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 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)

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This real-time review now continued here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_peacocks_eye_3.htm

Null Immortalis - order of stories

A Pause for Thought

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

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.

www.weirdmonger.com

http://www.weirdmonger.com/


has been moved here:


http://www.nemonymous.com/


sorry for inconvenience

I am going to have another another...

There was a belief that the wheel would last forever. The strongest design possible was, after all, the classic circular wheel that meant all forces around it played against each other before being able to focus any end force against the thing itself. Therefore, I stared at the person who showed me his design for a wheel and I could not believe it was a wheel at all. It seemed square but with levers along most of its exterior points, levers that changed position as the whole thing was pushed ... each lever levering the others with a series of internal pulleys and springs. I thought a real wheel would have been so much simpler – and I laughed.
And he laughed, too, as he produced from behind his back – like a conjuror – another thing he called a wheel...

“I am going to have another...” he intoned.

I expected him to continue the sentence. Another what? I signalled the question with a single glance. I was used to flirtatiously batting my eyelids and always getting what I wanted. But he remained silent, merely showing me another object and then another. As if they weren’t objects at all but speculative ‘anothers’, each ‘another’ complete in itself without another word following it to act as noun or descriptor.

Each ‘another’ was an invention. An invention of another invention. From would-be wheels, he progressed to was-once-upon-a-time musical instruments, and from those to never-could-have-been items of clothing. He even managed to produce a has-been. A ghost of an existence that took shape before my very eyes as he tugged pulleys, stretched out springs and opened hinges, its eyelids echoing my own with each tweak he gave it.


To come full circle, I watched his would-be bones refuse to fuse ... and he clunked to a halt on a hillock like a premonition of a modern stairway of stone steps.

I climbed them expecting each one to be the last. But there was always another.

Another last balcony.

The Terror and the Tortoiseshell (3)

The third part of my real-time review of ‘The Terror and the Tortoiseshell’ (A Benji Spriteman Mystery) by John Travis (Atomic Fez Publishing Ltd. 2010).

Continued from here: http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/2010/04/16/

15.
"The floor was covered in dust..."
The image of 'The Terror' as it has changed inter-breeding relationships reaches here the most imaginatively grotesque proportions both in material fact (with one's own bare eyes) and inferred philosophication. Benji is called urgently to a disused grain warehouse and I'm sure what met him there made him weep for his police 'buddy' in spite (or because) of his earlier gravest misgivings about him. I did not see him weeping, however. Only inferred it. (17 Apr 10 - an hour later)

16.
"Talk about using a bulldozer to bury a Sparrow."
Side-splitting first-real-drink-after-the-Change rite-of-passage with Benji getting drunk on eggnog. A yellow taxi becomes a double-decker bus? Miaow. A comic lull before the Terror resumes, I guess. [Is there any reason why the word 'terror' has 'error' embedded, I wonder with a degree of expected irrelevance?] (17 Apr 10 - another 2 hours later).

17.
"A thin beam of white light passed my left ear, the beam full of small motes of dust."
You know, this is one helluva chapter. Akin, in some way, with an epiphany, and I can only think of "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" chapter in 'Wind In The Willows' as anything with any feasible comparison to it. An epiphany that is both scatological and eschatological. An important moment not only in this book, I guess, but also, without putting too fine a point on it, potentially important in all general literature. (17 Apr 10 - another hour later)

18.
"The sky was far too low..."
Some narrative tusslings with previous plot events by Benji - with, to my mind, at least a hint in one place about 'retrocausality' (a new buzz word personally for me in view of my recent studies of implications relating to CERN's Large Hadron Collider). (17 Apr 10 - another 30 minutes later)

19.
A very brief chapter in an elevator. One that I dare not divulge the nature of for fear of possibly letting some sort of cat out of the bag. A complete surprise to me. (17 Apr 10 - another 15 minutes later)


Part Three: The Country of the Blind

20.
" 'Didn't you notice the clue I left?' "
And I am afraid you who who are reading this review before you read the book must also enter the Country of the Blind. Well, at least for a while. Meanwhile, why has Benji reminded me of Mr Polly?
" 'It was a bit oblique I suppose,'..." (17 Apr 10 - another hour later)

21.
" 'It started as a hunch...' "
And for you, it ended as such, too. Meanwhile, in general terms, many sensitive implications (or hunches) as to the philosophical interface between Animus and Hume. (17 Apr 10 - another 30 minutes later)

22.
" 'I got nowhere with it.' "
While in the Country of the Blind, I've been extrapolating (separate from but relevant to this book) upon the entire pure mid-Ash chemtrail-less blue sky beyond my window here today. It seems somehow right thus to muse upon this sky without aeroplanes as we enter territory with this book where even angels may fear to tread. 'Dark faucets' or Blue Wells? (17 Apr 10 - another 20 minutes later).

23.
I can lift the news blackout slightly at this point. As Benji speculates upon how he is to get entry into the misspelt newspaper's offices (for reasons you will eventually understand even if I don't!), he first meets up with Lieutenant Dingus, one of those remarkable characters I mentioned earlier, this an "undersized, squinty-eyed Basset Hound in a dirty brown raincoat..." (17 Apr 10 - another 20 minutes later)


This real-time review is now continued here:
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_terror_and_the_tortoiseshell_4.htm

I am going to have another...

“I am going to have another...”

A meaningful look but no attempt to finish her sentence. I looked at her quizzically as she fished for something that had fallen down inside the sofa.

“Another what?” I asked, without realising this was the sort of response she hoped to elicit from me.

“I am going to have another cup of tea and you’re going to make it for me.”

She smiled mischievously. She pulled a paper tissue from the sofa – which didn’t seem to me to have sufficient ‘weight’ to have fallen down inside it – and blew her nose noisily. She then pulled out another one and unsmudged her lipstick while peering into a compact mirror. I then reaIised that she must have put the tissues there when I wasn't looking.

“What’s wrong with keeping them in their box?” I asked, pointedly ignoring her comment about the tea.

Equally pointedly, she pushed the used tissues back down inside the sofa. I made a face.

I then made the tea.

As I stood in the kitchen waiting for it to brew, I found my thoughts wandering. All things in the world have their handles. Some handles are handles proper, made to be handles. Other things have makeshift or ad hoc handles, and were obvious as handles once you began to handle an object, like a pen or a book or anything without an obvious protuberance to use as a handle. The kettle had a handle: the least hot place as well as one to fit the hand conveniently. A teapot and teacup, too. But the packet of biscuits I was about to open had no obvious handle to grab, but grab it I did at one end. What about the water I had used to fill the kettle? How would I grab that, should I need to do so? I laughed at the prospect of grabbing the handle of water. The tap had a handle of sorts – one that moved and did a job, i.e. to make the water pour, but the water itself was not handleable, and even if it were, it would seep through the fingers however tightly you kept them together.

What about my thoughts themselves? There was an expression about ‘getting a handle' on things...

Armed with a tray – teapot, two cups and saucers, milk jug, sugar bowl, biscuits on plates, all balanced precariously upon it – I returned to the sitting-room.

I asked, without further delay: “Why were you stuffing snotty tissues down my sofa?”

Silence. Nobody on the sofa. Well, nobody on it. I saw something pink and suggestive stuffed down the side where my guest had been sitting.

I sat down with a sigh, at the other end of the sofa, listening to a stifled sneeze in the far corner of my consciousness. Absentmindedly, I picked up a crumbly digestive at one edge and bit into it as near to my fingers as it was possible to bite without threatening their integrity as fingers. I then poured out the amber infusion, with a delicious flowing sound. And picked it up by the delicate handle to take a sip.

“I am going to have another...” I said.

Silence. I looked plaintively at the crumbs in my lap and wondered if there ever could be a story with no handle at all.


Written today and first published above.

Back From The Dead

Part two of my Real-Time Review of Johnny Mains' 'Back From The Dead' - The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror Stories (Noose & Gibbet 2010)

Continued from here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/back_from_the_dead.htm

A Good Offence by Myc Harrison
"Whispering was a way of life when you lived in a small town..."
Boyhood sexuality is an open goal, perhaps, for some. Cruelly conceived, but arguably justified, this is Charles-Birkinite revenge horror. An ice for an ice.
Tightly written, succinct, to the point. Meanwhile, taking a punt, quite irrelevantly perhaps, I mention that Hockey-sticks do jolly well look like giant keys.... (7 Apr 10 - three hours later)

Gallybagger by Roger Clarke
"Only in the ground for a year and then treated like old bedsteads and baths."
In some ways, I'm a literary snob. In other ways, I'm the complete opposite. Against all my initial expectations, this impressive anthology is continuing to satisfy both these aspects of my 'reading' character. And often satisfying both simultaneously! This story, following the complicatedly embedded thing in the previous story, tells of the prising out (unlocking) of another complicatedly embedded thing: a pipeline in the Isle of Wight and its literal entanglement with wartime remains in the ground and, more figuratively, with some Wightian mythos of the Gooseberry Wife and scarecrows... This is the stuff of dream, where, cleverly, any surrealism is made real by being tangibly embedded in tangible things with implicit ley-lines veining real honest-to-goodness earth under the feet of man (wight). And is it any coincidence that the protagonist is named Coates (the composer of 'The Dambuster's March')? I think not. See what you think. (8 Apr 10)

Spinalonga by John Ware
"The graves were no longer than three feet, so that the joints of the corpses had to be broken and the skeletons bent double to get them in."
Another island, more grounded embeddings, an ikon and other disinterred matter reminding me of the keepsake and 'earthkill' in the previous story.... This book's stories (independently written and unnconnected other than by this book) continue to seem - whether by intention or accident - to flow in and out of each other like mutual filters.
Tourists on a Greek Leper Colony Island (the I-protagonist and his wife Angela) - and a 'priest' who reminded me of the Angel in 'Angel' or Peter Hopkirk in 'The True Spirit' .... while 'Spinalonga' itself is how I remember the Pan Book of Horror Stories, Britishly charming as well as insidious with an ending that we, in our early days, thought to be so refreshingly nasty. But, sadly, today, nothing's nasty any more because all is nasty. (8 Apr 10 - two hours later)

The Forgotten Island by Jonathan Cruise
"I have levered from its bed of moss and peat, the great iron boiler used a century ago for the rendering of fat of elephant seal and king penguin."
Another island - and a journal of 'Swiss Family Robinson'-like narration mixed with Jules Verne and 'The Lord of the Flies" ... but not flies, as such. If you're a cat-lover... No, if I say what I want to say, it will have the potential readership of this book halved! "Cats are 'The True Spirit'", I'd say instead!
A wonderful tale of a shipwrecked yachtsman on an Antarctic island called Solitude (not forgotten at all!), with his loved one Ailsa. And it is as if the pipe from 'Gallybagger' squeals inside with feline terror...
You'll have to read it to find the tale's moral. And which creatures finally win out, be they human or animal. (8 Apr 10 - another 4 hours later)

Dreaming the Dark by J P Dixon
"If you're a shapeshifter why stop at forms that already exist. What you are is limited only by your own imagination."
An important novelette, I suggest, in the history of Horror Literature. No connections with the rest of this book for me to adumbrate this time, because this work is the island, the hub or heart, from which all "chameleons" and "baroque monstrosities" of "language-from-imagination-into-truth" do spread. Serendipitously, throughout the whole of this reading experience that was 'Dreaming the Dark', I was listening to Bach Cello Suites - serendipitous because the language, too, was as easy, free-flowing, going down like the darkest, smoothest syrup - while, in contrast, its consonants and edges ripped reading-muscles with their high graphic descriptions. This is Horror. No pretension to anything else. It just is. And it was almost as if I, the erstwhile horror writer, glimpsed something I've never glimpsed before - I have my own drawer in my brain I dare not pull out and look in, for fear of becoming what the words actually say (phonetically, graphologically, semantically and syntactically). (8 Apr 10 -another 3 hours later)

The Little Girl Eater by Septimus Dale
"It was dark and silent beneath the pier. Thin banks of concrete criss-crossed the sand, the upright girders were built solidly into these banks."
More embeddings - and a man trapped (or literally locked) by the rising tide under the pier and afraid of drowning to the extent of considering cutting his throat with a rusty tin lid nearby. Apt for me, because I obtained this very book I'm reading in sight of a seaside pier. I now live too by a different seaside pier. I was born near yet another seaside pier. This is archetypal Pan Horror from my own memory of it in the early Sixties. It now reminds me of British black and white films from that era, like "The Taste of Honey", or perhaps more aptly again, "Whistle Down The Wind" - where a more (to use that word again) archetypal Angel meets its own imagined version of Peter Hopkirk (extrapolating from earlier stories in this book)? And, incredibly, they sing together! (9 Apr 10)

Mr. Golden's Haunt by Christina Kiplinger
"Mr. Golden swerved his car to miss hitting a tan and white cat that ran out into the street. Hearing a loud 'meow', the driver put his foot farther down on the gas."
A poignant tale of a man growing old, put out to grass by his life-career of an employer, now to spend all his time with his wife... A couple similar to that 'in "The True Spirit". Mr. Golden has a mortality-malaise even to the extent of seeking out Death itself so as to get to know it better ahead of its due time of arrival. Mr. Golden's own Angel? Or his Null Immortalis? I should know. (9 Apr 10 - four hours later)

This real-time review now continues here:
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/back_from_the_dead_3.htm

The Last Balcony's Last Balcony

I am pleased to report that, very soon, a pdf preview of the forthcoming DFL definitive fiction collection - 'The Last Balcony' - will be put up at the Ex Occidente Press site HERE


I am also kindly allowed by Unsettled Dust to use this wonderful photo (from HERE) in connection with this book. This is a photograph that has no connection with me or with the publisher. Its own title, I've been told, was inspired by the book title.

Today's Maxim (4)

When, at the end of the day, a weirdmonger cleans his slab with pride, he sees clearly from which balcony the next wave will come.

http://unsettleddust.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/one-photograph-the-last-balcony/

Today's Maxim (3)

When, at the end of the day, a fishmonger cleans his slab with pride, he worries from which weird seas the next fish to sell will be coming.

Today's Maxim (2)

When I write, I feel like I'm a band playing in my garage.

Brashly eclectic, but I know they're trying to perfect their art, so I put up with it.

Today's Maxim

Maybe, one man's obfuscation is another man's struggle to express the inexpressible.

Meat & Two Veg

The plate was empty. Like this page.

I knew that – soon – based on previous experience here, it would be full of meat & two veg. I’ve never known a cafe that simply plants a plate like that on the table and then has food dished up by the waitress piecemeal from saucepans on her trolley. Posh restaurants, maybe, do that, where a flaming piece of animal is often brought to the businessman’s trough, with a huge sizzling noise and billows of smoke. But never two-bit cafes like this one.

The waitress was done up as if she still lived in the past and travelled in Third Class carriages. Her saucepans steamed biliously like trains themselves. Her voice was in broken English, meaning she wasn’t even one of us. She told us about her troubles as she ladled the bits and bobs of tasselled bone in gravy. A thick accent that we could cut even with the blunt carving-knife that she then brought out to slice the still whole swede sweating nearby.

I nodded my head with my own version of small talk. My companion – a nondescript lass I’d met inside the cinema – merely tried to look pleased that I had taken her here for a meal. Going to see a continuous programme of 'Brief Encounter' and a B Film had left us with an appetite that would even salivate at soggy leavings in a plug-hole.

Soon, the plate was empty again. Every word eaten - & left a blank plot and nobody even to read it, let alone write it, if that was the right order.

Alone, I headed back towards the cinema – and now found it to be a car-park.

An empty car-park.


(written today and first published above)

Matt Cardin's Demon Muse

Matt Cardin has written some wonderful thought-provoking articles on the Muse or Daemon and the creative collaboration within self etc.: HERE in three parts. I recommend them to you.


They touch on some concerns that have preoccupied Nemonymous over the years and the Intentional Fallacy and The Ominous Imagination in Magic Realism and Magic Fiction. If one explores all my blog posts for example one may lose oneself forever in such concerns! :)

===========================================

Some quotes I hold relevant to this subject:

"My pictures are visionary and symbolical, and, from first to last, have seemed to be painted by someone other than myself. [...] I am thus entirely self-taught, or taught by that other within me. I am aware that my pictures lack serious technique(if there is a technique that can be distinguished from inspiration and invention). I should have given up painting them some time ago, were it not that a certain number of people seemed to find something remarkable in them, and have thus identified me with them, and made me feel mildly important."
FROM "RAVISSANTE" BY ROBERT AICKMAN


"From the cosmic point of view, to have opinions or preferences at all is to be ill; for by harbouring them one dams up the flow of the ineluctable force which, like a river, bears us down to the ocean of everything's unknowing. Reality is a running noose, one is brought up short with a jerk by death. It would have been wiser to co-operate wih the inevitable and learn to profit by this unhappy state of things - by realising and accommodating death! But we don't, we allow the ego to foul its own nest. Therefore we have insecurity, stress, the midnight-fruit of insomnia, with a whole culture crying itself to sleep. How to repair this state of affairs except through art, through gifts which render to us language manumitted by emotion, poetry twisted into the service of direct insight?"
from 'The Avignon Quincunx' by Lawrence Durrell ('Constance' 1982)

.

"The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it."
-- John Fowles 1964 (from 'The Necessity of Nemo' in 'The Aristos')



[[Pretension is the dismissive name given to people's attempts to be something
other than what they 'really are'. It is vilified in England in particular
because we are so suspicious of people trying to 'rise above their station'.

In the arts, the word 'pretentious' has a special meaning: the attempt at
something that the critic thinks you have no right even to try. I'm very happy
to have added my little offering to the glowing mountain of things described as
'pretentious' - I'm happy to have made claims on things that I didn't have any
'right' to, and I'm happy to have tried being someone else to see what it felt
like.

I decided to turn the word 'pretentious' into a compliment. The common
assumption is that there are 'real' people and there are others who are
pretending to be something they're not. There is also an assumption that there's
something morally wrong with pretending. My assumptions about culture as a place
where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties make
me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It's the way we make
our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.

Robert Wyatt once said that we were always in the condition of children - faced
with things we couldn't understand and thus with the need to guess and
improvise. Pretending is what kids do all the time. It's how they learn. What
makes anyone think that you should sometime give it up?]]

---Brian Eno (quoted: HERE)


==================================================
My questions: I wonder who the author of any work really is? Who or what do you interview on that work - the author or his 'muse-daemon-nemo-pretension' or both? Or does one just sigh and call all authors Nemonymous?

Just sigh and read only the texts themselves to discover all the necessary and available elements of the 'thing or things' behind those texts?

In line with the Durrell quote above, I struggle to find my own opinion to answer those questions!

A Third Class Murder

There was a subtle movement at the edge of things. Perception included most senses of the body, and the heady stench of imagined black steam was the first sense that officially hit you. Then its acrid acid taste, before the sound of moving metal juttered upon static metal. Closely followed by some fingering out upon either swaying side of your seated body testing the supporting touch of brushed upholstered shuddering weave. Finally, a gradual realisation that around and above was the emerging sight of concerned faces poking towards you with their own instinctive version of fingering out.

But which body sense had sensed the original subtle movement? The sense of fear: the strongest sense of all that could contain itself independently without the aid of other senses to support it? But a sense stronger than fear itself was consumed by a vision that you were thanklessly killed for mindless kicks, not even as a stranger’s gratuitous murder for literary treatment or as a murder performed with a choice of motives for a popular 'whodunnit'.

Yours was a third class murder where prior existence itself was nothing but a multitude of senses forever dwindling one by one along an endless track of dislodged sleepers.

A subtle movement at the edge of things. A hissing in a forgotten siding. A single smeared face and ghostly fingers upon a leather tongue.

Nontention and the Abhurdity of Onsense

"It is my nontention, however, that what we have here is not merely abhurdity but onsense." (sic)
from 'Children of Epiphany' by Frances Oliver (Secker & Warburg 1983 and Ash Tree Press 2004)

Song of the River

(Lewicide 5)


Bill knew a lot about River rights. Riparian rights, as he taught me. R-I-P-A-R-I-A-N.

I often asked him why he kept the river fenced in from the land through which it flowed.

“It’s my land and I don’t want my land suffering from the curse of that damn river!” he would say, brushing an ever-thinning fringe from his eyes as he squinted at me dolefully.

“But surely, Bill," I replied, "the part of a river that flows through your land is your river, for which you are responsible?”

Compared to Bill, I knew I was too young to know most things that he boasted knowing. And, what was more, the wrong sex for knowing anything at all – in his eyes. I smiled. I was so much younger, I knew one thing for sure: he was too old for me to view him as a prospect for marriage, however much land he owned. Never mind, I often enjoyed his company, although ‘enjoy’ may not be wholly the correct word..

“Have you heard of the word ‘riparian’?” he asked. He asked this question many times on different occasions, despite having asked it before. And then he would continue: “Riparian tells of a lot of things that rivers can and can’t do, who owns which stretch of it and if you own a particular stretch, do you also own the water in that stretch, even when knowing that water is ever changing within the current?”

“That’s a new word that,” I said. He knew it wasn’t new. I knew it wasn’t new. But it was best to say it was new.

“Riparian,” he said, “is in all the law books but one thing the law books don’t tell you, Miss, is about curses and things that history steep in its waters, things quite beyond the scope of laws. Riparian is more than just law or common sense. It’s a feeling of ... what shall I call it? Spirit of Place?”

Bill often went off on one. I smiled, humouring him, even charming him with what he once called my ‘sparkling looks’. He said, too, more than once, that rivers had sparkling looks on one day, but gruff ugliness the next. I think that is what he said. The river was one of his hobby-horses, and Bill would not have been Bill without his hobby-horses.

He touched my hand so fleetingly, I hardly noticed – and he continued:

“Riparian rights also tell of the noise of a river as well as its looks. Not just the changes that happen with the weather changing, but changes stemming from its actual moods as a river.”

“Do rivers really have moods separate from the weather, Bill?”

This is not the first time that I’ve told you that this was not the first time we had had this conversation. I laughed to myself as if knowing the very rhythm of this river’s ritual, but then Bill went off on another one. This time a different one. A Billish speech I had never heard before:-

“Of course, on foggy days, its song can be sad or it can be happy. On rainy days, the same. On sunny days, the same. But on snowy days, it seems to swallow and gulp and choke. Riparian rights and wrongs in books won’t help you there. That’s why I fenced off the river. Its moods seemed to seep into the crops and my grazing animals bleated in tune with tunes I did not want them bleating with. Sad bleats whether the river itself was sad or happy that day. So I thought that by fencing off the river through my land, along its fringes, I would show it that I disowned it. Disowned it, literally, Miss. Riparian, Riparian, damn your Riparians. But I can see you shaking your head. How can a mere fence remove the song of the river? A fence is not sound-proof. Well, let me tell you,” – and he touched my hand again, this time more lingeringly – “it is all down to showing the river who’s boss. A fence along its fringes is just as powerful as even the thickest, highest river-wall, indeed even more powerful because the river can see things through the fence-slats and this makes it feel sad at losing its own ownership of the land through which it flows. Ownership can work both ways, you see. This time it’s a permanent sadness. Never to be mixed with happiness. The fence makes the river feel even more cut off than if we’d dammed it at source!”

“The river can see things as well as sing?” I asked, withdrawing my hand.

“Yes, it can see us as clearly as we see it. And when it sees things it didn’t know it missed seeing, it sort of utters its own misbegotten bleats ... as if it wants to die. Riparian suicide.”

At this point, I got up from the stile where we were both sitting. I kissed the top of his head and went home across his land, along by the fence he had erected by the river. I’m never sure how it sounds when I am not listening to it, but today as I walked, I heard sobs rather than bleats. And I shook my head as imagination played tricks on me. Through the slats, I saw the fringed heads of creatures or other amphibians floating along like logs towards a log-jam.

That was the last time I saw Bill outside of an open coffin. He died of old age overnight, I guess. I never really forgave myself for not taking him seriously. His body seemed literally to flow between the ornate casket sides. Perhaps waiting for my tears to join him there.

I now always think of Bill when I see the word ‘riparian’ ... which is not often.


========================================
Written today and first published above

Lewicide 4: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/fantasy_land.htm

An Act of Despair

.
“Sort it out!”

His voice was Essex. I now knew there would be no crossing this ‘gentleman’ ... well, not crossing him twice, as, evidently, I had already crossed him to elicit such a response: a response with no possible further response.

I turned to see whether this man’s companion, a woman of equal presence to his, would give any clue, by look or word, as to the options open to me. There was an unspoken glance of recognition between her and me, a glance that neither of us read properly.

There was no comfort there and, in the end, no memory, as if by their closing off of any options, the man and woman had me cornered.

But even in those few short instants, it dawned on me that even a cornered rat has one option. By allowing me no get-out clause, they had allowed me the best get-out clause of them all. An Act of Despair.

And that’s the way I sorted it out. Doing nothing. All of us frozen in time, waiting for my next move. Nobody willing to escape the final unspoken clause of all.


The County of Essex has wide open skies. Straightforward bent diamonds embedded in the salt of the earth.

The woman eventually wandered off mumbling to herself. She’d forgotten if she’d forgotten who she was. Leaving behind two dead bodies: not dead from a sudden duel, but from the pure onset of old age, with both men waiting too long for each to grow old faster than the other.

They say reaction in a gunfight is deadlier than if drawing first.

The woman smiled mindlessly. She’d not really liked either of the men. Her get-out clause was not only unspoken but taken as unread. I was no longer alive to sort it out. The ending, that is. The writing or the reading of it. Yet I somehow knew that despair always acted in due course...


The woman boarded a bus for home. Luckily buses in Essex were always late. And often lost.


(written today and first published above)

Skights

Following my article on Gunfleet Sands Wind Farm yesterday:

Findings have just been announced today that moths and butterflies surf the wind; http://news.discovery.com/animals/migrating-insects-butterflies.html

They instinctively or deliberately discover fast moving winds or thermals in the upper atmosphere that enable them to migrate vast distances in a short space of time. One can imagine them surging along - enfolded together or separately? - in an unconscious nirvana or fully conscious? -

?? like fiction writers who send their synchronised shards or mites into visionary tides of random truth and fiction within the vast migratory creativity of art. Some tides self-created others created for them.

These phenomena should be called 'skights', I say.