
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From Robert Aickman’s lengthy SOME NOTES ON DELIUS article, unpublished until recently :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’?
Up to just before THE ARGUMENT
“Yes! Dragons can use their slow-blinking eyes to look into the heart of any man.”
Ripening with interpersonal interface, an earthy Lawrencian portraiture (without overt sex so far) of two well-characterised families belonging to two brothers, one more bookish, the other more sheepish, not sheepish as in slyly shy but in dealing with sheep and the ways of nature. The bookish one had to leave the city of Bath as there was no more bookish work, with his wife and son Gideon the boy protagonist, and this brother sort of tries to compete with his sheepish brother’s family, but retains a love or words, but I have said nothing yet of the Dragon, the Orme or Worm, the body of which is ridged symmetrical beneath the landscape of their feet and the legends told thereof. And an ancestor called Jonah (who entered the Orme as if swallowed by a Whale?) and later mapped treasure on a chairback…
A third through it, I intend to read the rest of this novella outside the scope of my real-time reviewing. Its decided narrative promise is not suitable to my style of retelling. For fear of breaking open spoilers and other plot eggs.