I collect photographs of torn posters on walls. You’d be surprised how many there are these days. Some so very torn they are just a few scraps of paper still clinging to the wall with grim death. Equally, even a poster with a small nick in the corner could count as a torn poster. I never cheated by tearing a poster myself before photographing it and posting it as a torn poster. I also never tell lies, do rest assured. Belonging to an online group specialising in photographing torn posters, I thought I would start a group for torn T-shirts, but I hated taking photos of people so these T-shirts needed to be found in the wild without a wearer within them. You can imagine I rarely found such a thing and it would need to be found naturally, never planted, never staged, otherwise it didn’t count. I spent years finding a torn T-shirt without a wearer within it. And then, lo and behold, there was a poster with a T-shirt upon it! The wearer of it was not real of course being an image on a poster — so this would thus be valid. All I had to do was tear the poster where the T-shirt was situated and I could be the first member on my online group to post a photo. But I did not cheat as I have told you already so I depended on mind-over-matter, as I stared at the intact poster of an intact T-shirt. I remained there forever stuck in position like a photograph frozen in time not wearing a strait jacket, not a time shift as such but a time shirt for which the expression T-shirt was short for a poster of photographs frozen as a photograph thus posted online, the wear and tear making the image of the T-shirt valid without the need of cheating or clinging in grim death. Don’t go there.
DEAD TOWN
TWENTY YEARS BEFORE AREA X
001
A rare quote: “…telling the story meant the story would at some point peer back and condemn the teller.”
002
Rimbaud’s drunk boat and ALLIGATORS OF LEAVES
003
Engagingly, as reader, I felt like a drone in the 2022 TV series ‘Mysteries From Above’ being chivvied by pushy scientific spokespeople — and their rhetorical questions galore — to gradually objectify my view of the ‘dead town’ in interface with the biologists at ground level.
004
It is the turn of the raw locals to be pushy with rhetorical questions, in their case about the visit of ‘the Rogue’ as strange stranger, “The blazer had a rip in one elbow…”
005
I am captivated by the concept of the white rabbit possibly with a camera.
006
The ‘null effect’, inter alia.
007
“…too concerned about storms becoming hurricanes—“
As if narrative structures have been recorded or filmed from houses OF LEAVES?
I remain captivated by this book, enough to look forward each time to its manoeuvres.
008
”…in some form, they were being read, or would one day be read,…”
009
Evocatively gradual, a series of numbered visionary Miniatures that breed like rabbits.
010
An apotheosis, if not absolution, of rabbits. Maybe crabs, too.
And ice cream sandwiches,
011
I have yet to colonise this book unlike its rabbits that seem to nest within it come what may. Even when shot by more than just cameras or drones from above?
012
I was all set to add a diary note here yesterday but someone or something seemed to shout STOP!
Today, I am throwing all caution to the wind. I am still very much interested in Absolution.
013
Cars parked upside down in Dead Town after rain.
THE FALSE DAUGHTER
EIGHTEEN MONTHS BEFORE AREA X
IMMOLATION
00O
”dead leaves”
‘Dead’ as a word is close to ‘Dad’. A ‘ghosting’. I prefer anagrams to reversals.
00A
“If you were an orchestra, what music would you play?”
00N
Is it an accident that the name Alexis Aguilar has either guerrillas or galaxies embedded within it?
INITIATION
003
“…receiving real-time detail.”
“It was a house;”
004
Heart-wrenching chapter.
I wondered if I were Old Jim and my own daughter his daughter.
005
This book is like looking for Lord Lucan. But why? A solution? Absolution? If the latter, whose!
006
“Okay, then, come into the damn house.”
Instead of him who otherwise leaves it?
The new concept, for me, of the ‘house centipede’ is so far enticing.
Ancient image that risks my own absolution:-
007
Earwig or centipede? This whole book so far is an earworm for me.
’Left elbow’ to ‘wrong foot’ or ‘right foot’ as prehensile being?
008
My obsession with the Uncanny and with Schubert’s Winterreise appeased.
009
Like Suzanne of Zoo CERN, I have spent indeterminate years in a mansion as prep for this Rogue of a novel.
010
“…giving the house band, Monkey’s Elbow, more gigs.” – Horror!
The curse of the elbow or the paw? Or even fist!
It needs fingers to type a VanderMeer!
My real-time review in July 2022 of THE MONKEY’S PAW by WW Jacobs…
THIS READING DIARY CONTINUES HERE: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2024/11/14/absolution-jeff-vandermeer/