
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From Robert Aickman’s lengthy SOME NOTES ON DELIUS article, unpublished until recently :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’?
Pages 7 – 18
“Even the people we know the best are mysteries to us, I thought.”
An all-consuming, stylishly described first half to this story of five people of various ages (three house guests of the other two), trying to reconcile themselves, after some time, to an earlier suicide by a sixth one from among their chance grouping of participants of the past, and we sense the possible interconnections of supposed blame for that suicide, expressed now, it seems, with even more ‘venom’, as evidenced by some striking memorabilia, and the repercussions upon the relationships between the others since that event…
…all abruptly subsumed by an evocatively conjured, but half-expected, snowstorm, as the three drive off, relieved to have an excuse to leave early, but perhaps not early enough…
The people we know the best? or the people we know the most? Not necessarily the same thing — as the carload stops in the exponentially increasing snow to investigate a possible roadkill shape, but man or animal?
I look forward, with some suspense, to reading the second half, hopefully later today, and I promise no spoilers…
Pages 18 – 29
“For one single moment, my heart broke for that woman, the woman I loved so much and didn’t want to feel she had anything to be sorry for…”
Is “didn’t want to feel she had anything to be sorry for” correct, as is printed in this morphing text, or should it be “didn’t want that SHE felt she had anything to be sorry for”? A complicity of selflessness or selfishness seems important to this suddenly reality-convulsive reading experience that becomes a duty-by-dread that we readers of it are in conspiracy not to make clear exactly what happens in this its second half. It surely transcends both dreaming and waking as a composite ‘objective correlative’, a disarming strangeness before someone takes to arms to keep us quiet…?
Motivations are felt here to be disowned, and methods of transport uncertain, as are places where snow can sensibly settle. We were all destined to be successful in what we wanted to do in life (be it divorce lawyer, as it is here, or horror writer or whatever) given the backstory in which we and all our readers can connive and collude and complicate by complicit guilt, whatever the agonising collateral-damage to those we love.
That is one interpretative reading possible of the hauntingly delayed aftermath deployed by this work. It is not, of course, the correct interpretative reading of it because we are all disallowed, by its implicit subliminality, to publicly impart it, given the privilege of our having read it at all.