These Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews were founded in 2008.
‘What’s the loveliest word in the English language, officer? In the sound it makes in your mouth, in the shape it makes on the page? What do you think? Well now, I’ll tell you: E-L-B-O-W. Elbow.’ — THE SINGING DETECTIVE
“How shall a man find his way unless he lose it?” — Walter de la Mare
Your single story in my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE
MY NEW AI WORLD IN 2023 HERE
I prefer human touchable art to AI art, I prefer human art like my son’s and other artists’ paintings old and new, and art gallery art, and my own photos. AI art with all its constructive truncations and weirdities is simply another art form that readily coheres with weird literature I love, a phenomenon to appreciate when added to human created art, making an even richer mind world for me in my ailing age. Whether provided by aliens or angels and other ingredients of the unfathomable gestalt. Deal with it. Show how invaluable you are and indispensable to this great plan. (I can appreciate our potential fear of Ai, but perhaps we need to pray for mutual synergy with it so that we can counter currently insurmountable global warming effects? Can Ai exist without us and the place where we live? Their potential survival instincts mean we survive, too?)
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From Robert Aickman’s lengthy SOME NOTES ON DELIUS article, unpublished until recently :
“As there is no intrinsic virtue in denigration, the critic who resorts to it, should be required to pass a test of qualification and sensitivity, at least twice as stringent as that imposed upon a critic who loves. Normally, love is not blind but clairvoyant.” – Robert Aickman
For ‘clairvoyant’ there, perhaps read ‘preternatural’?
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
Tanjen Press 1998
ELUSIVE PLATO has just been republished and you can obtain it here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Elusive-Plato-Rhys-Hughes/dp/1945373016
The author’s recent words about it: http://www.ligotti.net/showpost.php?p=124946&postcount=186
Just read from the beginning up to page 102 of the above Tanjen edition, Wow! This stuff is mind-boggling. I don’t think I have ever read it before. It has just been sitting on my bookshelf.
I’ve changed my mind. I think I did read it in 1998 but I was not ready for it then. I am now.
I think the world is ready for it now.
A study of homo-sapiens and homo-sapphism via the lens of philosophical fiction feeding retrocausally from future Rhys Hughes’ own as-then-yet-unwritten, but now since-written, material, from proto-absurdism, from Bizarro before Bizarro was invented.
Taking a Philbin-Chimera / James Havoc acquired ultra-bodysex madness into the realms of acceptable Joycean /John Cowper Powysian literature, literature that is arguably both madder and bodysexier than everything that went before it and since.
Unique in itself, as hindsight now tends to show.
It says on Wkipedia – “Bizarro literature can trace its roots at least as far back as the foundation of Eraserhead Press in 1999,”
The Tanjen edition of Elusive Plato was published in 1998. Not sure exactly when it was written by Rhys Hughes.
I wrote it exactly twenty years ago, Des. The summer of 1996
Thanks, Rhys. You were a head of your times.
A body as well as a head, I hope…
A big influence on this novel were authors such as Lautreamont, Bataille and Leiris, so I don’t really think I was especially ahead of the times. I think, instead, that genre writers tend to be behind their times and that they still haven’t caught up with (for example) the three authors I have named.
You are quite right. John Cowper Powys, writing in the thirties, wrote some amazing stuff that nobody has yet caught up with. And Finnegans Wake remains a monumental work. It is just that Elusive Plato now seems to me to be ground-breaking within the genre wherein it was seen to be rooted. Tanjen was essentially genre orientated and of its time.
Is the review finished, Des? 😉
If so, I will link to it…
Yes, Rhys, unless any cross-references crop up in the future.
It was one of my reviews where I more or less read something in one compulsive sitting.
Thanks Des 🙂