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Things are not brilliant in the personal health regime of the Gestalt Real-Time Reviewer, so please excuse any delays in whatever I do. (June 2021)
GESTALT REAL-TIME REVIEWING
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And Click: HERE for full Navigation, Stop Press & Backstory.
Träumerei: Co-Vivid Dreaming
DFS LEWIS: Reading Aloud
Available DFL books: HERE
The Three Ages of D.F. Lewis
0. 1948-1985 — Poems / Zeroist Group (1960s), The Visitor (Novel) 1973, Agra Aska (novella) 1983.
1. 1986-2000 – Over 1000 fiction publications in magazines and anthologies, some selected for the Prime Books D.F. Lewis collection ‘Weirdmonger’ (2003). Work once in Stand, Iron, Panurge, Orbis, London Magazine….
I was awarded the BFS Karl Edward Wagner Award.
2. 2001-2010 – Publishing multi-authored ‘Nemonymous’.
3. 2008-
GESTALT REAL-TIME REVIEWING (www.nemonymous.com),
Plus one novel NEMONYMOUS NIGHT (Chômu Press), a story collection and two novellas entitled THE LAST BALCONY (InkerMen Press), and a novella entitled Weirdtongue (InkerMen Press), and my reprint of Agra Aska that was originally published in 1998 by Scorpion Press,
Plus three originally created multi-authored anthologies that I published,
Plus two books from Mount Abraxas Press, and an Eibonvale chapbook called The Big Headed People. And a book collection from Eibonvale: DABBLING WITH DIABELLI,
Plus, in July 2020, a past story selected for THE BIG BOOK OF MODERN FANTASY edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.
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THE LAST BALCONY: HERE
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After many satisfying years of gestalt real-time reviewing, it now feels really special to see one of my own old stories showcased here!
My detailed review of this Big Book: HERE
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MASK
The Ha of Ha above.
Late Labelling:
“Des Lewis obviously needs no presentation to the wayward fantasts. Even if I have enjoyed reading his fine volumes for Dan Watt’s press and the one for Chomu Press two volumes I recommend I feel like there is still space and reasons to discover D.F. Lewis. It is no easy feat to break Mr. Lewis’s Code. His work is constructed like a house, almost like a living mausoleum, according to his particular way of thinking. In other words: astonishing and uncomprehending. There is no key to this house, although there are a lot of doors. Everything is available, everything is waiting to be plucked but few dare knock at the door. Caution is good. Running away is even better. You don t read Des Lewis to understand and enjoy his works. That’s not the point. You read him because you have to believe in something, after all.” (EOP)
P4 “One of the strange things about a literary work is its very uncertainty. And literature can always be read otherwise.”
From here: http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/r/nicholas-royle/ –>
Nicholas Royle
Nicholas is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He was born is Cheshire and has written for TIME OUT, GUARDIAN, INDEPENDENT, OBSERVER and others. He lives in West London with his wife and son.
My review of two novels by the two Nicholas Royles two years ago…. https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/novel-doodlings/
But that is NOT the photograph of the Nicholas Royle who co-wrote this book. Meanwhile, the hybrid bio of two Nicholas Royles on the page* linked above only helps illuminate my next quote below from my current reading of ‘This Thing Called Literature’, a wonderful book which so far seems now in 2015 gratifyingly to bolster the thinking behind my gestalt real-time reviewing and dreamcatching of books since 2008.
[*a page that has been this hybrid one for many years, but please do give it a look now in case someone changes it as result of this reference to it!]
P10: “No text exists in splendid isolation, however: everything is connected,…”
The first novel I ever read by Nicholas Royle was COUNTERPARTS…
P19: “‘One must be an inventor to read well’ (Emerson, 1996, 59).”
Sky thinking…
P37: ” There is a wonderful moment in Elizabeth Bowen’s 1963 novel The Little Girls that evokes the sense of being lost in a book,…”
P44: “Mind-reading, for humans, is a means of survival. / Novels are the great art form of mind-reading.”
P44: “…’leap over the walls of self’ (Wallace 1998, 51). Only in novels do people inhabit our thoughts in this way, prompting us to reflect on the idea that they read our minds as we are reading theirs.”
This is an eye-opening book, breaking new ground even for someone like myself who has gone on interminably about filters being two-way…
My own notes on ‘dreamcatching’ that hopefully can be factored into this wonderful book by Bennettt and Royle: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/i-only-buy-books-i-know-i-will-like/
There follows much interesting material on the nature of the short story…
P53: The short story “relies on ‘poetic tautness and clarity’, according to Elizabeth Bowen, another great exponent of the form,…”
My website dedicated to Elizabeth Bowen: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com
P94: “…Elizabeth Bowen: ‘To write is to be captured – captured by some experience to which one may have hardly given a thought’…”
Cf my dreamcaptchas, dreamcatchers – and my review of ‘Finnegans Wake’ : https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/finnegans-wake-james-joyce/
The full quote – “The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him – a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured – captured by some experience to which one may have hardly given a thought.”
Now – something where I disagree with this book. They encourage brainstorming when reviewing a fiction book. But then they say one should tidy it up and make it appear less haphazard, more argued as if you know what you are talking about. Well, I think there can be something valuable and revelatory in leaving your real-time thoughts written as you first write them. Those thoughts must be expressed carefully, I agree, and they must be based on the ‘truth’ of what you read and of what you feel about that reading. By revising it later you may be inadvertently destroying germs of that ‘truth’.
I think this book is advice to students and how to present considered academic essays as a result of previous brainstorming. My dreamcatchers and gestalt real-time reviews stand or fall in the cut and thrust of social media and blogs. If many of us do this dreamcatching about a specific fiction book we can increasingly ‘triangulate’ that book’s ‘truth’…
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A new novel by Nicholas Royle – https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/05/24/an-english-guide-to-birdwatching-a-novel-by-nicholas-royle/