Thursday, May 04, 2006

Obscurantism/ Norrell

I have had a large book of stories out since 2003 (one of which stories contains the phrase fustian to the nth degree). I notice very few readers seem able to get through it all ... even if they enjoy it -- or even with the carrot of being given the code to their own immortality should they manage to get to the end.

Is there an inspirational art to Obscurantism or is it something you need to work at or is it a curse one is born with? Can there be any justification for it? If you understand the question, please comment!


A review HERE says it is a book "to live with for several months, maybe even years." Replace 'years' with 'several lifetimes', I'd say!

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A poetic fable (written by DFL in the last few days) and apparently enjoyed according to much feedback received:
HERE.

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Regarding my earlier post here ('Fiction') and its references to 'fiction as magic' in respect of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, I'd call it, on reflection, genuinely 'weird'. If Weird Fiction has any meaning at all, this is it. I don't think I've read true weird fiction before encountering this 'novel'. 'Weird' as well as its usual connotations carries a colloquial 'controlling of fate' sense. A Weird is also a spell or charm or geas. If you have dreams from reading books, with this book, you'll probably have a 'real life' instead.

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Re yesterday's blog on Internet promotion, with me (and I don't know how typical this is of others), I'm all or nothing. If I'm on the internet, then I'm on it in a big way, as I have been*. I cannot reduce it. The only other option is to leave completely, and abandon my 'derelict buildings'.


* My blog entry of 27 April 2006: Chasing The Noumenon. Arguably - using a degree of pretentious objectivity with which I do not deserve to be indulged - my lifetime's 'opus' should not be seen as directly constituted of the various DFL fictions themselves. It is, rather, I feel, those very fictions' repercussions, i.e. their tentacular body of brainstorming accoutrements - from url to url to url to url - that I have tangentially built up (with the unselfconscious collaborative help of others) since 1999 on the Net.

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