ORTHOGONAL Vol. 2: Code
Kindle Edition
John Bowker, Editor
Stories by KS O’Neill, Eliot Fintushel, Amy Power Jansen, Jason Kimble, Teo Yi Han.
My review of Orthogonal Vol. 1 here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/01/23/orthogonal-the-war-at-home-vol-1/
When I review Vol. 2, my comments will appear in the thought stream below….
By KS O’Neill
“Have you ever told someone the story of a pornographic video?”
A leminscate with a Zeno’s Paradox glitch known as a squid story that is a not a story till it is a story, as influenced by squid who can see through the artificiality of our human narrative processes. Seems to fit exactly with my gestalt real-time reviewing, garnering a gestalt from leitmotifs (like car racing and my girl’s voice). Now I just need to avoid the squid glitch of blocked hindsight. My actual review of this mind-blinking story is not what I say about it but I what I don’t say about it.
“The squid find us interesting because not only can we never tell the truth, we can’t even hear the truth.”
By Eliot Fintushel
“She warned us how somebody from outside would be coming and how we had to pull in our nail and turn around our eyeball, so as not to, so as not to, so as not to, so as not to—offend.”
I loved this reading experience but I can’t tell you exactly why. It is as if narrative lessons have already been taken from the Squid in the first story. It is a Joycean stream of conscious that actually makes more sense than Joyce ever did in Finnegans Wake, although I also love that book, too, and once did a detailed on-line real-time review of it. Don’t let that put you off. Here we have ostensibly a feisty oldster giving a young shaver a bit of his sharp tongue and a summary of what has happened or not happened in all their lives, in a world where the word ‘word’ has ‘or’ embedded but otherwise ‘or’ does not exist as a word, a finger and a leg and a turned-round eyeball, notwithstanding. It involves retrocausality being obliterated by retrocausality itself, so a self-defeating retrocausality, and a spaceship that thus did not arrive, and you can read all manner of scenarios here, I guess, upon re-reading it, but my gestalt real-time book reviews are always upon a first reading of each work, in case a second reading expunges the first. I have so far only read this story once. It is already enticing me to read it again. But this needs to be read aloud as a first reading, but I only realised that by the time I had finished my first reading. I suggest you read aloud this work as a first reading of it while using an American accent with as much swagger you can summon from a sedentary position of old age. And wear a blue suit. Or nothing.
By Amy Power Jansen
“As hunger cannot imagine food, as thirst cannot imagine water, emptiness cannot imagine full.”
…and as gender cannot imagine male or female, we now have the pronouns necessary to allow us the removal of that ‘or’ in respect of the previous story between the feisty oldster masquerading as Aunt Bea, or vice versa?
The subtitle of this book is CODE and you certainly need to crack it in order to understand this story. The squid’s narration here has actually gained much territory in the spaces between the words and the paragraphing. Whilst we had retrocausal time in the previous story, now we have retrocausal space with a palimpsest of emptiness and fullness, not emptiness OR fullness. I sense the Nowrk, now, or , nor, OK?, works towards hir real name. I sense this name will become clearer later, assuming that, as most of my real-time reviews often discover, the authors in an anthology often work towards a gestalt, not an intentional or planned or confessed collaboration as such, but a preternatural gathering of forces beyond their control. A Jungian code?
By Teo Yi Han
“True/False?”
That Either/Or theme in this book. A perfect short/short that is a portrait of the dichotomies and gang gestalt that we have seen uniquely played out in these fictions. This one is the gang’s coda. Telling of a loving relationship (from its inside and outside), a relationship where, I infer, genders and intentions strobe. The first time I have ever seen my obsession with Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy (in which I have been interested since 1967, adumbrated by me on-line in the last fifteen years) now played out in naked Jungian code. Above and beneath textured-stylish and/or staccato prose. The tutelary squid, notwithstanding.
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