Reincarnivorate

I arguably coined these words and expressions: ‘zeroism, egnisomicon, egnisism’ in conjunction with PF Jeffery (1967), ‘whofage’ in conjunction with PF Jeffery (1973), ‘agra aska’ (1983), ‘weirdmonger’ (1988), use of ‘brainwright’ in modern times (1990), Salustrade (1992) use of ‘yesterfang’ in modern times (1997), ‘wordhunger’ (1999), ‘nemonymous, ‘nemonymity’, late-labelling, veils-&-piques’ (2001), ‘denemonise’ (2002), ‘megazanthus’, ‘weirdonymous’, ‘chasing the noumenon’ (2003), ‘wordonymous’, ‘wordominous’, ‘the-ominous-imagination’, revelling in vulnerability (2004), ‘a woven fire-wall of words’, ‘the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’, ‘nemoguity’, ‘vexed texture of text’, ‘fictipathy’, ‘nemotion’, ‘the hawler’, ‘the angel megazanthus’, ‘klaxon city’, ‘horrorism’ when used as a word for the philosophy of horror fiction (2005), ‘publication-on-reading’, ‘antipodal angst’, ‘the tenacity of feathers’, ‘a writer’s mandala’, ‘wordy weird’, ‘nemophilia / nemophobia’, ‘magic fiction’ as the obverse of the more common expression ‘magic realism’, ‘weirdtongue’ as the ‘name’ of a language, ‘Glistenberry’ as an alternative name for ‘Glastonbury’, ‘tonguage’ as a ‘conscious’ language, ‘yester-eggs’ as a term for Proustian ‘selves’, ‘the parthenogenesis of reality from artifice’, ‘all is for the pest in the pest of all worlds’, ‘Baffles’ as fables with muffled morals (2006), ‘fanblade fable’, ‘abutting the if’, ‘word clones / word clowns’, ‘bumps for books’, ‘rite of review’, ‘cone zero’, ‘a basket of coinages’ (2007), ‘small press cover ark(ive), the baser pulps’ ‘orrorfaces’, ‘the wheel culture’, ‘netogenic’, the first fiction about a ‘drogulus’, ‘Innerskull’, ‘meganthus‘ (2008), ‘CERN Zoo’ in literature, ‘Real-Time Reviewing‘, ‘ligottum‘, ‘the pit and the pessimum‘, ‘ligottus‘, ‘fubbcuckle’, ‘extraneity creep’, ‘pillowghost’, ‘intowards’, ‘powderghost’, ‘nightmare’s moat’ (2009), ‘THE TENSES’, ‘scream munch’ as another word for ‘captcha’, ‘skight’ – threepenny bit, ‘invitations from within’, ‘novellatory’, ’Ress’, ‘Venn Dreams’, ‘Tearsheet Doll’, scanbuncle, A Götterdämmerung of Guts , Holistic Horror (2010), SFtopia, Salustraders / Overspacers, Novellarette, Inquel, Gaddafery, Jungian autonymity, sudracide, an impesto novel, trendbaffler, our planet as reliquary, fictionatronics, Lovecraftianisation, “To know the worst is also to know the best“, vignellarette, “Nothing is controlled by logic other than logic itself.”, nightgators, Horror Genreators, dicksplay, roman littoral, ghostalt, poltergeistalt, horrasy, Horrasy: The Horrastic and the Heuristic, srednibution, srednidipity, Lovecraftian indescriptivities, bememorise, alephantiasis, reva-menders, metapomorphic, rarifiction, neoloquism, Was the God Particle born instable? (2011), angelivalent, literal-meaning dreaming, the ‘Higgs boson’ of Horror, The Weirdonomicon, Aickmania, shortcomings harnessed are stronger than strengths unused, privacy-trawler, disarming strangeness in connection with Robert Aickman, Fiction is like currency: belief is everything, oblique concomitant / oblique contaminant, age at the edge, A writer should make clouds shine even if the world’s sun has gone, The Call of the Silly, pastilential, eschairtology, e-born, read-tangler, ghorror, the authorial cloud, grosmance, quixotiose, most placating is playacting, ‘friendly fire’ fiction, dilemmachination, absurface, aeontonomous, HobbYiSt / Hobbit, aeontonomy, Horror Without Victims, fuckerlode, Earkth, Pronoun Horror, The Ives of November, PreMonday-ition, NoV – No Victims, an amid-life crisis, God created Ground in His own image by adding ‘run’ to His name, Old boots are always better than no boots, truth is never brash, End tring, Tendring is Trending, HorNET Nest, The empty future expects our arrival soon, if you fit, wear yourself, The Worldwide Cliff (2012), quantitative kamikaze, The Ohm Resistor of Literature, Only real books can be left anonymously on chairs, The Sibling Thing (as monster), lachrymonics, Cold Sororist, Gangster Gongsters, Cathrian, Cathrianity, Cathrechism, the optimum delusion, dogstone as a form of ‘found sculpture’, iDEATH as a form of internet implosion of self, Judge me on my works, not on my request thus to judge me, dyschronous recurrence, Belarhombus, the Palimp’s Zest, abseil-surdity, paradoxilogically, Devolved Fiction, fratrinity, bock-hide, the Ligottian lurch, denouement or deligottiment, Does a Seraph suffer from Harpes?, AickMANN, RTRcausal, irrealoscopic, a Myth Pitch, Versionary SF, pallianthology, Historation Comedy, Holy Grailtrack, Born Ancient, Bringing the Dead to Book, urbographical, genius tempus, sabbaticess, the life-insider, the God in the Goblet, tsunami of humani (2013), broodband, jamjoyance, miracle-politicle, paradoxidant, a role moral, the preterite of the preinternet, the four mutualities, eventernal slumber, femfeist, dreamcatching-up, fencing off the tides, reincarnivorate (2014).

Matthew Parris and Clacton

HERE .

Celebrity Big Brother - Summer 2014 (2)

CONTINUED FROM HERE

A recent skyline I took near where I live:


27.8.14

I quite like George and Stephanie, well, like them better than the others.
I know Stephanie is connected with the Speidi brats or was that prats, but I do not remember much about them nor why Claire of Steps recently said she doesn't like Stephanie because of that very connection.
I don't know exactly why, but it seems appropriate that this Midsummer season of BB and CBB should include a marathon dose of Morris Dancing.

28.8.14
Yes, it was a good decision for the first eviction.
I still rather like George and Stephanie and their TV world's first example of a faux-fauxmance!
And the no-win situation in the role-roleplaying of the Gary balloon task. I think someone actually would have a phobia of balloons after reading some Stephen King...

29.8.14

I agree with Marion about Audley via-a-vis Kellie. I feel uncomfortable around those who deem the word 'uncomfortable' uncomfortable.
I also agree with her about her inferences and observations about James. But he is not up for eviction! How did that happen?

30.8.14

Marion wrote: ...looking more and more like Whistler's moth [...] Kellie flew at him -

There's more truth to that than any typo will ever conceal.
Meanwhile, I, too, was surprised at Leslie's eviction. And at the contrariness of the voting public.
I guess I am due to discover even darker truths about that voting public, living where I do (see just to the left HERE under the avatar).

31.8.14
I'd only add that I spotted a glimpse of genuine affection from Edele towards Ricci - the sign of a real fauxmance to contrast with the once engaging faux-fauxmance of G and S? Or, even, a REAL budding romance between E and R with nothing faux about it? If so, is it a first for reality TV?

1.9.14
A cynical use of a dome as a task as they are currently advertising the drama series 'Beneath the Dome' during CBB commercial breaks. However, Gary's acronym for DOME seemed very Illuminati to me...
Meanwhile, James remains a pent up ball of mutant chipped shoulders and Frenchie a loose cannon with strange lips whence the balls shoot out.

2.9.14

Marion wrote: Later, the pair sat and barked like dogs, she a yappy terrier, he a deep chested big dog.  I don't know why I laughed.
I held my breath for another rant from James about educating Gary etc ec

I laughed, too, and held my breath. And I wondered if James is just a Peter Brough in this Educating Archie exercise; nobbut equivalent to a ventriloquist on sound radio.
The HMs seemed pretty muted (Stephanie particularly) as if they are in defensively static attrition yearning towards the end of their TV reality lives, like some of us do in real life when in self perceived 'old age'. Only the nominations later ignited Lauren (negatively) and Dee vis-à-vis Ricci...

3.9.14

I think that Kellie and James are right to hate each other.
(A wonderful report, btw, Marion, to follow all those other wonderful reports. So many witty and revealing observations. I still feel sad that you do not receive explicit reactions on the thread itself from other people, despite there being over 31,000 views since the Summer season began.)

.
4.9.14

Marion wrote: In the DR, Gary performed for BB a song about eviction he had composed. It was utterly tuneless but he did perform some useful syncopation and ended the song with a goose honk.
Highlight of the show, but that's not saying much as not much was shown other than a predictable interview with Frenchie. I think Gary is the certain eventual winner. I can't think of anyone I would currently prefer to him.
I wonder if it was a diplomatic illness by Claire (on her part or CBB's) to avoid further perception or lack of perception of her 'dead from the neck up Ricci rictus' type character depletion.

5.9.14

Marion wrote: In the DR, Gary was feeling exceptional, balanced, and even which is a good place to be. The DR is like the confessinal and BB teases and tricks like a parent so it's all part of growing up.
If he gets evicted, he will leave with honour and pride and won't really have left as his spirit of hope, truth and love will remain and BB will always be in his heart.
I almost believed that Gary almost believed all that. It was almost stirring and inspiring to someone almost his age, as I am.
Edele is an interesting case of an ostensibly nice woman with not enough CBB profile but sufficient profile to be nominated heavily by other HMs because of her otherwise lack of profile but insufficient profile to be saved by the voting public, at least in Clacton.

6.9.14

Marion wrote: George stood accused of too much drinking and clowning to hide from himself and disguise a cry for help. Audley claimed ownership. Quite profound, that comment.
Another word Audley used in this context was 'aloofness', which I thought was spot on. I infer he meant a sort of designer aloofness.
I still can't think of anyone I would rather win than Gary. I write this as I try to gurn at my computer screen as he would.
Did Stephanie mention the dreaded word 'pact' at the end of her interview - with Emma then abruptly finishing it with her best bits? There is nothing more counteractive to audience belief than realising that James and Audley have a pact to be nasty to each other, probably pre-rehearsed for added wit.

7.9.14

Marion wrote:

An entertaining night thanks to Mr. Gary Busey. If he doesn't win after tonight it will be an even bigger scandal than the Helen win.
BB appointed Gary as counsellor to the house. He was the perfect picture of a Californian guru as I imagine them to be. Dressed in a bright, striped poncho, decked with love beats, the tools of his trade around him, he was magnificent.
...he gave her one of his acronyms = P.A.S. T., (which stands for Preoccupation With Time Spent) which stops her moving forward.
Gary ROARED at him. 'You live in a conflict zone and can't get out of your own way.'
This gary was an entirely different one from what we've been saying - perfectly lucid, no trouble hearing, and right in all he said even if it was dressed up in pyschobabble.
Loved it.
He finished by blessing the public and saying he loved them.
You know what? We love you too, Gary.
Cunning old devil!

Say no more.

8.9.14

Without trying to be mouthest, have you noticed visually what a mean mouth James has got? That stab wound you mention?
What a report, Marion! Another tour de force. Lauren and James really are both media marionettes with tangled strings...
More sporadic roars from Gary bursting through - from his mouth that gurns with teethy love.

8.9.14 (later)
Marion wrote: Yes. I turned down the volume for a minute to watch Ricci's mouth which is a tiny pursed thing with odd tics to the side even when he's not speaking. James was there too and his mouth was a slash , welded tight shut to hold back the volcanic furies seething deep inside him. Gary's loopy radiant smile is refreshing.
That's a brilliant observation of Ricci's mouth, Marion!
(By the way, for the record, please replace my 'mouthest' above with 'mouthist'.)

9.9.14

Marion wrote: Gary thinks he gets nominated because he's likely to win.
Gary may lose some votes because of saying that, but he still should win, I hope. I have no preference for 2nd and 3rd. None of them deserve it.
The incident with the trousers was a hilarious Chaucerian cock and bull story.
And to James and Dee - get a life!

10.9.14
Thanks for explaining all that about Ricci and Lauren, Marion.
I think you began this CBB series by liking Dee, and I think I did, too. But I hope she goes tonight. Along with James. Still maybe Lauren and Ricci should go as they are less entertaining! The rest going on Friday, leaving Gary the winner.
Des and Marion, not to be confused with Dee and Marlon, will be going on Friday, too.

11.9.14

I think Gary lost a few more votes with the Edele argument and when harping on about the respect due to him because he is 70 years old and his experience of life. I still hope he wins, not that I ever demand respect because of my age. But I think George or Edele may win. James, even!

 

12.9.14

Goosey Goosey Gander where shall I wander,
Upstairs, downstairs and in my lady's chamber
There I met an old man who wouldn't say his prayers,
I took him by the left leg and threw him down the stairs.

Marion wrote:

In the garden, a lone goose flew overheard causing great excitement in Gary, Lauren and Audley. Gary honked a greeting. 'They finally found me,' he said. Audley thought the lone goose was symbolic, he wan't sure what it represented but it must mean something. Gary reckoned the goose represented staying power and/or a message saying 'I love you.'

So CBB this summer ends with an explicit reference by the HMs to "Goose symbolism", while the BB earlier this season ended with Swan symbolism:


DFL: "Following on from that, I've had a sudden revelation. The BB-historical double top for women as embodied by Ashleigh-Helen is simply a symbol of the Black Swan / White Swan syndrome or struggle in 'Swan Lake' (cf the film 'Black Swan'). Everything falls into place..."

Quote:

Rudeness was playing on Gary's mind. he gave Edele one of his acronyms - Riding Upon Defaming Energy = RUDE. He had to explain what defaming meant to Edele (he really s wasted on the HMs). Yup, Gary gets called rude, but others in the house are worse that he and 'there ain't nothin' said in church about that'
(Great phrase!)

I think that is the third such Illuminati acronym from Gary. Mine today: GARY: Great Age Running Young.
Goosey Goosey Gander, Climb those blessed stairs.

Hope he wins tonight. See you in January, Marion, and thanks again for the wonderful reports.

.

AS EXTRACTED FROM DISCUSSION WITH MARION HERE

 

CONTINUED HERE WITH CELBERITY BIG BROTHER WINTER 2015

My recent thoughts elsewhere (1)

I think I probably imagine many 'buried patterns', having sought them in every aspect of my creative fiction writing and real-time reviewing hobby. So apologies if I am seen to put too much weight on these patterns.

“Paul swam in a sea of theories. Everything from the morning’s headlines to the license plates of buses had hidden significance. But Paul’s torrent of interpretations had something joyous to it. Buried patterns everywhere. It sounded, sometimes, almost like musicology.” – from ORFEO by Richard Powers

----------------------

Me, too. I consider myself to be eclectic as well as catholic (with a small c). I would hate to be called a 'snob', but I don't mind being called 'pretentious'.

Re: The Primary Task I agree with much that has just been said, only to add that academic study of weird fiction and art for art's sake (pure weird fiction) are not mutually exclusive. It's just that when conscious didacticism impinges, that we have philosophical and/or aesthetic knots.
I go back to my earlier post on this thread:
What do you think of Thomas Ligotti's statement: The primary task of every great horror writer is to expose the miscreation of this world and everything in it.
I would agree and then add: "and the secondary task is to optimise the creative expression of such exposure."
where the optimisation of creative expression can expunge the miscreation of which it speaks. A circular ominous imagination that can bolster us instead of depressing us. Fiction into truth by dint of its vice versa. Untying those knots.

Celebrity Big Brother - Summer 2014

CONTINUED FROM HERE.

20.8.14
Happy HP Lovecraft Day.
Marion wrote: Dee told a couple of Royal tall tales. The one about accidentally killing the swan was best -I liked the bit about tossing the swan up into a tree so that Prince Philip wouldn't know what she's done.
Another swan! Was it white or black?
Actually, rough diamond Dee is quite good at role-playing Deirdre, the Duchess of Solihull, but I continue to be confused by this huge wriggling netful of 'celebrities' around her. I think I have heard of Audley Harrison and the Strictly dancer, but the rest are just people strictly to by-pass in any enclosed space, hardly noticeable in this increasingly eccentric world we all inhabit. Eccentric has always been good, but ordinary is now the new eccentric. A lesson for me.

Housemates Kellie Maloney, White Dee, Audley Harrison, Edele Lynch, David McIntosh, George Gilbey, James Jordan, Claire King,  Lauren Goodger, Stephanie Pratt,  Ricci Guarnaccio, Angelique "Frenchy" Morgan, Gary Busey, Leslie Jordan.

These excerpts are taken from the long-running discussion HERE.

20.8.14 (later)
Marion: The residents of the house are unknown to me too – celebrity sub rosa.
As to the swan, another mystery. When the Duchess recounted the murder of the swan and tossing up into the air, Claire immediately asked where the other one was as swans always travel in pairs. The duchess changed the subject suspiciously quickly.
Why? Did she accidentally shoot two swans and not want to admit it on the grounds that one feathered corpse was an accident but two smacks of deliberate carnage? Or is there one lone swan, a black one, hidden somewhere awaiting a chance for vengeance?
Des: Marion, just spotted that there is a Black Dee as well as a White Dee: http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/celebrity-big-brother-benefits-streets-4073622
Cf the black swan and white swan earlier of Helen and Ashleigh!

21.8.14
Yes, an interesting bunch and your report does full justice to what is going on. Thanks, Marion.
As to my earlier 'buried patterns', only Gary's 'angels' last night seem to fit.
I think I probably imagine many of these patterns, having sought them in every
aspect of my creative fiction writing and real-time reviewing hobby.
So apologies if I am seen (by others reading this) to put too much weight on
these patterns during this thread.

“Paul swam in a sea of theories. Everything from the morning’s headlines
to the license plates of buses had hidden significance. But Paul’s torrent of interpretations
had something joyous to it. Buried patterns everywhere. It sounded, sometimes, almost like musicology.”
– from ORFEO by Richard Powers

22.8.14
Some worrying, irritating and entertaining aspects as documented by Marion.
I sat agog with mouth open at times at the way that this group of Celebrities - who really should join, for real, last night's 'Celebrities Anonymous' - interacted and projected themselves. Tarr and Fether without a tether.
Agog, too, at aging catamite Leslie's description of sharing a bed with Frenchie - drowning in a sea of pink bras, etc.

23.8.14
Wow! That about sums it up. It takes a brave viewer to watch all this. This is a template for the world as it is at the moment, a template that gives off, a template that takes in. A Way Station for our bitter divisions, a vehicle for abject professional yearnings, the crossing of personal and international borders, a public transmogrification upon tides of almost mindless acrimony. Even the dependable structural 'patterns' are fleeing us. Or being replaced with unwelcome ones we cannot resist. The universal 'we'.

Interesting doubts cast on the result of the Helen win in the BB Summer final: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/s149/big-brother/news/a592154/big-brother-fix-claims-addressed-by-channel-5.html

24.8.14
There are at least five worryingly aberrant housemates simmering on and under the surface: Frenchie, Gary, Leslie, Kellie and James. Does this mean that generally over one third of all celebrities are seething loose cannons? Or that same proportion of the general public represent negative or aberrant forces in the chemical mix, because, with the Internet and multiple TV channels etc, many so-called ordinary people approach at least the nature of what, in my younger days, was once called 'celebrity'. This relates, too, with something said earlier in this thread: ordinary is the new eccentric, because eccentric is the new ordinary. Or was it always such, but now it is harder to hide?
I am afraid I, too, didn't understand the argument involving Audley, so I can't help Marion there.

25.8.14

When reading Dan Dare in Eagle comic at the age of 12, I remember slow tides of slime spreading over a planet. This is like what is happening to the CBB House: a physical and psychical living ectoplasm whence, I'm afraid, I can't really differentiate each shape lumping out such sticky porridge. I can't even bring myself to choose who should leave this spreading goo on Friday.

25.8.14 (later)
And I forgot to mention - a few days ago I am sure I caught a glimpse of some green swans in CBB as part of a task or something. Seriously.
Or am I going completely mad?  BTW, swans honk as well as geese, according to google. "Never, never, never give up." - Winston Churchill

.

26.8.15
That's a truly brilliant report, Marion. Had me in stitches and wide-eyed with revelation - honking geese, comparative celebrity, reincarnation, the new religion of NGU et al.
By the way, has anyone heard of 'NGU Illuminati Theory'?
I have now chosen for the eviction tomorrow - James! At the top of his game, he said, but wasn't he recently sacked from Strictly?
I liked Leslie's 'Yes, you are right - and then walk away' method of avoiding arguments with Gary.
When I was a boy, my grandmother made me a Davy Crockett hat.

CONTINUED HERE

Big Brother Appendix

CONTINUED FROM HERE

I've had a sudden revelation. The BB-historical double top for women as embodied by Ashleigh-Helen is simply a symbol of the Black Swan / White Swan syndrome or struggle in 'Swan Lake' (cf the film 'Black Swan'). Everything falls into place...including the swan shapes above.

“An angel’s face with the devil’s mouth.” –  Emma Willis in interview with Helen – about Ashleigh.
“She did it, too.” – Helen (repeatedly when previously in secret room)
“So many differences, but in the end the same.”  – Ashleigh in interview with Emma about both herself and Helen.

See also Winston Showan and Peter Quince: http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2014/08/03/winston-showan-and-peter-quince/

Tags: ashleigh coyle, big brother, emma willis, helen wood, winston showan

17.8.14
Further to my teasing out of the 'Black Swan' syndrome above with regard to Helen-Ashleigh, I make similar hopefully justifiable teasings-out in my real-time reviews (DFL Dreamcatchers) of fiction, including reviews HERE of the publications that are central to a discussion forum: i.e. that of TTA Press: Interaction: (Black Static, Interzone, etc). The discussion forum itself is HERE.

I see that Celebrity Big Brother starts tomorrow evening... Gosh!

My specific blog about the Black Swan angle: HERE
We need to know if BB planned this scenario or it accidentally arose? Nobody else so far has picked up on this.

18.8.14
CELEBRITY BIG BROTHER - Summer 2014

Enough of swans, now to stags.
Someone on CBB just asked "How's your stag?", followed by secret hand signals.
Well, this is the Illuminati Stag God:

Vaguely like the BB eye?

Yet, having just checked, apparently the film 'Black Swan' was full of Illuminati symbols!!!

19.8.14
Thanks for the aide memoire of CBB housemates, Marion. I've not heard of any of them, except the Strictly dancer. There seems too many for four weeks?
I thought the Royal twist - Duchess of Solihull - task a bit demeaning, but there seems to be some strange cocktails of people here that may fizz off interestingly. I liked Emma's new direction in escort job description - but where is Super Cassandra?

19.8.14 (later)
Nelly Furtado ("aka Black Swan") giving the same signal as Zoe and the other housemates (including Ashleigh):




19.8.14 (later)

Marion wrote: We must watch and wait for a revelation about this triangulation. Or perhaps an intervention - strange UFOs have been sighted over Huston, Texas

And I have just finished a book I have been reading for a while (ORFEO by Richard Powers about an Avant Garde classical composer, a book longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize) where I encountered this passage about a half an hour ago:

"And let him hold his fingers thus. The giant holds up his fingers in a sideways chink of V in front of his shining eye.
Shut the f**k up, Richard barks. Right. And let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisby whisper.
If that may be, the giant says, then all is well. Come, sit down, every mother's son, and rehearse your parts."

And, of course, the Pyramus and Thisby play was the play within a play produced by Peter Quince.
(ORFEO is stunning: Biopunk SF, tweets and musicology as chaos theory...)

20.8.14
Happy HPL Day.

Marion wrote: Dee told a couple of Royal tall tales. The one about accidentally killing the swan was best -I liked the bit about tossing the swan up into a tree so that Prince Philip wouldn't know what she's done.
Another swan! Was it white or black?
Actually, rough diamond Dee is quite good at role-playing Deirdre, the Duchess of Solihull, but I continue to be confused by this huge wriggling netful of 'celebrities' around her. I think I have heard of Audley Harrison and the Strictly dancer, but the rest are just people strictly to by-pass in any enclosed space, hardly noticeable in this increasingly eccentric world we all inhabit. Eccentric has always been good, but ordinary is now the new eccentric. A lesson for me.

CONTINUED HERE

Two Occasional Tables

An Occasional Table (1)

George knew that to be an occasional table its main purpose was not to have a purpose at all other than as an ornament or, at the most, as a coffee table that is employed to put coffee table type books on if not coffee cups themselves. George was born a Prince but in the subsequent wars and revolutions became a commoner. In his younger days the palaces had been full of occasional tables as well as framed portraits in rooms used as galleries rather than rooms proper. Most things in the palaces were occasional - only his cot then his bed had a definite purpose. Even he as a Prince was an occasional one, or became such when the republic was still unformed, finally not a Prince at all, not even occasional.

His father, a once and future king, was a helicopter pilot until he was pensioned off through bouts of myopia or forgetfulness that was blamed on myopia, his mother now an ageing Nanny for kids that would have grown up like her one day, Princesses in the making once the monarchy returned, as some still hoped. George became a carpenter like a previous budding messiah or spiritual leader as George thought himself to be given different circumstances, but now crucified upon a destiny that was not of his own making. He carved the legs of the table, giving it ornamentation, curlicue curves, knots turned into buds, snaky ribbons weaving through the grain ... but legs would have been legs whatever the ornamentation; in fact, the fussy designs made the legs weaker than they should have been, eventually robbing them of any purpose at all. Instead of supporting the heavy flat plane of the table's surface, they seemed to buckle as each chisel chop that George gave them kicked in. He was behaving like the obstreperous child he had once been in the Royal days. If a table was to be occasional it needed not to work at all. Obsessed with a basic loss that he felt, some right that had been stolen from him, it seemed as if he needed to make the objects themselves around him as useless as he was. Each table he made more and more occasional. His mother wept to see the frowns of frustration knotting his forehead as he wielded the chisel. A carpenter who made a new world in his own image. Easier with words, though, than wood. These words.

Yet, his occasional tables were a big success. It was as if people, shoddy themselves, needed shoddy goods to make themselves seem real in a shoddy world, where nothing was better than anything else. One occasional table giving its name to this story, an occasional table to end all occasional tables, sloping slowly before toppling, spilling all the refreshments that had been entrusted to its surface. This story sloped, too, before toppling the thoughts that it had once promised to the sound of disappointed shouts from those who read it or heard it read aloud - but it never fully toppled at all, only forever threatened to do so. An occasional story, with little or no surface; no depth to satisfy any of us who fell - or attempted to rise - through it.

George scribbled it all out, before being discovered as its author. And decided to play with the Corgis instead. Like all toys, occasional for every occasion.

An Occasional Table (2)

It sat beside me, as innocent as an object can possibly be without having absorbed the memories of a lifetime. Objects are objects, and not even good nostalgia sticks to them, let alone bad things that happened around their vicinity. It is what it is.

Yet, this occasional table was the oldest thing in my life, having travelled from address to address with the audit trail of circumstances, circumstances spontaneous and deliberate alike. It was about three foot square with two parallel wooden plank surfaces, one above another, topped by four screwed wooden knobs, and vertical posts holding the construction together. It looked very basically made, and it was indeed cheap as chips, as born from a flatpack, except I recalled this one, unlike most flatpacks, had been easy to erect, even for the likes of me. It had usually supported a TV set or just something used like a coffee table, but now the narrow strips along the sides of both plank surfaces had peeled away revealing some sort of cork innards. The screwed knobs at the top had become discoloured with indelible thumbprints. I often wondered why this particular shoddy artefact of mankind had outlasted all my other belongings, as life slipped behind me, hardly noticing it, until today...

It was as if it spoke to me with a voice that was beginning to penetrate my absent-minded existence. A dusty croaky tone that hardly uttered words, but it did possess a whining ingratiating sense of thankfulness toward me for preserving it, or so I imagined. Or was it complaining, showing an awareness of what it currently bore upon it, even jeering at the current use to which it had been put, yes, by the likes of me. A large framed photograph leaned back on its wooden pull-out support, itself in turn supported by the top surface of the table. Upon the lower surface underneath, I had placed all manner of a muddle, like extinct files, and handwritten-upon papers where I had once attempted creative writing of some amateurish sort and a few Radio Times from the time I used to buy the Radio Times, most of them with one form or another of the Doctor on the front cover.

The framed photograph was of my family that had been outlasted by this occasional table. I knew I had got my priorities all wrong somehow. Occasional had become forever, and what should have been forever had gone, had gone indeed forever.

I squeezed back into the flatpack, only for it to vanish like a vehicle for a time lord who never really found his time ... except for those handwritten-upon papers as occasional evidence upon an even more occasional table. Gone with a skip. And a hop and a jump.

Big Brother - Summer 2014 (4)

CONTINUED FROM HERE

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

Comments below extracted from discussion HERE
29.7.14 (later)
How could I have possibly forgotten till now? Amazing!!
Winston is also the name of the main protagonist in Orwell's 1984!


30.7.14


A good spot, Marion, in discovering Ashleigh's own sudden awakening that Chris is more than just avuncular towards her, hence Chris's hang-up with regard to Pav's own staring obsessions towards her.
Meanwhile, I was rather taken with the sight of the rainbow from the garden and the arm-linked HMs' obeisances before it. This relates to Winston (hero of 1984 and Young Churchill lookalike) earlier (accidentally?) mentioning the Illuminati and Chris's earlier reference to 'stonemasons' (freemasons?) when trying to explain the Illuminati to Winston.

31.7.14
Certainly vegetable and fruit anthropomorphisms are preferable to that utter bilge last night with Luisa Zissman and, however illuminating, preferable to the extraneous outside world intrusions (anathema to BB purists) upon those HMs with Beano comic question marks on their heads.
This below was a present a few days ago from my brother-in-law's allotment. I am still unsure what it is, some sort of ungulate, perhaps, wanting its toes clipped.

Dreamcatchers
Unknown or unexpected dreams that find themselves entrammelled fortuitously or ominously in the butterfly net with which we set to catch them.
Or targetted dreams we actually set out to catch with our dreamcatchers.
Or dreams that set out to catch us, captcha us.

BB always used to be the first and third, not the second.

1.8.14
I'm really fed up with:
(a) outside audience influences leading to the labelling of HMs
(b) the Mark-Christopher 'Gert and Daisy' act
(c) Chris's agonising over Ashleigh
(d) Helen and Ash's lackadaisical killing of time till the show ends
(e) Ashleigh's and Winston's disarming, condescending smiles when praised by an outside audience.
(f) The sound of Mark's and Marcus's voices staying with me after I switch off the telly.

2.8.14

Marion wrote: One interesting scene was when Chris sat talking to Ashleigh while she was in the bath. He banged on and on about the 'creepy' charges. She put in the occasional word of agreement but her eyes were glazing over. Later he told her that he wanted her as a frined forever. She tried not to look less than thrilled.
Another scene was Mark regretting that he had made Christopher look weak. Then he added that if matthew had still been in the house, he wouldn't have been as close to Christopher, whch seemed an unnecessary comment.
Two significant moments, where the Focus Group's findings, well, focussed.
Did you also notice that Zoe flashed an Illuminati triangle at the camera with her hand during the interview with Emma? --- 13 seconds into the interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE4FfAN4Mfo

3.8.14


For me, the evening belonged to Winston.
The commentary said he came to the diary room to talk about the remaining housemates, although it seemed to me that he had been dragged there by BB to give him more profile, and he sat there with half-tongue-tied opinions in his usual disarming fashion as BB force-fed him questions. But it was when he later said to someone that he once played the part of Peter Quince that everything so far fell together. The character that is Shakespeare's own comic portrait of himself melding with Winston Smith in 1984, the Young Churchill, the callow youth, the Essex beefcake, and his sudden out-of-context question to Chris about the Illuminati as if itself force-fed by preternatural forces in this our own Midsummer...

4.8.14

Marion wrote: Winston had to withsatnd the blandishments of a lapdancing Biannca. he did too.

The Temptations of St Anthony ....or St Winston?

Related, too, to last night's flagellation by fish etc.
A saint who carries his own flayed flesh.
A wise yet controversial view of Helen by Marion here, one that will stir all the BB forums no doubt, and also perceptive is her view of Christopher's Road to Damascus.
Mark's tears when cutting up onions assumed a new significance when looking back at an earlier discussion about anthropomorphic onions.

5.8.14
Some more BB bilge with the wild things task backed by a soundalike David Attenborough commentary.
Christopher later gratuitously and continuously plunged his head into some bilge in the kitchen sink. Don't blame him.

6.8.14

Marion wrote:

They're all tired. The show has been a song with one note. They have had to learn about BB's betrayals - notice how they mostly sing helen's praises in the DR now? For fear of what they say being played back to her? They've had to live with constant anxiety about Helen & co turning on them; they are constantly perturbed by viewers opinions and one another's opinions; they are given tasks which are juvenile and degrading ...
The only wonder is that Christopher didn't keep his head in the suds until he drowned.
I really liked Ashleigh telling BB where to go last night. It's how I feel too!

Like Ash's magic trick, I thus whisk last night's show away (great report of it, Marion) and return to quoting the whole of above from Marion the day before. Indeed, this show has more often than not dipped to such depths, and -- without the serendipities of the Illuminati, secret naïve codes from and about Winston and the interpolations of Super Cassandra, but above all Marion's reports themselves etc. -- it would have been a Summer wasted.

7.8.14

Nothing much to add to Marion's report. A boring night only made interesting in hindsight by that very report!
But I feel it is ironic, within this BB context, that the concept of money is power when money is the only force that requires our universal trust for it to work.

8.8.14

A lot of bawling and shouting, indeed. Christopher seems to have either gone mad or become very forceful and perspicacious. Probably a bit of both.
I, too, hope Mark goes tonight, but it will probably be Pav.
Winston is good for at least one more disarming unintended naivety that an ability to produce has been the highlight of this series, whatever one thinks of him as a person. As an empty vessel or medium, he has been the embodiment of symbolism, and the one I said in week two would win.

8.8.14 (later)
Your dream scenario, Marion, happened! Congratulations.
Shows you how much I know. I guess Winston's empty vessel was actually far too empty in the end.
Mark was taken to task over the money. As he should have been. He looked genuinely shaken.

9.8.14

As a general point, I often wonder what difference is made between voting to evict (as last night) and voting to save (or to win, as it will be from now on).
Anyway, it is what it is.
Meanwhile, I agree with Marion's "I'd like that fishwife Helen out frst, followed by Ash, followed by Pav.
Chris, Christopher, and Ashleigh should be the top three. Each of them has merit. I swither between Ashleigh and Christopher as the outright winner."

10.8.14

Marion wrote: And Helen said - and you couldn't make this up - 'Who do you think you're speaking to?'. As if she were royalty talking down to a clumsy servant.
[...] Helen insisted Winston hadn't gone, that he'd be back, in the tone people used for Arthur, the Once and Future King, returning from Avalon in the people's time of need.
[...] Hmmm- this isn't the first time I have suspected that Christopher is playig a very deep game indeed.

Three interesting observations, Marion, among others. Thanks.
Whatever one says about Winston, we have had reason to use more actual pictures for him than anyone else. An empty vessel for Churchill, King Arthur, Adam Weishaupt, Orwell's 1984 Winston or Peter Quince to sail to our world's rescue?
Like you, I LOVED Ashleigh's DR speech last night about Helen!

10.8.14 (later)
Some brilliantly appropriate illustrations there, Marion. You've now duly corrected the balance against Winston.


'Pauline's Recidivism' in the style of Jackson Pollock

11.8.14
Well, we're in some sort of coda to a strident symphony, now...
I was shocked yesterday to hear that this BB is to be closely followed by a CBB!

12.8.14

I found the court case last night silly. I almost felt sorry for Helen.

12.8.14 (later)
Yes, some telling hurts last night - upon Helen by BB, and upon Chris by Ashleigh. You sum it up, Marion, with true pathos.

13.8.14
Extreme silliness, last night. Finally lost patience with this show.
I imagined all HMs in a secret room in surveillance over one remaining HM counting teaspoons as a task - desperately trying to check his or her own skewed reflection in each tiny curved surface to check out the existence of personal identity...

13.8.14 (later)
Indeed, we need to know, Marion, how far BB this season has been staged and whether the contestants are in on the plot?
I believe it is half-staged - pre-planned by manipulation by BB - and the contestants, like Pauline choosing Helen to have a safe card and Chris being fake-fake-evicted last night, are conditioned by some form of celebrity-aspirational tele-arts osmosis. Not Illuminati, so much, as Immunity (manipulable immunity from a game of skill or even from a game of chance like the sponsoring super-casino).
Peter Quince: But, masters, here
are your parts: and I am to entreat you, request
you and desire you, to con them by to-morrow night;
and meet me in the palace wood, a mile without the
town, by moonlight; there will we rehearse, for if
we meet in the city, we shall be dogged with
company, and our devices known. In the meantime I
will draw a bill of properties, such as our play
wants. I pray you, fail me not.
(Midsummer Night's Dream)
(Speak the lovers through a wall?)

14.8.14

Marion wrote: Ashleigh doesn't do little girl voices. She has a harsh Irish accent full of expletives, nothing like what Helen described. Helen's Ashleigh is an imaginary creature.
Helen really needs to see somebody. Urgently.
Ashleigh and Helen are two memorable BB femfeists - and perhaps both are to be feared, the former approximating a word-filthy Alice in her own form of dangerous Wonderland, the latter an example of a Jadegoody but with relatively more intelligence beneath its wild fog of hatred or sporadically mindless releases of pent-up aggression, even madness.

14.8.14 (later)
Marion wrote: Ashleigh is a clear eyed Alice, a truth teller, a strong self which yields to none. Helen will one day go spiralling into the outer space that surrounds her and echoes with the voices of all the people who've ever wronged her, misunderstood her, and bettered her.
Can't argue with that - clear-eyed, itself.
 

15.8.14

All was finally compromised last night, with infection from some of the evicted housemates allowed back in to cloud the 'clear-eye'. And Ashleigh and Helen polluted each other with mutual affection, as they took off their masks of acrimony, masks once provided by BB's Peter Quince. So dismayed, I may not even watch the final tonight.
Bring on the old TV test card to replace the BB eye...each a moribund morphed form from or into the other.


15.8.14 (later)

Marion wrote: We can boo and hiss and throw popcorn if Helen wins.

That seemed like a joke when I read it earlier today. But now it is so horribly true. How can it be?

Thanks, Marion, for all your reports. They were simply great.



16.8.14

Marion wrote: I cannot begin to describe my feelings about this but I pointed out half way thrugh the series that BB was setting Helen up for the win - you know, repenting, learning life lessons, going on a journey - but I never thought she would get past the voters. The bully NEVER wins BB, the cool gang NEVER wins. And yet she did. Who the heck voted for her?
It was an Illuminati plot!
Or Helen is really a very nice lady playing a part in a Midsummer play. A medium like the hole in the Pyramus and Thisby wall? Triangle-shaped hole?
I, too, found the Last Supper sickmaking. Christopher should have won, surviving the flaying, like St Anthony, by today's modern demons. As Emma Willis said last night, Ashleigh is "an angel's face with the devil's mouth". All part of the plot. The Temptations of the Quince. Super-Cassandra and Danielle, this Hell's odalisques.
No, probably none of that. You are right HERE, Marion. Sheer travesty.

16.8.14 (later)
Following on from that, I've had a sudden revelation. The BB-historical double top for women as embodied by Ashleigh-Helen is simply a symbol of the Black Swan / White Swan syndrome or struggle in 'Swan Lake' (cf the film 'Black Swan'). Everything falls into place.

CONTINUED HERE

Metaphysica Morum by Thomas Ligotti

I have now read 'Metaphysica Morum', but not yet read 'The Small People'. I don't think it's any accident that Olan is an anagram of Loan, a loan being a two way 'deal', infecting and benefiting both ways, just as 'demoralise' is, in its modern sense, to make someone lose hope but, in its archaic sense, to strip someone of morals. This story is of the infinitesimal and the immeasurable, both ironic and non-ironic, about futility, where fighting in this literary way for futility is a purpose that outlasts and immortalises the fighter but also this fighter is fighting WITH futility thus landing him back in that bus station toilet where he began. I am indeed "open to 'delightful possibilities and interpretations'" but also believing "nothing really meant anything", like Dr. O. The story has its own "magnificent symphony" as its 'all-new context' for a 'metaphysical mutant'. Borrow or lend, which comes first? A fascinating tantalisation. Am I 'uniquely defective' in thus interpreting this work?

More: HERE

The First Page of a Slow Western

The saloon-bar doors swung slowly in the random wind - letting nobody in and letting nobody out, unless it was a ghost slowly chasing the scent of alcohol or even more slowly fleeing the enticement of card-sharpers.

A six-shooter sat on one of the barroom tables amid the left-over rings from glasses once holding ancient shots of whiskey. Nobody was there, but the weapon slowly spun - as reflected in the half-empty bottles behind the bar counter, sluggish glints tracing a line of optics stored on a shelf, stored there because in this bar they poured shots of drink straight from the bottles, unmeasured and uneked out. Blow the optics! Give me honest pourings for healthy gulps!

I looked towards the grimy window, having heard the snicker of my heavy horse that I had left loosely tethered to the tethering-pole, alongside a couple of other ungroomed steeds, each with an empty water-bottle and, from it, the screwtop plug slowly swinging in that increasingly slow randomness of wind.

Where were their owners? Why were the two cowboys not in the bar? Where was the barman? Indeed, where was I? In which chair, in which direction, was I now sitting, in lugubrious pose?

The six-shooter continued slowly to twirl, imperceptibly less slow, perhaps, with no evidence of what or whom had spun it and what or whom was still spinning it. I heard the barrel click round just one notch ... and I gazed at the trigger that was unbearably slow in being squeezed by an invisible finger - in this game of unrushed roulette.

Entering Eventernal Slumber

It was all predicted in early 2013 with my 'Relaxed Snowman' blog, including the fact that 'Horror Without Victims' was likely to be my final paying publication for other authors (the twelfth such publication). And, in recent days, my own slippage showing up with most of my many WordPress sites starting to vanish from public view, but still clinging on? Who knows what is next?

As promised, I intend to resume real-time reviewing when the current Summer break or Sabbaticess (a form of Eventernal Slumber or Perpetual Autumn?) ceases at the end of August – using the books I have already been showing on this site as recently purchased.

Big Brother - Summer 2014 (3)

CONTINUED FROM HERE

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

Comments below extracted from discussion HERE

18.7.14
Marion wrote: Chris sat on th edge of the bed like a naughty boy while she stood legs apart looming over him. He backtrackedvery rapidly and agreed what he said wasn't true - but it was true. Hes just killed any chance he had of winig th show.
I thought exactly that.
Quote: The 3 new HMs do nothing but discuss eviction, addig in different names each time. They are eyond tedious. Wish hey all go tomorrow night.
I wish each and every HM goes, the sooner the better.

19.7.14

Marion wrote: Could there be a worse combination than a coarse minded, thick witted prostitute taking the moral high ground?

Biannca with the double n gone! Hooray!
I am in two minds about Danielle's passing - and she seems to have two minds not about herself but within!
Chris's speech in the DR partially compensated for his earlier abjectness in the face of Biannca's attack.
I think Christopher and Ashleigh are the only two housemates I like. Maybe Chris, too.
Might come to like Zoe.
Meanwhile, BB's heavy-handed manipulation continues to make this season's show a travesty.

Perhaps that's symbolised by a manipulative hand being short-circuited into the HMs' own hands each time they enter the DR.

20.7.14
Steven is a very uptight man channeling a relaxed mode by means of the lackadaisical chomping of toast as he engages in an exchange with BB in the DR, an exchange that will become some of the most important accumulations of seconds in his whole life when that toast will have been long since digested by his body and evacuated into the BB house toilet. But the toast itself will remain forever as frozen by that manipulative electronic hand symbolic of the modern media. Raise a glass to the transience of humanity.
Danielle was a split personality not only in behaviour but also as reflected by the different versions of her own physical face as it changed expression by the flash of each second.
Meanwhile, Marion, thanks for another witty review of proceedings.

21.7.14

Marion wrote: I'm The One which became apparent when BB announced that Kimberly will not be retirning to the house. Personally, I think she saw the light when Steven said Bianca was his type of girl for saying she'd have sex in the house. To be put on the same level as Bianca must have been too much for her. [...] At bedtime, Steve kept his bulging eyes firmly fixed on Helen and Ash which was rather creepy. Eventually, he took the robot toy and cuddled up to it instead of Kim. It was probably more responsive.

The Penetrating Shrewdness of Marion
That's my heading. One should not watch BB without reading Marion alongside it.

22.7.14 And Ashleigh neatly finished the show by telling BB that, the coming night, she will be dreaming about "sitting on her money throne eating strawberries." Shades of Lewis Carroll?

23.7.14
Marion wrote: Anyway, Steven is going to go down wth all flags flying (two of them anyway) and the waves will close over him and his tawdry passions and constant munching. It;s going to be a good week!
Hope you're right but I wouldn't bank on it yet.
Winston is still my winner ... reluctantly!
Ashleigh ought to be the eventual winner. And Helen needs to be disenfranchised. And Mark needs a tranquilliser while Ash needs his embers stoked.

24.7.14

Marion wrote: This is all a thousand mles away from what BB used to be.

Bent and twisted BB politics have never before spiralled so far toward a rotten core concocted from otherwise generally good and decent folk. A mutant gestalt from manipulated disparateness.

25.7.14
The question is - are Pav and Zoe REALLY more than averagely Machiavellian or simply perceived to be such by their credentials outside the house reported on by ex-Hms?
Am I myself Machiavellian or am I simply me? I shall never perhaps know for certain as one's objectivity is clouded by modern communication and reality TV.


26.7.14
Agree with all that, Marion. Thanks.
I also quite enjoyed Super Cassandra's intermittent sound-bites about the book 1984.
Meanwhile, we assume from his interview that Steven's Missionary fell short of Orwell.

27.7.14

Marion wrote: And more to the point, how will this play to the voting public?
Will they believe in Helen's Great Reformation? Will they see Chris as two faced or very clever?
It's a very dangerous game he's playing.

You have identified there today's big 21st century question. Only we know what we are like inside, and even then we may be wrong.

27.7.14 (later)
Completely out of the blue and without obvious context, Winston tonight asked Chris about the Illuminati. Chris, in a deadpan fashion, replies quite seriously about the Illuminatus connection with The Big Brother show which he and Winston are currently experiencing. At last, I realise why I have been watching and commenting here upon Big Brother for the last ten years.

28.7.14

Marion wrote: The task tonight was a dance off between teams, Street Elite and Foor Soldiers. Natually Zoe was the coach. This is the second task to showcase her theatrical skills. And no HM ever criticises her although by rights she should be under the same cloud as Pav.Hmmm...Is her Dad a member of the Illuminati?[...] She's [Helen] really on her BB journey now - very near rehabilitated. It must be the work of the Illuminati.

It was simply the way ponderously half-a-sandwich Winston (Young Churchill lookalike) brought up the Illuminati subject himself out of the blue that convinced me. It didn't seem to have a context. It just was.
As to Mark complaining to God if his eyebrows, hair-straighteners etc. weren't up to scratch in Heaven, and saying that Jesus would help him. I foresaw odalisque Danielle up there, too, somehow, tending to Heavenly affairs....



28.7.14 (later)
Zoe leading the others in the Sign of the Illuminati?

29.7.14
Thanks, Marion. Some knotty dilemmas there, like the motives of Chris vis-à-vis Pav vis-à-vis Ashleigh. And Mark's half-baked psychic powers... a tapping into some tutelary muse whose spiritual Wi-Fi is faulty? Or some Illuminati plot mis-channelled through Mark as decoy?
Pav to go on Friday.

PS Did Winston get his words mixed up, i.e. that when saying 'Illuminati', he really meant 'immunity'?

How could I have possibly forgotten till now? Amazing!!
Winston is also the name of the main protagonist in Orwell's 1984!

CONTINUED HERE

Eventernal Slumber

Any of my WordPress sites marked as private can be reached by other WordPress users by inserting their normal details then clicking ‘request access’. This easy one-off process applies separately to each of my dozen WordPress sites during their Eventernal Slumber.

Ligotti's Didacticism

I would say that, in fiction literature, apparent didacticism is either purposeful and intense and sincere OR it is puckish or a narrative trick or unreliable/(non)-collusive. Sometimes a bit of both. After reading Thomas Ligotti's THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE, I have gained the impression that his fiction has become more like the former than the latter.

On a general level, I know that at least part of me somewhat resonates with anti-Natalism and its sensibility - and I would think that a 'l'art pour l'art' approach is something that suits any expected short-termism of finite life, making one relish the hedonistic and visionary as a bankable asset before existence is snatched away in pain or darkness. On the other hand, didacticism or a roman-a-clef approach seems more thrusting, more daring for the the future, proving a point, however negative that point is, a point that will outlast us.

My WordPress Sites

For any interested, my WordPress sites, other than the real-time review site, have closed down for a Sabbatical and an intended reconstruction, but all their current content and links will be preserved unchanged. Currently, you may enter these sites by requesting access if you are a WordPress registered user. Nobody will be refused.*

During this period, if you can’t find a continuation part of any review, you may be able to find it by searching here: http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com

Also you can always obtain from me, duly signed, the complete printed text in book form of any of my past Real-Time Reviews – or direct from the printer at Lulu. Details here: http://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/rtrs-as-books/
Non profit to me.

*all you need to do is sign in normally as a WordPress user and then, on the next page, click ‘request access’.

Big Brother - Summer 2014 (2)

CONTINUED FROM HERE


23.6.14
Toya scared the nation last night. A goaded zombie apocalypse where brain was replaced by fire.
But my real dislike is for four men: Steven, Winston, Ash and Marlin.
Meanwhile we can only hope that Matthew can tame the storm with which he is partnered.
Read HERE Marion's account of it. Love or hate what happened last night, this is real television. The only programme I watch. At other times, I sink back into the safe arms of 'classical' music. Still, I am sporadically reading Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann at the moment, wherein there is, inter alia, a long diary room conversation with the Devil...literally.

24.6.14
There has never been anyone like Toya on BB before --- deranged and articulate, but with flashes of wisdom, evoking soap opera type dramas with other housemates in turn, e.g. hen-spitting with Corrie-like Helen and tunnelling into the emotions of Danielle and shafting Marlin etc.
And as Hell breaks loose around her, Ashleigh quaintly paints her nails.
Well, Steve has been let off, so my vote for eviction on Friday goes to Marlin, with Winston and Ash close behind. Toya, now up for eviction herself, whatever you think of her, needs to stay!

25.6.14
Toya Story
A more conducive atmosphere last night.
Toya kept calling herself Hurricane Toya in the diary room - an attempt at self-branding. She would have been better using Tornado Toya, as she tends to zip from one housemate to another in turn and twists each one out of or into shape, depending how you look at it. She remains, whatever the case, a powerful, articulate, if sometimes deranged, feminine (potentially maternal) force, a positive step up from Pauline, but strangely similar.
Danielle, perhaps because she is up for eviction this Friday, loosens up, in more ways than one. I'm not sure which Danielle I prefer, but there is something strange about her. She emitted the 'Jesus Christ!' expletive at one point, which is something that Catholics strictly avoid, in my experience. Also her job as glamour model (wanting to do a double shoot with Kimberly when they get out) seems to sit uneasily with her explicit religion and with her (staged?) recurring shock at anything even slightly rude? And her act with the cigarette also seemed staged.

26.6.14
I think it was cheap and artificially provocative for BB to allow some of the nominations to be seen by the other housemates.This will deter future, supposedly private, nominations from being frankly expressed.
It is a nightmarish prospect for the housemates as well as the viewing public to be saddled permanently with Helen. Hell on Earth.
We can only hope she will transgress again and then be thrown out.

27.6.14

Marion wrote: Jale helped find Winston's spirit guide - she's beautiful and golden and has a bow and arrow. Jale thinks she's an angel. Winston looked quite impressed.

This deadpan description by Winston allows me to forgive him for at least some of his more usual Winstonness. At first I thought he was describing Marion's twirling avatar on THIS thread...until mention of the large breasts.
By the way, does Winston look a bit like the Young Churchill? I think he might:-


Quote: In the DR, Matthew discussed Helen. A gem -'I lose intellect when I talk to her.'
He's in the right and on the moral high ground, but he is SO supercilious you want to shove him off.
But I love his superciliousness.
And then we have another attempt at becoming Marion's spinning avatar:
Quote: Christopher's workout, more like the dance of the sugarplum fairy, was hilarious.
And, the BB brilliant breakfast? The foulest thing ever seen on TV (beyond any Horror genre concoction) and one could actually smell it through the screen in a direct-current of empathy with those reacting and retching to it.
Marlon to go tonight.

28.6.14
Well, Young Winston survived! Ready to be our saviour regarding the World Wars of the macro future. (See photo above).
However, Tornado Toya fizzled by the wayside and this is a shame and a surprise. She had shown much, on the whole constructive, potential within the future conflicts of this micro House itself. But it wasn't to be.
She maintained her fighting spirit to the end and performed well in the post-match interview. Violent lipstick and all. (How could she be evicted ahead of such spear-carriers as Ash and Marlon?).
Still, a sign of hope. The new Power is in the lined-up distaff forces of the Warriors of Love against the grizzled males, and these include an at least temporarily immune-from-eviction Jale: with her get-out-of-jail-free card -- which is probably a thin-end-of-the-wedge precedent by Big Brother to make Hellon Earth (Pauline's legacy of a curse) immune from her own immunity next week ... and, judging by last night's chants of the masses outside - those Canetti Crowds of Power themselves - Helen will then be jettisoned within the slice of a wink! We can only hope so. Excise the blight, I say!

29.6.14
Not much to add to Marion's latest report, other than to report that I have now settled on a prediction as to this season's eventual winner.
Taking into account all factors of evidence I can muster, I sense it will be Winston.
Believing that this person will be the eventual winner fills me with dismay, and we are not quite yet a third of the way through the series.

30.6.14

Marion wrote HERE: Danielle had to run a Finishing School for Gentlemen. She was got up like a Miss Prim and proper Victorian with amazing spes. The first task for the gentleman was to write a poem dedicated to one of the girls. Winston gallantly rapped a stream of personal filth and was told he was too forwar if he wanted to be a gentleman of any calibre.

Actually, Danielle seemed rather to relish Winston's doggerel that teetered on the edge of Swift or Pope for a modern age. Not that it was to my taste. She was far harder on the other men. I fear Winston has a spell that transcends...

1.7.14

Marion wrote: Chris in the DR was fed up with conspiracy. He believes Steve, Ash, Winston and Marlon will be saved. Steve - who has no investement in other people, who is like a clock that, after you buy it, asks you the time rather than tells you it. 

An interesting observation by Chris, that Steven talks to people only in questions. Is this new business-speak for the managerial entrepreneur like Steven these days? Actually, Steven Goode has long been my least favourite housemate, for reasons I can't really pinpoint. Helen is at least straightforwardly awful.
Quote: All in all, it's a very unhappy house. Only Helen's removal will cure it.
As I said before, we now have the precedent of the Pauline-permanencies being waive-able for a week, i.e. in the case of Jale. Why not with Helen, too?
And thanks, Marion, for defending masculinity from the broadbrush of the Marlon template!

2.7.14

Marion wrote: Just when you least expect it, a near perfect show. full of the little gems we crave.
I completely agree. The best BB show ever!
Can't add anything to THIS perfect report by Marion. Escapegoat, and all.
(I've never seen 'The Game of Thrones'.)

3.7.14

Yesterday, I wrote that I agreed it was a great show the night before. This time, I disagree.
Although there were some more telling insights with the masked ball as a tableau being got up well, the staged nature of the questions and answers from the archetypal zombie dead and the whole task itself, all very silly. I kept imagining the many make-up artists and other BB staff involved in tutoring the housemates in what do and how to do it (eg Mark suddenly turning up, carefully prepared, as a turbaned psychic) - why don't they film all that preparation? What behaviour is exposed during rehearsals etc. for what we eventually see? In the old days, the housemates were strictly isolated from any other people, except just the voice of BB in the diary room.

4.7.14

Marion wrote: I think everything is staged now -

...including, last night, with a budding clutch of fauxmances bedding in for the duration. I can't pretend to understand some of the machinations going on and even the TV's subtitles of what the HMs were saying didn't seem to help me. I can only hope Marion understands what's going on. All I know, is that Ashleigh is becoming a strong character and Kimberly less of a strong character, as if a form of symbiosis is draining one and feeding the other. And, despite his cerebral shortcomings, Winston remains, with some dismay on my part, the disarming jack-the-lad future winner of the series.

5.7.14

I was disappointed that Ash didn't leave last night.
As I speculated much earlier in this thread, ("...there is something strange about her. She emitted the 'Jesus Christ!' expletive at one point, which is something that Catholics strictly avoid, in my experience. Also her job as glamour model (wanting to do a double shoot with Kimberly when they get out) seems to sit uneasily with her explicit religion and with her (staged?) recurring shock at anything even slightly rude? And her act with the cigarette also seemed staged."), Danielle is not what she seems.
Meanwhile, Steven IS what he seems, and should leave, even before Marlon and Ash and Helen. A half-baked jammy dodger.

6.7.14

Marion wrote: She's an ex of dexter koh. That tells you everything. I find it fascimating the way the imp peeps out from behind the prim facade.

I'd forgotten that Danielle is an Ex of Dexter from last year's BB. She is either a complete impostor as strict creationist Catholic as well as Prude or just a bit of one?
I agree that Helen's topiary of Christopher seemed rather naughty. Meanwhile, to her credit, beneath it all, she is not as inarticulate as some of her swearing 'bitchy' forerunners in BB over the years.

7.7.14
Although the Santa scenario showed Christopher in a good light and threw Helen off-balance, the scenario itself grated on my nerves. I have nothing to add to another of Marion's hilarious and all-encompassing reports.

8.7.14
Marion wrote: At lights out in the bedroom, we saw rather more passion than is BB's wont or than we want to see.
Agreed. And the TV subtitles - used for my aging ears - seemed to indicate something shocking that Ash and Helen were doing. I shall be having a rest from watching BB for a while.

9.7.14
Marion wrote: So where are we? Contact from the outside world affecting the action in the house. The DR no longer a safe place to express one's feelings so BB mght as well close it for good.
Where are we? We are nowhere, with nowhere to go. Can't even have a private conversation without BB showing the others.

10.7.14
As Jale said meaningfully: "There are no innocent parties here."
Meanwhile, Marlon has never been one of my favourites but there was something strangely endearing about his reflex innocence amid devious guilt.

11.7.14
Yes, Danielle was hilarious last night. And Chris's appraisal of Marlon is spot on. I suspect that all private conversations and DR discussions are now much more guarded than they would have otherwise been without BB compromising them so radically in the last week or so. Hence, the 'Yawn'.

12.7.14
The question arises - as well the rhythmic see-saw of his duvetted rear - whether Steven was miming, possibly in cahoots with Kimberly... My bet he was. For something other than sexual satisfaction. Every thing was so dry and clinical.
I can't believe I am talking about this. Time for another rest.
And the other pantomimer, one of religious and prudish catchphrasing, Danielle, appeared in a Channel 5 programme trailer about girl webcammers, within BB's adverts! Presumably this was a programme that was filmed before she went into the BB house?
I think Cassandra should win BB. Know who she is?
(later)
Marion says here: I found an article this morning saying that Kim's ex is to enfer the house, along with an enemy of Helen and one of Ash's. It's going to be explosive. Cafefully staged with Steven and Kim in on it?
Look at. Ashleigh - everyone sure she was going and surpris surprise she didn't. BB injecting a little drama?
Has a subterranean script being written? The Kim/Steven scenario has been leading up to the explosion.
Tomorrow a HM will be evicted with no public vote - all we can be sure of is that it won't be Ash, Helen, Steven or Kim.
BB began as a social experiment. It still is, but of a different kind: how much drivel can the public swallow?

Thanks for that Marion.
I'm definitely off for a summer break now!
Thanks for all your finely witty and truthful reports.

13.7.14
Thanks, Marion. I did gird my loins again last night and I was satisfied that the person that I disliked most from the start of the series is more and more showing me why I thought that.  But even so one can't judge character through a screen of any sort, especially when they could be role playing and especially when we only see edited bits of their behaviour. It's like reading about a villain in a novel who turns out to be a hero.
It's not the real or enacted sex that worries me either; it's the way it's being used by the people involved and by those editing their performance.

14.7.14
Did I hear right? Did Helen tonight describe the blue barrel raft that she helped build in the task as 'Avant Garde'?


Another fine examination of the whorls and spirals of the thumbprint of the House. Thanks, Marion.
For thumbprint, read: the changing gestalt of the real and mock treaties between some and others and then others and some - the google-seeking and manoeuvring by the modern webcame boys and girls who have upped or downed their game under the gaze of National TV.

15.7.14

Marion says: I do long for the old days when they nominated and we decided.
I go along with that!
Anyway, a BB reshuffle running parallel with David Cameron's Cabinet reshuffle happening at this very moment! Armageddon indeed!

16.7.14
"Powerful, Babe, powerful!" says Bianca. I think BB has sunk to new lows with this character, and that's saying something! BB no longer deploys human behaviour; it now negatively manipulates it toward a lowest denominator.

17.7.14
I think Super Cassandra should replace the whole show with her snap intros.
I knew there was something fishy about Danielle when she once used the 'Jesus Christ!' expletive. No Catholic would have done that.
This programme has now gone ultra vires if not ultramontane. I am speechless. Biannca Lake - note the double n.

CONTINUED HERE

The Duke's Revenge (rewritten)

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. Light from the moon 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 this was seen from the hindsight of the darkest grave. Everything fitted the predicted pattern, but there was nobody who could actually have predicted it. Someone must have predicted it by planning it - and that would have been the one who was at the centre of this whole 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 groaned every time it was lifted or lowered, and that only happened once according to the undependable official records. But no doubt the drawbridge had worked a second time, 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 moonlight would be dowsed by clouds, to avoid locking eyes with any passing strangers.
He recalled one particular night when, leaving the palace, 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. Something with a new-found ambition to wield an astrological power.
For the first time, the Duke could clearly see the grains of the earth that loosely formed the ground upon which he walked and these were incredibly as separate as Patna rice grains.
But was this caused by a previous dream of waking up in a grave as a premature burial - with his face covered in earth, the individual components of its dirt crowding into his eyes like coarse grains themselves?

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, these people who looked after him. 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 - with their often flourishing into orchids ... sometimes, though, with their otiosely unfurling into weeds instead. Part of the game was to guess what organism 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 - making it seem 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 illumination was often the plant's fragile moonlight 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. This creating of gaps would reveal -- to those idly passing by, not realising this was a burial plot -- a dim yellow glow seeping from lower in the ground. But hardly anyone passed that way again to see it shining.
Meanwhile, the Duke's palace became a backstreet hostel, one with a dormitory, ranked darkly along each inner wall with mounds of over-used mattresses, these sleeping berths for a new breed of downandouts, ex-civil servants, B-list Royals and other hanger-ons. A sort of revenge. Whether it was the Duke's revenge or the Moon's, the results were the same. A creak and a groan, each time someone came or someone left.

Genes With Their Gloves Off

My expression: Genes with their Gloves off - to describe the incredibly powerful American Pastoral by Philip Roth