The Early Bird Catches the Worm but the Wise Worm Stays in Bed — Rhys Hughes
My previous reviews of Rhys Hughes: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/494-2/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
My previous reviews of Rhys Hughes: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/494-2/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
A hilarious twist in the resolution of a would-be love triangle among humans, where also a picnic hamper in a car and a boarded-up house in the back of beyond and a potential storm flood pretend to peer closer at each other but already knowing to expect themselves to be there. It’s just a question of an appearance of omniscience.
Not about a trophy wife as such, but part of this story’s big game at least was tempting the reader to construe what the ending of this couple’s hunting survivalism story in a wayside cottage was likely to be before he or she had read the ending!
THE 4-D MIND
Tessellated!
“, under diminishing arches lower than hands and knees.”
A story not about genius or masterpieces but about everything as prototypes. Including the inventor and the woman he invented who tells this story about him. Via an invented leasehold narrator? Or even an invented freehold author? But who invented him? Is this a new proof of God beyond teleology or ontology?
“‘Our dreams, schemes and constructs cannot be surpassed,’ they argued. ‘Their sheer scale precludes any improvement.’ They often cited this very tower as an example. The limits of grandeur had been reached here, they insisted: a tower carved out of a single tusk of a giant catoblepas.”
A story full of such wonderful passages, as we dupe even ourselves about the contrast between the dowdy and the glorious. Even my own wyvern is scrawny. My brass head — that makes all of me — unpolished. (One should never polish brass?) But this story remains resplendent with such ingrowing and outgrowing paradoxes. A would-be Rhysian classic. If only eyes that can read are able to cross over to it. Any crimson beards, notwithstanding.
On internet: Polished brass looks lovely, but over time, brass often begins to lose its shine and ends up looking tarnished and dull. Thankfully, you can usually return brass to its shiny state…
My third and fourth earliest, ‘Big Game’ (which was published in Dementia 13 in an issue following one in which I read the first story of yours I ever encountered, ‘Between White Lines’), and ‘The 4-D Mind’, both written in 1990 but not published for a couple of years after that.
My 11th earliest, ‘Nathaniel’, from 1991.
My 17th earliest, ‘Reflections from a Brass Head’, from 1992 (also published in an issue of Dementia 13… :-)
“They watched the house from the shelter of the park opposite, disguised as perverts to avoid drawing attention to themselves.”
I am surprised I have not read a story before by Rhys Hughes that so ably sets out his known views on the artistry of depression (eg the Horror genre) and the blight of needing to be unhappy to create such art. A man whose cabbage smells and recluse nature had led to lucrative and, to his friends’ eyes, great art but then these spying friends were dismayed to see his unhappiness dissipated by his getting a girl friend. And these friends seek to rectify the situation for posterity’s sake, with a punchline to die for.
(The title of this whole book also provocative in this light?)
“My apologies. I have lately been wallowing in the filth of Tartarus,…”
Roedelius composed A Walk in the Paradise Gardens, did he not? I just managed, with that question, the ultimate triple bluff fiction transplant in all reviewing history. A foolhardy business, I admit, because if I had missed by just one note, I would now bear the soul of Rhys Hughes!! The Devil mostly takes the hind legs first.
“The wholeness of her body, it seemed, was actually important to her.”
Mrs Robinson’s once young graduate of English lit, is faced with saving her, in the face of superstitious satansims from the surrounding common folk, and tempted by severe Reeves, not to save her from an unlucky fall down a cliff because she spurned Robbie-Grillet in favour of Jane Austen. Lit English, indeed. Hello, Mrs Robinson, good bye. As all sublime thunders ensue and an authorial concertina audit trail from Mrs McGeeney towards Pepys as a peeping tom is couched in the most remarkable prose from this author’s pen. I understand not a word if it, but it is grotesquely and brilliantly lit.
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And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson
Jesus loves you more than you will know
Wo wo wo
God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson
Heaven holds a place for those who pray
Hey hey hey, hey hey hey
We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files
We’d like to help you learn to help yourself
Look around you all you see are sympathetic eyes
Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home
And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson,
Jesus loves you more than you will know
Wo wo wo
God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson
Heaven holds a place for those who pray
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey
Hide it in the hiding place where no one ever goes
Put it in your pantry with your cupcakes
It’s a little secret just the Robinson’s affair
Most of all you’ve got to hide it from the kids
Koo-koo-ka-choo, Mrs. Robinson,
Jesus loves you more than you will know
Wo wo wo
God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson
Heaven holds a place for those who pray
Hey, hey, hey hey, hey, hey
Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon
Going to the candidates’ debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you’ve got to choose
Every way you look at this you lose
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you
Wu wu wu
What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson
Jolting Joe has left and gone away
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey
— Simon and Garfunkel
A momentous complaint from the eponymous roller of a boulder up a bigger boulder. A complaint that accounts of his doings are wrong, and about this myth that he failed at this myth, by actually getting it to the top… an ignition for our life itself. Well, there is no love lost. Homer is probably dead now, anyway.
“Sitting in the park, on the way home, two young lovers carved a heart and initials on my trunk.”
An engaging word-symphony in four numbered movements about a man turning into a tree from a seed in his neck. I don’t think he ever considers the possibility that, rather than a seed that invaded him from outside, it came from within him organically like a tumour. Nor does the author consider it, I guess. That possibility of non-omniscience, for me, makes it even more effective in its adumbranching of our human condition, that ebb and fallow of nymphs and naiads with bank employees and smartphone users.
“It would have been highly impractical for him to lock away his entire population in real dungeons. No, the King’s dungeons were not physical structures, but corresponding states of mind. Nevertheless, they were every bit as cramped and bleak.”
A prophecy of Trump. An example of a tale that they told forward now, rather than back then. But more a fable than a tale. Read it and see how this is a remarkable item of such literature bearing in mind what has happened since. And a moral means to a new end. And I also loved the one-legged God called Hopp! He lost it, I guess, in a prayer that backfired.
“The barbarians are closing in on all sides. In recent years, they have taken to raiding our homes, carrying off our young, polluting our environment with their foul diseases. The wild one, well versed in their ways, will be a valuable asset to us. We will be able to make plans. We will be able to retaliate.”
Except for mites that jump from fur to skin and then back again , as if forever. A new fable of the Noble Savage that we can co-opt to defend ourselves against even wilder ones among us. But can any of us humans ever be noble?
“(Shadows and tall trees. Nymphs and sprites cavorting with each other through the heavy sunflakes that fell from enormous sunflowers, heady scented and full.)”
Heady stuff, one of Rhys’s best. About the gods uploft with roofing and plumbing problems who once hired a typical handyman from our world, you know the sort who caused a lot of hair tearing out by the gods, and a couple of nymphs going home with him. They need to hire him again, but without the hassle. And there is some beautiful stuff placed between parenthesised monologues of the handyman himself and between the connivance scenes of the gods. I did not understand the final punch line. Until I realised that a final closing parenthesis is like a rainbow. Writers, both of us, still falling?
“(Had I fallen, I would never have known the joy of impact. I would have starved to death before I reached the ground. Such was my present altitude that songs sung in my grandfather’s day had only just reached it. Infinitely dissipated, they warbled past like the sighs of a ghost. It has been said that the first man to climb this ladder fell off near the top and is still falling.)”
An argument between two neighbours about which of them should next run the nursery of children, citing different activities and trips with which they would each regale the children. Another neighbour – who is currently painting the colours and scenes of today’s late autumn in our world – acts as a seasoned peacemaker. If I now regaled you with the story’s beautifully conjured ending, it would spoil it for you.
“And he saw himself in the future looking back in his memory at this scene; and he knew this was the extra step of distance necessary… […] …so the old man he would become would dream about the youth who was gliding into this adventure, first as voyager, then as voyeur”
As would the author himself look back at his early work today? This erotic ‘world muse’ or tauntress and its wordplay of temptations with outside observation by statues (with today’s smartphones?) Absolutely incredible. A Rhysian masterpiece, overlooked, since original publication, till now?
‘The Manticore’ was written in 1993 but not published until 1999 (in The Dream Zone #4 apparently). It was accepted for publication in an anthology too, but it never appeared there. I suspect it’s one of my (many) stories that have only ever been read by a small handful of people. But that’s true of all the stories in this book, I think.
“Once I was young, quick in mind and body. The strength of the body has waned, to be sure, but the mind is as sharp as ever.”
And mine is still sharp enough to perceive this otherwise fantastical Swiftian tale told by one of the characters to another with some very nice touches of creative absurdity as a very early Brexit prophecy. Just read it and see. It all fits in. The portal to a land endingUK, a Shangri La for the new or native to come or go and others to stay, and why to board up the portal and the obsession concerned with it, or not, and why or how to leave or remain. The whirlpool as an emblem of the politics involved. Also read about the book that told us all the myths and physical idiosyncrasies about those who are said to live there. And much more.
“It was irresponsible of you to take such a risk with the lives of others. Your ambition might have destroyed them as well as yourself.”
“He was my tortoise. I think you’d better try to fish him out.”
I have always been fascinated by the most famous of Zeno’s paradoxes and this tale of academic scientific rivalry is far from academic. Even the rivalry itself and its repercussions are subject to such a paradox, even this review, the only real-time review that can see the Gestalt as a tantalising target knowing forever that it cannot reach it. A bit like the optimum backstop. Wry as well as rueful.
Early or late, the worm will never catch the bird. But especially vice versa.
(Today I synchronously had other worms caught by another paradox, one called insanity: TAKE THE WAY HOME: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/11/01/years-best-weird-fiction-volume-five/#comment-14116)
Ostensibly, a satire on psychiatrists who have pretentious methods and are obsessed with Freudian sex and diagnosing other sexual hang-ups in their patients, to the extent of earbrushing out all else that the patient reveals about marital problems. Here, a wife who steals the king-size double duvet in the night, leaving the husband frigid. Some nice touches.
“; no one can say for sure whether it is connected to anything, or what might happen if it was.”
Probably the most original Kafkaesque story I have ever read, crammed with ideas to take away with you and treasure.
“My voice has a leatherwood honey timbre, a caramel tone that can smooth the ear of any who listen.”
‘“No.” He chewed at his bottom lip. “There is no comparison. Listen to me. When you cross a road in front of a moving vehicle, you have a choice. You have control. Your death is your own. But up there you are nothing. You have to die with people you do not know, with people you do not like. Besides, there is a big difference between the five-second collision and the fifteen-minute plummet.’”
“I knew for certain now that it would never be possible to convince him, that my exercise in style was over; that I had failed.”
This is a significant work about the fear of flying. And the lot of one man among many. How have I not read before something so central to my own angst of life? How has a writer like this transcended his own chutzpah of optimism?
Perhaps that’s why it has been broadly hidden till now?
We are all passengers on this planet.
“What has gone wrong with the world?”
A truly amazing wordplay extravaganza about the drumming up of freaks for a freak show business. Possibly the most amazing wordplay of this writer’s career. Sad, too, in its own way.
“And there I am, at the top of the hill, and I make a perfect loop with my body and I roll down, away, faster and faster, gathering momentum until I am no more than a blur.”
“The coriander snapped and hissed in the pan like the pods of his desire; the angry oil swirled in agitated circles like the ichor of his lust.”
From one astonishing story to another, this a paean of love and lust to a woman as a vessel of various spices, with sexuality as well as romance, explicitly tumescent in one passage, if not with capsi-cum!
A paradox of both fulfilment and destruction. A World Muse of curried flavours and favours.
Adds to another hindsight frisson of sadness I noted in my previous entry.
Essential reading for all lovers of a whole genre of literature, a genre if you read the whole of his canon of fiction (or most of it, as I have), the bounded but boundless genre that can only be defined by his by-line and name.
“But then I remember why I must catch this bus: it is because I must travel to work every morning. And why do I work? It is because I need money for the bus-fare.”
This has suddenly erupted into my reading-mind. A classic beyond classics, perhaps. A stoical view of life in our series of generations within my living purview, left-wing and factorial, not part of, while not being part of, one’s own observations. Bus journeys and tedious jobs. ‘Making chain’ is a genius trope for what I mean, but what do I mean? Rhys Hughes as an apotheosis of Lee Rourke and vice versa. With elements of Charles Wilkinson. But Rhysianism is essentially unique at its nub and flare.
Arguably, now, my favourite Rhys Hughes story!
“I am forced to frequent their realm, the labyrinth of terraced streets that define their mood and manner, the greasy alleyways. There is no golden cord to lead me outside. From the railway bridge it is just possible to glimpse the lands beyond the factories, all out of reach and pure. In the library it is possible to read about them, tracts of open country, rural lanes, places where apples come not in tins, where bread is the colour of melting snow.”
Amazing. I have just quoted all that because it is in incredible resonance with — but indirectly linked, by a story quite different — a story called Garbage Men I read half an hour ago and reviewed here about an ex-student and writer … The repercussions of comparison are staggering.
This Rhysian story in isolation — and there is no possibility that either author will have had the opportunity to read each other’s story, and they are so utterly different as stories, too — has a fantastic insight into the observation of students, invoking references to Candide and God in the Basement. And much more. Another classic!
It seems appropriate that, exactly a year ago, I completed the above review of this author’s own ‘love stories’, a book with a cover of a man with a scythe…and that today I have just read this, the next story….
BRACKET
“The couple jumped onto the table, amid the clatter of plates, and devoured each other, finally satisfying themselves in the most unimaginative position of all.”
A powerfully experimental work about sexual positions, with many references to Africa. Full of images and events to absorb and then allow percolation in the reader (mine still percolating!), amid some very strange use of numbered brackets or parentheses of prose. Seems at first to relativise or prophesy or transgress or enhance the changing stances of the world, the world in which we live, the stances regarding greater sensitivity to the interface of gender and sex, and the care (or lack of it) with which they address each other.
“I wish you all success in your forthcoming war with Jersey and trust that recalcitrant isle shall become the latest seashell in your crown, the freshest haddock in your nets, the sweetest bougainvilia on your lattice.”
A richly Rhysian wordplay (possibly the richest possible, to the nth degree of constructive nonsense) – a bracket is like a scythe blade – a wordplay on battles for the Channel Islands and other politics, including with the French about toupées and perruques, shenanigans that seem to strongly pre-echo the destructive nonsense of the Brexit Bracket. (“My fears are grounded in the metaphysical — that my words will eventually turn full circle and re-assume the cloak of meaning.”) Again, read it and see. Also, I loved the word ‘Whimocracy’!
“Any message received from a star more distant than 100 light years would indicate a superior technology. Contact was the last thing they wanted.”
Hilarious or absurd or meaningful or chance codes of human behaviour splattergunned across the universe to hopefully apologise — as a single signalled configuration from among those codes — for an earlier insult that we infer we, as humans, once issued to a cosmic contact out there … issued from an earlier human civilisation now long dead? I now intend to seek the whole canon of Rhys Hughes fiction text (the most fictionatronically fertile place to find it) for a hidden message.
Maybe I have already found it in the title of this book?
“The whole world is about three drinks behind.” — Humphrey Bogart
“— here in the jungles of Zugzwang — I am able to declare the independence of my very own Banana Republic!”
A flash feast fiction. Not a one-trick pony, more a one-joke chess move. Forced to laugh.
“Silence is unknown in Venice — it is always right to compete with the sea, shouting down the slap of the waves on the steps and mooring-poles.”
A wonderful evocation of Venice in body and soul. With a narrator giving the inverse Judas kiss on behalf of the Papacy to someone that arrives regularly with a particular rhythm of the year. A kiss that sends that entity “dry drowning” into the Venetian square … I sensed a prophecy, here, of Trump, I sensed something even more evil, I sensed something strangely beatific, too, I sensed all manner of things. It was a catharsis, but of what? The Pelican’s new clothes à la Leena Krohn?
“I saw he intended to sound the final trump from the middle of the Piazzetta, hemmed in by the splendour and pomp.”
SIMPLICITY
“Reality is simplicity itself once you understand that we aren’t supposed to know what it’s about.”
Conundra about a Mr Wolfe on a train journey with his son, where ‘voyage’ was quickly losing its ‘bon’. Dr Fraser boards the train and we slowly realise the nature of Mr Wolfe, and an embedded moon making his state permanent, also making me think I am a prophetic genius about this story by mentioning Krohn’s Mr Pelican novella in my previous entry above! Plain and simple.
Love letters to Alphonse from Windmill, but such love, on his part, we know, is as dead as a dodo.
“There are no roads to my house.”
That is what I have often said. An obvious lie of the land.
Meantime, this is the story of Judith’s noble act of dealing with the logistics of her own house, the tree beside it and the consequent spoilt view. I suppose any view depends on how you approach it. And whether you are early or late in the day. A bit like reading this book.
“To misunderstand I have to get the understanding wrong, but I don’t begin to even understand what you mean,” I said.
But I did eventually. This brilliantly and poignantly absurdist mission to stop the rain in Swansea (unlike Havana, not purpose-built for being a rainy place) is eventually an inspiring call to duty. Tiny bit by bit, we can make things slightly better. A bit better.
I mentioned Voltaire in a similar context here in The Riddled Man yesterday.
This is a story of encounter built upon an ultra-extrapolation of language called SFINGLISH, as if from that in Finnegans Wake, Clockwork Orange, Riddley Walker… interspersed with our own present English embracing it. Full of paradoxes about language development and the relativity of future / present time. The evaluative relativity of this story is an even more complex undertaking….
Potentially tomorrow’s classic. The early worm’s late catch?
“Female to males; male to females.”
“You are whatever a drowning person desires you to be?”
“Yes, apart from merciful…”
A major work, a fable or myth or Ovid as Void in metamorphoses, as the sea kidnaps Belinda for its detritus-accretive-civilising city of Glugville, but libido for its own sake wins out – and becomes rain over Swansea?
Transcendent stuff. Pity the few people who will not eventually read it.
“There are many strollers on the shores of the world,…”
A Socratic philosophical debate that out-debates all such debates to such an extent that my mind has not emerged unscathed from reading it. The number of us who have read it will no doubt increase exponentially as long as we each in turn manage to forget having read it beyond the time it takes to describe it in real-time no further than this full-stop.
“Soaked and chilled and imprisoned underground, his natural good cheer vanished completely.”
A work of extreme free-wheeling idea- and word-association of halves and wholes concerning a character called RUSTUS appropriately hoarse… Readers and other fiction works threatened or threatening to encompass this story character and each other. I happen already to be real-time reviewing THE RUST MAIDENS here…hmmm.
“Unlike most of the other instruments, a washboard doesn’t need to be tuned.”
A whimsical fantasy told as if it is solid logic, a Rhysian trait in keeping with the author’s own static growth as a prodigious child-like mind. Here someone is taken to musically entertain the Sun going out to a restaurant near Pluto. Shell phones and smalls. Sweat suds and skiffles.
“She was an expert at knitting but only did it before battles.”
A most moving portrait of the greatest, most stoical Barbarian Gran ever. Including a description of knitting that has never been knitted before in literature, I guess. And about her knitting coincidentally the exact number of balaclavas for those men felled in the latest snowy battle. With what upon whose heads we witness her sowing a “Keep them warm and dying”…., the carrion crows notwithstanding.
“…in her senescent prime.”
(Knitted worms, late and early, each knitted stitch eyeless within, and bone icicles, too?)
Someone who is embroiled in the frustrating dilemma or paradox of using the ‘phonetic alphabet’ words to identify other words.
Or Zeno’s Osmosis of the Singular Sample as a way to taste something uniquely sampled that you want others to taste after you have tasted it, including yourself.
“Use your head to keep your head, he told himself!”
A sort of duel in a war in an obscure chapter of history, where, while day-dreaming, the otherwise chivalrous loser has his neck so neatly sliced through, his head remains precariously in place… (if you see such wars as a series of individual duels).
Only one author from any corner of literature could have thought of this arguably wildest ever plot scenario and a possible solution with bookends on a bookshelf and perhaps extraneous queries in my mind about upper case decapitation…
Coincidentally, yesterday, I read a story, from a currently more famous corner of literary history, about a somewhat less absurd but equally mind-tickling duel, one as written by Vladimir Nabokov: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/10/06/collected-stories-vladimir-nabokov/#comment-14348
“The river was the fluid extension of her ongoing orgasm.”
And a man in the pink canoe sailing it, calling across to another in a parallel tributary mainstream, going whence he had just come. ‘Come’ being the operative word, yet neither coming or going but straddling polar opposite emotions in two women, at either end. Hope that is not a spoiler, getting his end away. Probably something too deep for the likes of me.
“It happened, is happening, will happen.”
Seemingly Spenglery wordplay based on his book ‘Decline of the West’. Philosophical history and geography. Most of it sadly went over my head. Some of it, happily.
My quite recent review of Douglas Thompson’s ‘The Fallen West’: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/05/24/the-fallen-west-douglas-thompson/
“They had folded themselves into origami cheetahs.”
The conceit here is that Grandma’s homily about the pounds looking after themselves, when pounds were notes not just coins like pennies, and it leads to the notes becoming autonomously inimical to their owner. The essence of counterintuitive thinking.
“I think it would have been easier to boil water for a cup of tea, but I was asked to boil a kettle, so that’s what I’m doing…”
A major unmissable Rhysian tour de force, of substantial length. A cornucopia of old and new jokes, paradoxes, mind-benders and fictionatronics, from a prodigious child-like mind. Rhys as an original beyond any possible originality of any writer-artist as well as Rhys as a writer-artist utterly separate from the work created by that same writer-artist.
“I love paradoxes so much that I’d like to kiss and marry them.”
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I think this book proves that Rhys has not developed as a writer-artist over the years but has always been the writer-artist he always was from the beginning. An often underrated writer-artist. Ranging from pure genius to downright silly to both of these qualities at once. Like the words ‘cleave’, ‘ravel’ and ‘peel’ meaning the same as as their opposite versions of themselves as un-words.
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