Crystal Castles: Invitations to the Voyages
RAPHUS PRESS MMXIX
Edited by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel
Stories by Ramon Lasalle, Rhys Hughes, Fernando Naporano, Justin Isis, Fábio Waki, Jonathan Wood, Chris Mikul, D.P. Watt, Thomas Phillips, Stephan Friedman, Tristan Corbière, Adam Cantwell.
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below.
“carrypo”
A strong neurotoxin upon neurotoxin where one either increases or heals the venom of the next, a rapture or ecstasy that the wind or word carries.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/ramon-lasalle/
One of my books that didn’t come by Amazon. Perhaps carried by another river, one nearer FRANCO than AL. Are any rivers as blue as its cover?
118 pages. Artfully filled and tastefully designed by the look of them.
“A path is dry, linear and long. A bath is wet, circular and squat.”
Pathos and bathos?
A pathetically and bathetically absurdist Socratic-dialogue, one that may have more wisdom than wisdom itself, with this author on child-like, defiant wordplay overdrive, a dialogue between a Count cured of being a vampire (I actually laughed aloud at the Nosferatu joke, having unnoticed the title till then!), the doctor who cured him, Prosperina who intermits with good bad-poetic songs by a strange ahead-of-his-times composer who sounds like one I would enjoy, and Others, (others literally). A debate on opposites. Leading to a need for a parachute to be invented. And olden days one ratchet behind or beyond elusive golden ones, I guess. Brilliant, and constructively clumsy. (BoJo’s clumsiness, elsewhere, meanwhile, is deadly. We need in UK more than just a parachute!)
“I can’t believe it was ever fashionable to be so clumsy.”
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The carrypo syndrome – two more possible sicnificant glitches: “He is dressed is (sic) black pyjamas.” – “Nor will I address you in pigeon (sic) English.” Appropriately, BEFORE I had read this new Rhysian classic, I wrote this morning (here) about a book called GLITCH: “‘He found glitches comforting […] it felt natural.’
…as do I. And I wonder if this is another glitch deliberately loaded into this book’s barrel of near-invisible glitches: ‘L-J discretely filmed her,’ (sic).”
by Fernando Naporano
A four line prose poem — automatic writing or deeply subtly meaningful?
My Gestalt reviews would want to believe it is both.
“I felt that the underground room existed not only beneath the city or beneath the world, but in some sense beneath the universe itself.”
This is an incredible feat of writing – with so many brilliantly described images I am constructively AND destructively crowded out with them – dreams and visions and realities that take you up and up and up … towards the underground room, a concept that I found utterly … well, I need to read it again, to see if I can actually reach it! And then read it countless times again to avoid reaching a dead end. Honestly!
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/justin-isis/
“Close to your body
Tight
To ascend”
AESTHESIA without SIN.
Striking enjambment and resolution.
A journey akin to that in the Isis, this time one’s human body itself as the new ever upward universe towards its unreachable underground room.
“And the ground runs faster
Right below
Right under”
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/07/09/the-conspirator-a-borgesian-tribute/#comment-16335
“far-away looks in their eyes as if they had tasted of the underside of Heaven…”
…or Blakean Hell? This ritual hit of hash, amid city riots outside and a friendly witness, I can almost feel hitting my brain, although I have never taken non-alcoholic drugs, so not able to compare or verify. Literature can be a hit, though, as it is here. All I know its another meaning-crammed ascent to the underground room, with a concomitant pyramid and much else.
Crystal Castles as an invitation to a voyage?
“multiple planes crashing”, etc, too, on a new 9/11 today!
My previous reviews of this author here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/the-new-fate-by-jonathan-wood/ & https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/jonathan-wood/
THE MELTING by Chris Mikul
“..,little squares of blotting paper with a coloured design on them — the ones we took were known as ‘Pink Pyramids’…”
,,,another drug hit or trip by literature for me, now literally, if blotting paper can be seen as a version of paper on which I read this story. Meanwhile, the remarkable vehicle for this is a story of a man in one of a few houses named after colours, who varies in his one trip between existence in Hell and real life. Plus a low-level anxiety prevalent in the 1980s. My own stems from the 1950s/1960s.
At the end of the day we are (unless we are people of colour) pink pyramids, upside down ones ever climbing towards the underground room?
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/chris-mikul/
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Cf the blue blotting paper I mention here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/05/22/the-deepest-furrow-jonathan-wood/ re the physical book of ‘The Deepest Furrow’ by Jonathan Wood (the writer who wrote the previous story above.)
From my story GENTLEMAN GEORGE that first appeared in ‘Roadworks’ magazine in 1999, and rewritten as AFTER YOU in my forthcoming book ‘Dabbling With Diabelli’ (Eibonvale Press):
“And the blotting-paper, too. But whether to the same famous person, Mr Copperlashes did not clarify. In any event, because of the many blots and doodles and mutant pixels on the blotting-paper, George assumed Mr Copperlashes meant an author had owned it. George saw with his mind’s eye – mind’s eye being an euphemism for the little moustachioed Brainwright who lived inside him – that a gentleman, not unlike Dickens in his later years, scribbled away upon sheaves of paper, testing out ideas on the blotter as well as using it to soak up excesses and peering through the thick roundel windows of his speck-ridden eyes. […] With a cluck of his tongue, he [Mr Copperlashes] brought out another folded parchment from his desk. It was completely black blotting-paper – or so badly stained with blots and doodles and holes, it seemed black. ‘He who used this blotter was really famous.’ Mr Copperlashes smiled as if he indeed realised he was talking to himself.”
“—a collapse into the miracle of your infinite becoming.”
That seems to summarise this whole book so far. This is indeed, for me, a major work, one that almost does – in fact DOES – what few other works of fiction do, if ever. It creates a new faith. A new transcendence. An epiphany. I will let you read it, without any intervening descriptions from me, as we travel from this woman’s bereavement with the vast window view left by her husband, towards crossing some brook of existence whereby WE are now in YOU. A study in ennui and glitch akin to and mutually complementing another book I happen to be simultaneously reading here.
My previous reviews of D.P. Watt here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/d-p-watt/
“So I ram margin comments through the arse of the book,”
This mind-frazzling complex representation of seeking self identity in history, architecture and book editions not only contains this whole book’s gestalt (here “another hit. Stimulants”) and upward-downward seeking, but also seeming to reflect the non-hit but margin-pencilling gestalt real time reviewer that is the me-self reading this.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/thomas-phillips/
“His soul swayed between the pleasure of passion and the guilt of sin.”
A ‘default guilt’ that we all feel (well, at least I do) is perfectly expressed here, balanced between the beautiful description of a slightly delayed drug hit (persuaded by a friend) as an Eve comes to his Adam AND a Metamorphosis into a lowly worm squirming in anguish. It allowed me, for the first time, to fully understand, perhaps inadvertently, Kafka’s work that, amazingly, I happened by chance yesterday to read and real time review here.
This whole book, bar one small poem, yet to be read, is thus now apotheosised. The up ever up, the down ever down. Toward the base of Heaven.
“Everything was interconnected…”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/stephan-friedman/
Also translated by Adam Cantwell
The book puckishly slouches towards a smoky Bethlehem in this short coda.
That amazing concept of ‘default guilt’ in the Friedman provocatively prevails. But smoke, as this book’s last clinch with its own gestalt, always rises, at least.
(My previous reviews of Adam Cantwell: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/adam-s-cantwell/)
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