Infra-Noir – The Literary Gazette, Issue No. 1
ZAGAVA 2018
Editors: Alcebiades Diniz Miguel & Jonathan Wood
Work by Brian Howell, Thomas Strømsholt, the editors, Chris Mikul, Anon, Avalon Brantley, Luiz Nazario, Nigel Humphreys.
When I review this publication, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
Title taken from that of Dan Ghetu’s edited anthology Infra Noir, and the Romanian art history that inspired it:
More details below when I read this gazette.
by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel, Jonas Ploeger and Jonathan Wood
“Infra-Noir will call for you in the heart of the night and tap you on the shoulder, seeping into your unconsciousness like a thawing waterfall as mid-winter dies and the deceit of Spring falters and concupiscent Summer approaches.”
Possibly the world’s first editorial and publishing introduction to various items of poetry and poetic prose that is aspirationally more poetic than what it is introducing. Either a self-satire as an over-reaching augury of what is within or an over-arching apotheosis of a potential gestalt that it has itself already ignited.
My previous reviews of Alcebiades Miguel Diniz: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/alcebiades-diniz-miguel/
My previous reviews of Jonathan Wood: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/the-new-fate-by-jonathan-wood/ and
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/jonathan-wood/
THE SHORE by Brian Howell
“‘I heard’, she added eagerly, ‘that everything is really more or less grey, if we could see how it really is.‘”
I can attest that in the 1950s that was actually so. The flash of colour on the front cover of this newspaper, notwithstanding.
This classic Howell crams much into a relative short space. A 50 year old man as protagonist who works in Japan currently in Hawaii for a conference, if I recall correctly. Reading minds are more taken with the young beautiful or cute girl who almost pesters him, and a girl with a salacious father, he witnesses, and the the mere paid touch of near passion our protagonist seeks elsewhere, with the colour of the sun that merely stains the black hole (sleep paralysis) of the newspaper’s front cover, now gone in the image below that accompanies this story, like the sun that outshines an orange bikini. I was more intrigued with the Japanese girl he saw who still wore a ‘cold mask’ in Hawaii. Pearl Harbour, and its audit trail, notwithstanding.
My previous reviews of Brian Howell: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/brian-howell/
“The office stank of stale liver pâté, rank armpits, years of gastric odours and angst.”
For me, another authorial classic, this time Strømsholt’s. It is very easy to use the word Kafkaesque, and it is too glib here for me to use it. It is far more than that. On the surface, a tale of a man trying to gather papers together via a consulate to enter another country. Full of detailed idiosyncrasies and obliquities. But the coup de théatre is the very effective method of typography, whether an authorial or publisher’s decision; it clinches this story’s deal with the reader. An ironic emblem of the people-stuffed passageway the protagonist starts not queuing in and the eventually missing document. A blank story within a full one. You must see it for yourself.
My previous reviews of Thomas Strømsholt: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/thomas-stromsholt/ and https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/o-altitudo/
“, the evil spell of its name (which already pleased the Romanian surrealists).”
A non-fiction, but philosophically rarefied or poetic, essay about this gazette (3 numbered parts of a first chapter on one page?)
It seems to be significant to how I have seen Gestalt real-time reviewing over the years and to something I posted earlier today before reading this essay (here)!
“, often designed in a kind of superposition that makes the recognition of fragments impracticable.”
Thus denying me my Gestalt! That impossible goal.
Yet, this fabulous fiction, this possibly Borgesian vision, poetically textured, follows a startling quotation from Swedenborg, and is a sort of Byronic or Blakean Darkness, filtered by an image of the eponymous CINEMA and its autonomous projector of false Potemkyms….on the observed genius-loci outskirts of Buenos Aires.
RESURRECTING SANDOR by Chris Mikul
is an interesting essay on Sandor Berger, a resurrection that to my eyes looks overdue.
A poem that contains the words “Brevity” and “Time / Treasured” and “Serendipity” and “Distance / Horizon”.
I will concentrate particularly on Serendipity…
Today, I happened earlier to share today’s three year anniversary post on Facebook. In hindsight, relevant to the whole poem.
And a few days ago I wrote the following to someone in a letter (photocopied by me in case it was later lost in the post):
by Avalon Brantley
Quite a long exposition of — or coda to — this author’s own novel of the same name. A possible breach of the Intentional Fallacy philosophy in which I have been interested my whole adult life, but it no doubt provides much further food for thought regarding this truly great work by the now noted author who sadly passed away recently at such a young age.
My previous review of this novel here https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/05/08/the-house-of-silence-avalon-brantley/ and my tribute to the author here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/avalon-brantley-1981-2017/
“With the emerging future silence
Laid out in envelopes
Upon the mat.”
As a writer of handwritten letters (as exemplified already above), this quotation from this poignant sequence of poems had a particularly poignant resonance with me.
Atmospheric sequence, too, with a bus ride… and spiritual thoughts…
Essential for Jonathan Wood readers.
Translated by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel
“: it was not a standard ruin, like so many in Germany, but an authentic ruin, like something from a fairy tale.”
A haunting portrait of a self that needs to pitch academic work against the time taken for daily needs in our times, and a dream of a Zeno’s Paradox like ferry trip to the atmospherically depicted island, where self and culprit also compete in nightmarish symbiosis. Like dreading you are dreadfully worse than the self that you have perhaps murdered by murdering children? We are all villains as created by our times?
“Multiplying.”
As if life is stymied by an eternal stammer of death. No articulation, so only humming or whistling possible. A revisiting recurrence of what one was before being beyond-dead, a consciousness of self as culprit (cf the Peacock Island), here absorbing the shrouded shapes of others, emerging as if from darkness at the cusp of life and death towards earthly life again and punishment by death again. I was entranced by the awakening of this self as an infra-noir status, ‘beyond dead’, as he puts it to himself on this page. Not beyond death but beyond dead, just another stutter-line of existence, as if life is a strobe. Like being beyond angry (as some people express it when they are furious or enraged as they are more often than not these days) or beyond oneself, out of control, yet still controlled by one’s previous consciousness and conscience of deeds, a strain to express things or get the words out, until, as a baby, the words smoothly kick in, unless you stay ever thus, with all the knowledge in the head but still handicapped by what one cannot say. Write it down, I say, while you can. As here.
You see, it may be a key to unlocking the Zeno’s Paradox.
That autonomous camera in the Black Box? A Howl’s Black Hole? Hawled upon a guillotine with a continuous faster-than-light slicing?
If there is to be another issue of this Literary Gazette, I look forward to it. Beyond dead.
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