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?)
***
From Robert Aickman’s lengthy SOME NOTES ON DELIUS article, unpublished until recently :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 
BREMEN by Claire Dean
“He returned to the Findling again and again.”
But I have been to Bremen only once, on a single day a number of years ago. And took this photo. Enough of a visit to be able now to imagine the market stall and its old woman who creates the Foundlings (or do they create her?), Foundlings who need to find each other before they are lost, it seems, some whose heads we enter. Amazingly this Bremen (breed-men?) piece also has many references to crows (ends with them, too), and only this same afternoon I have just finished reviewing here today’s episode of the novel KA by John Crowley whose characters are crows and have heads we can enter, too. Amazing coincidental resonance in my day’s gestalt, thanks to this Dean. Haunting, its style precise yet ornate, rich yet stark, obvious yet oblique. Was there a miracle working here?
THE UNWISH by Claire Dean
Copy 32 of 200: 16 pages.
“…where all the leaves were really birds…”
Whether Goldfinch or Crow, that seems something to help any reader keen on finding words for things that hide between the otherwise plain lines of this engaging story, more easily expressed than in Bremen, a story with a duty only unto itself, but containing implications towards things that remained concealed since the characters were last here. A family of parents and sisters returned to their holiday cottage of yore, the girls now grown up women, and everyone now beyond pooh-sticks except possibly for the Dad.
One sister happily settled and pregnant, but here alone because of her husband’s business commitments, the other sister waiting for the arrival of her new boy friend whose texts about his planned arrival are not up to loving scratch. I’ll leave you there balanced between a modern Austen and something quite else, creeping up on you as all good literature should. But not only what was lost in the past but also lost today? Another breed-man wished away? And who is that in the window above?
“In Scrabble she got F.O.U.N.D. on a triple word score…”