www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/justin-isis/
https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/i-wonder-what-human-flesh-tastes-like/
https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/the-master-in-cafe-morphine/
…but this depends whether you see the smears of chocolate pudding as symbolic of blood and the echoing movements across the globes as part of a pattern that always ends in war and horror? Or in mindless partying? Or a third way: in roast lamb as a treat for dinner, but some believe eating meat is worse than starving, especially if you’re trying to float in weightless space, with all limbs or lambs displayed in a gestalt of synchronised swimming…?
“Mark was a marketer who marketed marketing techniques to marketers who marketed marketing techniques to marketers.”
A Walk in the Mark, too. A hilarious buzzword fest, from soccer-metaphors to all manner of networking nodes, Skyping, even travelling in Aiaigasa real-time, although I was told to be deadpan and laidback, not enthusiastic, about this long piece, especially as it contains a YouTube of a dog being tortured. LinkedIn and Patreon, notwithstanding. Below is my new marketing profile picture, about the same age as Trump, taken today on this hottest day of the year where the ice cream passages in this work have been welcome. I can’t stress enough the brexitstorm of product placements and nifty mission statements that this work contains. But it has an inner wisdom as a Swiftian moral that I try to encompass in my expression below.
“Look . . . maybe I got a little carried away with Korea . . .”
A sandbox for playing in a certain area of History, on the exact day today when the news tells me that N Korea returns some of the Americans who were killed in the 1950s during the Korean War. Very apt. Also an amusing encounter when Hirohito and MacArthur meet while working for a hotel. But where else can we play with history’s characters? Sometimes one character trying to dissolve another into non-existence? The reader, if my own sense of counterintuitive existence is to be believed, also competes with the author in the same sandbox. Fiction as a leasehold series of Imperial Rescripts by the freehold author as self-proclaimed Emperor. When it is the reader who really controls truth’s rendition by dint of authorial Intentional Fallacy propounded in the late 1940s or early 1950s!
“The first time I saw her was on the psychedelic trance floor.”
Two such posh toffs meet in London’s West End, having been contemporaries at a posh uni, yet one is completely down and out, the other still posh. The former explains to the latter that he met a 19 year old Italian girl and the rest is history. Now Italy is now more right wing than it ever was. Only Britgirl Alice saw doors as too small to get through…
NB. I see this book is advertised as having pleasant tales for young adults. But it has swear words, and dog torture, fake news and buzzwords ….and now intimations of Brexit. Most young adults voted against Brexit. Most posh people and old people voted for Brexit. Which wonderland or sandbox are YOU playing in?
“, and Wong watched him with a weary, brittle jeer.”
Is he a paper boy because I first meet him as described on the paper of this book? In deadpan Beckettian conversation about vaginas with a man in a bar. (Look at Gove’s mouth above.)
Anyway, WARNING ABOUT VIEWING the link below to a 19th century painting of one; as shown on an example of the corpses that have just rained down outside where they sit talking… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Origine_du_monde
Together with a few more product placements such as, not bowels, but “bowls of Kellogg’s Special K Multigrain & Honey”, this is a powerful portrait of a 72 year old man facing not the big K but the big C. A tragic painful end in prospect, only to be aborted by mixed equanimity and the dulling by dementia. And the petting of wild pets by our future. Nearly at the age of 72 myself, I can confirm that I have already spent at least one night on Mussorgsky’s bare mountain.
“Herbert! Good God! Is it possible?”
“Yes, my name’s Herbert. I think I know your face, too, but I don’t remember your name. My memory is very queer.”
“Don’t you recollect Villiers of Wadham?”
“So it is, so it is. I beg your pardon, Villiers, I didn’t think I was begging of an old college friend. Good-night.”
“My dear fellow, this haste is unnecessary. My rooms are close by, but we won’t go there just yet. Suppose we walk up Shaftesbury Avenue a little way? But how in heaven’s name have you come to this pass, Herbert?”
“It’s a long story, Villiers, and a strange one too, but you can hear it if you like.”
“Come on, then. Take my arm, you don’t seem very strong.”
— from THE GREAT GOD PAN by Arthur Machen (my quote from it, and not explicitly quoted within ‘The Unassailable Value of Human Dignity’)
This work is a listing of unpleasant habits or events in interface with our (anti-)miscegenate age (WARNING: unsuitable for the youngest of adults to read) but it is also a telling coda to MALICE AND MAJESTY read and reviewed about half an hour ago here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/07/18/tears-for-europa-d-p-watt/#comment-13307
Also a feast or orgy or semi-colons.
“WTF”
A genuine classic of hilarious Swiftian humour or of heartfelt seriousness about the Grace of God – such grace being a rabid pursuer rather than being a sought blessing, where only the Reprobate can assuage its blight and reap the benefits of not submitting oneself to it.
Towers of Coins, too.
Should be endlessly re-published.
“I wonder how I can get rid of him.”
…of King Plesasant Tales II? Or King Ludwig II? No, here it is the doppelgänger itself.
A second genuine classic in a row, this one stringing together hypnotically into a story all the German words that are often used in English.
Makes me love Brexit even more!
“yawing above the abyss”
This is a beautifully written story in the style of Ligotti that arguably outdoes anything Ligotti created. We all stand on each other’s shoulders. Those who wrote before us provide ladders from their own literary endeavour. Or one further loop from a knot.
PS: My own nœud de Ligotti: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/11/27/le-noeud-de-ligotti/
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