fiction by John Schoffstall, Robert Reed, Suzanne Palmer, Dan Reade, Andrew Kozma and Ken Hinckley.
When I real-time review this fiction, my comments will appear in the thought stream of this post below…
. ================================ A short extract from Nina Allan’s article in INTERZONE #265:- My previous reviews of works by Nina Allan linked from HERE.
ALL YOUR CITIES I WILL BURN by John Schoffstall “Even France can’t make solid-state any more.” An accretively hilarious tale of swashbuckling miscegenation. Mongrel or hybrid, who cares when you’ve got liquor even in extinction events. This is a well-characterised French minstrelsy, a pink oozing roundelay, a far future campaign against meteor gods who seem to have replaced the meteors themselves in impact SF. There is even a romance between a man in permanent armour and a woman whose finger flirts upon and between his plate and joins. And soft bombs like marshmallows optimising the fact that one meteor god’s DNA is inimical to another’s DNA. I could go on and on. But this seems like a quite original dose of joyful Lovecraftianism in gargantuan proportions. Men become the new gods to defeat the old ones.
THE EYE OF JOB by Dan Reade “Once you get close enough, the Eye takes up everything you see.” This is a patient story where the narrator is his own version of Job, a transliteration of FOB. FOB as First Order of Business, Forward Operating Base, Free on Board, Foreign Object, Freight on Board, Fresh Off the Boat, Fibre Optic Bronchoscope, Fuel on Board, Fresh Over the Border, Forward Observer Bombardment &c &c? If you are not awe-struck by this text’s depiction of slowly accretive awe and sublimity or subliminality, I’d say go off and watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind and then come back here and see how much more awesome this text becomes in your mind’s eye. It is that good. It is also sort of its own drone upon things. The vision of the Eye, a slow-motion vista, aspiring to culminate as Impact SF, where a Meteor God from the previous story seems to have become a stasis of watching, watching our narrator watching it. We gradually gain a vista, too, of the narrator, his role, his deviousness in his slowly revealed job of work as well as his loyalty to truth and to a need to transcend the assumed mid-holocaust-caused departure of his wife, his building of his own version of the ‘mountain-encounters’ obsession by amassing strangers’ keepsakes and family photos as part of Job’s onward drone towards … towards what? I have been deeply affected by this story, but I don’t exactly know why. It has old-fashioned SF awe as well as new-fashioned psycho-selfies. Maybe it was the compelling knowledge conveyed by its text upon how the well-characterised houses beneath the Eye’s shadow – in which the narrator scavenges – are known to be occupied or not. This story is one such house, without a car parked outside. And that worries me, too.
belong by Suzanne Palmer Team-building is central to gestalt real-time reviewing. And the confidence boosting of the previous stories allowed me to defeat my fears that I might not know how my slavish understanding of the text would fit in with its own expression of it. In itself, an incisive, unquestioning portrait of corporate team-building exercises, this one accreting towards a confident culmination of becoming completely accepted as part of the team. This work, on an as objective a level as possible, is a very powerful story about such compulsive training, here by bots and colour codes, neatly featuring a mentoring drone tellingly echoing the previous story’s drone. But what went wrong when it went from sim to live? To answer that question would be a spoiler. To ask it at all, an even worse one.
on the techno-erotic potential of Donald Trump under conditions of partially induced psychosis by Ken Hinckley “…the cavernous nasal septum of Mr Trump brought on intense feelings of hopelessness and despair…” Yet, the revolting can be positive, while the attractive its opposite, as revealed by the permutations of sophisticated statistics and experiments, via the psychoses and visions (alongside his sexy assistant called Tamara, and a rag iconised after an immigrant fell to his death after window-cleaning, and much else I can’t cover here) of the protagonist Adshel (although his name keeps changing but not to this one I have just used which is a form of advertising here in Britain, and, inter alia, Brexit is mentioned in Mr Hinckley’s ‘bio’ for this ‘story’ and maybe Corbyn is our Trump and I think this author’s our Hinckley Point, too!) and I can’t keep up with myself, the sheer bravado of this text BEING the Trump phenomenon itself (DONALD TRUMP as all search engines hopefully will find here because it is seminal to what is actually happening in USA at the moment, and with Hillary, too, and what is referred to here as the triumvirate of Trump, his audience and the media)….also mention of Orlando, and more, but not the Olympics currently in Rio, as it should… BUT, it is much more. It taps into the Palmer team-building gestalt of this set of Interzone fictions so far, the Meteor God as impact SF, and the collective unconscious working both with and against such gargantuan archetypes to further them, a French minstrelsy with Hinckley also mentioning Charlie Hebdo. Trump is also Reade’s ‘Eye’, with all Americans sending their keepsakes by drone toward Trump’s eyes. The Eyesis State. But, above all, for me, and perhaps me alone, it ties together synchronously with a classic story by Katherine MacLean I read for the first time and reviewed YESTERDAY HERE, (where I mentioned Trump!), a tontine in mutual transcendence over the decades between these two stories being published: that snowball effect by dint of brainstorming. That Iceis State.
THE INSIDE-OUT by Andrew Kozma “Then Roam’s body twisted on itself like a wet rag. It separated into a man-shaped cloud of bloodless fragments of bone and flesh and cloth,” ….which perhaps is that iconic rag from the previous story… as well as this story depicting a version of Reade’s Eye (being fed human keepsakes and souvenirs and aide-memoires) and now here is returned the favour with the aliens on IO (Inside-Out) creating such memorabilia or mock artefacts and places as a home-from-home for humans whisked here light-years away from Earth. This story’s experience is, for me, like walking through an adapted Bosch painting, and whilst humans became new gods to defeat old ones in Schoffstall, here humans are taught “not to die”, not to ‘abandon’, so that they cannot become equal gods to the alien suicide-martyr gods…? A provocative panoply that is mind-bogglingly imaginative. The human characters and their names are engaging, as is the companion alien, a sort of metal spider.
“…if you could rule the world for a day? I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality.” ― Robert Musil, ‘The Man Without Qualities’ ———————————- A MAN OF MODEST MEANS by Robert Reed “Terrible events found your world,” SF Impact’s stylish thoughtful coda for this symphony of stories. Two alternating narrative viewpoints of a man and woman in sexual interface. But is one an alien, the other not? Or one who is nobody, the other not? One who has built a world of memories for the other – with Reade’s earlier craft of aimed keepsakes here as part of Reed’s? One of the foreplaying couple is due to utilise the other in creating a new history using those memories. The creation of that history from what humanity thinks it is, a race without qualities. But now seeking modestly for some optimum of what qualities humanity could have been given, or what humanity could have given to others… A new history – or Nina Allan’s ‘secret history’? And was impact from without or within? ———————- There is much else in Interzone to entertain the SF enthusiast in addition to the above fiction. end
BLACK BARK “…as if Sugg’s leg jostling back and forth against the horse had been trying to draw someone with his blood.” This story of two men, indeterminately pursued, both on horses, one man knowing a cabin is just round the next bend, the other doubtful, but both, for me, showing signs of delirium, and differentiated expectations of difficult bodily survival, and a cave as shelter is found instead. It feels as if this narrative itself is being painted to produce some found art of black bark into which the blood has dried or crusted, an ‘objective correlative’ for the unaccountable absences from each other. (A black bark that returns and returns however much you dither about keeping it or throwing it away, thus synchronously in tune with the metal cup in the story ‘On Balance’ from a book I happen to be concurrently real-time reviewing here.) “‘Tomorrow I’ll just be where I am,’…”
A REPORT “If he is someone chosen at random, made to suffer for no reason at all, then we are all damned, and this is all the more terrible a place.” The key is with what you can tap. Spectacles or a piece of black bark? The situation of the narrator slowly and at length, in this brief story, accretes, his interface with the regime and its opposition, what he had needed to put in his report, and why he is now in a prison of terraced cells, and who next to whom, and which correlation means which prisoner’s feet are tortured first? It’s a bit like reading this story, next to each other with only the book between us, but who reads it and who writes it by tapping on the keys? Thus, turned in on itself, the angst wells up as much as the absences between us – from the tenor of the previous story also accreting, limping foot or not. Or simply something in the boot?
A COLLAPSE OF HORSES “I tried to Ignore the lurch reality…” I think Lurch Reality is an appropriate name for the genre this author seems, so far in this book, to be initiating? Sporadic realities as reconstructed each time by the abruptly collapsible words used to describe them. After your wife’s imputation of your being “delirious”, you lurch between the instinctive knowledge of four pitifully dead horses in a paddock behind you and your house acting like a fluid HOUSE, not HORSE, of Leaves? With a pervading sense of guilt or shame regarding your care for your family, taken to the extent of a paradoxically healing of a self-dare to destroy them by fire. Role-playing to differentiate between the lurching realities, and thus hopefully insulate them from more dangerous ones. A complex behaviour therapy that involves the reader in creating collusive panaceas of textual interpretation regarding the work’s ‘objective correlatives.’ Not that you are forced do so, if you sympathise with the wife rather than the narrator. OR SHE with you? But who is gaslighting whom?
THREE INDIGNITIES “…the tumor that spread its fingers across his jaw and up one side of his neck.” The three indignities are represented as a three-part short short about submitting oneself to surgery or other medical procedures by so-called specialists. So as to show I am not cheating by now referring synchronously to my own very recent blob on my neck, I can link to three references about it in my recent real-time reviews:- https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/06/18/marked-to-die/#comment-7455 https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/06/18/marked-to-die/#comment-7462 https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/the-age-of-lovecraft/#comment-7677 The surgeon spoke to me while operating on this autonomous blob – about the tentacles in the blob and having to ensure removal of ‘the smaller rooms from its warehouse.’ I am currently suffering the aftermath of this operation. The question arises – at what point does surgical removal of various parts of your body reach the level where the body is no longer you? Relates no doubt to the piecemeal collapse of words that eventually change meaning as well as of your inner self – so graphically shown in the previous story and now, here, by a coda as a metaphor-of-physical-substance.
CULT “She had gotten into his head and rewired it, changed it.” And now gotten into this book, too, one that has so far been carried upon a relatively plain style, well-constructed, thoughtful, unostentatious, and, until CULT, one with telling ‘objective correlatives’ to dig up from the shallow grave of its text. Here, the man is still obsessed with the woman who stabbed him, she who ran away to a cult and collapsed her name Tammy so as to erect it again as Star, and, against his own best intentions, he is called to rescue her, having himself already been rescued, by his friends, from her. But who the cult, whom the culted? Who the gaslighter, whom the gaslit? Each a shallow grave with nothing buried there to dig up. Star, rats. (There was a similar gobby slut called Sarah who changed her name to Star in this story I recently reviewed HERE. One letter changed from cu*t?)
SEASIDE TOWN I have read and reviewed this before here (quoted below), but now I sense a collapse of more than just routines with the arrival of the woman in his life, but a dead horse, too! ——————- When Miss Pickaver said to Hovell, “I catch the train in an hour,” I somehow received a jolt that was bigger than when something more overtly horrific happens in some other stories, which I suppose is a compliment to this otherwise simply told story. Actually, I empathised with the male stick-in-the-mud protagonist, with a flighty female partner, each of whom called the other by surname. I sensed his humiliation as part of the horror accreting… The French town, the creepy hostelry, the dark shape seen from the balcony, the half-seen resemblances, the cinematic ‘Death-in-Venice’ like solitude he found himself enduring in face of the strange, half- or non-dressed other holidaymakers… Well, it somehow worked for me.
THE DUST “‘Just taking a break,’ one of them said. Lewis.” This is a great fiction novelette that, if you’ve not read it, you must read it straightaway, as I just did, to obviate my own guilt. It is an absorbing planetary drill-mining scenario with various possible male suspects as an ostensible team of workers, an environment full of tunnels, dust, ductwork, filters, baffles, ventilation shafts, obsessions, paranoia, suspicions and more. It is a tontine prize. We see most events through the eyes of the man responsible for security matters as well as his cleaning of baffles, as he liaises with the overall manager, including a panicky weighing of equations regarding depleting oxygen, men available to breathe such oxygen, and the dust as the particles of a gestalt. An insidious dust that may have its own mind, like the various named men, each a suspect, each a beneficial sacrifice for the others, all of them overtly trying to work as a team, but, equally, so do the millions of dust particles try to work as a unit of synergy, too. A suspenseful waiting for the relief team to arrive, just days away. I know what I know. Lewis. This is sheer momentous literary stuff. Believe me. And, as I have said before — during a number of my earlier dreamcatching gestalt real-time reviews — filters invariably work in both directions of flow. As does collapsing.
BEARHEART™ “‘Some people think it sounds like a stampede of horses,’ said the doctor.” In the context of this whole book, the fact that the sound of a heartbeat-recording of an as yet unborn baby – implanted within a novelty teddy-bear and then compared not to a collapse but a stampede horses – is very telling. This, meanwhile, is an almost unbearable story (pun half-intended) to read – at one moment absurdist, the next tragic. The blend is powerful, plainly spoken though it is, with the edge of a knowing nod towards bad taste. Again I ask the same question I have asked before – here about the young couple, the mother and father – who is the gaslighter, whom the gaslit? This story will hang about, with ash, if not dust.
SCOUR “The dust, or sand, if it was either dust or sand, began to rise in flaccid tourbillions around her, almost immediately collapsing…” I think “tourbillions” is, in the context of this book, a SICnificant typo, whether it is either a typo or not a typo. This bald or Beckettian text is, for the female protagonist, an entrancing blend of the prisoner inscrutability of ‘A Report’ and the tontine prize of breathable air in ‘The Dust.’
TORPOR Tourbillions, scour, torpor… “No, she did it for afterwards.” An effective deadpan study of the nature of marital love, a borrowing as well as a lending for all sorts of reasons. Phantom love and phantom limbs. Unseen but instinctively known visions of collapsed horses within the territory of each potentially loving body? The simple stasis of unquestioned being.
PAST RENO “…like a bolus or a tumor, both part of him and separate from him at once.” If you appreciate what I have long called ‘the disarming strangeness of Aickman’ and of much weird fiction of that ilk, then you would guess if you became an addictive ‘hard drinker’ of such weird fiction, more and more obsessed with it, you would think you would NEED it to get more ostentatiously strange, with even stranger words and ideas, more deeply textured with semantics and tentacular syntax, teeming with strangenesses and an inscrutably rich intaglio of objective-correlatives. But, no. This story has proved that someone like you who is addicted to such fiction actually NEEDS things to become drier, dustier, more bolus-shaped, unstickably insulated like the splattered blood not sticking or even staining this story’s protagonist’s father’s trousers, with things shown that you don’t actually look at, boxes provided you do not bother to open, car radios where the search facility stops working from one end of the dial to the other, shopping places where unaccountable amounts of stringy jerky is sold, mirrors placed on top of mirrors, where you can look into both surfaces, and you can yank one off and see there is nothing between the two mirrors, while going on an endless journey that you know while it is happening is going to be strange and it actually does grow stranger in a dry and dusty way of its route, and the whole story’s inheritance like that from your father’s estate is somethings you put aside, waiting for it to mature and then for someone else to look at or benefit from. A story where its own search facility also doesn’t work from one end of its text to the other. It PERFECTLY doesn’t work. Disarmingly so, like torpor. (Explain all that, including the stuck pig, to your girl friend.)
ANY CORPSE “There, he slung the dead body onto the tablature and worried it.” One learns as one progresses through this book to unlearn everything one thinks one knows so as to open up to a new armature beneath its dry, sometimes integumented, text. Music notation for a foreign plucked instrument. I learned about the cuts of meat on the way to Reno, and the earlier bartering of one’s own arms while sleeping so at to heal them. Now that armature comes to an intensely dry fulfilment, as dickering furnishers supply whole bodies — when they can get the whole bodies instead of just parts of them — between the caves, between the already-assumed-to-be bodies that are us. Almost now a religious experience but without the stifling luxuriance of high church furnishings. It is the cannibalistic exchange that ritualises us. But that concept eventually attenuates, too, when at Evensong, the Eucharist is dry. When I try to remember this book in a few years’ time, I suspect I shall remember only the dusty spaces between the words. But that will be good, not bad.
THE MOANS “He turned his head weakly to one side and retched, but nothing came out, then he drily retched again…” A moving obliquity about note-taking (retrocausal note-taking for one’s future responsibility as a sort of guru), note-taking about a hippy commune but by the the very act of that note-taking changing the behaviour of that commune and one’s status within it. The note-taking being ingested as their very paper-printed drugs (drug-stained on rice paper?) of which one wanted to give an impartial view without taking or ingesting them oneself… We are not ghosts, just the paper we are printed on. I am a guru, so I can state things like that with impunity. “Recording something changes it,” reviewing it piecemeal, too, while removing the underpinned meanings, “…leaning columns that would be perceived as threatening to collapse,” moaning in slow-motion?
THE WINDOW “– as if the fear was all around him, but he was swaddled from it somehow, insulated.” The word ‘insulated’ and later narration of this to a friend to share an experience as a non-experience is haunting. But even more haunting is this example of a ‘found art’ ghost (part and parcel of the accoutrements of where it is haunting) that I also recently discovered Wyckoff here. Evenson’s ghost somehow is Evenson’s, Wyckoff’s Wyckoff’s, insulated from each other, as if the Jungian collective unconscious no longer works. A chilling insulation, insolation, insolarity, insularity…? Even the blood continues to be effervescent, evaporable… But a ghost halved the same as a worm halved? Ouro/Boros? I will now refresh my memory of what I wrote about this story when I first read it here.
CLICK “Now, we need you to tell us what we should make of it.” A story written a while ago for me to read today on the author’s 50th birthday. It is a compelling vision of a serial killer’s post-reality constructed on paper, just as his interlocutors (lawyer, guard, nurse, doctor, parents) are constructed on cardboard. Their lower faces missing. lower: lawyer. The one who did it. The clue is in the assonance, It is also a genuinely disturbing deadpan unostentatious exercise in obsessively-induced dislocation. Worthy of my exclusive dysfunction room listing for dysfunctional acclamation HERE.
THE BLOOD DRIP “He watched the flame spread from the match along the leaf, reducing it to a delicate, spidery armature that quickly collapsed.” A blood drip is telling, insofar blood in this book ever effervesces or numbs out into nothing. Give or take the odd vesicle. I have one on the back of my neck. This coda to the book is the nearest the reader will ever lean in towards its author, as you struggle to seek meaning from whoever of the two of you rescues the other from the text, one of you Nils, the other Karsten, seeking shelter in a walled community but from where they throw stones from its walls. The Intentional Fallacy sitting between the two of you like horses uncollapsed, horses being daubed with another pareidoliac image in blood, found art by Damien Hirst. Each without its lower half. “He stopped shy of throwing range.” But a shy IS a throwing range. And this book has genuinely touched me like, in this story, “the sun touched the lip of the wall…” It is a book that honestly and naively grapples with itself, in a strange impulsive logic of illogic. You will never read read anything else like it, taking Weird to its barest bottom bone, but remaining rich near the cortex of the brain. Many nils still make one nil. Cast on, then cast off, like empty stitches. Not brainstorming so much as a brain-becalmed in the still centre of an otherwise riving self. “What are you doing in that tree?” he asked again. / “What tree?” asked Nils. end
27 thoughts on “The Pelican’s New Clothes – Leena Krohn”
THE PELICAN’S NEW CLOTHES (1976) A story from the city
. Translated by Bethany Fox
The Paving Stones
FIRST SIGHT “He liked macaroni more, but that Thursday they only had shepherd’s pie.” The story of the boy called Emil (a name that I first mistook as ‘Email’), and the routines such as eating and the money worries of his pyjama-folder of a Mother in the city they have just moved to, while the routines that usually fill out any boy’s world as important and significant are suddenly outweighed by a man in the cafe reading a newspaper that is upside down – but Emil’s message to himself is that it is not the man with a double chin who lives in the same block as he and his Mum, indeed not a man at all, Emil is convinced, but a pelican… (Some fine detail here unworthy to be consigned to anyone’s junk folder.)
SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT DREAMS “…the relief of nothingness was so easily forgotten.” Poignant account of Emil’s dreams of his time with him Mum and Dad at Brook Farm, and now he is in the city block with just his Mum, Nights, slumber, dreams, and nothingness. Like turning off a computer today in 2016, 40 years after this novel was written? Emil’s pyjamas are presumably folded, too?
MEETING This is becoming highly delightful, as Emil meets the pelican that everyone else among us seems to see as a normal man. An engaging tutelary relationship seems to impend conversationally between them. The pelican is currently learning his alphabet, just like another pelican, Mr Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. By the way, in the UK, a zebra crossing is one with black and white stripes while a pelican one is controlled by a flashing man plus red and green lights.
THE ALPHABET “He didn’t just imitate the train’s whistle, he was the train’s whistle,…” Emil visits Henderson the Pelican who lives in the boy’s own city block of flats, and helps with the alphabet etc. There is the promise of the Pelican telling him tales from the Pelican’s point of view to fill in the background of such a state of affairs? I like literature that promises things, even if they are never delivered, but here I am confident they will be delivered with more certainty than a Mailer Daemon is these days. Codes use the alphabet, and vice versa?
THE PELICAN’S STORY 1 “I can speak the dialect of gulls fluently, and can even exchange a few words with cormorants. But the language of humans is the most charming of any that I know.” A charming would-be classic now for the English language from that of Finns? Yes, this is an enchanting, Swiftian fable as the pelican that everyone except Emil sees as a man tells Emil of his initial experience in the world of the human, and then his meeting another rich language: music: by attendance at a performance of The Magic Flute… And his problems when seen as a migrant, where ‘abroad’ and ‘inland’ as opposites are wrongly inferred by him. “…between the walls of the stone houses.”
THE PELICAN’S STORY 2 “…I wished to hear the sound of the magic flute, which called me to adventures in the world of humans, and assured me of its musty and richness.” I don’t think anyone will forget this self-history of the pelican when attempting to earn money for his fish provender by trying to become a nanny looking after very young children, this transcending the gender-role prejudices of the era – as well as the hidden or instinctive prejudices against birds-as-humans of a parallel era? Nor will be forgotten his showing off his flying to a gob-smacked child on the way to school.
THE PELICAN’S STORY 3 “I have heard people talk about ‘the great symphony of nature’, but it is not a symphony at all’ because it has no beginning, no end and no direction, it just is, always and forever.” A delightful, yet existential-as-pelican-and-man, self-examination by ‘Henderson’, as he becomes a ticket-tearer at the opera house and a would-be member of the choir. This is classic stuff.
HOME BEFORE DARK “I am a bad bird, keeping you awake in this way.” The pelican eventually sings his ‘Little Night Song’ to Emil. It is exquisite in rhyming English; the translator, perhaps, has made it even better than it was in the language of Finns.
THE FAIR “‘But don’t you ever have a pain here?’ and the bird pressed his wing against his chest. ‘Don’t you ever feel as if there was some kind of fishhook there that was pulling you back to where you came from?'” The bird and Emil go off to a fair where it turns out to be trade fair selling paper shredders. Presumably, these days, shredders are in entropy because of emails and other on-linery? Another touching interchange between these two characters. You are a fool if you never read this novel.
HOME IN THE PUPIL OF AN EYE “And it came only now, when July was already almost over…” That couldn’t be a more appropriate description for today’s date! Surprised to see a rare typo in this section: “…who he had never seen before.” And that makes me think that I can never really judge whether this is an accurate translation from the pelican or gullible or cormorantic languages…. Meanwhile, Emil goes ‘home’ to the countryside to visit his father and others from his childhood, but now he is leaving the city with mixed feelings until he can return to visit the pelican again. A telling tension of relationships.
THE WHITE SCREEN A fascinating glimpse at the naivety of the pelican as he wonders at and beautifully describe the need for humans to have more than one world, for example a book he recently experienced (having learnt to read fully now himself while Emil was absent) and what appears on the white screen or through the window of a movie cinema, as he tells Emil on Emil’s return to the city. His deadpan incomprehension at the deviousness of humanity. The pelican’s Asperger’s made charming and incisive about us humans.
GLASS AND DIAMONDS “Once, when he was visiting the pelican’s bathroom, Emil noticed that there was a framed photograph hanging above the bathtub. It was a whole-body picture of a girl dressed in a cloud of white tulle and ballet shoes,” “The most beautiful thing about human women is their ears,” A touching account by the pelican to Emil about his ballerina friend… And a Proustian poem about cake and tea… “Reality to dreams is just As gleaming diamond is to glass.” Perfect. And a perfect synchronicity here a few minutes ago.
ELSA A girl in the same block as Emil and the pelican becomes part of the group, but she only senses a birdish strangeness about ‘Henderson’. The latter has befriended Mr Wildgoose at the opera, or vice versa? I think Mr W is a real man, though. I love uncertainty. Only real-time reviews as a dreamcatching or hawling process provide such constructive uncertainty, paradoxically a new certainty of forthcoming gestalt…
THE PICNIC CLUB “This sort of thing doesn’t happen.” But it does. Messrs Henderson and Wildgoose, Elsa and Emil, an outing for a picnic and an outing of themselves, charming, naive, sexy. This is a novel that is its own outing, too, a discovery for anyone who wants to discover it and to take off their own various layers of self as part of the process.
A DISCUSSION OF TIME AND ANGELS “When I was a bird,” he said, “I never thought about time.” Sibelius was a bird in the last 32 years of his life, I propound. And Angels have both hands and wings – like ‘Henderson’?
THE BIRD READS THE NEWSPAPER “‘It is either lying,’ the pelican said, ‘or then, even worse, it is telling the truth.'” A devastating little section where humans are seen as capable of creating both the magic flute and missiles. This novel is either lying or telling the truth? Fiction does both, I say.
THE MOURNFUL MAN “It became clear that there was a dead man in the box, who[m] he referred to in his speech from time to time.” And this speech by the pelican to Emil is literally a bird’s eye view of his first encounter with a church and its accoutrements. An eye-opener, indeed, for any who have taken religion and death for granted. Pelican as spiritual Gulliver? Interesting that in UK during my lifetime, Penguin books (orange) were fiction, whilst Pelican (blue, like this Complete Fiction of Leena Krohn) were non-fiction.
THE BIRD STUDIES SCIENCE “You have short beaks compared to us pelicans, but you have managed to poke them into all places.” Emil sees Henderson in a library carrel, intent on learning – to become a Renaissance Man?
THE CONDUCTOR “…the pelican was particularly enamoured of violin concertos.” I wonder if his favourite violin concerto is that of Sibelius? And I admire the idealistic potential that the pelican beNieves about us humans…. But I can’t also help visualising his miming of the conducting of Sibelius 32 year silence…
MOTHER “It wasn’t good to know about all sorts of things.” Hair air balloons. The pelican’s sadness over books he reads. Emil trying to get into adult cinema. But then… A very touching portrait of Emil’s mother through his eyes. Bitter-sweet. It as if he sees her for the first time. Really sees her. “He cried a little, and the tears flowed into his ears.”
EXPOSURE “He didn’t believe me at first either, but I told him to look at Mr. Henderson’s hands and feet.” I almost cried at that. The inevitable happens. Episodic, still, but with smooth suspense. Is a zoo a prison, I ask?
PRISONERS Emil and the pelican in his zoo cage exchange hopeful escaper proposals. Highly poignant poem about freedom. Studying this section makes me think more of my own Zoo trope in ‘Nemonymous Night’.
PRISONERS Emil and the pelican in his zoo cage exchange hopeful escape proposals. Highly poignant poem about freedom. Studying this section makes me think more of my own Zoo trope in ‘Nemonymous Night’.
FLIGHT “…the rarity of goodness.” Emil and his pincers for freeing the pelican from his cage. A moving scene as they prepare to travel to the coast. Why is coast a magnet? It was in Agra Aska. And a comfortless dream for Emil, in the land of the Black Elephant. This is all literary iconic stuff, believe me, for people of any age who can read, and all animals who can read Finnish, and now English.
. THE FLOCK “Animals are immortal because they do not know that they will die. Only humans are truly immortal.” So says the pelican. And only a creature such as he who has been both will know whether this is true. Somehow, that creature is any reader of this book… A glorious revelation or a horrific one? I know it is a glorious revelation having now been all three, this classic novel’s holy trinity of generic human, generic non-human and a specific reader that is you. Poignancy incarnated miraculously by words, as one reads this farewell scene between Emil and the pelican. Only in English does pelican rhyme with man. One created by a woman. Only now is the crystallisation complete, I suggest. This novel would make a lovely cinema film, I also suggest. With music by Sibelius. Including new symphonies as if conjured from his silent period? Not forgetting The Magic Flute.
I 1 & 2 “She found a picture postcard, with a design from the 1930s, advertising Butlin’s holiday camp in Skegness and Clacton-on-Sea;” An intriguing start where the woman Bonnie in 2 is writing 1 as fiction, fiction about another woman Susan she has created, someone who has moved to the Seaside. No curtains in her room yet, although she has been promised. Legs optional. I am captivated for many reasons, all of which would spoil it for you if I described them, like sensing I’ve read the fiction before but not the truth behind that fiction. Not déjà vu so much as knowing about knowing about Slash Lane for real from private dreams. A connecting door to where, from where? Between 1 & 2 themselves perhaps?
3 – 6 Casual thoughts aside: the text’s earlier reference to literary criticism and “Death of the Author” and my long-term feeling the word ‘seaside’ sometimes chimes with ‘suicide’…. The anxiety of fiction. The googleable ‘synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’ as I have long since called them. People out to ‘phish’ her… Sylvia Slythe, of all names, is Bonnie’s landlady at Slash Lane…she seems to know more about Bonnie’s fiction about Susan than Bonnie herself? And her reading list regarding the omens of the sea, including some well known books, especially a long-term favourite of mine, Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton, as well as Corbin’s Lure of the Sea. And Lovecraft. Undertow and Under Toad… Language deprivation experiments… Bonnie no longer a fashionable name, but there are other Bonnies we all know. Her father’s contempt for distaff lines in The Family Tree and pride for the spear ones… Labelled cakes and reference to Carroll’s Alice. Falling fear from a bedroom window, she now prefers the ground floor, Bonnie’s surname is Falls, the Tarot’s Tower… Changing a story depending on who is reading it aloud. Or simply on who is reading it, full stop. The ‘fragility of limbs’. Going to sea, or going to the sea? You know, this text is is really filling me with the joy of the art of fiction as well as its angst. It also has an old-fashioned appeal for me of black and white films like ‘Taste of Honey’ or the ‘L Shaped Room’, without necessarily having connection with that era. Bonnie who is a simple girl with cleaning jobs but one who also writes fiction with irresistible ‘al dente’ qualities as well as tractability, I sense. Seaside does that to you. Like the Nile as the longest river, knowing the seaside is not knowing what it means. I live there, and think I should know. Utterly page-turning, but I shall try to eke out this book. No spoilers.
II 7 – 10 “‘And if Erica dared you to jump off a skyscraper,’ said the nurse, ‘would you do it?’ It seems ironic that Bonnie was once thus dared by a girl called Erica, as Erica Jong wrote ‘A Fear of Flying.’ I am still consumed by this sporadically absurdist feel of a 1960s Britain, but one with iPods, and by Bonnie’s continuation of her Susan fiction story, and her growing friendship with Sylvia her landlady. There are still many ‘objective correlatives’ connected, say, with blank paper messages, dreams, seaside piers, jumping and fear of falling, and dislocation with her parents, past and present. I am reasonably satisfied that these do not yet fulfil a gestalt as I feel they are more of a patchwork of unconnectables like a collage I once did in 1967 for an exhibition on Surrealism at university. I won’t itemise here these objective correlatives or the other characters in the tapestry of her life, even though I did do this earlier above with a stream of asides. Some of them are a bit like today’s 24 hour rolling news (that Bonnie has ever rolling on her room’s TV), rolling with headlining recurrences, and déjà vus like Bonnie’s fiction about Susan.
11 & 12 III 13 – 15 “As a child, Bonnie had been troubled by the thought of these elves who let themselves into people’s private rooms and worked their strange magic, fixed their shoes in the middle of night, and then left again without being seen, although you knew they had been there.” Just with this book, I feel others having been in it, between my readings of it, messing with the words, messaging the text, but in a good way. BF Skinner, William Burroughs et al. (Altering it to fit my real-time review in hindsight?)
16 – 17 ‘THE DEATH OF TOI’ I have reason to believe there are secret undeclared subliminal things going on in this text, as well as different openly declared subliminal things going on as part of the plot. I won’t tempt fate by mentioning specific examples of these things as subliminality spoiled is possibly even more worrying than subliminality working. There are also artful frustrations of expectation, such as Bonnie’s landlady being much more than the classic landlady figure. And coincidental interactions with the past between characters in the present, sometimes denied or doubted, sometimes revealed to be true.
18 “At one junction, they took a wrong turning – someone had tampered with the signpost, turning the arm to point the wrong way, like a comic-book jape.” Sylvia and Bonnie arrive at the seaside resort supposedly used in the latter’s fiction story about Susan, a place Bonnie had once visited as a child. I am genuinely in suspense as to what the outcome will be. I will not report exactly on that outcome here, as that would spoil it for you. I shall twist the signpost a bit. Or perhaps not. Bonnie seems very forgetful with regard to her luggage, but they arrive safely at the Hook pub that featured in her story about Susan. The signpost incident reminds me of all the stolen road signs that happened to be in Sylvia’s owned flat when Bonnie moved into it…
19 – 21 “‘I think you’ve been dreaming,’ said Sylvia. ‘Or harvesting.'” I seem now to be one kilter aside from the truth of this text. I was right to promise no revelation of the outcome of the plot in this review, other than to say that it is genuinely disturbing. Like the text itself, a frame-up, a hologrammatisation. But who, between Sylvia and Bonnie, is the gaslighter, whom the gaslit? The gaslit is the gestalt you will need to form for yourself. Arguably a bit rushed with many objective correlatives and literary references thrown in as if into a literary rummage sale, but a genuine unmissable classic of the gaslight genre. Rayner Heppenstall meets Barbara Vine meets Hangover Square.
THE STAR by H. G. Wells “It is nearer.” The incantatory and the deadpan commentary; this has impact potentially macrocosmic. A precursor of Byron’s Darkness, but whether that is exactly right would be a plot spoiler to end all plot spoilers. This star is not necessarily the unexpected one from the Wells of Space now in ricochet with Neptune then toward US, but not only US, Europe, too. It could be the shock of Brexit in the blackening skies of politics, social/lreligious and cultural history, but NO … let me tell you THE STAR is THIS BOOK itself! Its beginning outdoing its never-to-be-reached end. Well, for someone of my age, I suggest that is true; this is the Star in the sky of my darkness that is a death to say ‘it is nearer’ again and again. To tell you that the book has over one thousand two hundred pages is to tell you nothing at all. They are very large pages, you see, with double columns, and small neat print. A story of say six pages as this first one turns out to be could well be a lot more pages in a normal book. The body of the book’s physical gestalt wallops on the lap and flows like solid lava with further lolloping and a lithe bend. My life’s cold white star but still molten enough to probe my reading fingers into it and pray that I will transcend it before IT transcends me. Before I reach the gestalt that is the whole of my life’s leitmotifs, now to be impacted by this mighty tome.
SULTANA’S DREAM (1905) By Rokheya Shekhawat Hossain “You need not be afraid of coming across a man here. This is Ladyland, free from sin and harm. Virtue herself reigns here.” This is an entrancing dream, or am I enchanted by it to believe it to have been a dream, when it was all so perfectly true? It is, whatever one believes, a type of utopia where men are in purdah in their mardana rather than the women being so in their zenana. A history giving birth to this present day by means of women’s quick brains creating better scientific inventions than men’s bigger brains, inventions to meet immediate contingencies of war or whatever. The inventions themselves are intriguingly described in an SFictional manner by this 1905 story. It even has a reference to “lady-warriors”, although it seems none were needed to wreak this victory over men. Meanwhile a question is asked within the ‘dream’ regarding the world outside of Ladyland, the world of the Sultana’s native India: “Men, who do or at least are capable of doing no end of mischief, are let loose and the innocent women shut up in the zenana! How can you trust those untrained men out of doors?” [This work resonates beautifully, in style and tone, with my reading so far in PF Jeffery’s duodecology of novels entitled ‘The Warriors of Love.’]
THE TRIUMPH OF MECHANICS (1907) by Karl Hans Strobl Translated by Gio Clairval “One could say he invented as easily as he drew breath.” Hopkins, an American, in some Germanic town, taken in Kafkaesque stages to seek permission to open his own toy factory after leaving the competing firm Stricker and Vorderteil (themselves characters in the story) comes up against the Mayor’s Trade Restraint Order against him. He threatens the town with a billion mechanical rabbits, a bit of a Trump of a Flashmob, I guess, and — even knowing this is a frighteningly futuristic vision of asexual reproductions-lines, devices for defying death (like this endless book itself) and Artificial Intelligence for the masses — we are also hilariously amused by the various events that ensue, till Hopkins pulls the cleverest rabbit of all from his hat on Schiller day! “A more lugubrious impression occurred when the trumpets released a discordant tune, caused by the rabbits obstructing the instruments.”
As an aside, I confirm this book also has the editors’ mighty overall introduction and individual essays for each story. I am not reading the essays until after each story has been reviewed. For anyone interested, my previous marathon real-time review in 2011 of these editors’ THE WEIRD anthology is linked from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/index-to-reviews-of-vandermeers-th/ I once thought that THAT book was a massive one – until TBBOFS was delivered by a weight-lifter to my door in the UK a couple of days ago.
THE NEW OVERWORLD (1911) by Paul Scheerbart Translated by Daniel Ableev and Sarah Kassem “Couldn’t we use this hot, very light crater air as a balloon carrier?” With a paradoxically controlled feel of sinuously processional improvisation, this engaging text (combining, inter alios, Leena Krohn and Jonathan Swift) builds a world uoon Venus (as some once built ‘real’ or since built SF universes upon Turtles, and there are turtles, here, too, even “turtle fur”) – and the striving for inventions to establish Eco-comfort for and by the two breeds of Venusians known as the Dynamic Ones and the Unhurried. This building of such a universe of fiction involves countering things like overpopulation and surface tension, using, say, balloons and sub-balloons,. And there is also a would-be saviour named Knax scientifically brainstorming (like the ladies in Ladyland earlier in this book) for the population’s consensual accommodation. A lesson for our times? The eyes of the new overworld, indeed. Knax evolving inevitably into the new-old Citizen Kane with a huge image behind him of himself projected like Trump sitting on a giant balloon? Only if all hyper-imaginative fiction literature ever published is preternaturally connected – which phenomenon, as dreamcatching, hawling or brainstorming, I contend, this type of gestalt real-time reviewing somehow taps into!
ELEMENTS OF PATAPHYSICS by Alfred Jarry Translated by Gio Clairval Although I anticipate this anthology of SF being eclectic as well as catholic with a small c, this text can only be taken seriously as part of it IF this is genuinely an SF anthology of SF. I take the text seriously, though, per se, and I recall seeing Père Ubu performed in the 1960s. By my green candle! [My marathon real-time review of Finnegans Wake here. And of Conflagration wherein Jarry appears at least three times.]
MECHANOPOLIS by Miguel de Unamuno Translated by Marian Womack “I sucked at the dark black blood that flowed from the fingers that I had torn in scrabbling at the dry ground in the mad hope of finding some water beneath it.” The narrator, having crossed a trackless desert, with several of his companions perishing, arrives, with some abrupt relief, eponymously. A worrying and fascinating vision of the believably future AI city. He yearns for human contact. But it was a comfort to me to note the art gallery with all the world’s famous paintings in their original forms, implying that those paintings the rest of the world hold are copies. And a real newspaper in his hotel room. At least, I thought, although they have nothing but thinking machines in Eponymous, they have eschewed the dreaded Internet in this eclectic future. As well as human beings!?
THE DOOM OF PRINCIPAL CITY (1918) by Yefim Zozulya Translated by Vlad Zhenevsky “We want to have your old, beautiful culture in the cellar, so to speak, and to age it like wine. . . .” This is a very engaging satire of a city on one level, with laughable Governmental Quangos, sky propaganda etc., a hyper-imaginative satire of a Orwell or Huxley pre-breed, but on another level there is yet another city of implication. But which city is the Principal which the Agent? Names don’t always give the right clue, but I was very intrigued by this war between two cities, one eventually built as victor ABOVE the other, with all the machinations you can imagine arising from such a building feat. This war was eventually written about leading, it seems to publication in 1918, that period of real war history which was a perfect storm of cirumstances, as TODAY in our world there is another perfect storm of circumstances, but leading to what! As is my wont, I tried to think of topical pareidoliac parallels, whether it be Daesh layering itself above our civilisation or the two levels of Man-City in ‘Nemonymous Night’. No, neither of these, I suggest, this story is about Brexit. It all fits.
THE COMET by W. E. B. Du Bois “Not that he was not human, but he dwelt in a world so far from hers, so infinitely far, that he seldom even entered her thought.” – as if he were foiled against the Webwood itself? There is something tantalising about the author’s name that gives an apocryphal meaning to his depiction of the destruction of all mankind, a destruction by dint of passing through the toxic tail of a comet, no, on second thoughts, not the destruction of mankind, just of New York – a once hopeful purity of purpose now in entropy and tapping into the tensions between the Christian Religion and race relations where a black man is tantamount to non-existent, but ironically becoming this text’s survivor mentioned alongside the dated use of the word ‘nigger’, now due to be one of two people deemed to start a new Creation process or Genesis along with the only other survivor being a white woman. We understand how he managed to survive the comet in the bank’s vault, but it never seems to be explained how she survived, except she is perhaps the Angel of Annunciation hovering over the dead? No mere woman? When factored into the earlier Hossain story, and when Survivor’s Guilt is eventually transcended by all her hangers-on turning up from outside of New York, everything is highly poignant and we realise that not only is “Death, the leveler” or “revealer”, but, for me, today’s reveller, too, in our own dark webwood, full of social justice warriors and their evil enemies in continued entropy. The sometimes elusive language and style of an otherwise ‘thrilling SF impact’ story seems susceptible to such a cross-wired or Jungian interpretation as I have just given it. I did not concoct it from thin air, I feel.
THE FATE OF THE ‘POSEIDONIA’ (1927) by Clare Winger Harris “‘Yes, yes,’ agreed the keeper affably. ‘We’ll let you see the secretary of war when that fellow over there’ — he jerked his thumb in the direction of the cell opposite mine — ‘dies from drinking hemlock. He says he’s Socrates and every time he drinks a cup of milk he flops over, but he always revives.'” …a bit like this story that often revives when there are shown genuine moments of spectacular wonder, with our male Earthman protagonist — jealous of his girl being attracted to a strange cove who turns out to be a Martian in charge of raiding our world to steal ocean water for the depleting seas back home — watching the nefarious process of the Martian fleets and the unshorn spiky-feathered Martians themselves on the shorn cove’s own five-levered TV set… But I actually think it is all in the Earthman’s mind, and one of the reasons I think that to be the case results from the dates he gives us. They seem confused. A futuristic story “in the winter of 1994-1995” but later it is “6th April 1945”, and I don’t think the explained calendar changes solve that confusion. The female lead is interesting, meanwhile, in a Du Bois and Hossain sort of way and thought-provoking are the inimical movements of seas becoming inter-planetary rather than merely global as they are in today’s Gaia.
THE STAR STEALERS (1929) by Edmond Hamilton Pages 77 – 86 “I gave a sharp catch of indrawn breath as they dropped lower toward us, and we crouched with pounding hearts while they dropped lower toward us, and while they dropped nearer.” An energetic, wonder-filling space adventure (so honestly, and unself-consciously, energetic the language flows by just like what I see as cone-zeroes themselves) where the narrative protagonist with mixed crew in charge of a Federation battleship in the far corners of our galaxy is called back to the Solar System to meet the dangers of a huge dark star about to ‘steal’ our sun like the Martians stole our seas in the previous story. The vision of the dark star whereto they plummet, is my mind-gymnastics, and the city where its motive force resides? I am genuinely caught up in a cliffhanger reminding me wonderfully of the Saturday Morning Pictures of my 1950s childhood. I can’t wait till I read the second half of this novelette. One thing, meanwhile, is that I note the word “bridgeroom” appears like a constant incantatory refrain, and I kept seeing it as “bridegroom”, in spite of myself. And I have just noticed that the former always autocorrects to the latter on my screen as I write this. I have to grit my teeth to ensure it stays correct…
Pages 86 – 97 In its own way, I appreciated the swashbuckling battle for the saving of the sun and our earth, a battle against the spectacularly described tentacle-cones on the Dark Star. But I sensed something more, something ultra vires, perhaps apocryphal… “….while Dal Nara, after the manner of her sex through all the ages, sought a beauty parlor, and I asked only to continue with our cruiser in the service of the Federation fleet. […] We would be star-rovers, she and I, until the end.” …so there was to be no romantic ending to this work as there would have been had the narrator and Dal Nara clinched some sexual knot. Indeed, that lack of romance was twofold. You see, I feel sorry for the cold Dark Star, as it continues to wander as a bridgeroom not a bridegroom throughout infinity and eternity of purdah – without its own companion and bride, our sun. Abandoning, thus, in its wake, what has turned out to be a human race as dubious no-good hangers-on.
THE CONQUEST OF GOLA (1931) by Leslie F. Stone “we were also freaks to those freakish” Unlike the superb Hossain gender story, earlier, this one seems a bit ungracious or ‘patronising’ to me. A bit grudging about the males:- “Their bodies were like a patchwork of misguided nature.” “–ugh, it was terrible when we dissected one of the fellows for study. I shudder to think of it.” “Although their hand movements were perfectly inane and incomprehensible, Tanka could read what passed through their brains, and understand more fully than they what lay in their minds.” (My bold.) Or ironic? Or, at best, tongue in cheek? (“…for the first time I knew the pleasure to be had in the arms of a strong man,”) Meanwhile, the text is, arguably, a major inversion of the usual sexual mores of the age in which it was written. And the concept is indeed striking of the gentle male consorts in the female-controlled world, a world attacked by “ignoble” men from outside it… However, one wonders, radically, at the nature of the ‘women’ and ‘men’ that compete in this inter-planetary warfare. Supposedly, this text is an early example of first person narrative through a non-human alien form, here the narrative of a ‘woman’ (and her description of these aliens, ‘male’ and ‘female’, is enjoyably imaginative). They are so non-human, I don’t think it is ever made clear what strictly differentiates the two bodily genders! A storm in a teacup? An own gola?
A MARTIAN ODYSSEY (1934) by Stanley G. Weinbaum “Mare Chronium was just the same sort of place as this — crazy leafless plants and a bunch of crawlers;” The previous story in Gola had this passage amid its ending: “and they no sooner appeared beneath the mists than they too were annihilated…” – as if that was a straight lead-in to the Weinbaum southern reach upon Mars, where the ANNihilation has turned this four man expedition to a four woman one in Area X, and the resonances don’t end there. The Weinbaum text itself is absolutely delightful, with the expedition’s jokey multi-language jokes between the four of them, and the parallel of more knotty communication difficulties with the aliens, ironed out by brilliant cartoonish nosedive ostrich-in-the-sand antics of the Martian creature that one of the four meets. This text is in fact the mind-tantalising debriefing by that one of the four to the others, in dialogue exchange, of his adventures on Mars, and the crazy creatures he meets there, before being rescued by the German among the other three. As well as the ostrich creature, there are the ones who build endless pyramid homes with excreted bricks from their rocky selves, and others, including happily conducted suicide creatures. All of this leading to a possible cure for human cancer… Very southern reach, if you ask me. Gender goals et al, as are sweetly accreting throughout this book so far, give or take adventures and wonders for their own sake.
THE LAST POET AND THE ROBOTS (1934) by A. Merritt “I do not like this which they call so quaintly the Wrongness of Space — nor the stone he threw into my music .” A group of multi-cultural Renaissance men (and women) organised for this story, too, if organised by a mad scientist? I have long been interested in astrological harmonics, in cone zero or cones zero, and in the music, as specifically mentioned in this text, of Beethoven, Mussorgsky and Chopin, even in “crippled music”, as this text has it, like Stockhausen? I almost feel I might BE the arguably ‘mad scientist’ as poet and composer who is said here to have created the caverns within the earth, a bit like those rock-excretors in the previous story, a bit also like in Nemonymous Night, as he comes up against the “common identity–group consciousness” of robots (now known as the Internet?), and the collateral human damage that defeating them entails…as well as the “grotesque rigadoons” and “bizarre sarabands” of simply factoring Jupiter and Saturn into Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata…? I’ve felt it all before! Glad to see its Jungian counterpart was already being once induced by Merritt.
THE MICROSCOPIC GIANTS (1936) by Paul Ernst “It happened toward the end of the Great War of 1941,…” An entertaining tale of copper mining and the frightening discovery of living doll-sized human creatures with menacing eyes and extreme specific gravity, creatures that can walk easily through concrete… Meanwhile, to brainstorm upon the theme and variations of this work … A war’s heavy use of copper as a symptom of the macro-economics of scarce resources at the time of this future past … an alternate world system seeming to form into a copper electric circuit with fiction as its only ohm resistor. Retrocausality existing BEFORE the Tiny Hadron Collider was built – as well as the sliding through of earthen rock formations by Man-City in Nemonymous Night…?
TLÖN, UQBAR, ORBIS TERTIUS (1940) by Jorge Luis Borges Translated by Andrew Hurley “Every mental state is irreducible: the simple act of giving it a name — i.e., of classifying it — introduces a distortion, a ‘slant’ or ‘bias’.” This is a work of apparently dense speculative philosophical texture, with real famous names rubbing shoulders with neologisms and fictions and unknowns. I have always considered it to be the apotheosis of retrocausal Nemonymity as well as, now, the hawling or dreamcatching labyrinths of this Jungian or preternatural site where you read this review. For the rest, it is mere Pataphysics. Or Sir Thomas Browne coupled with Berkeley. “Books are rarely signed, nor does the concept of plagiarism exist: it has been decided that all books are the work of a single author who is timeless and anonymous.” Paradoxically, despite such texture, this work has a text that, when dug up, proves to be a shallow grave, and I positively wreaked more ‘synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’ from earlier, arguably deeper, otherwise adventurous or wonder-filled yarns in this book. But… “A book that does not contain its counter-book is considered incomplete.” So be it. Meanwhile, we already have had the cone zeroes and the over-heavy specific gravities in this book. “Those small, incredibly heavy cones…”
DESERTION (1944) by Clifford D. Simak “Four men, two by two, had gone into the howling maelstrom that was Jupiter and had not returned.” Another foursome, sussed out by biologists, as ‘converted’ by a woman. A tontine prize of men, sent to transcend or optimise the Jovian ‘climate’, its Ernst-like heavyweightness and its Merritt-like trilling music…to do that or die? A fifth man, then, does not return. Then our narrative viewpoint sends and thus sacrifices himself and his dog Towser, and soon, now alongside them, we begin to understand fully… And somehow the reader, as my Desertion almost literally, does not, for equal reasons. want to return from having been in this story itself. Send the woman ‘converter’ into the Jovian soup next, I say, to bring back this review of it!
SEPTEMBER 2005: THE MARTIAN (1949) by Ray Bradbury “…and a gentle breathing.” An author who is in these editors’ massive THE WEIRD as well as in this massive SF book, both stories with a telling comparison of accreting crowds… Also, with arguably amazing serendipity, I read and reviewed here an hour ago BREATHING by Steve Rasnic Tem, about another aging couple, his couple still on earth, echoing each other, also with a visitation, as if on Bradbury’s Mars, their yearned for presence of loving loss is returned to them. Quite dissimilar as stories, but with a kindred spirit, seeming to enhance each other over the intervening years, and give added mutual meaning, especially as I happened to read them both together for the first time in a fateful process of dreamcatching just now.
BABY HP (1952) by Juan José Arreola Translated by Larry Nolen “To the Lady of the House:” Interesting to whom this amusing Swiftian ‘Modest Proposal’ of Harmonious Paediatrics by piggy-banking children’s and babies’ diurnal movements is addressed.
SURFACE TENSION (1952) by James Blish Prologue, I and II “There may be just the faintest of residuums of identity — pantropy’s given us some data to support the old Jungian notion of ancestral memory.” Wonderful stuff, and I almost understand it all! “We can’t very well crowd a six-foot man into a two-foot puddle.” I can now see that THE STAR was indeed this massive book coming across the horizon towards us and now this book starts, for real, its first major attempt at colonisation of us (as this story itself is a about a human-adapted colonisation) – colonising us with a personal vision of SFiction, stemming along the way into rotiferously parthenogenetic fiction and late labelling with which I was involved just after the turn of the last century. And exploratory small groups into various versions of a retrocausal AreaaaaaaX. “Most eternities went by.” This is the quintessential exploratory party, here five men and two women, leaving etched metal plates for posterity’s attempts at reading by their progeny amid their wet wet wet waterloggings and small puddles of pantropy’s sporification or sporulation, evolving into a mess of variously named contestants for existence on this planet around the star Tau Ceti. The different warring breeds, and genders, remind me of the trans-Internet today. “–but nobody kills the males anyhow, they’re harmless.” And the text’s language, evoking such sporifications, flows like the very biological rotifers etc amid the latent spoor of the reading mind, beautifully insumed as it is, even by my cyst-riddled lower skull… Blish, not Bling, around my neck. So far. “The Paras had exploded the trichocysts…”
[SURFACE TENSION – continued] III of Cycle One, I & II of Cycle Two “…but we still do not know what the thing is that it labels.” As I started this massive book, I claimed it was a device to defy death, as an ironic reference to the seemingly endless process of my reading it, knowing I couldn’t possibly die till I finished it, by both a felt need and a faith in destiny. Now I believe it is such a device to defy death, not simply by need or destiny, but by dint of the words in the various texts and their meaning. Maybe these words are now starting to brainwash me…bringing me through the three surfaces of Blish, of which brain-washing is literally its motive. It is overtly a text about human adaptation by seeding this book-star’s planet, seeding us through the “book-lungs”, and the complex avant-garde gaia that ensues, battles, wars, proto-internets, para-logistics, puddle genders, eater-crawlers and a human-made religion of what is written on the metal plates as some sort of instilled ‘happening’. Not SF so much as colonisation of the colonisers with a swathe of Joycean Finnegans Wake word-music in the guise of an audit trail of human high-minded exploration and base-instinctual crawling, with the reader stuck between, inspired via his or her book-lungs and face-book, while also dreading the moment when the words end and he or she expires – or re-spires? A new parable for parthenogenesis? Top-of-the-sky thinking? Bottom-fishing? Lavon as Laver, Lavatory or Lovecraft? More food-thought for mulching… “We saw that men were poor swimmers, poor walkers, poor crawlers, poor climbers.” “Someone to whom the word stars was important enough to be worth fourteen repetitions, despite the fact the word doesn’t seem to mean anything.” “…unable to learn that a friendly voice did not necessarily mean a friend.” “When the Protos decided something was worthless, they did not hide it in some chamber like old women. They threw it away — efficiently.” “But, of course, it was impossible to enter a bubble. The surface tension was too strong.”
To be continued in due course below. Meanwhile, only thirty minutes or so ago I serendipitously linked to my early 1990s ‘necklace’ immortality conceit HERE. This conceit I would relate to the missing metal plate in the Blish?
[SURFACE TENSION – concluded] III, IV, V “I can see the top of the sky! From the OTHER side, from the top side! It’s like a big flat sheet of metal.” The survival of Lavon in a web of mud, at first pitied as my empathisable “encysted” one, then emergence and ready for the ‘stars’ (15th repetition of the word?), useless knowledge or not, iconography of the metal history plate or not (as, for me, a defining ‘necklace’). Significant there are five of them planning for this travel to the stars (or from one puddle to another puddle?), as there were five of us at the start, and now at least one girl to save at the end. “…what man can dream, man can do.” And each work of great fiction has its preternatural nub from one’s own hawling, dreamcatching or dowsing its words. But that nub being, say, a star or a puddle, little matters. It’s the mission that counts, such as the mission of this book in which this work still miraculously evolves (parthenogenetically?), even while its text stays fixed from when it was first written.
BEYOND LIES THE WUB (1952) by Philip K. DIck “‘I wonder what the outcome will be,’ the cook said.” The WUB is either this book itself or one of its editors. Better pan-fried than oven-cooked. Arguably. A “semantic warehouse”, ergo, WUB: Warehouse Under Biologicalisation. “Tolerant, eclectic, catholic.” A fable regarding the social justice or democracy of not being eaten when viewed from both sides of the mouth. But being eaten can perhaps be another form of passing on myth and wisdom, better than by publishing books or being a book thus published, a process Odysseusly separate from the finite life cycle, because such passing-on is ever-mulched and pantroped. Lavon, eat your heart out. Beautiful gem, but probably untypical of Dick. I once loved Dick. Must get back to him.
THE SNOWBALL EFFECT (1952) by Katherine MacLean “Would that change the results?” Asking someone, in media res, about how something they are running is going, does that affect how that thing eventually goes, for good or bad? Reminds me tellingly of a story (The Moans) by Brian Evenson that I happened synchronously to review this morning. Meanwhile, any story, like this one, that contains the expression “institutional accretion” is bound to be a winner, too, whether that winner is one of a tontine or a sweepstake or a chain-letter distribution method or a Republican Trump pyramid-scheme (on this very day he threatens to assassinate Hillary!) I loved some of the interaction between the gamblers in this race, two university academics with algebraic equations as to snowballing their resources and fees-intake for a sociology department. And it was simply lovely for this book as a gestalt that the experimental guinea-pig for these sophisticated equations – and the determinant for the contest between the two men – was an all-woman sewing circle, one with no endgame factored in! Eating Wub may have been a better answer?
Now read this in the editors’ essay about this St. Clair story: “The story is one of the most original collected in this anthology.” I can empathise with that, but I keep my powder dry.
THE LIBERATION OF EARTH (1953) by William Tenn The concept of passive-aggressive behaviour starts here. A series of liberations and reliberations of us breathless humans by other collaborationist and warring races alike. Warring and collaborationist, by turns, sometimes simultaneously. Ranging from pre-Bengali to other languages with irregular verbs galore, and sporadic biological differentiations, and this is like the Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans conquering England where we intermittently became them and them us. I don’t trust this story, however enjoyably and wittily cosmos-swashbuckling it is, as Tenn, I infer, is also a collaborationist, for one elastically-long moment, then an enemy, for the next elastically-long moment, to those of us he imagines reading his words over the cycles of human history. I loved the bouts of his gusty style between immaculate textured descriptions. It’s as if he’s hedging his bets. “…from water puddle to distant water puddle.”
LET ME LIVE IN A HOUSE (1954) by Chad Oliver “Somewhere in this madness there is a pattern that will reduce it to sanity.” Which is ostensibly a blasphemy to my concept of gestalt real-time reviewing? Dreamcatching, hawling, dowsing fiction’s truth… This story represents a bubble of sanity, two ordinary simple-minded couples each in their idyllic pair of neighbouring cottages inside that far-space bubble, with a Frigidaire wheezing in the background, a state of the art TV called a tri-di, with game shows, exchange dinner parties, the perfect suburban sanity…but one of the four has inched beyond that bubble, a bubble millions of miles from Earth when something, looking like a man, inches into this bubble, threatening the whole construction. The other three sit at the “bridge table”, cards in hands. The outcome of this story is that they never crossed that bridge. What price sanity? A telling pattern of what is sanity and madness, and the finite nature of man’s mind. And what we are and what we would want to be if we were not what we are already. Even, today, with the help of books like this one, we cannot reach beyond our respective bubbles, unless we Dreamcatch these words beyond what they mean so as to stop ourselves descending into a sudden storm of multi-bubbling (no longer a single over-arching bubble), an inchoate bubbling that awaits each of us beyond the final Frigidaire.
Reading these poems, for me, encysts not the substance but the experience of reading Ezra Pound’s poems. One cannot really say more than what is said about itself above on its back cover. Sometimes blurbs are true.
Any “Color Plates” below in this whole review are my assessed choices as to the Golaski text’s referred images of paintings….for you to decide whether such images to be seen now are spoilers for each vignette-sized plate of prose. The black and white text, I guess, represents EITHER more examples of this author’s supreme weird literature (some of which I reviewed here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/06/03/worse-than-myself-by-adam-golaski/) OR equally supreme inferred colourful prose-music constituents of a ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’-type tour in which my job is to find the gestalt from such leitmotifs. It is probably both these things and more. ———————– prologue The first plate named ‘prologue’, a plate that is unnumbered, leaving the second plate to be numbered one, it will be seen, it seems. Portrait of the Artist 1878 “Paintings are brushstroke upon brushstroke.” A Proustian palimpsest of text and inferred paint, a self-portrait by Mary with richly textured memories of people in her life and of this ‘body’ she left behind. Thoughts of Galaxies and ‘God’ too. You live a day a day to put life in, and I intend to adumbrate each forthcoming plate no more than diurnally, perhaps less than.
.[ PLATE 1 ] Boy with Cherries 1858 “The small man who looked like Dad pointed down to a spot on the bed, where I could see he had a collection of marbles.” The brother and sister in this story (from whose point of view this painting is obliquely looked at) remind me of my own son and daughter. When they were children, I used to conduct them, individually at different ages, through books of famous paintings and we discussed each one in some detail. The idea of this book has brought those occasions back to me with a rush. I myself used to be obsessed with marbles as a child (see here: https://t.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/marble-racing/ and this painting reminds me of me then. Never seen it before.)
[ Plate 2 ] Luncheon on the Grass 1863 “: cherries march towards a baguette like ants.” A particular narrative rationale and modern aftermath for this painting that transcend both serendipity and ‘the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’ (my seasoned phrase that you can google.) For ‘shards’, now read ‘pearls’.
[ Plates 3 & 4 ] Olympia 1863 “Let me describe for you a scene.” You can then see it from link above. A woman wearing the pearl earrings from the previous Color Plate, pearls like pearl-pale cherries that I discern, although the description itself withholds this feature. It is more obsessed with her black ribbon holding the gestalt together, as well as her head. Another striking passage of weirdness as a fiction-painting palimpsest. My personal (non-Manet) ‘color plate’ as further extrapolation:
[ Plate 5 ] Portrait of Emile Zola 1868 “Of course, when glass is broken it cannot not repair itself…” A telling double negative there, as if deliberately or inadvertently echoing my earlier reference to ‘synchronised shards’… A description of Zola in his office and his meditation effectively on the nature of death by a bullet and the particle physics of skin and sand, and with the previous Color Plate actually on the wall of the office in this Color Plate! Whenever I see the name Zola I think of the violent castration scene in his ‘Germinal’.
[ Plate 6 ] The Railway 1873 “A blue bow as big as a girl.” Woman and girl by the railings. The older with another black band or ribbon round the neck. The younger has one around her hair. Grapes, too, bottom right, grapes instead of cherries or marbles or pearls. This fascinating textual extrapolation of a famous painting into a weird scene with an additional character, a young man, involved, and a retriangulation of coordinates into a new adventurous modernity, reminds me of the discussions about paintings and resultant story-telling that I conducted with my own children during the 1970s and 1980s. Makes this book even more of a delight, with my being the child this time round.
[ Plate 7 ] Mlle. Victorine in the Costume of an Espada 1863 “Goya lurks.” He still does. A bull fight film in a cinema where someone in the auditorium, every screening, masquerades as a bull-fighter in front of some of the scenes. A painting canvas as well as a cinema screen can be susceptible to the pricking of a picador. And sitting behind it is found some feeble back-projecting Wizard of Oz – or Goya himself? I wonder what the Picasso-like group right at the back of the Manet canvas is gossiping about? They still do.
[ Plate 8 ] The Balcony 1869 “That we see a skull of smoke above their heads is a wonder of paint chemistry and fear.” [ See skull of smoke here yesterday. ] A fascinating and detailed weirdness of an extrapolation from the characters in Manet’s THE BALCONY and an approaching visitor across arguably unnatural hills. The first Last Balcony? Paintings (Manet modelled) from the ultimate ‘Last Balcony’ posted a few years ago HERE:-
[ Plate 9 ] A Bar at the Folies-Bergere 1881 “Behind the bar the mirror holds the memory of the night before.” …which is a striking conceit for this famous Folies-Bergère bar painting, a conceit that is memorably extrapolated here, with references to sand (as constituent of the mirror behind the bar, I ask?) and a music-like ‘dying fall’ ending to die for. And of course the colour plate of oranges.
[ Plate 10 ] On the Beach 1873 “I heard my boyfriend get up and pee.” A woman and man on the beach, she with hat and veil that look to me like a skull, and this book’s black ribbon… Seen by another couple not seen by the painting. An evocative description of one of those skylines, now stretched out in time, and its witnesses … Photo sea-skyline images that often pepper my social media.
[ Plates 14 & 15 ] Luncheon in the Studio 1868 I have just noticed I have accidentally leapt over three intervening color plates; there may be some hidden meaning to that accident, when seen in later hindsight. I will rectify the omissions in coming days. The author seems to omit plates, himself, as not all his numbering relates to named painting plates. “The woman grunted.” This one represents an amusing discussion of a writer submitting to a publisher, as well as the painting itself being full of still life, but full also of things alive, including people and the objects themselves! A lemon with peel hanging, peel and pearl of light? And more plates within a plate.
[ Plates 11 & 12 ] Claude Monet in His ‘Studio’ 1874 “He dips the tip of his brush into her skin,…” Monet in his studio boat painted by Manet. Only one letter different, and only one letter different, too, between boat and boar as in boar bristles of the brush that produces such real light from the water. This type of exquisition from paint will lead you to look at not only paintings differently but also literature as weird fiction. (Perhaps there are two Plate numbers above, because there is a painting within the painting?)
[ Plate 13 ] Blonde with Nude Bust 1875 “I opened the box. ‘I don’t know. It looks like a big yellow slipper.'” It was a hat, I mistook not my wife for a hat, but a hat for a slipper. A fulsome portrait, with a happy ending of future fruit within her belly – to join the cherries, lemons etc.? “I wanted to occupy the whole room.”
[ Plate 16 ] The Fifer 1866 “Here, flat tones rather than careful grading. Here, shadows cast on nothing.” Aunt’s memorial, Aunt’s attic, the man who was once the boy, with childhood nostalgia staying with his aunt, the boy who could have dressed like this painting with its uniform jacket, but now his fiancée is small enough to dress in it in likeness to the painting instead. Her bust must surely be smaller than the painting’s bust in this review’s previous color plate, if not the previous painting in this book. The Fifer Boy is even flatter than the text about it, but both equally striking. The Drummer Boy on stage next?
[ Plate 17 ] The Execution of Emperor Maximilian 1867 “Cut this execution to pieces.” Almost a cut-up or ready-made or found art by Manet, a boy’s memory of a black and white TV Pre-Blair Witch Project, pre-Internet, now post-TV, post-modern, and I can empathise fully with this boy in what turns out to be a very strong well-aimed example of Weird literature. Unmissable. (Look like cameramen looking over the wall?)
[ Plate 18 ] Boating at Argenteuil 1874 “An ocean of boys, bobbling like plastic bath toys, rocking gently against each other, soundless, stiff.” You will need to go far to find another vision like this one as simply evoked by a man and woman in a boat. I am reminded of my father Gordon who often told me that he, as a boy in the 1920s and 30s, with two other boys, often jumped off the dock together into the water at Llanelli. One of those other boys was Desmond his brother who was later lost presumed dead in the Indian Ocean when a Japanese submarine sunk his ship during the 2nd World War.
. . [ Plate 19 ] White Lilacs and Roses 1883 “Serendipity took over:” Alison may be like the flowers in the vase, but “our man” is more like the vase beneath. Our man, but this book’s last Manet, it would seem. . .
. [ Plate 20 ] Head of a Young Woman 1867 This text is a very powerful vision of a man’s own wife whom he lusts after as much as after any illicit woman. And like the vase in the previous plate, here it is meaningfully a jar. An objective correlative. As is this wonderful painting of a woman’s head.
[ Plate 21 ] Spartan Girls and Boys Exercising 1860 “HER: ” The painting of the Spartan girls and boys, the former taunting the latter, I guess, transposed to two play-written dramas, the first that ends with the second one as contextual continuation of it with narrative between, and a salacious swimming party of those acting in the plays themselves… Young love or lust. A rough cut Spartan painting of Spartans, rough cut like their thoughts…
[ Plate 22 ] The Dancing Class 1876 A painting with depth enchantingly transliterated by logographics via a young girl’s yellow wallpaper moments when she creates a shadowbox with material supplied by of her father. There is a reference, too, to the previous Spartan painting. And there is a disturbing twist in this tale’s tail…or a ballerina’s twisted ankle?
[ Plate 23 ] The Dancing Class 1880 “Where the ballerinas and the mothers are not is yellow. […] I, too, am entangled, with Degas, his paint.” Nobody goes into these paintings, I guess, but I think those already in it can come out. Here the mothers come out of it to attend to a father who has lost his once dancing daughter? The second consecutive plate in this book where, at the end, a girl falls off a roof. ( cf ‘Fates of the Animals’ by Padrika Tarrant: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/fates-of-the-animals-padrika-tarrant/) The gestalt builds from this book of plates so far, but whither or whence does it build? Not even Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy as a literary theory can be my fig-leaf.
[ Plate 24 ] The Cotton Market, New Orleans 1873 “Slavery, you might not know, is terrible.” A painting of several figures in an office, frozen in time. And there follows this book’s most fascinating plate-talk so far, with a palimpsest of time now and then, a treatment of the concept of time itself, as the viewer sees his grandfather in the image and much else. Then news was slow-motion, now real-time. I found a brown human arm in my bed this morning. “two texts on tissue paper.”
[ Plate 25 ] At the Race Course 1869-72 “A turkey-vulture flew past at eye-level.” Off-the-track, finding carousel horses and my foolhardy friend teasing one of the ‘jockeys’ with the lit end of his cigarette. He’s a big-headed person who leads me to the Tower to witness better from the top his foul scorched-earth policy behind us.
[ Plate 27 ] The Tub 1886 “‘There,’ she points, ‘that yellow stain is like a painting hung on the wall.'” I rcall as a child in the 1950s, I had to use a tin bath to squat in. Here a moon, as a woman is in palimpsest upon the woman in the painting, as watched by her boy friend. Poetic allusions as part of an entrancing description, with some accoutrements such as a TV. Almost a ghost story.
[ Plate 28 ] The Bellilli Family 1860-62 “Who can possibly be happy in the final moments of annihilation?” Who can? This is ostensibly a description of the above painting where I had never noticed before that one of the daughters has a leg missing and the dog no head. But the description parses off into a haunting premonition by Degas, and probably in 2010 by Golaski, too, of the coming moments of our Trumpish times now, and of bombs, and terrorists…
[ Plate 29 ] Dancers at the Bar 1876-7 “Degas drew two girls, one more lightly, an echo of the other.” A male palimpsest of two sisters amid the modern drug-taking student scene. Yellow wallpaper, too. A telling off-kilter portrait of our times factored into and from a Degas painting… Unusual thinking, though, is not always a sign of sophistication.
[ Plate 30 ] Breakfast after the Bath 1883 “The giant blade of grass is a wall between sleep and awake…” The cabin fever, as a mother helps with her daughter’s bath, the daughter’s baby near by. Encroachment of the daughter’s inimical husband towards this safe house? Or the encroachment of nature’s Gaia itself? Tellingly, a bit of both, I suggest. A bit of bath.
[ Plate 31 ] A Ballet Seen from an Opera Box 1885 “Absolute realism is always deeply strange.” …as is the fact that this interwoven text of a brother and sister and a chance book, a transformation into a whale, a view of the ballet on the stage and his sketching g a door to the secret of that stage seems miraculously to blend two other works I am reading today and still reviewing, Leena Krohn’s The Pelican’s New Clothes and Jason A Wyckoff’s In the Library.
[ Plate 32 ] The Café Singer 1878 “The vulgar singer’s black glove haunted Toulouse-Lautrec,” A man chased by the tax people and by the certainty of death escapes with a tent to the outbush, and is there haunted by a ghost in the image of this plate. As we are, too.
[ Plate 33 ] The Mante Family 1889 “: mother makes the ribbons from very tiny ribbons.” A sense of gestalt dreamcatching? Aka hawling? A beautiful collage of the girls in the painting and others seen and unseen. Fiction has many characters to whom we are not introduced within it. “Politics are dumb and art is a belovèd wash of watercolor paint…”
. [ Plate 34 ] Young Routy 1882 I don’t dare tell him she thinks the hat he wears stupid. His tie, meanwhile, made from black ribbon, I reckon – another garter snake? I think this whole book is threaded through with black ribbon, whether it is or not. The colours often hide it. . . . . .
[ Plate 35 ] Portrait of the Artist’s Mother Reading 1887 A mother reading a mystery book, we are told, her son typing nearby, and by a spider’s thread (cf the black ribbon above), via the window, connected to another woman reading, and another son… I feel this book is threaded from day to day. More real than the day itself that I live. But to lose the track…?
This morning, I changed all the links above that were all simply labelled with the two words ‘Color Plate’ to what are now the actual names of each painting, with each link still leading to that very painting. Also today, I significantly cross-referenced this review to a concurrent review here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/08/03/black-static-53/#comment-7843
[ Plate 36 ] The Laundress 1889 1886? “I see the precedent of Degas, who towers, quite literally, over Toulouse-Lautrec.” This is an absorbingly meticulous or obsessive scrutiny of a girl’s thoughts, worry about someone seeing her ‘panties’, as she watches the Laundress. At once sensual and naive. Like many of these accompaniments to the Color Plates, it is a slice of Robbe-Grillet or Michel Butor.
[ Plate 37 ] Cirque Fernando 1888 “A whip makes a line…” …like the black ribbon? A brother and sister watch their cousins perform as circus animals. Words are like circus animals whipped into shape by the writer. On a typewriter’s black ribbon??
[ Plate 38 ] A Corner in the Moulin de la Galette 1892 “The fat man is horrified because he does collect strands of hair from the pretty woman’s jacket during class,” An extrapolation of these cafe characters as school kids interacting… An ironic retrocausality to the Spartans painting? ‘Weak chin’ when heard but not read sounds to me like someone’s name like ‘Wan Ju’?
[ Plate 39 ] M.Boileu at the Cafe 1893 This is a significant portrait, beautifully given out, beautifully felt. It is literature supreme. One can give it no bigger compliment. Papa Poignant and his slow-motion thread into the future. Parts of him were intended to be me, other parts not. I don’t smoke.
[ Plate 40 ] At the Moulin de la Galette 1890 “David Bowie?” That name always needs a ? PIty She Was A Whore. A nifty modern dance scenario with DJ and sexual politics. Not sure I have got the right Lautrec painting above. It does have a woman with green face. If the author ever sees this review, perhaps he will correct it by putting a link to the right painting in a sub-comment below.
[ Plate 41 ] A La Mie 1891 “– Toulouse-Lautrec loved to repeat motifs because every object has more than one meaning.” The couple have an absurdist conversation about, inter alia, cutting up a blue sky. His moustache seems to be false, fastened by black thread.
[ Plate 43 ] At the Moulin Rouge 1892 “Look at her face, says Toulouse-Lautrec; at her face, said Degas.” The difference between says and said. This is a devastating narration of a Halloween event, if only the narrator knew when he started it. Woman with green face (again) and his face of bone. I have just noticed I inadvertently skidded in the ice and missed Plate 42, life the universe everything. Sorry. I shall make amends when I take up this review again – tomorrow?
[ Plate 42 ] La Goulue Entering the Moulin Rouge 1892 “The least imaginative come dressed as traffic accidents.” An account of the nightmarish Ball at the el Greco hotel. The language is to die for. And a black ribbon again plays an important part. And the painting involved is a startlingly great one. I can’t remember seeing it before.
[ Plate 44 ] La Visite: Rue des Moulins 1894 A striking painting of two prostitutes on medical parade, quite new to me. This tells me they are identical women if I turn my back on them and they disappear. Nothingness as a mass of identical things by dint of their invisibility? The seedy scene in the text behind this painting is someone else’s unpadlocked pad. As I am frozen forever in the action of removing my (black?) tie for one such woman. Her uncrossed legs and a bruise. And other haunting mentions.
[ Plate 45 ] Woman Fixing Her Stocking 1894 “Years later, maybe in the distant future, maybe in outer space, my wife and I honeymooned in a small museum.” A dream-like re-enactment of that painting, a sexual role-playing. Unforgettable epiphany. In the plate, one of the stockings looks like scrawls of black thread wound round and round?
COMPLICITY by Christopher Ropes Dunhams Manor Press 2016 My previous reviews of this publisher’s publications HERE. When I real-time review this chapbook, my comments will appear in the thought stream below…
Pages 7 – 18 “Even the people we know the best are mysteries to us, I thought.” An all-consuming, stylishly described first half to this story of five people of various ages (three house guests of the other two), trying to reconcile themselves, after some time, to an earlier suicide by a sixth one from among their chance grouping of participants of the past, and we sense the possible interconnections of supposed blame for that suicide, expressed now, it seems, with even more ‘venom’, as evidenced by some striking memorabilia, and the repercussions upon the relationships between the others since that event… …all abruptly subsumed by an evocatively conjured, but half-expected, snowstorm, as the three drive off, relieved to have an excuse to leave early, but perhaps not early enough… The people we know the best? or the people we know the most? Not necessarily the same thing — as the carload stops in the exponentially increasing snow to investigate a possible roadkill shape, but man or animal? I look forward, with some suspense, to reading the second half, hopefully later today, and I promise no spoilers…
Pages 18 – 29 “For one single moment, my heart broke for that woman, the woman I loved so much and didn’t want to feel she had anything to be sorry for…” Is “didn’t want to feel she had anything to be sorry for” correct, as is printed in this morphing text, or should it be “didn’t want that SHE felt she had anything to be sorry for”? A complicity of selflessness or selfishness seems important to this suddenly reality-convulsive reading experience that becomes a duty-by-dread that we readers of it are in conspiracy not to make clear exactly what happens in this its second half. It surely transcends both dreaming and waking as a composite ‘objective correlative’, a disarming strangeness before someone takes to arms to keep us quiet…? Motivations are felt here to be disowned, and methods of transport uncertain, as are places where snow can sensibly settle. We were all destined to be successful in what we wanted to do in life (be it divorce lawyer, as it is here, or horror writer or whatever) given the backstory in which we and all our readers can connive and collude and complicate by complicit guilt, whatever the agonising collateral-damage to those we love. That is one interpretative reading possible of the hauntingly delayed aftermath deployed by this work. It is not, of course, the correct interpretative reading of it because we are all disallowed, by its implicit subliminality, to publicly impart it, given the privilege of our having read it at all.
But this book’s author, whether the name is remembered or not, produces, for me, work that grows EVEN better and better the more I read of this author or the more this author writes new and newer works about these rarefied books that are created within such works. No exception here, as V receives a book (not the thing thieved by her, but freely borrowed from S’s chateau), a book that transliterates with the temples in her own chateau’s wallpaper. V is not a yellow wallpaper woman, but a woman far more destined to have thieved, with the arguably knowing nod of its owner, something I shall keep from you until you read THIS book that will entrammel something inside you, not your heart, soul or spirit, but something perhaps even more significant. You learn to handle these “logographic” things the more you read this author. And the more they actually handle you.
A LATE ENCOUNTER WITH THE ENEMY
THE DISPLACED PERSON
H
ELEMENTS OF PATAPHYSICS by Alfred Jarry
[ Plate 34 ]
But the work represents, it seems, an appendix to or an original throwaway from or, more likely, a now realised lost highlight from the author’s much earlier success, ‘The Divinity Student’, in the early 1990s, something I have not yet read.