Big Brother 11 (2010)

Continued from previous Big Brother here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/celebrity_big_brother__2010.htm

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Below are my on-going comments from the interactive forum here:

http://www.ttapress.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=182

I like the circus theme - and the 14 housemates are quite interesting - including Laughing Friar Tuck - and Shabby who risked concussion upon her entry and 13 weeks in hospital...
I'll mention Caiomhe - just to prove I can spell her name.
Ben. the writer and broadcaster, seems one to watch...

Mario the Mole - not sure how he can hide being a mole, when dressed as a mole...?

! see the winners out of this lot are going to compete at the end with best housemates from the past... Hmmmm
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exuding languor...
in 'a lady likes milk tray' way...

Brilliant report, Marion.

I wonder how people can miss BB. Although your reports stand on their own, as Gilead appreciates, there is an added dimension to them if you've actually watched BB.

Still, I don't think we are going to change people's ways on the last programme. So much trivial and important has flowed under the bridge already since 2004 when these TTA reports started. Too late now to share the artistic, mundane, philosophical, human, show business kaleidoscope that has been BB. It has influenced many of the fiction books I'm now getting published.

I agree that the latest BB seems to promise even more!

The mole-hole scenario is well thought out and, so far, they seemed to have hit the random target with Mario as its central figure. David was a good target's target to choose for the beach-ball.

The intro speech by each HM was useful and enlightening. Today I shall deal with Shabby. She is BB10's Angel whose wings ripped off when rushing about somewhere. Keen to give forth of her Lesbian credentials, but really she is a comic book character in short trousers from the Beano who aspires to be a sad clown one day in this circus scenario. Her part is already being written; she is busy inwardly learning the lines to fit the milieu of people she finds herself in. The rushing about was merely a misbegotten attempt to become the Pete-type (tourettes) winner she orginally intended to be. A role she is already revising. A role with empathy, as she showed she was worried about David not reading the beach ball.

One day we all have to read our beach ball.
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Intriguing that the only one who stayed on the ground was someone calling herself Sunshine!

She is an intense lady in her red outfit and Olive Oyl face -

Those weren't snores so much from Steve as bloated pig-snorts - creating a suspenseful situation in waking up someone just as the Mole carries out his task at 4 am (birds just starting to twitter and tweet). What a waste of good food at a time of Recession, I say!
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I espy three potential couples: Ben and the Gay Mole, Govan and Josie, John James and Blowjob Rachael.

What was all that about the vegetables spelling out 'twist' at the end?

I think I'm losing my grip.
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An interesting exercise in bluff, double-bluff and minus-bluff, the impossible task of mario the mole that was a foregone conclusion of possibility by retrocausality - and its one retro-casualty: Dr. 'cry-baby' Sunshine (and possibly Shabby for talking about nominations).

Josie reminds me of Doris Day.

Nathan - the Oasis reject! lol

John James - in his hood, something from a 'Lord of the Rings' crap-film.

Govan - Smeagol / Gollum disguised as a hobbit, or vice versa?

And what a waste of food - again!

in the war, I was taught to stew dead scraps.
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As with previous BBs at this early stage in proceedings, I'm now beginning to live in the faces; these are people who I happen to think about (for good or ill) and who have entered my life in a very strange way, with their baffles and fables, veils and piques, two-way filters of truth and fiction. The thing about truth is that it is monumental, untouchable, but humans can't approach it without being blinded by differing elements of fiction, some fiction voluntary and conniving, other fiction involuntary and sometimes to be pitied. Marion's report above is a wonderful word-picture to net the core of things happening, whether truth or fiction or both. Whatever the case, it is the 'truth' of what she sees. I see it too. I see it with her, among the personality crags and faces wherein we shall live for the next 12 weeks. taking them for granted by paradoxically not taking them for granted (or vice versa), i.e. by peeking at their ... well, yes, their veils and piques, vales and peaks.

I'd add a note about Corin's nifty neck-dance last night. An involuntary glitch of 'character' or a conniving show for the cameras?
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I agree with you, Marion, about Govan. He's a new Horror character (a subtle wheedler) that needs immortalising in a fiction book, for those who have so far escaped his insidious influence. I am nothing if not altruistic. Is his surname Shipyard, by the way?

Shabby Sunshine and 'Monk' David up for eviction, but I hear a rumour that they are to have a comepetition and the one who wins escapes eviction and can choose someone else to go up for eviction!

I like 'Doris Day' Josie so far the most.

Govan's mantra of "you don't know my motives, you only know what I say my motives are" (or words to that effect) ... does he really mean that? Despite his complete dislikeability, that sort of sums up BB for me.
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BTW, Corin is an interesting case study in 'business as usual' - a loving companion for Shabby, if it's not too late. A squeaky Jordan - with no plaster for blind spots.

Nathan, someone else under the radar. If he is a reject from Oasis I suspect he'd write foul graffiti on their Wonderwall, given the chance. Another 'business as usual' character.
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An interesting discussion between Shabby and Ben - which goes right to the heart of Big Brother. For example, was she hamming up her anger at being told she hammed things up? Probably.

Caoimhe still continues to skim along under my radar. With Ife, I've even forgotten I have a radar at all!

Dave's starring role tonight on two counts was all rather silly. Why do they mess around with long-tested rules - there is something unsatisfactory about Rachael facing the public vote when she wasn't nominated.

And Govan is in Dry Dock for a while longer....
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BTW, Sunshine appeared low-key in her reaction to nomination, Marion, but we are not shown everything. Another fact to factor in when only watching the summary programmes, as I do.

And did my eyes deceive me - Josie an impulsively infantile suck-a-thumb?
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Yes, I began to like Corin yesterday.

And Ben, Mario and Dave snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug represented a strange new version of morecambe and wise or laurel & hardy in their double bed scenes that we always took for granted as innocent - as we should.

And Ben keeps putting his foot in his mouth. And is he leading Mario on, I ask, by enticing touchy-feely contact between them? Or is he leading his own latent side of himself on?

JJ and Govan each separately have long-practised methods of argument (used in real life beforehand) and articulate them as if there can be no logical comeback against their arguments. But that attitude is silly because every argument has its flaws, however carefully mustered. Human nature's frailty entails believing ourselves 100% right about anything - which essentially means we are surely not.
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Hey, did you see that? Just this minute Corin gave an exact imitation of Marion's twirling Avatar. It was breath-takingly similar.
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Yes, I was glad Rachael went for all the reasons Marion gives. And I, too, didn't like her interview. She is actually quite thoughtful in her own way and probably quite a successful kid on the block - but she did not do herself justice during her time in the house. A bit like the England team. Good when playing for her club.

Corin's 'mission' lying was done all very chirpily. As I said before this lady is 'business as usual', in quite a positive way. However, although Nathan, Caiomhe and Ife are similar, my radar is now only picking them up as ricochets off tiny homunculi in the corners of the screen.
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Thanks, Gary. I hadn't realised the identity of Shabby as a previous film actress.

She is certainly very well spoken - and I think I like her.

I am kicking myself (of all people) not to recognise that the name of Bob Righter (the clown with flashing eyes in the cabinet) is an anagram!

Ben is both a prig and that other similar word he used when speculating about what the audience thought of him!
Still, I like him better than JJ and Govan.

Sunshine became a cloudy day when she heard the crowd chanting her name negatively. Everyone was lying, I'm sure, when they told her that they didn't hear her name!
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I think they're Vuvuzuelas - and they grow in Caracas. Not to be confused with certain secret areas of the Pampas.
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That's who I've been trying to think of that Corin resembles. She's the new Bet Lynch (Bet Gilroy)...!

The Shabby - Caoimhe 'thing' is developing. Not sure where it's going, but it at least got Ife into prominence for the first time.

Govan doesn't look happy.

I think the person I like the least in the House is Dave. There's someting very dissembling about him ... indeed self-dissembling, too.

Nathan is probably the most 'natural' i.e. as he is in the outside world. Not my sort, really, though.
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I, too, was shell-shocked by the latest BB. It was like the nightmare after the circus, where they had once all put on happy faces. Josie had now smeared her make-up over her lips and nigh bared her chest in whorish mien. And Shabby had taken over (from Josie) the role of Doris Day in a grotesque version worthy of this nightmare, with braces and Calamity Jane swagger.

Ben was the dreamer dreaming the nightmare, visions swarming around him, some pawing his body, others tugging at his mind.

Phew!
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I thought the Tree task for Shabby was a brilliant idea and adroitly conducted by Shabby - and, funnily, I didn't have the same feelings towards Ben's predicament as Marion did. Perhaps I should have done.

Anyway, it sort of backfired making BB seem like a cruel agent provocateur in people's emotions, even though it was Shabby who chose Caoimhe as a dinner date.

However, one wonders how much Shabby (an actress by profession) is acting out these emotions or really feeling them - or both!!!

If she is really feeling those emotions, she did exactly right to tell Caoimhe about the task - whatever the consequences with BB's Tree of temptation. BB will be seen to be even more cruel if they now deal cruelly with Shabby.
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Caoimhe was very clever acting upset when bombarded with a Beckettian tape-loop of Ben's voice 'huis clos' with pictures of him around her. She knew that BB could not afford to be seen to be creating mental distress in a HM for too long.

Did Shabby choose Mario for the eviction vote because she thought him the least likely to be voted out? I didn't really understand that bit.

And - what a hoot! - David is still drunk with the Holy spirit. In fact his Lord's coming out of his stomach! (Wasn't there a HM in a previous BB who had things coming out of her belly or chakras?)

Nathan is a real rough diamond, with the emphasis on rough!

And, nice to see Ife prominent again.
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Through the course of BB we shall see the spiritual journey from Ife to Life itself. This will be the natural culmination of our own spiritual journey with BB ab initio.
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So ... Ben is an 'overwrought' 'paternalistic feudalist'

So ... Ife is is a philosopher of life : "We are all people, and we all live and learn"

So ... Dave's belly is bubbling with rivers of joy.

So ... the inevitable tying themselves up into knots regarding the talking-about-nominations rules has now set in with a vengeance

An animal farm ... or circus ... or zoo
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Beniel in the Ben's Den - Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin

I forgot it was backward day! Me! Who has been obsessed with retrocausality for the last year!

And yes JJ did stamp on Sunshine's ankle.
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JJ and Sunshine seem to be getting closer and Ife larger than life. She is a slow burner. Her imitation of Ben after the huge black sticky squashed spider suffocating him was priceless.

Nathan now seems the HM who is so himself that one wonders if he's just popped into the house on the way to a gig.

I hope Dave goes tonight. Him and his drunken Lord.
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[And why was Ben wearing a shirt with an outsize collar?]

He thinks he's Harry "Brideshead" Hill.

Govan going is OK by me. Dave to go next. Him and his bubbling belly.
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Ah, Gary, I remember Mikey. I often am amazed at how blind people possess an ability towards a normality of life. There was an amazing blind lady recently on 'Deal or No Deal'.

As to last night in the BB house, it is funny how over the years minor food substances have caused major World Wars in such a close community. Crisps, this time. But isn't there an advert on at the moment about giant crisps attacking the world? Or did I dream it?

I've gone off Josie. She seems very conniving and exhibitionist. Well, they all are, but some hide it better than others!

But my least favourite housemate is Dave. Evandemongelical and Episscopalian.
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Well, I think the winners of the penalty shoot-out are going to be sorely disappointed when they see the England - Germany match. They should have had Ife playing rather than Rooney!

Shabby is becoming quite an articulate philosopher of life. I am beginning to like her.

I was a bit disappointed in Ife in her bahaviour towards Sunshine regarding the Cosmic Crisps

Nathan's coming out of his shell and the more he does that the less likely I am to like him more!

JJ and Josie - I imagine the Move Over Darling song in the background as they spoon.
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I think Nathan was the star last night. The use of his muppet in the Diary Room - and then later when he tried to exchange half a cake for cigs and beer. "No snoggie-woggie without boozie-woozie'.

I think they tailed off in their muppet surrogacy towards the end of their task and didn't deserve to win it. But they couldn't not have Steve's party.

A karaoke party (cf the muppet surrogacy) that I am glad I didn't have to attend!

PS: I wonder if they could have talked about nominations with their muppets and got away with it? A very interesting (and amusing, as Marion says) experiment in puppetry-by-puppetry, i.e. in the context of all the other interesting human and philosophical phenomenology thrown up by BB.
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I haven't been able to write here till now about last night's programme but most of it has now gone out of my head. Thanks, to Marion above, I have been able to re-live it.

I go along with her usual perspicacious observations.

I am beginning to like Sunshine. She seems to have her head screwed on without it being screwed on too tight.

I really have antipathy towards Dave and was cheering JJ on - as long as it was done tongue in cheek. Towards the end I thought JJ crossed the line into disrespect. I certainly hope Dave doesn't escape the vote this week. Him and all his bubbling belly-joy in the Lord. I even prefer Stephen Baldwin to Dave!

Ife is turning into the office whinger. I've known many like that in my professional days.
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Well, much auditioning tonight by Shabby for a part in a theatrical play where she can let rip in Pinteresque rages.
The most interesting thing however is that she *thinks* she is not acting.
Also, interesting to note she is quite good at it. I want to see her in 'The Birthday Party'.

Enjoyed Josie's mimicking of JJ. A bit like she had JJ's muppet to use.

JJ is quite a queer cove. I can hear his voice now irritatingly present even though the room is in silence.

Damn! Dave got off again. But pleased he chose Caiomhe to replace him. She is a cold chill down the spine.

Ife is strutting around busy with mundane thoughts of smoking...
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Yes, as I implied in my piece before, CAOIMHE out! with your cold-chill spine and arbitrary letters in your name that apparently say KEEVER. She were ever iffy.

Thanks once again, M, for your pungent and incisive BB commentary. I hope these wonderful essays are not written just for my, Gary's and Gilead's benefit on this single thread.
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Wow! Marion. We loll across your sparkling reportage like Disgay Dave over Ben? ... no, like odalisques upon your bed of fine words.

Caiomhe stepped up the raunchy stakes with Shabby quite cynically - for votes tonight and the eviction of Sunshine. I certainly hope her ploy doesn't work.

Corin is trying to do a Nikki in the Diary Room - with her own repeated catchphrase: "How embarrassing is that?" - in her squawky voice: a cross between Bet Lynch and a mandrake root. Corin has a formula for winning and I am only beginning to notice.
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I've got it! Corin - Hylda Baker with a soupçon of Hilda Ogden!
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Marion, I am devastated that Sunshine has gone full stop. Also devastated by the Shabby - Caoimhe conniving that caused her going.

I do however have a sneaking regard for Shabby and her Beckettian Pinterisms.

Ben did well. I shall always remember his piece on 'mobile homes'.

Davina is right : Steve is a nice bloke but he does nothing. Or do we expect Housemates always to do something? Why should they?

And Nathan, too. He has his moments in the radar, but basically Nathan is Nothing. A rough nemonyte.

And Girl Iffy. She is living embodiment of her own dodgy existential place in the conjunctions of grammar.
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Not much happened tonight. Only an internal view of happenings last night.
I fear this may be the case here on in.
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Well, Marion, it only goes to show. Your discoveries of perception found much where I found none last night.

Or maybe it was just the mood I was in.

Let's hope tonight's edition will re-ignite my tutelary angel or daemon muse.
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...and, indeed, tonight inspired me. Especially the moral considerations arising from Ben's punishment under the aegis of an excellent American corporal (whether an actor or real, this man was brilliant) - and Ben's flunking his punishment with someone else being punished instead.

Ben's carefully wrought yet patronising rationale of his behaviour towards Mario - was another BB gem. Mario seeking privacy for this conversation takes on a new light when we think of the millions watching!

The political discussion with Nathan, too.
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It's a shame Shabby is about to leave, The whole situation of the Iffy Girl's fabricated anger and the reaction of the 'Mean Girls' reminds me of behaviour on the internet and, even, sadly, of my own behaviour sometimes thereon.

Has anyone noticed that Nathan and Ben (other than the hair and the voices) are identical twins?

The beds fiasco was very school dormitory immature. But who can talk?
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I am sad about Shabby.

I said earlier that Nathan is Nothing.

Indeed, for me, he is a black hole in reverse.

I am finding the whole programme depressing at the moment.

But your report of it, Marion, brightened me up.
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Thanks for the alert, Marion. A more positive evening, indeed. Nathan comes out of his shell (he almost strung some sensible words together) - only to be put up for eviction by eviction-busting-game-winner Caiomhe. But I'm in two minds - because I want her to go, too!

Ife was brave (foolhardy?) in actually admitting to Caoimhe what she said about her in the diary room about 'leading on' Shabby. Bravo, Ife! Probably a unique event in BB history - someone so dangerously 'up front' about divulging such a sensitive DR entry.

The shoes task with Sophie was a real hoot! She is a game girl, and Doris Day would be proud of her. The on-the-spur excuse about visiting the loo was priceless.

Cheered me up.
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Wow! Really good robot with impressive movements, huge size and fright- as well as humour-value. It doesn't look as if it's anyone dressed up but a genuine robot. A scenario that fits with (otherwise boring) tattoo-tapestried cyborg-Steve in a Mad Max film!

Caiomhe has been faith-baiting Dave - I think I'd be doing the same but in a much more subtle fashion, I hope. An interesting interaction. Neither came off well.

Rosebud plump-lipped Ben is bit fey and effete - and the others are noticing.

Corin remains the formulaic soap star in the Diary Room - and she has no engagement with people other than via the variety-show-of-self she puts on.

Nathan is beginning to learn to articulate like a growing child. He is slowly emerging from his own collider-hole.
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The clashing of cultures - in politics & religion.

Ben and Steve. (Is Ben right that Steve has never read a book?)
Caoimhe and Dave. (Who has the Devil in them?)


Then the clashing of evil wheelies with hooks.

Now Nathan must sling his hook!
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CONTINUED HERE

Rock Choir

They sat in a circle within the old hall that had seen many of the small town’s dance weekends. This afternoon there was a quiet that served as a blank space of memory, where the participants in the circle inwardly recalled various life changes that had centred upon this very hall. Someone suggested that the traffic had stopped outside just to allow them a precious silence. Another mentioned a possible roadblock due to some incident in the town. There was, however, no question of anyone outside the hall being aware of precious silence. Business prevailed, errands that each human being considered more paramount than they actually were. Only relative to each other. Many of the interconnections unnoticed or being chance ones.

By their nature, interconnections between townsfolk could bring importance as well as triviality. For example, Sadie’s expeditionary dash to the corner shop for a newspaper was unremarkable. Yet, Brian’s search for love on lacklustre streets was more significant when he later accidentally tripped Sadie by means of his careless attention to shop doors and other people’s paths of purpose. Equally, Charlotte’s mission was to save someone from despair and possible suicide, but when she arrived at Lionel’s house she found him away on holiday with a woman he had met in the pub the night before. She later went to the same pub by chance. In contrast, Charles’ regular constitutional along the sea front brought him, as ever, to an unexpected and unseen crossroads, one route to nowhere, another towards a dreadful fate, another to a wonderful fate, the last one back the way he had come.

Those in the hall were oblivious to these other comings and goings of the town as they sat in un-self-conscious circular communion – squatting upon the chair-less floor. In many ways, each was a chance encounter, arrived here at roughly the same time, surprised that the others had also arrived, all participants in a rock choir that had once appeared in the hall in a greater hey-day than it possessed today.

Wendy had always (‘always’ being a word she often used) seen her original joining of the rock choir not so much as a sharing of the rock song but more as an expression of the gospel in her soul, especially when the choir, if seldom, rehearsed and then performed hymns and new-born happy clappiness. Today, she had recently retired from her workaday life and had wanted to see the hall again, in the hope that she may now have more time to resume group singing. Visiting the hall (now many miles from her current home) was an instinctive unplanned ingredient in that process.

Cheryl – who had overlapped in the rock choir with Wendy for a few months in the old days – had returned to the town because she happened to be visiting an old friend nearby and, being early, decided to stop off in the shopping centre where the hall was situated. Both women recognised each other but – in tune with some unspoken agreement – had not talked to each other, but only with those whose names they had forgotten. In fact, one of the others was Sadie who had been in a neighbouring street and was now nursing her sprained ankle as she sat on the floor. She, too, completed the circle. She was probably only one of the very few ex-rock choir members who still lived in the town and had grown accustomed to the dereliction of the hall, in contrast to the others present who had found its appearance today quite shocking.

One ex-member was indeed perturbed as he rounded the corner from the train station – and saw the exterior of the hall: quite different from how he remembered it. Disregarding the evident need of renovation, he was struck by what once must have been an impressive colonnaded entrance and double doors. All he remembered, he thought, was a single undistinguished door. For one moment, he wondered if he had found the wrong hall. But, no, this was definitely it. Strange how intervening dreams must have altered its very nature. He shrugged to himself, still wearing the pony-tail , but now decidedly greyer. His walk was decidedly more laboured, too, Sadie thought, as she glimpsed him arriving to make up his share of the circle inside.

But then a stranger came. One whom each failed to recognise. ‘Charles’ he told them. He looked quite calm. He then looked almost not there at all.

Eventually, the group of people stirred from what most of them deemed to be sad contemplations. Completely unpremeditated, in unison, they began singing the old choir’s most successfully performed rock anthem ... as if Queen's words meant more now.

written today and first published above

"Remember You're a One-Ball!"

My review of "Remember You're a One-Ball!" by Quentin S. Crisp (Chômu Press 2010) continued from here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/remember_youre_a_oneball__by_quentin_s_crisp.htm

pp 104 - 129
"I shall tell you - there is always a third figure."
I dare not take you into the realms of this book fully without you having the 'benefit' of its full context. That stricture, however, rather diminishes the ability to do a proper real-time review. Suffice it to say, I am in the thick of it now. I can't retreat and a part of me dare not go forward. Here the inner laws of Playground Lore (hinted at before), the esoteric matters I couldn't divulge earlier, the care one needs to feel and then demonstrate towards living roadkill, the rage against bullying, the (what I call) Astrological Harmonics upon flesh and mind, even when it's only bits of your flesh, bottled and exhibited in front of reticent souls and human shapes.... That does not give a clear picture of the plot but it does of the state of my reader's mind, here, 'in media res' - with half the book still to read. I will, however, mention the specifics of Thirds in literature. I encountered this first in the fiction of Elizabeth Bowen*...
Hopefully, I can be more up front with my review in later sections of this astonishing and frighteningly poignant book. (30 May 2010 - three hours later)

*THIS touches on Elizabeth Bowen's 'shadowy third'.


pp 130 - 142
"The mere act of reading seemed like an escape that had gone wrong midway..."
My relationship with this book is akin to the same correlations that Ramsey himself is making - as if I'm in battle with the book in the playground and I hear the chants of 'Fight! Fight! Fight!...' in the background. And, like Ramsey, I need to clear the decks of other more artificial relationships in the real-time world of people before I can get to grips with the reality of the text in greater privacy and then grasp its implications.... The book is almost like a rubber file that keeps the impress of my fingers in its pliable spine and sides ... and people will point and jeer at me when they know I have handled it as proved by the unique fingerprints. (30 May 10 - another 2 hours later)

pp 142 - 157
"Some of the children were making sounds impossible to record phonetically..."
Jotters with secrets on (they called them 'blotters' in my day) and dustbins used as filing or postal way-stations. Ramsey searches his memory about the past and a school friend of his and Bagpuss and the spitefulness of girls and (perhaps to my mind alone) some mysterious binary code with bits missing.
Tell-tale tits and a secretly documented systematic sports injury (like a chanted skipping-game?) to retrocause deficiencies in most boys to harbour for when they grow older and even more miserabilist? I puzzle over what I am reading but, overall, I am enthralled by possible Jungian undercurrents I sense underlying those old fuzzy mis-scrolling small-screen black and white puppet shows on TV I used to watch on TV before TV people got cleverer with doing TV and gave things pink and white stripes. (30 May 10 - another 3 hours later)



pp 157 - 166
Combining memory and a school file from the time, Ramsey recounts, for our benefit, primary source interviews with the then headmaster and direct experience narrative (all of which is 'fiction' to us but filtered into truth via various authorial 'baffles' to interrupt or ease the flow of events) concerning the eventual de-bagging of that erstwhile school friend (not a friend really but one of those kids whom one shares a past with at 'Primary' School) and the spitefulness of child-evil interactions so typical of our memories of them when filtered by time as an extra ingredient in the mix of transmission to our present (but still fluid) selves. But who is the most skilful at this: the author or the narrator? Who invented whom? (31 May 10)

pp 166 - 184
"It was almost as if there were an actual plot against him."
Continued bleakness, induced semi-obliqueness, 'third' party admissions via kept counselling records, Ramsey makes this story of a previous school 'friend' doubly unbearable. A narrator who also puts it on us to carry these things in our own minds. Too late now to retreat. A mind like a carelessly kept attic or loft of memorabilia where the throat of sound is a stylus dropping on to tight dusty spirals within long-abandoned vinyl.
"I saw a great rock from some unknown quarter of the unspeakable darkness of eternity..." (31 May 10 - eight hours later)

pp 184-190
More discoveries in that dusty attic of childhood's artefacts are seen in interface (across the river space between two chapters - a chapter being a sort of guild or secret club)... in interface with telephonic tantrums from Jacqueline. It would be over-forward of me to comment on those discoveries in the attic. Ramsey has now told me, but he hasn't told you. Da da da-da da! You haven't bought the book yet? Ummm, I'm going to tell! (The book itself has a Foreword that I have not yet read. Forewords are unashamedly forward, too). (31 May 10 - another 2 hours later)

This real-time review is now continued here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/remember_youre_a_oneball_3.htm

The Peacock's Eye - by Frances Oliver

My real-time review of 'The Peacock's Eye' by Frances Oliver (Secker & Warburg 1986) continued from here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_peacocks_eye__by_frances_oliver.htm


pp 75 - 89
A new day. A new mind. And I have now met Stefan - and his implications for Mitzi - the sore or scar ... or soar towards an immortality. We are now under no illusion of a biography of her grandmother being tried on for size here in this fiction, but a full-blooded auto-memoir of Mitzi's own self taking sway. And moving on from a TB sanatorium's gardener to the act of painfully kneeling on hard peas seems a symbolically fitting rite of passage. I shed a fictional tear or two at a fiction that makes me feel it is realler than reality itself. (As an aside, Mitzi (called by her real name Maria (ie her grandmother's name) at the convent to which she's sent as an example of an era's disgrace) may have come into life from her grandmother via her mother but a two-way filter doesn't often work well in one of its directions). (27 May 10)



pp 89 - 99
"I have spoken much of deflating myths; in the last few pages I have indulged in a myth of my own."
My own myth is a pretence that I can manage this book in a real-time review. Nah! It grows beyond my ability to summon succinct summaries of character and event. While some become faint, others become bright, but we only have the narrative viewpoint to trust which is which. Mitzi herself has admitted defeat - effectively - inasmuch as this book is nothing to do with her grandmother or with others who are shouting from the biographical sidelines to keep the plot in check. It escapes even the poignancy of hindsight. Felix's bravado, Stefan's iconicity, Mitzi's mother's 'mating' habits. This a Mahler symphony. Each note (or word) larger in meaning than simply itself. It needs re-invention, needs packing....
" 'All you need to get rich is a new kind of zipper.' (Soon after that someone did invent Velcro, but it was not Felix.)" (28 May 10)




pp 99 - 113
"...what you commit is what you feel you are committing."
When earlier thumbnail-reviewing this author's novel 'Xargos' I wrote: "The relentless scenes of sleep and waking and nearness within the claustrophobic expedition tents are absolutely incredible. The flutes of shepherds in lands of hot-steaming misbegotten wonder. The faces in rocks..." Here, in 'The Peacock's Eye" we have a startling scene involving the edges of sexual protocol: and "the rhythmic motion was that of glittering caravans crossing the purple darkness, going over the horizon in a blinding shower of stars..." I will not shatter that beauty with any potential shame - but the 'faces in the rocks' are the battling biographers for the soul of the biography that lies at the heart of this novel: now swirling around the wonderfully stylised portrait or conception of Felix's 'future' wife: Betsy, an American unscarred by the war, bubbly-fey, precious and with, no doubt, lovely legs and grasping hands.
And scores to be settled by Mitzi across the years.* (29 May 10)
*retrocausally?

pp 113 -122
"...if you behave outrageously with an air of behaving well, you are quite likely to get away with it."
Or presumably so thought Mitzi's amoral half-brother Felix. He even uses Grandmother's senility to befog his tracks. Not for me to say, but I sense a bit of this in Mitzi's own method of narration-of-reality. Not only is it Betsy who has a fast-moving 'sincerity' on tap to suit each moment! Dysfunction and dissembling as a method of autobiographical insulation.
"Felix reached over and heaped whipped cream onto Betsy's plum cake." (29 May 2010 - three hours later)



I have not yet resumed reading this novel today, but it has occurred to me - 'tween dreams last night - that Mitzi and Felix are a version of Hansel & Gretel, and the witch's oven is a sort of palimpsest of time-spans into which a Biography manqué is thrust - figuratively, a 'scrambled Shakespeare' that is being noisily typed for show instead of the 'magnum opus' it is boasted to be (Cf. Frances Oliver's novel: 'The Children of Epiphany') ... scrambled by time and self-deception?? But what of the trail of crumbs? (30 May 10)

pp 122 - 133

An amusingly satirical interval where Felix falls foul of dog-food during his marital sojourn in America ...

Upon his return to the family hearth in Austria - amazingly as it turns out by my premonition of 'scrambled Shakespeare' above - he assumes the mantle of writing a serious work of literature upon which he is about to embark.

Another writer (and American) - Joshua Prescott -- of whom, from time to time in the narrative, we have heard mention ostensibly en passant (as it were, but possibly with the power of the chess move with that name?) from various angles of time and authorial omniscience as a potential biographer -- is worth noting here as still a pervasive force. A force, but how strong a force? (30 May 10 - four hours later)

pp 134 - 142

" '...we only know our own sufferings, we only know what we feel ourselves.' "

Joshua has arrived on a visit and "... my fanatical search for what are, after all, only approximations to truth is getting the better of me again." Approximations to truth: Mitzi writing her autobiography as a part of someone else's biography, Joshua planning to write a competing biography(?), the head-lease author (Frances Oliver) writing about Mitzi, Joshua et al, and me writing a review of all these tenants of truth via text and subtext....

Meanwhile, Grandmama, mixing up names between her various servants, Paula to Janka to Gordana, encompasses us all in her fading mind, me included. (30 May 10 - another 3 hours later)

pp 142 - 149

It may be my inattentive fault as a reader, but, until this section, I had entirely forgotten (in my conscious mind) that Mitzi limped following the handicap caused by the aftermath of the Stefan affair - but realising it here amid the relative happiness of being in the handsome company of Joshua, Werner, and Felix - made it so much more effective a realisation for me.

We hear talk of Grandmama's papers. How many audit trails of reality can be found in private papers when compared to the faltering attempts of fiction as the ultimate truth, a fiction that created those papers in the first place? The sense of Joshua's doom has been with us since the very start of this novel.

[Schubert is mentioned en passant - someone who died very young when his genius was already flowering - yet we now believe he was one of the greatest composers who ever lived. How many flowering geniuses were nipped in the bud?] (31 May 10)

pp 149 - 158

We reach some crux, following others' girlish bigotries and Mitzi's Mother's misbegotten match-making, as Joshua's only real love-match becomes the letters to Grandmama, (including Kafka's and Freud's?). It is as if Mitzi now bows out in favour of her older namesake. An autobiographical narrative that commits its own form of lexic self-destruction in favour of a different narrative based on perceived primary sources, or so I sense at this its early crucial stage. Poignant? Utterly so ... in the context. (31 May 10 - three hours later)

.

This real-time review now continued here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_peacocks_eye_3.htm

Null Immortalis - order of stories

A Pause for Thought

NU Immortalis

I have now decided on the order the stories will appear in this forthcoming book:

TURN AGAIN by William Meikle
A GIANT IN THE HOUSE by Daniel Pearlman
APOTHEOSIS by D.P. Watt
THE RETURN by S.D. Tullis
LUCIEN’S MENAGERIE by David Fitzpatrick
VIOLETTE DORANGES by David V. Griffin
EVEN THE MIRROR by Ursula Pflug
LOVE IS THE DRUG by Andrew Hook
THE DROWNED MARKET by Joel Lane
THE SCREAM by Tim Casson
THE SHELL by Tony Lovell
STRINGS ATTACHED by Gary Fry
OBLIVION by Derek John
TROOT by Margaret B. Simon
A MATTER OF DEGREE by Mike Chinn
ONLY ENUMA ELISH by Richard Gavin
ICARUS ABOVE... by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR by Reggie Oliver
HOLESALE by Rachel Kendall
FIRE by Roy Gray
BROOM PEOPLE by Cameron Pierce
THE TOYMAKER OF BREMEN by Stephen Bacon
THE MAN WHO MADE THE YELLOW GOD by Mark Valentine
THE GREEN DOG by Steve Rasnic Tem
HAVEN’T YOU EVER WONDERED? by Bob Lock
SUPERMARINE by Tim Nickels

I never heard him coming

“I never heard him coming, but I sure did hear him leaving!”
The man – by the name of Cecil (he didn’t look like a Cecil, more a Robert or David) – seemed to be talking to himself. He had on green wellies in contrast with a sharp pin-striped suit.
“Pardon?” I asked.
He looked up from pressing hard with a biro on several layers of purple carbon-paper – having realised that I had arrived and was listening to him. He should have put a proper bell on his door.
The door was called Cecil’s Sensible Emporium. It was normally deserted and I wondered how it ever made money. He had one assistant – evidently his wife – who stood stock still like a tailor’s dummy.
The shop sold useless or silly things, novelty goods, trinkets – and niche products without a niche.
“Yes?” he asked curtly.
“Have you a candle I can burn at both ends?” I replied.
He stared at me for a moment. He then put his hand under the counter and pulled out what looked like a firework – a rocket with a stick at both ends and two fuses.
“I said a candle...”
“Oh,” he replied. “Maude!”
And his wife (who didn’t look like a Maude, more a Jane or Gillian) moved for the first time and walked into the back of the shop where I imagined a storeroom to be situated. I listened to a lot of scrabbling noises, drawers being opened and shut. And curses under her breath that obviously carried further than she intended.
Being an impatient man, I decided to exercise a far too long sought after skill in patience. Two hours later, Maude re-emerged carrying a selection of candles, rattling them like thin wooden logs.
I chose one that I thought I could burn at both ends without compromising subsequent snuffing out. And I left the shop, as Cecil and Maude began to squabble. Their Sensible Emporium so-called was not very sensible after all, but being a sensible customer, I was probably a vital requisite for the shop to be a sensible shop. Sensible customers make for sensible shops, you see. And silly customers make for silly shops. Supply and demand.

Stories and readers, too.

www.weirdmonger.com

http://www.weirdmonger.com/


has been moved here:


http://www.nemonymous.com/


sorry for inconvenience

I am going to have another another...

There was a belief that the wheel would last forever. The strongest design possible was, after all, the classic circular wheel that meant all forces around it played against each other before being able to focus any end force against the thing itself. Therefore, I stared at the person who showed me his design for a wheel and I could not believe it was a wheel at all. It seemed square but with levers along most of its exterior points, levers that changed position as the whole thing was pushed ... each lever levering the others with a series of internal pulleys and springs. I thought a real wheel would have been so much simpler – and I laughed.
And he laughed, too, as he produced from behind his back – like a conjuror – another thing he called a wheel...

“I am going to have another...” he intoned.

I expected him to continue the sentence. Another what? I signalled the question with a single glance. I was used to flirtatiously batting my eyelids and always getting what I wanted. But he remained silent, merely showing me another object and then another. As if they weren’t objects at all but speculative ‘anothers’, each ‘another’ complete in itself without another word following it to act as noun or descriptor.

Each ‘another’ was an invention. An invention of another invention. From would-be wheels, he progressed to was-once-upon-a-time musical instruments, and from those to never-could-have-been items of clothing. He even managed to produce a has-been. A ghost of an existence that took shape before my very eyes as he tugged pulleys, stretched out springs and opened hinges, its eyelids echoing my own with each tweak he gave it.


To come full circle, I watched his would-be bones refuse to fuse ... and he clunked to a halt on a hillock like a premonition of a modern stairway of stone steps.

I climbed them expecting each one to be the last. But there was always another.

Another last balcony.

The Terror and the Tortoiseshell (3)

The third part of my real-time review of ‘The Terror and the Tortoiseshell’ (A Benji Spriteman Mystery) by John Travis (Atomic Fez Publishing Ltd. 2010).

Continued from here: http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/2010/04/16/

15.
"The floor was covered in dust..."
The image of 'The Terror' as it has changed inter-breeding relationships reaches here the most imaginatively grotesque proportions both in material fact (with one's own bare eyes) and inferred philosophication. Benji is called urgently to a disused grain warehouse and I'm sure what met him there made him weep for his police 'buddy' in spite (or because) of his earlier gravest misgivings about him. I did not see him weeping, however. Only inferred it. (17 Apr 10 - an hour later)

16.
"Talk about using a bulldozer to bury a Sparrow."
Side-splitting first-real-drink-after-the-Change rite-of-passage with Benji getting drunk on eggnog. A yellow taxi becomes a double-decker bus? Miaow. A comic lull before the Terror resumes, I guess. [Is there any reason why the word 'terror' has 'error' embedded, I wonder with a degree of expected irrelevance?] (17 Apr 10 - another 2 hours later).

17.
"A thin beam of white light passed my left ear, the beam full of small motes of dust."
You know, this is one helluva chapter. Akin, in some way, with an epiphany, and I can only think of "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" chapter in 'Wind In The Willows' as anything with any feasible comparison to it. An epiphany that is both scatological and eschatological. An important moment not only in this book, I guess, but also, without putting too fine a point on it, potentially important in all general literature. (17 Apr 10 - another hour later)

18.
"The sky was far too low..."
Some narrative tusslings with previous plot events by Benji - with, to my mind, at least a hint in one place about 'retrocausality' (a new buzz word personally for me in view of my recent studies of implications relating to CERN's Large Hadron Collider). (17 Apr 10 - another 30 minutes later)

19.
A very brief chapter in an elevator. One that I dare not divulge the nature of for fear of possibly letting some sort of cat out of the bag. A complete surprise to me. (17 Apr 10 - another 15 minutes later)


Part Three: The Country of the Blind

20.
" 'Didn't you notice the clue I left?' "
And I am afraid you who who are reading this review before you read the book must also enter the Country of the Blind. Well, at least for a while. Meanwhile, why has Benji reminded me of Mr Polly?
" 'It was a bit oblique I suppose,'..." (17 Apr 10 - another hour later)

21.
" 'It started as a hunch...' "
And for you, it ended as such, too. Meanwhile, in general terms, many sensitive implications (or hunches) as to the philosophical interface between Animus and Hume. (17 Apr 10 - another 30 minutes later)

22.
" 'I got nowhere with it.' "
While in the Country of the Blind, I've been extrapolating (separate from but relevant to this book) upon the entire pure mid-Ash chemtrail-less blue sky beyond my window here today. It seems somehow right thus to muse upon this sky without aeroplanes as we enter territory with this book where even angels may fear to tread. 'Dark faucets' or Blue Wells? (17 Apr 10 - another 20 minutes later).

23.
I can lift the news blackout slightly at this point. As Benji speculates upon how he is to get entry into the misspelt newspaper's offices (for reasons you will eventually understand even if I don't!), he first meets up with Lieutenant Dingus, one of those remarkable characters I mentioned earlier, this an "undersized, squinty-eyed Basset Hound in a dirty brown raincoat..." (17 Apr 10 - another 20 minutes later)


This real-time review is now continued here:
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_terror_and_the_tortoiseshell_4.htm

I am going to have another...

“I am going to have another...”

A meaningful look but no attempt to finish her sentence. I looked at her quizzically as she fished for something that had fallen down inside the sofa.

“Another what?” I asked, without realising this was the sort of response she hoped to elicit from me.

“I am going to have another cup of tea and you’re going to make it for me.”

She smiled mischievously. She pulled a paper tissue from the sofa – which didn’t seem to me to have sufficient ‘weight’ to have fallen down inside it – and blew her nose noisily. She then pulled out another one and unsmudged her lipstick while peering into a compact mirror. I then reaIised that she must have put the tissues there when I wasn't looking.

“What’s wrong with keeping them in their box?” I asked, pointedly ignoring her comment about the tea.

Equally pointedly, she pushed the used tissues back down inside the sofa. I made a face.

I then made the tea.

As I stood in the kitchen waiting for it to brew, I found my thoughts wandering. All things in the world have their handles. Some handles are handles proper, made to be handles. Other things have makeshift or ad hoc handles, and were obvious as handles once you began to handle an object, like a pen or a book or anything without an obvious protuberance to use as a handle. The kettle had a handle: the least hot place as well as one to fit the hand conveniently. A teapot and teacup, too. But the packet of biscuits I was about to open had no obvious handle to grab, but grab it I did at one end. What about the water I had used to fill the kettle? How would I grab that, should I need to do so? I laughed at the prospect of grabbing the handle of water. The tap had a handle of sorts – one that moved and did a job, i.e. to make the water pour, but the water itself was not handleable, and even if it were, it would seep through the fingers however tightly you kept them together.

What about my thoughts themselves? There was an expression about ‘getting a handle' on things...

Armed with a tray – teapot, two cups and saucers, milk jug, sugar bowl, biscuits on plates, all balanced precariously upon it – I returned to the sitting-room.

I asked, without further delay: “Why were you stuffing snotty tissues down my sofa?”

Silence. Nobody on the sofa. Well, nobody on it. I saw something pink and suggestive stuffed down the side where my guest had been sitting.

I sat down with a sigh, at the other end of the sofa, listening to a stifled sneeze in the far corner of my consciousness. Absentmindedly, I picked up a crumbly digestive at one edge and bit into it as near to my fingers as it was possible to bite without threatening their integrity as fingers. I then poured out the amber infusion, with a delicious flowing sound. And picked it up by the delicate handle to take a sip.

“I am going to have another...” I said.

Silence. I looked plaintively at the crumbs in my lap and wondered if there ever could be a story with no handle at all.


Written today and first published above.

Back From The Dead

Part two of my Real-Time Review of Johnny Mains' 'Back From The Dead' - The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror Stories (Noose & Gibbet 2010)

Continued from here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/back_from_the_dead.htm

A Good Offence by Myc Harrison
"Whispering was a way of life when you lived in a small town..."
Boyhood sexuality is an open goal, perhaps, for some. Cruelly conceived, but arguably justified, this is Charles-Birkinite revenge horror. An ice for an ice.
Tightly written, succinct, to the point. Meanwhile, taking a punt, quite irrelevantly perhaps, I mention that Hockey-sticks do jolly well look like giant keys.... (7 Apr 10 - three hours later)

Gallybagger by Roger Clarke
"Only in the ground for a year and then treated like old bedsteads and baths."
In some ways, I'm a literary snob. In other ways, I'm the complete opposite. Against all my initial expectations, this impressive anthology is continuing to satisfy both these aspects of my 'reading' character. And often satisfying both simultaneously! This story, following the complicatedly embedded thing in the previous story, tells of the prising out (unlocking) of another complicatedly embedded thing: a pipeline in the Isle of Wight and its literal entanglement with wartime remains in the ground and, more figuratively, with some Wightian mythos of the Gooseberry Wife and scarecrows... This is the stuff of dream, where, cleverly, any surrealism is made real by being tangibly embedded in tangible things with implicit ley-lines veining real honest-to-goodness earth under the feet of man (wight). And is it any coincidence that the protagonist is named Coates (the composer of 'The Dambuster's March')? I think not. See what you think. (8 Apr 10)

Spinalonga by John Ware
"The graves were no longer than three feet, so that the joints of the corpses had to be broken and the skeletons bent double to get them in."
Another island, more grounded embeddings, an ikon and other disinterred matter reminding me of the keepsake and 'earthkill' in the previous story.... This book's stories (independently written and unnconnected other than by this book) continue to seem - whether by intention or accident - to flow in and out of each other like mutual filters.
Tourists on a Greek Leper Colony Island (the I-protagonist and his wife Angela) - and a 'priest' who reminded me of the Angel in 'Angel' or Peter Hopkirk in 'The True Spirit' .... while 'Spinalonga' itself is how I remember the Pan Book of Horror Stories, Britishly charming as well as insidious with an ending that we, in our early days, thought to be so refreshingly nasty. But, sadly, today, nothing's nasty any more because all is nasty. (8 Apr 10 - two hours later)

The Forgotten Island by Jonathan Cruise
"I have levered from its bed of moss and peat, the great iron boiler used a century ago for the rendering of fat of elephant seal and king penguin."
Another island - and a journal of 'Swiss Family Robinson'-like narration mixed with Jules Verne and 'The Lord of the Flies" ... but not flies, as such. If you're a cat-lover... No, if I say what I want to say, it will have the potential readership of this book halved! "Cats are 'The True Spirit'", I'd say instead!
A wonderful tale of a shipwrecked yachtsman on an Antarctic island called Solitude (not forgotten at all!), with his loved one Ailsa. And it is as if the pipe from 'Gallybagger' squeals inside with feline terror...
You'll have to read it to find the tale's moral. And which creatures finally win out, be they human or animal. (8 Apr 10 - another 4 hours later)

Dreaming the Dark by J P Dixon
"If you're a shapeshifter why stop at forms that already exist. What you are is limited only by your own imagination."
An important novelette, I suggest, in the history of Horror Literature. No connections with the rest of this book for me to adumbrate this time, because this work is the island, the hub or heart, from which all "chameleons" and "baroque monstrosities" of "language-from-imagination-into-truth" do spread. Serendipitously, throughout the whole of this reading experience that was 'Dreaming the Dark', I was listening to Bach Cello Suites - serendipitous because the language, too, was as easy, free-flowing, going down like the darkest, smoothest syrup - while, in contrast, its consonants and edges ripped reading-muscles with their high graphic descriptions. This is Horror. No pretension to anything else. It just is. And it was almost as if I, the erstwhile horror writer, glimpsed something I've never glimpsed before - I have my own drawer in my brain I dare not pull out and look in, for fear of becoming what the words actually say (phonetically, graphologically, semantically and syntactically). (8 Apr 10 -another 3 hours later)

The Little Girl Eater by Septimus Dale
"It was dark and silent beneath the pier. Thin banks of concrete criss-crossed the sand, the upright girders were built solidly into these banks."
More embeddings - and a man trapped (or literally locked) by the rising tide under the pier and afraid of drowning to the extent of considering cutting his throat with a rusty tin lid nearby. Apt for me, because I obtained this very book I'm reading in sight of a seaside pier. I now live too by a different seaside pier. I was born near yet another seaside pier. This is archetypal Pan Horror from my own memory of it in the early Sixties. It now reminds me of British black and white films from that era, like "The Taste of Honey", or perhaps more aptly again, "Whistle Down The Wind" - where a more (to use that word again) archetypal Angel meets its own imagined version of Peter Hopkirk (extrapolating from earlier stories in this book)? And, incredibly, they sing together! (9 Apr 10)

Mr. Golden's Haunt by Christina Kiplinger
"Mr. Golden swerved his car to miss hitting a tan and white cat that ran out into the street. Hearing a loud 'meow', the driver put his foot farther down on the gas."
A poignant tale of a man growing old, put out to grass by his life-career of an employer, now to spend all his time with his wife... A couple similar to that 'in "The True Spirit". Mr. Golden has a mortality-malaise even to the extent of seeking out Death itself so as to get to know it better ahead of its due time of arrival. Mr. Golden's own Angel? Or his Null Immortalis? I should know. (9 Apr 10 - four hours later)

This real-time review now continues here:
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/back_from_the_dead_3.htm

The Last Balcony's Last Balcony

I am pleased to report that, very soon, a pdf preview of the forthcoming DFL definitive fiction collection - 'The Last Balcony' - will be put up at the Ex Occidente Press site HERE


I am also kindly allowed by Unsettled Dust to use this wonderful photo (from HERE) in connection with this book. This is a photograph that has no connection with me or with the publisher. Its own title, I've been told, was inspired by the book title.

Today's Maxim (4)

When, at the end of the day, a weirdmonger cleans his slab with pride, he sees clearly from which balcony the next wave will come.

http://unsettleddust.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/one-photograph-the-last-balcony/

Today's Maxim (3)

When, at the end of the day, a fishmonger cleans his slab with pride, he worries from which weird seas the next fish to sell will be coming.

Today's Maxim (2)

When I write, I feel like I'm a band playing in my garage.

Brashly eclectic, but I know they're trying to perfect their art, so I put up with it.

Today's Maxim

Maybe, one man's obfuscation is another man's struggle to express the inexpressible.

Meat & Two Veg

The plate was empty. Like this page.

I knew that – soon – based on previous experience here, it would be full of meat & two veg. I’ve never known a cafe that simply plants a plate like that on the table and then has food dished up by the waitress piecemeal from saucepans on her trolley. Posh restaurants, maybe, do that, where a flaming piece of animal is often brought to the businessman’s trough, with a huge sizzling noise and billows of smoke. But never two-bit cafes like this one.

The waitress was done up as if she still lived in the past and travelled in Third Class carriages. Her saucepans steamed biliously like trains themselves. Her voice was in broken English, meaning she wasn’t even one of us. She told us about her troubles as she ladled the bits and bobs of tasselled bone in gravy. A thick accent that we could cut even with the blunt carving-knife that she then brought out to slice the still whole swede sweating nearby.

I nodded my head with my own version of small talk. My companion – a nondescript lass I’d met inside the cinema – merely tried to look pleased that I had taken her here for a meal. Going to see a continuous programme of 'Brief Encounter' and a B Film had left us with an appetite that would even salivate at soggy leavings in a plug-hole.

Soon, the plate was empty again. Every word eaten - & left a blank plot and nobody even to read it, let alone write it, if that was the right order.

Alone, I headed back towards the cinema – and now found it to be a car-park.

An empty car-park.


(written today and first published above)

Matt Cardin's Demon Muse

Matt Cardin has written some wonderful thought-provoking articles on the Muse or Daemon and the creative collaboration within self etc.: HERE in three parts. I recommend them to you.


They touch on some concerns that have preoccupied Nemonymous over the years and the Intentional Fallacy and The Ominous Imagination in Magic Realism and Magic Fiction. If one explores all my blog posts for example one may lose oneself forever in such concerns! :)

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

Some quotes I hold relevant to this subject:

"My pictures are visionary and symbolical, and, from first to last, have seemed to be painted by someone other than myself. [...] I am thus entirely self-taught, or taught by that other within me. I am aware that my pictures lack serious technique(if there is a technique that can be distinguished from inspiration and invention). I should have given up painting them some time ago, were it not that a certain number of people seemed to find something remarkable in them, and have thus identified me with them, and made me feel mildly important."
FROM "RAVISSANTE" BY ROBERT AICKMAN


"From the cosmic point of view, to have opinions or preferences at all is to be ill; for by harbouring them one dams up the flow of the ineluctable force which, like a river, bears us down to the ocean of everything's unknowing. Reality is a running noose, one is brought up short with a jerk by death. It would have been wiser to co-operate wih the inevitable and learn to profit by this unhappy state of things - by realising and accommodating death! But we don't, we allow the ego to foul its own nest. Therefore we have insecurity, stress, the midnight-fruit of insomnia, with a whole culture crying itself to sleep. How to repair this state of affairs except through art, through gifts which render to us language manumitted by emotion, poetry twisted into the service of direct insight?"
from 'The Avignon Quincunx' by Lawrence Durrell ('Constance' 1982)

.

"The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it."
-- John Fowles 1964 (from 'The Necessity of Nemo' in 'The Aristos')



[[Pretension is the dismissive name given to people's attempts to be something
other than what they 'really are'. It is vilified in England in particular
because we are so suspicious of people trying to 'rise above their station'.

In the arts, the word 'pretentious' has a special meaning: the attempt at
something that the critic thinks you have no right even to try. I'm very happy
to have added my little offering to the glowing mountain of things described as
'pretentious' - I'm happy to have made claims on things that I didn't have any
'right' to, and I'm happy to have tried being someone else to see what it felt
like.

I decided to turn the word 'pretentious' into a compliment. The common
assumption is that there are 'real' people and there are others who are
pretending to be something they're not. There is also an assumption that there's
something morally wrong with pretending. My assumptions about culture as a place
where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties make
me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It's the way we make
our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.

Robert Wyatt once said that we were always in the condition of children - faced
with things we couldn't understand and thus with the need to guess and
improvise. Pretending is what kids do all the time. It's how they learn. What
makes anyone think that you should sometime give it up?]]

---Brian Eno (quoted: HERE)


==================================================
My questions: I wonder who the author of any work really is? Who or what do you interview on that work - the author or his 'muse-daemon-nemo-pretension' or both? Or does one just sigh and call all authors Nemonymous?

Just sigh and read only the texts themselves to discover all the necessary and available elements of the 'thing or things' behind those texts?

In line with the Durrell quote above, I struggle to find my own opinion to answer those questions!

A Third Class Murder

There was a subtle movement at the edge of things. Perception included most senses of the body, and the heady stench of imagined black steam was the first sense that officially hit you. Then its acrid acid taste, before the sound of moving metal juttered upon static metal. Closely followed by some fingering out upon either swaying side of your seated body testing the supporting touch of brushed upholstered shuddering weave. Finally, a gradual realisation that around and above was the emerging sight of concerned faces poking towards you with their own instinctive version of fingering out.

But which body sense had sensed the original subtle movement? The sense of fear: the strongest sense of all that could contain itself independently without the aid of other senses to support it? But a sense stronger than fear itself was consumed by a vision that you were thanklessly killed for mindless kicks, not even as a stranger’s gratuitous murder for literary treatment or as a murder performed with a choice of motives for a popular 'whodunnit'.

Yours was a third class murder where prior existence itself was nothing but a multitude of senses forever dwindling one by one along an endless track of dislodged sleepers.

A subtle movement at the edge of things. A hissing in a forgotten siding. A single smeared face and ghostly fingers upon a leather tongue.

Nontention and the Abhurdity of Onsense

"It is my nontention, however, that what we have here is not merely abhurdity but onsense." (sic)
from 'Children of Epiphany' by Frances Oliver (Secker & Warburg 1983 and Ash Tree Press 2004)