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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:
THE IMPERISHABLE SACRAMENTS by Damian Murphy
“A friend of hers, a bookbinder, had created for her a series of blank white books…”
Simone, a ticket-booth keeper. Her extra-murally methodical placement of ready-mades as more than just art is, in this first section of another bookbinder’s construction, a sacrament to itself, to this book, as if this book itself is or will become a sacred object within her placements. The text feels like it is a gospel, a touching upon your spirit to distil any esoteric faith you may have hidden away. Under the auspices of the dusk, then of the day, as this book has it, we follow Simone through the exquisite genius loci of the courtyards and churches, with the turning-point of this section being when her holy placements are switched overnight by an unknown hand. Intriguing, and beguiling. I only wish I had set Satie’s piano music playing in my reading-room before starting this esoteric book, and not Scriabin’s, as I actually did. I am slipping. (Some of her placements: “Perishables would decay in surprising and horrific ways,…”)
I shall eke this book out and savour its second section in due course.
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This bookbinder’s art has 72 pages, plus three pull-out illustrations. It is a model of luxurious and sturdy architecture in itself, with a stiff dustwrapper that has bespoke edges on its flaps wide enough to fit the black ridges inside them. Black ribbon marker and radiantly red end-papers. Mine is numbered 23/85. Esoteric, too.
LUX ÆTERNA
Pages 33 – 52
“She became dimly aware of the presence of some sort of monolith,…”
Was it a Tower like that in L.A. Lewis or Mark Samuels, or somewhere I’m sure in John Howard or Arthur Machen himself? Even my own ‘dead monument to once ancient hope’? And from around that ‘Tower’ (something that tries to TOW you TOWards Heaven or Wherever?) do radiate Simone’s often effete or fey perambulations in the Art of Wandering (real, imagined, dreamt, half-asleep or barely awake), making this book, as among the others described, take on an even more sacred aura, Gnostic or otherwise, as if seeking a spreading state of self in contrast to more modern iconoclastic spreadings of various states that dog us today outside of this book. I hope I can be forgiven if the items, in these specific numbered pages, that in turn radiate, for me, from those perambulations and lodge in my mind can now be listed, thus: Borges, Baudelaire, the lowest volume possible for music coupled with a broken record player now able to play music backward, “Simone felt as if she inhabited a secret city”, “the cheerful stoicism of the dockworkers”, the gestalt of “several tawdry mystery novels” to fashion a single mystery, the gestalt of many dream-fashioned maps smuggled into a real map shop, “a smattering of Schubert” (how can one possibly smatter Schubert!), “She contemplated the contents of books which had never been conceived by their authors” (echoing my life long interest in The Intentional Fallacy), a vast post-Finnegans Wake Joycean novel called ‘Abaddon’, similar conceptions of textually extrapolated TS Eliot, a “meticulously choreographed” Wandering to follow Simone’s earlier aimless version, the “uncanny symmetry” of Simone’s hands and hands’ general “psychological landscape”, Sir Thomas Browne “like a holy book unto himself”, and, important to many of my real-time reviews, “that a homeopathic effect might be derived from the text,…”, “Rather, it consists entirely of the aesthetics of the books themselves, being endowed with the memories, contexts, and associations which we give them.”
Mind-breaking.
The rest of LUX ÆTERNA
followed by EXULTET
“A ray of light shone through the stained glass window above,…”
And now, we really do hear Scriabin – amid a chess match in her ticket booth outside the concert – and, although it may be hard to believe, I did not know that Scriabin would be mentioned later in this book. But does his music really turn up in the text as the game is said to be played ‘in silence’. Did I dream it? I would claim not to dare to turn back the pages to check. Surrounding this event, Simone’s more aimless wandering outside of sleep now actually becomes deliberate for real, as repercussions of many of the aspects contained in my list above come to fruition. Does she become ‘like a star’ as is written in the text, or is she the star itself? As she reaches that pre-ordained ‘Tower’ that I made a big premonitory fuss about yesterday.
This book is the ticket for its own journey.
The heady language seems to slip behind the reader and become its own altering hands. A book so solid, you would think the text unchangeable. Dare you re-read to see if it’s imperishable… Or has it been switched for another?
A transcendent experience. From Satie to Scriabin. Dilettante to Mystic.
Mind-mending.
The reviewer in Ely Cathedral
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