Sunday, June 28, 2020

Fake Ass Lawyers - Justin Isis

 

8 thoughts on “Fake Ass Lawyers – Justin Isis

  1. Pages 5 – 19
    “Rintaro had been coughing for what felt like months even though it could not have been more than a week and a half; she visualized the immune system as a small, pale, beleaguered cartoon animal…”
    Or what might have once passed as the manipulated focus of a twelve year old’s onanism alongside a YouTube film filming a thirteen year old…. till reading this. Despite some constructive confusions as to backstories and stage names or real names or trade names, the mother of Rintaro is working as a hostess in a club where one of the customers is that erstwhile twelve year old now grown up… unless I am destructively confused instead! The textured style is pitch-perfectly wordtacular and, in one place at least, obsessed! Doesn’t do any 72 year old reader like me any good in this his due time of Midsommar.
    .
  2. Pages 19 – 32
    “Human beings seemed to be living lives of thoughtless routine punctuated briefly by meaningless events such as birth and divorce that in turn led to further routines.”
    I have recovered! … as the erstwhile side-character – with the obsessive trip alongside the YouTube video when he was 12 – let’s call him Taro – with his consuming backstory and equally consuming forward story – has taken over this text’s ‘routine’ of what he considers to be a wasted life from the future hostess in the club, and, indeed, Taro seems to have become our central real-time concern as he reaches an epiphany in the street, one featuring a purple ball, and his then accretive urge to assume a career as a fake lawyer, a ‘patchwork monster’ threatening to fill my Gestalt…. I am consumed, too. Albeit recovered from yesterday’s obsession of my own.
    “…strange maggots of thought.”
  3. Pages 32 – 40
    “‘Yes, Wódka Žołᾳdkowa Gorzka,’ the bartender said. ‘It’s infused with herbs.’”
    But what herbs, does one drink it without knowing one drinks it, is it the tripswitch nostrum from the Rix FEATHER as a ‘Coincidence?’ earlier this morning HERE? As we follow Taro into his own trip or leap with the underlying triangulations of this Isis work? As he is led to a back room where all lawyers are fake, or those ‘lawyers’ who have seen assonance with fake truth? Sussed out by the boy he once was, the boy tugging or testing his grown-up penis-symbol of a neck-tie? And he is explicitly said to be so short of breath at one point (“on the verge of suffocating”), I do wonder if Taro is now really the Rintaro I assumed (wrongly?) to be the son of the hostess whom he later meets along this book’s future triangulations? Assonance, assume…
    “He assumed the child was wearing a mask, until it became clear that the smooth skin stretched tightly across its cheekbones formed its real face.” (an ‘its’ that later became ‘his’)
  4. Pages 40 – 51
    “, he pieced together a taxonomy of fake lawyers.”
    I am now amazed that I have not considered this taxonomy before, this building-up of a gestalt of truth from real-time fictions or fakeries … such as fake yews (or yous) within the word ‘lawyers’ as Ley-lines of prehensility, explaining, at least for me, the synchronicity (‘as above, so below’ rather that cause-and-effect) of one of my earlier passions: Astrology. Also the Saitama syndrome described here — where “Beauty is often found in darkness” as that ‘darkness’ in ‘obscurity’ of endless flat roads — reminds me of my favourite ever novel: ‘The Unconsoled’ by Kazuo Ishiguro. And of some works by Haruki Murakami. Even my own ‘They Crawl Over the Outside of Buildings More Than They Walk in the Streets Between’. Here, Taro’s “inner ear” needed for such fake lawyerhood is to be induced by a token gratuitous crime as in Camus’ ‘L’Étranger’…except it’s due to be a ‘flat road’ crime, not a murderous mountain one.
  5. A12792C1-01D7-4720-A13E-4CE51288EBECPages 51 – 60
    “, you’ll be confirmed as a legitimate fake.”
    This section genuinely supplies me with a sort of personal epiphany to match the Kit Kat / Penal Code bird epiphany of Taro described in it. I now know I am a genuine fake reviewer, and if I had not been reading this book, I may have missed the point of this long-term mission of mine, its dependence on preternatural synchronicity and the hawling of meaningful typos or SICnificant autocorrects. A46A7656-1E07-4154-B1D4-5F3F6178874F And, as with Taro, I may now be able to see the concomitant birds that fly alongside me at each turn of the multiple onanisms as an eventual gestalt epiphany … and to have such a métier successfully rubberstamped by a literary notary or, as appropriate, mucked upon by bird flew now seems a worthy goal. As you can see, I have been significantly affected by this section’s art installations of procedure towards legitimate fakery, and by its explicit “geomancy” that is not a million miles away from my erstwhile asstrology (sic).
  6. Pages 60 – 76
    “Osmosis.”
    We all have this if we train ourselves to use it. I use mine for literature…
    Here, also used for law itself, and law livers, even raw livers? Drink, like knowledge, seeping into us. Like that doctored nostrum in ‘Feather’, here a series of more trade names for various disguised drinks , even Strong Zeros. How much of this induces Dream Sickness, I wonder. A drinking contest and a Rock, Paper, Scissors one both of which you need to read about, and now a fake paralegal turns up, as if in parallel world where we all walk up the parasites or parasides of buildings and not in the streets between, some of us not even needing ropes to hawl us up! Pity our lockdown urinals in our own real-time today are not even open!
    Salarymen and Girls Bar staff…
    “The young are mapped onto ruins, the dreams of the dead.”
  7. Pages 76 – 92
    “Now you’re in the Golden Liver Gang! You’re a pants-to-ankles man and you’re no longer subject to the law of causation. The mighty become your slaves. Cancer and flatulence cripple your enemies. All omens fall in your favor.”
    All omens are to be hawled preternaturally; synchronicity, not causation, as I said above about asstrology; I am thus confirmed in my own instincts of osmosis. More c letter words in addition to cancer and cripple and causation are covid and coronavirus and, here, even crude coital cottaging, but my own law giver or boyish Penal Code Bird was irretrievably shrivelled by radiotherapy for prostate cancer in 2015. Yet I now feel I belong to the optimal gang, thanks to what I have hawled from this all-giving book. An “ink painting” inside me, and a “spectral forest” in the sky, a skein of laws, logic to logic and back again, hopefully embracing as well as outlawing illogic, with bright advertising signs and climbing apps up the sides of buildings near the hostess club, but the hostess’s “coughing boy” is still at home. Each of us has a Jack Vance aura, but taste and smell now foregone, at least for a while, and we “…need to get locked down into consensus reality…” by ironically embracing our coranasensual or co-vivid dreams, dreams that, as such, have no doubt developed since this book was first written.
    end

 

Friday, June 19, 2020

Fosforos Library brochures

 

Mount Abraxas Brochures of Rich Folded Text


563F7A83-BF93-4B30-9610-0029E2C5DD96
Mount Abraxas Press 2020
[EDIT: Fosforos Library brochures]
My previous reviews of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/complete-list-of-zagava-ex-occidente-press-books/
Work by Sebastian Montesi, Patrick Mallet, John Llewellyn Probert, Christian Riley, Milenko Županović, Dominy Clements and Liam Garriock
When I read these, Covfefe permitting, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…

22 thoughts on “Mount Abraxas Brochures of Rich Folded Text

  1. The first one has text by Sebastian Montesi. Artwork by Adolf Hiremy-Hirschi.
    As an aesthetic entity, when concentrating on it alone, there is something special about its configuration of rich folded text. A concept that needed a conceit to achieve.
    5B55C477-A776-4305-8080-165708E67F76
    When I have read it, in due course, I will sub-comment below.
    • “with the hiraeth of verdant fire”
      “Hiraeth” is an important word for me.
      Reading these many Montesi poems and prose pieces makes me think that reading something has its own necessary embouchure, a shaping up of the thinking mind towards blowing them like woodwind and making them sound out beyond the craquelure of semantics. Here, I have a feel of Finnegans Wake. I mean that as a compliment! (My gestalt real-time review of this Joyce book HERE.)
      Any catharsis of coughing notes blown, notwithstanding.
      “Corvus, cathar so heralded”
      “the spittle from roaring maw”
  2. 0B5D1270-5892-46E8-AB56-007185F7B361 ARABESQUE EN ARRIERE a story by John Llewellyn Probert
    “As the car pulled up to the theatre Maria Bournonville coughed again,…”
    This is the exquisite final symbiosis of an ageing, diseased ballerina with the theatre where she had her triumphs, the theatre that had absorbed so much and was now giving it back. Taken there by her equally ageing, and loyal, chauffeur Bruno, who felt a similar symbiosis with her. This story itself feeds off itself, with elements perhaps of an honouring symbiosis, too, with the theatrical work of Reggie Oliver? The theatre itself is a living force and echoes the fact that I mentioned ‘craquelure’ in the previous review above. A cracking and crunching of bone at every ‘en pointe’. The crunch of plaster, too, “…its crimson paintwork cracking, its gilt peeling.” And I am left with the projected sense of an inevitable purging by all parties triangulating their symbiotic coordinates in death’s distancing. At the point of that one last little leap away or ‘petit saut’…
    [“…that all people die, but art does not. It is all that remains of us.”
    — Sue Harper (The Dark Nest) reviewed a few days ago here.]
  3. 0520E8F2-6E41-4DC9-9F7D-B7E227B1FA4C
    THE UNEXAMPLED PHANTASMAGORIA OF DOCTOR WEIMAR
    a story by Liam Garriock
    “…in their narrow rooms above the butcher shop as if sheltering themselves from the apocalypse outside.”
    84096146-E216-493C-96F5-38C3C2522CE4
    I have shown above, I hope, the experience of reading close-up each folded luxury of brochury represented by these artful items. Those vertical lines — as evocations, when combined with the words they bear, of today’s co-vivid dream-reality, dreams we all now dream in our apocalyptically furloughed times so much like the Weimar Republic — are not lines at all but watermarks or intrinsic textures, and they enhance the already enhanced writing by Garriock. A startlingly clear and engaging texture of text depicting brilliantly a coastal community in the north east of Scotland. Their Calvinist principles et al, and one day the eponymous Phantasmagoria show arrives in town, all seen through the eyes of the young narrator, feeling constrained by his family, a narrator who still holds a crush for the beautiful Freya who had by then already departed the town. The shock of the show I cannot do justice to here, the perfect descriptions of the concupiscence and grotesqueness, and the repercussions for the narrator are surely unforgettable. A disturbing epiphany. Leading to a disarming bathos or dying fall.
    My previous review of this author: https://howivi.wordpress.com/something-remains/#comment-404
    Artwork by Jeanne Mammen
  4. 4C10A398-9AA8-481C-AE28-4D492C84AB87
    THE MACKAY-BENNETT by Patrick Mallet
    “Between the frozen fingers of the child’s tiny right hand, a little ball could be seen.”
    This is a core-stunning witness eye view of the Titanic sinking, as part of a gestalt witness that we all become, firstly, from on board, a little boy and his sister, his precious ball rolling along a sloping cabin floor, she with her doll, the iceberg itself as a prehensile part of this gestalt, and then a sailor on a separate ship who ‘rescued’ some of the multitudinous corpses… and pairs of dancers who ice stuck together in their last dance; you feel the cold to the core of every reading bone. Leading eventually to a “macabre ballet”, a Mallet ballet, with its own (eye)’ball’ embedded, somewhat in tune with Probert’s ‘en pointe’. On the balls of the feet, when the toes are too frozen…
    Translated by Jeffrey Probst
    Artwork by Moyen
  5. Can you recall the lasting effect of the most deeply disturbing collection of horror stories you’ve ever encountered? The narratives join hands…” — From THE USELESS by Dominy Clements, a story in THE HORROR ANTHOLOGY OF HORROR ANTHOLOGIES
    THE PAINTER in Nemonymous 4, I think, was Dominy Clements’ first published story, and we also wrote together a number of fiction collaborations in the day.
    His story in ‘The First Book of Classical Horror Stories’: ANEMNESIS IN EXTREMIS.
    Berian Winslow & The Stream Of Consciousness Storyteller – his story in ZENCORE
    Angel Zero – his story in CONE ZERO
    Artis Eterne – his story in CERN ZOO
    My previous reviews of his work: https://horroranthology.wordpress.com/editors-story-by-story-commentary/ and https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/book-the-inkermen/
    E637446A-107B-4287-AD58-AEC0336A108A
    There are two stories by Dominy Clements in this Abraxas Brochure and I will read and review them both separately below…
  6. THE GREAT CIRCUMBENDIBUS by Dominy Clements
    “The high, soft sound which I had experienced before came as a prelude,…”
    Quite randomly, as I typed out the above quote from the story, Spotify filled my room with some sweetly high and soft notes of a flute playing Schwanenlied by Fanny Mendelssohn…
    This story with adeptly evoked genius-loci has the wonderment of a lost or hidden realm, a large house in Kent parkland at the embouchure of the Second World War, a place where the narrator as boy and later as callow teenager was able to stay on a number of visits – often playing hide and seek in its large maze with his friends.
    Is this a story as a metaphor of a personal and social ‘lost innocence’ via Rodin’s Gates of Hell or is it a disarmingly gratuitous journey in fiction for its own sake with a chill of terror in its closure charming those who simply relish such chills? Each of us will have their own answer to that question. Meanwhile, games of hide and seek with voices guiding you high and soft as well as hot and cold can often involve extra seekers or hiders you did not otherwise know were there. Poised for playing at the Jaws of Hell, as Hell has no need for Gates?
  7. THE OLD MASTER by Dominy Clements
    “Most people like to know what they are going to get in advance, especially if they are about to fork out a vast sum of money for something intrinsically useless.”
    6587DC61-35A7-4887-A5D4-FFFB2A720771
    Is all art intrinsically useless, unless the fickle Tuning-Fork of genuineness deems it not? And this is a creditable copy of an original, or an original begging for a copy. A jobbing artist who doubles, in a fabricated capsule of seventeenth century lockdown, as creator of original work by Willem Claez. Heda. A Tuned Forgery as adeptly described here that makes Heda make Still Lifes hedonist! Rather than cold objects. Until he emerges into the cold light of day to find some other artist had beaten him to the game almost by travelling back in time to obtain the unobtainable object. Who is the primary source in mutual synergy with whom? The painter himself (the one by Dominy Clements in 2004) or the painter by Brian Howell? Or the reviewer who drew it altogether as a crystallisation of truth? All of us invisible, except here.
  8. DEVOTIONAL TEXTS by Milan Županović
    “…black anchors
    still standing.”
    Astonishingly to me, I seem to have asked exactly the right question as a postscript to the two Clements works above yesterday — is Rodin’s Gates of Hell a Still Life? And great still lifes do indeed come to life! As if a fermenting still of existence and memorials and monuments, ‘a dead monument to once ancient hope’ and Ruinenlust, I suggest. And this feeds into today’s ‘statues’ issues, at least the enormous political and historical and stone-into-life issues about them in the UK….
    And, these hauntingly hypnotic (sometimes experimentally typeset) prose pieces and poems are mainly instilled with such considerations, especially from a devotional and spiritual and Christian point of view. Frescos, come to life with a hammer. A stone statue at the bottom of the ocean. Those black anchors as black statues. Dreams of Gods. And three boys who are either in the above image or playing in Clements’ maze! And when the sun itself died…
    ‘Sunce obasjalao. mesec zacarao.’
  9. WHEN THE WOODS COME CALLING by Christian Riley
    “I heard voices. It was perhaps a vague chorus, a song of some kind, at least that’s what it sounded like.”
    …if not this story’s keynote, it is certainly a connection with the image above created before I read this story, a story, for me, uncannily and personally epiphanal. Dungiven, of course, that it starts with a boy, this narrator amid a house of a lost domain (in the woods of Ireland), a lost domain that we found similarly with the house that the boy is visiting in the Dominy story, both stories explicitly mentioning or featuring hide and seek. And now we meet him again as a man of my own age, and I, too, was in Corporate Assurance for much of my life! This surely must be a rite of ‘Midsommar’ passage for such septuagenarians as me that I have long publicly talked about. Perhaps that Rite day is today! Also a story of Anti-Natalism made into almost a self-cannibalism of sin-eating, following the discovery of a still-life box of wood that was also found in the Dominy story. Wood beyond Aickman. And this Riley story’s ‘Mends’, for me, represent all the books I happen to read and review every day, especially the Mount Abraxas ones. The narrator had perhaps ‘seeked’ his own hidden self and found Rourke as his own self, a sort of re-oak. Rourke is also the name of one my favourite reviewed authors…

  10. All these Brochures edited and designed by Dan Ghetu.
  11. Just been reminded that there are 6 other Fosforos brochures – new works by D.P. Watt, Thomas Strømsholt, Geticus Polus and a few other surprises. The entire Fosforos Library set contains 13 brochures. I have these other ones already on order.

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf















Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

My reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read this book, Covfefe permitting, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…

3 thoughts on “Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf







  1. “…London; this moment of June.”
    Post choice of the first words’ war then in 1922 and now here in 1923. It is June again now in my own real-time of 2020. And this book’s plot is summarised over the internet for all and sundry to check out, so I won’t retell it here — this single day’s dark rhapsody of instinctive Clarissa Dalloway. Just for me to quote appositely from it for today’s June and our times’ hopefully-by-now-relaxing lockdown. A once deep lockdown that most of my advanced age have suffered or even enjoyed. Meanwhile, this book has a rich prose that is as satisfying as that I described about and quoted from THE WAVES. The waves of time, the vales and peaks of pandemics, the veils and piques of literature. I only hope I can reach beyond the letter Q in this book’s alphabet. Reach that lighthouse.
    Read up to:
    “Whose face was it? Nobody knew.”






  2. “But what letters? A C was it? an E, then an L? Only for a moment did they lie still; then they moved and melted and were rubbed out up in the sky, and the aeroplane shot further away and again, in a fresh space of sky, began writing a K, an E, a Y perhaps?”
    An aeroplane spelling out …what? and below it a car with a bubbled lockdown of people within, people of the day’s Royalty, it not being the earlier assumed ‘Proime Minister’s kyar’ (sic)?
    “’K … R … ‘ said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say ‘Kay Arr’…”
    This book is about shell shock. Not only that of Septimus in 1923 but all of us today. Toward or from our shells.
    Read up to:
    “Away from people—they must get away from people,…”





    1. “Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy’s skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions. […] She pierced the pincushion and laid her feathered yellow hat on the bed. The sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would her bed be.”
      The most open and expressive passages you will probably ever read of Sapphic magnetism, Mrs Dalloway’s attraction for Sally. A Clarissa for its Sally. Got her doll away? (See the references to a different ‘Clarissa’ as a Dark Nest fortuitously and simultaneously being reviewed here.)
      “Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips.”



    2. I have now read up to this wonderful passage…
      “For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, “This is what I have made of it! This!” And what had she made of it? What, indeed? sitting there sewing this morning with Peter.”
      … a version of memory — and the shifting distancing of time and people — that matches filmic effects that happened to be explained to me earlier this evening in a 15 hour documentary called ‘Women Make Films’…
      The synchronised shards of random truth and fiction.
      Intrinsic serendipities that literature carries beyond any barriers otherwise imposed by its author’s Intentional Fallacy, barriers that perhaps only the adept process of Gestalt RealTine Reviewing is able to transcend.
      There are many such passages in this book so far.
  3. I




    1. “As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”


    2. More of today’s statue syndrome….
      “Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England. […], and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline. One had to respect it; one might laugh; but one had to respect it, he thought. There they go, thought Peter Walsh, pausing at the edge of the pavement; and all the exalted statues, Nelson, Gordon, Havelock, the black,…”
      And another red carnation! …
      “But she’s not married; she’s young; quite young, thought Peter, the red carnation he had seen her wear as she came across Trafalgar Square burning again in his eyes and making her lips red.”


    3. “; an absurd statue with an inscription somewhere or other.”
      Read up to:
      “She’s a queer-looking girl, he thought, suddenly remembering Elizabeth as she came into the room and stood by her mother. Grown big; quite grown-up, not exactly pretty; handsome rather; and she can’t be more than eighteen. Probably she doesn’t get on with Clarissa. ‘There’s my Elizabeth’—that sort of thing—why not ‘Here’s Elizabeth’ simply?—“


    1. “But what was the scientific explanation (for one must be scientific above all things)? Why could he see through bodies, see into the future, when dogs will become men?”
      Co-vivid dreams started then. Or delirium by dint of the heat of the day? A sense of stress and depression, as well as coviduals and individuals, and the ‘battered women’ singing. And a feel already in London of another later writer following the next future war, Elizabeth Bowen as mysterious core if not kör…she wrote: ‘Most of all the dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their anonymous presence – not as today’s dead but as yesterday’s living – felt through London. Uncounted, they continued to move in shoals through the city day, pervading everything to be seen or heard or felt with their torn-off senses, drawing on this tomorrow they had expected – for death cannot be so sudden as that.’
      Now read up to this passage in the Mrs Dalloway…
      “One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.”

    2. “; men were trapped in mines; women burnt alive; and once a maimed file of lunatics being exercised or displayed for the diversion of the populace (who laughed aloud),…”
      “The dead were with him.”
      Depression, co-vivid nightmares, Septicide:
      In face of this amazing Woolfian portrait of society’s demand for a sense of ‘proportion’, its policing to expunge disproportion and to impel that “these prophetic Christs and Christesses, who prophesied the end of the world, or the advent of God, should drink milk in bed,…”
      7F0F4A3F-A6F7-4B89-B046-B0A0D62B6FA6
      So soon after the dire pandemic onward from 1918, the apparent need now of having “to be taken to the seaside in the middle of the session to recover from 
    1. “The cruelest things in the world, she thought, seeing them clumsy, hot, domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous, infinitely cruel and unscrupulous, dressed in a mackintosh coat, on the landing; love and religion. Had she ever tried to convert any one herself? Did she not wish everybody merely to be themselves?”
      The insular and the emotional dilemmas and personal combats. Richard and his flowers, to give to a derelict girl in the streets, or take them, as he intended, as a sign of love to his wife Clarissa. And Clarissa’s own tussles of jealousy about her daughter Elizabeth, and the latter’s relationship with Miss Kilman. Until we reach the sanctuary of Westminster Cathedral … and the monument as a tomb of the Unknown Warrior. The first Nemonymity of the Nemonymous? The Nemo of Fowles?
      Read up to:
      “…the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, still she barred her eyes with her fingers and tried in this double darkness, for the light in the Abbey was bodiless, to aspire above the vanities, the desires, the commodities, to rid herself both of hatred and of love.”
    2. In and out of its many doors, I shall now read the rest of this novel outside the scope of my real-time reviewing. And outside of today’s coronavirus and co-vivid dreaming, too. Though, I know it is steeped in the latter, as I have already shown. The waves of rich and dark prose ebb and flow.
      “Actually she would look for flames, it was so vivid. But there was nothing. They were alone in the room. It was a dream, she would tell him and so quiet him at last, but sometimes she was frightened too. She sighed as she sat sewing.”
      end