The Cat and the Coaster

Previous Yieldingtree HERE

I arguably coined these words and expressions: ‘zeroism, egnisomicon, egnisism’ in conjunction with PF Jeffery (1967), ‘whofage’ in conjunction with PF Jeffery (1973), ‘agra aska’ (1983), ‘weirdmonger’ (1988), use of ‘brainwright’ in modern times (1990), Salustrade (1992) use of ‘yesterfang’ in modern times (1997), ‘wordhunger’ (1999), ‘nemonymous, ‘nemonymity’, late-labelling, veils-&-piques’ (2001), ‘denemonise’ (2002), ‘megazanthus’, ‘weirdonymous’, ‘chasing the noumenon’ (2003), ‘wordonymous’, ‘wordominous’, ‘the-ominous-imagination’, revelling in vulnerability (2004), ‘a woven fire-wall of words’, ‘the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’, ‘nemoguity’, ‘vexed texture of text’, ‘fictipathy’, ‘nemotion’, ‘the hawler’, ‘the angel megazanthus’, ‘klaxon city’, ‘horrorism’ when used as a word for the philosophy of horror fiction (2005), ‘publication-on-reading’, ‘antipodal angst’, ‘the tenacity of feathers’, ‘a writer’s mandala’, ‘wordy weird’, ‘nemophilia / nemophobia’, ‘magic fiction’ as the obverse of the more common expression ‘magic realism’, ‘weirdtongue’ as the ‘name’ of a language, ‘Glistenberry’ as an alternative name for ‘Glastonbury’, ‘tonguage’ as a ‘conscious’ language, ‘yester-eggs’ as a term for Proustian ‘selves’, ‘the parthenogenesis of reality from artifice’, ‘all is for the pest in the pest of all worlds’, ‘Baffles’ as fables with muffled morals (2006), ‘fanblade fable’, ‘abutting the if’, ‘word clones / word clowns’, ‘bumps for books’, ‘rite of review’, ‘cone zero’, ‘a basket of coinages’ (2007), ‘small press cover ark(ive), the baser pulps’ ‘orrorfaces’, ‘the wheel culture’, ‘netogenic’, the first fiction about a ‘drogulus’, ‘Innerskull’, ‘meganthus‘ (2008), ‘CERN Zoo’ in literature, ‘Real-Time Reviewing‘, ‘ligottum‘, ‘the pit and the pessimum‘, ‘ligottus‘, ‘fubbcuckle’, ‘extraneity creep’, ‘pillowghost’, ‘intowards’, ‘powderghost’, ‘nightmare’s moat’ (2009), ‘THE TENSES’, ‘scream munch’ as another word for ‘captcha’, ‘skight’ – threepenny bit, ‘invitations from within’, ‘novellatory’, ’Ress’, ‘Venn Dreams’, ‘Tearsheet Doll’, scanbuncle, A Götterdämmerung of Guts , Holistic Horror (2010), SFtopia, Salustraders / Overspacers, Novellarette, Inquel, Gaddafery, Jungian autonymity, sudracide, an impesto novel, trendbaffler, our planet as reliquary, fictionatronics, Lovecraftianisation, “To know the worst is also to know the best“, vignellarette, “Nothing is controlled by logic other than logic itself.”, nightgators, Horror Genreators, dicksplay, roman littoral, ghostalt, poltergeistalt, horrasy, Horrasy: The Horrastic and the Heuristic, srednibution, srednidipity, Lovecraftian indescriptivities, bememorise, alephantiasis, reva-menders, metapomorphic, rarifiction, neoloquism, Was the God Particle born instable? (2011), angelivalent, literal-meaning dreaming, the ‘Higgs boson’ of Horror, The Weirdonomicon, Aickmania, shortcomings harnessed are stronger than strengths unused, privacy-trawler, disarming strangeness in connection with Robert Aickman, Fiction is like currency: belief is everything, oblique concomitant / oblique contaminant, age at the edge, A writer should make clouds shine even if the world’s sun has gone, The Call of the Silly, pastilential, eschairtology, e-born, read-tangler, ghorror, the authorial cloud, grosmance, quixotiose, most placating is playacting, 'friendly fire' fiction, dilemmachination, absurface, aeontonomous, HobbYiSt / Hobbit, aeontonomy, Horror Without Victims, fuckerlode, Earkth, Pronoun Horror, The Ives of November, PreMonday-ition, NoV - No Victims, an amid-life crisis, God created Ground in His own image by adding 'run' to His name, Old boots are always better than no boots, truth is never brash, End tring, Tendring is Trending, HorNET Nest, The empty future expects our arrival soon, if you fit, wear yourself, The Worldwide Cliff (2012), quantitative kamikaze, The Ohm Resistor of Literature, Only real books can be left anonymously on chairs, The Sibling Thing (as monster), lachrymonics, Cold Sororist, Gangster Gongsters, Cathrian, Cathrianity, Cathrechism, the optimum delusion, dogstone as a form of 'found sculpture', iDEATH as a form of internet implosion of self, Judge me on my works, not on my request thus to judge me, dyschronous recurrence, Belarhombus, the Palimp's Zest, abseil-surdity, paradoxilogically, Devolved Fiction, fratrinity, bock-hide, the Ligottian lurch, denouement or deligottiment, Does a Seraph suffer from Harpes?, AickMANN, RTRcausal, irrealoscopic, a Myth Pitch, Versionary SF, pallianthology, Historation Comedy, Holy Grailtrack, Born Ancient, Bringing the Dead to Book, urbographical, genius tempus, sabbaticess (2013).

THE BELLMAN - Colin Insole

from my review of ELEGIES & REQUIEMS (Side Real Press) here.

The Bellman
"I too observed 'the bones of the precluded pomp' and 'the dark thing waiting for a soul'."
I normally expect an anthology or collection to end with its own musical coda, something that I'd nod at and say yes we can go now.
Yet, this substantial story is more remarkable than any such considerations - as if we have been merely teased before in this book, and this is the real thing.
It tells of a Museum of Lost London, out-Ackroyding Ackroyd, a story with a central tract of an account of a past pageant of jubilee, an erstwhile 'flashmob' as it were, done with posters. And its recurrence through history. This is major stuff. There is no way I can even give you an inkling of the power of this story, its allusions, its style of descriptions of upper and lower London, its sheer chilling implications, and I'd dub myself the Bellman of this story, nay, of this whole book if I could, but others will clamour to outdo me first. I thought, when writing my review of this story, I would lay into its 'delights' with gusto, lay bare for you its dreams and nightmares, its truths and its (hopefully!) fictions. But it just IS. Read it for yourself. You will never be the same again. And I'd say the same thing for the whole book, too. Oyez, Oyez, come to the dark journey through the forgotten city streets of your own mind and beyond.
As in Apoplexy and Blackthorn, the text if written cannot be unwritten. It creates its own reality. The deed is done. It WILL affect you, come what may. Even if only by what I earlier called object-osmosis. And the style is immaculate as is the construction of the whole book. Visionary and decadent.
And this last story also conveys what Bowen described in one of her novels and some of her stories as her own visionary version of these mobs of her Blitz, her dark crowd shapes and thus she prefigured this story with what she saw coming through the dust and clamour of war, and so does Insole: "And there were worse things we saw in the Blitz. As the city burned, we saw them mocking us from the ruins. The dead didn't come to mourn but to rejoice."

----------------------------------------------

From Chapter 4 of ‘The Heat of the Day’ (1949) by Elizabeth Bowen:

They had met one another, at first not very often, throughout that heady autumn of the first London air raids. Never had any season been more felt; one bought the poetic sense of it with the sense of death. Out of mists of morning charred by the smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter; between the last of sunset and first note of the siren the darkening glassy tenseness of evening was drawn fine. From the moment of waking you tasted the sweet autumn not less because of an acridity on the tongue and nostrils; and as the singed dust settled and smoke diluted you felt more and more called upon to observe the daytime as a pure and curious holiday from fear. [...]
Most of all the dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their anonymous presence – not as today’s dead but as yesterday’s living – felt through London. Uncounted, they continued to move in shoals through the city day, pervading everything to be seen or heard or felt with their torn-off senses, drawing on this tomorrow they had expected – for death cannot be so sudden as that. [...]
The wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned. In that September transparency people became transparent, only to be located by the just darker flicker of their hearts. [...]

My Reggie Oliver book collection

Süssmayr’s Requiem

I am a sucker for Requiems: Cherubini, Mozart, Dvorak, Fauré, Verdi, Britten, Penderecki and now (and then) Süssmayr’s own. This is what I mean by a Reggie Oliver classic story, one that it is a privilege to read and I am personally pleased to imagine the massed and marshalled audience of this book applauding as it comes to the close of its visionary pattern on the stiff, luxurious paper of the page. It tells of an Englishman who rents a room in Vienna under the room of a bereft Süssmayr who is in turn tainted with a Salieri type bitterness after helping a dying Mozart complete his own Requiem, and seemingly haunted by Mozart’s widow. The English protagonist is as Eric Fenby to Delius who by the end returns to the ‘stone music’ of the Morchester cathedral, which I imagine to be like Lichfield’s.

This story, for me, completes the book’s earlier astrological chart (in ‘Lord of the Fleas’) but inspirationally of death as well as of birth, the precise Epochal moment of each of these two events by charting between them a changing river of astrologically literary harmonics to represent the pattern of the Requiem, a Jungian synchronicity, transcribing a chart-intrinsic series of Blakean passages (not purple so much as golden) fluted through with that ‘riparian spate’, that idea of a river never being the same twice, borne along by the oxymorons of humanity, philosophy, science etc that were first adumbrated by ‘Singing Blood’. And riven by the spirit and music of Mann’s Magic Mountain.

A story that needs to be read and read and read till it gives up all its secrets. Never be impatient with literary works like this one!


Above is an extract from my review of Reggie Oliver's book 'Flowers of the Sea' (Tartarus Press) HERE.

THE UNHOLY WEIGHT OF THE GLIMPSE

Railtrack Teeth and Turquoise Gums

Lichfield Cathedral as God's Anchor

The two pictures above are possibly the world’s first perceived link between Lichfield Cathedral and the nearby Arboretum.

The Fatal Vision

a great novella by John Howard:

2. nullimmortalis

   October 7, 2013 at 1:59 pm (Edit)

   The Fatal Vision – pages 96 – 125
   “There were times when he seemed to be walking along a canyon-like street, its smooth bare sides forming into a the stark cubes and blocks of buildings and similar intersecting avenues.”
   Of novella length, this work takes place in the same Romanian genius tempus as ‘The Flowering Wound’, with the borderline machinations of geo-politics and high-level conspiracies and ratcheting human architecture, all as ignited by the start of Hitler’s war. This is skilfully carried by the naggingly 1940s fractured way (cf ‘The Heat of the Day’ by Elizabeth Bowen) within a bifurcated story surrounding the work and personal relationships of a Professor of Architecture. Bifurcated (or torn) by two audit trails of narration, with differing degrees of narrative reliability or collusion with the reader, one audit trail being about the professor from a seemingly independent stance, the other from a first person singular narration by one of the professor’s students who seems to be stalking him. This is further hologrammatised, as it were, by the professor’s own extrapolations of imaginary architecture. The prose style, for me, has many wonderfully adumbrated images caught up in this history-trawling net I have just tried to describe above, images that seem to convey more about history than history itself. Seems also, so far, to encapsulate Howard’s work, as if I have been striving for this point since reading ‘The Silver Voices’ a few years ago. Abstractions. Ragged frontiers. Flying from the ground. Spies seeking spies, seekers seeking seekers. The loss of something in one’s self. “There was something missing, as if sliced away, stolen by an invisible flensing hand.” Or a genre of literature based on a stylised Berlin Wall as an archetype that escaped Jung’s trawling-net of collective unconscious. “…the ground fell away sharply to where the wall had been pierced to make room for Queen Elizabeth Square.”

   Reply
3. nullimmortalis

   October 7, 2013 at 3:31 pm (Edit)

   The Fatal Vision – pages 125 – 158
   That fatal vision – partly the Fate of that ‘dreamy white city’ Howardian vision, partly a Fatality to the Vitals that history threatens any who travel back to live it for real, partly both those two meanings together – and “We debated and argued; dividing into rival factions that merged and split again”, as in all wars, not only in this one … and to be “on easy speaking terms with the future”, one needs to be on easy speaking terms with the past, too. The ultimate dichotomy of reactionary and revolutionary.
   I take some of this structure of fiction away with me from the novella, but also something perhaps more personal: The professor’s secret apartment struck me forcibly as my own fiction work whereto I escape much to the ignoring or bemusement of those around me in real life, but above all it is my own literary hologrammatisation via ‘gestalt real-time reviewing’ of which the Process is identical to its Noumenon where I feel myself living most of the time with, say, some of the stairways not leading to the correct corridors (as in the environs of the Professor’s ‘secret’ apartment), instead of where I actually live or where people think they see me living. But with the Professor he had someone within the actual world, someone sufficiently neutral, with a grievance as well as a fascination for the Professor, someone who saw him in his secret apartment, so it must have existed in the actual world, too. A tear or rip in the fabric of self, mended like a single shoe’s two leather flaps across the tongue – with laces.
   History has such secret apartments, too, that Howard has opened up for us. Time travel for real.
   You will perhaps find your own secret apartment or fatal vision within the apartments or ‘spatial dimensions’ of this great book, your secret apartment or fatal vision quite different from mine. 
   “…like beautiful music playing too low to hear but which could be felt in the depths of the heart.”

   end

   
   

Shards of Yesterfang

I arguably coined these words and expressions: ‘zeroism, egnisomicon, egnisism’ in conjunction with PF Jeffery (1967), ‘whofage’ in conjunction with PF Jeffery (1973), ‘agra aska’ (1983), ‘weirdmonger’ (1988), use of ‘brainwright’ in modern times (1990), Salustrade (1992) use of ‘yesterfang’ in modern times (1997), ‘wordhunger’ (1999), ‘nemonymous, ‘nemonymity’, late-labelling, veils-&-piques’ (2001), ‘denemonise’ (2002), ‘megazanthus’, ‘weirdonymous’, ‘chasing the noumenon’ (2003), ‘wordonymous’, ‘wordominous’, ‘the-ominous-imagination’, revelling in vulnerability (2004), ‘a woven fire-wall of words’, ‘the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’, ‘nemoguity’, ‘vexed texture of text’, ‘fictipathy’, ‘nemotion’, ‘the hawler’, ‘the angel megazanthus’, ‘klaxon city’, ‘horrorism’ when used as a word for the philosophy of horror fiction (2005), ‘publication-on-reading’, ‘antipodal angst’, ‘the tenacity of feathers’, ‘a writer’s mandala’, ‘wordy weird’, ‘nemophilia / nemophobia’, ‘magic fiction’ as the obverse of the more common expression ‘magic realism’, ‘weirdtongue’ as the ‘name’ of a language, ‘Glistenberry’ as an alternative name for ‘Glastonbury’, ‘tonguage’ as a ‘conscious’ language, ‘yester-eggs’ as a term for Proustian ‘selves’, ‘the parthenogenesis of reality from artifice’, ‘all is for the pest in the pest of all worlds’, ‘Baffles’ as fables with muffled morals (2006), ‘fanblade fable’, ‘abutting the if’, ‘word clones / word clowns’, ‘bumps for books’, ‘rite of review’, ‘cone zero’, ‘a basket of coinages’ (2007), ‘small press cover ark(ive), the baser pulps’ ‘orrorfaces’, ‘the wheel culture’, ‘netogenic’, the first fiction about a ‘drogulus’, ‘Innerskull’, ‘meganthus‘ (2008), ‘CERN Zoo’ in literature, ‘Real-Time Reviewing‘, ‘ligottum‘, ‘the pit and the pessimum‘, ‘ligottus‘, ‘fubbcuckle’, ‘extraneity creep’, ‘pillowghost’, ‘intowards’, ‘powderghost’, ‘nightmare’s moat’ (2009), ‘THE TENSES’, ‘scream munch’ as another word for ‘captcha’, ‘skight’ – threepenny bit, ‘invitations from within’, ‘novellatory’, ’Ress’, ‘Venn Dreams’, ‘Tearsheet Doll’, scanbuncle, A Götterdämmerung of Guts , Holistic Horror (2010), SFtopia, Salustraders / Overspacers, Novellarette, Inquel, Gaddafery, Jungian autonymity, sudracide, an impesto novel, trendbaffler, our planet as reliquary, fictionatronics, Lovecraftianisation, “To know the worst is also to know the best“, vignellarette, “Nothing is controlled by logic other than logic itself.”, nightgators, Horror Genreators, dicksplay, roman littoral, ghostalt, poltergeistalt, horrasy, Horrasy: The Horrastic and the Heuristic, srednibution, srednidipity, Lovecraftian indescriptivities, bememorise, alephantiasis, reva-menders, metapomorphic, rarifiction, neoloquism, Was the God Particle born instable? (2011), angelivalent, literal-meaning dreaming, the ‘Higgs boson’ of Horror, The Weirdonomicon, Aickmania, shortcomings harnessed are stronger than strengths unused, privacy-trawler, disarming strangeness in connection with Robert Aickman, Fiction is like currency: belief is everything, oblique concomitant / oblique contaminant, age at the edge, A writer should make clouds shine even if the world’s sun has gone, The Call of the Silly, pastilential, eschairtology, e-born, read-tangler, ghorror, the authorial cloud, grosmance, quixotiose, most placating is playacting, 'friendly fire' fiction, dilemmachination, absurface, aeontonomous, HobbYiSt / Hobbit, aeontonomy, Horror Without Victims, fuckerlode, Earkth, Pronoun Horror, The Ives of November, PreMonday-ition, NoV - No Victims, an amid-life crisis, God created Ground in His own image by adding 'run' to His name, Old boots are always better than no boots, truth is never brash, End tring, Tendring is Trending, HorNET Nest, The empty future expects our arrival soon, if you fit, wear yourself, The Worldwide Cliff (2012), quantitative kamikaze, The Ohm Resistor of Literature, Only real books can be left anonymously on chairs, The Sibling Thing (as monster), lachrymonics, Cold Sororist, Gangster Gongsters, Cathrian, Cathrianity, Cathrechism, the optimum delusion, dogstone as a form of 'found sculpture', iDEATH as a form of internet implosion of self, Judge me on my works, not on my request thus to judge me, dyschronous recurrence, Belarhombus, the Palimp's Zest, abseil-surdity, paradoxilogically, Devolved Fiction, fratrinity, bock-hide, the Ligottian lurch, denouement or deligottiment, Does a Seraph suffer from Harpes?, AickMANN, RTRcausal, irrealoscopic, a Myth Pitch, Versionary SF, pallianthology, Historation Comedy, Holy Grailtrack, Born Ancient, Bringing the Dead to Book, urbographical (2013).

Links to my Diderot reviews

“Brun complains loudly that Palissot, his guest and friend, has written some couplets attacking him. Palissot had to write the couplets, and it’s Brun who’s in the wrong. Poinsinet complains loudly that Palissot’s attributed to him the couplets he wrote against Brun. Palissot had to attribute to Poinsinet the couplets he wrote against Brun, and it’s Poinsinet who’s in the wrong………………”
 From Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot

"After this argument, with which they could have circled the globe without running out of things to say or agreeing, they were overtaken by a storm which obliged them to hurry on their way…"
 From Jacques The Fatalist by Denis Diderot.

Hook-nosed men with patchwork dreams.

The flared trousers that belonged to Bowl were what could only be described as patchwork orange, if it is indeed possible to have different shades of orange to fill the various compartments of the trousers' quilted material. Judy argued that certain shades of so-called orange were more yellow than orange, or more red than orange, or more brown than orange, and only orange was orange, so how could any trousers be described as patchwork orange.

Bowl, Judy's other half of something they used to call an 'item', told Judy that they had once belonged to a showman with a hook nose and a squeaky voice, someone who wore those patchwork orange trews as well as a patchwork green waistcoat, a patchwork blue shirt like unstriped pyjamas, a patchwork white (a colour often called uni-polkadotted) hat and a patchwork pink face that was his real face.

This showman, Bowl told Judy, performed with a puppet crocodile, a tiny doll that he called his wife - plus a doctor and policeman who followed him about - and Bowl had often played the part of the policeman in a patchwork navy blue uniform.

Judy examined the patchwork orange trousers that Bowl had inherited before he started trying them on and she thought to herself that the showman could not have been very fastidious as a part of the trousers seemed to have a different shade of patchwork orange from the rest of the patchwork orange. A crucial patch that was more a patchwork purple patch than any patchwork orange patch. Funny how bodily fluids often ended up a coloured stain different from the colour as which it started out when first expended, she thought.

"Is he still alive, Bowl?" asked Judy.

"Ha, that's the mystery, Judy. The doctor kept him alive by putting him in various stories under various names to keep him alive, the doctor's methods of cure as well as prevention being the transformation of people into fiction with a healthier state than they were before they were transformed."

"What did the policeman do all the time?" asked Judy.

"He kept illness away by a laugh laugh laugh when swivelling his head round round round like this--" said Bowl, demonstrating a trick that was once common in the Good Old Days Shows at the end of every pier.

But there was nobody to watch Bowl because he was in a solitary cell of a prison - in a patchwork striped prison pyjama tunic. Bowl had murdered the man who wore the patchwork orange trews upon his hand like a glove and made them talk in a squeaky voice. Meanwhile, Bowl kept Judy in his head, which was safer for her than anywhere else.

Perhaps it wasn't a prison at all but somewhere safe from danger rather than keeping danger inside safe from those outside it. Somewhere to keep us all safe from hook-nosed men with patchwork dreams.

Each dream filled with shades of black black black.
His crocodile jaws going clack clack clack.

Celebrity Big Brother - Summer 2013

Continued from here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/big-brother-summer-2013-3.html

23/8/13

I've just seen the start of tonight's programme where in 15 minutes I have seen them all enter - and that has saved me from watching the two hours last night! 

As these include Les and Janice Battersby from the old days of Corrie when I used to watch it regularly, I might try to stick with this CBB if I can. But the rest of them look pretty awful.

And who is that mute blonde lady who looks a bit like Harpo Marx sitting in the secret room?

24/8/13
Excellent description of Courtney, Marion. Mangling the rabbit, though, was a scene to cherish from perhaps another Marx Brothers film...
It's funny how the the Battersby characters cling to Vicky and Bruce.  I was rather shocked when Bruce said, in an enforced double bed scene with Vicky, that they must seem like the Battersbys. For me they *are* the awful Battersbys!
Whoever said that Ron Atkinson is more famous than Bruce and Vicky was right.  Not only for his remarkable football career, but for his latter day TV pundrity from which he had to be sacked because of an allegedly racist comment, I recall.

25/8/13

A very fair report, Marion. Both helpful and enjoyable.
You said many of the things I was going to say about Ron, Louie, Carol and Charlotte.
The quoting of words by others - is that the same as using them for oneself?
The aggressive smashing of the cake was the first real aberrant thing to happen in this CBB. The earlier mangling of the rabbit was also a theatrical happening, but less aberrant. In some strange way, I like Courtney's personality (when sober), but not Charlotte's.

26/8/13
I agree with what you say about Ron but I did hear him mention the bomb.
The only HM I really like is Vicky.
Judging by BB and CBB, everyone walking about in the world is incredibly crude and/or dangerously idiosyncratic. Do these programmes give a false impression of life in general these days? Discuss.

27/8/13

Marion wrote:

This is what is dangerous about the media - the gap between the reality of society and the media's love of oddities and the downright trashy and awful, presented as somehow representative of us all. What makes BB work, is not the trashy, but the moments when a human being peeps out from under the front they have erected in the belief it makes them interesting. I don't know if BB understands that. Tonight, for example, Lauren was genuinely discomfited when confronted with Courtney's genuine upset someone different appeared for a moment even if she was still wearing the Queen Alexandra pearls.

Indeed.
As a separate point, I don't know where BB will be going after this summer's two series.
Here three of the Hms were made, three times, to enact a semi-religious Ceremony of Judgement as robed figures in the Celebrity of Cult - and then any sacredness snatched away by divulging everything they said to the other Hms. This was a most ludicrous and, then, cruel event.
Nobody will believe in any privacy of secret room or diary room, again. Perhaps this Summer is actually intended to be the self-destruction of BB by BB.

(later)

Marion wrote:

Next year's house will be full of Sams snoozing in corners and HMs sitting tight lipped and granite jawed in the DR. The betrayal of HMs confidences is suicidal.


BB HMs 2014

How true and how apt, Marion.
But they seem to be poignantly pouting for a kiss...

28/8/13

Marion wrote:
  She's also a party planner and wants to organise the birthday party for Courtney - everyone will dress up as Courtney (Lauren can hardly wait) and Lauren will bake a birthday cake with pink icing for her. (PLEASE, BB, let her do it!) Blast - I'm getting fond of the kindly woman and it's too early in the series to attach to an HM.



Lauren in happier times

 A gem about Lauren, Marion!
BTW, I wonder why Courtney is in CBB and Gina Rio (obviously already a celebrity before she went into the house) was in the ordinary BB? 
On CBB in general, 3 weeks is hardly any time at all for the long game of finding (or even losing) oneself. CBB is just a semi-rehearsed folderol.
Ordinary BB itself used to be 13 weeks in the old days, but now it is only 9 weeks. Hardly enough even for a snap-judgement rite-of-passage or Road-to-Damascus....

30/8/13
Get Ron out, get Ron out!
And Princesses Lauren and Courtney both seem to leave untidiness in their wake and naturally want to be looked after hand and foot!

31/8/13

Marion wrote:

What a wondeful evening it was tonight - and it was all down to Lauren. She played comedy, pathos, tigress (well, angry kitten), tragedy, and triumph, and even possibly a murderess, slipping from one role to the other seamlessly.

Well, yes. But she sometimes has mouth surrounds a bit like Yogi Bear's...


And Bruce needs to go on an anger management course.
Yes, a great episode. But Ron's clenched false-teeth grin always put me off...

1/9/13

Marion wrote:

Marion guessed right away that it was a task because BB wouldn't let any item be promoted.

Des and Marion alike. But, thinking about it, this summer BB has regularly had frozen shots of used food and other packaging showing clearly Weetabix and other trade names.
Why and how is Lauren a celebrity? She claims not be used to mixing with people, only her Mum and Brother. Sitting up in bed she tries to cut a pathetic figure. But that is her 'game' - transcending a pathetic mode with a carefully moulded personality that she wants 'Lauren' to be. She alone so far has made this CBB interesting.
The others, other than Sophie, also cultivate fallibility as a game plan to lesser and greater degrees. But I have not seen enough of my potential favourite - Vicky - to tell what game, if any, she is playing.
But Bruce is truly a fallible character and I wonder if he is due to do a Vanessa Felz...

PS: I know I placed here a photo of Yogi Bear earlier, not realising till last night someone (who?) shouted out 'Yabber Dabber Doo!' when Ron left...

(later)

Marion wrote:

Lauren is a puzzle indeed. How much is real and how much cultivated it is nearly impossible to say. Her wardrobe changes are key = she shifts from vamp to 'Yellow Brick Road Dorothy'.. Even when cleaning, she had to have a cleaner's hairstyle. I think she really is a non-integrated person playing the part of different 'types' of female: Nurse, sexpot, giggly girl, Mummy, pitiful oppressed spinster and so on...and yet somehow the caricatures have real elements in her. Which is why she is so much more successful at beng poignant than Sophie (who isn't really scared of Lauren; her jaw is too strong for that and she wasn't made to be vulnerable) or Louie ( who apparently wept in the DR last night but didn't really). Lauren slips a perona off with her clothes and dons another within the hour.
Perhaps she truly doesn't know who she is and is trying everything on for size.

Very astute, Marion. This makes complete sense to my inexpert eyes regarding someone who is (recently?) Transgender.

2/9/13

Yes, Charlotte does lead the regrettable uncouthness on the ever downward path of what BB chooses to edit IN rather than edit OUT. As BB obviously needs to edit for an hour long summary, one needs to question their editorial policy. Meanwhile, though, their sponsors, Supercasino, have adverts I find both tasteful and hauntingly effective with that strange attractive striding blonde lady and the inscrutably rugged and thoughtful man spinning the disk, although I personally hate gambling.
I thought Vicky was marvellous when dressed up for the dancing and I thought her dancing, too, exceeded all the others. Shame on Louie for making her lose.

3/9/13
I rather admired the way Vicky handled the Charlotte-Bruce situation and she should be given the job of sorting out the Middle East.
Yes, the nomination process in general this summer has been devalued and made unfit for future purpose - a destruction of a 14 year tradition just for short-term 'entertainment' purposes.
Hopefully without being ungalant, I shall point out that Carol has a genuinely classic 'old lady' face but upon a beautiful young woman's body. And I'm liking her personality more, now. Between her and Vicky to win.
Lauren - I'm not sure she should win although she has been very entertaining but that entertainment value is now wearing thin.

4/9/13

Marion wrote:

 'Lauren, have you been in the toilet?' Carol demanded. Lauren denied it, but interestingly, put her hands over her face and peekd through her fingers like a nuaghty child. Carol then ordered her to flush the loo. Lauren immediately complied,, headdown. Even Mario looked embarrassed. When she returned, Lauren lay on the floor all cureled up before announcing that she had had enough. This wasn't acting - this was real distress.

Yes, a classic BB moment, but the whole task was otherwise boring rubbish and I don't believe in a million years that Louie hadn't already been told by BB that was not real broken glass.
Sophie to go tonight.

5/9/13
It was Courtney's summary programme last night, and I do think she is far more attractive in the dungarees and hairnet. Seriously. And she is far more astute than given credit for.
(later)

I've now seen the interview on Ch.5 On Demand - and predictably it was Sophie. I think she was genuinely surprised by her own 'bossiness' when shown back to her.
Carol made a grand re-entrance and predictably nominated Courtney.
BTW, I enjoyed the Les and Janice Battersby reunion - but noted that it was played against the Corrie wall that once belonged to Stan and Hilda Ogdon.

(later)

Marion wrote: Were the flying ducks on the wall?
yes, indeed, from those innocent days...

6/9/13

Sex-obsessed Charlotte was actually quite funny during her self-appointed role as clairvoyant.   "I can see a lady with a creased face..." "I have a vision of a large [redacted]..."

7/9/13

Marion Arnott wrote:

Dull And Duller
Dull show. Dull eviction. Dustin and Bruce have gone, said their piece in their interviews and the waters will close over their heads and we shall not think of them again.

Indeed, and Louie's 'drunk' task was stupid, both setting the task and the way it was then performed. I didn't know he had once been a judge on 'Dancing on Ice' ...
...and I still can't believe that I didn't realise Lauren Harries was the precocious bow-tied boy who once appeared on Wogan around 1980.
And, wow!, Marion, thanks for that huge red blow up of a comic-strip Courtney!

8/9/13
I think this is the first time I've mentioned Abz in any of my posts here. But it was an engaging conversation he had with Lauren in the tree house - and his extended communion with a spider appealed to whatever there is in me that only enjoys cinema films that move very slowly like 'Claire's Knee', with minimalist music, and preferably with subtitles.
In hindsight, Dustin was interesting in his compulsion to get to the bottom of things, struggling with inexplicable things, a bit like Abz and the spider.
Lauren should win BB, I guess. The now elongated and curved out Little Lord Fauntleroy, slightly stooping, wayward, carrying an aura of my first impression of her as Harpo Marx and, decked out in her Royal jewels, inscrutably featuring in an atmospheric minimalist cinema film called 'Last Year at Marion-abad'...
But I have a soft spot for Vicky. I also loved her dancing with bright red lipstick a week or so ago.

9/9/13
I think Vicky lost herself some votes when she briefly gave what she saw as a typical image of a CBB viewer - i.e. someone messing about on the internet all day and then switching on the TV to watch CBB. 
BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning: "The National Trust will open the Big Brother house to the public for a weekend later this month [...]. Ivo Dawnay, London Director of the National Trust, explains why they have made this decision, and Ann Widdecombe, former Conservative politician, gives her reaction to the idea."
I've recently noticed I never mention Mario in my posts here. Just don't like him, I suppose.
But Abz is growing on me, slowly fluttering awake under my gaze...

10/9/13

Marion wrote:

It was the BB moment to end all BB moments tongit - ad your fave, Vicky, did it, Des! But of that more later!

Yay! I watched it with glee and I knew also you would react thus, Marion.
Indeed, where have we got to in this world. BB teaches us a lot about social history - as well as truth and fiction which are often blurred but BB viewers learn to pick them apart; it teaches us of unwelcome things, but there's no point living with one's head in the sand ... and knowing about something is half the battle toward eventually exorcising it.
Lauren is still in that slow-moving cinema film I love so much. She is also an Anita Brookner heroine. And what she doesn't say often speaks louder than what some others do say.

(later)

Marion wrote:
I was thinking about it all today. You and I both like Abz and Lauren - it occurred to me that both waft about the house in the scent of past times - Abz exhales a hint of gentle joss sticks and peace and love, man; Lauren shakes out of her stiffened petticoats a soupcon of Edwardian gardenia and lavender. We do not care for the stenches of thoroughly modern Charlotte. Long live milky pearls and kindness to moths!

Beautiful!

11/9/13
Indeed, the Rylan Bitch Fest was a cack-handed attempt by BB as a psychological ginger group.
And Ch 5 are playing their old games again, with an advert between parts of the show for Geordie Shore involving Charlotte herself.
And more stills of product placement within the show itself.
The Abz cushion mountains were a reminder of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Nice one, Abz.
Lauren as ever was tantalisingly inscrutable.
Vicky is simply lovely in a basic good-natured yet stringently righteous broad-brush way. In fact, that last bit you could also apply to Lauren but with a metaphorical twin-set and pearl necklace on.
Vicky to win, Abz second, Lauren third.

12/9/13

A fair result last night. Glad to see Vicky at least survived to the final. I've really grown to dislike Carol. I hope she is making a mistake by continuing to side with awful Charlotte. But who knows? The public might like Charlotte. Can't understand why, though. I can meanwhile 'understand' why the final six are the final six (even if I actively dislike two of them and am indifferent to another). That indifference is to Mario. I have nothing to say about him. I can only think he is in the final six for what I infer to be his classic good looks, though I can't really see those either! 13/9/13 Marion wrote: But this is where I despair - Charlotte won the Funniest HM award, and also the most Entertaining. Charlotte? What is WRONG with people? Were the votes even real? Indeed. And Charlotte was advertising again for her TV programme between the parts of CBB, as was Carol for that gossip mag Gina earlier advertised similarly. The sleep-talking incident was obviously staged by Carol but she was then effectively upstaged by Vicky who took credit in the DR for getting to Carol big time to the extent of her talking about it in her sleep!

Well, Sam and Charlotte this Summer's winners? Not very auspicious. But I've enjoyed some things, been inspired by others, disturbed and annoyed, too. But above all, I've enjoyed your reports, Marion. Thanks so much. PS: loved the rain and smoke on Charlotte's exit!

CONTINUED HERE

Big Brother - Summer 2013 (3)

'Continued from HERE

7/8/13
I think Hazel was particularly perturbed by Charlie's friend bringing up the Daley incident and Hazel is now thrashing around to divert attention away from it again. Until this incident, BB itself has been complicit in airbrushing away that incident - because nobody has talked about it until Charlie's friend just brought it up from such a devastating female standpoint on the outside of the house.
I feel sorry for Charlie as everything is being twisted out of proportion against her. In the long run, I think this may do her some good with the outside voters. Dexter certainly went over the top in this context by transcending his normal cool urbaneness with swearing bitterness (truly felt or not, I'm unsure).
As an aside, I was trying to imagine this extended dramatic scene (about 40 minutes?) with all the ganging up against Charlie being transcribed for actors to perform as a modern theatrical play. I think it would be revelatory. (Later) Marion wrote: I have my suspicions about Charlie's friend's outburst. She could not wait to throw the first stone. Was she prompted by BB?
You may be right to have those suspicions or she may just think she is the spokeswoman for an internet groundswell of opinion that due justice wasn't done to both participants in that incident. But I don't think it would have been prompted by BB as I get the impression, since Dan forbade the whole House to talk about it, that that act of airbrushing was first prompted by BB.

8/8/13
I don't know what to say about last night. It was all a bit of a muddle, even more muddling than normal. My loyalties change and my views of various housemates mix and match, but I have really no core loyalty with any of them, and the only things I can really depend on are actions I've seen (via the muddle of BB's editing) with my own eyes when certain Hms have been unguarded or drunk! If it weren't for Marion's reports I'd be in even worse of a muddle, but that does depend on Marion not being in a muddle herself! I have known and trusted Marion longer than any of these HMs (including one face to face meeting a few years ago), so my ultimate core loyalty is with her and her reports.

9/8/13
The bee task was like a piece of music entitled 'Attrition' as if by Morton Feldman, nothing happening except odd buzzes and endless playful stings, nothing changing to the participants in this hive of muddle, gently relaxing for us viewers it is true, but just wallowing in mock honey.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
H. L. Mencken

(later)
Marion says: But there are things to observe even when standing in line:Gina's utter selfishness; the enjoyment of the license to persecute demonstrated by both Gina and Chalie; the rebellion seething in Hazel which I cheered on because I am sick of seeing her tormented. Tragedy on the minor scale is there = be popular or be damned. And your prospects depend on accurate calculation = Hazel is not beloved but just supposing Gina has miscalculated that it is safe to persecute because of that. Not long to go ...
Yes, it is true that even minimalist music has rich textures. But the textures in this BB have been more a weave of muddled motives with only one set of jagged graph lines and we can only go on what we've been allowed to see, and that one set of jagged graph lines in this season were a single night with two people at best darkly tangoing in the secret room and at worst involved in a case of 'sexual cannibalism'.

(later)
That was a strange interview with Hazel about Daley - dealing solely with the girl friend situation (something I had forgotten about) and not with what actually went on in the room that caused the enforced and justified eviction of Daley. There was nothing discussed about Hazel's own actions in the room.
I think Emma was being deliberately disingenuous in keeping the questions solely on the girl friend situation - as some sort of diversion from BB's own actions or lack of actions that night?
The Gina and Hazel cat fight earlier felt a bit staged, in my view. Nothing compared to Ena Sharples and Elsie Tanner!

10/8/13

Marion Arnott wrote:

- we don't actually know what happened when \bb left the room and showed the birds twittering instead.
But we do know they had a hug in bed the following morning.

I fear the Twins are now bound to win.
I certainly don't like any of the HMs after last night as this series goes into a mock climax which would be improved if it now remained unfinished like Schubert's 8th.

 (later)

I think they were both confused or stunned by that stage. Hazel's confusion was a bit in hindsight, too, in how best to create a rationale for herself during last night's interview, Hazel and Daley having drawn each other into such a drunken confused web of role-playing that arguably crossed a line from acting into a perceived reality that could have offended some in the audience and also upset the advertising sponsors. The man is generally punished more than the woman as a result of such role-playing webs getting out of hand. Hazel is a tough cookie and seemed, by the evidence, unaffected by the incident. Not that that excuses his actions. Or hers! Both should have gone then rather than leaving it to a rather cruel exit for Hazel last night! Not that she seemed fazed by it.
I hope to see neither Hazel and Daley again. I don't know if she did more tendentious interviews after the Emma one.

11/8/13

Yes, the Twins maintained their loyalty to Hazel, but I wonder if they will maintain this loyalty when they've watched the whole season as it was shown to us?
From day one, I thought the Twins were annoying and irritating, and I still do. Gina has gone down in my estimation since I said she was my preferable winner. Marginally, now, Charlie may be the least bad choice - she is sometimes visually the famous portrait in the gallery with her frozen expressions and gypsy attractiveness, when the camera dwells on her slow motion, almost philosophical face. However, I still find it hard to stomach her garbled emotions when expressed by her speech rather than by her inscrutable looks.
Dexter is a wriggly fish and I can't like him. Sophie and Sam still grate with me and will win only by having not done much to annoy more people.

12/8/13

Levi Roots is famous for appearing on Dragon's Den with his Reggae Reggae Sauce for food, not for singing, I believe. He is now a very successful businessman.
Anyway, it was an interesting turn of events with the Marcus Bentley commentary of the programme causing the action rather than being caused *by* it. Only on BB can such philosophical matters of time and causality be addressed.
I am going to cut through the mess of residual housemates.
Charlie should simply win because she has the nicest smile (one she inherits from her Mum).

13/8/13

Marion wrote:

This outrageous man is priceless.

Indeed, Dexter is. But should an outrageous man win BB?

Marion wrote:

The other event of note was that the Twins removed their shirts again and one of them lay on the grass screaming like an extra from War Horse.

That's the funniest line in this year's Marion Reports among many other funny, witty, truthful, ironic or outrageous lines.

14/8/13
The Dexterity of Marionettes.
The BB report of all BB reports, Marion. Making the inscrutable scrutable.
You've nailed it, Marion. Absolutely nailed it. Nailed it supremely.

15/8/13

What a silly task, what silly people. All of them!
Charlie should win, if someone has to win, simply for the best winning smile.

And I was annoyed to see Gina Rio in the actual independent adverts between the parts of the show - i.e. for a gossip magazine - and this is strictly against the rules of TV advertising (like Noel Edmunds advertising something between the separate parts of Deal or No Deal).
And did she record the advert before going into the House (in which case she was already a celebrity) or was she allowed out to record it? Either case, very disturbing.

16/8/13
Well, last night's programme made the whole series worth viewing. In fact it has made watching BB and reporting it here since 2004, worthwhile retrocausally. Where else can you get such real but uncertain emotions, beyond drama, beyond theatre...
I'm not sure Dexter did unravel. This whole series has been called Secrets &  Lies from day one and BB has not flinched from the most significant and hurtful lies.
Sam sees BB more as a spiritual rite of passage. A strange callow self-righteous lugubrious  man-youth with some degree of sporadic intensity coupled with raw deadpan emotions and, yes, deadpan humour as shown a night or so ago. The slurred-but-rich-Welsh timbre voice conveys this persona uncannily.
BB is also a game show. And if Dexter was playing the game, then so be it. But he simply must have thought, too, at the back of his mind, that this was likely to be another Lie. The complexity of the situation (and the many erratic sums of money on the wall) - all mind-boggling and Dexter has gone up in my estimation either for raw untrammelled honesty and gameshow greed (evident in the very clever 'Deal or No Deal' that has many wild emotions and similar trickery with sums of money in interface with the 'evil' Banker) or for unbelievable counterintuitive subtlety. Or both at once!
Sam or Dexter to win!

17/8/13
Dexter may have unravelled but judging by his behaviour he doesn't *think* he unravelled, which is half the battle.
I wasn't surprised when Sophie went last night. Not much to her. Surprised she lasted so long.
Sam is slowly growing on me - unwelcomingly.
I fear the Twins will win. Bearing in mind their drawbacks, they have played the optimum game for who and what they are.
Celebrity Big Brother starts Thursday.

18/8/13

Marion wrote:

Dexter admitted that his life had been on the road to nowhere before BB and then came up with one of his convoluted mysterious metaphors: now that he's been on BB, he can start life afresh because hitherto his life had been confined by padlocks and chains and locks (of his own devising), but BB had broken them all one by one until he was left with only a box which he will open when he gets outside. Charlie LOVED this speech - right up her alley. She kept nodding and agreeing andd saying that this was exctly whet she felt, even to the mysterious box. She was hilarious and suggested some primal screaming.

It is as if, retrospectively, the convoluted or 'Mysterious' Dramantic Exterlie has ever been the raison d'etre of this whole rite of passage since June. Charlie was effectively offered to the house by her blood Mother (Jackie) as in the Old Religion sacrifices of Ancient Times, for the Goddess's way to work through the Rituals or Mysteries. The Eleusinian Mysteries much more powerful than the Christian Mystery Plays...
Gina and Sam, last night, were now *literally* acting out their Ancient version of the Greek Chorus which -- in hindsight, alongside the earlier 'evil' catalyst Callum (not a Love Triangle but an Illuminatus Pyramid when also taking into account the contrastively 'wrong' union of Hazel and Daley) -- they and the other housemates have ever enacted since day one as a Tragi-Comic Chorus around the Dramantic Exterlie core.
Ancient Religions, representative of the world's original soul, are now perhaps returned to our times -- the Phoenix rising just when the modern versions of Ancient countries sadly destroy themselves in more ways than one.
Anyway, the Primal Scream clinched this deal for me!

(later)
Marion wrote: Did they keep saying 'But not in a sexual way' during the Eleusinian Mysteries?'
Do you think that the male participants were probably quite relieved?
Come to think of it, GIna's face and hair do rather resemble one of those Classical Greek actor's masks.
Primal scream did it for me too!

And the box may become clearer later. Not necessarily Pandora's.
As an aside, the Twins are grotesquely Rabelaisian... rather than cherubs or cupids, I guess.

Ps: the Eleusinian Mysteries did involve a Mother-Daughter cult, but I don't think Dexter is a slip of the pen for Demeter!

19/8/13

Marion Arnott wrote:

Dexter responded that he had become the person he wanted to be .

The concept of going into BB as a tabula rasa or an empty box - a nemonymous clean slate - is interesting, and then building a character like a child's dress-up toy -
but the high point of the series was Callum's spoked widget and his speech about it - 
two separate but related incidents.
Char-lie meanwhile was the season's secret or 'lie' ... not that she lies herself. But she was Dexter's central 'lie'.
Meanwhile Sam did lie in bed!
Charlie to win. Though, sorry, Marion, I think the Twins are almost certain to win on a public vote.

19.8.13
Des wrote:
on 16 Aug 13: Sam sees BB more as a spiritual rite of passage. A strange callow self-righteous lugubrious man-youth with some degree of sporadic intensity coupled with raw deadpan emotions and, yes, deadpan humour as shown a night or so ago. The slurred-but-rich-Welsh timbre voice conveys this persona uncannily. [...] Sam or Dexter to win!

Well done, Sam.
Well done, Charlie's Smile.

Thanks for all your wonderful reports, Marion.
Des

20.8.13

Marion wrote:

I have a vision of next year's house being cluttered with HMs napping all over the place, using their sheepskin jackets as pillows.

Indeed. I had a similar vision myself.
But Sam comes from Llanelli, where my late Dad came from, and Dad's own grandparents were deaf, by all accounts.
.
Dexter did look very sinister last night, as you say. I think he should get together with Hazel.

I hope to watch CBB but circumstances may prevent me. If so, enjoy it, Marion. And thanks again.
And here's to the Cheshire cat.



Continued here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/celebrity-big-brother-summer-2013.html

INSIDE

Mat and Hilda were a couple who did a lot of role-playing to spice up their marriage. Often they never knew if the other one was being serious or pretending. That is the art of role-playing -- to believe in your own role and that of the other with the excitement of not knowing when one role turned into the real self and vice versa. I'm not an expert, of course. I'm only going on what Mat and Hilda told me -- but what they told me separately was often different from what they told me together.

Eventually they invited me to join in with their games. Knowing I was single, they presumably thought I was flexible enough to fit in to whatever they decided I should do. I would be so grateful for their company I would be amenable for any demeaning role, even a situation that bordered between life and death. Or so they thought.

My only experience was a Murder Dinner, one that I once attended as a gypsy girl in drag -- and I ended up being the murderer. I spent many years in prison as a result -- but that was better than being the one who was murdered. A life inside was better than a life without. But of course all those years turned out to be imaginary and here I was about to be welcomed by Mat and Hilda on the night of the ultimate role-play.

I had been told at first there would be nobody at all in the house and that I should make myself at home inside and there would be plenty of nibbles scattered about. And I was to expect the unexpected -- and I suspected that I would not recognise Mat and Hilda when they eventually arrived. This seemed a bit off because the original thought of mine was one of pleasure at being in Mat and Hilda's company. But to sit there in an empty house, listening to the clock tick, fiddling with cheesy crisps in a half-hearted fashion, sipping lukewarm Lucozade, expecting, at best, complete strangers....

None of this really seemed fair. I imagined myself back in prison - and the windows grew bars before my very eyes. But I was woken from my day-dream by the sound of steps coming down the stairs. I had earlier been upstairs but there had been nobody around. I even poked my head in the loft and the various cupboards.

The soft crump of carpet slippers, the shamble and shuffle in the hall ... then Mat and Hilda hopefully bursting into the room dressed in wonderful costumes and make-up, wanting me to enjoy playing up to the role they wanted me to play...

I watched the door slowly open --

-- and then slowly shut again. Somehow, I knew it wasn't me inside the room. It was me out in the hall not daring to come in, terrified at the thought of who may be inside the room in my place.  A gypsy girl in ghostly drag -- once called Mathilda  -- looking inside the mirror above the fireplace and seeing nobody there.
.

[Last night's speed-writing exercise at the Clacton Third Thursday Group.]