CERN ZOO

Shall I sleep with one eye open?

I have heard so many tales of chimneys that contain noises. And there is a chimney in the room where they’ve put me. I’ve already tried to stuff the flue with most of my own clothes – leaving me to sit on the bare bed, shivering in just my underwear. And, even so, I can never be sure that stuffing the chimney in this way will keep anything at bay.

I slumped sideways on to the bed, sleep almost superseding any fears that I might have had. But the cold alone kept the sleep away ... merely allowing me to glimpse the edge of darkness as it crept back and forth towards me in the shape of the deep slumber I so yearned.

I abruptly realise I have awoken. So, in those earlier interminable hours, I must, after all, have dropped asleep, only now to be disturbed by the scrabbling somewhere in the heart of the chimney-breast.

Both my eyes must have been fast shut, with not even a spare nerve as an antenna to sense approaching danger. My ears alone stood guard, a-prickle with batches of moonlit soot snowing into the otherwise empty grate. And the sad sad tinkle of the bell-wether creature straining to dislodge itself time and time again.

What has put me here upon this Christmas Eve? Surely a cruel gift to remind the old man who was once the child eager for an early bedtime – then, in boyish excitement, daring to stay awake to hear the crinkle of wrapped presents being laid just near his tiny feet snug like animals beneath the warm eiderdown and tucked-in, tucked-under sheets and blanket.

The edge of deep slumber is the only possible present that will now please him ... with its beginnings of calm engulfment.

But, even so, now fully subsumed by the eventuality of pure dreamless sleep, I can still hear the faintest possible tinkling.... even after the static crackling ceases.

Dreams are items engendered by an individual’s equally competing ‘sleep’ and ‘waking consciousness’. A balance of you and something else. That is common knowledge.

What isn’t so commonly known is the fact that dreams can be harvested and milked. Not only in the figurative sense of employing them as contents for fictions like this one, but also as real objects that can be handled and squeezed like udders. You see, the actual tension between self and non-self in this way creates a seamless skin-dome upon the flat surface of the dream, thus allowing items of dream to become collected as a finite group instead of infinite items on a never-ending surface ... subsequently for them to become upwardly mobile as well as three-dimensional within the constraints of the sealed space.

Some dreams have bigger domes than others. What determines the size is arguably the power of imagination within the mind of the dream’s dome-owner.

It is, moreover, I contend, a tension between ‘old nonsense’ and ‘new nonsense’. There used to be an expression used by exasperated parents in my younger days to their obstreperous children: “Don’t give me any of that old nonsense!” Whether that was a condemnation of ‘nonsense’ generally, or an implicit desire for ‘new nonsense’, I was never sure. But I decided the latter was more appropriate to me. Hence, this treatise on dreams you are now reading.

Soon, I was aware that the items within the dome could burrow beneath the surface as well as fill any given space above it. What that said about my imagination is anyone's guess.

And in this way the concept of 'milking' dreams was born. Somehow managing to get a handle on the original dream's dome and squeezing it so that the weak-points in its circular bottom surface were made even weaker seemed to encourage items to burrow underforth – either by force of extrusion or simply being provided with the requisite ‘physics’ for them to do this off their own backs. The aim of this operation is lost in the actual process, a process that works only by destroying itself and any memory of it after it has served its purpose.

One such operation’s results, however, still stick in my mind. Upon squeezing the dream, a weird yet recognisably human tongue poked out and sharply withdrew. It reminded me of my own tongue’s action when I was being scolded by my parents in days of yore. Thankfully, however, Mum and Dad never seemed to notice. Or, if they did, diplomatically forgot.

Nobody has yet connected the recent start of collisions at the CERN LHC, Switzerland with yesterday's mauling of a man by a bear at Berne Zoo, Bern Park, Switzerland.
Quite seriously and astonishingly, the common factor is the earlier published book CERN ZOO as described and illustrated HERE.

This is also connected with recent upsurge of retrocausality TV fictions like 'FlashForward' and 'Paradox' and 'Dr Who and the Waters of Mars' - and the two scientists who recently suggested that the Collider may be sabotaging itself from the future ... and the bird that dropped the beget bread into the Collider?


'The Devourer of Dreams'

The living-room felt a sense of its own perfectibility. A Haydn harpsichord sonata in surround-sound, hyper-minimalist furniture and a sculpture of an old-fashioned Compact Disc industrially slit from the centre into fanblades splayed-out for optimum air-resistance when spinning. It set the teeth on edge to imagine it inside a CD Player emitting a damaging clatter beyond even the most avant garde of composition.

There was also an old-fashioned diary or journal upon a near-invisible glass-table. The last entries – on three consecutive days – were found to be:
Zencore
Cone Zero
Cern Zoo

The previous days bore normal entries of events, thoughts, appointments and so forth. Scouring these essentially un-mysterious passages for clues as to the meaning of the three mysterious entries was a pointless activity. The fact that scouring was attempted at all must have served some purpose in hindsight, however. With no further attempts being made, untoward amounts of time were now not to be wasted in doing so by whoever.

Perhaps all entries worldwide were abruptly first left blank on the same day but how many more days were left blank between then and now?

Anything can be downloaded from anything these days, even empty minds. Flashing forward from blog to blog.

======================================

EDIT: The Final Fanblade

We climbed from the old car – because it spluttered and died. We lifted the heavy bonnet, then propped it open with the dipstick because the proper prop was broken. It was not easy because of wind and rain ... and darkness. Each of us gave the other moral support, while the driver stayed behind the steering wheel. We were, I suppose, the worst sort of ‘back-seat drivers’, having shouted out in turn to criticise the real driver’s driving. The least we could do was venture outside to investigate beneath the bonnet, having just blamed the driver for breaking down. It was not the driver’s car to keep roadworthy. The driver only happened to be driving it.



We immediately discovered by the light of our flickering torch that the problem was the fanbelt. But then the torch abruptly died on us. Leaving the wind and rain beyond the sense of sight if not of touch.



Touch sounds like a positive sense. Something one does.



Weather is touchy-feely, I guess. Like some people are more touchy-feely than other people.



The night was utterly silent. The country-road deserted. The trees, as we had earlier seen, swaying vigorously.



But the weather in question should have been noisy as well as touchy-feely. We listened for its surging and sucking and splattering, but, instead, strangely we heard nothing.



Despite the sense of complete darkness, we could just discern, through the windscreen, the shape of the driver in the front seat. Slumped over the wheel, as if also propped up like the bonnet.



Then the dipstick as makeshift bonnet-prop must have snapped and the bonnet crashed down. Except it wasn’t exactly the metallic crash that we expected. The sound was muffled by goodness knows what. Then, it became clearer. It must have been muffled by one of our necks.



A collider with no collision. Head-on.



The sound of the car’s re-ignition suddenly spinning the fanblades gave me the sense of a hadron. But did I touch or feel it?

=====================

EDIT: New Fanblade Fable (8): http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/2009/11/19/

The country pub had regulars ...that pub, you know, in the shadow of the chalk-giant who ever wielded his mighty 'hadron'.

One such regular was Susan. Not a bag-lady, but one that would have been a bag-lady without her spot here or without her inexplicable availability of wherewithal to cadge drinks, even to buy them for others on occasion. She not only sat in her inglenook-seat enshrined for so many years as her spot – she not only drank the drink, talked the talk, but also she wrote things out in long-hand. Some assumed them mindless doodlings, some others reportage of quaint character, others mere fictions.

Today, with few visitors, and even fewer regulars like Susan, she examined her prized ancient fountain pen. Filling and re-filling it from the black ink-pot that kept company with today’s tipple. It was a weighty-barrelled instrument that was heavenly-crafted to her bespoke handling and primed with fanblade fables just aching to be written out. Slightly whirring inside ... or was that her imagination?

She began to write...

“With the unspoken complicity of their keepers, the Cern Zoo animals left two by two, crossing the pebbly land towards the Collider that they knew as Nemo’s Ark...”

When writing, Susan lost all track of time. Regulars came, regulars went, but this regular that was herself remained, it seemed, a force forever. The spirit of ‘pub talk’ ... but in writing.

Self-devoured by inky ghosts in advance of splaying themselves in cantilevered articulations of blot or that were simply minced by spinning thought-processes before they even reached the paper...

...until forever stalled ... or she felt her own God’s loving arms around her, whispering sweetly in her ear: “Zoocern, Zoocern.” Her name she’d always spelt like that. Or was that imagination?

Her God, the ultimate devourer. The last five words unwritten.

 

The jaundiced ceiling bore the steady spinning of giant mosquito-wing fanblades that were synchronised-swimming in the smoky air of Gordon Desmond’s office in what he laughably called film-noir land.

 

GD was a grizzled curmudgeon who had grown into a singularity from two separate men at different ends of the age spectrum - perhaps father and son, one of whom had died, but he was never sure which one he truly was. He made a living from coining new words and absurd truths and other angles upon dubious existence – not only to discover ‘whodunnit?’ in this self-fabricated black-and-white film within which his slowly shuttling visions had made him live but also to summon human characters to his office that he could later write about as if they had never existed other than in the fiction he subsequently wrote.

 

“Hi, GD,” said a man-too-mean-to-be-me called Mack Hadrian. He had sailed into GD’s office as if he owned it. A deeply furrowed face with a line in lying that laid his soul open to the truth.

 

 He continued, without waiting for GD even to acknowledge his presence: “You know they’ve started building the first collider for our city...”

 

GD now looked up at Mack Hadrian. He knew that the world had built a number of what were called colliders to stir the air from its endemic stagnancy. The only way to disperse the global climactic slow-down.  Effectively, they were spinning fans that whirlpooled the air in a crop of tornado funnels, hoping at least to trigger further such spirals of storm elsewhere ... thus igniting a new-born airiness that everyone could breathe in perpetuo. Not that breathing was yet as difficult as it was feared to become if such measures were not taken. Called colliders in sarcastic reference to the very thing their fanblades mustn’t manage to do! A superstitious ‘baffle’ that had worked in many fields of human endeavour throughout history.   If not obviously so.

 

“We need to discover,” said Hadrian, lighting a cigar, “who or what has been sabotaging many other colliders so at least this one where we live can work properly.”

 

GD knew there had been rumours of an underground movement called Cern Zoo that had sent ‘animals’ or ‘birds’ to drop foreign bodies into the colliders’ fan-systems elsewhere. A sort of wish-fulfilment of matter-over-mind in collision with mind-over-matter. Nobody really knew Cern Zoo’s motives, and how many levels of bluff at which it worked.

 

The ‘animals’ or ‘birds’ had resorted recently to dropping themselves suicidally into the fan-systems. But that was yet only hearsay.

 

GD looked quizzically at Hadrian. “Hmmm, you want me to investigate?”

 

“I’ll make it worth your while.”

 

At that moment GD’s office fan suddenly discombulated upon something extraneous - one blade's chance ricochet off the wall sending it into Hadrian’s head.

 

GD shrugged as he suddenly realised what was what regarding the contents of Hadrian’s head. Not a brain. But a tiny fan, itself now spluttering to a halt upon bone and bloody gristle.

 

GD’s job had apparently been done even before he started it. Pity nobody would now pay him. And he looked at the ceiling, sighing. “It’s gonna get real hot in here”, he thought, with the onset of a psychologically self-induced breathlessness.

======================
Later edit: NEW FANBLADE FABLE (4):
http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2009/11/new-fanblade-fable-4.html

A FABLE (just written)

In the land there were many large domestic cooler-fans - their fanblades spinning so frantically that nobody could see them as fanblades.

Within each fan's hub where the motor resided, there was also space enough for a new-born baby to be kept and only rarely taken out to be breast-fed, if at all. Close proximity with spinning fanblades would make the babies become more intelligent, more able to deal with the world.  The belief was so strong that many babies were forced to spend as much time as possible within the purpose-built body of the fan's motor. Sometimes forever.

Necessary nursing or, as they called it, 'servicing' of the baby's body was managed, for some superstitious reason, between the spinning fanblades rather than via the housing at the back.  Skilful avoidance of laceration worked in parallel with intravenous mock-fanblade vanes (known as 'veins') precisely timed with the fast-shuttering/shuttling configuration of the fanblades proper.

In the most extreme cases of this infantile care-policy, the fanblades were never switched off and the baby itself grew up within the wiggle-room of the slightly elasticated housing of the hub as well as being simultaneously weaned off an unfortunately hit-and-miss targetting of inward and outward bodily metabolisms.

The 'veins' - spinning in tune with the fanblades - had special 'baffles' inserted along the length of their inner 'rifled' circuits both to facilitate and resist, at the optimum moments, various flows of sustenance and slurry.  Scientifically-contrived particles were triggered to collide at various crucial flashpoints - a 'process music' that the inhabitants of that land took for granted as the barely heard/whirred substructure of Beethoven's Ninth.  A delightful resonance with the fanblades.

Until something went wrong, which it often did.  For example, today, a piece of bread was dropped on a fan by a passing bird escaped from the aviary in Cern Zoo.

You see, the people often put the fans outside in the garden on extension-leads, because it got too cold and draughty to have them in the house.

Thus ends the Fanblade Fable

A Swiftian Fable with a moral regarding the Large Hadron Collider

continued from HERE

===============================

POWDERGHOST

After merely moderate drinking at Brian’s new local pub in the village, he and his visiting friend, whose name was also Brian, returned to the newly moved-in house. So recent, indeed, there were still unpacked cases in various hallways among which the two Brians had to pick their way to reach the kitchen where the visitor eventually sat while the new resident fussed around failing to locate every means of making coffee.

 

They soon gave up any mission other than the visit itself. No TV. No internet. Nothing fixed up. So, they returned to the pre-modern ways of talking the talk. But even that wore thin as air. Modernity still seemed to suffocate the old ways, despite modernity itself having not yet been officially established beneath this particular roof.

 

“You know I have some more stuff here, if you’re interested.”

 

He opened a drawer that provided materials far more easily than anything else they had sought during the previous hour.

 

He placed a white pellet thing on the pastry-board and proceeded to grind it with a pestle. Much harder and noisier than one would have expected, as if, indeed, he was attempting to grind mineral rather than vegetable or animal. Meanwhile, they kept up the small talk.

 

“You know we’ll need more of this for later. Did you keep that other bit you found? It was too late in the day, really, for me to tell.”

 

The other felt in his pocket and shook his head.

 

“I must have dropped it.”

 

He now consciously inspected his red, raw hands for the first time since arriving back. Hands that had man-handled various large stones and slabs.

 

There was silence as the pestler inspected the gritty residues upon the pastry-board, leaning forward to sniff.

 

“Hmmm, the powderghost has not yet arrived.”

 

He squinted uneasily.

 

The visitor had recently announced he’d fetch a cushion from the living-room to ease the hardness of where he sat. Except, in the confusion, he had mistaken the bedroom for the living-room. He wandered through various – now seemingly uncluttered – dark hallways, rocking to and fro whatever it was upon his chest. He coughed then choked upon some dust in his throat. And saw the eye that stared down at him from within nightmare’s moat.

  

written today and first published above.


LATER EDIT: NIGHTMARE'S MOAT: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/nightmares_moat.htm

 

The graveyard on the south side of my friend’s village was not immediately as unusual as he indicated it might be. I was only staying with him for the weekend, mainly to see the house he had bought in this new area where his job forced him to live. He was one of those friends who, over the years, became comfortable to visit, even though both of you weren’t exactly close. Indeed, I knew little about him, with us having met on a business course somewhere or other.

Friendships can be built on just a few chats in a pub about the women we fancied. Friendships, these days, needed to be grabbed like nettles.

We continued to visit each other irregularly. His name was Brian. Mine, too. This was a coincidence that frequently made us both laugh as and when we met on each visit.

The graveyard was attached to a typical English country church, with a single tower and stunted gargoyles – a derelict air, even though Brian had told me it was still in use for parish worship. I was not struck by anything in particular other than, of course, the unkempt nature of the trees and shrubs and stumps and other natural growth. Nothing unusual, except...

Well, let me put it plainly, I was soon to discover that the gravestones themselves, although bearing names and dates from the distant past, looked as new as the day they had been planted in the ground. Scrubbed pristine stone, perfect un-eroded lettering, unchipped set-square edges...

I was astonished. I turned towards Brian so as to see if he was equally astonished. There was nothing dream-like about this anomaly – it was simply a fact.

Brian smiled.

“I was astonished the first time I came here, Brian, but now I’m used to it.”

He told me that others in the village claimed it was because of a freak weather microcosm that local experts had written about in Climatological Journals concerning the sheltered nature of the church and its grounds.

“But they look as if they were put here yesterday! This one has 1833 on it and the name’s chiselled letters are perfectly clean, and crisp.”

My voice revealed that I was somewhat shaken by what I had seen.

“This one is even more interesting,” said Brian, taking me to a headstone that included one of those stone pillows for the soul’s ‘eternal rest’. “Look at the edge of the stone. Its grain has chance faces you can imagine quite easily amid the natural patterns caused by geology.” Those were not his exact words, but I’ve naturally done my best to transcribe them.

I looked. He was quite correct. Some faces were as if a child had drawn them in a stylised fashion; others more complex. The weathering had not even touched them. In fact, I thought that if there had been any weathering, it may have etched the stone into even clearer faces ... or blotted them out altogether. I wasn’t sure which.

I laughed. I suddenly expected to turn round and spot a gravedigger with a wheelbarrow full of new headstones to replace old ones. Date for date, name for name.

Brian laughed, too, without evidently sharing my secret joke. How could he? He could not read my mind.

He said: “It’s as if time is in a state of constant flashback in this graveyard..”

I knew instinctively what he meant. Time as a retro-causality of inverse weathering. Those were never my exact thoughts. But hindsight is often wordier than the present moment.

Friends such as Brian and I could share a sort of ‘pub-talk’ of the spirit without ever really going to a pub together. There was indeed something off-the-wall about his theories. And mine.

Once upon a time, this graveyard was not a graveyard at all. Shorn or unplugged of all headstones.

One day, in the future, I, too, would share an unmarked grave with strangers.

I shook my head and examined the stone pillow while Brian watched and waited. Our evening constitutional together was no doubt soon to be at an end.

The pillow was rougher than it looked. With some considerable effort, I man-handled it from its embedded fixture in the cold earth and, beneath it, found a single white tooth.

Written today and first published here
 

CONTINUED HERE: http://weirdmonger.mindsay.com/powderghost.mws

==========================================

There is something about a pillow on a bed, one that has just been slept on, its pressed-flower-embroidered pillowcase still in the midst of ‘pillowfight’ with its own soft sinkable innards ... ripe for turning or plumping-up before going back to bed. Earlier, by chance, it had too easily slipped out from supporting the head thanks to the sleeper’s tossing and turning. Or lively dreaming.

 

There are many incidents of pillows being used for suffocation and, so, it is strange that there are not more ear-marked pillowgeists roaming the haunted bedrooms of our world. Or perhaps they are the many floaters upon the eyesight that the mind blanks out.

 

A particular white-and-blue striped double bolster-pillow was kept in a Crime Museum in Bucharest as the one used by the most notorious pillow-suffocator of modern times. It had been a dastardly act as he had used it upon the wife with whom he had shared the same pillow for a lifetime of erstwhile happy marriage. Happy, even though it still bore the yellow tearstains of both parties, marks that had been induced by the sadder moments of the night that we all (in our own way) share-in-suffering, whatever our frame of mind during daylight hours. 

 

The bolster-pillow was old ... so old, many museum visitors took the tearstains for a pillow’s version of an old book’s foxing. 

 

I once toyed with buying a pillow that I saw in a Krakow antique shop as opposed to in the more customary bedding store.

 

“Do you want it for sleeping on?” the shopkeeper asked in good English.

 

I nodded, fingering the texture of the starched pillowcase. It gave off late-night dormitory horseplay. But everyone has their own feel for pillows. Somebody else may have sensed something quite different, like, for example, a sexual act that the smell of mothballs did well to conceal.

 

“I’d advise not using it for sleeping,” the shopkeeper continued. “The owner told me it is haunted with a member of ancient Austro-Hungarian royalty who died while trying to transfer from this pillow to his bed-companion’s pillow by force rather than by suitable negotiation, suitable, that is, for a shared night...and now it creates similar dreams for anyone who sleeps on it, dreams that are too real ... too close for comfort.”

 

What a bizarre statement, I thought. Folklore was one thing, but such superstitious pillowtalk was quite beyond the pale, as far as I was concerned.

 

But what did I expect, as a serious collector of pillows? I, too, had glibly slipped into pillowtalk myself earlier, by use of the word ‘pillowgeist’, a term that was only known to experts in the field. Ordinary collectors did, it is true, refer to ‘pillowghost’, or more obliquely, ‘pillowguest’, (in each case one word, not two) but ended up laughing off such concepts as mere salestalk inducements. Only a few collectors had the gumption then to connect pillowghosts &c. with ‘candle-dreaming’ (the legend that one’s last dream is eternal as betokened by the simple sight, within the dream, of a single lit candle).

 

I did not buy that pillow. If I had, there may have been a proper story to tell.

 

 

(above written today and first published here)

 

.

 

Just as a final aside, I think I had a lucky escape. That night, in my Budapest hotel, I did have a singular dream connected with the pillow I had nearly bought in that Krakow antique shop. Amid the craziness of dreams that many of you will recognise, that pillow somehow merged with the white-and-blue double bolster-pillow I told you about earlier – forming a discrete pillow that was not single or double, but somewhere between ... for two small people or one giant person? I saw it wriggling – thank goodness I hadn’t already laid my head on it – and noisily tearing first through its inner substance then through its outer starched texture were pincers or claws. In the dream, I jumped off the balcony of my hotel room.

 

The Last Balcony

Pillowghost

In The Post-War City

Intowards

 

The streets were without corners, the roads without bends, and I was without any side whatsoever. No ulterior motive. No motive at all, in fact.

I was, as ever, seeking a single sign or recognition to prove that there could be no such sign or recognition in the first place, no sign or recognition in what I hoped to be a purposeless universe. A maze of missed opportunities, unfulfilled chances, forgotten paths, bricked-up entrances and exits ... and a stern frown that indicated no emotion at all. My own face taken at face value.

I saw a single candle in the window of the only window lit at all in a huge high-rise of ancient architecture. Although this was a city, I imagined myself to be exploring a flat terrain in a mystical world quite beyond the conceptual range of our world as I knew it. It was a shock, then, to be confronted with a high-rise block – reminding me of my own home beginnings in another city far away. I had expected skewed pyramids or other ill-wondered wonders of a world that could never be explained beyond its reality as a world.

The shock of vast ordinariness focussed greedily intowards that pinprick of faltering light from a sole window around which, in different flats, I supposed, thousands squatted in rank poverty. Only one family could afford a candle in their window? Rather that the other families were content with darkness.

A tower of flats, interleaved ... shuffled, re-shuffled, as Fate took its hand each day.

Just above the window with that eternal candleflame was another window, one with a dark balcony just discernible in the half-begrudged light of a fitful dusk that had grown several times into night and back again without the eventual foreseen success of even a despairing dawn.

I fell to the pavement, quickly retrieving the pillow from my rucksack. I positioned it behind my head in such a way that, for whatever reason, I could keep watch on the lonely candleflame ... expecting it to melt down to the very wick’s end. I could not afford to sleep off into dream in case I dreamed of a truly eternal candleflame that would betoken my death. I simply had to hang on to what I got.

If only I had raised my sights further uptowards the dark balcony for longer than just a nonce, I would have seen a shadowy figure standing there. The lost wonder of the world I had once hoped to become. The writer I could have been if I had been able to write him into existence .... scattering the leaves of his greatest book downtowards he who had failed to create it. In obeisance.

If any thus scattered were caught piecemeal by balcony below balcony....in random fashion ... I knew in my heart of hearts that there were still no leaves left as there were no leaves to leave.

The pillow was uncomfortable. A pyramid whose topmost point daggered intowards my brain.

written today and first published here

---

Pillowghost (used as a compound noun here in public for the very first time) is in fact something quite different and far more dangerous than Poltergeist because its name seems sweeter – appealing to parents who like telling spooky stories to their children and comforting to oldsters who increasingly sympathise with the spirit of haunting. 

Throughout centuries, many may have thought about or spoken of pillowghosts while visualising it as a single word, not two. But never in print. In fact, rarely, has it been referenced in print at all even as 'pillow ghost'.  Therefore, it is has been difficult to prove pillowghosts' existence as thoughts or entities, one way or another.  Except by those of us who refused to acknowledge them simply as a means of preserving them.

So, never before in print. Never on Google...until, presumably, today.

It has been as if there existed an open secret, a direct by-word-of-mouth conduit to a haunting-by-pillowghosts of which nobody wanted to spoil the spell.

In many ways, I hope this blog entry is not a spoiler in that sense. On the contrary, I expect - with the power of the internet - this will strengthen the spell.  A collective conscious can be so much more effective than an uncollective one. Meanwhie, it remains difficult to set the pecking-order of truth and fiction and their various apportionments of symbiosis.

Tonight, instead of mere candle dreaming, your dreams should be more directly connected with the truth of fiction than ever before. Your head buried even more deeply into your pillow the closer to hear the whispering of the ghost it surely always wanted to be.

Not a pillow ghost, not a ghost pillow, not even a ghostpillow, but a veritable pillowghost as the softest shape of connived-with poltergeist - not only a compound word but also one with its constituent interconnection of letters in the right order and snuggling together in a neat row upon their own white pillow of meaning.

Whispering that you will never be awake enough again to hear it whispering.

======================

 

"The candleflame in a candle dream never dies."

from 'THE PILLOW GHOST" by E. Nesbit.

Continued from here: http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/117379.html

A Cup of Tea

"I would read a section like this before I had to rest myself by looking up, only to find myself in a world of the 'dull smoke-coloured light from Hell'. Then I would turn back to the book feeling almost as if I were choking on fumes."

I wonder if the writer of this letter would be disingenuous enough to deny the Proustian quality of his communication to one with whom he used to share cups of tea. I'd boast about it, if I were him.  It's a gem of this literary genre.  Ranging from the Tibetan Dead to Lovecraft to considerations of self and Proustian selves within that self and selfhood talking to selfhood - and the photographic light that just one cup of tea can fleetingly contain upon its spinning meniscus of valued memory (cf. the use of light in the book 'Traces').  Memory is often better than now, a 'now' with even one's Job Centre moved to another town, better than the homelessness owned by another Karakasa as seen without memory. I wonder if he posted this letter he wrote or filed it somewhere with his P45. (25 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later). 

Asking For It

"Once in London, on my way back from visiting a friend in Greenwich, I had a rather unpleasant experience."

Yet this relatively brief story (compellingly told and enjoyably read) takes place in Tokyo.  A troubled protagonist stalking our sympathy or even empathy. He's almost a bit like Erstwhile Joe doing a bit of haunting for its own sake. I shake my keys at him. (25 Oct 09 - another 3 hours later GMT)

The Fox Wedding

"He had created his own world of words and could not stray beyond its verge."

A substantial and extremely powerful text comprising a smoker's dual-directional narrative of an exquisitely conjured-up Japanese 'genius loci' - trotting with foxy powdery geisha-girls - laced, in contrast, with the cute salaciousness of girls from bottom-of-the-range novelty stickers - and a studied empathy with semi-consciously stalking the stalkers (cf. 'Asking For It' and 'Troubled Joe') while self-disgust becomes layered with a mazy sense of literature desperately attempting to neutralise (insulate? cauterise?) itself by point-of-view (yours as well as the narrator's): an alley within a building.

"It was like a tide rising in my chest." (26 Oct 09)


 

Mise en Abyme

A densely textured text that is impossible to 'spoil'. To say it is merely Escherean or Alicean is to diminish it. Not a Venn Diagram so much as a Venn Psychopomp. Seriously, I'm hugely impressed by this philosophical exercise in 'The Synchronised Shards of Random Truth & Fiction' (many potential readers will flinch at that, but don't!) - and not only, for me, because it is in tune with Nemonymity (that I have been nurturing for forty odd years) but also in the 'retrocausality' (now here in surround-sound!) hinted at by earlier topical references to the Hadron Collider...and more, much more. A Swiftian 'Baffles and Fables'.  Traces upon Traces. Stalking stalkers. Proustian selves. Here is a short selection of unspoilers:

"Creating the many worlds of his fictions, the writer should, theoretically, stand outside all of these fictional worlds in some transcendent universe of ultimate reality."

"...prompted him to write a letter to the newspaper expressing his personal and vocational concern at the recent malfunctions in reality that had been the cause of such global panic and bafflement."

"...but I wonder if it would not be more helpful if, instead of looking at particles or forces, we saw instead that we live in a universe of doors, windows, corridors, rooms, stairs and ladders."

"A similar pattern, however close in design, would not suffice; the pattern had to be identical."

"...his heart palpitating as he wondered whether they were following his movements or he was following theirs;"

"He almost believed he could hear this second self breathing..."

The breathing is accentuated by the as yet uncoughed-up phlegm, I guess. Soon, we will not need to know which of us is the true "Metascribe". One of them will probably be dead! (Fore-shadowing 'Suicide Watch'...???) (26 Oct 09 - two hours later)

 

Italiannetto

"Eventually I managed to select a toy which was a kind of inverted plastic cone for shooting ping pong balls in the air and catching them again."

It is not easy to say this. But this is my favourite story (so far) in this book. I shall resist the temptation of saying it may also be one of my favourites of all-time, in case the moment has grabbed me too hard.  The plot and style have an Elizabeth Bowen-esque elegance coupled with fracture. Its lead actress - 'Aunt' Annette - has the same power as I imagine Elizabeth Bowen herself to have had in real life. All seen through childhood's eyes. Then again by his same eyes when older. Retro-shadowed, as he gives an interview, when older still, about the stories the once-child-he-was later wrote. A dual-palimpsest Proustian Remembrance of Things Past.  Trace upon trace. Sheer delight, like the rich knickerbocker-glory I should not finish, but I will - today.  Pigging on Crisp, because I can't help it.

I was brought up in a Penny Arcade of the Fifties, by the way. Almost. (26 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)

 

Suicide Watch*

"...for whom the horror of existence becomes a maddening double image."

This is 'cast' in the book's context as another item of fiction, indeed a seeming story of substantial length. When 'real-time reviewing' previous books, I have eschewed any Author Story Notes or Introductions and so forth so that I can alone approach the fiction texts themselves uncluttered by any 'extraneity-creep'. If this author has pulled the wool over my eyes, by casting his 'Author Story Notes' as just another Story, I shall find it very difficult to forgive him. With that preamble, I can safely say that I am convinced in myself that I was destined to read this last piece as I must have been retro-destined to read the whole book itself. If wool has been pulled over my eyes, it is morling wool, not shorling. There are 'puppets from ancient children's TV', that 'were-sheep' again, accruing and accreting bits and bobs, some involving Vishnu's maw and ready-mades and other artwork from one of the story's 'characters' (Karen).  And it is all so tangibly moving.

It would be so easy to 'spoil' this story with an extraneity-creep like me describing it further. Suffice to say, it compellingly encapsulates and gives further variations on the theme that is this book.  Indeed, I wish that theme to subsist holistically, holographically, photographically, spiritually, without... without what? And perhaps I should tear all the pages from this highly-honed beauty of a physical book and pin the pages round my walls....and shake my keys at them.

A reader's love for the book he's just read (and indeed truly loved) expressed as a series of suicide notes.

"...even though you are safe and cosy, chatting over a cup of tea, you are not actually safe at all..." (26 Oct 09 - another 3 hours later).

END

*Sorry, I mis-typed this title here yesterday, now corrected. It changes nothing of what I said. A compliment to this 'story', but it is a fiction that artfully reads like autobiography - and in hindsight is even more powerful today than when I read it yesterday. My overall favourite in this wonderful book, however, is still likely to remain 'Italiannetto'. (27 Oct 09)

I’m starting another of my real-time reviews on this page, i.e. of "ALL GOD'S ANGELS, BEWARE!" by Quentin S. Crisp (Ex Occidente Press 2009). I shall attempt to draw out all the fiction's leitmotifs and mould them into a gestalt.

I anticipate this being a delightfully slow-sipped journey through this mightily filled and exquisitely honed book. The process may therefore entail days or even weeks between additions below.

EDIT: CAVEAT (24 OCT 09 - one hour after writing the review for 'Ynys-y-Plag' below): There may be inadvertent spoilers. You may wish (i) to take that risk and read my review as the items are posted below, before or during or after your own reading of the book, or (ii) to wait until you have finished reading the book.  In either case, I hope it gives a useful or interesting perspective.

All my real-time reviews are linked from here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/recent_reviews_of_books_by_dfl.htm

Troubled Joe

"...I thought I might as well do a bit of concentrated haunting on this spot just for my own sake."

The language flows limpidly as if from some meaningful source or fount of the future.  The omens are good for me as, today, I start reading this long-anticipated book - having recently been considering, for 'Cern Zoo' purposes, the latest news that the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland is sabotaging itself from the future or, as some have said, committing suicide in self-retrospect.  This story's themes include what it calls 'retrocausality' in a very similar vein.

The plot flows as beautifully as the language that tells it. I really should have read more QSC before today! The narrator is a ghost (of Troubled Joe) and it is a staggeringly original treatment of such a consciousness trying to find its own 'source' of being or hindsight explication, by a form of confessional with those it haunts, sometimes almost with tactile or even sexual frisson.  It is a story of some length and I cannot do justice to the relentless power of concept and emotion, leading to a fatal and seemingly spiteful ricochet that this ghost 'causes' or ignites between two realities, and one wonders whether assisted death (assisted by whomsoever) is an act of despair or hope.  The truth, perhaps, it's neither. We all shall see, no doubt. (23 Oct 09)

 
 

The Were-Sheep of Abercrave

Well, I'm seriously Half-Welsh...and this story is absurdly half-something else.

It starts off as a tale of a Black Path in the Welsh countryside along which the narrator wends his way towards a structure called the Round House, presenting an ambiance that has a strong 'genius loci' amid the start of a compelling plot-thread of 'weird fiction' in the sanest sense of that genre. It then changes somewhat suddenly, somewhat gradually (I'm significantly uncertain which) into its own "piecemeal effigy", as if there are tufts of morling* wool snagged on the letters themselves. 

It does not exactly become an avant garde art installation but, rather, a narrative that, by being even weirder than the weirdest imaginable 'ready-made' in the Tate Modern, begins to assume a degree of empathisable sense that the story itself calls "non-human thought".  It's as if the reader loses bits of himself and gains other bits (both physical and mental bits) in a sort of  Consequences game before following his (the reader's) own personalised Black Path - meeting, inter alios, Elvis Presley, Darth Vader and William Blake along the way. I, of course, cannot evaluate the whole of this story, being Half-Welsh.

*morling wool is shaved off a dead sheep, shorling wool from a live one. (23 Oct 09 - five hours later)

 
 

And now of substantial novella length:

Ynys-y-Plag

Part I

"I suppose I shall be accused of employing the pathetic fallacy but, then, the true fallacy is to believe that inanimate things have no mood or spirit of their own..."

A notable photographer - in a hybrid WG Sebald / Lovecraft and geographical-synaesthesia mood with an element of something that seems generally endemic as 'photographer's angst' or paranoia when photographing, say, children as an inadvertent part of his art as much as when photographing a tea-bag in an ashtray - seems to be starting a journey with us explaining connections with his famous book of photographs ('Traces') with no thought for the Intentional Fallacy!  I feel very much in tune with the strong and realistically unsettling sense of place and with this narrator as he chooses this (to him, unknown) Welsh area of Ynys-y-Plag with a preliminary random pin on the map for his photographing trip (much as I chose Clun for my honeymoon in 1970) after he briefly mentioned Braintree (where we have friends not far from where I live now, i.e. in Essex).  I also feel very much in tune with his approach to a tree at the tail end of Part I where he finds a swing and a tiny white sock like a maggot. I only hope my current chest infection does not dare to prevent me from reading further or from approaching the 'tree' that is this book. Heart in mouth, I approach this novella in the same way because it promises to be something truly special in my long life of reading literature. And I say that advisedly. (24 Oct 09) 

Part II

"I stalled here because I realised I did not actually know what he had told me, at least, not so that I could paraphrase it."

Indeed, I share that danger with the narrator of re-telling the story by means of this 'review'. I will not, can not do so. But here we have concerns of photographic light related to pre-Raphaelite twlight, the narrator's chance brief conversation with the 'Otter Man', his landlady at his lodgings who seems to be worried for his welfare by coming in so late in the evening for his dinner, all the paths seeming to lead to bridges one of which is due to become one of his most famous photographs with a child's shoe nearby, manholes in the countrified ground, and a 'bug' that I don't think can be likened to my current chest infection (or I hope not!).  I merely say that my awe-struck anticipation for this highly atmospheric novella is growing even greater. And, in hindsight (by retrocausality?), I wish to replace 'Lovecraft' above with Sarban and Algernon Blackwood.  WG Sebald may stay, however.

"The stranger I fear in others is also the stranger I fear in myself." (24 Oct 09 - ninety minutes later)

Part III

"If you saw something strange it was best to look the other way, walk on, and, if possible, forget it."

Bugs are illnesses as well as things we project into our life's technical paraphernalia to explain their shortcomings, the text at some point states. But now the reader is given the paraphrase of a paraphrase that, in turn, also paraphrases.  The desolate area of the bug (or 'bwg') where the 'swing' swings is thus fleshed out with some perspective of and from the past by such effective means.  One of the paraphrase's protagonists ended up perpetutaing the 'bug' in herself. I know several people in real life who have surely touched their own 'bug'.  But this girl is or was due to suffer "mental backwardness", a supposed condition which takes on a whole panoply of meaning in the context.  Meanwhile, I am careful here not to plant spoilers. But who knows how many spoilers plant themselves? Or will do so? (24 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)

Part IV

"You can judge for yourself how well I did, by turning the pages and comparing 'Traces I' with 'Traces II'"

The narrator now has a seeming antagonistic companion called Rhodri provided by the dubious landlady for apparent fear of his photographing at twilight alone.  Seeming, apparent...  We now enter the dark zones of this story and Sarban, Blackwood, Sebald &c have by now abandoned us and we are joined instead by some head-lease or freehold author (whether QSC himself or someone else, I cannot say) to accompany the photographer-narrator in a different manner from someone 'real' like Rhodri.  And together we all visit the aforementioned woman of "mental backwardness". Some of the ensuing events are shocking, even disappointingly strident by over-implication. I am not sure who's the constructively craziest of them all?  Me or you for submitting ourselves to this story? Or those who put the 'bug' into the reading-text in the first place for us to catch? All I can say is that the language remains impeccable, the shocks heartfelt and the horror immediate but also subtly retroactive in possibly increasing measure. I sense and hope that the final part as yet to be read will be a calm coda of some sort. (24 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)

Part V

A perfect ending. It is as if the Narrator sees something now in his Narration which is not entirely his, because he has become a different person (mentally and physically, cf: 'The Were-Sheep of Abercrave'), different to what he was when within that very Narration.  This is intrinsic to reading fiction and suspension of disbelief and 'becoming' (living through) the character himself.  The photographs, too, become - in his subsequently successsful book 'Traces' - beyond his own 'intentions', some possibly perpetrated by Rhodri with his camera when he wasn't looking, i.e. with fleeting images within the negatives (or 'dark zones') that bring back his 'photographer's angst' and paranoia...  We also spot such images among the text, in a similar fashion.  We, too, as readers, have become different. It's as if we have submitted ourselves to a rite-of-passage for real and beyond ourselves. We were hysterical, but now calm.  We just need to watch behind us in case the text was indeed catching. Or will be. (24 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later).

.

And now another of substantial novella length:

Karakasa

Unlike 'Ynys-y-Plag', this is not divided into formal Parts. Therefore, in advance, I intend to read and review this in three convenient parts (I: pages 135 - 159, II: pages 159 - 181 & III:  pages 181 - 202). (24 Oct 09 - another hour later)

 "This would mean I stopped being myself in my mid-twenties."

Part I

"...but the thing that really did for England was the urban rhizome." (24 Oct 09 - another 4 hours later British Summer Time)

This novella is not in itself like 'House of Leaves' but, as reader, I feel I'm exploring the acual text and urtext as if I'm exploring something like exploring the 'House of Leaves' but my Mary Poppins opened-umbrella hinders my progress, assists my clumsy attempts to become even clumsier to fully apppreciate what I am exploring so far.  It is a stunning monologue, at times old-fashioned like May Sinclair's Heaven stories, at others original and breath-taking, science-fictional or apocalyptic, both a painting and cinematic film, a printed novella and a waking dream you had yourself, a cartoon or a tsunami of images relating to death / life - mortality / immortality - architecture / dream - reality / unreality - England / Japan - homelessness / security - self / selflessness. The language is all-enveloping and flows sweetly and takes you on a fabricated journey to you know not where. Fabricated on the hoof, while tightly pre-destined. There are just hints of things, Kadath, Nabokovian turns of phrase....and things that are more obvious all swirling you, as reader, onward.  Someone yesterday criticised my real-time reviews as being un-academic and full of spoilers, i.e. with particular reference to this current one. OK. Hence the added 'caveat' above.  All I can say is: "All God's Angels, Beware!"  Most of the stuff I 'review' can't actually be spoiled because it is the reading experience that counts not the enjoyment of any plot possibility being tripped up by a careless unofficial denouement. This novella, so far, is a spoiler in itself.  But only a spoiler for those who never get round to reading it. It will just be there, out there, precarious and tantalising, and the person who did not read it will be nowhere. (25 Oct 09 - 8.10 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time)

 Part II

"It occurred to me, with the force of inspiration, that I should take holographs of myself at set intervals, if possible in the same position, at the same time of day, against the same backround."

...similarly with photographs in 'Traces' earlier. And a Brainbook as the new Braintree.

The journey (my umbrella lost) through a reality-rarified Japan continues with thoughts concerning the wriggle-room, I infer, at the cusp of mortality and immortality ... longevity as a determinant of regard or disregard, love or sex as a potential nuisance neighbour, CGI as a 'stone age' mummery and Time almost literally like wind and weather. Then a philosophical dialogue, but which one is Socrates? Plus still all the wonderful ingredients I've already covered above for Part I.  A rose tree that reminds me of my own father's rose tree and plaque in the crematorium grounds and an appointment I may need to keep. 

Keep taking the medicine, I say. I need Part III not only to be read, but written.

"...like looking at the moon after seeing someone leapfrog over it, but knowing that for me the moon was still the moon." (25 Oct 09 - five hours later)

 Part III

"If it was raining, or if there was danger of rain, she would usually remind me to take an umbrella."

Well, it would only too easily now to fall into spoiler territory,  with a (for me) surprising finale that is, inter alia, relevant to the unChristian belief that icons hold the soul of he or she or it they iconise.  Indeed, in the Hundred Year Museum there are many ready-mades on a production-line of Time.  This is an amazing novella, there can be no mistake - one that is remarkable and original and beautifully, mellifluously languaged, containing much of what I have already hinted at above and much much more.  It is glib to say something is life-changing. But this must surely edge towards such a claim, at least.

"It was the gutter of history, that flows into the sewer of the forgotten, and inhaling this smoke had been like drinking from that gutter."  Some may know from what I've said before in this review that I currently have a bad cough.  I coughed while reading that sentence, but the cough seemed to take on ((de)generate into) a tail-end language of its own 'inspired' by this novella.  My wife in the room heard it. I told her that that cough had been a Japanese cough. She laughed.

"My hair had become entirely grey on that side..." Cf. the photographer of 'Traces'.  I am left with one question: can ruins be ruined? (25 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later). 

  THIS REVIEW IS NOW CONTINUED HERE: http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/117628.html

I’m starting another of my real-time reviews. This time it is of the fiction stories in TTA Press's ‘BLACK STATIC’ - Issue 13 (October / November 2009). I shall attempt to draw out all the fiction's leitmotifs and mould them into a gestalt.

This review may be done slowly in real time, so please do not look back here more than once every few days for additions. 

All my real-time reviews are linked from here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/recent_reviews_of_books_by_dfl.htm

Black Static # 13 - www.ttapress.com

Cuckoos - Tim Lees

"I realised that it didn't matter what I said, or how annoyed I got: she understood. She knew."

An effective story of today's society, its credit crunches, its ways we take for granted ... or perhaps shouldn't take for granted. As if there are breeds apart we should recognise for what they are, even when they are younger...

It's a subtle organic story that presents its horrors artfully but none the less horrific for that. It's organic in the sense that it's deriving a gestalt from the paralleling of two back-stories between strangers meeting in a wonderfully described pub scenario - and catching each other's company conversationally and sexually as an island in today's loneliness. I shall be haunted by what underlies their conversations staged as pub talk or small talk or pillow talk.  A seriousness deriving from less serious glib exchanges thus more easily sparking a ricochet of 'horror' truth from the later unravelling-by-formal-text. (21 Oct 09)

The Shadow Keeper - Kim Lakin-Smith

"...that the real monsters hide beneath the look of skin."

Personally, I think this story is in a quite different league from the author's story in Black Static #12 (which I also reviewed). This truly special story is powerful: holding an inner darkness tonguing out from its midst as if miming an element of its own plot. It is obliquely linked to the story above ("Cuckoos") by its treatment of children, both at face-value and inwardly ... and ("but he is a child") too easily forgiven.

All this, however, needs to be read keeping in mind the period (this month (October) in 1871) ... and its unpolitical-correctnesses and superstitions.  The era is brilliantly evoked as are the stress-points between the narrator's care for the girl physically disabled by giantism and this girl's relationship with society around her. Bullying fatally mingles with inferentially magical considerations regarding the girl's shadow (a concept that draws themes  - yet with originality and probable serendipity rather than intention - from Dunsany's 'The Charwoman's Shadow' and 'Peter Pan' and, dare I say, 'The Shadow's Departure' in 'Cern Zoo - Nemonymous Nine').  I cannot cover all its details but they are done beautifully, leaving the reader with an aftertaste of dark brooding philosophication about its plot as well as a content open-mindedness spilling out from it with regard to your coming death because it makes you feel you have done what is right in your life. (21 Oct 09 - four hours later)

 

Dead Loss - Carole Johnstone

"Lachlan hated bottom-trawling. Hated the very idea of it: of a vast weighted net dragged over rock and corpse and wreck."

And the story-winners keep coming, no mistake! Hugely impressed by this tale of the North Sea near Scotland and Norway (far rougher and foreboding than that part where I live on its coast in North Essex!).

I am not an expert on trawler-fishing but this seems to evoke the state (emotionally and technically - otter boards, enabled cookies) of being right there in the thick of the British Shipping Forecast, and not only the weather - the things that one might trawl in distant trenches that either Innsmouth or Hodgson may blench at.  'Bottom-fishing' is a term in Investment Banking - but here Creation's pecking-order takes on a new dimension, and you won't know exactly what I mean till you read this literally reverberating story. The protagonist is not exactly in love with the sea. Nor is the sea in love with him.  But there is a symbiosis and catharsis here that quite obliterates finer emotions about Fate and philosophy. 

Like the previous two stories it tells of giant versions of things or unseen versions that things hide within themselves. Breeds apart.  And here I imagine to myself that the catch will be fish bigger than even Islington Crocodiles!  Giantism-in-action.  Shock and awe.  But I've only skimmed the surface.  (22 Oct 09 - six hours later)

Some Of Them Fell - Joel Lane

"'This place makes me feel really strange. It's like the sea. It's not old or new, just different."

A Birmingham-ringed urban-countryside nocturne of some haunting ritual-by-passage: starting as 16 year olds in the Seventies, then into the Eighties: a group of four with yearnings sexual, fanciful and seedily real.  The narrator's relationship in particular with one of the other male protagonists (Adrian) is convincingly conveyed. Beliefs, some wild and occult, some forced on them by the harsh realities.  Adrian was bullied at school because he was "thin, pale and short-sighted" (compare and contrast the girl in 'The Shadow Keeper') and his equivalent to giantism is epilepsy. The mysteries of selves ("But then, absolutely nothing you say or do at sixteen makes sense a few years later.") - and the politics of selves, as they develop or change.  Adrian's sister was bullied, too, and the 'shadow' in that previous story here for her is 'ground glass'. Things are far larger than any of these protagonists realised or even than what is possibly realised by the inferred author who gave birth to the story's separate narrator's frame of reality. 

The outcome is a return to a scene where, when they were sixteen, they discovered the results of deaths of some who were then even younger than they were and who never grew older (a bit like Peter Pan, perhaps).  And our journeyers through this story never find Never.  They just go on perhaps ... driven not into the ground but into the great 'sea' of human politics around them that they never really fished to its bottom.  In that final scene, there is a vision by inchoate metaphor that was pre-figured earlier, but I won't go into detail because of the danger of spoiling things. A metaphor that one can't nail, because it paradoxically means too much by meaning too little.

The whole piece serendipitously makes a fine companion story to 'Under The Overpass' by Simon Strantzas - and vice versa.  It is another immaculately written and provoking story, probably one I need to read again ... and again. (22 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)

My Secret Children - James Cooper

"They think I'm weird because I like being by myself."

Just remove the 'by'.

From the baiting in 'Dead Loss' in the stormy North Sea we now tellingly have the "dog baits" of dog-fighting sessions where the protagonist boy's father unashamedly takes him.  Where before our children suffered from giantism or epilepsy or early-death-by-glue-sniffing, we now have here the central pivot of Autism (e.g. obsession with white goods like Zanussi,with toy action-men heads, with role-playing missing or secret children). Some very evocative writing here of fallible souls simply striving to become themselves.

This story I expected to be the exit from this issue's fiction, a summing up, a crystallisation ... but instead it is a series of entries into estrangement. It is as if the gestalt I was earlier teasing into shape refuses to behave. This story, like the other four, tries to stand on its own...and succeeds. This story is the ring-leader to escape any critic who wishes to cohere them, make them whole ... in the same way that the characters themselves in this story wish to become fiction's real 'children' with earlier secret impulses to be Peter Pans but now unashamed, self-dramatised urges to escape the words that created them and become real grown-ups in a real world.  The teacher, the father, the couple upstairs, the boy himself. As tiny as they are giant. A breed apart. A race now estranged from fiction.  All discrete entities.  All discrete entries.

A quintet of honestly great stories that both cohere and separate in optimum measure. Bravo! (22 Oct 09 - another three hours later)  

 

NB: There is also much of value for the Horror reader within ‘Black Static’ in addition to its fiction: - www.ttapress.com

CONTINUED FROM HERE: http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/116600.html

Turn The Crank

"Jonas was standing outside what had been Woolworth's plucking a quiet tune out of his acoustic guitar."

But not quiet for long, as an organ-grinder with a caterwauling organ disrupts the pitches of various buskers. This is, for me, a very effective Horror story that tells of the mayhem caused and of how people can be caged as if in a Zoo in more ways than just in a cage. Without reading it, you wouldn't believe me if I told you.  I'm only glad - that although this is a typical British city scenario - it appears it all takes place on an island hopefully far from where I live. 

Significantly, from the stuffed hippo in the previous story to the organ-grinder's stuffed monkey (both of whom come to life in their own special ways), this turns the clock as well as the crank in much the same way as in Elizabeth Bowen's masterpiece of a story: "The Inherited Clock".  Like beng sucked into the Collider itself. (19 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)

 

The Devourer of Dreams

"...the balance between madness and sanity tipping many times before I wrestled it straight."

I really think this story is even more horrific than its own author may realise and even beyon the scope of its own words. It mentions an Isle of Cern at the beginning (matching the island in the previous story) but search how you might it is only linked in some obscure corner elsewhere in the raw text to a zoo - whence the text's huge spider-like creature (that both milks others and is milked itself for dreams) derives. This story itself makes you think you are its imaginative creator by dint of reading about that creature for yourself. It's a sort of story that milks the reader to feed itself.  I cannot emphasise that enough. It's circular like the Collider and your head starts spinning at the implications. Not only a shadow from the future disguised as the past but a shadow of itself made double by being you as well as itself. (19 Oct 09 - another 3 hours later)

Just Another Day Down On The Farm

"The small striped animal sat petrified as he grabbed it and dragged it from the safety of its cage."

Caged animals and a care regime that ends ... I actually can't tell you how this brief piece ends for spoiler reasons which is why I won't.  But it is ostensibly THEORY-based and quite quite cruel. And hilarious. I don't know if this gives you a clue but the author wrote to me when he or she knew I was doing this review saying: "I'm pretty sure that if you want to travel back in time you would have to use Llamas. Travelling to the future is possibly best powered by gerbils, though there is probably a strong case for a mix of Yorkshire Terriers and Gnus.  If I can be of further help please let me know." (19 Oct 09 - 30 minutes later)

Strange Scenes From An Unfinished Film

"'I'm not important. I have nothing to offer... I have no story to tell.'"

In some ways similar to 'The Devourer of Dreams', this story has power beyond its own means. It seems half-finished in itself, if not Unfinished. It also shares the fabricated (theatricalised) visions I sometimes see in "Mellie's Zoo" and "The Shadow's Departure"... and it is telling that the 'unfinished film' is on Video, i.e. a spool's slow spinning into which the protagonist is sucked as if into the (unfinished?) Collider in a similar way to how I hypothesised the sucking-into of 'Turn The Crank'.  It is mysterious how it also has the power of a famous Nemonymous story of the past ("The Vanishing Life and Films of Emmanuel Escobada") and, furthermore, the Director of the film in question in this Cern Zoo story is assassinated before his career takes off, as if the imputed author writing about it is also 'assassinated' by the story he or she is writing and that we are reading.  Coupled with elements of deja-vu, this is a remarkable tale that grows on you even as it shrinks in size and diminishes into static, but the visions in its last two pages are surely sufficient recompense alone for buying Cern Zoo. (19 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)

 Lion Friend

"She had the kind of nervous self-effacing personality that instinctively compelled people to be cruel to her."

My morning starts with a re-reading of this highly poignant tale of a derelict Zoo which still has caged animals - an original scenario at which I defy you to stop thinking about as you go through your own day. Also, a believable Office situation where our protagonist is bullied for no other reason than the shadow of Fate somehow determines it.  As well as in itself, this brief story, when complementing (and being complemented by) other stories in this book, is a landmark reading experience and it is a shame that it has so far mainly stayed under the book reviewers' radar. Perhaps that it is its Fate, too.  I love it and will come back to it over the years to re-live the experience. (20 Oct 09)

 

The Ozymandias Site

"Our Five were on the verge of all-out civl war..."

This is a substantial SF story. Well-written. Significant, too. How significant, I'm not sure, as I am not a current expert on modern SF. I would like someone who is an expert to tell me how significant it is. My gut feeling, every single part of me, tells me it is highly significant. And not just because it explicitly mentions Cerne Zoo!  It is specially significant in the light of THEORY. The Hadron Collider supposedly in 'civil war' with itself is just one level of consideration - and there are several other levels of this plot relevant. If there is something significant going on between this Book and the Future (CERN-wise), then this story is its ring-leader. A first person plural narrative of a five-way-colour uncollective-conscious in one 'body' is an observation on my part that only scratches the surface of this story and its repercussions or implications. I need others to report in and give their views. And I also wonder if I missed whether we ever know the colour of self? (20 Oct 09  - three hours later)

 

 

 

Cerne's Zoo

"...Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, among others who have contemplated the possibility that souls exist in not only people..."

Another important story that has so far escaped under the radar. A touching and original ghost story about Zoo creatures and the death-bed confession of Cerne Lincroft (Christened thus as he was said to be conceived under the aegis of he Cerne Abbas chalk giant) who once smuggled an elephant with him on an aeroplane between USA and UK because the elephant felt home-sick. However, the story is far more tender and serious than that implies.  It has a telling connection with THEORY, too, vis a vis its take on Animism. (20 Oct 09 - another 4 hours later)

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Sloth & Forgiveness

"'I was OK until you stood on my toe - and then it all went down hill from there.'"

An enjoyably quirky Aesop-type fable that at last explains what Cern Zoo really is and gives an aspirationally happy ending (by inadvertence) to "Just Another Day Down On The Farm" and with its take on forgiveness gives an oblique slant on THEORY.  Bravo! (20 Oct 09 - another 30 minutes later)

 

 

City of Fashion

Now we really come to the beginning of the poignant dying fall of 'Cern Zoo' as a book.  A worthy companion pub story to "Artis Eterne" - here a pub called 'The Cerne Zoo': marooned in the downtrodden, increasingly sodden City with its close but changing community of pub regulars, all dreaming of when the Swiss landlord moves them (as he falsely promises) to a new pub in the Swiss Lakes. It is not a surprise to me that it is Switzerland: to where British people travel these days (because of the law) for an assisted death by euthanasia: and where CERN is situated inasmuch as some commentators say not that the Collider is sabotaging itself from the future but actually committing suicide. [And the landlord has family connections with a glass factory, the one which, I infer, is described in "The Shadow's Departure"... perhaps appropriately]. (20 Oct 09 - another hour later)

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Fragment of Life

This ends the book as 'To Let' similarly ended 'CONE ZERO', ordinary life now in credit crunch Britain, and like the recession-islanded pub in 'City of Fashion', property becomes just places for ghosts rather than people. But before that process is ended, here, in 'Fragment of Life' (like one of my all-time favourites stories, i.e. 'Fragment of Life' by Arthur Machen), there is almost a wishful-thinking on my part for a mystical undercurrent to the bare necessities of prose. Yet, poignantly, not for long. This heart-rending story concerns an ordinary working-class family's engagement with childbirth. And its echo in a 'ghost' next door seen with a glass of milk. Almost unbearable. This Ghost Story (for that's what it essentially is in an original way) should be anthologised in future Ghost Story collections as one of the modern greats.  I wonder if the milk is akin to that in 'The Devourer of Dreams'? I can speculate forever about some of the implications. Indeed, I feel I am witnessing here a parallel to THEORY as now discovered to be threading this whole book: the future soul trying to speak to its present soul (Dead Speaking through opposite windows in two houses) but in fatal symbiosis? 

This story has one of the best last sentences of any stories I've read. So it must be one of the best last sentences of any book I've read, too! I won't quote that sentence but it seems to echo my thoughts on fatal symbiosis above: but in a perhaps more tantalising vein. Not hopeless so much as open-ended.

============

I will now leave others of a more strictly independent frame of mind to evaluate the book, but I hope my own views as its editor and publisher at least give some food for thought vis a vis life, the universe, everything. (20 Oct 09 - another 90 minutes later)

CONTINUED FROM HERE: http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/116378.html

See above for important context.

The Rude Man's Menagerie
This is an apocalyptic story deriving from the Chalk Giant thread weaving through this book as well as the Zoo one, where chalk drawings become a menagerie of creatures, comprising the female protagonist's touching (still conversational) relationship with her dead Dad and her righteous cause against the Rude Man drawing in the well-depicted landscape and the Rude Man's own tethered chalklings. One cannot do justice to the crop of joy and anguish intermingling so tellingly. It is a fictional rite of passage like none other, I suggest. One that will haunt you with chalk dreams. It does me.
Here, too, the Dead Speak again (as part of THEORY?): an added dimension I had not appreciated before. Or is this me hindsighting yet again? (18 Oct 09 - three hours later).

Window To The Soul
"'Welcome to CERN ZOO. We buy your unwanted memories,'..."
Another fable that deals with the core of this book, I feel. Today, even more so than I originally thought, with explicit reference to the Higgs particle itself so central to THEORY. Hindsight and pathos, exquisitely conveyed, with Alzheimers perhaps on some future horizon cone-zeroing back in on us through time... (18 Oct 09 - an hour later)

Salmon Widow
"...Sam: tall, boyish, sharp-of-nose and eyes full of tomorrow, she..."
This tour-de-force (literally!) -- well, it is tucked away in the Cern Zoo book and, like other stories here, deserves a wider readership. How can anyone go through life without, for example, reading 'Salmon Widow'? But it passes even under the radar of most of the reviews, too. Even (almost) under mine, other than to say: it is a swirling rich fishbone-marrow A.S. Byatt time-woven shoal of images and emotions and horrors and coincidences and 'Who Do You Think You Are?' with Kate Humble or David Mitchell or Marcel Beque or Prickle / Holly / Samantha... all conveying a real story-plot.
All I can really do is quote the actual writer of this story who has given me permission to quote here what he or she wrote to me when he or she heard about THEORY: "Salmon Widow's circular construction was not unmindful of Hadron. Similarly Marcel's snakebelt, that from some angles might be seen to eat itself. And remaining on the mournful: as you'll know, the Old English Cerne (hmm, from the Old French "dark circle") refers to a cairn or grave. Big Crunch theory suggests that we'll meet ourselves on the way back: the collision may or may not be pleasant."
This writer has aso reviewed the whole CERN ZOO book (other than 'Salmon Widow') here:
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/cern_zoo_review.htm
"Perhaps her husband had joined her..." (18 Oct 09 - another 3 hours later)

Pebbles
"...the clouds threatening a rain that had not yet come..."
A simply beautiful short tale of a girl collecting pink pebbles from a beach and the boy protagonist who met her. Ending with a dying fall that contains a poignant contentment at impossibility. It seems a shame to mould the meaning further than that. But did she really seek just one pebble, one particle of our existence? The story does not give the answer to that question because, I suppose, it does not ask it. (18 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)


The Shadow’s Departure
A dark vision of Distraction, derelict Glass Factories, enticing madness... this is the Shadow of the Future that is tied to us all. Whether we reach full liberation from it is a knot or ligottum that few can untie. It is just that (and this is my thought and perhaps not the story’s) if the future speaks to us we are truly the Dead who Speak back to it.
In honour of this story, I have concocted a short waking-dream from its Synchronised Shards of Random Truth & Fiction, i.e. distilled from the prose in its first half (I dare not distil anything from its second half!):-
the secret life of broken glass
a shadow haunted sector that even the cranks and the closet cranks of academia dare not analyze
I secretly hoped to meet that one-in-a-million madman who clasped some shocking inner truth
the stupid whir of a trillion pointless devices (19 Oct 09)

Inspired by last entry above and by 'Salmon Widow': SHOALS (19 Oct 09 - an hour later)

Being Of Sound Mind
“...sending an attack of the vbvbvbv’s into a current opus.”
One of a number of stories in ‘Cern Zoo’ that I accepted and contracted without first knowing who wrote it – a writer who has since kindly given me much information on Time and Parallel Worlds and other philosophies that also perhaps underlie the Cern phenomenon. As does the story itself implicitly and explicitly.
An enthralling and touching and concept-provoking story of someone recently retired now taking fiction-writing more seriously, later facing a whispering then clamouring ‘political correctness’ after the sudden bubbly arrival of a mysterious ‘granddaughter’ manqué. This plot really blossoms even further in the (for me) new light of THEORY. I am so glad I spotted this memorable intarsia of ‘magic fiction’ before fully appreciating it as such. (19 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)


Dear Doctor
The girl on the cover suddenly has a pain in her stomach. Or on it. Incredibly, now, I find, in hindsight, this brief and (for me) hilarious joke letter to a doctor is the plainest example of the power of hindsight itself. This all seems to be in a synergy with THEORY that I, as editor, never foresaw. (19 Oct 09 - another hour later)

Mellie’s Zoo
“'I wish you were real,' she whispered.”
I just ended re-reading this story with tears in my eyes. It’s that kind of experience, especially today, in context. A tale of Mellie, a Child as Mother of Man – faced with a ‘lost domain’ Zoo beyond the woods we know, of memorable inward atmosphere, in company with other children (one boy as their internal ‘pied piper’). ‘David Almond’-like sensibilities are punctuated with visions of a metal bird and shadow-creatures (both in tune with ‘The Shadow's Departure’) and a Salmon ...
And a caged version of her own stuffed purple hippo at home...and much more. Extrapolating wildly in an uncaged way, I feel this is the Zoo of ‘The Lion’s Den’ version of future self in logical progression as transmuted and rusticated by its return journey come back to haunt itself with pathos as well as bathos. (19 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)

CONTINUED HERE: http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/116765.html