Tuesday, January 09, 2018

The Drone Outside - Kristine Ong Muslim

12 thoughts on “The Drone Outside”

  1. KILROY WAS HERE
    Pages 7 – 9
    Against my wont, I found myself reading this three or four times. And sensed it was a tale of when the Machine finally Stops, and when it Stops we forget it ever Started. But which of us Stopped it? Happily Howard’s End?
    108 = 9 x 12 (sixth day of June, as sixth month, with 6 + 6 = 12)
    “One of us, someone from the tribe of susceptibles.”
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  2. THE OUTSIDERS
    Pages 10 – 11
    “I have seen them, spoken to them, loved them. They are hiding in the midst and the ferns until our civilization stops. Today they are the Homeless – tomorrow —–“
    From ‘The Machine Stops’
    “Why can’t we be friends now?” said the other, holding him affectionately. “It’s what I want. It’s what you want.” But the horses didn’t want it — they swerved apart: the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file;”
    From ‘A Passage to India’
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  4. EVENTIDE
    Pages 16 – 19
    A striking vision. A black mould (‘mold’ is the alternative spelling here) that prevents your dreaming in colour. Mark Samuels’ ‘The Black Mould’? Or the green mould that Trump’s darker mould will soon subsume? The spreading green mould with Demons and Angels in Fracassi’s Civil War Battle of SHILOH (incredibly a day or so ago reviewed here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/12/16/shiloh-philip-fracassi/) Or, rather, it is the black mould WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD (“She tore the letter into little pieces and scattered it over the mould.” EM Forster in his novel with that title.)
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  5. DEMOLITION DAY
    “obsessed with wanting a view—“
    We return to the 9 x 12 =108 focal point of the first work in this chapbook, here the brutalism of demolition (often a theme in EMF fiction) and shown here as a matter of bombs or an apocalyose and a heatwave seen through the letters to its victims in rooms, letters sent by someone who seems to be a drone-operating photographer.
    .
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  6. I read and reviewed the next (longer) KOM piece in June 2016, having read it in MARKED TO DIE (Tribute to Mark Samuels), the same book wherein my only recent published piece — THE BIG-HEADED PEOPLE (recently republished as a Eibonvale chapbook at double its original length) — was also printed. This is what I wrote about the KOM piece at that time:
    —————————
    THE EARLY SIGNS OF BLIGHT by Kristine Ong Muslim
    “the bad man’s rot seeping in”
    A very intriguing take upon OCD, even the synaesthesia of paper publications themselves, a shared OCD between a mother and her son, the latter haunted (and thus haunting us) by a recurrent bad man in the closet of childhood’s Pooh lamplit bedroom… Their backstory, even in this relatively brief text, we gradually learn to learn about amid a hypothesis of chaos theory behind it that makes this story linger on with us.
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  7. THE NEIGHBORS
    “, their interiors buzzing with the collective drone…”
    Incarceration-fiction, also deployed by Beckett, Evenson, Samuels – and this KOM version is a fine example in perfect tune with this book’s Machine Stops Gestalt.
    Also see the broadcast essay by Forster headed “Self and Neighbours”, although not sure that was his own title for it or someone else’s. Also EMF’s ‘The Other Side of the Hedge’ which by a pedometer’s tally possibly matches Samuels’ incarcerative ‘In The Complex’ https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/01/04/the-prozess-manifestations-mark-samuels/#comment-11410 that I read yesterday.
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  8. THE LONGEST NIGHT
    “Like other middle-class families, the Machins conserved energy and only resorted to their meager light sources when necessary.”
    Not only the Machine, but now the Machins stop… or inevitably they default that way eventually. Empathising with their five year old daughter, we vividly experience our earth’s increasing darkness and perhaps also the implications of using ‘vividly’ at all in that context. Mourning Becomes Electra.
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  9. The Machine Stops: “A remarkable foreshadowing of the internet, tablet computers and artificial intelligence from a century ago: E.M. Forster’s 1909 short story.”
    And hence the BOLTZMANN BRAIN, the title of this chapbook’s last story….A sense of a brain remaining after all that darkness, global warming and Boltzmann’s understanding of entropy etc. And now 70 year old Trump’s nurturing of globular warming….
    “On this day 70 years ago,…”
    In a few days I am 70, and once spent 22 years “in one of the world’s megacities or hunched in capitalist enclaves toiling to earn…”
    A remarkable refocussing here, at new coordinates to replace those of 108 = 9 x 12, a new triangulation of a broadcasting base like this site where you read my transmissions. Are you out there, despite apocalypse?
    YES, I AM, the Drone Outside.
    You will have your own triangulation on this series of short works. Each reader will have one, and mine is not necessarily sacrosanct. The beauty of these works.
    “It is still relatively dark outside the vault. It is always relatively dark.”
    end
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The Big-Headed People and Other Stories




12 thoughts on “The Big-Headed People and Other Stories”

  1. The Orange Book:
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    The Eibonvale chapbook: 50 pages
    The first half of the title story was published in MARKED TO DIE (Snuggly Books 2016), the second half being brand new to the Eibonvale Press book.
    Other works:
    A Halo of Drizzle Around an Orange Street Lamp
    Thoughts and Themes
    Origami Shadows
    The Soft Tread
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  2. The blurb on chapbook cover:
    “The story missed a beat. It was sad. It never knew it could create such utter truth from such utter fantasy.”
    These stories of D. F. Lewis are deeply rooted in both horror and dreams, yet told in a way that maybe comes closest to ‘outsider art’. These works are dreamlike in a true sense of the term, capturing that feeling of portentous yet seemingly random shifts in narrative, state and environment with complete ease. The results are both subtly unnerving in ways few horror stories manage and also demonstrate the author’s unique writing style.
    This collection includes an expanded version of the title story plus four smaller pieces.
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  11. The title story is about my head, true, with added themes and variations. Francis is my middle name; I am genuinely an only child named after my Welsh Uncle Desmond who died in action during the second world war and my London East End Uncle Frank who died in 1980. My wife has a much smaller head than mine and so our two now grown-up children have normal sized heads. Otherwise, what is the story about? I do not know, other than it is very dumpty.
    The extra stories chosen by ‘Frightful Horrors’ are typical of my later work and I would welcome interpretations. Thoughts and Themes as nurtured by life in our current chalet bungalow at the seaside and by my stage in life when in a few days I am 70? And the sound of a future lung collapsing like a Circus big tent about to be moved on.

I am more than delighted with the Eibonvale production. THANKS.
end
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Saturday, January 06, 2018

The Prozess Manifestations – Mark Samuels

8 thoughts on “The Prozess Manifestations – Mark Samuels”

  1. DECAY
    “Only way to get up to human intelligence is bring a machine up like a kid. Teach it stuff. Self-awareness and intentionality. Geddit?”
    …this being the brilliant central tenet of this slick, para-modern fiction noir – out of the side of the mouth witty – amid stylish prose and even slicker dialogue, this first Prozess ending sooner than I expected, among my own pre-nurtured malware mandalas given to me by this book’s contents list having non-matching page numbers to what actually is apparent when you get further into this book’s projected Machine. A surveillance job given to the protagonist Riaz, later morphed to ‘RZIA??????’. It’s more as if it’s surveilling me! Checking I don’t give out any spoilers. So far so good. “Gotta be sober for the game, though.”
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  2. AN END TO PERPETUAL MOTION
    “When motion begins to slow we decay…”
    Ah, I know about the page numbers, now, as useful to S.S. Pyrrho’s impetus across the living sea, being a means to beat Doctor Prozess at his own game! But a Pyrrhic victory? I suspect the twin 1920s flapper girls were in cahoots with the Zeno’s Paradox man who was out-chasing Phileas Fogg and they shared his lifeboat after all, all three on the same rough gin? At first, I thought this a rather pedestrian storyliner, an early talkies script cinema man crossing the Atlantic, but nobody can even second-guess its connection with the previous story let alone with some of the stories I have not yet read. Eventually entertaining, whatever the case. Cleverer than it seems. Tentacles across the Atlantic. Exceptions to the rule of universal synthesis, notwithstanding. The fight against time to find the ultimate gestalt. (Also noticed a specific link in it to ‘A Pilgrim Stranger’.)
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  3. I reviewed the next story last May, after reading it in another book, and this is what I wrote about it then:
    ———————–
    MOON BLOOD-RED, TIDE TURNING
    “I was only twenty-four, and when I think of myself as I was then, I realise how much of a stranger that younger man appears to me now. The memory of his hopes, his dreams, his view of life, all fill me with contempt. He would hate this future self, and regard me as a usurper.”
    IMG_3201A new story by Mark Samuels, that had, right from the start, an aura – via the male narrator working in his relative youth at the Samuel French theatrical publishers – of Reggie Oliver, and at the end, I finally saw that the story is dedicated to Reggie.
    A satire dealing with tradition versus experiment in the theatre, the time-bending journeys from London to Cornwall, a vaguely unrequited romance with a woman who gets her own negative requital at the end, the nice touch of a Powysian amphitheatre built into a Cornish cliff, and a reprise of Dr Prozess from another new story that I read recently.
    I was rather taken with the Brechtian drama production that induced audience alienation. I wish I could have seen it.
    This story was published in TERROR TALES OF CORNWALL (2017) Edited by PAUL FINCH
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  4. THE CRIMSON FOG
    Prologue, 1, 2 & 3
    “I think back to the half-ruined temple and its cryptic banners riddled with Mandalas.”
    The first half of this novella. A honest-to-goodness pulp horror adventure, a misanthropic narrator telling us about those who are sent into the jungles of Chang-Yi province to help piggy-back a rescue of someone who might help stem the tide of that province’s fiend-infested crimson fog about to engulf the world, based on calculations. Pulp, but sown with the rescue party’s foursome having a potentially didactic mixture of races and religions and philosophical temperaments, and a rather self-aware slant upon the writing and history of such pulp horror by the narrator. Loved the hilarious Blue Tiger scenario, among other events with a pungent atmosphere of coming dread. A few clumsy phrasings of style by the pulp narrator (e.g. “Only the wind and the occasional band of Nomadic tribesmen occasionally crossed it, that was all.”)
    “…the moment slows down to such an extent that time itself simply stands still in your head. I suppose that fact doesn’t make for good characterisation. It’s incommunicable. I think they call it the numinous.”
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  5. THE CRIMSON FOG
    4 to 9
    “…it was always the man on last watch who disappeared in a trail of red slime.”
    (POSSIBLE SPOILERS)
    This is a cosmically but solely human-centred Tontine to discover how far reality extends. Roughly written by this once would-be pulp horror fiction narrator, we nevertheless gather that much knowledge – as well as following the thus depleting rescue party towards the centre of what I now see as Man’s Mandala or Prozess, as if similar to seeking, as I do, a gestalt of all hyper-imaginative literature. (Perhaps, in future, I shall call this site a Gestalt Review Prozess.)
    The actual climax, as well as being a melodramatic shoot-out, is in itself a prefigured numinous flash of genius in and amongst the sometimes pedestrian narration – with fallible human blood, I guess, being what gives the colour and smell to the now quickening encroachment of this work’s eponymous confection. A decided momentary frisson of terror.
    “Each one is part of a greater whole.”
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  6. I read and reviewed the next story in 2016 and this is what I wrote about it then (seemingly another prozessed Tontine):
    ——————————-
    THE COURT OF MIDNIGHT
     “new quests for nothing”
    The writer Melchior — having lost “a position of great respect and status in society” and beset, along with other artists and writers, by lunar fever — comes to the Court of Midnight with his English gin so as to follow up the promise of a doctor called Dr Prozess. Including a striking scene with Melchior’s friend Santon finally falling by the wayside, and we realise the dreadful diminuendo involved, as, one by one, the residue of us thinkers and artists and poets wanes…
    My extrapolation of this provoking work –
    We sense that our own preciously mannered masque alongside these gifted words is one of realising that the process is of a tontine not of a deadly attrition. And the writing here is writer Melchior’s pitch for such a prize. While the rest of us wait in great suspense for our own telegrams of a hopeful process of procession or a doomful moon’s precession (sic).
    A court or a court’s court?
    (A story in UNCERTAINTIES Vol. 2 – Swan River Press 2016)
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  7. IN THE COMPLEX
    “When the noise of laughter returned it seemed to emanate from all directions at once, as if mocking my attempts to isolate the source.”
    The source of this book’s Prozess?
    The last work is a truly terrifying coda to this book’s symphony — but also a stand-alone worthy of isolating as a great horror story — and it takes the ground from under my feet, the ground I had heretofore built for myself to stand this physically stylish book upon. Not a book to be thrust at me on my death bed, saying I told you so, not for you to read now! It starts as an Evenson or Beckett type incarceration-fiction, here subject to the perceived whims of that erstwhile Doctor who is responsible for keeping you – as a disease of ‘you’ – in strict quarantine. A Quarantine Tontine that now extends to the discrete parts of one’s own body. And as you listen to the projected passing of trains, you keep, with a Zeno-angst, a slavishly religious tally of those trains like earlier keeping that Atlantic ship moving forward through the sea, even to the extent of concocting such a future tally for when you are absent and can’t hear them pass. A concertina of quarantined ‘YOUs’ with a reverse cri de cœur ostensibly in the shape of a Lovecraftian Mythos neologism now made Ligottian. Yes, a mighty coda, still giving off new meanings, even as I finish writing this gestalt real- time review while still in its immediate aftermath.
    67460333-594C-4029-805B-E82362478853
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