MARGARET by PF Jeffery (Tuerqui's Treasure Books 2010)
This DFL real-time review of the above book continues from HERE
=========================================================
Chapter 13
" 'Seeing you with all those bondlings at Solstice, Margaret, it ran through my head that you might be happier enslaved.' "
A chapter that mixes crudities with protocols, secrets with spies, sauce with taming ... leading to a hilarious, yet disturbing, 'Restoration Comedy' type scenario within the book's plot that includes dressing the lamb for slaughter in the most appetising fashion (my image, not the book's) as Margaret meets her husband-to-be for the first time, an event that finally confirms the Surretrix (if not the Slave) within her. Then to the theatre - for a real Restoration Comedy? (20 Jul 10 - five hours later)
Chapter 14
" 'Does the girl need to be present?' Wilfred Addal asked testily.
'Fiddling with a girl relaxes me,' the crown prince replied. 'It clears the mind wonderfully. You should try it yourself.'
'I think not,' the spymaster growled.
'Please yourself, but I kept a girl on my knee for the strategic deliberations leading to the victories against the Ex Moor bandits - and saving my friend the earl's pardon - against Ampsher.' "
In addition to each chapter's impressively ever-pungent scene-setting pieces of prose, Margaret's narrated 'dialogues' take rumbustious, almost farcical, turns, with sexual gropings at a formal War Council, till it is decided that they need deaf whores for groping instead so as to maintain secrecy. Margaret's wedding is again postponed because of military diversions, with semaphore signals playing a part in the thrust of the plot. A theory on 'slavery' potentially working in both directions of family trees, or have I got confused (rhetorical question)? And following the 'cracked meadow' earlier on (and in this chapter the stroke of virgin cracks!) we have here mention of the 'Meadowlands' that lend - to my mind alone perhaps - a gentle backdrop to the crosswire panoply of basic instincts. (20 Jul 10 - another 3 hours later)
Chapter 15
"Scowling, I wished that the topic of ghosts had been allowed to rest. This seemed to be just the sort of talk to enrage the uneasy dead. I tried to form the sign of Mortalia without Jenna or the countess noticing."
This chapter seems to represent some crux or tipping-point in Margaret's life - amid marsh mud, spyglasses and kidnappings etc - where she grows Surrenely much closer to her cousin Jenna - including "With a sense of release, the confused strands of my childhood feelings began to unknot" and "It may be this love-making coloured my understanding - for the rest of my life - as to what the relationship of mistress and slave is, or at least should be." (21 Jul 10)
Chapter 16
"Colossal statues formed the gateway pillars. [...] The two figues symbolised the power of the Blood Victoria which my paternal grandfather had usurped."
This book has much powerful scene-setting and history - but even more love-making in between ... and a tension between the two or a synergy? This tension or synergy sets up apparent 'salaciousness' for the reader (slave/mistress role-playing, S/M, incessant love-making in its truest sense as well as in a more basic sense of 'squirming heaps') i.e. a tension or synergy between that salaciousness (as described above) and its context -- and which of them, if any, is the priority? Much is left untold about certain time gaps and other events while what is more often told (together with its evocative context of place and history and the five senses) seems to tend towards that salaciousness of Margaret's life. Each reader will have to make their own mind up on how that tension or synergy works out for them. I will not discount the possibility that the salaciousness is simply a key towards an emerging spirituality. Again the readers will have to make their own minds up as they proceed through the novels. The danger is that some readers who might eventually achieve the correct balance of tension or synergy - as unknowably intended by the author - may be too early deterred (or even halted or never started reading it in the first place), i.e. too early deterred from appreciating these books by a wrong interpretation (within themselves) of the tension or synergy described above. [A glib aside on my part as a rhetorical question.: the stamina of these girls for love-making seems insatiable - does this also apply to the men in this book's 'world' or are they stymied by the same too easily drained sumps of their bodies as in our own world?]
" 'In the story books, it's a handsome prince who gets the girl. In real life, it seems to be a beautiful princess.'
'It's just that you've read the wrong books.'
'It's not the books you read that matter,' I said. 'It's the books you live.' " (21 Jul 10 - three housr later)
Chapter 17
"My focus fell upon a child's doll, lying on its back, wide eyes staring at the sky as though in terror. Tiny hands reached upwards, legs splayed oddly, reminiscent of broken limbs. The plaything's dress had been white, but mud now spattered its folds. At first, I thought that it was also bloodied - but, on reflection, decided that its miniature garment had been decorated with a little red stitchwork."
Here the book itself becomes stitched with the truth of blood (as Surrey girls foment real battles and mayhem, as witnessed by the erstwhile participants in earlier less dangerous 'battles' of squirming bodies in sex) paralleling 'as though' and 'reminiscent of' above: an interesting mutual foil of truth and fiction.
Elsewhen, it seems as if Margaret and Jenna expect to be taken North along the Grand Junction Canal - and there is an effective description of a game of 'calendar bones', plus cartography and steam engine physics.
This chapter adroitly represents the 'context' element of this book as relief from the the 'salaciousness' element for the benefit of these elements' tension-towards-synergy. (22 Jul 10)
Chapter 18
" '...the waterways are no longer safe - Cap'n Gentle, the pirate, is ravaging the Grand Junction. We live in dangerous times.' "
Preparations for travelling northward for Margaret et al (and the party does in fact depart at the end of the chapter like a Wagon Train in the Wild West of our times!) - but there are more than just hints of impending treachery by those close to our heroine.
I am of course enjoying this book - how could one not enjoy it with it being so well written? I have mixed evaluations, however, as I can't shake off the previous three versions of this work I've read over the years (so as to judge this latest (final) one in isolation as a fresh experience) and, in the past, I have preferred books with chunky prose rather than a lot of dialogue, books with a tinge of negativity rather than this book's presumption of positivity -- and there are some characters' names that I can't get a handle on ... and I still keep a watching brief on the balance of themes and I have misgivings yet to assuage. However, it is a wonderful work (indeed it simply must be wonderful to remain wonderful for me in spite of those personal 'problems' of mine above) and I am confident that these novels will one day be read far more than they are read at the moment.
The book's 'alternate and/or parallel world' -- or post-holocaust world reflecting parts of our world or whatever sort of world it represents -- is certainly a world that becomes more real and engaging chapter by chapter. And I still have two more chapters to read... (22 Jul 10 - five hours later)
Chapter 19
"So I sank into a fitful slumber, punctuated by disturbing dreams that melted like snowflakes every time I opened my eyes."
The north-heading group pass places along the Emson Road and reach Watt's Ford Gap Services for overnight stay. As ever, with short paragraphs of much wonderful prose description and dialogue - with place-names near but not too close to the names we know in our own world - and with an adroitly conveyed sense of fear regarding possible ambush. My concerns relating to the possible 'tension / synergy' of plot matters have currently been eased and I trust the author is indeed hitting the optimum balance on this score. One reason for bringing up such checks and balances is my own wondering about this book's default (or intended?) audience: the author alone, a small coterie with an acquired taste, a larger genre enclave, or other gradations of audience (literary/popular?) towards a mass market? I'm of course hoping it reaches towards the latter end of that scale. (23 Jul 10)
Chapter 20
"Although she talked a great deal, the dowager Duchess imparted very little information. Her every utterance involved a value judgement assessing everything as either horrid or simply divine."
Some very effective and vividly bloodcurdling scenes (brutal nazemen, canal pirates(!), Lady Isobel's intitations, and Inqui with the whip hand etc) whereby Margaret reaches spoiler-territory as Tuerqui. I found the sense of humiliation (bordering on potential fulfilment?) and Margaret's enforced detachment from those once close to her all so heart-breaking yet, simultaneously, something quite indefinably different. This book is unique. One can't make easy judgements on it. Whatever else one might think about it, it is special. As a reader of Proust, Ligotti, Aickman, Elizabeth Bowen and as a writer myself of densely textured weird fiction, I would not normally think this to be my sort of book, and it must be, therefore, to its enormous credit that it is something I value reading as both enjoyable and agonisable over.
A picaresque adventure story in body and spirit: a journey into different experience zones....
To be continued (for your reading now) in The Warriors of Love Volume 5, Tuerqui ... and one day in the future, no doubt, for my real-time reviewing of it.
END (23 Jul 10 - two hours later)
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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
The Blank Screen
Tommy was a solitary man. It was 1961, just before things took off. He was a man who, today, we’d call a geek or anorak. In those days he was just someone else at the corner of eyesight. Someone whom most people would simply see through, not even wondering what he did for a living as he stared into the TV showroom – cleaning his glasses absent-mindedly, with a hankie that put on more smears than it took off.
Tommy was a lonely man, his only colourfulness being the red hat he wore, but now I’m not even sure if it was red at all, as I strain to remember through the badly broadcast mists of my memory. Potentially, he would have been even lonelier without me following him around the streets intending, as I did, sooner or later, to befriend him, because I was lonely, too. Still am. All the lonely people. But I was more curious about other people than most people were in 1961 – a dowdy year that still had the soul of the Fifties in its grey bloodstream.
But Tommy stayed indoors most of the time. I knew he sat behind the drawn curtains staring all day at the test card on his TV. Nothing much was on in those days before the evening, except fifteen minutes of Watch With Mother or the odd rare special State occasion. How did I know he did this? Well, with much flowing under the bridge since then, I can safely reveal that I crept up to his window and – through a crack in the curtains – watched him watching the test card, watched him listening (just audible through the glass) to the relentless old-fashioned light-music that accompanied the test card.
There was a woman involved. Her name was Michelle or Claudette, I think. It was probably Claudette, though I’m sure, in my innocence, I thought the ‘dette’ bit of that name to be something you owed somebody, the power of that word (debt) later pervading the whole system of society today, underpinning the enormous complex of 24/7 broadcasting, the internet and mobile phones ... all of us riddled with debt, spiritual as well as fiscal. A reality crunch.
Tommy, on one occasion in 1961, entertained Claudette (or was it Michelle, after all?) in his sitting-room and, for once, thought to turn off the TV screen. Where he’d first met her was beyond even my close surveillance of his habits. It didn’t work out for him, though. I don’t think she liked being given tea in a plastic cup.
I eventually had a date with her myself – but that’s another, much longer story. One that stretches (or will stretch - or did stretch) fifty years into the future with or without her in it.
I know I don’t have a uniformity of tone. That’s me all over. One minute common as muck, the next as sophisticated as the toffest toff of all. I suppose that’s why I’m the only possible person who can tell this story. Someone who is a blank screen. Now and then showing a highly cultural documentary but, following another period of blank screen, showing the Big Brother reality show. Then blank again. Indeed, blank most of the time.
And that reminds me. One day, as I approached the crack in the curtains, I did not hear the barely audible onset of light music – and I saw Tommy sitting this time in front of a blank screen rather than the test card. But not purely blank. It carried a snowstorm of static. I have since deemed the migraine or hiss of static on the TV or the radio as a symbol of death. It is a Horror moment. A Horror trip. A Horror trope.
I turned and suddenly saw a distant church steeple in the sunny grey sky, one that I had seen on the horizon from Tommy’s garden as if forever, but without really seeing it. The thought of religion had never given me comfort. But I almost sensed, that day, a yearning to visit the church, even join its congregation. Sing its songs or soaring anthems. Then I looked down – as if my eyes were tugged by some sort of magnet – and there was a pigeon’s body at my feet. I had been too concerned with checking upon Tommy, accompanied by a growing sense of alarm that all was not well with him, and, therefore, I had not before noticed this highly charged symbol of death. Not really a symbol, however, because the pigeon was all too real. It must have been there, unnoticed, for several weeks. The ‘flowering’ of decay from a body in the form of reality’s debt to an erstwhile soul.
I turned from Tommy’s house as someone walked by. It was a young man whistling a tune, a tune that I would have easily recognised, a couple of years later, as a Beatles tune, if I had remembered it at all. And I still fail to think about how significant some insignificant things often are. Or what colour that young man’s hat had been amid the pervading greyness, if he had worn a hat at all. And indeed who exactly he might have been.
I heard the distant church bell ringing as I went on my way.
=================================================
Written today by DFL and first published above.
Tommy was a lonely man, his only colourfulness being the red hat he wore, but now I’m not even sure if it was red at all, as I strain to remember through the badly broadcast mists of my memory. Potentially, he would have been even lonelier without me following him around the streets intending, as I did, sooner or later, to befriend him, because I was lonely, too. Still am. All the lonely people. But I was more curious about other people than most people were in 1961 – a dowdy year that still had the soul of the Fifties in its grey bloodstream.
But Tommy stayed indoors most of the time. I knew he sat behind the drawn curtains staring all day at the test card on his TV. Nothing much was on in those days before the evening, except fifteen minutes of Watch With Mother or the odd rare special State occasion. How did I know he did this? Well, with much flowing under the bridge since then, I can safely reveal that I crept up to his window and – through a crack in the curtains – watched him watching the test card, watched him listening (just audible through the glass) to the relentless old-fashioned light-music that accompanied the test card.
There was a woman involved. Her name was Michelle or Claudette, I think. It was probably Claudette, though I’m sure, in my innocence, I thought the ‘dette’ bit of that name to be something you owed somebody, the power of that word (debt) later pervading the whole system of society today, underpinning the enormous complex of 24/7 broadcasting, the internet and mobile phones ... all of us riddled with debt, spiritual as well as fiscal. A reality crunch.
Tommy, on one occasion in 1961, entertained Claudette (or was it Michelle, after all?) in his sitting-room and, for once, thought to turn off the TV screen. Where he’d first met her was beyond even my close surveillance of his habits. It didn’t work out for him, though. I don’t think she liked being given tea in a plastic cup.
I eventually had a date with her myself – but that’s another, much longer story. One that stretches (or will stretch - or did stretch) fifty years into the future with or without her in it.
I know I don’t have a uniformity of tone. That’s me all over. One minute common as muck, the next as sophisticated as the toffest toff of all. I suppose that’s why I’m the only possible person who can tell this story. Someone who is a blank screen. Now and then showing a highly cultural documentary but, following another period of blank screen, showing the Big Brother reality show. Then blank again. Indeed, blank most of the time.
And that reminds me. One day, as I approached the crack in the curtains, I did not hear the barely audible onset of light music – and I saw Tommy sitting this time in front of a blank screen rather than the test card. But not purely blank. It carried a snowstorm of static. I have since deemed the migraine or hiss of static on the TV or the radio as a symbol of death. It is a Horror moment. A Horror trip. A Horror trope.
I turned and suddenly saw a distant church steeple in the sunny grey sky, one that I had seen on the horizon from Tommy’s garden as if forever, but without really seeing it. The thought of religion had never given me comfort. But I almost sensed, that day, a yearning to visit the church, even join its congregation. Sing its songs or soaring anthems. Then I looked down – as if my eyes were tugged by some sort of magnet – and there was a pigeon’s body at my feet. I had been too concerned with checking upon Tommy, accompanied by a growing sense of alarm that all was not well with him, and, therefore, I had not before noticed this highly charged symbol of death. Not really a symbol, however, because the pigeon was all too real. It must have been there, unnoticed, for several weeks. The ‘flowering’ of decay from a body in the form of reality’s debt to an erstwhile soul.
I turned from Tommy’s house as someone walked by. It was a young man whistling a tune, a tune that I would have easily recognised, a couple of years later, as a Beatles tune, if I had remembered it at all. And I still fail to think about how significant some insignificant things often are. Or what colour that young man’s hat had been amid the pervading greyness, if he had worn a hat at all. And indeed who exactly he might have been.
I heard the distant church bell ringing as I went on my way.
=================================================
Written today by DFL and first published above.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Hannah
Hannah became irritated when she was told one day – in relative middle age – that her name spelt the same backward as well as forward and she realised that she hadn’t realised this before. For ‘irritated’ please read ‘inexplicably distraught’, but that only became evident in hindsight.
Then – in some bizarre method of transcending the eventual despair – she found herself frantically examining words to see how they looked backward and it soon extended towards an obsession about anagrams. She couldn’t even read words without trying to shuffle their letters in as many permutations as possible and, before long, she couldn’t read anything properly even if she skimmed the text in an attempt to override her lexicographical tics while absorbing its meaning – a sort of enforced dyslexia where no dyslexia had existed before.
Writing words was OK but as soon as Hannah had typed them she then found the letters dodging about like flying insects – even words she had handwritten in joined-up letters designed to anchor each to each. She literally witnessed each letter uncurl, uncoil, dislodge, dehook, defuse – even to the extent she could watch the arms and legs of her attempts at linguistic glue unstick themselves with increasingly audible clicks, rips and hisses.
Hannah, of course, blamed whoever had called her Hannah – and then blamed the person who had first drawn attention to the palindromic potential of words, leading to a glut of tugging anagrams at every corner whether meaningful or not.
Her ‘disability’ meant she couldn’t hold down a job. Office work was obviously out. Even manual jobs were difficult as, without prior warning, here or elsewhere, she had begun to see objects as the words that described them, each business end or lever or aperture of the thing itself leaning or twining or twitching as if they thought she was dreaming about them rather than seeing them for real in real life. Things as their own increasingly fluid words made for a very strange world. Hannah’s world alone, thank goodness.
One day, her body itself came apart as each of its sections pulled into swarms of competing fixed and unfixed motives and whims. Her arm became an a and r and m, like a fleshy tattoo. The tattoo was her arm. Then, as we all watched, she visibly became an anagram of her body, a palindrome and rejigged jigsaw at several levels of twisted language.
She screamed as we tried to join up the letters of her soul – and in the right order.
“Nah, Nah,” were the only sounds we eventually heard. “Nah Nah,” again and again like a slow-motion police siren in pain. Several versions of Hannah who wanted never to have been born ... yet sadly couldn’t die.
Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah ... a pile of ants wanting to make ourselves an ant-hill.
==================
Written last night as a speed exercise in a writer's group and revised today.
Then – in some bizarre method of transcending the eventual despair – she found herself frantically examining words to see how they looked backward and it soon extended towards an obsession about anagrams. She couldn’t even read words without trying to shuffle their letters in as many permutations as possible and, before long, she couldn’t read anything properly even if she skimmed the text in an attempt to override her lexicographical tics while absorbing its meaning – a sort of enforced dyslexia where no dyslexia had existed before.
Writing words was OK but as soon as Hannah had typed them she then found the letters dodging about like flying insects – even words she had handwritten in joined-up letters designed to anchor each to each. She literally witnessed each letter uncurl, uncoil, dislodge, dehook, defuse – even to the extent she could watch the arms and legs of her attempts at linguistic glue unstick themselves with increasingly audible clicks, rips and hisses.
Hannah, of course, blamed whoever had called her Hannah – and then blamed the person who had first drawn attention to the palindromic potential of words, leading to a glut of tugging anagrams at every corner whether meaningful or not.
Her ‘disability’ meant she couldn’t hold down a job. Office work was obviously out. Even manual jobs were difficult as, without prior warning, here or elsewhere, she had begun to see objects as the words that described them, each business end or lever or aperture of the thing itself leaning or twining or twitching as if they thought she was dreaming about them rather than seeing them for real in real life. Things as their own increasingly fluid words made for a very strange world. Hannah’s world alone, thank goodness.
One day, her body itself came apart as each of its sections pulled into swarms of competing fixed and unfixed motives and whims. Her arm became an a and r and m, like a fleshy tattoo. The tattoo was her arm. Then, as we all watched, she visibly became an anagram of her body, a palindrome and rejigged jigsaw at several levels of twisted language.
She screamed as we tried to join up the letters of her soul – and in the right order.
“Nah, Nah,” were the only sounds we eventually heard. “Nah Nah,” again and again like a slow-motion police siren in pain. Several versions of Hannah who wanted never to have been born ... yet sadly couldn’t die.
Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah ... a pile of ants wanting to make ourselves an ant-hill.
==================
Written last night as a speed exercise in a writer's group and revised today.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Margaret (2)
MARGARET by PF Jeffery
My realtime review continued from HERE
====================================================
Chapter 6
"In which I am entranced by a magician's assistant, go shopping and celebrate Solstice." (italics in original).
I thought I would mention at this stage that each chapter begins with this type of brief introduction exemplified above, charmingly reminding me of Victorian novels or, say, 'Tom Jones' by Henry Fielding.
It would be cheating to quote this opening introduction as part of my review for every chapter, but, indeed, in this chapter, there is much action wonderfully described and 'dialogued' pertaining to the events described above.
I am pleased to see the expression 'curtain lecture' used in this chapter as I think I first brought this to the author's attention many many years ago as meaning a wife's scolding of her husband.
I also note, in this chapter, by the use of the word 'jealousy', that our heroine already shows susceptibility to Surrenity. I thought it was only in our current times that, exposed to various media, children are forced to grow up quicker than they should.
Another enticingly written chapter about towards we know not what destiny we and feisty Margaret tread. (11 Jul 10)
Chapter 7
"Entranced, I said: 'Miss Fletcher, don't you wish that this moment could last forever?'
'In its way, it will, Margaret. Even when you're a very old lady, you'll be able to look back on this moment - and it will always be there, waiting for you to return.' "
A chapter, indeed, where we grow more accustomed to Margaret's narrative perspective from the future, as she re-witnesses, as it were, emotions she didn't originally understand in full, particularly those concerning the serial corporal punishment at the hands of Miss Lace under whose governess-ship she has now been placed following friction with her mother relating to the Solstice presents. Meanwhile, an earlier aside from this chapter: "House slaves often know more about matters, both domestic and of the wider world, than do most persons." And Margaret encounters snow in the season's month of Chillflurry. (12 Jul 10)
Chapter 8
" '...But make no mistake, Jenna is a dangerous enemy. Essex is at war with Surrey, and won't win.' "
Years tumble through the combine harvester of fiction narration (my image not the book's), as Margaret grows nearer to wedding alliances within the dynastic business of this novel; she meets short-haired Jenna (a relative) but things always change: loved ones leave, loyalties change or wither, and a star takes off its socks for the last time. And a slave called Inqui is given to Margaret. Like life on the outside of this novel, its kaleidoscope is mixed, unpredictable, and poignant, with bodily and emotional changes - positive and negative as a two-way filter. And this chapter effectively continues to convey all this within the ever-strengthening 'world' that is delivered by the words. (14 Jul 10)
Chapter 9
" 'Your interests, Margaret, wll be those of husbands and sons. Titles descend through the male line - except in Surrey.'
'Is that what the wickedness is all about, mother?' "
A chapter of the 'politics' of this book: male/female, slave/person, marriage, ways of procreation, how a thing looks rather than is, farewells, respective feelings vis a vis spankings by males on females and females on females... as Margaret prepares to go to Lundin to meet her intended.
" 'Margaret, we live in real life, not in a story book.' "
I tore a page from the book so I knew where I had finished reading it. After eating sandwiches with piquant pickle (not marmite).
" 'Kingdoms can be rocked by ambiguity.' " (16 Jul 10)
.
This DFL real-time review now continues HERE.
=============================================
My realtime review continued from HERE
====================================================
Chapter 6
"In which I am entranced by a magician's assistant, go shopping and celebrate Solstice." (italics in original).
I thought I would mention at this stage that each chapter begins with this type of brief introduction exemplified above, charmingly reminding me of Victorian novels or, say, 'Tom Jones' by Henry Fielding.
It would be cheating to quote this opening introduction as part of my review for every chapter, but, indeed, in this chapter, there is much action wonderfully described and 'dialogued' pertaining to the events described above.
I am pleased to see the expression 'curtain lecture' used in this chapter as I think I first brought this to the author's attention many many years ago as meaning a wife's scolding of her husband.
I also note, in this chapter, by the use of the word 'jealousy', that our heroine already shows susceptibility to Surrenity. I thought it was only in our current times that, exposed to various media, children are forced to grow up quicker than they should.
Another enticingly written chapter about towards we know not what destiny we and feisty Margaret tread. (11 Jul 10)
Chapter 7
"Entranced, I said: 'Miss Fletcher, don't you wish that this moment could last forever?'
'In its way, it will, Margaret. Even when you're a very old lady, you'll be able to look back on this moment - and it will always be there, waiting for you to return.' "
A chapter, indeed, where we grow more accustomed to Margaret's narrative perspective from the future, as she re-witnesses, as it were, emotions she didn't originally understand in full, particularly those concerning the serial corporal punishment at the hands of Miss Lace under whose governess-ship she has now been placed following friction with her mother relating to the Solstice presents. Meanwhile, an earlier aside from this chapter: "House slaves often know more about matters, both domestic and of the wider world, than do most persons." And Margaret encounters snow in the season's month of Chillflurry. (12 Jul 10)
Chapter 8
" '...But make no mistake, Jenna is a dangerous enemy. Essex is at war with Surrey, and won't win.' "
Years tumble through the combine harvester of fiction narration (my image not the book's), as Margaret grows nearer to wedding alliances within the dynastic business of this novel; she meets short-haired Jenna (a relative) but things always change: loved ones leave, loyalties change or wither, and a star takes off its socks for the last time. And a slave called Inqui is given to Margaret. Like life on the outside of this novel, its kaleidoscope is mixed, unpredictable, and poignant, with bodily and emotional changes - positive and negative as a two-way filter. And this chapter effectively continues to convey all this within the ever-strengthening 'world' that is delivered by the words. (14 Jul 10)
Chapter 9
" 'Your interests, Margaret, wll be those of husbands and sons. Titles descend through the male line - except in Surrey.'
'Is that what the wickedness is all about, mother?' "
A chapter of the 'politics' of this book: male/female, slave/person, marriage, ways of procreation, how a thing looks rather than is, farewells, respective feelings vis a vis spankings by males on females and females on females... as Margaret prepares to go to Lundin to meet her intended.
" 'Margaret, we live in real life, not in a story book.' "
I tore a page from the book so I knew where I had finished reading it. After eating sandwiches with piquant pickle (not marmite).
" 'Kingdoms can be rocked by ambiguity.' " (16 Jul 10)
.
Chapter 10
" 'And make it the best you have,' Inqui added. 'My mistress is a princess of the Blood Victoria - and will, in time, be crowned as a queen.' "
Journeying to Lundin, Inqui, Margaret's personal slave, is both a source of advice to her mistress - and a preservation of her virginity in a vivid scene where a certain male predator becomes dispensable for the common good. We also learn there are two sides to a soup spoon, one of which is for polite society. We also learn of clothes that seem to render their wearer more naked than before donning them. The entry to Lundin is brilliantly described, such scenes of smell and sight being a great strength of PFJ's writing. (17 Jul 10)
.
Chapter 11
"Inqui disengaged from me to allow Fliti to go to work with a small pair of scissors, before smoothing my nails with the file. First, she placed a sheet of paper under my left hand to catch the clippings. It was the act of a slave who might be required to sweep up afterwards - and, when she was done, Fliti shook the parings into the fire. To me, this seemed a rite of passage, something that would demonstrate my Surrenity as surely as a brand is the mark of slavery."
Inqui and Margaret reach the Palace Victoria - a building that reminds me of Gormenghast. Talk of cleaning the sewers leading up to the place and giving our heroine a second slave, both to impress her intended husband when he arrives. This book reminds me of a blend of Mervyn Peake, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Henry Fielding, Jack Vance, 'Fanny Hill' and certain forms of SF/ fantasy including what I understand 'steampunk' to be - but, far above all this, it is unique, it is PF Jeffery, and you can only distil this for yourself as you read it. (19 Jul 10)
.
Chapter 12
"Stepping with Jenna, I traversed one side of the triangle that comprised my known routes through the Palace Victoria labyrinth. The three corners between which I was able to navigate were my apartments, Mrs Clay's stitch rooms and the dining hall. Having now been in Lundin for almost three weeks, my local knowledge remained unimpressive. Inqui, most certainly knew the passages and stairways much better than I did."
I feel similar to above about the Warriors of Love novels (of which 'Margaret' is one) when theoretically compared to a new reader I can imagine who may already know his or her way better than me, desipte me having read at least three previous versions (over 20 odd years) of the story being told in 'Margaret'. The cascade of characters, for example, some only scantily described, if at all. I do recall, for example, that Lisa-Louise (mentioned briefly in this chapter) becomes an important character later in the envisaged novels and I've heard from the author in the last few days that Fliti is a new character, here in this latest and 'final' version, who is due to become important later in the novels. This chapter concerns many running themes, male-bonding within Margaret's father's caricatural brand of sexism, Margaret's own growing sense of a competing sexism and female-bonding, the ethos of bondlings / slaves / persons / Royal lineage, sado/masochistic tendencies arising from the earlier corporal punishment, Solstice celebrations (all wonderfully described), the background of politics or war or rebel-rousting (some of which delay Jenna's and Margaret's as yet unmet fiancés' arrival at the Palace Victoria)... (20 Jul 10)
This DFL real-time review now continues HERE.
=============================================
Saturday, July 03, 2010
'Margaret' by PF Jeffery
I am starting a real-time review of this book. I genuinely don't know how long this will take, whether days or years? Probably somewhere between! :)
Beware possible spoilers.
[All my real-time reviews are linked from HERE]
My earlier blog about the fiction of PF Jeffery: HERE
and HERE archivally.
PFJ's library page about his 'Warriors of Love' books (of which MARGARET is one): HERE
These novels are complete in themselves and can be read separately, according to information from their author.
Chapter 1
" 'Ghosts have very sharp ears. They can hear a child breathing a mile away.' "
Predominantly, this chapter is a series of charmingly written dialogues between Margaret as a young girl and her Nanny, the former full of childish questions at bedtime and the latter often full of tales and myths (some frightening) to entertain her charge. This chapter starts to convey this fantasy world as if it is real. Indeed, the book literally serves to make it real.
Embroidery causes some talk of punishment: spanking. Interspersed with theories on 'slaves' and 'persons'. This aspect reminds me (perhaps me alone) of the phenomenon of Marmite. People who love Marmite can't imagine people who hate it, and vice versa. But perhaps more of that conundrum later in this review.
Of nanny's tales, I was particularly struck by the one about the nature of the Cracked Meadow. Brilliant. But they're all good. (3 Jul 10)
.
Chapter 2
"Plucking eight buttercups I placed them between my toes, contemplating the effect. They tickled a little. For a few minutes, the sensation seemed pleasant - then I decided that it wasn't, and removed the flowers.
'If you hold a buttercup under your chin,' Nanny Spencer said, 'and your skin looks yellow, it means that you like butter. I don't know anything about buttercups between the toes, though.'
'Perhaps it's something to do with buttered toast.'
'I suppose it must, my sweet.' "
More conversations and situations surrounding the young Princess Margaret with her nanny, her mother and with other figures seen precisely yet vaguely (an artful narrative indeed to convey a young girl's observations of the world around her gradually emerging for herself as well as for the reader) ... involving war, politics, philosophy, and the three S's within what I call the the 'Marmite' conundrum of PFJ's fiction: Sapphics, Slaves & Spankings ... and the womanhood (personhood not slavery) of which Margaret feels herself due to become part eventually.
I will not keep repeating this: the prose and dialogue are perfect. The language and its sensations will compensate (if compensation is needed) for any misgivings as to the potentially worthwhile distance you the reader must yet travel to live fully in this truly believable yet novel world. Without the travel one cannot hope to arrive. (4 Jul 10)
.
.
Chapter 3
"On my way downstairs, it occurred to me that - if Nanny Spencer had placed the boots in the cupboard - she presumably knew that I was about to be assigned to a riding instructor. Had she known, before I did, that we were to part? If so, why hadn't she mentioned it to me? The whole world seemed a grown up conspiracy against me."
A conspiracy against her like the impending novel itself? Poignant partings afoot, we are shown a fourth S in this chapter - that of the turning Seasons of this world, their smells and other truly felt senses. Also the continuing ritual, received with equanimity, of 'warm bottoms' as some metered custom of punishment or simple wear and tear like horse-riding.
I would now like to quote a sentence from the first chapter, as it is now coming home to roost for at least this reader of the narrator's narration and thus through it to the narrator herself (if not to the head-lease or freehold author whose name is PF Jeffery): "It is through language that we make sense of the world, and through writing that the sense is fixed.." For 'language', one may also read Princess Margaret's embroidery picture in Chapter 3! (6 Jul 10)
.
Chapter 4
"...titled with a small label in spidery script reading 'A Description of Surrey'. / The long word 'Description' defeated me, but my reading skills were adequate for the name 'Surrey'. Perhaps, I hoped, the part I couldn't read meant 'wickedness' - the s-c-r - suggestive of screaming, scratching and screeching - looked wicked. Leafing through, I encountered a picture that could only depict the Cracked Meadow, of which Nanny Spencer had told me. Unable, in my terror, to look at it for more than a few seconds, I quickly turned the page."
And so, as our heroine explores the library, we meet another S: Surrey. If I recall correctly from earlier drafts of these novels: another S: Surrenity, will eventually emerge? There continues to be really beautiful description here, e.g. of theatre going and horse-riding, in addition to that quoted description of 'description'.
And Margaret in conversation with a maturely promising Miss Fletcher about things for older ears; yet another S seems to start emerging ('the goddesses hate lies'), i.e. Spirituality.
Perhaps we are complete now with our S's: Slaves, Spanking, Seasons, Sapphics (Surrenity?) and Spirituality (pregnant with many prospective, possibly bitter-sweet, facets of life in this 'fantasy' world)? -- A Conundrum.
Margaret Might (my expression). Might what? Mighty, how? She learns the facts and fanglements of life. A Symphony of Childhood. But one where I remain tussling with its imputations of behaviour that do not necessarily resonate with my own. An embroidery or tapestry which I, as reader, haven't yet used the potential skills of this world's needlepoint to create?
[Some men (or most?) in this novel seem to be fops, if not ponks (my word)!] (8 Jul 10, the author's birthday)
.
Chapter 5
" 'I tried to sew a field mouse balanced on an ear of wheat. Grandfather thought the gods might think we were asking for a plague of mice.' "
Corporal punishments from sergeant-major type ladies of instruction seem ever on the hair-trigger for our demure Princess. However not so demure, as she shows signs of ingenious methods of revenge - via embroidery - and revenge that actually goes beyond the realms of apparent reason ... alongside her less than secret delight! Much pungent description as well as copious easeful dialogue and in the background her horse - Star-Socks. And suspicions of Surrenity infiltrating the purlieus of Essex where Margaret is living currently and where such acts are more than just officially frowned upon?
I must say how much I am also enjoying the actual physical text of this book. It is a joy to peruse, with no right-justification and with paragraphing as empty lines rather than 'Return + Tab'. More books should be like this one, I suggest. (10 Jul 10)
THIS REVIEW NOW CONTINUES HERE
Monday, June 21, 2010
Mysterious Place
It was intended to be a holiday home. Yet, as the years went by, it became, by default, my main abode, while my flat in the city grew its own ghosts without me.
It seems laughable now, but, when I bought ‘Mysterious Place’ from a distant Aunt who was emigrating further away in the world that I could imagine any place being from England, I did not question that name she had given the house. Mysterious Place, in hindsight, probably seemed appropriate, situated as it was in the corner of some common ground, ground in itself quite a few miles from the nearest village, with woodland and hedges between it and the shops. Having said that, there was another house situated within that common ground, on the other side of it, in fact, next to the access gate and just perceptible from my window. Common ground may be a misnomer – I call it common ground because there were disputes regarding ownership of it outside of the land occupied by the two houses themselves, or so I heard.
Whether such an interface of disputed freeholds could subsist legally, I was determined one day to ask my solicitor friend when I saw him next. But when I did see him, the whole matter had gone out of my mind, because life is often like that, especially when in your sixties as I am.
There was a single woman living in the house opposite, I soon gathered, when taking my first holiday break under the roof of Mysterious Place. We waved to each other but it did not seem right not to have a few words face to face. She was quite attractive, dressed to kill, in fact, and she advised me about various delivery and shopping logistics for our two houses. I offered her help when I was staying in my house as any man would.
Looking back on it, she must have been off duty on that first occasion because, next time I occupied ‘Mysterious Place’, I saw her in a police uniform, being collected by a colleague in a police car. Over the next few years, I saw her both in her off-duty ‘dressed to kill’ mode and in her day-job mode as a very smart policewoman, with all the paraphernalia that police personnel seem to carry with them these days. I was indeed astonished by the contrast between the two modes. As a policewoman, official walky-talky phone jabbering in her ear, truncheon in its neat belt-pack. And as a woman-about-town with a posh handbag and high-heeled shoes. In the latter mode, she was often collected, by someone I guessed to be her boy friend in a small white van, but in this day and age one wonders about the true relationship and why they didn’t live together ... or whatever.
I did not pry ... except recently when, after a long period of staying in ‘Mysterious Place’, during which time I had even forgotten that I should be returning to my city flat to cope with my normal life, we had a rare conversation. She was picking some sort of wayside fruit from the bushes near my house as I happened to be inspecting a fence after the previous night’s storm.
She seemed neither the woman picked up in the boy friend’s van or the police constable collected by the smarter official vehicle with the blue light on top. She now looked more matronly, with an apron and hair untidily loose. More kindly, in fact. With a wicker basket instead of her posh handbag. Maybe there had been more years than I realised since I first saw her. And we all change gradually.
“Not at work?” I asked.
“No, it’s a long story – but I’ve left the police force.”
“Oh dear... Or should I be congratulating you?” I laughed nervously.
She spoke about a situation which I couldn’t really follow. Something about losing her handbag – or about losing something she had lost from her handbag - and then, strangely enough, something she had somehow lost in her handbag – I’m still not sure which of these or if any of these.
“Well, it’ll be good to have a break from work. Have you any plans?”
She nodded – presumably acknowledging the first part of what I had said but ignoring the question.
She delved, plucking, into a deeper part of the hedgerow.
Had I told you that the common ground between our two houses was mainly grass? It was the sort of scrubby grass that never seemed to need mowing. I often wondered if it was done when I was back in the city at my flat.
Had I told you, too, that I fancied the young lady? Not so young now, though. But it seemed off-putting, knowing about her being a policewoman. I’m sure you will know what I mean by that. Also knowing about the man in the van. I had never asked her about him. Until now...
“Has your friend been able to help?” I asked towards the back of the woman as she leaned into the hedge.
It was then I saw she was swishing a police truncheon at the undergrowth, beating a path further into it. She must have had it in her basket.
She called back to me without turning: “I’m looking for what I lost.”
“Can I help?” I asked. “What is it exactly?”
I admired her round fulsome behind, with the tied bow of the apron strings tagging down cutely in a countrywoman or housewife sort of fashion.
But then that caused me to recall the type of handbag she used when in her glamorous evening wear. In fact, over the years, she had used several different handbags, all in high top fashion. Like many women, she seemed to collect them and often replaced them before they were worn out.
Manufactured with different materials, some animal and some synthetic, bearing delicate chains and baubles of stylish quality on the outside, often jingling as I heard her walk from her house towards the white van when it came to collect her.
As she eventually became immersed in the hedge to the very point of vanishment, I saw at the corner of my eye the pulsing blue light so common in our English cities. And heard the siren.
Unaccountably, I shed a tear. A Mysterious Place indeed – a woman’s handbag.
written today and first published above
It seems laughable now, but, when I bought ‘Mysterious Place’ from a distant Aunt who was emigrating further away in the world that I could imagine any place being from England, I did not question that name she had given the house. Mysterious Place, in hindsight, probably seemed appropriate, situated as it was in the corner of some common ground, ground in itself quite a few miles from the nearest village, with woodland and hedges between it and the shops. Having said that, there was another house situated within that common ground, on the other side of it, in fact, next to the access gate and just perceptible from my window. Common ground may be a misnomer – I call it common ground because there were disputes regarding ownership of it outside of the land occupied by the two houses themselves, or so I heard.
Whether such an interface of disputed freeholds could subsist legally, I was determined one day to ask my solicitor friend when I saw him next. But when I did see him, the whole matter had gone out of my mind, because life is often like that, especially when in your sixties as I am.
There was a single woman living in the house opposite, I soon gathered, when taking my first holiday break under the roof of Mysterious Place. We waved to each other but it did not seem right not to have a few words face to face. She was quite attractive, dressed to kill, in fact, and she advised me about various delivery and shopping logistics for our two houses. I offered her help when I was staying in my house as any man would.
Looking back on it, she must have been off duty on that first occasion because, next time I occupied ‘Mysterious Place’, I saw her in a police uniform, being collected by a colleague in a police car. Over the next few years, I saw her both in her off-duty ‘dressed to kill’ mode and in her day-job mode as a very smart policewoman, with all the paraphernalia that police personnel seem to carry with them these days. I was indeed astonished by the contrast between the two modes. As a policewoman, official walky-talky phone jabbering in her ear, truncheon in its neat belt-pack. And as a woman-about-town with a posh handbag and high-heeled shoes. In the latter mode, she was often collected, by someone I guessed to be her boy friend in a small white van, but in this day and age one wonders about the true relationship and why they didn’t live together ... or whatever.
I did not pry ... except recently when, after a long period of staying in ‘Mysterious Place’, during which time I had even forgotten that I should be returning to my city flat to cope with my normal life, we had a rare conversation. She was picking some sort of wayside fruit from the bushes near my house as I happened to be inspecting a fence after the previous night’s storm.
She seemed neither the woman picked up in the boy friend’s van or the police constable collected by the smarter official vehicle with the blue light on top. She now looked more matronly, with an apron and hair untidily loose. More kindly, in fact. With a wicker basket instead of her posh handbag. Maybe there had been more years than I realised since I first saw her. And we all change gradually.
“Not at work?” I asked.
“No, it’s a long story – but I’ve left the police force.”
“Oh dear... Or should I be congratulating you?” I laughed nervously.
She spoke about a situation which I couldn’t really follow. Something about losing her handbag – or about losing something she had lost from her handbag - and then, strangely enough, something she had somehow lost in her handbag – I’m still not sure which of these or if any of these.
“Well, it’ll be good to have a break from work. Have you any plans?”
She nodded – presumably acknowledging the first part of what I had said but ignoring the question.
She delved, plucking, into a deeper part of the hedgerow.
Had I told you that the common ground between our two houses was mainly grass? It was the sort of scrubby grass that never seemed to need mowing. I often wondered if it was done when I was back in the city at my flat.
Had I told you, too, that I fancied the young lady? Not so young now, though. But it seemed off-putting, knowing about her being a policewoman. I’m sure you will know what I mean by that. Also knowing about the man in the van. I had never asked her about him. Until now...
“Has your friend been able to help?” I asked towards the back of the woman as she leaned into the hedge.
It was then I saw she was swishing a police truncheon at the undergrowth, beating a path further into it. She must have had it in her basket.
She called back to me without turning: “I’m looking for what I lost.”
“Can I help?” I asked. “What is it exactly?”
I admired her round fulsome behind, with the tied bow of the apron strings tagging down cutely in a countrywoman or housewife sort of fashion.
But then that caused me to recall the type of handbag she used when in her glamorous evening wear. In fact, over the years, she had used several different handbags, all in high top fashion. Like many women, she seemed to collect them and often replaced them before they were worn out.
Manufactured with different materials, some animal and some synthetic, bearing delicate chains and baubles of stylish quality on the outside, often jingling as I heard her walk from her house towards the white van when it came to collect her.
As she eventually became immersed in the hedge to the very point of vanishment, I saw at the corner of my eye the pulsing blue light so common in our English cities. And heard the siren.
Unaccountably, I shed a tear. A Mysterious Place indeed – a woman’s handbag.
written today and first published above
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Where The Heart Is
Review of WHERE THE HEART IS (Gray Friar Press) continued from here:
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/where_the_heart_is_gray_friar_press.htm
=====================================================
The City in the Rain by Mark West
"...he felt as though he was being plugged into a being that was greater than he could ever be..."
I don't think I've read any fiction by Mark West before and, judging by this story, I most certainly should have done! Without putting too fine a point on it, it is in many ways the perfect horror story. It has the horror feel, its tropes, a sense of pulp and popularity, yet with an underlying sophistication and poignancy that bowled me over, a completeness, a satisfying whole, and a language perfectly pitched for what it is. Quite confident in trying to be what it is, without frills. And hauntingly believable with Leicester's 'sagging' and crucifying brick buildings, the urban underclass, the alleys and the implications for the protagonist's wife's death in the past from cancer...
It also fits well into this book so far ... echoing the form of resurrection in 'A Killing in the Market'. In fact these two stories work in synergy.
There is a sense of gratuitous despair and a nihilist brick in the wall that I have been building towards a gestalt.
I see that an 'earlier version' of this story was published in 2003. I hope this does not prevent it winning awards in 2010, as it should, for being a great horror story. (16 June 10 - another 2 hours later)
Last Summer by Stephen Bacon
"Bricks bounce off the side."
This is an effective evocation of the Miner's Strike in Sheffield in the mid-Eighties (the bitterness and personal wars between strikers and scabs and their families) in parallel with the present day protagonist's return to his childhood at that time and in that place, and an unforeseen redemption now seen-to-be-done by exposing its gory results in this story-as-memorial.
Meanwhile, I, as reader of it, can imagine the mine structures - resonating, at least for me, with the structure in 'Easter' above. That seems a right comparison to make, bearing in mind the passions and emotions of that time, of that place, with which I, as someone who only watched all this on the news at the time, can now more fully empathise .... paradoxically via the truth and immediacy of fiction when compared to the disputatious facts of history.
"...we are standing on the grassy incline of the pit tip, looking down into the colliery." (16 June 10 - another 2 hours later).
Also please compare the return into the past of 'Summerhouse' with that of 'Last Summer' - amazing I missed till now that glaring connection synergising both stories. (16 June 10 - another hour later)
Winter's End by Simon Bestwick
" 'So?' he asked."
Paul links up with singer Helen after first meeting her at a Manchester gig where she's performing with some 'sullen moshers'. One believes in both members of this couple, and gradually we realise she has a past that pervades her present - eventually in a truly monstrous form. There is an alchemy here (similar to that mentioned before in this review) between forces of amorphousness as well as particularity. Insidiousness breathes wetly in our ears and reminds us, as it were, that there may be no escape clause from a retrocausal future that feeds on the past. Be very very worried that any distillation of the flesh does not prevent it being smeared all over our living-room as a spoiler. Rest assured, that tells you nothing about this story, this more disturbing story by subtle implication (as well as gross-out) even than itself. (17 June 10)
The Daftie by Paul Finch
An obstacle course across the Wigan Wastelands - a well-written, location-rich, vividly felt story that seems to be an 'adventure playground' within many of the book's previous stories (without being glib) - e.g. a colliery with a "ghostly totem of the declining wealth" - an effigy of a man literally crucified in a pit cottage garden (!) (cf 'Easter' etc) - "you can't bury stuff forever, can you?" (cf the previous story) - a 'Summerhouse' type sketch (on a deflated football) ..... the obstacle course being the rite of passage of an unsporty narrator who takes a short-cut to avoid punishment for flunking a school cross-country race. He fears meeting the local 'daftie' who is said to stalk the area. The ending was a surprise that set me thinking...
Good literature is about narration: reliable, unreliable, collusive, uncollusive, a pecking-order from head-lease or freehold author to those creations to whom is handed the story's baton in a relay marathon of the soul... (17 June 10 - another two hours later)
A Victim of Natural Selection by John Travis
"Ahead was a solitary streetlight he couldn't remember seeing before at the foot of those great steps, illuminating ash-grey soil piled up on either side of the old structure."
A striking nightmare vision of urban desolation as Crocus (with meaningful name) is presented with some hope. But sometimes Hope is the greatest Horror of all, when even memories and people we once knew conspire to corrupt even the ground beneath our feet. Breaking glass, a telegraph pole like a totem, black alleys ... this is a brilliant mood piece that fits this book hand in riven glove. [I don't normally draw attention to typos but there was one here that particularly irritated this reader: 'alluding' when it should have been 'eluding'.] (18 June 10)
This real-time review is now continued here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/where_the_heart_is_1.htm
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/where_the_heart_is_gray_friar_press.htm
=====================================================
The City in the Rain by Mark West
"...he felt as though he was being plugged into a being that was greater than he could ever be..."
I don't think I've read any fiction by Mark West before and, judging by this story, I most certainly should have done! Without putting too fine a point on it, it is in many ways the perfect horror story. It has the horror feel, its tropes, a sense of pulp and popularity, yet with an underlying sophistication and poignancy that bowled me over, a completeness, a satisfying whole, and a language perfectly pitched for what it is. Quite confident in trying to be what it is, without frills. And hauntingly believable with Leicester's 'sagging' and crucifying brick buildings, the urban underclass, the alleys and the implications for the protagonist's wife's death in the past from cancer...
It also fits well into this book so far ... echoing the form of resurrection in 'A Killing in the Market'. In fact these two stories work in synergy.
There is a sense of gratuitous despair and a nihilist brick in the wall that I have been building towards a gestalt.
I see that an 'earlier version' of this story was published in 2003. I hope this does not prevent it winning awards in 2010, as it should, for being a great horror story. (16 June 10 - another 2 hours later)
Last Summer by Stephen Bacon
"Bricks bounce off the side."
This is an effective evocation of the Miner's Strike in Sheffield in the mid-Eighties (the bitterness and personal wars between strikers and scabs and their families) in parallel with the present day protagonist's return to his childhood at that time and in that place, and an unforeseen redemption now seen-to-be-done by exposing its gory results in this story-as-memorial.
Meanwhile, I, as reader of it, can imagine the mine structures - resonating, at least for me, with the structure in 'Easter' above. That seems a right comparison to make, bearing in mind the passions and emotions of that time, of that place, with which I, as someone who only watched all this on the news at the time, can now more fully empathise .... paradoxically via the truth and immediacy of fiction when compared to the disputatious facts of history.
"...we are standing on the grassy incline of the pit tip, looking down into the colliery." (16 June 10 - another 2 hours later).
Also please compare the return into the past of 'Summerhouse' with that of 'Last Summer' - amazing I missed till now that glaring connection synergising both stories. (16 June 10 - another hour later)
Winter's End by Simon Bestwick
" 'So?' he asked."
Paul links up with singer Helen after first meeting her at a Manchester gig where she's performing with some 'sullen moshers'. One believes in both members of this couple, and gradually we realise she has a past that pervades her present - eventually in a truly monstrous form. There is an alchemy here (similar to that mentioned before in this review) between forces of amorphousness as well as particularity. Insidiousness breathes wetly in our ears and reminds us, as it were, that there may be no escape clause from a retrocausal future that feeds on the past. Be very very worried that any distillation of the flesh does not prevent it being smeared all over our living-room as a spoiler. Rest assured, that tells you nothing about this story, this more disturbing story by subtle implication (as well as gross-out) even than itself. (17 June 10)
The Daftie by Paul Finch
An obstacle course across the Wigan Wastelands - a well-written, location-rich, vividly felt story that seems to be an 'adventure playground' within many of the book's previous stories (without being glib) - e.g. a colliery with a "ghostly totem of the declining wealth" - an effigy of a man literally crucified in a pit cottage garden (!) (cf 'Easter' etc) - "you can't bury stuff forever, can you?" (cf the previous story) - a 'Summerhouse' type sketch (on a deflated football) ..... the obstacle course being the rite of passage of an unsporty narrator who takes a short-cut to avoid punishment for flunking a school cross-country race. He fears meeting the local 'daftie' who is said to stalk the area. The ending was a surprise that set me thinking...
Good literature is about narration: reliable, unreliable, collusive, uncollusive, a pecking-order from head-lease or freehold author to those creations to whom is handed the story's baton in a relay marathon of the soul... (17 June 10 - another two hours later)
A Victim of Natural Selection by John Travis
"Ahead was a solitary streetlight he couldn't remember seeing before at the foot of those great steps, illuminating ash-grey soil piled up on either side of the old structure."
A striking nightmare vision of urban desolation as Crocus (with meaningful name) is presented with some hope. But sometimes Hope is the greatest Horror of all, when even memories and people we once knew conspire to corrupt even the ground beneath our feet. Breaking glass, a telegraph pole like a totem, black alleys ... this is a brilliant mood piece that fits this book hand in riven glove. [I don't normally draw attention to typos but there was one here that particularly irritated this reader: 'alluding' when it should have been 'eluding'.] (18 June 10)
This real-time review is now continued here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/where_the_heart_is_1.htm
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Big Brother 11 (2010)
Continued from previous Big Brother here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/celebrity_big_brother__2010.htm
=================================
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
.
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.
.
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!
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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
.
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.
.
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.
.later....
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!
=================
CONTINUED HERE
=================================
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!
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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!
.
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.
.
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.
.
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
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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...
.
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.
.
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.
.
I've got it! Corin - Hylda Baker with a soupçon of Hilda Ogden!
.
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.
.
Not much happened tonight. Only an internal view of happenings last night.
I fear this may be the case here on in.
.
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.
.
...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.
.later....
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?
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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!
=================
CONTINUED HERE
Saturday, June 05, 2010
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
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
Sunday, May 30, 2010
"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)
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
Thursday, May 27, 2010
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 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
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Null Immortalis - order of stories
A Pause for Thought
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
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
Friday, April 30, 2010
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.
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.
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