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From Robert Aickman’s lengthy SOME NOTES ON DELIUS article, unpublished until recently :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 
Pages 3 – 27
“This begs the question – who is the author?”
I’ll need to take this book slowly, struggling to delineate its plot (at least yet), amid the off-putting swear words; there seems to be a Schism, or more than one Schism, as, on this day just now, in my world, a new Schism actually emerges, as observed externally. In this City of a dire Messiah for whom at least one woman has mixed feelings of hatred and lust, where happiness cannot be deliberate or it slips away, and factions fight each other or even fight themselves, and the central point of view, one minute, is a fallible man who has lost fingers and the next imagines the fingers found intact on his hand. So much to quote, I am engulfed by this book, possibly fatally. We shall see.
There is a striking paragraph at the top of page 5, about happiness ‘for a prolonged period’, that I somehow roughly presaged a few weeks ago here. I feel that, amid misgivings, I was destined to read this book. I shall need to eke it out, for my own sanity, perhaps. A necessary hairshirt for our times. But which of me is wearing it?
PS: it now seems apt that, before starting to read this book, I had added this to my banner above on this website: “Reviewing a book is not writing an immaculate essay about it, but getting your hands dirty with it.”
“I was born with these stories already in my head. I remember more from them than I do events in my own life. I am a prisoner of fiction. I use it to shape me.”
And I feel as if this book itself, possibly as an autonomous force, is taking me over to help me understand how its protagonist’s own ‘Braingate’ is being taken over by someone actually within this book, alongside its plot’s declared ‘infobesity’ of too many books and blogs (explicitly) like this one.
Page 58 onward to end of book
“You don’t seriously believe all this BS about us being animals hooked up to a computer, do you?”
I read Tem’s Garbage this morning (review here). That described what I feel as my ensuing state of mind. This book has now brought such a description to full fucking fruition!
I dream of mirrors? No, they dream, of me. Their nightmare, eventually not mine. Hopefully.
I should have read these blurbs in the book first!