Cabaret Zoltaire

I woke during the night with a sudden revelation. I recorded it on my real-time review of SECRET EUROPE at the point I had reached, i.e. with 'Cabaret Zoltaire' by Mark Valentine.
Whether or not this is an intentional literary trick, it’s a literary trick that will go down in history!!!!!!
http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/secret-europe-howard-valentine/

The Defeat of Grief

AN EXTRACT FROM MY REAL-TME REVIEW OF 'SECRET EUROPE' HERE

In 2008, I saw this painting by Christian Krohg (1852 -1925) inside the Oslo National Gallery. I wished her better.

A Minor Official - Mark Valentine

“There are some men, I know, who like the wasted beauty of sickly pale creatures: yet — even so. At least, it seems he did not put the portrait in his book. Perhaps it was to be a private pleasure. The point is that a minor official does not indulge his morbid fancies: he resolves to find out how the sickness was caused, how it might be prevented, or at least assuaged.”.

“A Minor Official” is a minor classic.

It had me in tears by the end. Someone so conscientious about his official duties as a water inspector in Herzegovina. A simple good man who has instinctive brainstorming thoughts about ‘emotional’ geography (cf the aural geomancy earlier — here more mood-mapping) as well as his humble-important position or task in optimising the water supply for other simple folk he meets … and the tears came to my eyes when he expressed unqualified confidence in the equal conscientiousness of the postal workers (other minor officials) in ensuring delivery of his letter enclosing a copy of the ’Hydrologer’s Manual’ he had earlier promised to honest people whom he had met during the course of his water duties: despite not knowing the correct address but drawing a map on the envelope instead. I then brainstormed myself. I’m a minor writer, of course. An official of real-time reviewing. I speculated on the mood-mapping of our current Euro debt and currency crises, knowing, as I do, the importance of emotions: the confidence (or lack of confidence) in somehow determining the direction of the markets etc. Not a horsocope of tidal currents, but a conscientious cartography of currencies. A major consideration from a minor pen regarding a Sad Europe? (6 Mar 12 - five hours later)
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The Way of the Sun – John Howard

“A balcony on the Mediterranean: it had become almost an obsession with him.”

[I had no idea this story was coming up when I chose 'The Last Balcony' page of my website to house this part of my review. Also, the author's own off-piste comment at the bottom of 'The Defeat of Grief' review page here takes on a new significance!] — And after my reference to ‘Sad Europe’ (as opposed to ‘Secret Europe’) at the and of my previous entry about ‘A Minor Official’, things seemed ripe for this story of a sunshine trip, in quest of the balcony, threaded with lucid dreaming. A Defeat of Grief indeed. ‘Mediterranean’ itself – literally – reminds me also of seeking the Earth’s Core of the Nemonymous Night as well as the ultimate balcony, adding a perfectly offsetting tone of oblique dark-lightness,,, yet, we have the Mike Leigh-type (?) married couple, all mouth and trousers, bugging our protagonist, ever turning up with ‘good intentions’ and pointless chatter….not the minor official’s ’emotional’ map as such but a downhill pest-piste. In many ways, I resented them as much as the protagonist did! A story that can swing in this way is surely a masterpiece. [A world without a Bill and Joan would be like a world without the gloom under the aegis of which I collect art gallery painting cards by Munch, Bosch et al.] Or am I swayed by the story’s own insistent bugging obessions as well as by my own? No, it is an exquisitely-styled story, with or without any such connections. Surely set to become an all-time favourite story from the viewpoint of the Lewis head. (7 Mar 12 – 9.20 am gmt
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Westenstrand

Extract from my review of SECRET EUROPE - here

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Westenstrand – John Howard

“…with effort routes work themselves out.”

[More often than can be warranted by chance, I feel, when I am carrying out two or three real-time reviews simultaneously, as I am now, one story enlightens or synergises, across-books, with another story. Here, remarkably, the tone and plot of 'The Night of His Sister's Engagement' that I reviewed here this afternoon, just before reading 'Westenstrand', has now become even more highly wrought regarding a watery foolhardy challenge to oneself - and, dare I say, vice versa!] – ’Westenrand’ itself is a wonderful account of an island off Denmark – subject to Hitler’s contemporary shenanigans, I sense, that also have bearing on the protagonist’s romance with a woman who frowns on his connections, albeit indirect, with that Dictator - an island (a bit like Mersea Island near where I live in Essex, if the latter is in a much smaller way and with shorter  intervals) that is one minute an island, the next not an island, as subject to the sea’s effects on a causeway. A bit like history. And economics. In both of which disciplines, routes work themselves out, while human bail-outs often falter. (They often milled coins with ‘reeding’ to prevent shaving off their edges.) (4 Mar 12 – another 3 hours later)