Thursday, March 31, 2016

Experimental Film



31 thoughts on “Experimental Film by Gemma Files”

  1. ACT ONE – FILM HISTORY
    1.
    “Because stories lie hidden inside other stories,…”
    And reviews inside other reviews.
    Slow motion, yet a fast-framed opening building naturally the facts from the vulnerably writerish woman character who wants to write this book, Googling the man so as to meet him and for him to tell her of the circumstances and possible witnesses of the mysterious vanishment of Mrs Whitcomb early in the 20th century on a train between Ontario and Toronto, and then, as real-time reader, I learn what this writer already knew more than she found out about Mrs Whitcomb, and I now know more than those who use Google about Mrs W’s possibly making-films etc. In her backstory and about the writer writing about her, but not as much as what’s already in the official Files, I guess.
    Don’t expect this slow motion ‘review’ to tell the story about this story — this story about its writer written by herself (a Ms despite the wedding ring) about wanting to write the story of spooky sounding Mrs Whitcomb — but just to tell my own flickering reactions to both stories inside each other via the projector of my mind.
    So far, I am captivated.
    Edgar Cayce and all.

    • This being today’s note, it is addressed to everyone except the book’s author. The Dreamcatcher slow-motion book review below is, as ever, in fusion or symbiosis with a hyper-imaginative fiction. A NO SPOILER POLICY OPERATED THROUGHOUT. But on rare occasions real-time reviews can accidentally reveal too much and you may wish to read both this review and the book itself alongside me or read the book first.


  2. 2.
    “in Quebec, it’s genuinely considered cool to want to see films that reflect your reality, because nothing else coming in from the world around you does. And in English-speaking Canada . . . it’s the exact opposite.”
    I love it when I start a book that I had an instinct, before starting it, that I will love it and it then turns out, quite early on, that I love it EVEN more that I anticipated. This is one. The narrator’s name, let’s get that out now: Lois Cairns is already a character full-fledged in my mind, with the delineation of her chequered career in teaching and making films and the quite brilliant echolalia-jazz speech-ThomasTheTankEngine depiction of her son, a boy with many difficultly loveable facets that many parents have to grapple with as I once did many years ago when such facets didn’t even have a name.
    “The problem with thinking you’re the centre of the world is always wondering why, if that’s so, do you palpably not control a single goddamn thing?”

  3. 3.
    Assuming I, as reader, probably don’t know what constitutes an experimental film, I am asked to suck the eggs of Dali and Bunuel, fascinatingly for some, if not me, because I call Experimental Avant Garde and vice versa (see the world’s first blank story mentioned HERE among the credentials of my own avant-gardening, as it were), but all this from Files serves to drag me screaming and dreaming with delight into concepts of dream within dream, waking dream, experimental film as the nearest one can get to someone else’s dream (or Dreamcatching?) and the linear gravity to which we all tend should we not fight against the non-linear as a paradoxical part of that very Avant Garde sensibility. This is beautifully tied in with the Mrs Whitcomb phenomenon being investigated by Lois non-linearly in real-time as well as backstory, it seems, and the whole gamut of the experimental film ethos and community in the area where she lives and works.

    • A quote from 3. above…
      “I still have the text in question today, bookmarked between pages 112 and 113,” – leading to the extract about Lady Midday.
      Cf: “Ah! There was something firmly held between pages 112 and 113 – probably a bookmarking…” – in the story ‘Only Connect’ from my book collection of collaborations with my father Gordon published in 1998 under the overall title ONLY CONNECT.

  4. 4.
    “One way or the other, I knew I’d read “Lady Midday” before. Had to have. Why else would I have kept the book? How else could I have connected the dots?”
    Mythocentric Lois – riding the geeking geekiness of her son and husband – spots Lady Midday in a film Untitled 13, as a film within a film, like that story within a story, review within a film, and she interviews the director, but only connect Mrs Whitcomb, only connect Lady Midday text?
    Full of conspiracies of found footage, a bit like walking the staircase by Duchamp? A piecemeal rite of passage by found Google?
    Everything is impressionistic like her recurrent migraines.
    If I tell you this story line by line, this review would be found text to match the found footage, reflecting my memories of having already read it when I haven’t. A waking dream.
    Suffice to say it is amazingly involving. And, if this were not a slow motion review, I would have already finished reading it.

  5. 5. (up to “…start talking about magic.”)
    “Could you really call it “working,” though, if nobody was actually paying you to do it?”
    I often ask that question, especially when I always buy the books I review as a normal reader. Even as an abnormal reader!
    Meanwhile, I am becoming EVEN more entranced by this work, as we learn more about Lois and her mother and her special needs son and migraines and ‘drama queens’ from her skilfully adumbrated backstory. As well as the found coincidences and synchronicities (that are, I hope, the no-spoiler lifeblood of my still evolving preternatural reviewing style), such phenomena being concerned, here, with the found footage on Nitrate films in turn found in ‘hell holes’ in a random moment of becoming lost in a wood, part of her investigations and Burke’s Law interviews and found googling, activities she conducts as a well known figure in the Canadian experimental film community.
    And film theories that seem now felicitously and fortuitously to hark back to my earlier reference to Duchamp and staircases? So, osmosis, too, as well as coincidence?
    “Instead, they’re supposed to somehow pick up, via osmosis, that if they wander up a flight of stairs…”

  6. 5. (Rest of)
    “Oh, absolutely, but people do switch disciplines; sometimes they move out of their comfort zones, play around for a while, then stop and move back again,…”
    The fathoming continues of the Whitcomb / Lady Midday syndrome as [W]robbed or, at best, enhanced (arguably) into a filmic theme and variations upon Danielewski’s bookic attics, passages and backrooms in the HOUSE of found Leaves.
    Meanwhile, we learn to empathise with Lois’s guilt hang-ups at the interface between this almost self-indulgent career and her role as mother…as I read it.
    “…a fire and two floods put paid to half their back-files, according to the woman who runs it.”

  7. 6. (Up to “I have faith.”)
    “Yeah, they do—and you know what? I actually want him to pick up how there’s more people in the world than just him, and sometimes things don’t go the way you want them to,…”
    ….which sort of echoes something I quoted earlier, as Lois’ backstory within a backstory takes on a new gestalt, including the circumstances of the pre- and post-natal of her son’s actual birth – a sort of aberrantly astrological epoch in parallel with the presumably dislocated chronology of dates regarding the theory of the Whitcomb / Midday connection, a dislocation that an old book publication tends to prove…despite with whatever ‘fiction filter’ she tries to layer it like a palimpsest. (Natal charts are usually set at Midday when the actual time of birth is not known.) Ironic that this dislocation in the chronology within Lois’s research (for which she is seeking finance) seems to be confirmed by a gift of that old book from her husband during a marital ‘date’ enabled by her Mum’s babysitting. The boy’s pet name for his Grandma is Nay-Nay. There is something inchoately organic going on here, I sense, where things are taking shape just as I try to make them take shape, and without such attempts at Dreamcatching they would diverge and dissipate? Astrology, for me, is concerned with synchronicities not cause-and-effect. My attempt at pinning down an astrological angle is an act of faith, an angle that is possibly not intended by the author at all. But it is an unstated thread I have sensed going on beneath the text. An experiment within an experiment.

  8. 6. (Rest of)
    “…suddenly inside my silhouette, some bad idea made manifest.”
    ….being a blink or click ratcheted into synchronisation by the angles of mirror or of natal chart, or a crystallising effect of the migraine, or the point where this text aspires towards a ghost story, a frisson of someone in a chair where someone should not be. That blink or click also paradoxically or ironically accompanies the point where Lois’s theories about Mrs W have been returned by the robber, as it were, become a potential gestalt, become her meal ticket antidote for her pride, her son and her work….
    This novel has not only become my experiment but also its own, too, and the fact that it is ABOUT an experimental film does not prevent it becoming, almost autonomously, an even bigger experiment that uses a linear grammatical syntactical language that disguises what’s beneath its surface nitrate. As reader, you are induced to walk before the author, before the guard, not walking behind, as you prepare to enter the rest of the book…

  9. ACT TWO – FILM
    7.
    “….where Australian Aboriginal star charts described an ’emu in the sky’ between the Southern Cross and Scorpius, its half-lifted head formed by the Coalsack Nebula. . . .
    And on very bad nights, the angels would come.”
    Lois’s backstory of Planetarium visiting (a “pocket universe”) seems highly appropriate bearing in mind my earlier speculations, as well as reference to the Star of Bethlehem, the speed of light reaching us from the stars…
    And this claustrophobically cosmic feel then fits in with the introduction of a new character, Safie Hewsen, her Armenian backstory, Lois’s student from the old days, beautifully honed as a believable woman coming off the page, a collaborator on the distaff project of Mrs W as an early Canadian filmmaker. Safie’s backstory includes the Armenian myths and a God that controls both good and evil….
    And Safie’s “Interactive art installations” (serendipitously to match the story I reviewed about an hour or so ago HERE for the other book to which I earlier referred above) – one such installation being, for Lois, a virtual womb-like directionless abyss or something, I infer, sucking down upon her like the power of dark stars – to match her migraines?
    Meanwhile the mechanics of the actual plot, that I try not to spoil, continue to compel.
    “…the instant realization that somebody else just gets it; that you’re not alone in your dislocation.”

  10. 8.
    “Other people’s obsessions can be fascinating, but there’s also an element of pull. A current.”
    …like a current, perhaps, from this section’s mention of “unfamiliar Australian stars” during a past example of Lois’s night terrors, obsessively adumbrated by her, as a phenomenon, for our benefit. Today, I infer L’s pain and insomnia as well as the onset of migraines, as she tussles with guilt stemming from her son’s “autism spectrum”, from her husband’s needs and her mother’s anxieties about L’s forthcoming collaborative Mrs. W-orientated research trip, collaborative with whom? Someone safe enough as Safie?
    L’s latest adumbrated night terror is terror indeed in this context. As powerful as the parallel plot itself.
    “I’d never quite bought into the idea that being someone’s parent or child automatically guaranteed their love or yours.”

  11. 9. (up to “I found myself in complete sympathy.”)
    “—it’d be noon soon, it occurred to me. Lady Midday’s time.”
    The road trip of Safie and Lois, their conversation seeking the myth of Mrs W, while Lois questioning the Armenian myth-system of Safie …… Safie’s belief for belief’s sake or belief as some intrinsic truth? (That belief/truth question has evolved from the concurrent Darlington review, too.)
    “; I had no idea how much of this might prove useful, but I’d never been able to resist a new myth, creation or otherwise.”
    “human beings are flawed because we were made flawed, intentionally; we need to be guided by sublime beings,”
    Lois thus finds herself actually trying for the first time to establish the nature of Mrs W as a person. The road trip itself, outside of such conversations, is the current spine or audit trail of a plot that continues to compel.

  12. 9. (Rest of)
    “Maybe everything’s linked, like atoms; all the component parts of some unknown universe, laid parallel beside our own. Maybe it was fate, always: inexplicable, inescapable.”
    …thus a fiction for the first time truly to be dreamcaught, a text running alongside rather than being actually read…almost using such fate as a way for our narrator Lois to loosen the reins of her story, withdraw responsibility for it, for there is a name I think I spot, unannounced in this section, to compare with an earlier similar name, seeking my own clues and discoveries amid an inchoate panoply of myths, Angels, Christian tropes feeding on other tropes, history, and what you do when the one who comes at midday comes, often mixed with whatever Safie’s tropes of religion are or once were. In fact, I sense Lois abdicates, at least for a time, her narration to Safie’s, but at which point? Which of them tells us of other alias names and documents about or by Mrs W…?
    As reader-participant, I feel I am not so much confused as partially clouded with facts and suppositions, clouded in the modern electronic sense.

  13. 10.
    “It’s sad, but it’s true . . . what bleeds, leads. So this leads.”
    Vinegar House
    Smells and murals… a filial parallel.
    The earlier PoV abdication now becomes a most effective Cairns Whit Project style of filming through words, filming by rewatching, via exhumed kirlian images, or combing through the gaps between memories of something you once experienced…along the autonomous spectrum.
    “If her earlier work was mainly Impressionist and only tentatively Symbolist, the Mural Room friezes seem to transcend these influences—to take them and wring them out, boiling them down to bare essentials, pure, weird, and stark.”
    “You can see a lot of crossover, true enough,”
    …between self and projected self?
    Some amazing real-time review passages here in this section of text to which no subsequent real-time review as a gestalt (even an experimental one like this one) can do justice.
    (Meanwhile, I intend to research the use of vinegar in medical astrology.)

  14. 11.
    “Didn’t have the least idea where I was, until I recognized the smell—astringent, metal-and-antiseptic—”
    Trip and seizure aftermath, hospital…debriefing.
    A page-turning narration, PoV resumption but still with blind spots, ordinary stuff, with extraordinary stuff underlying, queries to Mom and her husband, dealing with son, and seeping paranoia that people knew where she had been.
    Incantatory “phone bleed” – chilling.
    “Sometimes you can tell the truth in advance—lie that you’ve done something, then make it so. I’ve done it most of my life, and I don’t feel guilty.”
    …except I never use that method when real-time reviewing.
    Things seem to be speeding up on my side of the page.

  15. 12.
    “I saw,” she told me, often enough. “I shall never un-see, nor be un-seen, so what I know must be told somehow, by any means. I must remove it from my head; translate it to the heads of others. Perhaps then, the debt will be paid.”
    This is gripping primary source material from the past that Lois reads as written by Mrs Iris Whitcomb’s husband – or it is something she has conveniently written herself to further the narrative drive or subtly fill in the gaps of the plot’s audit trail?
    “If he’d lived during the Internet age, old Arthur M. would’ve probably ended up being labelled an unrepentant fanboy, prone to tweet or re-blog a million shots a day of whatever Iris happened to be working on, along with selfies of him mooning over her, and her blocking her face with anything handy.”
    “it is sometimes easier to beg forgiveness after the fact than to ask permission before.”
    …hence my real-time note written today and posted, also today, at the beginning of this review above in bold.

  16. 13.
    “the story’s inherent pull turning her big eyes starry.”
    I feel this could be a very frightening story dealing with something I myself, as a self-confessed pareidoliac, am cursed with: “pareidolia” – a word often used before in my real-time reviews over the years and now used in this book as reported on or concocted at various levels of concoction separately and severally by Gemma Files or by Lois Cairns or by Safie Hewsen or, written for real as a primary source or via GF, LC or SH, by Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb – and dependent on the answer as to which in that list (or even someone else like Mr Whitcomb as a sort of Branwell Brontë?) as the perpetrator of this book, it would surely represent today’s April Fool’s joke.
    If not a joke but rather a multi-collusive fiction, it is an even more frightening and preternatural book than I have heretofore given it credit for.
    As well as pareidolia –
    Illusion masquerading as the truth,
    “Narrative unreliability”, “due diligence”,
    the special needs of parallel lives,
    sublimation of sound and vision.
    “So . . . which file did you take this part from?”

  17. 14.
    “If this be the connivance of a charlatan, therefore, in my opinion it is ineffective, to say the least.”
    |
    L’s Dream
    |
    “Yes, but other stuff too, sentences popping out at me like automatic writing in constant revision, shaping and re-shaping themselves before my eyes.”
    And this seems a slant on the art of fiction itself:
    ” —that reflex instinct to distract yourself from your own pain by trying to console someone else—”
    There now transpire skilfully adumbrated scenes, turning into a filial seizure, another filial-maternal one to reflect her own at Vinegar House, between Lois and her son, and a feisty interface with her own Mom at the hospital. Out of character Lois towards a career appointment regarding the Iris Whitcomb project, while her son lies in limbo.
    And, after all, an iris is part of a lens is it not? Iris is also the name of my own mother, and iritis is a serious eye condition I have intermittently suffered all my life.
    Every angle leads to a terrible corner.
    It is as if names are factored into this text deliberately to give it even more pent-up preternaturality as earlier the text had –
    “Augustans and Romantics, maybe; Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Byron and Shelley and Keats…”
    Then a pending cliffhanger before the Third Act starts – And I shall leave this unknown turning-point pent up till I resume reading this wonderful book… Not that I am likely to reveal the results of the cliffhanger here.
    “Every angel is terrible, as Rilke says,”

    • A new day, and I have been wondering about the author dealing with this book as itself a difficultly loveable child.
      But this is also a book about a mother with difficultly loveable children as real child and a book of the film wherein her own mother appears in double vision as Mom and Iris. An experimental child, a film as veneer or first file, now fleshing out…
      Or a gem already in existence that simply needs to be found embedded in that flesh, just as a sculptor discovers a ready-made already in place within the material being sculpted?

      • Ready-made – cf my reference to Duchamp earlier.
        Hyatt and Clark as double vision of the difficultly loveable or loveably difficult child?
        Or is Lois herself that child – a Cairns under “unfamiliar Australian stars”…?
        As it says, elsewhere in this book – it is always Midday somewhere in the world…or words to that effect.
        ps: my own mother’s name being Iris and my suffering from chronic iritis are corroborated in this 2012 real-time review (pages 97-102) and elsewhere on-line over the years.

  18. ACT THREE – SCREENING
    15.
    “If my life was a movie, this is the exact moment—”
    Events come to a critical point, a cusp of planetary-transits, a turn-around, something that I shall merely call what the book calls “the vinegar stage”….and the text then retreads what has already happened up to that point.
    And ostensible narrator Lois, as perhaps I predicted above, acts the difficultly childish…
    “‘When did you figure out you hated yourself, Lois?’ I wondered yet again. ‘Or better still, and far more relevantly, in context . . . when was it you started thinking you were essentially unlovable,…'”
    …while she tests the marital breaking point, debating the logic or illogic of magic as metaphor made real, the danger their son is in, iPads et al…
    (I am writing this review and reading this text on an iPad.)

  19. 16.
    Cf Mrs W’s non-linear methods in her ground-breaking films and the mechanics of this collusive text we are both reading at the moment…
    “…none of it in service of making things explicit, making things easy. More like . . . the exact opposite.”
    But that, I contend, makes it more powerfully explicit – eventually – as it’s beginning to do now.
    The visit to the only person living who once knew Mrs W in real-time. A blind man with visionary scrying powers that once were tested. Remarkable scene. Remarkable description of him.
    Also, I feel that the nature of nitrates as a form of alchemy is significant, because alchemy has long been linked with astrology, and relates to what I said much earlier above about the cathartic point of noonday natal charts when the actual real-time of birth is unknown.
    This event is an attempted catharsis, too, in this crucial section. A child-like, if not childish, insistence upon catharsis for the book as well as for Lois and for whoever created her or has read about her.
    And, now, we have Lord Tennyson, too.

  20. 17.
    “But doors open both ways, by nature.”
    |
    L’s dream
    |
    And doors do indeed open both ways, by nature.
    I wonder sometimes who the ‘Her’ is that impends upon us each noonday?
    An achronological mix of L’s dream and then (perhaps retrocausal?) memory of the events of the catharsis and their effect upon the old blind psychic with the nitrate film.
    And then a family regrouping…. relatively happier despite police involvement and L’s own hopefully temporary “hysterical blindness”, pre-figured for us, I suppose, by her own reports of earlier migraines or ‘megrims’.
    “I could feel his grin, though;”
    (On a personal note, iritis can turn to blindness if left untreated.)

  21. 18.
    “a seasick Hitchcock focus pull.” …at start of this section.
    John Cage music at its end (cf my mention of a blank story so where above, one that happens to have the same title as a Cage musical composition.)
    A section that is L’s clinching “fugue” – Lois and, me, Lewis?
    “First, a sort of light seed in the darkness, just beginning to bloom—the very start of an old-fashioned iris shot, unfurling outwards.”
    What shall from now on be known as a ‘memory-movie’ – a wonderful sense of being in an old-fashioned train, with Mrs W…
    And facing what needs to be faced. You will need to read it to face it for yourself.
    “And bright, so bright, but . . . slanted, somehow. Not lit so much by the still-noontime sun above, burning stationary at its centremost point—the time between the minute and the hour,” … Just as a mere taster.
    “Because when one mind touches another, even through the medium of a third mind, things happen at absolute top speed;”
    …as they have been happening – alongside a sort of autonomous spectrum of literary intake – with my reading of this book yesterday and today.

  22. 19.
    A rationale of “Self-protection” as “shitty liar”…?
    The preternatural rationale as preferable to a supernatural one.
    L’s eyes finally refocus in tune with wishful-thinking ratcheting into a perfect noonday point of existence, foreseeing or dreaming her son grown up and whole…but that surely is too easy, “…because pain gives life a point, and without it life isn’t even death, just . . . nothingness.”
    “an iris shrinking inward”
    19. Is a perfect section to end this perfectly imperfect book about our transcendable and never-to-be transcended projections of self.
    “a matter of misfiling,”
    A remarkable book that will stay in my mind.
    end

    • CREDITS / STING
      I take it that the text proper ends with (19.)
      And I leave you to interpret the ‘Intentional Fallacy’ of ‘Credits’ and ‘Sting’ that follow as codas. (‘Intentional Fallacy’ is a literary theory that you may want to Google, a ‘found’ theory of authorial, as well as narrative, unreliability in which I have been interested since 1966 when I first studied it). We do see the villain of the piece have his wrongs sort of righted, with the link between his present and ancient name still unannounced but here shown contiguously to make it obvious. Too obvious.
      Previous 'PoV abdication' now become full-blooded apocrypha?
 

    Wednesday, March 30, 2016

    A Saucerful of Secrets

    15 thoughts on “A Saucerful of Secrets – Andrew Darlington

    1. The Strange Laudanum Dream of Branwell Brontë
      “You cannot touch a nightmare.”
      …unless the language is slice-subtle enough with chunky steampunk laced into it to tell of and be told by literary legends like Branwell and Andrew, as they both have been, since I started reading the latter’s slick and staccato SFslices in the late 1980s and it’s about time he became a legend again, if he ever stopped being one, which I doubt. This is a prose story about another ‘would-be’ and ‘was and will be again’ legend when the layers of reality reveal the true authorship of the Brontë classics, with all theories being right somewhere somewhen, starting with a steampunk giant bee and its metal sphere on a snowy Haworth day, then mixed with ‘War with the Newts’, an old-fashioned SF fantasy like a fable with Earth and its walking talking monsters that seem to transcend the substance that created this Visitor from Porlock of a Darlington story in your otherwise uninterruptible life, with the borogoves and slithy toves then giving a Swiftian modest proposal about literature and its legends; we are all each of us a legend somewhere along one of many timelines of “inconvenient truth”.
    2. LONDON BRIDGE IS FALLING DOWN, FALLING DOWN, FALLING DOWN
      Professor Moriarty’s last, and strangest adventure.

      “Yet the firm grasp of a knife in the hand can be as reassuring as a good cigar.”
      The British “pompous empire.”
      “afflictions of convenience.”
      “We are a pimple of reason riding a primeval mass of terrible instincts, fears and terrors.”
      I simply knew that I knew what I was doing when I decided to pick up this book as a needle from amidst the giant haystack of the internet’s wares. This story alone justifies the decision. It is an immaculate (immaculate except for arguably one minor thing: “Four discretely armed men,”) a stunning exercise in conjuring up — with a richly textured, para-Dickensisan style — a London with amended frogs and foxes, rats and bats, a fictional figure having been made real for real by bringing him back to life with an electro-magnetic heart, and amazing scenes of a bespoke chaotic chaos fighting a pragmatic inchoate chaos for the soul of Gaia. Loved it.
      “Yet an editing and reviewing process is essential.”
      The need to crystallise a whole book in real-time, as I hope to do in the coming days.
    3. THUESDAY TO FRYDAY
      “The spectral conversations of the dead, spoken with dead tongues from dead mouths.”
      They keep on coming, fulfilling my expectations, this one a sort of extrapolated continuation of this book so far and of the Alasdair Gray ethos of short story writing (and that from me is an enormous compliment to both writers by making this comparison of one to the other) – here a Leeds version of the other’s Glasgow, maybe semi-auto biographical, of a man’s lifetime, whereby intense present moments become shared backstories, from the nineteen fifties to an alternate NOW where exploding cats become exploding bombs. An unforgettable series of “drifting might-have-beens”, in a crisp but textured Darlington style that you will soon feel jiggling through your reading bones like old songs from your past, and future semantic scintillations you haven’t yet lived, romance, love or just Facebook friends…
      “The government panicked into sliding out of the European Union.”
    4. THE DOOR TO ANYWHERE
      “…blurring the vista of rooftops, backyards and outside toilets into magical single-colour patterns.”
      This is, for me, a wonderful exercise in the 1950s kitchen sink (complete with lodger in the attic room and the Beano comic and the mysteriously named Yorkshire Tea) blending in and out of a boy’s imagination, starting with his pet cat Jingle (the same name as the cat that exploded in the previous story), and the cat’s prey that the boy saves – well, this is where the story veers into a truth of fantasy from the truth of reality, full of some of the most bizarre Swiftianisms and comic-strip extrapolations of rat-lizard and mutated Narnian contiguity… outdoing even Alasdair Gray – and mutually complementing the exquisite pair of novels by Michael Wyndham Thomas that I reviewed HERE a few years ago.
    5. BEAST OF THE BASKERVILLES
      “On the face of it, a dozen random facts can be spun in any number of ways to create a variant number of situations. […] So the task is just that, to find the one correct way in which the facts fall into alignment. A twist this way, and that, until the Rubik planes fall into alignment.”
      I call it Dreamcatching.
      This is another Sherlock Holmes derived extrapolation, but not a steampunk one like the first one. This is a serious and disturbing treatment of loss, self-doubt, fiction as a version of truth as in Derek Edge’s adventure in the previous story, tumours as psychological as well as physical entities, telling of a father, with the help of a man called Holly, rerehearsing the daughter’s loss from his benighted run-out-of-fuel car after he went off for petrol.
      And another attic, this time with more than just a lodger living there, but something else lodged in the brain. If the Rubik cube never lies?
    6. DEREK EDGE AND THE SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS
      “Sometimes things connect. Sometime they don’t.”
      I think I should have that up in a my room as a motto!
      Meanwhile, this is a very engaging SF story, with elements, whether borrowed or ignored or pre-dated, of Flash Gordon, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Michael Wyndham Thomas, Stephen King’s Dome and, judging by the author’s own footnote, three names of which I am unaware: Frank S. Pepper, David R. Motton and Sydney Jordan.
      Abducted into outer space while within a motorway service station food hall, Derek and his friend Gordon who rather suffers Derek’s autonomous asparagers syndrome (my phrase, not the story’s) meet both romantic interest and fearsome aliens, time manipulation and a sucking sun, fearsome if it were not for the fact that Derek and Gordon are already familiar with such situations from the Twilight Zone, etc. The ending is genuinely touching when time’s remanipulation snatches away as well as gives.
      I thoroughly enjoyed this well-written romp, and I also have a theory about it that may even have by-passed the author himself in the true tradition of the Intentional Fallacy. There is a theory given earlier in this story about contact lenses, and in the light of this theory, the dome in question could well be a giant version, a wide shallow one…. Hmmm.
      “A dislodged eyeball lies on the floor like a glaucous slug.”
    7. REFUGE
      “Migration lies in people’s souls. Until there is nowhere else else to go, and no possibility of ever leaving…”
      This book is remarkable for its eclectic moods, with a gestalt of a healing process through Poetic SF, be it inspired by its sheer imagination and genre-spunk or the blended archetypes of memories racial or personal (as here) and deep emotions buoyed above or beneath the surface.
      This powerful story takes the current facts and despairing hopes of today’s migrants, imbued with a network of memories, buoyed themselves, not upon a celebrity Titanic or Poseidon Adventure, but a lethal trek and voyage from deepest Africa towards Europe.
      Reaching some version of a Priestian archipelago?
      Richly honed and deeply affecting.
    8. THE NON-EXPANDING UNIVERSE
      “Some people call it the Blott, others just say the shit-hole. Some claim ‘Chernobyl-on-Tyne’ extends ten miles from end to end.”
      So how long the middle?
      A ten year old Asian girl runs away to the Blott after tipping over the furniture and lasaring her Dad. Encounters a man who wants to show her the wriggly caterpillar – on his shoulder.
      This book, despite its sporadic serious nature, is itself a mutancy from the radio-active waste in the Blott, a deadpan acceptance of the Francis Bacon like perversity of life. Perversity, not perversion. There is often indeed a counterintuitive healing, and this story is no exception, even if the words are threatening to grow appendages they shouldn’t have.
    9. GENDER-SHOCK
      “Have you ever been disappointed to discover the gender of a lover.”
      This is a remarkable and, dare I say, without putting you off, SOPHISTICATED story about a future or alternate world where gender is legislated as a spectrum rather than a polarity, a story expressed as the thoughts of the defence lawyer in a case against someone who had contravened that legislation with regard to ‘her’ son’.
      I simply loved this story and it deserves to become an SF classic.
      As an aside, this work’s smoothly prose-skittering style is in mutually complementary contrast to the radio-active style of some of the other works in this book so far.
    10. BIG BAD JOHN
      “An angular younger man with meat-cleaver nose and undernourished mouse-coloured moustache. His spectacles pushed up onto his forehead, where they perch precariously.”
      Often Darlington makes me want to take up my Stylistics studies again. For example, above, as well as the assonances of meaning and sound between words, the angular reaches out for the spectacles, the meat-cleaver for the nourished in undernourished and the mouse moustache perched, too, just as precariously as the spectacles. Darlington ever seems to have a knack of embracing you in a sense of stylistics that supplement his plots.
      Meanwhile, this engaging story of tourists in Scarborough, comparing earthquakes in California with fracking ones in this story, and the man — who helps out at the B&B and paints as a hobby, trying to sell his work to the guests — has an atmospheric painting trip to the countryside near some fracking structures and near a pub that shouldn’t be there, an adventure with Neanderthals, creatures who probably exist by inbreeding? Full of ripe deadpan absurdism as well as sharply satirising the artistic taste of tourists. I bet none of them would like to read this story, either. Too busy reading popular stuff.
    11. TERMINATOR ZERO & THE DREAM DEMONS
      “The place is the image that’s already in my head.”
      Richly vintage Darlington, I suggest, with a place amid the synaptics of film-making and dream which amazingly ricochet with my concurrent review of Files’ “Experimental Film” HERE – a place where he meets his own darling sex Penny and other recurrencies of objective-correlative like the rooftop gardens of Moorcock, dragging something from the sea, meeting pre-Conan or post-Cornelius bruisers in machinations of a Vishnu statuette, and more. Beautiful stuff.
      “…and I decide that even too much sex with her couldn’t be enough.”
      And John Coltrane playing the Dartford tunnel – statistics, interballistics, movies – a dead budgerigar that involves a scene so poignant I nearly honestly wept – and even a prop used of an issue of the magazine INTERZONE the latest issue of which I reviewed HERE.
      Intentional disorientation. Mortgaging one’s soul for one’s art (I buy every book I review). “Someone else’s memory with squatter’s right to my head,…”
    12. A GROTESQUE ROMANCE
      “Cobalt and crimson illuminate the walls like high-tech lamination. It’s as if I’m sucking in screeds of hallucinatory prose, snapshots of the unconscious, the dreams and nightmares of the three people who’ve sat, eaten, slept, fucked, and dreamed here, in this impossible place. The artist. The wife. The mistress.”
      “Cobalt and crimson illuminate the walls like high-tech lamination. It’s as though I’m sucking in screeds of hallucinatory prose, snapshots of the unconscious, the dreams and nightmares secreted by other previous residents who’ve sat, eaten, slept, fucked, and dreamed in here, in this impossible place. Ghosts.”
      “Cobalt and crimson illumination washes the walls like some high-tech lamination. Glints of hard aquarium-green light. Shapes? Hallucinations?”
      This is another classic, I am sure. Keep them coming. Upon the edge of caricature, this is a stunning evocation of Art Aesthetics as seen through the life of a particular artist, Hannibal Mytholmridge: Avant Garde as well as effective in the public, even popular, arena, a life of art’s apotheosis through one’s own skill and that of those with whom one associates, described in a prose that itself pulses like sex and like Mythol Mbridge’s paintings, his happenings, installations, as portrayed by an art critic who visits his house and studio and his two women, all following the Mythol’s death.
      As my own book reviews hope to build an interactive gestalt from a text’s various leitmotifs, this literally happens in this story, then leading to a telling climax that blends Damien Hirst with the Pan Book of Horrors.
      I sense a tension between pretentious art and popular art. And a similar tension is inferred, too, within this book’s author himself as represented by the whole of this remarkable book so far. Self-mocking and self-preening, in Jungian self-immolating collusion with the archetypes of those who read him?
      Artist and critic. Author and reviewer.
      “…but to explain myself to myself, through him.”
    13. THIS WORLD HOLDS SPACE ENOUGH
      “Later academics and speculative researchers debate the likelihood of placing Otto Czibarovsk within the autism spectrum,…”
      Again that is another chance connection with the other book I am concurrently reviewing in the link above!
      “Print-literature consists of words arranged into sentences that build by a logical process, one step connecting to the next, into paragraphs and so into text.”
      This is a substantive SF story that deserves much attention and will no doubt receive it by the gritty attrition of literary criticism, a story that starts as a patchwork of real history and geography in the 19th century, stretching as a slow-motion quilted review, by means of an equation created by Otto actually changing things piecemeal into the 21st century, a vast extrapolation of disrupting the Toynbeean challenge-and-response theory of history – “a dialogue of thesis and antithesis into synthesis.”
      You will do well to study this story. It is crammed with vistas and visions, and parallel universe publications of itself. Horizons stretching to vanishing points. An infinite world that was once or would have been our own world, still recognisable as itself. Collective dreams and population pressure, H1N1 influenza virus, Russian Doll islands and inland seas, inhalable dreams, contagious insanity born of fear, all this and the equation actually altering the composition of the brain…
      This is more than just an alternate world vision, it is artfully blended with genuine ground-breaking weird literature, too, material that reminds me of much that has been published by Ex Occidente Press over the last few years…
    14. …AND THE EARTH HAS NO END
      “What use is truth to your everyday life? What good does it do you to know truth if it sets you at odds with your fellows and makes you a lonely outsider? […] …belief is more useful than truth. Belief is a social thing, a belonging thIng. And because of that inter-connectivity, it creates and reinforces its own zone of truth.”
      Wow! That seems to sum up a mighty load of my thoughts in life and in gestalt real-time reviewing. This story has been saved until last for this remarkable book to pack its final punch, a coda to the whole reading experience as well as a specific sequel to the previous story about our world whose horizons have been believed to have become infinite, instead of the heliocentric truth of Copernicus. This perfectly posed, perfectly prosed story has its own special belief system, a painterly one like Mantegna or Bosch, a surreal one like Dali, even a Magritte one with briefcase and brolly. The text defies you to summarise its constituent tenets of philosophy or science, be it Berkeley or Einstein. You become the observer and by observing the text you can actually change the text you are reading, as well as the margins of the world within the text and in your own world outside the text. Well, at least, that is how I feel.
      This story’s pre-Copernican dome, with stars painted on its underside, is akin to that dome over a motorway service station in a previous story, a dome that I compared to a contact-lens or ‘saucer of secrets’ described in that earlier story. And now that comparison makes a perfect sense of belief, if not of truth.
      This final story is a Pilgrim’s Progress, a pilgrim with a toothache – or truthache?
      There are far too many staggeringly described visual images in this final story for me to itemise here, and I have only broadbrushed my thoughts, but I can assure you it’s a mighty experience at the end of a mighty book. I only hope I have done it all justice.
      without end