Dostoyevsky Wannabe 2020
My previous reviews of Lee Rourke: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/lee-rourke/
When I read this book, Covfefe permitting, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
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The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books 
Initially, I have cross-referenced my image of what this book may contain with my review of The Fly by Katherine Mansfield a few minutes after receiving Vantablack: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/katherine-mansfield/#comment-1080
“—a geometry of blackness set against light—“
I first encountered paintings by Hammershøi (mentioned here) when I decided to collect images of women with their backs to us, started here in 2009: http://www.ligotti.net/showpost.php?p=31619&postcount=1
Meanwhile having read the first three pages of em-dash rarefied wordplay in this intriguing book – and with my having published the world’s first blank story in Nemonymous in 2002 – I wonder if black is actually more blank than white! Not thought before about that … nor about the black-blank word-assonance.
Cross-referenced with William Trevor’s “Its walls and ceiling were a sooty white” in a story I happened to read here later the same day; https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/22207-2/#comment-18887
Up to page 15
Short prose pieces with generous blank, non-black spaces below them, and, of course, between letters and words, too, but the close-ordered em-dashes keep these spaces to a cabin fever’s minimum—all this upon the edge of OuLiPo as an evocation of many shades of blackness.
“the geometry of black rooms” has the feel of TODAY’s cabin fever!
Up to page 19
“—shielded in flesh—“
The whole of page 23 is taken up by…
[…]
And I would cross-refer you to the many fiction books of Rourke I have already praised in my gestalt real-time reviewing linked at the head of this web page.
Page 22: “—drenched with connections—“
Sorry, I somehow quoted that wrongly. It should be:
“—drenched—with connections—“
My constant lockdown view….
We’re primarily still concerned with recovering bodies, and we hope we find them in that big section of fuselage, but don’t everybody think that this is going to happen…
—Robert Francis
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Up to page 29
“—fuselage through a window pane—“
This is such strange book! You may quote me on that.
“—you’d never felt ‘blackness like this before’—“
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“Take out the glass eye, unscrew the legs, the arms. Remove the wig, the teeth, the silver plate in the skull, the tubes in the anus and abdomen, and just climb into bed and wait for summer.”
— Lawrence Durrell, The Black Book
In the tube journey up to page 34, a number, for many reasons, important to my mother who was born in Walthamstow and I seem to travel from that very station with “corrupted lungs […] through darkness towards complete blackness—“
Page 35
I am so far intrigued with a numbered series headed VANTABLACK, here no. 8
“—black in black—like a—colour so black it makes—black seem tame—“
Just an extract. Book that somehow makes book seem tame.
Cross-referenced above with Durrell’s ‘A centre of blackness in things which trembles and changes shape.’ from Justine here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/763-2/#comment-2037
Page 36
“) came the footfall—“ “—reflected in black—“
As well as a numbered Vantablack series, there is a lettered Francesca Woodman series, it seems. Many art exhibitions that started recently had their footfall aborted, the now sadly quarantined galleries, except one beneficial spin-off is that they have produced a wonderful series of different monologues of people going round such footfaded exhibitions on BBC4 TV.
Every blackness has a salver lining?
Up to page 41
There now seems to be a new series with episodes denoted by Roman numerals, a series headed “—the geometry of black shells according to wikipedia—“
This is mind-fazing Em Dash OuLiPo that does not flatten today’s curve but möbiuses it.
Up to page 45
This includes algebraic or acronymic footnotery amid the em dashes, outdoing OuLiPo at its own game of blackening stuff with squashed insects as semantics, graphology, mouthed phonemes, upon an otherwise white page of assumed poetic syntactics.
Page 49
The blank story I mentioned earlier above was entitled ‘4’33”’…
Cross-referenced Vantablack with Pale Fire here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/769-2/#comment-2063
Page 51
“—the echo of concrete—taking it deep—into the lungs—“
There is something very poignant about that. The em dashes as indrawn breaths.
If the em dashes are generally meant to denote the many takings of breath, they denote extreme breathlessness indeed throughout the book, and sporadic insertions of […] to denote… to denote what?
Up to page 62
“—Beckett’s silence is blackness in silence in silence in blackness—“
And the reference to ‘Hades black‘, a reference to the poet named Shade in Pale Fire?
Cross-referenced here again with Nabokov: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/769-2/#comment-2078
“—light of snow—doesn’t speak of—whiteness—but a—dark—dark”
A death on Christmas Day in 1956. Beyond even his own Microscripts.
Page 65
“—‘the desire to run from one thing—or state of being—and be—absorbed into another’—can it ever be—undone—“
That seems to be the crux of our essential dilemma today, precisely today, as we await this weekend’s announcement by a buffoon about our loosening lockdown destiny…
And a long movingly short-breathed passage about a person referred to by ‘she’ and ‘her’, and her ability to echo our blackness, amid the tower blocks and doom of the city and, I infer, amid the Gestalt Tardis of our innerdividual or covidual lockdowned bodies and other vertically aligned nanotube arrays.
Cross-referenced here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/25598-2/#comment-20543
Up to page 70
“—as black as shellac—“
Then, I note another series denoted by a., b…
I also now note a. was hidden in plain sight at the beginning of this book, before the em dash punctuated breathing started. And now we have b., a series depicting the drawbacks in trying to ‘own a colour as a thing’… as I try to own this book about black? Steal it from its author? Live off its back like a blackacle?
Up to page 73
“—Pale skin on black—“
Up to page 89
I have had a long run at reading this today, having been figuratively semi-released in the Government’s world from a sort of blackdown. Though being over 70, I am unsure. They called such a blackdown by the word blackout in the last War. Yet this still is today “only blackness”, although it strives to be a period piece, because there are people in pubs here, if absorbed by Guinness. Yet here we have truly powerful em dashery of crowblack, poemblack dash-divided lines as a theme and variations upon the tactile and spiritual and genius-loci and wordsources and dribbleslutch of the Thames, being another numbered series up to (17) stemming from this river’s source at the Chivers book. St Paul’s et al. Did the Chivers firm ever make black jelly? The darkest was more purple than black I recall, even though it had BLACKcurrant in it. Did lockjawed Corona bottles ever have black fizz? The darkest was probably fizzy Dandelion and Burdock. Which brings me back to Guinness, that darkest of all spiritually dark drinks with a creamy head, preferably, for me, as cold as the Thames water in that 1963 Winter I recall so well. Under milkwood, under milkstout.
Cross-referenced above with The Cough here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/04/27/the-dark-nest-sue-harper/#comment-19069
Page 97
I hope the author will forgive me showing the whole of this section….
Up to page 105
“—-black made up of things black—“
“—it’s vulgar—“
Up to end
“—completely black—the cars have—all gone now—“
This section, if not the whole book, is a staggering prophecy of blackdown or lockdown and its accoutrements and causes. Covivid, covidual (not individual, as in Jungian) and lucid dreaming, too. And em dash breaths between coughs?
I see the book was first published on 17 January 2020!
“—when communication is finally switched off—“
“—‘voices shovelled away into heaps guttural—like phlegm—coughed up—spat—out’—“
Ending with some black matter called redaction.
end
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The redactions from my review of ‘The Hanged Man’ here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/05/22/well-never-have-paris/#comment-16073
“The god of skylights.”
Merleau-Ponty sounding like a tourist sight 
phenomenology of cemeteries 
needing a man 
lifting corpses before they are dead 
we’ll never have 
.
Or of redactions
Cross-referenced with The Black Paintings: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/05/22/black-static-75/#comment-19174
Cross-referenced with Armageddon House: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/05/17/armageddon-house-michael-griffin/#comment-19177
Cross-referenced with XX here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/911-2/#comment-2253