CERN ZOO

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)

.

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)

.

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

For a specific purpose (see THEORY below), I have started another of my real-time reviews on this page. This time it is of the stories in Megazanthus Press's CERN ZOO - Nemonymous Nine (June 2009).

I shall be trying to unravel emerging leitmoifs and an eventual gestalt whether or not intended by the authors and the editor (me) - both generally and in specific regard to a scientific theory that has emerged since the book was published, i.e. that the Hadron Collider is sabotaging itself from the future (THEORY).

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

An anthology of short fiction comprising these authors (in a random oder): Rosalind Barden - Gary McMahon - Amy Kinmond - Tim Nickels - Bob Lock - Lesley Corina - Jacqueline Seewald - Dominy Clements - A.J. Kirby - Brendan Connell - Daniel Ausema - Gary Fry - Mick Finlay - Robert Neilson - Steve Duffy - Geoff Lowe - Stephen Bacon - Rod Hamon - Lee Hughes - Lyn Michaud - Tony Lovell - A.C. Wise - Roy Gray - Travis K. Weltman

. 

Introductory Prose

This prose is on the very first page of the book and is met before anything else (i.e. even before the title page and contents). It seems to be a 'fiction' all in itself, expressing a time conundrum not out of place with the new theory that the Cern Collider is sabotaging itself from the future (labelled THEORY within this review). This introductory prose also pre-figures some of the stories in the book in short-hand notes and gives birth to the cover image which perhaps can be seen as a symbol of the future nobbling the present.  This power of creative retrospectivity can also be seen in the transmuting within this prose of 'Cern Zoo' to 'Zoocern' (i.e. Susan, the girl's name in the picture): and that is my only spoiler I hope to be included in this whole real-time review by dint of future hindsight. (17 Oct 09)

 

CAVEAT 

With most of my other real-time reviews heretofore, I have evaluated the stories as well as describing them and attempting to connect them.  Here I have no need to evaluate them as stories, because I chose them to appear in the book and therefore self-evidently thought them to be great well-written stories in themselves as well as suitable for the book as a whole. I am now merely seeking new connections and interpretations during the book's and my own future (i.e. 'today') in and out of context with THEORY that has since emerged.

.

Dead Speak

Here we have a tale of intrigue / politics connected with dangers associated with the CERN project - laced with explicitly mentioned 'déjà vu', the flash-past-forward 'dust of centuries' and hubris-Icarus-style and religious faith. An ostensibly open-ended fiction that seemed autonomously to need to publish itself at the start of this book. It now happily seems to be THEORY-in-action.  I suspect few of the forthcoming stories in the book will fit so comfortably with this on-going gestalt, but I keep my powder dry. (17 Oct 09 - 2 hours later)

Since writing the above about 'Dead Speak', its title has been nagging at me ... as if those people we have killed in our future with our ostensible 'bad' ways today will have their final say today, too.  Very telling, in the new context.

.

Parker

"Up and down, round and along until after a series of twists and turns, you come back to where you started from."

A relentless impromptu on the physical sensuality, the memories, the necessary decision-making associated with writing with a fountain pen. The indelibility compared to the transient ghosts as liquid stories - and life's hindsight so impermanent, too, as the reader infers the impermanence of our planet itself. We only have today to make things dye permanently. Consideration of the internet ('computer screen') come to mind - and impending doom: the mistakes we make today travelling electronically back towards us...

Thoughts that brainstorm me rather than vice versa. (17 Oct 09 - another two and half hours later).

.

Artis Eterne

"There was however one character who was not only a permanent fixture, but whose static presence had a kind of strange dynamism all his own."

The Cerne Abbas pub (its sign outside with doctored image of the famous chalk giant) has, inside its ancient public bar, a 'moment' of moving serenity (as modern times rush past all around) and I shall not delve further into that serenity's nature for fear of spoiling this truly remarkable and haunting story.  I am so enthralled by its now ever-tantalising association with THEORY that I am aghast I never noticed such considerations before today. (17 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)

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The Last Mermaid

This story is a closely-described panorama of lizard skin and fish-tail - and, today, for the first time, I notice, it literally inverts the merging relationship from the book's cover image. It is a word-febrile delight, this story - and presents a menagerie of strange creatures and concepts. Of exquisitely tangible tastes ... smells and pungent desires. And imaginary cures that are really poisons.  Other than its serendipitously mutant depiction of the cover, I wonder how it all relates to THEORY. Perhaps this will become clearer as real-time expires.  The story more readily encompasses the Zoo aspects of this book, as opposed to its Collider and/or Chalk Giant aspects. (17 Oct 09 - another 4 hours later)

.

 

The Lion's Den

"They both saw the lions fall upon him, and then he was lost beneath their colliding bodies..."

This could be the enduring Zoo story of all time (i.e. all Zoo and nothing but Zoo at length) - a substantial experience of supreme stylistic accomplishment by someone who surely must have worked in a Zoo for the whole of his or her life.  As well as its sheer plot-driven power, there are moments of feral wonder and secret machinations well in tune with this whole book's own onward drive. Much video time-shift ... and a photographic angst which reminds me of the frantic day a year ago when I took the photograph that is now on the book's cover because I had to run back a long distance with a borrowed camera to capture the image before my transport left without me. An image that is also in tune with this story in so many inscrutable ways.

I have now discovered that a variation on the theme of THEORY is of this story's essence, giving even more dimensions to it. The action takes place before and after the 1999-into-2000 New Year when the Millennium Bug was rampant, a phenomenon that reminds me of what we have been talking about in relation to the Hadron Collider. And this story's new Memes meanwhile are perhaps quietly roosting like Hitchcock's Birds, except they're not just birds...

"Along the walls, the watching worm-lizards pressed greedily against the windows..." (17 Oct 09 - another 3 hours later)

 

 

 

Virtual Violence

This short-short fable, as well as being a parody of our modern Health & Safety political correctness, is a very telling view of our continual battle with Fate casting all of us as CernZooans in a Gulliverean way. I defy any reader to deny that this piece is steeped in the retrospectivity of THEORY. This is its opening line: "Jeremy's party ended with an ostrich-egg-sized bump on his forehead and three paper cuts, just because he decided to ban violent video games." (18 Oct 09)

 

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

The man started to talk to me.

 

“There was once a pirate radio station called Caroline that, in the Sixties, was a masted-ship anchored a few miles off the Essex coast where I still live today. Its disc jockeys needed to weather the moods of the North Sea beyond national territorial jurisdiction and thus be able to broadcast pop music on 199 metres medium wave almost as far as London. Previously, the BBC national wireless service of the day had failed to broadcast much pop music – and so we had to make do with Radio Luxembourg on 208 metres medium wave, its reception fading in and out...”

 

The man stared at me as his favourite topic of conversation itself started slowly to fade out. He stared at me because he had nothing else to stare at. He could hardly believe his own eyes each time it happened.   He was staring at himself, I gathered, just by seeing reflections upon my eyes that also faded in and out of focus. And not only focus, but size, too. From pinprick to an all-encompassing sea of sight – and back again. Time and time again.

 

But neither of us broadcast round the clock as they seem to do these days – but we did try not to overlap so as to give as much coverage as possible. 

 

Which the real him, which the pirate me?

 

One day soon, there may be just a static or hiss as the only evidence of life. Then, like all old-fashioned wireless sets, the glowing dial of stations will also fade ... and the tight tuning-wire eventually slacken off.

 

Meanwhile, I hope to broadcast forever by leaving traces of myself like this on the electronic ether for when the rest of me is beyond territorial jurisdiction. See me gone. See my medium wave.

I speak weirdtongue...

 I am reading aloud the novella THE APOCRYFAN (2007).  Please click on 'chapters' below.

The reading of 'The Apocryfan' is another real-time stumble-through that is authentic to its plot and to the emerging surprises of internal-development by the novella itself.  The novella changes, while the words stand still.

These are all normal .wma files.

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

THE END

Other DFL readings aloud are linked from HERE
 

I speak weirdtongue...

 I am reading aloud the novella YESTERFANG (2007).  Please click on 'chapters' below.

The reading of 'Yesterfang' is another real-time stumble-through that is authentic to its plot and to the emerging surprises of internal-development by the novella itself.  The novella changes, while the words stand still.

These are all normal .wma files.

ONE

TWO

THREE

Four 

FIVE

SIX

Seven

Eight

Nine

TEN

Eleven

.

Part 2 - The Pest Of All Worlds

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

THE END

Other DFL readings aloud are linked from HERE

I am reading aloud the novella WEIRDTONGUE (2006).  Please click on 'chapters' below.

 

(aka The Glistenberry Romace or The Narrative Hospital or The Nemophile)

The reading of 'Weirdtongue' is another real-time stumble-through that is authentic to its plot and to the emerging surprises of internal-development by the novella itself.  The novella changes, while the words stand still.

These are all normal .wma files.

ONE (2 Oct 09)

TWO (2 Oct 09) 

THREE (2 Oct 09)

FOUR (2 Oct 09)

FIVE (2 Oct 09)

SIX (2 Oct 09)

SEVEN (2 Oct 09)

EIGHT (3 Oct 09)

NINE (3 Oct 09)

TEN (3 Oct 09)

Eleven (3 Oct 09)

Twelve (3 Oct 09)

Thirteen (3 Oct 09)

Fourteen (3 Oct 09)

Fifteen (3 Oct 09)

Sixteen (4 Oct 09)

Seventeen (4 Oct 09)

Eighteen (4 Oct 09)

Nineteen (4 Oct 09)

Twenty (4 Oct 09)

Twenty-one (4 Oct 09)

Twenty-two (4 Oct 09)

THE END

Other DFL readings aloud are linked from HERE

I am reading aloud below a novel entitled 'Klaxon City' (2006) that is a sequel to 'The Hawler' (2005) already read aloud HERE.

 

Painting by David Welham

The reading of 'Klaxon City' is another real-time stumble-through that is authentic to its plot and to the emerging surprises of internal-development by the novel itself.  The novel changes, while the words stand still.

 

One (20 Sep 09)

Two (20 Sep 09)

Three (20 Sep 09)

Four (20 Sep 09)

Five (21 Sep 09)

Six (21 Sep 09)

Seven (21 Sep 09)

Eight (21 Sep 09)

Nine (22 Sep 09)

Ten (22 Sep 09)

Eleven (22 Sep 09)

Twelve (22 Sep 09)

Thirteen (22 Sep 09)

Fourteen (22 Sep 09)

Fifteen (23 Sep 09)

Sixteen (23 Sep 09) 

Seventeen (24 Sep 09)

Eighteen (25 Sep 09)

Nineteen (25 Sep 09)

Twenty (25 Sep 09)

Twenty-one (26 Sep 09)

Twenty-two (26 Sep 09)

Twenty-three (26 Sep 09)

Twenty-four (26 Sep 09)

Twenty-five (26 Sep 09)

Twenty-six (26 Sep 09)

Twenty-seven (27 Sep 09)

Twenty-eight (27 Sep 09)

Twenty-nine (28 Sep 09)

Thirty (28 Sep 09)

Thirty-one (28 Sep 09)

Thirty-two (28 Sep 09)

Thirty-three (28 Sep 09)

Thirty-four (29 Sep 09)

Thirty-five (29 Sep 09)

Thirty-six (29 Sep 09)

Thirty-seven (30 Sep 09)

Thirty-eight (30 Sep 09)

Thirty-nine (1 Oct 09)

Forty (1 Oct 09)

Forty-one (1 Oct 09)

Forty-two (1 Oct 09)

Forty-three (1 Oct 09)

Forty-four (2 Oct 09)

THE END

The best of novels, the worst of novels... 

 

The whole Hawler text is here: http://www.hawler.esmartweb.com/

Please excuse stumblings in my reading-process; the novel's plot and/or text entails such stumblings.

I intend to read aloud 'The Hawler' (a novel) written by me in 2005.  Links will be placed below on this page as this reading progresses. Please download from yellow bar at the foot of the page as shown. Please let me know if this presents a problem. Currently, you need to wait 30 seconds after first clicking on 'download' and then you need to click it again. I've been promised (15 Sep) that in the next few days that 30 seconds wait will be removed.

This is a raw reading aloud. I've not re-read it since 2005. If there is surprise in my reading voice, that's because I am surprised. I think this is the authentic way to read it aloud, even if it does result in a few stumbles as I go through. Please tell me what you think.

.

The Hawler (a novel by DFL)

 PART ONE: NEMONYMOUS NAVIGATION

One (11 Sep 09)

Two (11 Sep 09)

Three (11 Sep 09)

Four (11 Sep 09)

Five (11 Sep 09)

Six (11 Sep 09)

Seven (11 Sep 09)

Eight (11 Sep 09)

Nine (12 Sep 09)

Ten (12 Sep 09)

Eleven (12 Sep 09)

Twelve (12 Sep 09)

Thirteen (12 Sep 09)

Fourteen (12 Sep 09)

Fifteen (12 Sep 09)

Sixteen (13 Sep 09)

Seventeen (13 Sep 09)

Eighteen (14 Sep 09)

Nineteen (14 Sep 09)

Twenty (14 Sep 09)

Twenty-one (14 Sep 09)

Twenty-two (14 Sep 09)

Twenty-three (14 Sep 09)

Twenty-four (14 Sep 09)

Twenty-five (14 Sep 09)

Twenty-six (14 Sep 09)

Twenty-seven (15 Sep 09)

Twenty-eight (15 Sep 09)

Twenty-nine (15 Sep 09)

Thirty (15 Sep 09)

Thirty-one (15 Sep 09)

Thirty-two (15 Sep 09)

Thirty-three (15 Sep 09)

.

PART TWO: NEMONYMOUS NIGHT

Thirty-four (15 Sep 09)

Thirty-five (15 Sep 09)

Thirty-six (15 Sep 09)

Thirty-seven (15 Sep 09)

Thirty-eight (16 Sep 09)

Thirty-nine (16 Sep 09)

Forty (16 Sep 09)

Forty-one (16 Sep 09)

Forty-two (16 Sep 09)

Forty-three (16 Sep 09)

Forty-four (17 Sep 09)

Forty-five (17 Sep 09)

Forty-six (17 Sep 09)

Forty-seven (17 Sep 09)

Forty-eight (17 Sep 09)

Forty-nine (18 Sep 09)

Fifty (18 Sep 09)

Fifty-one (18 Sep 09)

Fifty-two (18 Sep 09)

Fifty-three (18 Sep 09)

Fifty-four (18 Sep 09)

Fifty-five (19 Sep 09)

Fifty-six (19 Sep 09)

Fifty-seven (19 Sep 09)

Fifty-eight (19 Sep 09)

Fifty-nine (19 Sep 09)

Sixty (19 Sep 09)

Sixty-one (19 Sep 09)

Sixty-two (19 Sep 09)

THE END OF 'THE HAWLER'

I also intend to read aloud the sequel of 'The Hawler', i.e. 'Klaxon City', plus the novellas: 'Weirdtongue', 'Yesterfang', 'The Apocryfan', 'Ladies' and 'Agra Aska'. I shall advertise the links here in due course (19 Sep 09).

Other DFL readings aloud are linked from HERE.
 

I’m starting another of my real-time reviews. This time it is ‘Extended Play - The Elastic Book of Music’ (Elastic Press 2006) edited by Gary Couzens. As ever, I shall attempt to draw out all the stories' leitmotifs and mould them into a gestalt.

The book seems just begging for this sort of treatment, because I (as Nemonymous editor/publisher) understand the stories were initially chosen blind-anonymously by the editor.

The stories and interludes, as I understand it before reading this book, are written by Jean-Jacques Burnel, Marion Arnott, Gary Lightbody, Andrew Humphrey, Sean 'Grasshopper' Mackowiak, Becky Done, Rebekah Delgado, Nels Stanley, Iain Ross, Tim Nickels, Lene Lovich, Emma Lee, Tall Poppies, Tony Richards, jof owen, Rosanne Rabinowitz, Chris T-T, Philip Raines and Harvey Welles, Chris Stein.

As I understand it, all stories were to be music-based but otherwise written separately by the various authors in the normal independent way. Consequently, I say, there should be no connection between these stories unless it is by the purely serendipitous strength of 'The Synchronised Shards of Random Truth and Fiction' or, to coin a new phrase from that old one of mine, 'The Random Shards of Synchronised Truth and Fiction'! (DFL)

This review will be written here ... slowly, savouringly, in real time, so please do not look back more than once every few days (even weeks) for additions. 

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

 

I shall be merely making a short quote from each of the 'Interludes' and reviewing the stories in detail.

Interlude One: Intro - Jean-Jacques Burnel

"Songs and music have often been inspired by literature and here, within these pages, the literature is conversely inspired by songs and music." (3 Sep 09)

 

The Little Drummer Boy - Marion Arnott

"It was as if without his anger Dad was no one."

This is a very powerful story of a boy whose 'sideways' moments lead to animalistic retributions against the dysfunction this his violent Dad and chain-smoking Mum and others have induced in him.  Musically, it is the most basic; the rhythm of blood's drum beat.  Without exaggeration, this story is truly a classic, one that will live you forever.  Much telling detail of boyhood in, I guess, modern England.  Here lycanthropy and its ilk are more than just the product or possession of role-play.  The devil's not in the detail. It's out of the body in the open. And I am the devil's advocate. As Sandy Nelson once said: 'Let There Be Drums'. (3 Sep 09 - three hours later)

This first story presents possession as the ultimate or optimum karaoke, tuning drumbeat with drumbeat, on full song, on a (drum)roll... (4 Sep 09)

 

 

 

Interlude Two: Sexual Heaney - Gary Lightbody

"...as green as spring [...] I was writing thunder and dirge up from the basement..." (4 Sep 09 - three hours later)

 

 

Last Song - Andrew Humphrey

"Cal played in a band for a while [...] This was in the mid-nineties when Oasis and Blur were cool.."

This story is quite long with a style that flows like silk.  An old-fashioned, almost 'Romance novel', style that I don't normally enjoy, but here it works limpidly as well as insidiously with things that turn out to be even darker when compared with darkness's light expression: telling of narrator musician Josh and his self-diminishng rivalry with his elder brother Cal and his detached posh parents and music performer Lucy whom he and Cal meet in the present day (not the mid-nineties) at a gig in a club which one can imagine featured in a Joel Lane novel. The sense of the music is conveyed with a sure brushstroke. The characters are shown to have tantalisingly semi-fathomable pasts while their present moments are recorded by Lucy in exercise books in the form of all her verbatim conversations.  But can any fount of information be trusted implicitly, especially as to who darkens doors the most?  A sense of being filmed and recorded for posterity as touched upon, even eaten into by exegesis and cut-up. Brilliant stuff. [In 'Little Drummer Boy', the animals are possessed temporarily; here, it is one stage further, where the end result is cruelly enforced non-existence.]

"After a moment Cal says, 'She says it's all recorded anyway.' / 'What?' / 'Everything we say.' / 'You mean, Big Brother...'" (4 Sep 09 - another five hours later)

Interlude Three: Etcetera, Etcetera... - Sean "Grasshopper" Mackowiack

"In other words, we would like to celebrate that there is a congeniality of feelings that are present in the audience as well as the performer; an invisible connection." (4 Sep 09 - another hour later).

 

 

Tremolando - Becky Done

"Tamsin found Stravinsky to be useful in most situations."

Well, for me, this substantial story has everything going for it. Well-written, of course. A compulsive, well-characterised plot. And it is centred upon my passion: Classical Music (with many nifty prose 'movement' sub-titles from that field) - with believable references to the twists and turns of tractable Elgar, Britten, Debussy, Haydn, Mozart, etcetera, etcetera...  And, for once, a major character (Joseph) who is of the same age group as me! :)

The story centres on a String Quartet group called 'Viol' (two young women, a young man and Joseph) who regularly meet and play in Joseph's home. There are many cross-currents, initial congeniality of connection, then rearing sex, later mysterious or blameworthy pasts, drugs and, apparently, madness of sorts, and connections that are invisible to the reader except, possibly, until when the reader reaches the story's end.

I enjoyed it immensely but perhaps I didn't really understand the ending or the ending is fraught with implications too subtle for me or it is simply as over-melodramatic as I suspect it may be... Yet, when one thinks about it, Chamber Music (such as a String Quartet) is deceptively stylised and subtle but, intrinsically, as one begins to live with the music time and time again -- even with, say, Haydn, let alone with, say, Penderecki -- it starts brimming with passion and mystery towards a true ending of stridency-by-sensibility via an invisible connection between audience and performer if not via the actual up-front 'noise' of the music itself.  Given me plenty to think about. Bravo! 

"He's almost thirty years older than her. The thought of it was vile." (4 Sep 09 - another three hours later)

Some Obscure Lesion of the Heart - Nels Stanley.

This story is a mosh pit of words. First of all, let me say that its linguistic style is based on a formula around a semantic / syntactic structure typified at its simplest by: "Her cheekbones were so sharp I could've cut my hand on them."  There are many variably complexer and complexer variations on that deep transformational Chomskyan structure (or theme-by-musical-dincopation), encompassing the naming of real rock traditions, legends and conceits from the Death Cult that the type of music embodied here generates. The story plotwise is also very impressive, involving a serendipitously-challenged music journalist as narrator, sometimes expressing himself in scorching satire about the job he does, sometimes expressing himself in sheer blood and thunder from the basement of an almost religious gospel of this melodramatic music world. 

It also features a girl called Vinnie who reminds me of Lucy in 'Last Song'. Here, for example, about Vinnie: "'It's OK,' she went on, as if she could read my internal dialogue straight though my skin."

It makes an interesting contrast with the Chamber Music in the previous story. A contrast that somehow brings home that it is not a contrast at all.  But the same thing. (5 Sep 09 - four hours later)

 
 

Interlude Five: Living in a Bear Suit - Iain Ross

"..the same kind of 'broken future' I try to set my songs in." (5 Sep 09 - another hour later)

.

fight Music - Tim Nickels

"Wall clocks created from viola  carcasses."

This review ought to be my first blank review. Here we have a story of novella-length that seems to be a prequel of my own novella 'Agra Aska' that I wrote in the eighties.  No, how can that be? 'fight Music' has had a major effect on me, with its fluid interpenetration of plot, so much more effective than special effects, so much more musical than music.  It tells of an institution that reminds me of the children in Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go', but so vastly different. It has music and is music.  There are frogs and organ music and a post-holocaust that is the holocaust itself.  I did leave this review blank at first to match my own interest in silent music. I vowed to come back and re-read and review it anew, and perhaps I shall. Review means to view again, after all.  A moto perpetuo review.  It will never let me go.

"We'd howl at the moon if there was one." (5 Sep 09 - another seven hours later)

.

 

Interlude Six: Half Magic - Lene Lovich

"I am tied to the madman, I go where he goes." (5 Sep 09 - another 30 minutes later)




 

First and Last and Always - Emma Lee

A new day. A new palate.  "'You're so uncomplicated. And that's a compliment.'"  Indeed, but never so complicated as a map.  The female narrator's life (a record collector whose purchased records throughout the years form a sort of map of her rite-of-passage) and the story that tells this life is, at first, delightfully uncomplicated in the telling, but 'at the end of the day' nothing's so complicated as life. ("All clichés have a germ of truth at their core.")

An effective contrast, then, between, the told and the telling.  Even the telling grows textured, with simplicities like promotional "polysterene cups of coffee with a complimentary plain digestive biscuit" followed later for the reader to remember why a kiss "tasted of sludge and sawdust..."

The protagonist's life is told compellingly, her boy-friends, her collecting, her strengths and weaknesses, her boy friend's strengths and weaknesses all on the record, the record-collecting road map, until we hope she replaces the sat nav with her own brain's autonomous course beyond the story's end. 

One boy friend is an eventual madman who strings himself up. Another is a rock star who reminds me of Last Song's Lucy's verbatim-maps of dialogue (and of those of Obscure Lesion's Vinnie) because, similarly, this boy friend meticulously includes account of the female narrator's doings in the lyrics he writes for his songs. The Told and the Telling in harmony. 

The story's harmony tells of disharmony? Depends on the music taste of the reader, I guess. I really enjoyed this story, against all my initial expectations.

"...it felt like I was missing fom my own life." (6 Sep 09)

.
Interlude Seven: Singing the Classics - Tall Poppies

"...concepts and style of a writer infiltrate one's thoughts during the period of time that it is being read..." (6 Sep 09 - seven hours later)

 

A Night in Tunisia - Tony Richards

"In jazz there is no destination, just the road itself."

And no road map at all, I guess. A very powerful story with an extremely original ending (that reminded me, in an oblique way, for those who have seen it, of an inverse Torchwood: Children of the Earth and also, consequently and illuminatingly, of the novella 'fight Music'). But let that rest for a moment. Ranging from premature burial to politics, this is an extremely touching story of an Englishman's friendship with a black jazz saxophonist. A story that also artfully winds along a road-map that cross-sections time itself, almost haphazardly ... but you feel safe in the narrator's hands, and believe that there is an essential truth here, and, as you later realise, you are not only safe in the narrator's hands, but also in the actual author's hands as he collusively leads you through this compelling story. Story? We are told early on that it is 90% true, but not told which 10% is untrue.  Possibly, a bit like the book 'Extended Play' itself as a whole: i.e. approximately 90% being the truth of fiction stories and 10% the fiction of Musician's non-fiction 'interludes' plus the Contributor's Notes!  (6 Sep 09 - another three hours later)

. .  But

Interlude Eight: how the boy least likely to became - jof owen

"...drawn to things that were written from the perspective of things that weren't human..." (7 Sep 09)

.

In The Pines - Rosanne Rabinowitz

This is a story of connections through music, aptly suiting my everpresent 'Only Connect' quest with my book reviews. It's the turn of folk music here, later towards discordancy and dincopation, within three areas of time: 1875, 1973 and 2015, in each of which finely-etched plot-scenario this novella-length 'tour de force' forces us as a feminine spirit gradually to pack ourselves with new literal-realities of self and myth and monster ... to journey, to gather experience, to move on with our own version of Rabinowitz's "dissonant symmetry" / "etcetera etcetera", Mackowiack's 'invisible connection', Iain Ross's 'broken future'... 

As previously with 'fight Music' (here, 'fight Mathematics'?), I dare not dwell too long on quotes and details or else I shall be writing a review as long as what I am reviewing! The story itself is rather like its own sung-of train, its body of carriages still leaving from the station even when its front engine (its head) is a great distance away in the pines. It's still moving. In all senses of moving.

[Just one aside, the thalidomide pine-needles remind me of 'the children of the earth' in 'fight Music' and 'Night in Tunisia'.] (7 Sep 09 - seven hours later)

 

Interlude Nine: Time Travel - Chris T-T 

"Too often, time goes missing from the equation..." (7 Sep 09 - another hour later)

.

The Barrowlands' Last Night - Philip Raines and Harvey Welles

"That silenced Paul, which was fine by Cam because he hated Paul doing Big Brother in public." 

Cross-sectioning time-chunks of life in a two-tier part of the city, this is another mosh pit of words describing the ultimate rave where the Mosh Demon choreographs the unchoreographable-others-of-his-kind for Touchpaper's performance at the Barrowlands venue's last gig before it's redeveloped. For me, the chaos of many vertical Clive-Barkeresque giants now become an unpent huge horizontality of humanity with traditional names for each passing prancing protoplasm of people.  Or am I exaggerating? Reading too much into and from...

Two brothers in symbiosis (Cam and Paul): who's rescuing whom?  A story that has its readers rioting individually in their homes and in other-reading-places along the lines of Jungian flashmobs.................

"It's a force that can set a time in stone or trigger a revolution, it can unite a city or drive apart two communities." (7 Sep 09 - another three hours later)

 

 

.

Interlude Ten: Lower East Side (revisited with reflections) - Chris Stein

"The artistic character of the neighbourhood was in a direct line to the Beats and the jazz era of Slugs..."

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

The 'Interludes' are my name for them. The book has no distinction in the contents list between them and the stories.

A term I often use in my book reviews - leitmotif - is basically a musical term, e.g. in the Wagner cycle.  It is a 'direct line' as a Ring that this Gollum reviewer seeks.  And in this great book he thinks he's found it.

Music makes an interesting contrast with fiction. A contrast that somehow brings home that it is not a contrast at all.  But the same thing.  Don't fight it. (7 Sep 09 - another hour later)

 

END
 

 

I’m starting another of my real-time reviews. This time it is of the fiction stories in Elastic Press's ‘the ALSISO project’ (2003) edited by Andrew Hook. As ever, I shall attempt to draw out all the stories' leitmotifs and mould them into a gestalt.

The book seems just begging for this sort of treatment, I claim, bearing in mind all the stories are reputed, in literary legend, to derive from the same Marion Arnott typo for 'IS ALSO'.

This review will be written here ... slowly, savouringly, in real time, so please do not look back more than once every few days (even weeks) for additions. 

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

 

Not the Dharma Initiative, but something far more significant: the Alsiso Gestalt.

The stories are all entitled ALSISO and written (in the book's order) by K.J. Bishop, Nick Jackson, Justina Robson, Kaaron Warren, Marie O'Regan, Christopher Kenworthy, Andrew Humphrey, Alasdair Stuart, Allen Ashley, Nicholas Royle, Antony Mann, Andrew Hook, Matt Dinniman, Tamar Yellin, Steve Savile, Kay Green, John Grant, Gary Couzens, David Allen Lambert, Brian Howell, Conrad Williams, Lisa Pearson, Marion Arnott.

All stories were to be entitled 'Alsiso' but otherwise written separately by the various authors in the normal independent way. Consequently, I say, there should be no connection between these stories (other than the same title) unless it is by the purely serendipitous strength of 'The Synchronised Shards of Random Truth and Fiction' or, to coin a new phrase from that old one of mine, 'The Random Shards of Synchronised Truth and Fiction'! (DFL)

Part One

Alsiso - K.J. Bishop

A neat and evocative fantasy-flavour of a  story creating for real a figure called Alsiso whose name derived from an assassin who wrote it as his name in blood... A figure that becomes an abiding hero, a villain, a joker, a lover, a hater, a Legend For All Seasons.  Alsiso twines and bifurcates into both the trivial and the treasured, the pure and the mongrelised, with an exponential ending that leaves a cosmic taste in the mouth. Yet maybe agog for more....(25 Aug 09)

Alsiso - Nick Jackson

A rite of passage by Boy's literal soul-searching quest for his own name, a quest from out of nemonymity, via a test involving family and forest and impending savageness and a 'widow' whose husband still breathes and an intense empathy with nature. This is remarkable prose. Nick Jackson has been one of my favourite writers for a few years now. Why is he not published more? "Boy lets his gaze slip and his eyes drift out of focus so that his leaf divides into two and metamorphoses into a butterfly with reflecting wings. He can do this trick with his eyes. He lets the two halves shiver apart then drift together again; Boy's leaf, whole again."

The first two stories carry Alsiso through Time and Space pantheistically, but not without infiltration from other forces that envy such pantheism. Yet pantheism, by definition, surely must wield these forces from within itself ... ? (25 Aug 09 - 4 hours later)
 

Alsiso - Justina Robson

This is a simply quite brilliant SF story of planetary exploration. Did it win awards in 2003? Serious question. Mimetic plague. Messiaen birdsong. Pantheism sublime. "I'll see. So..." (25 Aug 09 - another 3 hours later)

The Robson story aliso has bowers or, in the terms of the story's opening 'Gaia Obasi Nsi', 'gaias' of human forms in mimesis - physically (often perceived as mutation) and mentally / spiritually. 

 

Alsiso (Al's Iso Bar) - Kaaron Warren

"Metals only disturb me when I am not pregnant."  The pantheism extends to an enigmatic process of the I-narrator woman with an impotent (dying?) husband (Cf the 'widow' in the Jackson story) or with several husbands in trial pregnancies, in a universe (a police state?) where metal corrupts the woman's, if not the world's, Gaia.  A birth process that is more ingestion than gestation (Cf. the Robson story). Very intriguing. Still trying to work it all out. Gaia mutated as Galena?  Reality on paper that can be scrunched up.  I need to catch the words before they slip away. Fix the leitmotifs while I can. Too late. (26 Aug 09)


 

Alsiso - Marie O'Regan

When in real-time creative processes - and reading fiction, let's be honest, is more creative than it is passive - one sometimes comes across constituents in that process that one moderately enjoys - that one understands - sort of - and that one then places in the forgetting-drawer. Well, for me, I do not put this story in the forgetting-drawer but in a place of abeyance, waiting patiently to discover for itself if it turns out to be a key piece in a wider jigsaw, a jigsaw that is incomplete without it.  Or a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card...

This story is one such. Well written, it is a run-of-the-mill haunting of a shaky male / female relationship, by a pervasive sound or force - Alsiso. A Jungian Archetype that seems to underpin the story's male protagonist. But, finally, I am left unsure who it is in the relationship that Alsiso underpins.  Underpins or undermines? This story is an intermission, a light (although dark) refreshment, after the mind-twisting tours-de-force presented by the previous stories. I wish it well for its period in abeyance. (26 Aug 09 - three hours later)



    

Alsiso - Christopher Kenworthy 

"If you want to see what somebody's really like, ask them what they think about when they're going to sleep." OMG, this story is the essence of serendipity and gaian magic.  We've now made pantheism subject to the spells embodied in Ted Hughes poems. No wonder everyone connected wih him killed themselves.  A stunning piece that treats of 'waking dreams' and the only-connectedness of things otherwise disconnected and of 'Alsiso' as I'm beginning to understand it. It even connects with my own novella 'Klaxon City' that's hardly been read by anyone to my knowledge. I wonder who alsio dreams of the city or its destruction?  Major stuff. I wish I had read this book before. (27 Aug 09)

Alsiso - Andrew Humphrey

"Moments later I slept and my sleep was deep and unbroken and dreamless for the first time in too many years."

This story is by the author of 'Alison', a novel I enjoyed a year or two ago. I shall make this a linear review of his story as it is a perfectly linear and limpidly wrought prose fiction of immense old-fashioned quality.

 It tells of a spiteful marrriage (Cf. the relationship in O'Regan) ended by cancer, an earlier spiteful purchase of a painting at a Norfolk car boot sale that ties a knot of destinies.  But it's the least expected destiny that is the one we more often follow. Nevertheless, even one's rogue destinies are connected in unknown ways with every action we take.  Not a ghost story, but it does have the ambiance of a modern ghost story.  I wonder if the female I-narrator ever reaches her own version of Alsiso?

Now, to try to connect this story with the rest of the book so far, in the same way as the painting in the story itself is connected with the rest of the story in which it exists?  I think there may be a clue in that this story ends PART I of this book.  Looking at the book's contents list, there are three such parts, seven stories in the first one (just ended) and eight each in the other two. Are these arbitrary divisions? A question I shall put in my abeyance-drawer.

So far I sense leitmotifs pointing towards pantheism.  Or paintheism? (pain, paint...?). From the Redness of Robson to the forest Hues of Jackson via the Hughes of Kenworthy.  Not forgetting the Gouaches of Warren and Bishop.  (Re Gaia, in the Humphrey, the female protagonist's brother's boy friend when in Alsiso was called Guy, by the way). (27 Aug 09 - four hours later)

Part Two

Alsiso - Alasdair Stuart

"The word 'Alsiso' is scribbled in the margins next to a listing for an early Da Vinci sketch."

Looking at the dates, this story was published simultaneously with (if not before) the famous Dan Brown book and, for me, it sensationally represents a far superior capsule variation of that very book ... here with important 'Alsiso' accretions. A miniaturised lecture that has a number of original concepts in such a small space, with words as planets. (28 Aug 09)

Alsiso - Allen Ashley

I've never been disappointed by an Allen Ashley story and this is no exception. It is crammed with ingenious variations on the Alsiso gestalt, including multimedia, a rock band that goldfrapped its personnel, multiplex attention spans, Alsiso made acronymic or anagramamtic as well as queuing behind crazy people.  By now this story is at the head of that queue.  Premonitory and mind-blending. Both sides of a still spinning coin. (28 Aug 09 - two hours later)

Alsiso - Nicholas Royle

"There was a shop on the corner. There's always a shop on the corner."

Cheshire Semis are a fascinating concept of houses, each containing more or less than it portends.  Like this story.

It tells of someone returning home to Manchester with his wife and small daughter after living for some time in London. Nostalgia and remembered places loom large, including music he used to know via Peel and so forth.  And people and memories and haunted moments of guilt.  In Simon Strantzas, this return to a secret pool where someone may have once been abandoned would end up with a phenomenon as inchoate metaphor awaiting the protagonist's return to this place.  In Nicholas Royle, it's something even more inchoate than any metaphor.  A driver deciding which way to drive or a writer deciding how to end things...

Alsiso, like Glyphotech, is a label on a van or dustcart. I wonder if Councils sub-contract the dreging of secret pools....

A serious 'genius loci' and a truly felt, personal sense of past regret paradoxically created by the hope otherwise stirred by a change of life, a change provided by a return to the scenes of that regret.  I felt unaccountably sad. 

Part Two of this book so far remains intangible as a contribution to any gestalt that I was previously seeking.  Maybe that is what Part Two is all about, i.e. simply creating a pool of stories wherein the essential Alsiso is sensed to exist ... yet lurking at unfishable depths? (28 Aug 09 - another seven hours later)

ALS 150 - Antony Mann

"...you could live your whole life in a place, build what amounted to your whole life there, and not know the first thing about it."

With the driver at the end of the previous story not knowing which direction to turn, here we have another driver led by a dark serendipity rather than his own volition. A very effective sketch of urban life through the eyes of a curmudgeonly protagonist, except he is really a passive antagonist, not a protagonist. Overhearing phone-ins, listening to chance inexplicable conversations, being cut up by a car with undue care and attention, life not in the fast lane but in the rat run.  It all means something in the end, always leads somewhere.  And every time you take out your car, the vapid sat nav sits uninvented in your brain, plotting the future. Loved its back doubles. [Still fishing for leitmotifs.] (29 Aug 09)

 

Alsiso - Andrew Hook

"As he drove back onto the Expressway he cranked up the radio and let the improvised jazz make sense of everything in a way that Mozart always failed to do."

A tantalising 'film noir' ambiance, the mystery of a gun, its bullet, its intended victim, and why.  A story of prostitution and rich men masquerading in bars as bums, some looser than others.  An atmosphere to sink in. The plot twice as long as the story's length. 

I'm beginning to sense that Alsiso in Part Two is becoming a cruising whodunnit-to-whom rather than than a myth-laden prose-fest to pick over as Part One was. (29 Aug 09 - two hours later)

 

Alsiso - Matt Dinniman

(or The Sociology of the Unpopped Masses)

"'That word. Alsiso. Haven't you heard it? People have been screaming it all day. It just pops in your mind, and you say it.'"

The previous story started with a Pop!  And now this story of Pops aptly follows. An onward driving plot from the initial head-bang - a disaster movie of a tale: not zombies but a Diploma in Group Compulsion. Frightening.  So routine it makes me feel it's happenng - or about to happen. Where it sits in the Alsiso Gestalt is now beyond me. In fact, I dare not give that conundrum too much thought. I'll just make a show of being an ordinary reader.  Blasé is the new watchword.  One cannot look too deeply ... or make connections. On the other, being a loner, being a perceiver of things that no-one else perceives may stand me in good stead... (30 Aug 09)

 

AlSiSo - Tamar Yellin

"There I have said it. Written it, at least. And the difference is critical, though the word alone is such an object of terror, I am almost as afraid of writing as I am of saying it."

This story is devastating enough as fiction goes, but coming straight after the previous story it's almost devastating for real. Almost? There I've said it.  This teeters on the 'almost' brink of pure magic fiction - the nearest anyone can get without tumbling into it. It's a horror story supreme.  A symphony of a single word.  Still, Tamar Yellin? In my book, she can do no wrong. See here. (30 Aug 09 - three hours later)

 

Alsiso - Steve Savile

(or The Pain, Heartbreak and Redemption of Owen Frost)

A substantial story that tells of its own subtitle.  It is a highly stylised evocation of textual 'Biblicalness' with veins of Matt Cardin, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Hieronymous Bosch and (making this an apt finale of this book's Part Two when compared with Part Two's opening story) the Da Vinci Code, but here it is the Michaelangelo Code.  It has a monkish studiousness - and a contaminatory depiction of sin-eating. 

Alsiso is a mighty Stone Golem that the Monks' mission is to awaken by feeding with geared creativity and holy belief.  Exegesis made flesh-sensitive.  Soul-coring.  This story seems as if it was written even before it was written.  The author has craftily given the impression that others wrote through him. It has a self-belief as fiction. It is flawed, though, and over-long. Thankfully, it is flawed and over-long.  The focus is spread. And we can escape.

And so ends an intangible Part Two. Not really the Pa(i)ntheism of part One where all is at least clear via (albeit a clotted) pervasiveness. Here, in Part Two, we have codes and conspiracies in contrast with 'utter' compulsions. Queuing behind the crazies to find the truth but never knowing which way to go when we eventually get to the door. To follow the sat nav or not.  Where metaphor has demetaphorized itself and left us naked ... afraid ... despite or because of the risky redemption from which we escaped as readers. (30 Aug 09 - another four hours later)

 

Part Three

Alsiso - Kay Green

     A fable of the gods and men, of mortality and immortality, of Wordsworthian pantheism soon to turn Blakean...  Maybe a new beginning. A new realism, as in being realistic as opposed to being real.  The opposite of the previous story (the last in Part Two) but it alsiso the same.

I sense what I am learnng from this book is that an anthology's gestalt (via literary leitmotifs within the stories) is paradoxically easier to establish when its stories by several different writers have no up-front steer. But more difficult when such a steer is present (eg in this case the word 'Alsiso) because of the fault-lines of rebellion by the gods of fiction. But I have not given up hope of forging a gestalt from this book, an undiscovered ring that my Gollumic brooding over such rarefied matters may still elicit. Seven more stories to read.  And one of them may contain the key to something that I have yet to predict. (31 Aug 09)

     

AlsisO - John Grant

And this may indeed be that key.  A tale of an I-protagonist/narrator who was last night someone's dream but cannot now die, i.e. a narrator who is an Alsis (acronym for which is spelt out in the story), eventually leading to that same dream's Otherwise.  Serendipitously, I mentioned Realism being more associated with being Realistic rather than being Real, in connection with the previous story. This story now is a compulsive, brilliantly written narrative tussling with the spectrum of Realities and Proustian selfness and more.  Its author owes the Alsiso concept (a word accidentally provided by Marion Arnott) a great deal.  The story as a tangible text is his own Alsis.  It is his own Otherwise. Bravo!

"'Assuming we ever get to Grand Central,' I say, 'there's no way that you'd be able to forget' - an inclusive wave of my hand - 'all this.'"  My underlining, not the book's. (31 Aug 09 - three hours later)

 

AlSiSo - Gary Couzens

"There were three of us: Alex, Simon and Sophie. Sophie was the one who came up with the word. AlexSimonSophie."

Now on to another spectrum of realities and relativities, in mutual self-enhancement with the otherwise quite dissimilar previous story. One can only judge originality by what is original to you. Indeed, this story, for me, is an original first person singular / first person plural narrative whereby protagonists and antagonists interchange points-of-view as well as negotiate a spectrum of gender / orientation realities in relativity.  It is quite startling and graphic.  Alsiso, here, is a rite-of-passage archetype towards quieter older lives, lives that once cohered concupiscently but later separated out into generative-curds as life's so-called maturity takes its toll. I now think I know why I kept the O'Regan story out of the forgetting-drawer but left it in the abeyance-drawer. See above what I wrote about the Alsiso archetype there. Underpins or undermines?  That story seems to be the requisite ignition for experiencing Couzens' realistic, but less run-of the-mill, story about young peoples' emotional lives to the full. And vice versa, for the benefit of the O'Regan, as well as of the Grant that in turn benefits the Couzens and so on.  But not all at the same time nor in the same way - a bit like AlexSimonSophie him- or herself. (31 Aug 09 - another three hours later)

Alsiso - David Allen Lambert

The first story I've ever read, I think, situated in Cromer, Norfolk!  Well, this is a bit like the Hook - but with even more revenge, gangstas ... coffee with or without milk, a couple of Cuban cigars, Alsiso/Alison accompanying Mr Roadkill (with that name because of his tie)... the protagonist's Mel, and his next door neighbour Natalie come home from the restaurant followed by vengeful Roadkill and Alsiso (but being so angry one wonders why they didn't have the climax in the restaurant itself or just outside) - through the streets of Cromer! - a dog that is like a ghost emerging from the sea's waves - to where the protagonist lives next door to Natalie and we have mayhem, shoot-outs, a Hitchcockian clamber out on the balconies, and late-arriving-police... and my late-arriving comprehension as a reader. I feel like Roadkill myself, splattered by words. Forgetting-drawer or abeyance-drawer? Guess.

"The person who used to thrive in the dynamics of desire feels more and more like a dream me." (31 Aug 09 - another 4 hours later)

 Alsiso - Brian Howell

"'Far away is closer than you think, with Alsiso.'"

Here Alsiso - amid a Japanese ambiance that approaches a slight 'manga' feel at appropriate times - is a memorably haunting version or vision of an original concept of an alternate world that feeds off an advertising campaign featuring an ever-sought-for rainbow image of idyllic family life, but cast with sexual temptations that parallel graphically those in the Couzens story ... and also parallels (quite incredibly) the Royle story with here a new duplex of houses (where the family lives) that takes on the weight and resonance of the 'Cheshire Semis'. But, like the alternate world that the story conjures up, the story itself stands separate as a different story that brilliantly works on its side of things without those glimpses of its part in the Alsiso gestalt.  (The Japanese-looking couple in 'Lost', too, and the Dharma Initiative ... but I could go on from my 'side' as a sort of 'alternate reader' with more and more glimpses of the tantalising rainbow....?)

A story that is strong when alone ..... and 'differently' strong when within the overall book's Alsiso alternations, i.e. that spectrum again of realities and relativities that seems to mark out Part Three in particular. (1 Sep 09)

Alsiso - Conrad Williams

"'Metal provides solid work. It'll never go away. There'll always be someone willing to sell it, or buy it. You've got a job for life there.'"

This is the Kaaron Warren story straight out of the abeyance-drawer and mutually complementarised with this Conrad Williams story, i.e. the corruption or non-corruption themes connected with metal. A SF story that has a touching common-touch of a father/son relationship and pervasive slivers of nano-malleability as a metal called Alsiso.  Not so much photographic plates but positive negatives of reality's spectrum. Intriguing.  We're ticking the boxes gradually. Ticking like time.

I have read the Horror fiction of Conrad Williams for many years, from his appearances in stapled Small Press mags of the nineteen-eighties to genuine international stardom now in 2009.  Good to see this subtle, thought-provoking Alsiso moment of his in 2003.  Not heavy metal at all. (1 Sep 09 - three hours later)



 

Alsiso - Lisa Pearson

"In Africa, everything as close as it is faraway."

As earlier indicated by the Howell, 'as close as it is faraway' could indeed be the gestalt for the whole book. Meanwhile, alsiso, here in the Pearson, is just a single passing ingredient in a list of plant-life and thus has put itself in the abeyance-drawer, only to be pulled out again perhaps when we are ready to model or mould it from all the printed paper's facets of pantheism, 'utter' horrors and reality-spectrums that we have gathered from the three Parts of the book respectively.  You see, the scrunched paper from the Warren and the metal 'rizlas' from the Williams have here become an origami zoo, with themes colliding from the Biblical to the African in a scintillatingly poetic extravaganza of sex and ritual - and the duplicitous sacrifice of love for selfish reasons.  (1 Sep 09 - another four hours later)

Alsiso - Marion Arnott

After the gestalt thus limned above, we have the opening line of this story-as-coda ("I cannot forget Alsiso..."), a SF Fantasy of War's End told in a 'swirl of silk' by Lyra with a scarecrow face, wherein Alsiso is both a place and a person. Redolent of 'The Warriors of Love', this speaks of men and women who are at life's edge, some temperamentally typical men and women, others not true to their sex at all.  Both cruel and charming.  Role-playing and real.  An essay of peace and recrimination, where wars live on in imagination or dream. Of Fear and of Names.  Loyalties strained and loves induced. A story-enclosed group where endings are rife, farewells at the brink.

"There is magic in names. To say mine is to bring me near, out of nightmare into daylight."

I, too, cannot forget Alsiso. (2 Sep 09)

 

END