Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Eventernal Slumber

Eventernal Slumber

I thought of this phrase this morning in an eschatological context.
Yet I have not yet fully defined it. I need the synergy of input by several diverse minds, of various philosophical and religious dispositions...
From the evidence of watching TLO since 2005, I thought the ideal place to help find a meaning for 'eventernal slumber' would be here.

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Re: Eventernal Slumber

Well, if you want a troglodyte's point of view, I'm thinking 'death'.

Now I will try to keep awake. The fog.
~ Eric Basso, “The Beak Doctor”
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Re: Eventernal Slumber

Seeing eventernal as a portmanteau of "event" and "eternal", I'm thinking a not-too drastic form of mass extinction. Only instead of dying, the entire race falls into a state of sleep from which it can't wake up. Nobody is left out, nor is there some kind of hivemind process at work. Every sleep is individual, as are the dreams and nightmares that may appear in this condition. So we're left with a planet full of dreamers in a most literal sense.

And I was thinking this would end with everybody dying as a sequel to dehydration and what not, but that would kind of spoil the "eternal" part
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Re: Eventernal Slumber

Immune to external influence, hopeless
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Re: Eventernal Slumber

Eve In Her Eternal Slumber.
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Re: Eventernal Slumber

"Thinking death" - when your thoughts are all about death or Death thinking about you? Yet, Wafflesnaq is followed by Ramonoski and I sense that as we all grow older, we have more and more event-driven broken sleep or slumber, i.e. dozing between dreams ... as a dress rehearsal for Death that may be like that? - which then reminds me of my own story 'Candle Dreaming' where if you finally dream about a single candle burning in your dream and nothing else then that is your last dream, a dream that will last forever, without any dozing between, powerless to wake. This then relates to Stratovarius' 'immunity'.

And Druidic's Eve sleeping incredibly reminds me of all these many paintings HERE that I posted a week or so ago - drowsy with divinity.

I feel this is early days in nailing 'eventernal slumber'. We have hardly scratched the surface. Or maybe we have already nailed it. 'Drowsy with Divinity'. Our backs turned on life but still conscious of the flame within.

Thanks, all and others yet to come.

PS: my broken sleep last night was interspersed with thoughts of this thread.

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Saturday, June 07, 2014

Big Brother - Summer 2014

MY BB COMMENTS (since 2004) CONTINUED FROM HERE: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/celebrity-big-brother-january-2014.html

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

Marion's Aide Memoire of Summer 2014 Housemates: http://ttapress.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=182&p=28847#p28835

My comments from the above thread:

7.6.14
Crumbs! Just watched last night's show and thanks for the comments, Marion. Pauline is quite the professional discovery - she even kept up the customary suspense by leaving a meaningful gap of silence before uttering Helen's name...just like Bruce announcing a winner on Strictly.
It will take me some time to accustom myself to the various personalities. But I find this a promising start.
You know, Marion, we have been exchanging views about BB from 2004, so this is the 10th anniversary, so taking into account the intervening CBBs, this is the 20th series illuminating the TTA forum. Let's hope we can celebrate by welcoming some other regular commentators here on this thread...
I will choose to give one of them a free signed copy of my book "Des's BIG BROTHER" of which Marion is the only other owner.

8.6.14
WAGGISH SMUT VERSUS THE PROUD PRUDE
Not sure who's play-acting here. BB's beachhead for decency after years of things like Kinga's wine bottle and the late Jade's shenanigans. Go in confusion to Jale, do not collect £200.
Chris the actor? Another mole even we don't know about? A mole's mole.
Meanwhile Marion's wisdom shines out: "Helen and Tamara have teamed up. Already they are meeting up in the toilet and bitching.... [...]the Helens and Tamaras of this world bond through shared loathing of an easy target." How true.

9.6.14
All a bit bitty last night. These people in the main were brought up with reality TV like BB and they know what to expect and what to do and how to react and to stir things up. They see themselves as entertainers rather than people.
Image

10.6.14
I'd forgotten who Dexter was and so looked up his face on google. Yes, you're right, wouldn't brag about going out with him - but the fact that she did and the fact she started swearing like a trooper, Danielle is a force to be reckoned with, especially with lipstick on, a play-acting and feisty glamnorm (Clark Kent to Superman, or in her case Superwoman).

11.6.14
I don't like Steven, Helen, Tamara, Winston, Pauline... The latter has not used her power wisely. I dread to think of the rest of the Summer containing Helen, come what may!
I like Kimberly, Jale, Ashleigh and Chris.
I both like and dislike Danielle!
Toya is a potential like. Christopher a potential dislike. Ambivalent about the others.

12.6.14
A motley crew. Marion has them spot on.
Just thought - Danielle's rumoured relationship with Dexter is not a linear faux romance in the same BB house but one that transpires across time and space in the same place, to match the Interzone ambiance that the place has now become.
Image
13.6.14
All true about Pauline here. I enjoyed her self-consciously pronounced, pre-rehearsed-at-home-before-the-show-started, use of the word 'recidivists' with regard to some of the other housemates. I now feel I am a recidivist myself by watching BB year after year, and allowing myself to view certain people to whom BB has given house room.

14.6.14
Marion wrote: "The woman is not just a bully - she;s deranged."
I don't think there can be any doubt about that. And at least we have a new 'Power' in Chris who recognises that.
Your picture, Marion, of "Fields of Asphodel, home of the unburied dead": the place of the roaming recidivist...
Meanwhile, this melange of characters is one of the most fascinating I can remember.

15.6.14
Marion wrote here:
You're right, Des, thery are the most interesting HMs we've had for a while: all acting, all diminant, yet easily cowed and led by Pauline. Strange assortment...
Worrying assortment, a melting pot with weird chemicals.
Quote:
Death was much on Pauline's mind tonight as she contemplated what she was sure would be Jale's eviction.:lLike a funeral, she said, and how at a funeral you don't suddenly be nice about the dead person.
Pauline has a certain fiction-work or poetic turn of phrase or word, often grotesquely conceived. A tone of expression that in turn supports and belies her dogged one-track superior mother icy outbursts.
Quote:
Mark was gven a rather silly task - to be Gypsy Rose Lee and predict the futures of three HMs. He predicted a powerful blonde woman in Winston's liife but had to remind Winston that Tamara was blonde, Oh, yeah,,,He hinted that Danielle would be evicted.
I think he then came to the conclusion that Tamara would be evicted, when he compared the six of cups to the five of cups. Quite an achievement, bearing in mind that, from the HMs' internal perspective, Tamara would have been the least likely to be evicted of the three candidates.
Quote:
Chris in the DR was anxious about the nomination he had to make and the effect on his position in the house. I'm beginning to think he's shrewder and more calculating than the rest of them put together.
A dramatic moment, his Shakespeareanly grappling with his position and the burden of his own clear perception through the mists of 'acting'.
Quote:
Next up for a paper hankie was Winston - he wept in the DR because Tamara was gone (his showmance storyline was ruined?}
An aborted trivial fauxmance, indeed. That concocted date in the see-through attic squandered. A week is not long enough for this to outlast the audience's communal memory of them, even if they wait for each other outside the House gates. Like Dexter waiting for Danielle, along some oblique trajectory of retro mass consciousness that he has identified?
Quote:
When the secret nomination was announced, people erupted in fury. Beloved Pauline...it cannot be...Pauline reckons the nomination is revenge. She kept nodding and saying 'Told you'.
I don't recall her telling them anything because nomination was the furthest thing from her mind.
She did say that she now realised (in her own mind, if not in reality) that Jale had trapped her into creating Jale as a victim, and her original 'told you' was in relation to the audience's chanting outside that has now migrated to an internal 'told you'.
Quote:
What a wimp. What a gold plated chicken hearted wimp.
Indeed, Christopher has sold out to the negative force represented by Pauline. Her first real victim.
Roll my eyes. :roll:

16.6.14
The group hug was one of the most remarkable scenes ever in BB - and Steven, the hard-nosed, successful businessman with lots of his employees watching him is reduced to tears, in face of the Coming of the Goddess Saviour who, in his eyes, once might have been his penthouse flat cleaner.

Image

The one to watch: Kimberly. Certainly my favourite, even over wise Chris.

17/6/14
Marion wrote: Steven paid the public a charming compliment and said he trusted us not to evict him.  We've got bigger fish to fry this week, Steven, but your turn's coming.
My immediate sights are on Steven. I think there is more mileage in Pauline's preservation for the sake of removing the filling from between frictionable fictionable surfaces.
I like the sight on this side, and the sight on that side. But do I not like any sight of Steven!

18/6/14
A brilliant summation, Marion. Thanks. Much within the closed system of the house can be evaluated, but BB has for many years ceased being a closed system, for one reason or another. Things leak in, like the rogue shout over the garden wall.
I also decry silly gratuitous individual tasks (like that of Winston yesterday). This has become a role-playing game rather than a closed system of human beings interacting as themselves. Or was it ever thus? Perhaps not.

19/6/14
I am losing faith with all of them except Kimberley and Chris. And going off Toya big time.
Steven to go tomorrow.

20/6/14
Marion said: The abominable Pauline was fascinating playing at being Mother Theresa.  She finds that HMs are not good at sharing and her face when she said it - oh, saintly, sorrowing, a little sad smile playing about her lips. Gone the sharp tongued Pauline, the viper ready to strike.  Does she think anyone will fall for it?
I think she may go tonight, but I still hope it is Steven Goode.
I agree about the kerfuffle arising from the Kimberly-storm-in-a-shower-tray but Kimberly's own motivations for that act remain enticingly out of reach... Impulse or subtle strategy?
Ever since I said 'watch Kimberly' a few days ago she has indeed raised her profile - cause-and-effect or synchronicity?
Kimberly Kisselovich: note no 'e' between the 'l' and 'y'.
(Around 5000 views on this thread since this new series started about two weeks ago).

21/6/14
Marion wrote: ...she had slept with a marrried celebrity. But it was just a job and it wasn't she who sold the stroy to the newspapers. She refused to name him, as if we didn't all know... 
Well, I don't know with whom the celebrity fling was. Helen is not someone whose backstory I have wanted to follow up. She reminds me of a younger version of Liz McDonald from Corrie.

22/6/14
Marion wrote:
'The last temptation is the greatest treason
To do the right thing for the wrong reason.'
Do I not like Toya. She is far worse than Pauline ever was and that's saying something!
Quote: The wine crew sat drinking the wine and mourning the loss of Pauline. Tsk! Tsk! Pauline didn't approve of people who didn't share.
Very wise. The only truly wise woman around is indeed Marion. (Only one tiny typo short of dour Marlon. So be careful.)
Ninja Kimberly: steely glam and strategic wiles, wisdom in embryo.
CONTINUED HERE

Saturday, May 31, 2014

The Four Mutualities

Concocted this week HERE:

1. Cosmic cause and effect upon YOU.
2. YOUR cause and effect upon the Cosmos.
3. Synchronicity empirically recorded between YOU and the Cosmos (as above, so below).
4. The Free Will (self mutuality) of YOU and the Cosmos, separately.

The Moon King - by Neil Williamson

An extract from my real-time review of this novel:

Pages 278 – 289
“…the child was determining the time of its own birth,…”
…reminding me of the eponymous hero of ‘Tristram Shandy’ – yet, here, perhaps the child wants to tie or be tied by its own horoscope or Prenatal Epoch (for me, a significant hyperlink). The times are falling apart, and we may fail in re-towing or re-harnessing the moon, and the vision of the water child is one of the most memorable and poignant in this whole book… As is another fall, that of “A broad-leaved greenstick [...] the strange smear that clashed so with the vivid green of the leaves.”

moonking4

Saturday, May 24, 2014

The Duke's Revenge

The Duke was inadvertently buried alive. It was at the height of moonshine - so there was no real excuse. The shadows represented men leaning on their shovels; a job worth doing was worth doing well, but they needed to do it quickly before the moonshine faded from the night sky, and thus not even one of them noticed the barely perceptible breathing of the corpse as they dropped it into the bespoke trench.
One would have thought that a Duke worth his salt ought to have warranted a costly coffin with all the requisite knobs and knockers. But this Duke was perhaps 'persona non grata', an ingredient of a conspiracy that few of the land's commoners could forgive - and these few loyal men, silhouetted by the moon, were the only ones willing to put themselves out in order to give him an honest burial, if not a rich one. Or such was the speculation abroad at the time.
A pity none of them bothered to check the pulse.
Or were they communally wise in their shortcomings? A death by mass misunderstanding is not a death by mass murder, after all. And should the revolution fail, there would be no connection of evidence to incriminate them. It is said that every group of loyalists has at least one of them marginally disloyal enough to betray the others. Moonshine often casts queer shadows.

The Duke eventually stirred beneath the newly undug ground. He had been poisoned temporarily, he realised. This event had been writ in the stars, even if in the hindsight of the darkest grave. Everything fitted the predicted pattern, even if he knew nobody who could actually have predicted it. Someone must have done so, he guessed - and that would have been the one who had planned this whole later conspiracy against conspiracy.
The Duke had been brought up in a privileged nursery, within a palace that, in more socialist times, had been made ugly outside to conceal the riches within. Spoon-fed by calf-gloves, then tutored by voices as silky as their throat-ruffs, the Duke was at first shocked to leave such a palace to see exactly how ugly it looked from the outside, with its grey and chipped buttresses, its bedraggled flags failing to fly from leaning turrets, the drawbridge that creaked and croaked every time it was lifted or lowered, and that only happened once according to the undependable official records. No doubt it had been done at least twice, to reverse whatever the first had been.
Now close on suffocating, the Duke woke with his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth. In a flash, like someone drowning, he remembered the conspiracies that had surrounded his life, and the odd occasion he had left the palace, disguised as a commoner, turning a blind eye to the state of the palace's ugly exterior, hoping that any illuminating moonshine would be dowsed by clouds, to avoid locking eyes with any passing strangers.
He recalled one particular night when, again leaving the palace via the drawbridge, the moonshine was so utterly strong, he mistook it for sunshine. He was not accustomed to leaving the palace during daylight and the building's viewpoints were permanently curtained under with thick drab curtains so as not to conflict, when viewed outside, with the image of the rest of the building's uncared-for look ... or these viewpoints were completely defenestrated with new but deliberately-worn brickwork. He had rarely ventured out during daylight hours and, in this way, he had very little experience of sunshine as opposed to moonshine. Tonight, the full moon was so bright with reflected sunlight, it was as if it had become a circular mirror rather than a huge rock careering through space above the earth.
For the first time, the Duke could clearly see the grains of the earth that formed the ground upon which he walked and they were incredibly as separate as Patna rice grains and not smoothly veined or bound together with prouder ridges.
But was this a dream of waking up in the grave - with his face covered in earth, the individual components of its dirt crowding into his eyes like coarse grains of dust?

He suddenly remembered his childhood. The many different nursery toys, some hard and clockwork, others soft and malleable, together with the rich comestibles, sweet or spiced, the valuable books, some with pop-up pictures, some with just dreary text, and the people who looked after him; he averted his face so that he could not look directly into their eyes. He didn't know how spoilt he was. He just took it all for granted. But if he had known he was a mere Duke rather than a King or even a Prince, he may have wondered how a King or Prince could possibly have been treated better than him.
One of the activities - taught to him by the figure of a man in a hood, or the voice indicated that it was a man - involved the planting of seeds in indoor beds of earth. The Duke could remember relishing the growth of those seeds - often flourishing into orchids, sometimes, though, otiosely unfurling into weeds. Part of the game was to guess what each seed would produce, following months of daily watering which somehow, as a child, he found exciting, too.
Little things please little minds, he was once told by an officious piping-voiced retainer without a face, so such an individual had no need of a hood at all. Or was this figure just a figment of the young Duke's nightmares?
These growing seedbeds were in one vast chamber in the palace, double-ranked along each long wall of blind windows - like a hostel dormitory of filthy futons. His favourite plant - the one with the biggest surprise for him when it suddenly grew with a spurt - was a variety of sunflower that had a moonface as its bloom instead of a sun. It glowed in the dark, like real moonshine, an effulgence unhindered by the blindcast windows. Meanwhile the indoor lighting was kept dim on purpose, so dim, the Duke could hardly see a hand in front of his face. In fact the only light was often the plant's fragile moonshine itself.
As he dreamed like someone suddenly drowning in the pit of earth with which he himself had been smothered like some huge seed, the Duke hatched his own revenge upon the whole world for not planting him dead, but alive. However, revenge would have been harder for him to wreak if he was, like the drawbridge, only either lowered or lifted, rather than both lowered and lifted. During the later unpredictable phases of the moon's dark side, some grains of the grave often shifted and separated to reveal a dim yellow glow from lower in the ground. But nobody passed that way again to see it and wonder.
History could go on quite easily without a mere Duke and his purpose-built palace became a backstreet dormitory for a new breed of downandouts and ex-civil servants.
-----------------------------------

All my thingies 2007 - 2014 are linked from here: HERE.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

The Last Balcony - Weirdtongue

I currently have for sale these two books by DF Lewis at the same price as they were previously sold by Amazon before the InkerMen Press closed its publishing business. They can be signed by the author. Enquiries: dflewis48@hotmail.com

Friday, May 16, 2014

The Clock Struck Three

The clock struck three - The clock struck none
The clock struck a bit - The clock had some fun


Jack was trying to write a nursery rhyme -
Well, once upon a time, someone had to write all those nursery rhymes that we all heard on our mothers' laps when we were very small. Such things didn't just appear from nowhere.

Hickory dickory dock, the mouse run up the clock
Tom Tom the piper's son stole a pig and away did run
Lucy in the sky with diamonds, goo goo ga joo
Lucy Locket lost her pocket, Kitty Fisher found it


Jack's wife's maiden name happened to be Kitty Fisher. They lived in a dark forest in a dark part of time -- and his self-imposed job was to start many of the traditions that haunted us when we were children, otherwise our childhood would have been just the same as any old modern life with nothing worth cherishing from the past, nothing worth remembering in whatever future we had left.

For example, Jack invented the coins called threepenny bits so that they could be taken out of circulation in time for us to be nostalgic about them when we were older.

The clock struck three - the clock struck four
The clock was struck with love of Margery Daw


Hmm, this one wasn't working out very well; no potential of memorability or haunting nostalgia. It wasn't like 'Mary Mary Quite Contrary' or 'Old King Cole was a merry old soul'. They were living archetypes of childhood rhyming that underpinned girls' skipping and boys' tree climbing as well as our sleepless nights, those wastelands of dark time when we were all scared of ghosts. Ghosts went out of circulation, too, in our modern times today.

Jack had managed to conjure up ghosts and fairies and changelings as well as rhymes and threepenny bits in the dark forest of dark time when such things were easier to summon for later circulation. He imagined all sorts of potential nostalgia for our future, making our lives worth living by looking back at the things he imagined for us, and by imagining made them seem more real than real things themselves. Imagining some things we loved but can't love now because the things we loved are not around to be loved. It's better to have loved than never to have loved, even if we no longer have all of Jack's things to love.

Jack even imagined summoning up himself for us to remember as someone we once loved:

Little Jack Horner sat in the corner
Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean
Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick
Jack and Kitty went up the hill to fetch a pail of water


Hmm, something a bit wrong with the last bit.

The clock struck a threepenny bit
Lucy lost her diamonds
Girls made from sugar and spice
Boys from frogs and snails and beetles
Lucy in the skight forever
The clockadoodledoo struck three then choked
Good Morning, Good Morning
A day in the life, a day in the death

"Even nostalgia has to stop one day," whispered the ghost of Jack.

Thursday, May 08, 2014

Drop Dead Gorgeous

image

Extract from my review of 'Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #47' HERE.

Zombie & Son by Anthony Malone
"'Mm. I wonder, Tigh, have you ever thought whether her Majesty the Queen might be a zombie?'
Charles didn't say that, of course -"


Shades of a similar authorial retraction or intrusion in Coriander and (quoting from her story) her attempt to "figure out what was what, who was who, and what the who should do about the who with the what."
Or Malone's reference to the 'wild uncomprehending eyes' of those in the phone-hacking trial, as they would be if they read his genuinely laugh-out-loud Zombie & Son story, and the world would indeed be advised to read this story as its intrinsic truth is made even intrinsicker by a believably cumulative Royal audit-trail based on already public evidence - and by its extremely convincing and well-written text that transcends its otherwise seeming absurdity of subject matter. And it includes the best and seemingly original rationale for the existence of Zombies in general that I have ever encountered. In fact it provides a ratcheting rationale for the Roper story, too!
The Malone story, meanwhile, is full of recognisable, if caricatured, incidents and well-observed cameos. Just as one of many examples, I loved the image of Charles's simple pleasures like having his corns buffed by the drop-dead-gorgeous Duchess of Cornwall.

So this set of fictions ends with a genuine classic that is bound to cause a stir, a good stir, I estimate, to which nobody could object, even those involved by name. The first story ended with what it foreshadowed itself to be: an 'unrequited love' conclusion, while the whole gestalt of fiction in this book ends with a now requited climax. And, for full effect, the text needs, of course, to be read, as I have done, in a real physical book, to make the zombies stand up. And to enable human love for each other and for good literature to be requited. See my The Transfiguration Of An Unchanged Text blog post from a while ago, especially, now, vis-a-vis this book's retractionary authorial intrusions...

Thursday, May 01, 2014

A Rape of Knots

From my real-time review of JOURNEYS BEYOND ADVICE by Rhys Hughes (Gloomy Seahorse Press) HERE:

A Rape of Knots
"While I could accept a gestalt rat with an evolved sentience, the application of this talent to metaphysics was too ungainly a conceit for such humid stews as Nassau."
At different times I come to a certain side of Rhys Hughes' work that appeals strongly to a certain side of my reading taste. I relish his work's various sides ironic as well as visionary simply because I think I have many sides to myself that can individually tune into what is being asked of me by whichever Rhys Hughes work I happen to find myself reading. But this story immediately replaces my current favourite of his works (i.e. The Quixote Candidate) - and 'A Rape of Knots' may even become, at a good rate of knots, my favourite fiction story by anyone. I know that is a bit strong, but I feel sufficiently strong about it to make that perhaps dangerously premature assessment.
This story combines the almost religious 'soul-searching' (literally) quest of the previous Stairwell novella together at one point with that novella's dimensionless feel of a secret passage potentially reaching forever... Also a stunningly strong genius loci of the place in question, here Nassau, brilliant turns of phrase and conceit common to most Rhys Hughes fiction whatever its caste, an examination of evil and the Nature of God as philosophising that does not disrupt the flow of the plot, and effectively deep character development, too, here, of a gay priest and his precarious relationship with the ungay narrator, and a creatively dangerous approach to these factors and to notions of racialism, and the most memorable human-entwined 'monster' that is prefigured by that wheel of a 'gestalt rat' and its knot of tails about which my quotation above from earlier in the story is concerned.
I have long defined the word 'ligotti' as 'knots' (plural of 'ligottus') and the themes of Thomas Ligotti's anti-Natalism, evil dolls, puppets etc and the examination of the nature of evil present in this Rhys Hughes story seem exquisitely to dovetail. But I came away from 'The Rape of Knots' uplifted, not depressed. Uplifted by its intrinsic truth - but a truth from a healing fiction or a devastating nightmare? Or both?