28 November 09 - 11:00The Weirdtonguer
Dreams are items engendered by an individual’s equally competing ‘sleep’ and ‘waking consciousness’. A balance of you and something else. That is common knowledge.
What isn’t so commonly known is the fact that dreams can be harvested and milked. Not only in the figurative sense of employing them as contents for fictions like this one, but also as real objects that can be handled and squeezed like udders. You see, the actual tension between self and non-self in this way creates a seamless skin-dome upon the flat surface of the dream, thus allowing items of dream to become collected as a finite group instead of infinite items on a never-ending surface ... subsequently for them to become upwardly mobile as well as three-dimensional within the constraints of the sealed space.
Some dreams have bigger domes than others. ...
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18 August 09 - 18:40Black Static - Issue 12
Black Static - Issue 12
TTA Press
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My Brother's Keeper - Nina Allan
My standard introduction to my real-time reviews shown above seemed even more appropriate once I started reading this haunting story of fluid existence passing through a fixed perspective together with the steady fade-in and fade-out of people in one’s life, not only because real-time is treated here with TCP ointment (Time Conflux Parentage (my inference) any others?) but also a telling reference to Wagner’s Ring Cycle – a work that probably invented leitmotifs in music. This story has childhood angsts blending brilliantly with other serendipities and synchronised shards of random truth and fiction. Also related to a Ligottian figure (named Ferenc here) and to childhood’s ‘imaginary friends’ made real. And adult conspiracies too grown-up to fathom. Dark family secrets. And ...
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30 June 09 - 10:41Intentional Fallacy
I had another on-line discussion about the Intentional Fallacy yesterday. I have a book called 'The Verbal Icon' by WK Wimsatt that I first owned in the late sixties, a book sitting, as it happened, on my bookshelf in immediate proximity to 'From Blue to Black', a novel by Joel Lane - which was coincidentally appropriate as the discussion in question was with Joel himself!
I was pleased to find this quote in the Wimsatt book to help demonstrate the point I was trying to make:
"In his essay on 'Hamlet and His problems' TS Eliot finds Hamlet's state of emotion unsatisfactory because it lacks an 'objective correlative', a 'chain of events' which are the 'formula of that particular emotion'. The emotion is 'in excess of the facts as they appear'. It is 'inexpressible'. ...
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16 May 09 - 16:49Test
Test
30 January 09 - 13:51test
test
05 November 08 - 14:22The Lady Opposite
THE LADY OPPOSITE by DF Lewis
Published 'Flickers 'n' Frames' 1994
Dear lady opposite, you may live in the large house across the road, but I seem to know you better than if you lived over here with me. On the other hand, it is strange how little I do know. There is of course the timing of your curtain drawing, the people who visit, the various delivery men, your doctor, tbe rare trips you make (both on your own and arm in arm with lady friends) and, of course, the smoke curling from your chimney, at times, grey, thin and uninteresting, but at others tantalisingly black and so very thick with the fuel on which you must feed it. Only yesterday, you had a visitor whom I was extremely shocked to see was a man. Your normal callers are of course people of the female persuasion, most with wide-brimmed hats and walking tall on fashionable heels. But this visitor was a sooty-faced man and, what was more, your curtains were closed before it was ...
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05 November 08 - 14:19The Clinging of the Cold
THE CLINGING OF THE COLD
Published 'Dark Matter' 1998
Donna wanted to be the first woman werewolf. You see, most of her friends dressed like vampires, with more eye-shadow than any their actual bodies cast when the sun was low in the sky. They wore loads of jingle-jangling bangles, too, but they did draw short of hanging fangs because that would have indeed been a tinsy wincey bit childish - or 'sad', as the fashionable word for unfashionable was among nineteen year old girls then.
Thus, you must understand, Donna wanted to go a stage further than her Gothic pals: break new ground, if not graveyard ground, and be a glorious wolf howling to the same moon as hounds bayed at. Donna's own glossy pelt of fur would then no doubt suit her taste for luxurious clothes without transgressing her almost religious regard for Animal Rights. ...
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