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From Robert Aickman’s lengthy SOME NOTES ON DELIUS article, unpublished until recently :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 
An aesthetic pamphlet with over ten densely texted pages, plus a title page and five full page photographs in addition to the outside cover. My copy is numbered 14/100
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From start at “In the summer of that year” to “I have never forgotten him.”
“Part of my purpose in going to Whirlwell was to gather folklore about folklore.”
The narrator’s enthralling quest – in person, by dint of ‘spoor’ and from research – for the cockatrice, at first in this byway of Hampshire where he dares talk to only one person (hoping he is not the village idiot?) while he is there. And that is as far as I have got.
This, so far, is engaging, rurally urbane, Valentine-vintage textwork.
From “I suppose it ought to have been one of those summer days…” to “…I had a feeling that I must remember the moment. There was a quality about it I could not quite identify.”
Comfortable narrative of a church’s missing weather-vane depicting a cockatrice, meeting a man with four coloured jam jars and a sign of the cockatrice on the local pub, a magazine about mazes, but nothing about a megazanthus.
From “We came to a narrow house…” to “…of his fantastical model.”
Sampling this in order, savoured morceau by savoured morceau, “an extraordinary athanor of shades” being part of a deviously tactile description of the cockatrice model belonging to the man the narrator met. A forbidden description, I infer. I am intrigued even more by the man met and all his accoutrements.
From “I subscribed then –” to “…and if he would want to meet again.”
A tour of arcane periodical journals, some more serious than others.
Or more or less professionally printed. Leading to “a world quiet different to the everyday one, a mysterious unfathomable world,…”
At first I misread, in the small print, ‘unfathomable’ as ‘unfashionable.’ Both are true, and I try to blend a gestalt of traditional and avant garde in my own real-time reviews. The regular embodiment of periodical disprint.
Laced with found art in photographs, as also in this booklet.
From “The field lay at a slightly lower level…” to the end
“I knew the patterns of these miz-mazes to be complex, as I had seen diagrams of them, and I did not think his great-aunt’s rough sketch could be more than a rudimentary recollection,…”
Sharing the maze with this man I’d met, this person who I am or who I may not be as first person narrator, a maze itself, of self, as are the emotions shared when sharing a bottle of water, without his wiping the top after I had drunk from it. This is a megazanthus after all, an anthology of mazes and magazines. And a gazetteer of landmark horses, one possibly a landscape’s dragon abbas, or even, dare I say, a cockatrice. A sleight of gender.
This is prime Valentine.
“…I said, ‘I wonder what’s in the middle?’
‘We are,’ he replied,…”