Immortality takes on a new achievability

The retro-causal theme of Cern Zoo has, in many ways, been taken over by the later real history of the Large Hadron Collider as reported in the world’s various media during recent days and weeks. The bird with the beget bread in its beak now leading us, two by two, towards Nemo's Ark. The respected scientists who seriously proposed that the Collider was sabotaging itself from the future. Just symbols, perhaps, but they have given a new dimension that could not have been foreseen when initiating the Nemonymous ‘win immortality’ competition all those months ago: HERE
This unique competition is still open until 31 December 2009. And all its implications have yet to be played out while, even as we speak, new dimensions of the Cern Zoo open up day by day in parallel with real events.
It is not beyond the realms of imagination that the prize to be won now is not simply a fabricated, semi-laughable version of immortality, not simply a gimmick of publicity to underpin a ‘guess-the-author’ competition, but soon to become an immortality that is achievable. A fictionhead. Dr Who’s own water-park of forever. A flashy FlashForward.
After all, Cern Zoo was originally a near anagram of the previous Cone Zero and Zencore books, but it then beget from itself a hindsight destiny when a real professor duly gave a lecture entitled ‘Visit to the Cern Zoo’ on 4 February 1995: as indicated HERE.

New Fanblade Fable (6)

Cave Art is supposed to be pre-technological, yet when I entered the underground system beneath the Abbas Chalk Mines as a producer for a TV programme on popular aesthetics, I was astonished nobody had noticed a scratched image in a dark corner that only the strong camera lights (needed for such a venture) could sufficiently illuminate for me to see what I could only describe as a modern domestic cooling-fan complete with electric flex.

Of course, it only looked like one. On closer scrutiny, I could see it was just an accident of chance shadow and my imagination that made the 'whole' from the bits and pieces of expertly dated caveman art. Abstractions as well as cunning representations.

The flex was indeed a queue of what appeared to be animals – two by two – just made out with a magnifying glass. How the cavemen had had the wherewithal to create such precise down-sized figures – with just a stone implement upon a rock wall and in utter darkness – was quite beyond me.

We were the fist TV crew allowed on-site and I had yet to meet the head curator of the Abbas underground system. His girl assistant had led us down – more concerned with her love life, no doubt, than what she was showing us.

Indeed, it appeared she, too, was surprised by what the TV lights and magnifying-glass revealed.

“They are like lemmings slowly heading towards some vast spinning-contraption,” I said.

The adverb ‘slowly’ seemed an odd choice of words in the circumstances, I guess, but I am not a scientist. I am an entertainer and reporter, and sometimes the two became far too close even for my comfort.

Eventually the programme was made. On my instructions, we did not feature the mysterious Lilliputian zoo creatures heading towards their own collision with Fate. It was a great success. One does need to balance truth with secrecy. The showing of the bizarre interesting bits in the corner would have undermined the whole Abbas project, even if those bizarre bits were just as real as anything else we showed. In fact, I later suspected that the only genuine caveman art in the Abbas system was that depicting the zoo animals and their fate while the remaining more believably ordinary images shown on our TV show had earlier been completely fabricated.

Who says crime doesn’t pay? The crime of concealing bizarre truths in favour of boring fabrications.

I wonder how many other projects, artistic or scientific, are dogged by similar considerations. It makes one wonder. I only report this here for my wife to post on the internet when I am gone. It seems right somehow bearing in mind where we first met.

You see, the flex had no plug.

The New Fanblade Fables

Gunfleet Sands Windfarm:  http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/200992.html

==================================================================
http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/189.html
Old Fanblade Fables: http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/201274.html


Links for the New Fanblade Fables:

First five Fables in comments to this post: http://wordonymous.tripod.com/blog/index.blog?entry_id=2058685

New Fanblade Fable (6)

New Fanblade Fable (7)

New Fanblade Fable (8)

The Final Fanblade

All above by DFL
=================================

A Fanblade Fable - by Bob Lock

Hadron

The Cerne Abbas giant had a 'hadron'.

Original spin-off from the CERN ZOO book (June 2009)

New Fanblade Fable (4)

As the bird left the vicinity of the Hadron Collider, the beget bread it had dropped in a cooling-unit had created all manner of concertina results – a domino-rally of fanblades toppling upon each other round and round, flashing forward and back in the Swiss sunlight....

Meanwhile, the bird returned to the aviary at Cern Zoo to the sound of resounding cheeps.

And roars and lowings and squeaks and brays ... and silence from the snakes and insects.

Amazingly, one Zoo feature that was assumed to be ever silent broke into what could only be described as the screeching of chalk (or nails?) on an old-fashioned school blackboard. It was the crudely ‘drawn’ giant carved into the side of the limestone hill overlooking the zoo - a priapic landmark that the visitors took for granted as it had been positioned there for years on the upslope of the extraneous glance.

Loaves and fishes went missing, too, as the sound of hollow feet vanished in the opposite direction by which it was thought the bird had flown back. The pity was a drawing couldn’t fly. Even by the skin of its fingernails.

New Fanblade Fable (2)

In those far-off-the-wall days, resistant baffles were built within the inner-tubes of the tyres on bicycle wheels. And the spinning spokes were fantail-flanged to mimic fanblades.

Brian loved pedalling around, thus fanning the otherwise stagnant air in his wake. Summers, in those ancient boyish days, were not only quite endless but also steeped in what sensitive souls like Brian called 'atmospheric doldrums'. Indeed, the sky formed its own version of the Sargasso Sea, reflecting* the sun-scorched countryside through which Brian's bike travelled in a circle to and from his family home.

*Reflections that the sky's intrinsic blueness turned from bleached-yellow into weedy green.

==================================

The world then needed more fanblades at every turn, so Hadron Colliders of various sizes were built all over the land in the same way as wind farms were once built at sea. For many years, there has been one such wind farm opposite where I live. Now derelict as its fanblades no longer turn. Tangled-up as they are in the sky.

Today, at Summer's end, the pedalling silhouettes of various increasingly breathless Brians on bikes gently pedal along the aging horizon of my hopes and dreams.

Not off-the-wall so much, as off-the-earth.

The Pillowcase

“What counts are the tangible books on one's shelves, whatever the soon-to-be-forgotten chequered-history of their publication and distribution.”

The man who spoke carried a large old-fashioned suitcase, as battered-looking as himself, one with metal spring-loaded catches that could be fitted into the notched slots of each of two fastening contraptions with rather more difficulty than a quick getaway would have required. Or so I surmised. It looked to me as if this individual who called himself Brian couldn’t get himself away anywhere quickly whatever the emergency or the nature of his suitcase!
I imagined it had a number of elasticated pouches inside for compartmentalisation of its luggage load. But before I could speculate further, he continued with a non-sequitur:

“Everyone is the outcome of a patchwork of motives, deceptions, truths, honesty, falsehood, chance luck, deserving fortune... of Toynbeean challenge-and-response.”

He spelt out one of the words because I looked puzzled, before he continued: ”I think this fits in with any observation about adding one's own experience to the melting-pot of history. All reality is a sum of such experiences. Mine. Yours. And everyone who has experiences at all to tell. This is why the internet can be such a useful tool in pooling all such experiences towards the goal of solidifying reality. But, meanwhile, the books are what count. The people behind them sink back eventually into anonymity or rise up to fame, whether deserved or not. They just do. The books remain.”

This looked if it was a chance conversation between strangers much like that time-passing small-talk in which one often indulges when on a train journey. Except we were in the waiting-room, not yet on the train. It was late.

I replied: “I am with you regarding books, Brian. But the internet! I never know whether to resist it or embrace it. A part of me once used to wait for the postman in the same way as today it waits for the email inbox to open. There's no helping people like that part of me. Actually, most of me wants to escape that bit of me. But, there again, just because communication has been 'oiled' by electronics (just as it was 'oiled' by the printing press in the Middle Ages), why should we destroy it by walking away from it, as I am often sorely tempted to do, as the only means to escape it? Partial, moderate use of the internet is not an option. When things are so oiled it sort of oils you, too. Makes you a different person. And soon you will not be able to recognise that different person because that different person will be you. It’s Hell on earth. Walking away from the internet cannot now reverse that process. That's the frightening thing ... just like the Large Hadron Collider.”

That last reference of mine opened the floodgates. Brian mumbled of the collider being 'the fast-swirling of nightmare’s moat' – 'a crystallisation of candle-dreaming' - 'the erection of a last balcony like a sea-side pier where we all walk towards its end and one by one drop into the sea after waving at the waves'....

“Only yesterday (7 November 2009),” he continued, “there was a nemonymous tweeter escaped from the aviary at Cern Zoo that dropped a white pellet of beget bread into the collider causing it to overheat...”

The train seemed as if it would never come, its steam fried to a frizzle on its boiler, I imagined. Giving up hope, the waiting-room’s benches looked decidedly uncomfortable for sleeping on. But beggars couldn’t be choosers.

“Never fear,” said Brian, “I have something for our heads.”

He tried to unfasten his suitcase.

The Weathering

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 2012 - 'THE LAST BALCONY' COLLECTION (The InkerMen Press)

Intowards

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 2012 - 'THE LAST BALCONY' COLLECTION (The InkerMen Press)

Candle Dreaming

Now published in THE LAST BALCONT book (InkerMen Preas 2012)

CERN ZOO - DFL Real-Time Review (part two)

CONTINUED FROM HERE: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/cern_zoo__a_dfl_realtime_review.htm

See above for important context.

The Rude Man's Menagerie
This is an apocalyptic story deriving from the Chalk Giant thread weaving through this book as well as the Zoo one, where chalk drawings become a menagerie of creatures, comprising the female protagonist's touching (still conversational) relationship with her dead Dad and her righteous cause against the Rude Man drawing in the well-depicted landscape and the Rude Man's own tethered chalklings. One cannot do justice to the crop of joy and anguish intermingling so tellingly. It is a fictional rite of passage like none other, I suggest. One that will haunt you with chalk dreams. It does me.
Here, too, the Dead Speak again (as part of THEORY?): an added dimension I had not appreciated before. Or is this me hindsighting yet again? (18 Oct 09 - three hours later).

Window To The Soul
"'Welcome to CERN ZOO. We buy your unwanted memories,'..."
Another fable that deals with the core of this book, I feel. Today, even more so than I originally thought, with explicit reference to the Higgs particle itself so central to THEORY. Hindsight and pathos, exquisitely conveyed, with Alzheimers perhaps on some future horizon cone-zeroing back in on us through time... (18 Oct 09 - an hour later)

Salmon Widow
"...Sam: tall, boyish, sharp-of-nose and eyes full of tomorrow, she..."
This tour-de-force (literally!) -- well, it is tucked away in the Cern Zoo book and, like other stories here, deserves a wider readership. How can anyone go through life without, for example, reading 'Salmon Widow'? But it passes even under the radar of most of the reviews, too. Even (almost) under mine, other than to say: it is a swirling rich fishbone-marrow A.S. Byatt time-woven shoal of images and emotions and horrors and coincidences and 'Who Do You Think You Are?' with Kate Humble or David Mitchell or Marcel Beque or Prickle / Holly / Samantha... all conveying a real story-plot.
All I can really do is quote the actual writer of this story who has given me permission to quote here what he or she wrote to me when he or she heard about THEORY: "Salmon Widow's circular construction was not unmindful of Hadron. Similarly Marcel's snakebelt, that from some angles might be seen to eat itself. And remaining on the mournful: as you'll know, the Old English Cerne (hmm, from the Old French "dark circle") refers to a cairn or grave. Big Crunch theory suggests that we'll meet ourselves on the way back: the collision may or may not be pleasant."
This writer has also reviewed the whole CERN ZOO book (other than 'Salmon Widow') here:
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/cern_zoo_review.htm
"Perhaps her husband had joined her..." (18 Oct 09 - another 3 hours later)

Pebbles
"...the clouds threatening a rain that had not yet come..."
A simply beautiful short tale of a girl collecting pink pebbles from a beach and the boy protagonist who met her. Ending with a dying fall that contains a poignant contentment at impossibility. It seems a shame to mould the meaning further than that. But did she really seek just one pebble, one particle of our existence? The story does not give the answer to that question because, I suppose, it does not ask it. (18 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)

The Shadow’s Departure
A dark vision of Distraction, derelict Glass Factories, enticing madness... this is the Shadow of the Future that is tied to us all. Whether we reach full liberation from it is a knot or ligottum that few can untie. It is just that (and this is my thought and perhaps not the story’s) if the future speaks to us we are truly the Dead who Speak back to it.
In honour of this story, I have concocted a short waking-dream from its Synchronised Shards of Random Truth & Fiction, i.e. distilled from the prose in its first half (I dare not distil anything from its second half!):-
the secret life of broken glass
a shadow haunted sector that even the cranks and the closet cranks of academia dare not analyze
I secretly hoped to meet that one-in-a-million madman who clasped some shocking inner truth
the stupid whir of a trillion pointless devices (19 Oct 09)

Inspired by last entry above and by 'Salmon Widow': SHOALS (19 Oct 09 - an hour later)

Being Of Sound Mind
“...sending an attack of the vbvbvbv’s into a current opus.”
One of a number of stories in ‘Cern Zoo’ that I accepted and contracted without first knowing who wrote it – a writer who has since kindly given me much information on Time and Parallel Worlds and other philosophies that also perhaps underlie the Cern phenomenon. As does the story itself implicitly and explicitly.
An enthralling and touching and concept-provoking story of someone recently retired now taking fiction-writing more seriously, later facing a whispering then clamouring ‘political correctness’ after the sudden bubbly arrival of a mysterious ‘granddaughter’ manqué. This plot really blossoms even further in the (for me) new light of THEORY. I am so glad I spotted this memorable intarsia of ‘magic fiction’ before fully appreciating it as such. (19 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)

Dear Doctor
The girl on the cover suddenly has a pain in her stomach. Or on it. Incredibly, now, I find, in hindsight, this brief and (for me) hilarious joke letter to a doctor is the plainest example of the power of hindsight itself. This all seems to be in a synergy with THEORY that I, as editor, never foresaw. (19 Oct 09 - another hour later)

Mellie’s Zoo
“'I wish you were real,' she whispered.”
I just ended re-reading this story with tears in my eyes. It’s that kind of experience, especially today, in context. A tale of Mellie, a Child as Mother of Man – faced with a ‘lost domain’ Zoo beyond the woods we know, of memorable inward atmosphere, in company with other children (one boy as their internal ‘pied piper’). ‘David Almond’-like sensibilities are punctuated with visions of a metal bird and shadow-creatures (both in tune with ‘The Shadow's Departure’) and a Salmon ...
And a caged version of her own stuffed purple hippo at home...and much more. Extrapolating wildly in an uncaged way, I feel this is the Zoo of ‘The Lion’s Den’ version of future self in logical progression as transmuted and rusticated by its return journey come back to haunt itself with pathos as well as bathos. (19 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)

THIS REVIEW IS NOW CONTINUED HERE: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/cern_zoo__a_dfl_realtime_review_part_3.htm

=========================================

Pirate

“A pirate as a person or a group involves an element of illegality or at least a bending of the rules, does it not?”

It sounded more like a statement than a question. And a long way short of a chat-up line, I guess. He stared at me at the dark bar on the edge of a nowhere where, lost, cold and hungry, I had just left my car in its car park of no obvious allotted spaces.

Women on their own in such places must be a rare event, I continued to guess. I had only come in here for directions, while deciding whether or not to partake of the establishment’s ‘hospitality’.

I looked sideways at the solitary barstool-occupant. A man wearing glasses that must have made the interior even darker, by the look of them.

“Excuse me?”

“A pirate can also mean people who are not eligible for things but take them nevertheless.”

I felt affronted. Could he mean me? Perhaps this was a club for carefully chosen members and I had parked my car outside ‘illegally’?

I was immediately inclined to leave without further conversation. This was part of the country to which I was unaccustomed. Visiting someone from University days I hadn’t seen for years. We’d just got reacquainted by some internet finding-old-friends site. Maybe old friends were not meant to rediscover each other – as in the old days, with very little means to do so. Such precarious reunions could cause all manner of ‘not-meant-to-be’ situations – and the world sent off into directions equally ‘not-meant-to-be’. These were not original thoughts of mine that I was thinking as I waited to decide about my next move in the dark bar. I had had these thoughts for some time when deciding to pursue, via the internet, certain lost friendships in the first place. But there was something ringing at the back of my mind about my current predicament in the dark bar being a ‘not-meant-to-be’ of some significant risk to my health and safety. A pirate destiny, as it were.

If words could be caught like infections – there I had just thought about the word that seemed to be preoccupying the man in dark glasses who had just used it – twice. As if he was toying with it. Worrying it, teasing it, trying it out on his lips. Obsessed with it.

A member of the bar staff – and I was pleased to see it was a female of some age – now suddenly arrived in my vicinity to take my order.

“Is that your car outside?”

She pointed at a shape I could hardly discern through the window.

“I guess it is,” I said.

“Well, can you move it? It’s private.”

So, I hadn’t been far wrong with my earlier presumptions. But the place had a sign outside indicating it was a public bar serving drink and food.

“Private?” I responded in questioning echo.

“Yes, private.”

“Private,” more forcefully echoed the man in dark glasses.

“Is this private, too?” I asked with a nod towards the bar, trying to take some initiative without antagonising anyone with a forceful reference to the public sign outside.

Thoughts raced through my head. Time seemed to stand still. Many things put on the internet with the wrong assumption of it being private were often available for viewing by many millions. Just see the hit counter if there is one to see at all. Just because these potential millions don’t make their presence known to you does not mean they aren’t there, watching, reading, toying, teasing, worrying at your words ... obsessing ... storing up a whole host of ‘not-meant-to-be’ scenarios. How often have you conducted what you think is a private conversation on a blog or a supposedly ill-frequented forum – only to discover it was far from private. It’s easy to imagine seclusion even when millions are watching you.

Suddenly, the bar woman pointed at a word engraved on the mirror – the backs of the shorts and optics reflected dimly in it.

The word was, of course, “Private”. Except the letters seemed slightly mixed up and one letter had teasingly been rubbed off as if in a game. It was then I saw the woman was wearing a black patch over one eye, fixed in place by a single elastic band around her scarfed head. Stepping nearer, the man took off his dark glasses, then opened his chest...

The Two Old Gents Have Flights Of Fancy

“The address is dot dot dot,” said George.

“No, it isn't, it's dash dash dash.,” replied Albert.

The two old gents sat on the bench outside Blackwoods Supermarket, gazing across the fields at the spire of a distant church. They knew there was a town over there quite different and separate from the town in which they always sat whiling away the hot Summer’s day.

Passers-by somehow proved that town’s other existence. They were not consistently the same passers-by so they must live at least somewhere else. They’d always be the same passers-by if they lived in the same town as the two old gents.

The times were ones when people didn’t travel far from their own home town – either because of a lack of money or due to rudimentary transport systems that worked irregularly. Different towns then were different countries now.

The two old gents were speculating beyond the realms of their usual gossip. Gossip became a bit tedious after many years. So they used to make things up. About imaginary places. Imaginary towns. Imaginary people. Waking dreams tossed between them as the day shone on.

Sometimes the imaginary people took off like semi-real existences upon flights of fancy. Often they became so very real to the two old gents, the existences fleshed out and became the new passers-by miming the people just conjured up by the two old gents as passing by.

Then the two old gents returned to gossip of the trivial and mundane. Then they perked up again with fresh flights of fancy. Except their vocabulary was not a match for their fancies. They interspersed their talk with 'dot dot dot' and 'dash dash dash' as a sort of personal morse code to fill any gaps. But, meanwhile, they were able to visualise the things that underpinned the dots and dashes, but whether telepathy worked or whether they visualised quite differently not even their telepathy could tell them.

“The address is dot dot dot," said George, visualising the road before he visualised the house. The road was indeed “Dot Dash Dot Avenue” and the house-name “Dash Dot Dash Villa” – and out from it came a figure made completely of dots and dashes that needed joining up into shapes as in a children’s dot-to-dot puzzle. He gradually made out a woman’s bits and bobs from amid the emerging squiggles.

Suddenly, he visualised his own eyes welling with tears.

“You know, I love her,” he said.

“Why don’t you go there, then?” asked Albert.

“I’m not sure of the address.”

“Sad, that.”

“Yes, sad, that.”

“But do you know her name?”

“Dot. Her name is Dot.”

“Short for something?”

“Ah, yes.”

“Ah, I know her. You’re welcome to her. A flighty piece.”

Silence, punctuated by dry sobbing.


Written today and first published here

Different Skins - by Gary McMahon

I’m starting another of my real-time reviews. This time it is of ‘Different Skins’ by Gary McMahon (Screaming Dreams 2009). [My previous reviews are linked from here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/recent_reviews_of_books_by_dfl.htm ]

This review will be done slowly, savouringly, in real time, so please do not look back here more than once every few days for additions.
*
EVEN THE DEAD DIE

Part One - My London Ghost
"There are hundreds of streets out there in the Shitty City..."
As stirred in me by an incident told here, I think Horror Fiction is looking through the fish-eye into the corridor outside your bedsit? Do you open the door when you have first glimpsed what you have glimpsed...? For one moment, I though it was a real fisheye and a real me looking through it.
The initial setting casts an under-grounded, inward-swarming, dead-leaning London as a receptacle for the Personal and the Recurrent. Our first-person singular protagonist addresses us direct and we cannot help but participate in our act of reading something that flows more like listening.
A shame the very first sentence contains, to my eyes, a blatant hilarious misprint. Or maybe it isn't a misprint. I may hit on its signficance later. Or it may just prove that the inadvertently ridiculous is subservient to the deliberately compulsive, especially when the protagonist's own dreaming of the unreal him forces you to dream of the real him. (4 Oct 09)

Part Two - Body Badges
"'The tattoo's forever...'"
The self-dramatised monologue continues, beautifully, darkly threaded with its soul-mate (dialogue) and its parameter (vision). London is not only an eschatological receptacle hinted by the previous part, but a vessel of paranoia, reconciliation-of-evil and irony. Not only eschatology but a faecal scatology. Amazing stuff.
"The choice is simple: we either reach out to connect or let the moment pass..."
The skin-tattoos are a particularly effective metaphor, i.e. of permanence, the ultimate non-nemonymous late-label, contrasting with the pale transients and the Traveller tattoo (upon our protagonist himself) as signs of impermanence that is strangely more permanent than permanence itself. And now not only the underground, but the under-underground of weirdly named stations. And a new form of sex and cross-addressing.
"'It is all diversion therapy, of course: a way of pussyfooting around what you already know...'" (5 Oct 09)

Part Three - The Big Black
This completes 'Even The Dead Die'. I have many thoughts going through my head, as stirred by this final part. Some I can't nail. It's as if the escapist Death Games of childhood are now provided by this book for us in adulthood. But none of those games took account of 'The Big Black' and Kerouac.
There are some rather disturbing images in this part (with the power of a McMahon in overdrive), images, that if you are not a seasoned Horror reader, will probably scar - or tattoo or 'God's signature' - you or your skin for life. Even if you are seasoned, I don't give a very comforting prognosis for your peace of mind...
At times, I was perturbed by the almost automatic, too easy unrolling of seemingly outlandish plot-data via dialogue in this final part. But if that was a fault, it is a minor one. The earlier irony now often touches on satire.
Strangely, one of the most frightening moments, for me, was the female protagonist ringing someone called Pin on her mobile.
And, if I may touch on a frivolous point, I fear for the long-term safety of Mr Tweety in view of what appeared in that first sentence of Part One!
I still reserve my judgement on the whole book's gestalt, as I prepare to enter its second half, as entitled 'In The Skin'. (6 Oct 09)
*
IN THE SKIN
One - All Alone Together
"...the love I have for my family causes me an exquisite agony."
McMahon, I feel, is the master of what I call 'the Horror Prose', both literary and slick, whereby all senses are subject to synaesthesia but personal aspirations fall short of those senses. A synaesthesia that artfully hints of Horror tropes within it ... plus a disconnection, a detachment that is paradoxically sensual. Here McMahon even excels himself, telling of a family man, his business trip to New York away from his family who have just moved into a new house, his temptations, inbuilt goodness, urges, self-deceptions, aching soul. This promises much...
An interested party publicly asked me yesterday about this review - "But do you like it?" Yes, I like this book, am enjoying it very much so far, but 'like' and 'enjoy' are difficult words in this context. As if they, too, are detached.
"...we reach out to each other but rarely ever touch, missing the connection by inches, miles, light years..." (7 Oct 09)

Two - We Are It
Upon returning to it, this story itself becomes its own changeling. Honestly wrenching stuff, and, for me, as a father long ago of small children, horrifically empathisable. The connection breach between him and his famly has widened so much it needs bridging with things that try to climb from the story to your very own personal story-within ... in parallel with that thing in the garden craning towards pawing the protagonist's own window. I shall not say more for fear of easing things too much for you by preparing you for coping with it. I don't think I'm being too melodramatic when I say I now need simply to prepare myself - with "the ghost of a smile to tickle my lips" - for proceeding onward to what must await. A changeling of a changeling, a notch or ratchet up? Or down? (7 Oct 09 - three hours later)

Another two hours later -- I shall deal with the final two parts together, as the reading-rush (much like the sugar rush in eating) has become all-consuming and the fourth part is relatively tiny:
Three - The Patter of Tiny Feet
Four - Thin as Skin
Firstly, may I get this particular exorcism off my chest: "...the twisted corpse of a house cat, a neighbour's pet. The skin has been peeled carefully from the cat's skull, and the strange marking I rubbed off the door frame is stencilled onto the sticky red bone..."
Strangely, however, having quoted it, that tangential moment seems to parallel the whole rite-of-passage in the final two parts. I will not describe further the outcome of the plot. There is no safe bridge between it and us. I think at least part of me - as a reading-soul - slipped between. "There is little distinction". No distinguishing the edges.
Indeed, I don't think I have experienced such a self-rending tour-de-force as a book's finale in empathy with any protagonist during my long history of reading fiction. You can only experience it for yourself.
Like it? Enjoy it? Forget it, big man!
-------------------------
I shall not read the author's story notes at the end of the book. I hate author story notes. The text is all. If the text needed more, then the text would have been given more. Indeed, I did glimpse that McMahon himself has headed these notes: "Oh, no, it's the Story Notes!"
I will return to the beginning of the book, however, and soon read Tim Lebbon's Introduction, to see what further food for thought this luminary may give.
The whole book as a gestalt? There is one. John Donne's HOLY SONNET TEN and John Donne himself. (7 Oct 09 - another two hours later)
==================

Another Two Old Gents

Once I grew used to the idea, it would still be hard for me to get to know the two old gents who replaced the two who had gone. There always had been two old gents populating the bench outside Blackwoods Supermarket – near the Town hall car park – opposite the Bookworm bookshop – all in a town that tried to be a village.

The previous two old gents had occupied that bench for it seemed forever – at least two decades just by my reckoning alone. Most of the time, they hardly grew older than they originally were.

The town went on day by day, with little change. Mrs Clark of the local Blackwood family, with the ear of each recurring holder of Mayoral office, was a stickler for keeping all change at bay. And shop signs were kept in position even when the shops using them had changed completely. Some called it laziness, others the credit crunch – but any change seemed to be a badness in itself whatever the bigger badness that the change may have changed into a goodness.

So when – overnight, as it were – the two old gents that had long held fort outside the supermarket in sedentary male gossip changed into two completely different old gents, I was perhaps the first to notice. My philosophy of life involved things staying the same by only changing gradually....so gradual, in fact, the changing was barely perceptible. So, here my sense of accustomed reality was challenged.

As witness, I was not alone for long. The Bookworm proprietor came out with the usual array of cheapies to stack outside in all weathers. He double-took the bench opposite with the two new old gents sitting on it. He then looked at me – triangulated, as I was, beside the car park entrance in relation to him and the two gents together as one.

But not an unchanged tableau for long. Mrs Clark, now squaring the set piece, was soon spotted scowling beside her Austin Mini.....all of us as if in an ancient sepia photograph being taken by an unseen onlooker who is new to the town.

From Blackwoods Supermarket comes the Undertaker in front of the first of two cheap coffins upon the shoulders of faceless procession.

Written today and first published here

Summary of DFL's Readings Aloud

SUMMARY OF DFL READINGS:
CARETAKER: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=57&page=1
MY GIDDY AUNT: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=37&page=1 - Published in Year's Best Horror Stories 1992
SNAIL TRAIL: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=23&page=1 - Abridged by Amy Ewbank
THE HOUND by HP Lovecraft: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=22&page=1
THE TELL-TALE HEART by Edgar Allan Poe: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=25&page=1
DOWN TO THE BOOTS: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=24&page=1 - Published 'Dagon' 1989 and 'Shadows Over Innsmouth' 1994
MELTDOWN: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=27&page=1 - First published in 'The Starry Wisdom' book (1994)... foreshadowing the 2009 global meltdown?
WATCH THE WHISKERS SPROUT: First published: 'Cthulhu's Heirs' (Chaosium Press 1994) Republished: 'Weirdmonger' (Prime Books 2003) http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=33&page=1
UNCLE ABSOLUTELY: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=34&page=2
CELLIANO: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=44&page=1
ECLAIRCISSEMENT (poem): http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?linkid=46&catid=2
CANDLE DREAMING: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?catid=1&linkid=56
----------------
PUBLIC READINGS:
THE GRINAGOG: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=1585
THE PROVENANCE OF SOULS: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=2778
GRASS: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=677
TUGGING THE HEARTSTRINGS: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=1794
WORK NOT STRICTLY DONE, BUT NO FURTHER ATTEMPTS WILL BE MADE: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=1208
THE MISSING ARROW: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=811
GRASS (2) or THE MISSING ARROW (2): http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=814
BUILD A CHARACTER: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=2615

Regarding the links below, please download from yellow bar at the foot of the page as shown. Please let me know if this presents a problem.
The Brainwright (1990): http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah81a60/n/VN650137_WMA
Snail Trail: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah80985/n/VN650019_WMA
Bloodbone: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah805g3/n/VN650031_WMA .
The Piano: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah80501/n/VN650032_WMA.
Small Fry: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah8052c/n/VN650036_WMA.
Egnis: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah8054f/n/VN650041_WMA .
Padgett Weggs: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah8055a/n/VN650085_WMA.
When I was An Old Man: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah80559/n/VN650086_WMA
The Tallest King: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah80567/n/VN650108_WMA
In Unison: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah80572/n/VN650139_WMA

NOTE: Reading aloud of my novel THE HAWLER: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_hawler_read_aloud.htm

Tea and Biscuits

written today and first published here

I always had the same dream during that period of two weeks when staying with Sarah. It is a long story to tell you about Sarah and how I came into her life. Suffice to say, that I did not befriend Sarah for her large country house; I did not befriend Sarah for the regular sex that later ensued; I did not befriend Sarah for the comfort and confidence-building she provided as we talked into the late afternoons around a moment-in-time, an occasion that we happened simply to call ‘tea and biscuits’.

We often met in the wet streets of Colchester, visiting the cinema for unwanted, unwatched film matinees - flickering screens that seemed to wash over us - then eventually migrating to a cafe that kept open later than the others for our sessions of ‘tea and biscuits’. Neither of us crossed the line. We simply met, then unmet ... until we met again. A routine that was not recognised as a routine. A routine with no obvious end ... until, that is, out of the blue, Sarah invited me for a two week stay in her country house.

I record here – in the hope you may consider this tantamount to a legal document – that I did not spend those wet afternoons in Colchester meeting Sarah in our late middle-age for any other reason than that we had met at a book club and simply met again outside of the book club with no ulterior motive within each of us or no ulterior motive between us together. There was not even the motive of neutralising loneliness. In fact, Sarah never gave me the impression she was lonely at all. And she, I am confident, never received the impression from me that I was lonely. So it was not for that reason. Our meetings just were. The fact we called the core of each meeting ‘tea and biscuits’ seemed to relieve us of the necessity or duty of rationalising our relationship any further.

Our relationship changed, of course, following Sarah’s sudden invitation to me to visit her country house for a two week stay. In hindsight, that was not only the seed of the relationship’s growth but also the seed of its destruction. We should probably have left it at ‘tea and biscuits’.

It is a long story, too, about the circumstances of the recurring dream. It only started coming when first sleeping in the guest room at Sarah’s country house, a place I often visited just for various weekends after the initial much longer toe-in-the-water fortnight.

Suffice to say that most normal dreams – or normal dreams to which I at least am accustomed – feature flowing events, whether linear or non-linear, but certainly events, moving images, echoes of real life in recognisable if possibly mutated interaction, some echoes forgotten, others not. But, no, the dream in question was what I called a ‘candle dream’. Since then, I have heard of many people having candle dreams, once I admitted to those people about having candle dreams, i.e. once having had them during stays with Sarah, with whom, let it be said, I have since lost contact.

How many of you have had candle dreams?

You need to know what a candle dream is before being able to answer my question, I’m sure. Others may know candle dreams with different names. Let me tell you that a candle dream, in my understanding, can be also called a fixed-camera dream, a frozen dream (or, at least, near-frozen), an unwavering dream (even if the candleflame itself wavers), a static dream (even if it flickers slightly), a single-frame dream (even if the image imperceptibly strobes or, as they say in the trade, cart-wheels), a single-flame dream (even if there is an after-image of a flame burnt on the retina by the original flame).

Simply put, a candle dream is of a single candle with a slightly flickering flame (with or without a candlestick, but usually with an ornate candlestick), and your minimalist view of it is as a slightly unwavering, non-shortening candle-wax and, from within the dream, perceived to be alight for eternity. A fear of eternity within a dream, let me tell those of you who are unaware of this fact, is the greatest fear of all. In other words, a candle dream is not a nice dream to dream. It cannot really be called a nightmare, I suppose, because nightmares are traditionally never static, never single-frame, indeed never single-flame. Nightmares have monsters and obvious fears and mutant echoes of life. Many who dream candle dreams rarely have contact with lit candles in real life. Many who dream candle dreams never complain of having nightmares.

One never knows whether any particular candle dream is the last candle dream you will ever dream ... whether, indeed, the eternity you sense from within the dream is a real eternity or not.

Sarah once told me during our tea and biscuits in her drawing-room at the country house that if I could tell someone, like herself, about the dream, as I was then doing as part of our usual small talk, then that fact was proof positive I had escaped the eternity of the candle dream.

I suppose I should have insisted that we abandon the sex and return to just meeting in the wet streets of Colchester, visiting the cinema matinees and late-opening cafe as part of a routine that may, in hindsight, have lasted us for a good while, even until we both no longer needed or even wanted company. It is now strange, looking back on it all, how I never questioned, during our small talk, how our afternoons together were always so wet, with Colchester being in the driest part of the country.

Cern Zoo Review

A 'Cern Zoo' review by The Author of 'Salmon Widow':

“Untitled”: Far more than “sweet nothings”: a wistful call to arms for the world’s broken hearted. The young inside the old, and - for the lucky few - the other way around.

“Dead Speak”: Polonium behind the arras? Weather hawks fight over knowledge and wisdom. Off at a good clip!

“Parker”: The messenger not the message. An intimate portrayal - and I raise my own Lady Parker in salute!

“Artis Eterne”: I love the timeless, placeless quality - the return to childhood haunts and hauntings. Arthur’s legacy passed like a dusty baton. Some very careful writing. I was completely absorbed.

“The Last Mermaid”: Big and bold. A rich seafood supper indeed!

“The Lion’s Den”: Assured and relaxed, the writing becomes invisible - no higher aim for a writer. Bravo! The animalism is powerful and - for me - is the truest embracer of the Cern Zoo concept. A FAVOURITE.

“Virtual Violence”: Lord of the Flies meets Cluedo. A wild little number. Liked it.

“The Rude Man’s Menagerie”: This piece put me most in mind of the “Untitled” opening story. Loss, memory and the very chalky earth itself reaching up to engulf Rebs. Beautiful. Unusual. Ooh.

“Window to the Soul”: More memories. At a price.

“Pebbles”: I have as much respect for this story as the author obviously has for her or his reader. It hangs like a dream. I loved it. A FAVOURITE.

“The Shadow’s Departure”: Jittery, spiky and full of icicle limbs. Strange, frightening. Truly visual.

“Being of Sound Mind”: Sara is faith personified. A leap of Sara. Did Sara leap? Uncomfortable. Moving.

“Dear Doctor”: Hah!

“Mellie’s Zoo”: The childhood answer to “The Lion’s Den”. The amplified imagination of children create creatures, worlds. Mellie’s purple hippo becomes Sara’s Dolly. The mazey zoo, its puzzles leading to... A deep story that I shall enjoy reading again.

“Turn The Crank”: Breathless, fearless writing! Loved it!

“The Devourer of Dreams”: A canny hand on the tiller here. Respect! A web woven with skill and precision - and the web is woven around... the reader!

“Just Another Day Down On The Farm”: Downbeat, downtrodden, the men are as caged as the animals. The men have no names - nor do their charges. I was numbed with real pain.

“Strange Scenes From An Unfinished Film”: Rather like the final paragraph of “Devourer of Dreams”, “Strange Scenes...” directly addresses the reader/narrator; tricking the light too drastic, the shadows between the sprocket holes of the film blurring story reality and story fantasy. Should he crack open a lager or a Kia-Ora? A bleak triumph.

“Lion Friend”: Perfectly formed - like an acorn in its cup - and polished like the deft shoes of a tap dancer.

“The Ozymandias Site”: This piece of vivacious cognitive estrangement is strong, moving, beautiful rhythmical stuff. Sustained otherness; utter humanity. To actually smell the moon... That such a story was written - and that I was lucky enough to read it - made me dance. I am still dancing. Thank you - whoever you are. A FAVOURITE.

“Cerne’s Zoo”: Animal souls slip through a gentle one. And - like “Devourer of Dreams (yet again!) - it’s a gift that keeps on giving. A little charmer.

“Sloth & Forgiveness”: Now here’s a right old laugh. Not “Albert and the Lion” but “Albert and his One Alternative”. There’s evidence of genuine madness here. I smiled all the way through.

“City of Fashion”: Some might read this story and give it no further thought. I think it’s one of the best stories I’ve read in the last ten years. A FAVOURITE.

“Fragment of Life”: Fraught and finely worked. Relentless. The electrician’s brain becomes re-wired and uncrushed. A liberation of sorts, a beginning of an end or... A very, very good story. Loss as a process, not as a memory. Boy, what writing. I should give up. A FAVOURITE.

Like Falling Snow

A story by Simon Strantzas

My review of it:

"I don't need to know any more sick people. I know me..."

I found this story quite unbearable, in a deeply poignant way. It should be read by everyone who is terminally ill. And we all are. I made the 'mistake' of reading it while listening to Mahler's Adagio from his 5th symphony. I shall never be the same...genuinely. The story is like a symphony in itself, alternating between the sick person's diary and a straightforward narration. That we are all part of each other - part of our history and future as self and unself. Even when those we loved we may not have loved enough because of inbuilt negative as well as positive symbiosis.

To think the ghost child within me may live on gives some sort of comfort. As does the story's ending. But deep down, we know that ghost is a snowdust bunny.

Literature like this can give you inspirational remissions along the way, but it is never forever. Old is only one letter short of cold. Esche one letter short of Escher.

"She coughed in a fit [...] until her eyes were full of stars."

My review of the whole book HERE

Susan Boyle Prefigured

Melissa and the Singer (by Terry Grimwood)

My review of this story:

This is a brilliant story. Simple, staccato language suits Grimwood. Actually, with 'Melissa and the Singer', I was compelled to read to the end voraciously, quite agog. Both cringing and uplifting. I really felt Melissa's emotions. The stress of an office party in all ts nightmarishness. It is an effective story of a gauche, overweight girl in a highly believably-evoked office scenario of professional and personal politics. Presumably, this story was written before the Susan Boyle 'Britain's Got Talent' phenomenon? (The story is in a book that was first published in 2008). Whatever the case, it either prefigures (or echoes) that phenomenon with panache and memorability. I won't forget this story for a long time. I will continue fathoming how Melissa progresses beyond the story's end, Susan Boyle or not.