Raphus Press
Just received two books with work by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel and Damian Murphy.
My previous reviews of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/raphus-press/
If I review these, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
LIMINAL
translated into English from ‘Sevastopol’, Count Lyon F. Tolstoy
In among the amputations and other treatments by medics of Sevastopol’s defenders in apparent preparation for our entering the Bastion…
“He had always been aware of certain deficiencies within his nature, as if he’d somehow been assigned the wrong station in life and was unable to perform the tasks entrusted to him.”
Of course, Ghislaine, the ostensible man in this work who(m) the protagonist perhaps becomes, is also the unusual name of a mentoring woman in the recent headlines of international news (most probably before this work was written) concerning a Duke or Prince who has never been master of his own inherited portfolio of status. Here he is tempted by Ghislaine into behind the doors of this building that contains its own citadel or bastion, a twerp in Antwerp, as it were, but also echoing the fighting battles hinted at by the Tolstoy within this highly enticing Damian-infused audit trail of occult presentations, exhibits and visions. One of which is a Cage of silence played on an old record-player. An audit trail without grooves…
“…yet the feeling imparted by the images that surrounded him was as erotic as it was savage. […]
Men and women swarmed right over one another […] as if engaged in some ferocious dance.”
My previous reviews of the author Damian Murphy: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/damian-murphy/
“By not dwelling on the repulsive enormity of the cleaning task, he could fix details, loose fragments…”
Whether bastion, citadel, fortress or casemate, this is boy Ivan’s redoubt. As if further blending Sebastopol with a Cage of Silence, the history-contexted task of clearing the corpses creates almost an occult power in Ivan, until he himself reaches , as we all do, our hoped-for “night of sleep”. Only today did I finally clock that ‘vault’ is both a dark oubliette and a leap forward. My own son’s name is Ivan.
My previous reviews of the author Alecebiades Diniz Miguel: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/alcebiades-diniz-miguel/
The English text of this sometimes black-leafed book ends on page 24 but then followed by further pages numbered by Roman numerals containing what I presume to be Portuguese translations of the foregoing works as reviewed above. There are a small number of other oddments of design, decoration and text to round it off as gestalt. In your own time.
WASTELANDS by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel
.The second book (to be described later) starts with…
THE SENSES FUGUE
“…one of my dreams as a young man — in school, in college — was to adulterate, to defile all available books, turning my pages into indistinguishable ink blots.”
…Ink blots on text, not on a book’s images, engravings etc.
“The heat and humidity of that land conspired to make the vegetation less a paradise and much more a grinding machine, designed to crush the flesh of animals so that they would become nutrients for the dense, infinite verdure.”
An expedition to South American jungle by one caught up with the racial ‘engineering’ of the German Nazis and a most telling description of what he found there. In a relative short space, it is teeming with philosophical implications and living rot. A sort of gestalt overseeing body count Frankenstein. With a throwaway ending situated on the Brazilian-Venezuelan border that makes one hold one’s breath as everything pans out today and as we work and play, eyes wide shut. Coincidentally, as I started to read this work, I was already listening to a recording of last night’s Late Junction from BBC Radio 3 featuring Venezuelan music. More human seeds and elephants in rooms, I guess.
Hindered or arguably helped by inconsistent en-dashes and some dislocations of syntax in this piece, we learn of the magic lantern work of the protagonist, beset by a chest illness and modern techniques soon to make redundant his already groundbreaking methods of showing motion amid more traditional static sights, delicate crystals and near invisible audiences…
…which brings me to this enticing thickly hard-covered tenuity of an aesthetic book itself, numbered 19 out of 22 copies, 40 pages, and containing black-leafed sections — and other decorative or textual accoutrements, as with the first book.
end