Des Lewis will be 77 years old on 18 January 2025
Those who have read these episodic brainstorming reviews of mine must know they are very personal — rough-shod and spontaneous. Synchronicity and anagram mixed. I know they are not professional, never potentially publishable other than in the madness of my head, but I do hope they show grains of dark truth and cosmic panache.
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
To any current genre author I have reviewed before — if you have a new story recently published or soon to be published in a collection or anthology, you may have a review by me of the story that also showcases where it is published. See HERE. (This is because I am no longer well enough to review as many books as I once did.)
Fresh Fictions, free to read HERE.
No AI input in preparation of my texts whatsoever.
THE NEW NONSCENIC
Photos here: https://conezero.wordpress.com/2024/02/24/d-f-lewis-recent-photos-1/
A Tub Of Squid And A Faded Chair On A Sunny Day And The Human-Centered Nature Of Narrative As It Relates To Communicating With Aliens, Listening To Other People’s Dreams, Or Watching Porn In Which You Are Not Interested
By KS O’Neill
“Have you ever told someone the story of a pornographic video?”
A leminscate with a Zeno’s Paradox glitch known as a squid story that is a not a story till it is a story, as influenced by squid who can see through the artificiality of our human narrative processes. Seems to fit exactly with my gestalt real-time reviewing, garnering a gestalt from leitmotifs (like car racing and my girl’s voice). Now I just need to avoid the squid glitch of blocked hindsight. My actual review of this mind-blinking story is not what I say about it but I what I don’t say about it.
“The squid find us interesting because not only can we never tell the truth, we can’t even hear the truth.”
Just cross-referenced this story with a story I happened in the predetermined course of my reading to pick up immediately after finishing this one. It is coincidentally part of my concurrent real-time review of the BIG BOOK OF SCIENCE FICTION here: https://cernzoo.wordpress.com/the-big-book-of-science-fiction/#comment-358 and the story in question is entitled THE SQUID CHOOSES ITS OWN INK.
Paradise Unified
By Eliot Fintushel
“She warned us how somebody from outside would be coming and how we had to pull in our nail and turn around our eyeball, so as not to, so as not to, so as not to, so as not to—offend.”
I loved this reading experience but I can’t tell you exactly why. It is as if narrative lessons have already been taken from the Squid in the first story. It is a Joycean stream of conscious that actually makes more sense than Joyce ever did in Finnegans Wake, although I also love that book, too, and once did a detailed on-line real-time review of it. Don’t let that put you off. Here we have ostensibly a feisty oldster giving a young shaver a bit of his sharp tongue and a summary of what has happened or not happened in all their lives, in a world where the word ‘word’ has ‘or’ embedded but otherwise ‘or’ does not exist as a word, a finger and a leg and a turned-round eyeball, notwithstanding. It involves retrocausality being obliterated by retrocausality itself, so a self-defeating retrocausality, and a spaceship that thus did not arrive, and you can read all manner of scenarios here, I guess, upon re-reading it, but my gestalt real-time book reviews are always upon a first reading of each work, in case a second reading expunges the first. I have so far only read this story once. It is already enticing me to read it again. But this needs to be read aloud as a first reading, but I only realised that by the time I had finished my first reading. I suggest you read aloud this work as a first reading of it while using an American accent with as much swagger you can summon from a sedentary position of old age. And wear a blue suit. Or nothing.
But if you really believe this is Aunt Bea talking, just change the gender of the accent. And forget the blue suit.
Nowrk of Urtwirth, Unconfessed
By Amy Power Jansen
“As hunger cannot imagine food, as thirst cannot imagine water, emptiness cannot imagine full.”
…and as gender cannot imagine male or female, we now have the pronouns necessary to allow us the removal of that ‘or’ in respect of the previous story between the feisty oldster masquerading as Aunt Bea, or vice versa?
The subtitle of this book is CODE and you certainly need to crack it in order to understand this story. The squid’s narration here has actually gained much territory in the spaces between the words and the paragraphing. Whilst we had retrocausal time in the previous story, now we have retrocausal space with a palimpsest of emptiness and fullness, not emptiness OR fullness. I sense the Nowrk, now, or , nor, OK?, works towards hir real name. I sense this name will become clearer later, assuming that, as most of my real-time reviews often discover, the authors in an anthology often work towards a gestalt, not an intentional or planned or confessed collaboration as such, but a preternatural gathering of forces beyond their control. A Jungian code?
Whatever Remains
By Teo Yi Han
“True/False?”
That Either/Or theme in this book. A perfect short/short that is a portrait of the dichotomies and gang gestalt that we have seen uniquely played out in these fictions. This one is the gang’s coda. Telling of a loving relationship (from its inside and outside), a relationship where, I infer, genders and intentions strobe. The first time I have ever seen my obsession with Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy (in which I have been interested since 1967, adumbrated by me on-line in the last fifteen years) now played out in naked Jungian code. Above and beneath textured-stylish and/or staccato prose. The tutelary squid, notwithstanding.
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