Wednesday, June 17, 2015

The King in Yellow Tales, Vol. 1

The King in Yellow Tales, Vol. 1

 
kiy

THE KING IN YELLOW TALES, VOL. 1 : by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

Lovecraft Ezine Press, 2015

I have just received this book as purchased from Amazon UK.

My previous real-time review of ‘The King in Yellow’ by Robert W. Chambers HERE
…and of the work of Joe Pulver as linked from HERE.

I intend to real-time review this book and, when I do, you will be able to find it in the thought stream below or by clicking on this post’s title above.

32 thoughts on “The King in Yellow Tales, Vol. 1”

  1. A LINE OF QUESTIONS
    An achingly recurrent tontine of a poem in Dim Carcosa, I say.
    image
    “What comes after the lost song?”
    My answer is: The Last Song.
    A threnody of ‘Dissolution’s endless melody” – as are the Four Last Songs…
    “It’s a marvellously important advance beyond the tonal and graphic subtleties of Richard Strauss.”
    as Robert W. Chambers wrote in his ‘The Common Law’ about this very poem that hadn’t yet been written then. It was just waiting to be asked, I guess.
    Reply
  2. CHOOSING
    “Too frightened to look back, I never saw her last look.”
    This CASian short short, mixed with CATHRian entropy in ancient ages as man’s loved ones are chosen, involuntarily becoming brides for those higher in the pecking order, never to be seen again. With fear closer than one’s shadow, this tale resonates in tune with the poem just read, aptly another form of tontine. Death, meanwhile, is the ultimate prize in a parallel pecking order of sacrifice.
    Reply
  3. THE ‘CARL LEE & CASSILDA’ TRILOGY
    CARL LEE & CASSILDA
    “Have no fear, Sweet Princess. I’ll find you. I’ll find a way through this maze of lies. I’ll find the road to Carcosa.”
    Escaping, I sense, like I shall have to sense, rather than KNOW (how can any reviewer be in the author’s brain?), from a Tarr and Fether type asylum, from a Dr Archer, but who knows which the doctor which the patient, which the author which the patient reader, where a book, like this one, is also like a Tarr and Fether type text, and you don’t know which you are as you do not give up seeking one’s loved one from the previous story, by unlocking the tontine… To reveal more unrequitedness here in sharp, abrasive prose urban noir, with phrases that join brain with brain by a mixture of phonetics, graphology, semantics and syntax. But all with the security of meaning that one feels from the resonation with the original Lethal Chambers whence this sensibility was transferred here to The King in ‘Yellow Tales’.
    Reply
  4. AN AMERICAN TANGO ENDING IN MADNESS
    “The line of questions comes.”
    Question after question, as before, with Fredric’s “financial holdings’ calling… Imagine a tontine (where the sole survivor from a group gets the whole prize) that has now turned from such urban noir ruthlessness to an ancient city’s tocsin on the point of ringing with another choice of whores, engorged on scents after the freeing of nipples. As Dr Archer’s other patient Susan (who it is hinted is to hold dialogue across these eras in this trilogy’s third part with the patient from the first part?) joins a rich panoply of images – suicide chambers, masks, sculptors, dances, unbuttoned buttons, demons, angels et al – a panoply that takes hold of your brain as if the original book of a King in yellow text has become entangled with it in some fuckin’ avant garde swindig. The Carcosa Syndrome, notwithstanding. A shameful patrimony.
    Reply
  5. HELLO IS A YELLOW KISS
    “We will sit in the Room of Yellow Curtains before the fireplace and with the evening painted all around us we will read of the thirst in times past as the wings of black moths whisper their melodies to us . . . And we will play as angels and demons play . . . Come home from your star-chasing in dream-time. I offer you my hand.”
    Beautiful… This third part of the trilogy, I return to my real-time review of this author’s ‘The Orphan Palace’ HERE and everything I said there comes home to roost in today’s retrocausal experience that also features Dr Archer and this trilogy seems to have been written earlier. Even the reminder of my mention, in that real-time review on 29 October 2011, of the evil Jimmy Savile, written by me on that day he died before we knew he was evil. Time knitted with time, a Cardigan has buttons to unbutton to reveal Archer within, Susan knitted with Cassilda, Fredric with Carl, mask with mask. The Carcosa Syndrome.
    Amid this foul-mouthed text there are many gems erupting like pearl-shaped nightmares. I love this text as much as I hate it, even while I sense some pulverised distillation of RWC’s KiY being jabbed into my ageing brain.
    Which of us will survive the tontine first? Those ‘whispering bells’ as the tocsin or toxin from the Orphan Palace?
    “How many times in our sessions did I tell you a person can change his or her mask, for it is merely an expression posed above the neckline, a script or color if you like, we change to suit the needs of the day, but our eyes never lie?”
    “The next question appears.”
    Reply
  7. THE LAST FEW NIGHTS IN A LIFE OF FROST
    “In and out of grey open wounds those trying not to die call cities; ”
    There is something that makes Pulver prose pulverse, set out on the page like accretive poetry, one staccato line after another, while earlier they had spread and coiled from line to line like freed enjambement, like those lines of questions towards tontine’s end. Here, we feel we are choosing not deliberately but in some other form to go from one bit motel to one bit motel, reading a continuous serial of separate diaries in bold print from brassy vocative whores, as if the bold print of the page numbers, KING IN YELLOW TALES I and JOSEPH S. PULVER, SR. become implicated with the main text. Follow the directions, one says, I recall. Something about this pulverse that makes you think you’re missing something while you’re reading each story but when you finish you feel replete with full meaning as if by skilful osmosis, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Choices, questions, triangulations of coordinates, leitmotifs making a sudden gestalt, that approaching tontine’s end, via tocsins, toxins, testes, townships and tensions. Motion by stopovers. Or motels.
    Reply
    • Synchronously, HERE, the day following the above review of The Last Few Nights in the Life of Frost, I have reviewed a poem by Robert Frost in the real-time review I happen to be concurrently conducting with this one. Perhaps this is an indication that there is some mileage to comparing The Great God Pan with the King in Yellow?
      Reply
  8. CHASING SHADOWS
    “; its text more than stirring, almost hypnotic.”
    This is truly exquisite, exstatic – I think the more you delve into pulverse, the stronger the osmosis becomes, if that’s what it is. This story has sheer moments or shards of literary synchronicity deliberate as well as accidental; not only is it imbued with the soul of RWC’s KiY but also with a book I’ve read and reviewed very recently HERE, another book with ‘Vol.1′ actually embedded in its title on page, cover and spine, but now, with my having read about the ‘raw waterfall’ in this story, the pervasive rain, and also with Pulver’s whole book’s style of textual graphology, and much more that is slowly dawning on me, I suspect that The Familiar, Vol.1, is familiar with Chambers’ KiY as well as with Pulver’s work, and it decided – without its author’s conscious collusion? – to help embroider that ‘world’ together, different though each input is. Chambers and Pulver with avant garde masks on.
    The continued picaresque unrequited-love and wandering — from a mad viola composition to a procession and a tavern etc., through torment and torture (words used in this story) and another line of questions towards its beginning — are all shaping this book’s gestalt. Its ever-recurring choice (“in crashing repetitions”) of who survives not only the wandering but also the rich reading of it. Or am I just chasing shadows?
    “Atmospheres of possible sprang up like civilizations only to fall into ruin.”
    Reply
  9. imageLAST YEAR IN CARCOSA
    “The way the lines sit on the page.”
    That familiar textual graphology again and, here, a haunting theme and variations upon viewing Last Year at Marienbad – yes, on a rainy afternoon. The same rainy afternoon.
    You as Uoht, the tontine’s prize, I suggest. Mirrors and guns. Black stars.
    “(Then–) Vivian? (once crossed the room . . .)
    Then–) Delphine? (once crossed the room . . .)
    Then–) Clarissa? (once crossed the room . . .)”
    “The choices—a hundred silent autumns on her lips . . .”
    Reply
  10. AN ENGAGEMENT OF HEARTS
    “Cordelia Pierpont Buchanan’s face was flushed, her eyes moist with salt tears. Outside, beyond the patterned lace from the Continent which accented the windows of her comfortable home, rain from thick gray clouds hid the vista of bright-flowered Washington Square.”
    THIS has long been my vision, now re-ignited by that above quote, of Cordelia’s Face – (can you see a face HERE, as I can, lightly imprinting the glass of the framed picture? (and please also read the attaching comment stream to that old post of mine)). And, indeed, this new pulverse I’ve just read seems imbued with John Cowper Powys as well as Marcel Proust, but, above all, and the strongest such imbual so far in this book, it is imbued with the King in Yellow, a book of its play with French title now being used as a weapon (a book with a dangerously preternatural gestalt that a DREAMCATCHER real-time review like this one is required so as properly to tease it out), a weapon in the tontine being fought between Cordelia as CASSILDA and Denis and E—- and the other Bohemian sculptors and hangers-on all of whom, with one name or another, populate Chambers’ Music of words….
    “Cordelia walked along the manicured promenades, from fiancé’s grave to fiancé’s grave to fiancé’s grave, placing a single, wilted yellow rose upon each marker.”
    [Above story read and reviewed while listening to Richard Strauss.]
    Reply
  11. CORDELIA’S SONG
    “Yet another dream broken. Yet another lover unfaithful.”
    This engaging poem with that once repeated refrain seems an explicatory coda to the previous story. It pleasingly seems to confirm my general interpretation.
    Reply
  12. SAINT NICHOLAS HALL
    “for Michael Cisco”
    “Three years of his life chasing it. Pushing other things, the things of friendship and life, aside, he moved further towards the edge. Before–THEN . . . There was a morning of bells.”
    The Tocsin for the Journey of Torment and Love’s Unrequited Tontine continues, with a sense of Eyes Wide Shut towards Proust’s Parasol Villa or Poe’s Masque house in Marienbad or Carcosa. There are too many phrases or sentences I could quote as examples of the ever-resonating Pulverse. Each one to cherish, chew upon or spit out but do I have time? This is Yester Park; the King en Jawn not Jaune (see ‘Yesterfang’). Also this is Pan as Shepherd of the Leapfrog not the Lea.
    “Every soul loses small pieces of itself on the way to The Rendezvous.”
    Reply
  13. A SPIDER IN THE DISTANCE
    “Shadows chilled in endless hours reached for flesh and bone.”
    Sometimes, Pulverse itself seems at ……………. a distance. But that adds to Its numinous ability to change name for name, face for face, mask for mask, in this eternal questine. Yes, QUESTINE. You heard it here first. A line of questines makes a complete tontine.
    And this story is at such a distance that, when it comes back at you, it has longer to pick up lethal speed. Full of mistiaeval interactions and underground chambers and the theakerine spider past which one cannot see.
    Reply
  14. UNDER THE MASK ANOTHER MASK
    “All the blind spots of The City filled with chaos metamorphosed into simple struggle for the fragments trying to outrun the tomb, and every minute–day after day after day–losing speed . . .”
    Like the spaced-out ellipses in this book’s typesetting often running from line to line.
    “…a heated experiment of phantom soliloquies…”
    Someone has looked at my Cordelia’s Face post linked above and told me they can now see her face. I have looked at this story and I can now see its lower mask. I have yet to see this book’s face upon the arrival of this story’s ‘repairer’ – also a repairer of leitmotifs into a gestalt shape that means something?
    “From each death The King’s misery narrows.”
    “It’s a network of hard lines and bitter deeps, a clenched masquerade drifting until it comes upon a heartbeat.”
    “This is The Night of On and On, the end of errors. It eats light and weaves it into stories of rain.”
    My advice to new readers of Pulverse: the more you read its texts, the more you get out of its yet-to-be-read-texts along the path of your own literary tontine. This book is bearing that out. I am still absorbing this story into the sump. It’s full of lines that hit you. And scenes that shock you and remain tantalisingly on the brink of catharsis.
    Reply
  15. EPILOGUE FOR TWO VOICES
    “I remember the / whisper of a petticoat on my / fingertips . . . There was no / frost then.”
    A Pulverse-drama between Thale and The Masked Stranger that sporadically reminds me of verse drama by TS Eliot (who surely must have read KiY) and of the ferryman scenes in Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel The Buried Giant (surely Ishiguro must have read Pulver) and something completely its own source where even KiY cannot reach to read.
    Reply
    • And incredibly (later)…
      YVRAIN’s ‘BLACK DANCERS’
      …this work – under the hand of BORIS YVRAIN in the company of DR. ARCHER – produces sculpture worthy of the world of the Geat God Pan and that ‘interpretation’ of mine about the ‘tattered cape’ sentence in ‘The Yellow Sign’…and much more.
      I wanted to quote bits from this astonishing work, but decided I would have to quote it all!
      Reply
  17. THE SONGS CASSILDA SHALL SING, WHERE FLAP THE TATTERS OF THE KING
    “Before the shrine 5 came. Then 6 became 9, 2 more over there. & 5 off to the left near the maw of the alley. Now 20 or more waiting.”
    This is Susan –> Lily, off in the noir Ginsberg HOWL urban alleyways, eager to not only hear but also be deafened by CASSILDA singing earthcore-heavy music with her group ‘The Society of the Yellow Sign’ or SYS for short. Avant-parodic tour de force of whole and broken words that, often bold-fontly, hit each other as well as hitting you. No review can outdo this text with its own text. Not even this one I’m doing now. Imagine something that I can’t make my words imagine off their own back and you have some idea what is in this Pulver text. Everyone of us living on the whole globe seem to be earmarked by the text’s manipulated lethal tontine.
    This work is beyond even its own “complex amalgam of pagan delirium and death.” Beyond even the worst unimaginable acts imagined (or identified and criminalised) by today’s Social Media. It is beyond PANIC and HAVOC. Dare I say, without irony, it is beyond anything conceivable by fiction itself!
    “Where flap the tatters of the King . . . / The coiled thread unravels–“
    Reply
  18. THE SKY WILL NOT FALL
    “…and I believed in nets and remedies. I was quick to reply about the consequence of crime and argue necessity and the value of living beings.”
    Indeed the sky will not fall … until it does.
    This feels to me like a touching, wrenching threnody upon personal family matters as both variously illuminated and darkened by a number of references or ‘objective correlatives’ – provided by the text of the King in Yellow book – used not as executive toys or rosary beads but as transcending DREAMCATCHERS.
    “I left. There were graves to dig.”
    Reply
  19. TARK LEFT SANTIAGO
    “(for Karl Edward Wagner)”
    “One more for the line. One more road to push it out on. Let it walk. See how far it would go. And if it lead anywhere.”
    Like those earlier serial diaries from motel to motel, totem to totem, we follow this non-stalker who follows a woman and she turns out to be a missed out paragraph, or is it him?, via various pages of a book, some blank, where the words themselves are the noir journey that he negotiates between littered exhausted vowels, Hikdred Catsigne typos, Macbeth’s margins, unbuttoned nipples of vocabulary, the synaptic syntaxes, the Danielewski (brackets).
    Reply
  20. MARKS AND SCARS AND FLAGS
    “Why does she fear the stars? / They’re too far away to leave scars.”
    A telling parallel to the previous story, I guess, where the letters, vowels, typos are here replaced by a universe of stars and moons for the woman’s follower or ‘questiner’ to negotiate. As Above, So Below. This is the totem of the tontine, I say.
    Reply
  21. LONG-STEMMED GHOST WORDS
    “Let my skin be your road.”
    …and that toward this story’s end presents, for me, a sort of retrocausal coming together of stalker and stalked who then go on dates – but who is whom, with changing names, underpinned by countless KiY objective correlatives. The previous two stories’ ‘writing in the stars’ in interface with ‘the writing as letters and typos’ (in this story the chosen typo is the poet ‘Rikle’) here become the writing on her flesh. I think she realises he is a famous writer who plays in the KiY world with his words. Yet there is the most incredibly described BLOODcrash at their interface after which she ends up in hospital. This book’s tontine is relentless. As is the language relentless. Here in this story the words are in overdrive, with thousands of richly crepitating phrases, just one of which you would genuinely remember forever if it were alone on the page and not crammed together with other such vying memorable phrases. The fact they are writ on her flesh is an added diversion, too.
    Reply
  22. IN THIS DESERT EVEN THE AIR BURNS
    “Everything out here looked like it was once headed to someplace else. It just never got there.”
    Lying in another motel room, the man is now old, like me, full of regrets about that multi-named woman whom this book often calls CASSILDA, regrets that the writing hasn’t yet found its optimum surface to be enscribed about her or on her.
    “Then close got closer and things got blown into a million pieces. Rock yer baby. And she rocked you. And there was paper. And scissors. No one won. And a million miles had passed.”
    With that core passage, tonight, I sense the book ends? The rest is coda? Or empty ebook? We shall see, another day, when I pick up this seminal book again. A book, if it were smaller, would fit into my pocket wherever I should go.
    Should I get to the end of this book, tomorrow, or the day after, or never, I will be the winner of its tontine, because the stories, each of them one by one, will have expired, gone into some sump called memory, the line of ‘questines’ ended, and I will be left standing, alone, with all its spoils in my head. And you will be gone. All manner of things will be gone.
    Reply
  23. PERFECT GRACE
    “In their silent midnight shoes . . . they discard the frost.”
    imageMy morning after. “Troubadour sweet.” Perfect grace. ‘Under the face under the face.’
    As I now enter beyond or behind the mask of this book, I have found this book’s face, but have I reached the face under the face? We, as part of its continuing questine or tontine, need to scry this hypnotic text of staccato refrains or incantations. Hollow-men TS Eliot filled with Pulverse.
    And grey distances in the rain. “Soft yellow blouse unbuttoned . . .” As well as the spaced-out ellipses, we now happen to be given, to compensate, as it were, many unspaced-out full.stops in this text. “Me.me.”
    “Lips touching. Ears, lost in the ritual of echoes. Ringing from the distant dust.welcoming dust.”
    Reply
  24. MY MIRAGE
    “Toying with the wet footprints she leaves being letters or changing into them. Neon maybe, red or orange with blurry green borders? They may spell vacancy?'”
    In these rough sketches or rushes for a Pulver-kaleidoscopic story about David Lynch by name himself approaching a writer who admires Lynch’s ‘Inland Empire’ to work on the rushes and rough sketches for a cinema film of Chambers’ ‘King in Yellow’, I am also reminded again of ‘The Familiar’ Vol. 1 by Danielewski (2015) with all its single Ulysses-like day of constant rain with its texts that often look like rain and its small Alice in Inland? And pre-Pizzolatto finger-plucking in this 2012 published story (I am a true literary detective as well as dreamcatcher)… “After del Toro’s hit with Lovecraft, David said it was a good time to do something from an old weird fiction writer, but he didn’t want horror-horror. You know how he loves to get in people’s heads.”
    [And they served some damn fine coffee in the Tontine Coffee House I’m told. My past view HERE about TWIN PEAKS and FINNEGANS WAKE may be relevant.]
    Reply
  25. MOTHER STANDS FOR COMFORT
    “The night, colored with the throat and roads of goodbye, had come. It brought rain and other things . . .”
    An apotheosis of reconcilement physically and spiritually between this book’s distaff and its spear.
    Survivor takes all. Eye of the tiger.
    Reply
    • A COLD YELLOW MOON
      by Edward R. Morris Jr. and Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
      “For Adam Niswander, a truly inspiring voyager!!!!!!!!!! !”
      “THE CARNIVAL OF TIGERS NOW SLEEPS.”
      But not until laying myself open to an extensively rolling madcap Coda to this book, a collaborative Yellowpunk whirligig of Tesla, Moby Dick, Jules Verne, youthful Southern Reach scientific politics and what I see as my own concept of ‘CERN Zoo’ as a Large Hadron collision with my even madder, now derelict ‘Weirdmonger Wheel’ complex and with a ‘Nemonymous Night’ journey toward the self … All written in a pidgin form of multi-graphological Weirdtongue!
      Loved it.
      Yellowpunk, you heard it here first. Well, perhaps not.
      Reply
  26. This book is Lethal Chamber Music striated among an earthcore-heavy tonnage of semantics, phonetics, syntax and graphology. I hope, by reading the whole review above, you will ‘get’ my enthusiasm for its unique pantheistic gestalt.
    It is only God who can win a tontine, of course. Not an individual deity, but a singularity of tattered-mask PANtheism constituting all us animal-humans, warts and all, cosmic nightmares and Proustian promenades alike. That is God.

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Soliloquy For Pan

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Saturday, June 13, 2015

Big Brother - Summer 2015 (2)

CONTINUED FROM HERE

MY RESPONSES TO MARION'S COMMENTS HERE

June 13:
Image

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...
"An angel's face with the devil's mouth." - Emma Willis

Image


The Black Swan is back! And no White Swan, only the March Hare with whom mutually to metamorphise. I dread the outcome.
I never really liked Brian's style,. Nikki, although being the most memorable HM, never won BB. Memorable not for good reasons, in my book. This is BB nightmare time...
Do we draw a line here? Cut our losses?

(Later):
Marion wrote: We are the Night Watch, guardians of the Wall...
I'll follow you until, together, we help to:
...save the world from it or from becoming like it or from the world actually creating it in its own current baleful image, indeed to change the world itself,
OR be present at - even help bring into being - its resurrection as a better BB, a better world,
OR, like embedded War reporters, reflect the circumstances of BB's and/or the world's demise?
Whichever the three options, it can't be too distant.

June 14: Well, it's all a plot by BB from day one, to get Helen and Marc together, and Nikki with Nick.
The chemistry - as Stephen King says: "When it's laid, it's played."
Helen in the DR calls Marc a Psycho-Rolo. She'd obviously been fed that brilliant line beforehand by her advisor.
Nikki is role-playing a crush on Nick, and does a 'classic' Nikki whining act in the DR. Over-played, though, over-laid. Saying she wants to 'sit on Nick's face' is sadly out of character.
Amusing to see Simon deluded that the public voted for him to stay.
One thing, though, Nikki IS right about Jack.

June 15: Distressing, indeed, Marion.
If these were ordinary people instead of would-be TV celebrities or entertainment business people or politicians, I might be even more distressed.
Still, thinking about it, on topic with Helen's 'wise' words, mainly because of social media etc, there are now NO ordinary people, except perhaps some of our very elderly relatives. Or no ordinary people who THINK they are ordinary. Unless ordinary is to think oneself special and entitled. And perhaps being 'ordinary' is only bearable IF one does think that.
All this leading to depression when their self-made house of cards finally falls down, as, in most cases, it will. And it ALWAYS does fall down eventually.
It is difficult - perhaps impossible - to stand outside oneself and make those sorts of judgements.
Trying to make such judgements here says a lot about me, I suppose. :oops:
I can't really feel empathy with these people, except grievance at the conniving collusions with them and at the top-down master plan to which they are subjected by Channel 5 and its advertisers.

(Later): Marion : I still pine for BB supervising evolution rather than fomenting revolution.
Perfectly expressed and justifiably felt.
I can see no way back, though. BB is now nothing but a Pogrom Panjandrum.
(And I do mean pogrom not programme.)

June 16:
Some hilarious, telling comments there, Marion. Like the batting eyelids.
I, too, thought it was cruel to taunt Jack in such fashion with presumed outside knowledge.
I was impressed with Danny and Brian last night.
Harry's turned back in the DR looked like a giant head.

Image

June 17:  Marion said: The BB voiceover at the start of the show has a new alert - the show contains scenes of aggressive confrontation.
How much better can BB get? Can we look forward to a warning that the show features a double murder and a suicide?
Beautiful Botticelli, Marion.
I was going to praise Brian, until you put doubts in my mind about his 'being out of character' in his rant. Thinking about it, you're probably right.
Chloe would have done better by calling herself the only 'ordinary' HM rather the only 'normal' one.
Marion, was your 'spoon' and 'stir it up' wordplay intentional? Either way, brilliant.
"After all, 'It's not the battle of Hastings. It's Big Brother.'" Like 'psycho-rolo', this is another good line fed to Helen by her pre-show creative advisor.
Danny to win. The only one 'in character'.
 
June 18: Everything was in extreme caricature last night. The explosive task and its classic Nikki hysteria and her rubber face expressions. Brian's flailing from wild temper to mild rapprochement. Brian and Jade role-playing with arms and legs flailing now, under the duvet. The only tone of sense last night was Helen's temperate cynical dissection of showmances. It is as if she has become not only the de facto nurturer of TV Reality Show behaviour but also, now, its critic and potential destroyer!
 
June 19: Drivel about drivel, Marion? Never! Shrewd, well-written and witty reportage about drivel, more like.
Meanwhile, I do usually enjoy the perennial 'freezing' task. This one worked particularly well in all cases, and it was good to see Pete looking so well.
I still decry outside info effectively being imparted to HMs by such a task or nominations being witnessed and/or shared face to face. The original purist BB 'hothouse' in purdah has gone forever, however. There is no way back.
And to answer your specific question, Marion. No I don't remember the Jack who entered the house as a joyously engaging Pieface. I don't think it ever existed.
 
June 20: Marion wrote: SCREAM! Image
The whole thing is a mess. I can barely watch it any more. And now we have tag nominating - last one evicted nominates X, and X later nominates Y, and Y later nominates Z... Then X,Y and Z are up for the public vote, a vote that is based on partial editing of what the public can see. And then there are gratuitous immunities...
Wasn't Victor the catalyst in the biggest fight BB has ever seen? And now he has been allowed to start another one from outside the house.

Helen to win. Image

24 June:  des2 wrote: I've managed to watch least night's. Can't resist commenting on the 'white swan' that some preternatural force has brought into the show - to save it? Hopefully, but also to defeat the black swan that is Helen. The BB tutelary gods must have read my real-time 2014 post about last summer's show: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/20 ... -or-faith/
Marion wrote: I forgot to mention something that will please Des. Last night, while Harry and Nick were having their tedious spat Marc and Nikki crossed the garden in front of them. Marc led Nikki by her upraised hand liked a courtly gallant. She turned to Nick and Harry and said, 'Marc is taking me to see my swan,', and on they passed, elegant and gracious, with no further explanation.
A mysterious and intriguing little incident, loaded with hidden meaning which remains unexplained.
Beautiful. Thanks.

29 June: Thanks, Marion, for keeping me and others up to date with your highly entertaining-in-themselves reports.
I hope to resume watching from tonight. But 'hope' doesn't quite seem the right word. Trying to dip my toe in with some trepidation, more like!

30 June: Hannibal Lecter, indeed, as well as the March Hare and Noble Savage and Modern Brat, Marc crams in mutant icons like stocking up on bread.
Harry was again last night doing 'her hand across the face' act to unlock a perfectly long-held deadpan zombie expression to reveal a smile at the end of the show.
None of these Hms inspire me. None of them ever have.
The only things that inspire me about this BB season are Marion's reports about the Hms. None of them or us deserve her. And that includes those who read her reports without responding here themselves. Or perhaps they can't obtain membership to the forum?
You were joking about McCririck, Marion, I hope!

1 July: Whatever one says about Helen and Charley (yes, I do remember her, Marion!), they have been 'successful' BB HMs, based on the evidence of either winning it or being invited back. I don't know what that says.
I didn't think I would ever say this, but McCririck was a breath of fresh air!
As to Marc, I echo everything Marion says above. To add to the list of epithets: he is also a Dangerous Path.
Meanwhile, this whole season is a NONSENSE.

2 July: I think Harry likes a spam forehead - rather than a fringe - as it is more effective in her intermittent zombie face modes.
I too can't remember Jasmine. Placed perfectly to ignite a showmance with Cristian.
The nightmare spats between Aisleyne and Marc are beyond anything that contrived theatrical drama could ever produce. Thus interesting, yet highly disturbing.
As to Joel having been given a script by BB to question Jasmine .... practice for potential Tory politician?
He seemed to get really officious about the task and its luxury food prize. A budding George Osborne.
I am hoping now that Danny will eventually be the overall winner, but I fear Marc will eventually win and become a celebrity couple with Helen.

3 July: Thanks for the two Simon&Garfunkle videos, Marion. I had to laugh at Jasmine being Mrs Robinson. Spot on.
Indeed, after Dexter was pushed off early for ineffectiveness, they brought in James Jordan for vileness to meet vileness (Marc) and to suppurate together in dark symbiosis.
But I am beginning to think that Harry is the vilest of them all. I am in turn infuriated and frightened (yes, genuinely frightened) by her expressions and behaviour. Another Dangerous Path.
(LATER) Marion wrote: I checked back to Harry's entrance to see how she has changed. I found astonishing things - firstly I had totally forgotten about Harriet's, Adjoua's and the Twins' existence, about Joel's forefront performance, and most of all about Harry's confident entrance and her latex. Here was a girl unphased by Marc or anyone. There was no sign of the seething thunderousness of her nature. She has been ground down by the fact that what wins her approval with her clients does not transfer to people in the house. Nick has proved a weak vessel, a 'lover' who makes her the butt of his jokes. The situation is entirely out of her control.Her fragile self esteem (she went from being homeless to buying her own home, her proudest boast) has been destroyed and anger that people don't value her consumes her. She cuts a pathetic figure.
Not vile, therefore. I take that back. More unhinged by what BB has done to her.

4 July: "A sort of Much Ado About Nothing without the blank verse and with an undemanding vocabulary."Marion, you should win some sort of prize for the whole of your latest report. It is simply brilliant.
Marc went out on a high note of hilarity, as you say. And it was nice surprise that the public voted him out.
I was particularly struck with Aisleyne's interview where she certainly put the blackest possible black spot where it belonged, on the black swan.
Jack's roseate cheeks were other high spots.
I notice there had been a positive transformation in Harry. I wonder what had gone on behind the scenes to achieve that sudden transition? A visit from her friends and family?

5 July: Well, that's the Marc phenomenon erased, marching out, with his no doubt bespoke-remunerated role done.
Now, as Joel explicitly reveals with a bespoke trailer, it's certain that we are now entering a 'money' thing, or, as I would put it: The BB Tontine process metamorphosed.
Tontinnabulation, as a game.
(Later)
BTW, a question I keep meaning to ask. Is all smoking banned this year? I can't recall anyone smoking or arguing about cigarettes!

6 July:
It's an outrageous scandal. How can BB so arbitrarily reduce the prize Tontine fund from £150,000 to around £40,000 at one gratuitous blow, as if they never intended the larger fund, a prize that was not only advertised to the Hms but also to us viewing public when starting to watch this series? It is an absurdity that Joel, quietly, but with a point well made, turned even more absurd - good on him! - with his buying a pizza for £2500. That's a politician for you. Psychologically, after all the previous shenanigans with Marc and other celebrities, this was the last straw. And no wonder the HMs instinctively made rebellion. At first with playful-seriousness but with bitter otherwise unexpressed undercurrents, and with now possible bad consequences.
This was very telling as, even while we watched these events, the Greek referendum vote results in absurdly parallel circumstances, were on the other TV channels. You couldn't make it up.

7 July: It was confusion night for me.
Firstly, I agree with Jack that it's an electronic number on the wall, not real money at all. This is because it's not underwritten by the IMF or any other organization, including BB Bank itself. Any rebellion against it - like Jack's and Joel's - and indeed Nick's (by bidding for immunity) - is all fair by me. Making a now meaningless BB process SEEN to be meaningless.
I had no idea of the what went on with the letters from home, who was a martyr, who got letters read aloud to them, and the difference between each letter's wording was indiscernible. And why were some letters eaten?
I also do not understand why some HMs were already immune in the twist nomination of Chloe.
On the other hand, Cristian's redubbing of this BB as a game of Selfish or Selfless, I did understand and appreciate.

8 July: Last night's red hot chili of a programme was both infuriating and disturbing, particularly, again, the behaviour of Harry. Joel and Jack also showed signs of cracking and twisting themselves into knots. Despite Chloe's hysteria at times, she seems basically in control of herself. Nick with his hot water bottle in red hot July, merely a flabbergasted refugee from Brideshead Revisited.
Danny to win.

Marion:  I have just been informed that on Monday night,, Rylan Clark showed a clip from the BB house in which Jack had to sacrifice his dressing gown to win a Golden Envelope. He was made to cut up the dressing gown - THE dressing gown, his signature dressing gown - with scissors. This was not shown on the main show , edited out, no doubt in favour of one of the house's tedious rows. I protest!
(later) - he was wearing his dressing gown. Can false rumours be circulating?

 
9 July: I am afraid I can't solve THE MYSTERY OF JACK'S DRESSING-GOWN. I think this was the name of a book I once read during the 1950s. I think Malcolm Saville wrote it.
Yes, last night saw a reasonably engaging task and HM behaviour.
Marion: But there is a caveat - according to the Malcolm Saville Society, in his books, criminal types are often characterised by 'their slack dress sense.' Now, clearly running around in your Y fronts is slack and so Marc is clearly an undesirable type. But is a dressing gown slack? Is Slack Jack a criminal mastermind in possession of two dressing gowns, one for public destruction to persuade us he is reformed; and one cunningly concealed, showing his true nature?
Admirable research, Marion. Noel Coward often sat around all day in a dressing-gown. But I do think that Jack is another cut of the cloth. Without being politically incorrect, one belonging to Jack could fit two of someone else. Which perhaps solves the mystery?

10 July: Harry: "Drop the Subject."
Joel: "You went into the argument."
In recurrent incantation. Relentless refrains still ringing in my ears.
Glass's 'Einstein on the Beach' has nothing on this.
Other relentless refrains. The whole season has involved tasks about what the HMs think the public think of them and what they think of each other. Week after week of Steve Reich's Clapping Music. Angry clapping in mistuned unison. Uncouth screeching like Xenakis' 'Ais'. The Stripper music on tape loop. Dressing-gowns and chubby legs. Dissonant prosody. A Summer of Nightmare
.
 
11 July: Good to see Harry go!
Yes, it was inevitable they'd choose Sam in the 'mind-blowing' finale last night. After all, she was the only 'new' HM left and the original HMs are loyal to each other. Sam took it graciously and did a good interview. If she had been as engaging as that in the House as she was in the interview, then it might have been a different story.
I rather liked Joel's rendition of Money, Money, Money. It will be a good backstory for when he becomes Prime Minister, which he will. Hope he changes his party before then, though. He is amazingly mature for a 19 year old. And I now favour him above Danny to win. I gather Danny is a regular Reality Show jobber.
 
12 July: A reasonably entertaining general knowledge task. I could have spelt both canoe and yacht.
Chloe has done well to be the winning lady HM. Congratulations.
The Joel and Danny argument was uncannily the exact parallel of what must have gone on overnight with the EU's various stances on whether to evict (rather than just nominate) Greece.

13 July: A lot of silly tasks last night, Jack's tan, Joel's pizza, conga etc. It's like a children's programme from the 1970s which I watched with my own children, plus today's swearing. Twas Tiswas.
Jack's taking the money will finish him for the eventual overall win, I think, for which he was otherwise slowly becoming the favourite. I hope that come-uppance is true, anyway. And I bet he will be tempted into bargaining away the money he has already won? Or just have it stolen off him by BB?

14 July: BB obviously wants Jack to win, giving him a whole programme, yes, a whole programme, well almost, to shine through ostensibly hard but manageable tasks. Thus to recoup his winning chances.
Credit to BB for almost recouping the Tontine prize, mainly by manipulative means. Or did they have an auditable budget for that which they simply had to spend on a prize?
Nick was evangelical in the DR about his getting into the final. Good to see that BB still holds its cachet among the young. Illuminati or not.
Joel again was good with an Abba song. It was an interesting tableau, with Nick swinging lackadaisically on a pole to the music, Danny swaggering into the cool noir bar to survey the scene magisterially, and the only woman talking over it in chance dialogue given to her by the noir writer of the scene. Chandleresque.
The finalist we find ourselves hardly ever mentioning: Cristian. Is he a dark horse for the win?
 
15 July 2015:
Marion wrote: You've got no sense of humour, Cristina.
A new housemate? Wonder, if she'll win at this late stage.
BTW, no sooner than we comment on Cristian's low profile, than it is heightened - in a bad way. An Internet troll and blackmailer (from his own mouth during this BB season), allegedly.
Marion: One interesting scene that came from this task was that Nick was judged the most open and honest - while he stood there, hoodie up and concealing his face, and head bowed low, a creature that lived in the shadows and could not tolerate the light of day. Well observed, Marion.

And Jack and Joel went up the hill:
Popcorn licks with stoic will.
 
16 July:
Marion wrote: So who is your winner, Des? I swing between Joel and jack. Tonight I slightly favoured Joel but Jack would do. Just not Chloe.


Image

All in all, I think Joel. Anyone who can bring the topic of "constitutional monarchy" to the BB house deserves it!
(later) Marion wrote: On the other hand, there is stubbornly honest Jack, tormented and teased, unappealing in some ways but possessed of an iconic dressing gown.
Oh, dear - I like to have a clear candidate for the win in mind but I swither and swither...
You mean that tiny figure in the bottom right hand corner of my photo?
(later) Marion wrote: Chloe wins. Why?
A good question, Marion.
Thanks for all your reports. The highlight of BB every year.
750,000 hits! Well done. YOU are the winner.
Here's to CBB...
 

MARION COMMENTS HERE

===========

CBB JANUARY 2016 http://weirdmonger.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/celebrity-big-brother-january-2016.html


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Tuesday, June 09, 2015

Dreamcatcher - Stephen King

DREAMCATCHER

 
DREAMCATCHER by Stephen King
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A real-time review by Des Lewis

The book King originally wanted to call CANCER.
Or DREAMCANCER?
My previous real-time reviews of Stephen King’s work are linked from HERE.

I intend to real-time review this novel and, when I do, you will be able to find it in the thought stream below or by clicking on this post’s title above.
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38 thoughts on “DREAMCATCHER”

  2. This is utterly unlike him, and suddenly the only thing he wants is to get the fuck out of here, fill his lungs with the cool, salt-tanged seaside air,…”
    So utterly unlike me, too, I guess. Reviewing this book at all. Reviewing this book NOW. Seems preternatural. Explicable somewhere, sometime, but meantime, inexplicable. Like these four backstories. And data on historic UFOs. But they are not backstories. More paced or staggered retrostories.
    Accretive tantalisations to resolve: SSDD. Along the way somewhere they went on a Hunting Trip as men do with guns and drinks. The file marked D-F. Darkness as a polarizing filter. Moonrock. Aspirin. Finding a woman’s lost key. Cheating in exams. The Line. Depression, both seductive and unpleasant. Beware Mr Gray?
    Four of them. 1988 Beaver. 1993 Pete. 1998 Henry. 2001 Jonesy. Once there was an inscrutable fifth. Their next meeting at different distances from each of their heartache retrostories just given…each with a preternature to call their own? Some link?
    “Dreams age faster than dreamers, that is a fact of life Pete has discovered as the years pass. Yet the last ones often die surprisingly hard, screaming in low, miserable voices at the back of the brain.”
    Compelling King as ever. Threaded with sadnesses while having joys from accepting and/or transcending those sadnesses.
    Later, below, I shall read on into the text of…
    PART 1
    CANCER:
    “I learn by going where I have to go.” – Theodore Roethke
    Reply
  3. CHAPTER ONE – MCCARTHY
    Van Gogh was master of browns and oranges. As is this ‘ascairt’ intruder with his unwise targeted brown and orange garb in the woods, someone whom Jonesy nearly shoots dead, while left on his own by the other three, during their latest hunting trip. Never seen such snow coming, I guess, during their earlier decades of coming here. Jonesy is recovering from, in 2001 (presumably just after the events told earlier before this chapter began), being knocked over by a car. Double Zero for Emptiness, like King himself around this time? Authorial retrostory? Pre-accident Jonesy and Post-accident Jonesy almost two separate characters. Not only hunting ‘eye-fever’ but also existential I-fever, I suggest. The ascairt stranger (preternaturally named as hovering toward Jonesy’s own target of guessing McCarthy at the end) seems slowly born as an inscrutable character through the zip of the flowing text. Hallucinatory text urgently driving on with its drawn-out words. I found it obsessive reading.
    “Because maybe death was out there, and maybe sometimes it called your name.”
    I no longer intend fully to itemise the plot, for fear of spoilers – life is full of spoilers: like death? – but I will try to describe my reactions to it (as well as to death itself) as I read this huge work. I will simply note that the foursome have a traditional ‘dreamcatcher’ hanging in their hunting hideaway. More brightly coloured than just brown and orange. A charm.
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  4. CHAPTER TWO – THE BEAV
    “Again Jonesy was struck by the man’s queer ungainliness – it made him think of himself a little that past spring, as he had learned to walk all over again.”
    Beav, larger than life, well-characterised, arrives at the hideaway as the heavy snow sets in. You’ll love THE BEAV.
    Worries about Henry getting back from shopping in their vehicle (Beav and Jonesy sure need his ‘shrinkology’, with ‘the guy’, aka Rick McCarthy, ill, farting, time-confused, red blemish on his cheek, now ensconced) and also worries about Pete getting back with Henry. I, too, blink and somehow see ‘the guy’ but as a sort of trophy on the wall. Click, Rick, like guessing his name correctly. Bonhomie at bay, but still rustling up eggs for scrambling, As they always do in King!
    [I hesitate to yet talk about my earlier literary visions of ‘dream sickness’ but I smell it here, be sure! Also, I hesitate to talk too much about personal health problems as part of my book reviews, but I first took my body to the GP a few months ago because of flatulence, and the hospital later found something in my prostate instead. The treatment on that situation is progressing well. Nobody’s solved the flatulence, yet, though.]
    “‘Okay.’ Beaver took off his jacket (red) and his vest (orange, of course).”
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  5. CHAPTER THREE – HENRY’S SCOUT
    “Henry let off on the gas until he felt the Scout start to straighten out, then zapped the go-pedal again, deliberately too fast and too hard.”
    Talk of mass hysteria back at the shop, but more like God’s Flashmob. I shall take it as read and I won’t keep repeating it in this review, that this is prime King, compelling, page-turning (but I am trying to eke it out and savour it slowly), crammed with King’s bon mots and mots justes, expletives and beer, full of cosy prospects of bonhomie in snowbound hideaways while away hunting, sown with leitmotifs, now the woman sitting in the snow-tracked road with orange vest and orange streamers on her hat, and Henry — who now adds his own Eschatological (deathwish or feeling ‘down’ syndrome) to the Scatological (plague of flatulence) — nearly accidentally drives his Scout into her, like someone in a car nearly hit Jonesy once, or DID hit him, of course. Oozing the Claret. Whick-thump, whick-thump, there are even what I shall call Close Encounters lighting up the sky, too. Enthrallled. Entrammelled. Despite or because of the Nemonymous Night ‘dream sickness’, I have already inferred. Hope it doesn’t entrammel me TOO much. Eke it out, boy, eke it out!
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  6. CHAPTER FOUR – MCCARTHY GOES TO THE JOHN
    “‘Go away!’ McCarthy called with weak vehemence. ‘Can’t you go away and let a fellow . . . let a fellow make a little number two? Gosh!’”
    ‘Weak vehemence’ is maybe code or dream-captcha for ‘Mongol’, what they used to call those children with Down Syndrome when I was a boy in the 1950s. Look at my face in the mirror; it sometimes has a Mongol look about it, I guess, but I am not one. But I think the way they treated Duddits in the old days, like letting him win cribbage, keeping things from him to protect him; they treat me the same as a reader. You, too. We readers are all Duddits. That’s my theory but I do not yet know the significance of this Duddits character in their past. I’m only guessing.
    Meanwhile, whup-whup-whup, helicopters come as there is a quarantine panic afoot, bullhorn hovering above Beaver — and ‘the guy’, aka McCarthy, goes to the loo. GOES TO THE LOO. What is conveyed is beyond this review to re-convey. Just read it, sucker.
    And animals come in and gather, close to, even IN, the foursome’s hunting hideaway. And those CE3K lights dodging about in the sky as if CERN Zoo has been allowed to escape from the LHC. Peg it there, I reckon. For today, anyway. Just one thought: can you ‘catch’ dreams like you can catch disease? If so, this is a dangerously preternatural book. Stinks.
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  7. CHAPTER FIVE – DUDDITS, PART ONE
    “‘Beaver,’ Pete said, and toasted the dark afternoon as he sat with his back propped against the overturned Scout’s hood. ‘You were beautiful, man.’ But hadn’t they all been? / Hadn’t they all been beautiful?”
    Silence gives consent, it says somewhere. As Pete – his damaged leg killing him [with his own Kingian post-‘accident’ fugue with “Double Zero for Emptiness” (Mike O’Driscoll’s phrase for it), passive and deadpan] – tries to get beer by dodging bear in the snow back to the Henry’s Scout. Through mooseshit (cf the earlier mouseturds for mustard) – leaving the orange-tasselled woman behind at least for a beer-hunting while. Amid that ‘weakly vehement’ diaspora of animals, linking with the CE3K lights, or the whup or thud of proximate vehicles. And he returns in his mind to 1978, the school where the 4 of them (girl-pussy hunting, then) attended – and that school was near the ‘school for retards’ (or ‘mongoloid idiots’ as the text says and I had no earlier idea that it was going to say it) where DUDDITS attended. He knew the dream-captcha ‘SSDD’ mantra, too, but now I myself, as DUDDITS the reader, know it, too, but I won’t spoil it for you. Chapter ends with another Click and now the name Marcy? Who’s Marcy? Like the foursome together, I seem to be getting their mutual ‘mental links’, too. The intensely scatological theme-and-variations on farts, notwithstanding. A passage of agonisingly passive threnody.
    “He did not look back at the overturned Scout, did not see that he had written DUDDITS in the snow, over and over again, as he sat thinking of that day back in 1978.”
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  8. CHAPTER SIX – DUDDITS, PART TWO
    “It’s the smell of the body eating itself, because that’s all cancer is when you take the diagnostic masks off: autocannibalism.”
    imageimageA flowing theme-and-variations on Nursery Rhymes, a yellow Scooby Doo lunchbox, mixed with present perils and the foursome’s ancient past rescue of DUDDITS ‘retard’ from bullying, all in Henry’s mind as he tries to get help for Pete in the snow. Double Zero for Emptiness. All steeped in a sense of twisted destiny. ‘No bounce, no play’. Refrains interwoven with ‘foo-lights’. No worthwhile pussy but they found DUDDITS himself. Mr Gray again? Henry’s Ligottian anti-Natalism seems slight when compared with the ‘Everything infected’ scenario of the foo-lights. And ‘eyes with Chinese tilt’ – like his mouth? – DUDDITS’ real name Douglas Cavell. My unique UKIP MP in Clacton where I live is called Douglas Carswell with his own tilt. Preternatural connections abound with me and this text – and between things WITHIN this text.
    “In an effort to turn his mind away from his friend behind and his friends ahead, or what might be happening all around him, he let his mind go to where he knew Pete’s mind had already gone: to 1978, and Tracker Brothers, and to Duddits. How Duddits Cavell could have anything to do with this fuckarow Henry didn’t understand, but they had all been thinking about him, and Henry didn’t even need that old mental connection to know it.”
    “…only a dust of white on the aromatic orange- brown needles. There Henry fell on his knees, sobbing with terror and putting his gloved hands to his mouth to stifle the sound, because what if it heard? It was Mr Gray, the cloud was Mr Gray, and what if it heard?”
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  9. CHAPTER SEVEN – JONESY AND THE BEAV
    “McCarthy, sitting there on the toilet, made no response. He had for some reason put his orange cap back on – the bill stuck off at a crooked, slightly drunken angle. He was otherwise naked. His chin was down on his breastbone, in a parody of deep thought (or maybe it wasn’t a parody, who knew?). His eyes were mostly closed.”
    Scatological? Eschatological? Just leave off the ‘-logical’ and replace with ‘aberrant’. Aberrantly aberrant to the power of monstrous. Scatorrant, Eschatorrant, as the McCarthyite incubus beast takes his seat or throne within the bowl, not on it, and Beaver sits there acting as downweight waiting for Jonesy to get the tape to tape the worm within. Of course, that gives you no idea. Only the text has the nature of the incubus within it, a horn’s oogah-oogah, a submarine’s dive, dive, dive, the wood’s crackle-crunch-splinter. It’s iced-tea Proustian with DUDDITS’ mother, too, a retrocausation from today back to DUDDITS and then forward again from their five years of walking him to school to keep him safe from bullies.
    DUDDITS’ open-vowels of speech now become open-bowels, I guess!
    You heard it here first – in hindsight.
    The mercy killing that was never to be. I have a reviewer’s ‘slant’ second to all.
    “He saw the little gelid gleam from between McCarthy’s eyelids.”
    Reply
    • Having slept on what I’ve read so far, I sense this is a backstory in itself, not only a personal rite of passage, but a literal post-accident retrocausal *back-passage* story of the extremist scatological and eschatological kind. It is a case study in extrapolated Horror genre as well as personal absurdity. A lost masterpiece – spoilt by a deterrent cinema version?
      Reply
  10. CHAPTER EIGHT – ROBERTA
    “In Roberta’s view they had been friends sent from heaven, angels with kind hearts and dirty mouths who had actually expected her to believe that when Duddits started saying fut, he was trying to say Fudd, which, they explained earnestly, was the name of Pete’s new puppy – Elmer Fudd, just Fudd for short. And of course she had pretended to believe this. Too many memories, too many ghosts of happier times.”
    Roberta, DUDDITS’ mum — with him suffering now in leukaemiac Dracula syndrome on top of Down, and in his thirties — watches TV reports of the missing hunters, the quarantine area, the UFO lights [uncannily reminiscent of my own brief LEFT FOOT (2) (from ‘The Last Balcony’ (2012) book) that I very recently rewrote HERE before starting King’s ‘Dreamcatcher’]. DUDDITS sobs his heart out – ‘Thump and hum, thump and hum, thump and hum’. She goes to him and hears his transcending traumatic message (“Eeyer-eh! Eeeyer-eh! Oh Amma, Eeeyer-eh!”) that the text later translates for us, even though part of us is DUDDITS himself, I guess.
    DUDDITS as Peter Pan? Does one Never in Never Never Land cancel the other one out? I naively ask. Evidently so…
    “No Never Land for her.”
    Reply
    • Left Foot missing, as part of my own dream sickness. Van Gogh’s left ear, too, although this book’s link with Van Gogh is so far tenuous. Missing teeth. Pete’s knee ‘gone’. And the innards of incubus and later Becky succubus as a form of excreting rather than birthing that I’ve just read about in next chapter below.
      Reply
  11. CHAPTER NINE – PETE AND BECKY
    “Tears of horror, tears of pity, tears that opened the stony ground of self-regarding obsession and burst the rock inside.”
    Pete returns to Marcy or Becky? He clicks her name somehow, she who was left in the road. His preternatural contact with Beav sitting on the toilet trap to keep his under control….”What’s all this jobba-nobba?” A form of Spielberg’s ET – as carcass or carcinoma? Chemo Demon on the roof. Words I’ve just used, not the text, although the text somehow gave the words to me. And ‘Margaret Thatcher’ is mentioned in the text of this chapter for real at some point, Douglas. ‘A dog’s scat.’
    The invasion’s under way. Like the worst mass biopsy, I guess. On to…
    PART 2
    GRAYBOYS
    Reply
  12. CHAPTER TEN – KURTZ AND UNDERHILL
    1 – 6
    The phooka horse: “I use it to mean an operation which is both covert and wide open. A paradox, Perlmutter! The good news is that we’ve been developing contingency plans for just this sort of clusterfuck since 1947, when the Air Force first recovered the sort of extraterrestrial artifact now known as a flashlight.”
    Things grow macro. As we are fed well-characterised soldier men’s men, in abrasive interface with each other, a blend of men from a combo of Cambodia, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Bosnia, with Clinton’s voice somewhere, as they combat, whup-whup-whup, these invaders. This infection of grayboys or cancer called clusterfuck. A telepathy that I’d prefer to call preternature. A spreading IS State before its time.
    What I need to know is why is one of these soldier types called Kurtz with the same name as the main man in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’? Why is ‘grayboys’ one typo short of ‘gayboys’? And the infection a ‘reddish-gold fuzz’ growing on everything? – like a Van Gogh painting? Whatever the case, there is some dialogue here to die for.
    “Time of intercept 0627, November fourteen, two-zero-zero-one.”
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  13. 7 – 12
    “With that, twining through it like a pigtail, came the voice of Mick Jagger: ‘Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste;…'”
    With Owen Underhill’s backstory as a boy, with his hat turned back, despite being a good guy like Napoleon could have been, I sense, defecating in his neighbour’s house when it was unexpectedly empty…. And his involvement, along with Kurtz, in the tactics and strategy and craziness of a stunning description of a whupping battle with the almost sadly stoical Grayboys, a red-gold cancerous collaterally suicidal sting in their tails, all interwoven with lines from ‘Sympathy with the Devil’, HOO-HOO, crowned by the telling Cain and Abel coda, yes, with all those things, these sections of text represent the strongest writing of King so far in this book, possibly his strongest writing in the whole of his fiction canon so far.
    “Kurtz spun the cocked hat on the end of his finger. If possible, he intended to see Owen Underhill wearing it after he had ceased breathing.”
    Reply
  14. CHAPTER ELEVEN – THE EGGMAN’S JOURNEY
    1 – 6
    “Suicide, Henry had discovered, had a voice. It wanted to explain itself. The problem was that it didn’t speak much English; mostly it lapsed into its own fractured pidgin. But it didn’t matter; just the talking seemed to be enough. Once Henry allowed suicide its voice, his life had improved enormously.”
    Quiet Ligottian anti-natalism. In spite or because of what I imagine is going on by dint of the sound effects and undercurrents in the text, I now feel I am gentled into a good night by Henry’s PoV, half aftermath, half continuing battle by helicopters overhead, as he returns to the foursome’s hideaway, amid encroaching plague-zone of red-gold fuzz like ‘Ebola’ the text says; the diaspora of animals, mercy killing, all narrated by half-inchoate half-sophisticated Stubb from Moby Dick, I guess. Toadstools in the cleft of the buttocks. Doc Martens as a sexual flag. Fuck me Freddy, as casual expletive… Insidious growth: almost too much.
    “: the dreamcatcher had snared a real nightmare this time.”
    I am old enough to have watched the Magical Mystery Tour on British TV when it first came out in the sixties. Some Boxing Day of yore. I Am The Walrus – my favourite non-lieder song. Amazing scat of eggs and the eggman that Henry descries. Classic King.
    “….the occasional padded plop as a clot of snow slid off…”
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  15. 7 – 14
    “I’m on a journey , he told himself. Maybe someday someone will write an epic poem about it: ‘Henry’s Journey’. ‘Yeah,’ he said.”
    Yeah, we readers say, too.
    Like Henry, we skirt despair as well as hope, unaccompanied by Devil or God, with whom we would have no Symphony. HOO-HOO. Henry is skiing back to where he left the woman and Pete, the text threaded recurrently with song music extracts and modern American history, modern for him. Thoughts of comforting suicide. Of past acts of kindness. ‘Idiotic non sequiturs’. ‘Prattling madness’ and HG Wells. DUDDITS imprinted in the snow by Pete.
    NOW LISTEN BIG. Another real-time revelation. This book (was it published in 2001?) was a premonition of the Internet CLOUD.
    DUDDITS, inter alia, inter alien, is in that ‘cloud’ with tilted face. Read these sections and see. Accompanied by the stutter and crackle of gunfire and the big whoosh of jets, as the war against the Graybots goes on above or below that ‘cloud’. Left leg throbbing upon its colony of red-gold fuzz. The Eggman, notwithstanding. Goo-goo-joob and more goo.
    “Not after the foot sticking out of the bathtub.”
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  16. CHAPTER TWELVE – JONESY IN THE HOSPTAL
    1 – 6
    “He could, he was the little engine that could, but what a price the little engine had paid.”
    “Death pretending to be a patient. Death had lost track of him – sure, it was possible, it was a big hospital stuffed full of pain, sweating agony out its very seams – and now old creeping death was trying to find him again.”
    The Crowrd OR The Grayboys - By Camille Gabrielle
    The Crowd OR The Cloud OR The Grayboys –
    By Camille Gabrielle
    We come to the nub of things here, but most nubs, like clouds, are full of nonsense and madness, carrying these things but not changing them, like today’s ‘cloud’, mixing, too, the real past, present and, indeed, future, for some moment’s consumption, here Jonesy in hospital after being knocked down by a careless car that could, or the dementia driver could? Mixed with a DUDDITS vision, as well as Grayboys, and Jonesy’s own separate Proustian ‘selves’, explicitly mixed, too. ‘Scatting the words.’
    Jonesy even appears in a film about the war against the Grayboys. Against what the text calls those ‘space-niggers’. This is strong stuff. It’s silly, too, because such experiences — although truly really felt like a gestalt real-time review, a preternatural series of connections, a dreamcatcher review, indeed, as I have now called these reviews DREAMCATCHERS (on this seven year old review site) for over a year now and ensconced in some carrying but not changing ‘cloud’ — ARE silly. These Reviews, I hope, make a triangulated seriousness of sense from fiction. Meanwhile, this book, so far, is far better than some seem to think it. Have faith, dear Author.
    “He glimpses something more, as well: some huge pattern, something like a dreamcatcher that binds all the years since they first met Duddits Cavell in 1978, something that binds the future as well.”
    I’ll soon be coming up to halfway in this book, just to give you some sort of triangulation upon this review’s coordinates.
    ————————–
    “If he yelled they might turn around. / And he was afraid to see their faces.” – from ‘The Crowd’ (not ‘The Cloud’!) by Ray Bradbury.
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  17. 7 – 11
    “For a moment – brief but far too long – Jonesy fully imagined the reddish-gold tendrils reaching from that defunct eye into Pete’s brain, where they spread like strong fingers clutching a gray sponge.”
    Byrus is now the name for the red-gold fuzz, the ‘outer-space thrush’, and I feel a parthenogenetic sense to this growth (and the eggs); I referred, in 2001, to the fiction literature in ‘Nemonymous’ as ‘parthenogenetic’, in print and on-line at that time. Check it out. I then coupled this with ‘late-labelling’ the authors’ names in the same way as this first use of the ‘Byrus’ label now becomes a force of retrocausation in the gradually dying text, but making the increasingly flabby use of italic refrains and the blurring character identities tighten back again in my mind. Authorial omniscience at least stops Mr Gray from knowing about DUDDITS and the open-vowel sounds and the incantation, ‘No bounce, no play.’ But am I alone, at this stage in the book, in connecting GARY Jones (Jonesy) with Mr GRAY? Not a spoiler, though, as nothing has been hidden from the reader in the text on this score, only perhaps some readers having been denied the ability to connect the two names, in spite or because of all us readers being DUDDITS. No nous, no know.
    Van Gogh
    Van Gogh
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  18. CHAPTER THIRTEEN – AT GOSSELIN’S
    1 – 4
    “…but in his shock at hearing the names of his wife and daughter from this stranger’s lips, Owen barely noticed. The urge to go to the man and ask him how he knew those names was strong,…”
    There is something very ‘Nemonymous Night’ about the sliding in and out of identities or selves, like Jonesy and Brodsky (a week or so ago I saw the Brodsky Quartet play a Zemlinsky String Quartet as reported then on my other blog) in a movie set that is really a real place, (a CEof 3K hub, spotlit, humming, or Apocalypse Now) if anything can be real in fiction, and now the text comes clean about Kurtz the name, Heart of Darkness and all that, and about his nature, blowing off someone’s LEFT FOOT (yes, LEFT FOOT, can you believe this serendipity?) blowing it off for his using that awful expression ‘space-niggers’ earlier. The Horror, The Horror. Apocalypse Soon Enough. Kurtz is ‘existential’. The state of being, the ‘IS’ State now truly spreading.
    Religion as ‘plumage’. Fiction as a Review of itself. A Review more fictional than the Fiction it reviews? No, more a preternatural positive symbiosis between the two, I say.
    “‘Or Allah akhbar, as our Arab friends say; “there is no God but God.” What could be more simple than that? It cuts the pizza directly down the middle, if you see what I mean.’”
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  19. 5 – 8
    “Henry realized that he was looking at an actual river of consciousness, and at the flotsam and jetsam the river was carrying along. The humbling thing was how prosaic most of it was.”
    And, naturally, this text is going that way, too. Like the ‘cloud’, infected with universal low-grade telepathy as a form of dream sickness, an annoying virus in the guise of a carrier, a cloud saver, like Typhoid Mary or the little girl (a dreadful thought for our times) with fuzz infected lipstick, a President covering the truth, a Kurtz-Hitler with his phooka horse, about to mass murder parts of the human race as a sort of scorched earth policy following the diaspora, shit-weasels, et al. Only Owen, as undercover, under-hill representative of the author, has the ability to stand separate? Like all authors or their pecking order of leasehold narrators and PoVs? Yet the head-lease or freehold author himself is perhaps infected, too. He hates this book, someone has told me since I started this review of the Invasion of the Grayboys… Yet, if only he’d re-read it or at least read my review of it, he will begin to understand it, optimise its message for our times by aversion therapy? A bird in a crocodile’s mouth. But which the crocodile, which the bird? Which the suicide-bomber, which the bomb?
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  20. CHAPTER FOURTEEN – GOING SOUTH
    “Duddits is what held you and Henry and Pete and Beaver together – you’ve always known that, but now you know something else, as well. Don’t you?”
    What, me? Or you? Going South often means a GoIng Down Syndrome, dropping, going backward… “Welcome to your own head, big boy.” And here, Jonesy’s is an endless warehouse of memory-boxes, where Gary meet Gray for the High Ground, Scooby DOO-DOO, notwithstanding, et al. Monsieur Mesmer included. ‘Kurtz’s net’, all these things to avoid, alter-egos, alter-nemos, other readers, the Author himself who sticks his biro byrus in your eye. Nobody else can write stuff like this to get at his readers, from his own hospital bed. Double Zero meets Emptiness. A Duel to the Death. You or him. each wanting to be human. And a spear-‘carrier’ character just for this chapter has this suicide-biro jabbed his way… Do not ‘save’.
    “He caught a shiny zipping glitter as his hand, which was gripping the ballpoint like a dagger, plunged the pen into his staring eye. There was a popping sound and he jittered back and forth behind the wheel like a badly managed puppet, his fist digging the pen in deeper and deeper, up to the halfway mark, then to the three- quarter mark, his split eyeball now running down the side of his face like a freakish tear. The tip struck something that felt like thin gristle, bound up for a moment, then passed through into the meat of his brain. You bastard, he thought…”
    Indeed only King can write like that.
    In contrast to my otherwise consistent habit of only real-time reviewing hard copies of books in paper, cheap paperback or luxurious hardback, this review is based on my reading of the ebook version of ‘Dreamcatcher’ bought from Amazon. It somehow seems right, or at least advisable, from outset. I’m now not so sure – can the viral telepathy or dream sickness cloud work better through screens than through paper? No answer does there come. Although there is a ‘comment’ facility on this page for others to join in, if anyone is actually bothered to read this review at all.
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  21. CHAPTER FIFTEEN – HENRY AND OWEN
    “…only Jonesy could run with him mind for mind, book for book, idea for idea; only Jonesy also had the knack of dreaming outside the lines as well as seeing the line. But Jonesy was gone, wasn’t he?”
    A dream is the truth dreaming you (my expression, not this book’s) but it is what I feel this book is about, as if now reaching an attempted, disappointingly over-thought, ‘rationalisation’# of what happened in 1978 and now with the Grayboy invasion et al; when the teenage foursome went hunting to their hideaway, what was dreamed then, about Jonesy’s 1978 ‘puke’ as a sort of rectoplasmic (my word) version of byrus, the past as benign parasite of the future, and the future (now become the present) as cancerous parasite of the past. All to the ‘weakly vehement’ backdrop of shed and barn with people as part of Hitler’s hive-cull (my idea, not necessarily the text’s).
    “When it’s laid, it’s played.”
    Jonesy as King pursued by his son Owen-Joe? Cruel to be kind. With the help of the DUDDITS – the readers. Only the readers, having once been made to eat shit (earlier parts of this book?), have now the purest or objective telepathy by being able to absorb all the words without having first written them. Now able to puke them out and begin to rewrite them in the head? The reader fighting back.
    “Thoughts and words have become one.”
    But only possible in a reader’s mind. In this case, mine. There’s something white growing out of my shoulder. Paper before the print is applied; King was a pioneer of the ebook, don’t forget. Byrus Vyrus building up around the fingernails, left leg itching. “And a little in one ear.”
    Note, LEFT leg. Left ear? Byrus as telepathic papyrus? Papa byrus. The new tactile-pathic electronic-screen. It says in this chapter that byrus can think. Can cancer think? I have been diagnosed with it recently and I wonder how that is affecting my reading of the text and the writing of my review?
    # Please read Henry’s and Owen’s Socratic-Scientific Dialogue as ‘phooka horse’ in this chapter if you want such a rationalisation.
    Well, thinking about it, it’s not a rationalisation as such, but a reconciliation of the irrational as the arational.
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  22. CHAPTER SIXTEEN – DERRY
    1 – 7
    “It was just a dream, Duddits.”
    “– Marigolds, a Christmas gift from Henry –”
    “…concentrating, he could look out through his own eyes.”
    “He looked at the boxes he’d dragged in here, most marked DUDDITS, a few marked DERRY.”
    “The Standpipe’s been gone since 1985.”
    These sections are like notes in memory boxes. The memory boxes in this book’s warehouse of the head. So my own review is taking its model of notes from that. Memory boxes like ‘clouds’ as Internet packages. A thinking cloud. How much memory is left for saving?
    Concentrating, too, King is perhaps looking through my eyes reading his own novel. But who is concentrating best to out-concentrate the other? My fulfilment of a ‘temptation to taunt him into a tantrum’? Or vice versa, as he links into a DUDDIT like me?
    The ‘standpipe’ has a 11/22/63 feel about it. Years are now messaging each other through time’s ‘cloud’ – 1978, 1985, the year ‘now’ in the book, the year ‘now’ when I’m actually reading it, the year ‘now’ when others once read it or will have read it. Thinking aloud, if thinking is allowed at all.
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  23. 8 – 10
    “The years of 1984 and ’85 were bad ones in Derry. In the summer of 1984, three local teenagers had thrown a gay man into the Canal, killing him.”
    “‘We do what we have to do.’ / ‘That might be, but if you expect me to help you, you’re mad.’”
    It’s as if my dialogue of tussle with the author’s dark side reflects that of Gary and Gray quoted with an extract above, twin peaks peaking each other out — bad things seeping through, even sending the text itself bad, rotting the book’s tightness of plot, so that it now hangs flabby and contrived on the insipid screen, but the good things remaining like nostalgia, like when the foursome visited DUDDITS regularly in the good old days, but finally leaving him (or me?) with ‘chemo’… And porn instead of marigolds. Gaiety grayed out? Bracketed by Danielewski bracketed texts instead of King’s italic thinkings aloud, thinking clouds?
    “She just gave Duddits the Valium, painted his poor dry lips and the inside of his mouth with one of the lemon- flavored glycerine swabs that he liked – the inside of his mouth was always developing cankers and ulcers. Even when the chemo was over, these persisted.”
    “(the matter-of-fact pornography of the girl with her skirt raised had been replaced by Van Gogh’s Marigolds),”
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  24. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN – HEROES
    “Kurtz had everything on but one boot…”
    This chapter deals with ‘instinct’ or ‘the hunch’ pitted against ‘telepathy’ as dream sickness. Human instinct pitted against alien [[Byrus as reality and dream mixed]], a Byrus as foreshadowed by my earlier quote from Lord Byron. And MY instinct is that Owen Underhill here is the author’s unconscious instinct of the personification of his own non-dark side, despite Owen’s underhand childhood misdemeanours – Owen as leader of a kaTet fighting the kaTet of the dark side of the author (cf another K name: Kurtz) on behalf of all us DUDDITS. Yet, how can I be certain whether this is my instinct and not King’s instinct about farting out of me when concurrently looking through me at the text? Or do different rationalisable instincts make an arational fudge? Eras and identities morphing and blending, the Nemonymous Night of the soul. Refugees and internees not in Bosnia et al, but in a barn in America! A flabby flashmob of Canetti’s Crowds and Power?
    This text is now quite intractable, where each reader can have his or her own gestalt of meaning among many possible such separate gestalts, derived from ever-permutating leitmotifs, but there are still some wonderful flashes of genius, viz:
    “Kurtz shucked his gray workout shorts and stood naked in front of the mirror on the bedroom door, letting his eyes go up from his feet (where the first snarls of purple veins were beginning to show) to the crown of his head, where his graying hair stood up in a sleep-tousle. He was sixty, but not looking too bad; those busted veins on the sides of his feet were the worst of it. Had a hell of a good crank on him, too, although he had never made much use of it; women were, for the most part, vile creatures incapable of loyalty. They drained a man. In his secret unsane heart, where even his madness was starched and pressed and fundamentally not very interesting, Kurtz believed all sex was FUBAR. Even when it was done for procreation, the result was usually a brain- equipped tumor not much different from the shit-weasels.”
    With some trepidation that I might soon be forced (internally or externally) to give up reading this book before finishing it, I shall now proceed to:
    PART 3
    QUABBIN
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  25. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN – THE CHASE BEGINS
    “Jonesy realized an amazing thing, both touching and terrifying: Mr Gray was smiling with Jonesy’s mouth. Not much, just a little, but it was a smile. He doesn’t really know what laughter is, Jonesy thought.”
    I sense I am reading the text closely, but someone within me is only skimming it. Or vice versa? One of us farting daintily, the other uncouthly. Is that what they call osmosis? :)
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  26. CHAPTER NINETEEN – THE CHASE CONTINUES
    ….OR one of us is reading closely a different book to the book that the other one of us is skimming?
    The chase, indeed. My chase to nail this book. My chase to find a cure for cancer. This review must follow the chase to the end. Someone called Moorcock wrote a book called ‘Cure for Cancer’, I recall. A title gives no entitlement. No cure for needy passive-aggression.
    Words and thoughts are not always one. The title of a book is just a label with a merest smidgen of indication as to its contents and it is not what it really IS. It is not its IS state, still spreading like Byron’s (Heart of) Darkness.
    “Hadn’t that been the real source of his despair? The grandiosity of the dreamcatcher concept coupled to the banality of the uses to which the concept had been put?”
    Didn’t King want ‘DREAMCATCHER’ to be called ‘CANCER’? A market killer…
    Meanwhile, KaTet still chases KaTet…
    “In the end it was Owen who took Roberta Cavell by the arms and – with one eye on the racing clock, all too aware that every minute and a half brought Kurtz a mile closer – told her why they had to take Duddits, no matter how ill he was.”
    That bit made me feel tearful. Little Head and Big Head.
    image
    Onward; from Moorcock to Hitchcock; I sense a spectacularly thrilling cinematic ending at a potentially Byrus poisoned reservoir judging by my instinct or hunch.
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  27. CHAPTER TWENTY – THE CHASE ENDS
    “South and South and South.”
    I sense the Owen and Henry KaTet has the open vowels as gestalt of O Henry. It all fits in. The dog is Oy, another ‘I’ that is me.
    “…and Jonesy thought: Outpegged by a retard – what do you know. Except this Duddits wasn’t retarded. Exhausted and dying, but not retarded.”
    Indeed, I am not a retard.
    “Mr Gray didn’t like the idea of leaving a trail ‘Duddits’ could see, but he knew something Jonesy didn’t.”
    With all my DREAMCATCHER reviews (when so-called a year ago, without thought to this novel), reviews that evolved from my public gestalt real-time reviews of fiction books since November 2008, I have ever not only sought to catch a book’s ‘dream’ but also follow its audit trail. Here it is a farting yellow bricking road induced from the Byrum or Bacon, a sort of yellow paint that Van Gogh used, literally, to EAT, a trail that mixes in even with American history, modern news management, philosophies of crowds and power, clouds and memory boxes, internal dialogues of existentialism and suicide…
    “Between 1860 and 1865, it seemed America had split in two, as byrus colonies did near the end of each growth cycle. There had been all sorts of causes, the chief of which had to do with ‘slavery’, but again, this was like calling shit or vomit reprocessed food. ‘Slavery’ meant nothing. ‘Right of secession’ meant nothing. ‘Preserving the Union’ meant nothing. Basically, they had just done what these creatures did best: they ‘got mad,’ which was really the same thing as ‘going mad’ but more socially acceptable. Oh, but on such a scale!”
    “The entity which now thought of itself as Mr Gray – who thought of himself as Mr Gray – had a serious problem, but at least it (he) knew it.”
    This book now even relates its farts to trumpets and in the news YESTERDAY (my time as I read the book and write this review) I heard about eerie trumpet-like sounds coming all over the globe. http://www.trendspot.co/2015/06/eerie-trumpet-like-sounds-heard-across-the-globe-now-heard-in-some-parts-of-the-Philippines.html – You’ve gotta believe it.
    This is one whole crazy mishmash. But my audit trail holds – to Quabbin Gestalt and beyond. Or so I sense. A unique masterpiece of a mess.
    “Are we going to be heroes?”
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  29. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE – SHAFT 12
    EPILOGUE – LABOR DAY
    “Mr Gray feared Duddits, sensed that he was the one most responsible for how absurdly, infuriatingly difficult this job had become. If he could stay ahead of Duddits, all would end well. It would help to know how close Duddits was, but they were blocking him –”
    This book is imbued with the contrast between Byrus and snow. It somehow makes tactile the battle between author and author, author and reader, and something that neither can control. The audit trail has become that aqueduct, a potential conduit for a cleansing force, a mixed-up religious force of fiction…
    “….a byrus culture which Jonesy’s mind identified simultaneously as ‘Christianity’ and ‘bullshit’. The image was very clear, from a book called ‘the Holy Bible’. It showed ‘God’s only begotten son’ carrying a lamb – wearing it, almost. The lamb’s front legs hung over one side of ‘begotten son’s’ chest, its rear legs over the other.”
    It is also a study of the Corridors of Pain, filled with memory boxes.
    It is also a battle between KaTets.
    DUDDITS is of course the Dreamacatcher that, in turn, IS the book in a raw state, a book that eventually dies. But as each reader turns to it or returns to it, DUDDITS is born again. “They often come to visit it in his dream.” That other force accretively discovers human emotions not only from the other characters but also upon the book’s paper or screen itself, turning it grey with text – eventually growing black as the darkness. But Conrad’s Darkness or Byron’s?
    Whatever the case, DUDDITS always wins, despite having given Mr Gray ‘his foothold, his mindhold.’ A tilt in the balance of his Douglas Cavell face.
    The customer is always right. Turning the paper white again by creating letters of text upon it instead of deadpan greyness, ready for the emotions to accrue again, ready to read.
    This mad book only works as a cathartic self-anatomisation by the author of the author through the eyes of his reader so as to transcend its madness and pain, his own madness and pain, ever hoping for the ultimate reader to solve its cumulative puzzle. Whether that reader in the shape of myself has now arrived, I hope not. The book needs recurrent readers to keep it alive, ever on the brink of, but never reaching, resolution. Even madness, one short step from genius, needs its own book. This book.
    “And Jonesy slipped into darkness, smiling.”
    image
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