Glen Hirshberg
Part Two of my review continued from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/03/05/infinity-dreams-glen-hirshberg/
CEMETERY DANCE PUBLICATIONS 2021
My previous reviews of this author: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/glen-hirshberg/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
HOME
“She touches him now in the same way he gazes all the time into his clock.
That clock.”
Rev is ‘loading’, computer-wise, loading as a person in Nadine’s eyes, Rev in ricochet or see-saw with Normal, Rev showing his true colours demanding that N and N fulfil themselves, clinch the moment of Collecting as I hopefully do for the act of Reading by reviewing it, here the mention of the reel-to-real of some legendary radio show. A show even more powerful as a collectible than Tom Hanks’s TV Neighbourhood version, I guess?
PERSONAL: This now arguably most important book I have ever read is finally ‘loading’ for me, too. That radio show that I myself broadcast from my own reel-to-reel tape in the 1950s or early 1960s, I forget exactly when, a show broadcast to myself and my nanna in the front room of my home, and all those radio show schedules that I wrote out as small 10 year old, and of course the 1950s mass communication hub that I invented under the pavement outside (importantly for me recounted HERE in the first part of my review of ‘Engines Beneath Us’, and recounted elsewhere, too!
I actually used the word ‘hub’ in the 1950s in this context!
This partic. HOME inlogue is esp. heady with thoughts for me, and it simply needs to be read with an open mind as to its lost meanings and mysteries now loading….
‘Get some lost.’
“…always glimpsed in the act of vanishing—“
PRIDE
“She took his elbow instead.”
From something numismatic in collectible sight, we now “descended from the high desert toward the west Texas waste,…”
And a supermarket called Family Pride. You will never experience a supermarket car park, wandering cats, stray shoppers, and a shopping trolley tipping over a hard curb and gravel into something numinous or ineffable in the reading spirit.
This is now Bowen blended with O Henry, without it ceasing to be utterly unique in itself!
And we get to fundamentally FEEL even more the collectible power of Nadine suddenly opening like an eye opening, when she scents something. And the normal equivalent power of the Collector himself who can “bring the quest to resolution—was what made him who he was. It was also why, despite Smartphones and linked databases and indelible digital footprints, people still sought him out.”
Here feathered flutes and shopping bags like bagpipes, and a sudden unexplained departure by the Collector in his jeep, leaving Nadine at the supermarket with visions and feelings within her of Ireland and other nuances of the Nadine spirit, while she tries to fathom out what has just happened and why. And a sky’s precipitation “as unlike precipitation in her homeland as Nartana’s fluteplay was to pennywhistling. No less stirring or beautiful. Emptier, though. Even lonelier.”
All with Scott of the Antarctic, I felt. But I now forget why. Or even if.
The nostalgic call of her Irish Home and cake…and sisters if she had sisters. In passages that even exceed any once non-exceedable passages already read in this book! Quite staggeringly beautiful. Why is this book not more famous?
Pride in that I actually found it before it was too late…
I have read so far up to:
‘Jaysus, shut it!’ and the apple-caramel cake already cut but still warm, just sitting there waiting.”
Not to mention the cactus candy!
[“The Ibis, and when’s the last time Nadine has let herself think that name?
This radiant, revved-up kid. Normal and her.” — from second HOME above]
“Somehow, that was the moment Nadine saw what leaving her had cost him. How scared he’d been of what he’d find when he came back.
How scared he still was.”
The scaredness infects us, too. We feel everything as if each one of us are the cats. The Ibis with her flock of sigil-labelled women in the supermarket, until they, too, escape over the aforementioned curb. Thoughts of war (Nadine’s thoughts of a roadside bomb in Connemeara) and a prophecy of today’s war that we all currently witness with shock if not surprise, the sense of denial and conspiracy and news management and lying without knowing we are lying, a sense imbued here.
“The Ibis looked too enraptured to answer or even listen.”
…the reader, too, after reading this.
“There really is a difference, she thought, between accretion and collecting.”
… as part of a contexted passage in this chapter, a passage that I shall value while, perhaps pretentiously or self-deceptively, yet sincerely, continuing to accrete and collect fiction’s leitmotifs and synchronicities for the ultimate timeless gestalt.
“For a time—though she would never know how long, time being lost to her, then—the Ibis and the Collector went on eying each other.”
“Every book has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.” — from ‘The Shadow Of The Wind’ by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
INFINITY DREAMS
(1)
Whisper ‘there, there’ while he stares into that goddamn clock?
Sorry if I am being repetitive, but now this chapter affects me deeply! There have been tears. A story of flurry or fluster of guilt, as I think of my own wife and myself in this House of Never-Leaves where we have lived for twenty plus years, as we near our end days. That guilt represented by the enthusiastic disdain of the revved up kid… fulfilment, too, that we have lasted to a critical point here presaged by these moving passages half-glimpsed, half-understood, but fully absorbed.
I hope the author and publisher will forgive me quoting from it so fulsomely below…
“…and Nadine remembers at least part of the reason she told him that last story. To stall. Give Spook time to get his covert ass up here. Where is he?”
“‘He knows,’ says the Rev, wrist-deep in the rubber-band-and-bills drawer.”
“Also, she’s paralyzed by warring, simultaneous urges: to hurl herself at the Rev and stop him, or to drape herself over the Collector like camouflage netting. As if that would do any good. As if either action could do any good. Or absolve him from whatever he’d done. And her, from not finding out.”
And the we have the echoes of Bowen’s Inherited Clock passage that I am proud to have subconsciously foreseen would later be needed here when I quoted it recently alongside this author’s SLOUGH (of DESpond)….
“She watches the Rev’s fingers slide up the pendulum to the notch at its top, right at the base of the wishing-tree trunk, and curl around the thin part.”
“The rod catches light, shades it redder. With one finger, he probes the half-inch gouge along its right side. “Hmm. Did he do this, do you think? Save a little piece, because he knew better than to use it all? Or, oh, this is what he gave the Ibis!”
“A Collector marionette with its strings cut. Performance finished. Nadine realizes she is crying. Has been.”
“Every minute, for everyone alive, there are just so many things.”
“She should call the police, she guesses. And tell them what? Well, yes, I did invite him, Officer. Yeah, yes, I gave him cookies, but only Rich Teas. He stole the tongue from my cuckoo clock.”
What ‘guests’ did The Collector as Normal wittingly or unwittingly invite into their house, what ghosts and spooks did I invite into mine?
“….whirls for her phone to call off Spook, and smacks elbows first into the Collector.”
(2)
“Too much Normal in it.”
Or not enough? This is – I keep on being miraculously fazed! – gestalt-fizzing stuff.
N, N & Spook in a car with flicking wipers, almost becoming a cartoon car, various leitmotifs from this whole book clicking into place just like Nadine’s ‘opening’ epiphanies — a book ‘loading’ itself as no other book has done before.
Click wiper Spook earphones winking yellow “…like cats. How can there be so many of these people, she wonders? How does she keep finding them?” Cats or ferrets. “Beer, barf, and spiders,…” & more short wave radio numbers recited in Spook’s headphones. “Surfaces.”
That reel-to-reel radio show quest resumed or never ended, Daddy long legs dancing off its tape, bouqiniste hinge, if not Binna’s key, now in the inherited clock…
“I could feel my blood fizzing. […] Opens her mouth as memory rushes into or out of her, she can’t even tell which. Because she has been blind.”
—> Resulting in own personal ‘loading’ having, by chance, half hour hour before reading this chapter, re-read ‘Effervescent’, a story I had completely forgotten from ‘Weirdmonger.’
Walls collapsing on each other, like the walls within books melting and coming back like Nadine or those wiper flicks, but when in melting mode revealing the books’ core literary gestalt?
I well remember trying to deal with tape hiss as well as radio hiss most of my earlier life, a battle of wires and contraptions and installations..,”Running wild toward absolutely nowhere,…”
News item today, just read! — https://news.sky.com/story/paul-mccartney-unheard-cassette-of-demo-expected-to-fetch-16310000-at-auction-12583868
“The writer never was or, if he was, he was the reader now.”
From ‘Egnis’, the story that followed ‘Effervescent’ in due alphabetical order of Weirdmonger’s story titles, just re-read!
(3)
“Mopping his lips, Mr. Map lays his napkin on the countertop…”
“In-‘N-Out”
….like Spook’s head endearingly in and out of his headphones, in the back of the jeep, even to the poignantly deadpan extent of his valued notebooks having been burnt in a fire, as the threesome head into a Ligottian Mall of shopfronts and storage plots containing a shop in this plot that might sell Frosties and the Clockshop with the equivalent to the Aickman Clockmaker, clocks that vibrate under the hand like animals, and a clock concoction that bites the hand as Bowen’s Inherited clock does.
I keep on saying it, but I’ll say it again! — there increasingly seems no way that I can do justice to this book in a review…especially when trying to convey how its many dreamful leitmotifs fit together like a jigsaw, a phenomenon for which gestalt real-time reviewing may well have been loaded! Notwithstanding any police chases. And Nadine’s whole body-flashes of realisation.
Today, a Charles Ives collision of marching bands, the nowhere-spaces that Normal and Nadine need at needful things to replace the burgled thing to apotheosise what makes them tick. The tick of the gears of their marriage. The maps of Mr. Map, ordnance or something that needs a nothing or nowhere to plot a course. A no-place with that Parisian door? Normal has brought a bit of the Binna hinge for the clock. A hinge pin, even while the number lady with her short wave still chants, a hinge that resonates with possibly the most important short passage in the book so far…humming it at Dolly speed…alternating, even strobing opposites (“Appearance, disappearance”, &c., cf. ‘The strobe theory of history’ in Nemonymous Night) —
“…the angle of the arm the giveaway. Something he has learned to mimic, knows is expected without fully understanding the point or connotations.”
***
“We need one with something not there on it,…”
All things in this book that weren’t there yesterday, but are there today or vice versa…
“Everyone who lives in Paris has their own Paris. And yet they all think it’s the same as everyone else’s.”
For ‘Paris’, please also read ‘this book’ or ‘book’…
(4)
“This whole block just got possessed by Banksy.
Unless she said banshee.”
Through streets of carnival and non-carnival wildness that’s our current ‘nowhere’, naīve refrains, incarnations throughout this chapter’s text by Infinity Dreams as Naïvety, even Nativity, Dreams, our own birth as reader being coded, encrypted into this book, and actually sucked into it by the end of this chapter via the erstwhile Sawyers’ View-Master reels ( “Receiving. Transmitting. Seven. Six. Nine. Null.” )
“Why are they always where we are?”
Please forgive me for quoting necessary clues for those who may resist this book’s ‘nowhere’. Its Jolene beyond Miranda, its Parisian hostel, its Nadine as Name, as her Ireland, both hers and Bowen’s.
“…tugging a shawl around her shoulders, and slides an elbow through her sister’s. […] For symmetry, Nadine takes the Collector’s elbow.”
That strobe-history again…
“Like all of us, every moment we are alive. Going nova. Being born. Going nova by being born.”
“We’re hurtling off the map into the middle of the woods in the middle of night to find a town that might not be there—”
“The thousand-year hush of redwood trees. The most life-saturated silence on Earth. As close to the Causeway of her childhood dreams as she has ever come. Quite possibly as close as there is in this world.”
Ghost-ferrets, prions, GPS coordinates of a book’s triangulation that have not developed half-lives, plus Rothko colours, Land stingrays, &c. &c.
And here we also have. the full clinching, even the full solving, of the half-lives in Zeno’s Paradox, a gluey Paradox that threads all Bowen and Aickman works, one where Nadine’s steps are through something that might be grass sticking to her sneakers but, above all, by … “a clock ticking in Nadine’s head, so that she seems to track each second passing” towards the sister “who’d sold Tony both halves of the watch case.”
If not exactly her own sister, but that woman in Ireland who is the sister of everyone experiencing this book…
(5)
“…the tree will suck her deeper into it, like quicksand.”
There is so much to uncloy from this finale. A strobing of Didactic/Undidactic and Raving/Revolution and Dream/Reality and Governance/Anarchy and (Toynbeean) Challenge/Response while even visiting the Zoo in Nemonymous Night might not be able to differentiate the Dream Sickness from anything else…but some pattern seems fully ‘loaded’ or triggered when such strobes are combined with this finale’s version of The Last Balcony and this finale’s own clinching ‘stuff touching stuff’, our world’s current Tempest as Miranda’s dream stuff dreaming on stuff (quoted in this finale itself) with Sycorax, spigot, ferret wheel or Ferris with sprinklers or baskets, its clinching clock cases and hinge/elbow, its Buddha and the Buddha’s ranting Rev-son, its inverted wishing- tree with porous bark et al from a gluey Zeno’s Paradox, not to mention glinting bits of Lewis (Carroll) and with a berth inside a Bowen or O Henry. Who the saviour, who the destroyer? The author of these dreams or the reader who adds their own to his? “Rulers dropping disease bombs on their citizens”, and much else listed here from our world’s Tempest that you will recognise. Nonsense or Genius? This book’s strobe-history proceeds till its end… Balcony or Blankness?
Bark like a sketch by Nadine, a Balcony upon Blankness, “Why does everyone assume dreams have to be crazy?”, Chaplin message machines that Weirdmonger book’s first story includes by dint of its title being alphabetically first.
This book. Nonsense or genius? Genius, I say.
But who am I to say? A poached egg? A reverie?
“When do you think it was, in the history of human evolution, that we decided to divorce reality from dreaming? When did we start to imagine that was even possible?”
“An irrigator out there they can redream right after we undream it.”
Redream or redeem? Into nothingness or somewhere?
“Seven. Six. Eight. Five. Null…” Immortalis
How or why did I decide to quote that italicised bit in my review above of the previous chapter before reading this final chapter wherein it is repeated?
The literary gestalt works.
“Concentrate it. Connect it to itself and harvest it. And set it loose in the air.”
“I saw my feet through my arms.”
end