CONE ZERO

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Cones In Art & Literature

Monday, 18 August 2008 8:52 P GMT+01

CONES IN ART & LITERATURE HERE:

http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=1905

 ======================================================

 

For what they're worth, DFL Stories linked below contain the word 'cone', 'cones' etc:

 

One Day At A Time: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=1615

http://wordonymous.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1657410/adrians-spacewalk/

 

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2004/06/afternoon-tea.html

 

http://weirdmonger.mindsay.com/after_tea.mws

 

Almond Cottage: http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=80029030&blogID=238715437&MyToken=3fff966e-2b7f-4976-84fb-847767105c2d

 

Bloodfest: http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/2007/09/11/

 

http://weirdmonger.mindsay.com/boys_a_symphony.mws

 

http://weirdtongue.tripod.com/weirdtongue/index.blog/1760562/brakelights/

 

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2004/06/breakfast-at-noon.html

 

Cigwitch; http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=138197636&blogID=205844237&Mytoken=D9476E3B-0424-4E57-A6C14052F86722AC15176587 

 

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2007/12/compliments-of-season.html

http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/crime_of_plenty.htm

 

http://weirdmonger.mindsay.com/curfew_watcher.mws

 

http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/gentleman_george.htm

 

http://www.midnightinhell.com/index2/fiction/hoodedspider/page1/

 

In the vein of the father; http://www.clarkesworldbooks.com/weirdmongerwheel.html

 

Inventions: http://expressblogs.com/blogs/index.php?cat=1213&blog_ID=Simonymous

 

Knuckledraggers, Inc: http://newdfl.bloghorn.com/129

 

Not Even In Legend: http://newdfl.bloghorn.com/135

 

A Live Show: http://elizabethbowen.fortunecity.com/blog/entry18.html

 

http://weirdtongue.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1779409/london-christmas-story/

 

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2004/09/no-circumstances.html

 

http://simplon.blogspirit.com/archive/2005/05/24/nothing_in_between.html

http://wordonymous.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1799432/off-beat/

 

http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/pipe_dream.htm

 

http://wordonymous.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1810921/pyramid-selling/

 

The Steering-Hole: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/225.html

 

http://augusthog.tripod.com/blog/index.blog/1777850/strangling-a-snowman/

 

Sun, Sea & Sorrow: http://expressblogs.com/blogs/index.php?cat=1234&blog_ID=Simonymous

 

http://simplon.blogspirit.com/archive/2007/07/17/sunset-of-stings.html

 

Tale About Thomas: http://newdfl.bloghorn.com/159

 

The Hoop & The Teapot: http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=138197636&blogID=389496689&Mytoken=5C434355-336F-4E6B-9DD74D677A0F08B6144477495

 

http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_thingie.htm

 

This Flight Tonight: http://elizabethbowen.fortunecity.com/blog/entry17.html

 

The Tide of Time: http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=80029030&blogID=231349310&Mytoken=A694C5F3-9804-467E-908EF5966126E9EF17792034

 

http://simplon.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/07/11/a-titanic-breed.html

 

Twice The Man: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/269.html

 

http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/two_films_and_an_interlude.htm

 

http://simplon.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/12/19/the-virgin-the-valentine.html

   ================

 

FREE AND EASY (an unpublished story I wrote a few years ago and features Cone Zero)

 

 The cameras rolled, and I was lucky enough to be in the live audience. Lucky, despite the cold opening.  With the prospect, however, of warming up when...

The front man strode to the front.  He was the 77 year old Piero Lopez – a touch of class, free and easy, still swinging it like a 21 year old with the whole of his life in front of him.  The crowd began eagerly clapping along with the music. Each piece contained the blowing of numbered cones, the flicking of projector propellers, the opening / shutting of lens filters, the slamming of fridge doors, the ratcheting of loft ladders, the clatter of manholes, the clamping of wheels, the wild alarums of fire and the clunking of ice-cold cocktails. The music’s own in-built clapping grew louder then muted then even louder as it merged with the audience’s own applause proper and returned to the instinctive accompaniment of any music allowed to be heard between the slapping of bottoms and the cresting of tone-deaf tops, thirds and piping trebles followed by the lowing of low brass as it burgeoned amid snort and snicker.

Like the words used in description, it was a wild, hip-sweaty scene in a cold cold climate, a whole razzamatazz surrounding the regimented audience that the crowd (mob?) often mimicked in civilised attention to a supposed entertainment.  The audience and entertainment together were a single variety show: a cornucopia of escapist skill rather than a chaotic fandango of lost Hollywood dreams.   The absurd abrasions of mind-upon-matter were what all this would soon become when the audience eventually imagined they were watching something on a screen and not a wild indulgence of a live stage-show.

I climbed down from the trip-easies of word and sound. I was a member of those clapping monkeys, or audience as I began to assume it surely always was, gazing at old Piero Lopez's antics on the stage as he directed the jazz rhythms into clearer and clearer contexts of civilisation's near collapse. A catharsis of wanting a catharsis even if that very catharsis was its own destruction. Freak and easy. The words were far too easy. Meaningless and meaningful.

Mean and cruel. Without being as harsh as the winter was quickly becoming outside the concert hall … even as we were shook and shaken to the cavortings of the brass and woodwind and cool percussion. I clapped my own hands more for heat than in appreciation. I'd never liked jazz at the best of times, and this was the worst of times, believe me, despite the enjoyment.  Jazz was really part and parcel of the dire straits we all found ourselves in. During the past, when I was genuinely happy, even the best Jazz Singer had seemed to deplete such happiness; but today the music actually created happiness from a sadness that had earlier contained no happiness at all - despite the white streets outside and despite the white faces inside (whatever their original colour under the make-up)..

Piero Lopez was the essence of metaphorical warmth as he was seen to change brass for silver, and vice versa, as this his flute-and-trumpet market held snorting sway amid the increasing swathes of misty breath that the concert hall was seen to contain. A trading arena where nobody now understood what was valuable and what was not. Freezer burns at every turn, as that percussive scorching of the music ballooned in frosty frenzy.

I turned to my side to see if Anabel was also smacking her palms together in desperate pleas for heat to materialise from the braying bells and horns of the instrumentalists on the stage. She was sobbing. We knew as a unit of both of us – knew better than what each of us could possibly know without the other – that this was fiddling with friction whilst Rome froze over.

Piero Lopez held up his hand. I remarked it was gloved. This seemed wrong. Only high fashion ladies in the thirties wore gloves in public. Glove-puppets. Mittens maybe. But not gloves. I stifled my own shouts of recrimination with my decorative scarf. More a Dr Who scarf than a means to keep myself warm. Though it now served both purposes. I was in the audience. I was the paying customer. I could wear what I liked. The band in overcoats however seemed to be cheating some unspoken law of entertainment. But Piero's upraised hand – gloved or not – halted the jazz to the mere grumbling stutter of a single randy sax.

"I woke up this morning at four eh em," he announced into the microphone. Even at the age of 77, he could hold an audience – even an unruly one – in the palm of his hand. And this audience was not only unruly with drink and funny fags, it was now in extremis with a cold coming of it like the three Magi at Christmas and another cold coming from their noses like a tuneless brass band of snorts and brays, including Anabel and me: both of us keeping time with countless other couples in permutations of love and lovelessness, same sex and unsame sex, till the whole world audience clapped their cupped hands to their mouths and horned a desperate call to the wild wild.

Free and easy. The music resumed with the swaying rhythms accompanying an elegant Eartha Kitt in high fashion gloves – as we all approached the thankfully hotter climes we could sense awaited us amid the ring of near death. Even Piero looked baked sooty. Only sound and colour were missing in the silence, as filming disinvented itself by piecemeal time-travel. The coated film of silent unsound dreams with Al Jolson as the chief minstrel entering Cone Zero. 

 

Comments

Bruised by Boxing

Saturday, 16 August 2008 11:25 A GMT+01

BRUISED BY BOXING

written today and first published here

 

 

He won a medal in the very last Olympic Games that were ever held.  He had gone there to run in the 100 yards sprint but ended up inadvertently competing in the welter-weight division of the boxing.

 

The world was beyond any organisation at that time.  Mass memory-loss was not exactly the problem but rather a growing inability by the world’s population simply to cope.

 

He no longer had a name.  He once had a name.  But without any order in things or requirements for reference, names tended to atrophy then drop off, like labels from ancient luggage.

 

He was a He-man.  He was, after all, too stocky for the sprint.  So, as if automatically, he found himself entered for the welter-weight.  Unsurprisingly, he had been mis-weighed and should have been entered for the heavy-weight.  He had sweated for days to get body-weight off, like old lard, so that even the feather-weight division seemed a possibility.  The tenacity of feathers, he thought, with some anticipatory pride.  Mixed emotions.  He often remembered he was a sprinter, not a boxer. 

 

As the sweat grew in amounts during the lead-up to the weigh-in process and as it streamed in soupy rivulets down his back, he found himself inevitably weltering in not only the various divisions of one particular sport, but in all sports needing sportsmen like him to fulfil as competition-fodder and thus present a show of brawn and speed for the mass audiences that were expected to attend, if such audiences could organise themselves to come there in the first place.

 

There was no Olympics sports events for darts-players.  Tradition had it that way. Even the very last Olympics scorned darts and bar-billiards ... even when the world’s standards were slipping, as now, with every missed target of past tradition and simply-what-was-right. But targets prevailed. Mass audiences came to attend events - events that had not been timed to happen in the Olympics programme - through a process of instinctive targetting.  Turning up together as if by chance.

 

Our he-man however meanwhile enjoyed relaxing as he started winging the tungsten-arrers towards the circular dartboard, clunking treble twenties into the cork almost with every throw.  He eventually gazed pitifully down at his physique.  Not exactly a sprinter’s trimness.  Nor the tightened armour of muscles that a boxer would need.  He wrestled the mixed emotions to the ground in a wriggling clinch-hold that any referee would need to view, cheek upon the mat, pummelling the ground with a fist as he checked the legality of the various moves.  And the mixed emotions sort of squirmed back, attempting wildly to escape from our he-man’s grasp. Punching above their weight.  Bruising his ribs as he tried to burst out of every mis-labelled box that the obstacle race entailed.  The referee gave him the benefit of the doubt.  As we in turn give the referee’s very existence the benefit of the doubt.  A bit like God's.

 

Our he-man received a medal.  It was just sad that it did not have his name on it. Nor even which sport.  At least it didn’t fall off.

Comments

Baroque Prose

Monday, 11 August 2008 2:40 P GMT+01

 

 

Thanks to gvernon here: http://www.ligotti.net/showpost.php?p=11406&postcount=19 for the following passages:

 

"But this does not mean that this jeweled and coruscated style springs full-armed from Durrell's personal gift. He stands in a great tradition of baroque prose. In the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne built sentences into lofty arches and made words ring like sonorous bells. Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, used the same principal device as Durrell: richness through accumulation, the marshaling of nouns and epithets into great catalogues among which the eye roves in antiquarian delight. The feverish, clarion-sounding prose of De Quincey is a direct ancestor to that of Justine. And more recently, there is the example of Conrad. In the later parts of Lord Jim and throughout The Rescue, Conrad uses words with the sumptuous exuberance of a jeweler showing off his rarest stones. Here also, language falls upon the reader's senses like brocade.

"This baroque ideal of narrative style is, at present, in disfavor. The modern ear has been trained to the harsh, impoverished cadence and vocabulary of Hemingway. Reacting against the excesses of Victorian manner, the modern writer has made a cult of simplicity. He refines common speech but preserves its essential drabness. When comparing a page from the Alexandria novels to the practice of Hemingway or C. P. Snow or Graham Greene, one is setting a gold-spun and jeweled Byzantine mosaic next to a black-and-white photograph. One cannot judge the one by the other. But that does not signify that Durrell is a decadent show-off or that his conception of English prose is erroneous. We may be grateful that Hemingway and his innumerable imitators have made the language colder and more astringent and that they have brought back into fiction the virtue of plain force. But they have done so at a price. Contemporary English usage is incredibly thin and unimaginative. The style of politics and factual communication verges on the illiterate. Having far fewer words at our reach than had the educated man of the seventeenth and even of the late nineteenth century, we say less or say it with a blurred vagueness. Indeed, the twentieth century has seen a great retreat from the power of the word. The main energies of the mind seem directed toward other modes of 'language,' toward the notation of music and the symbol-world of mathematics. Whether in its advertisements, its comic-books, or its television, our culture lives by the picture rather than the word. Hence a writer like Durrell, with his Shakespearean and Joycean delight in the sheer abundance and sensuous variety of speech, may strike one as mannered or precious. But the fault lies with our impoverished sensibility."

-- George Steiner, "Lawrence Durrell I: The Baroque Novel" (from Critical Essays on Lawrence Durrell)

NB: Avignon Quincunx (by LD) thread here:
http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=1304

Comments (1-0)

MEGANTHUS

Friday, 8 August 2008 5:19 P GMT+01

 

 

Very pleased to learn yesterday that ZENCORE! (Scriptus Innominatus) - aka Nemonymous Seven - has been nominated for a British Fantasy Award (Best Anthology in 2007).

Thanks to those who have bought it, voted for it, appeared in it and helped me produce it.

I notice that the BFS have used a misprinted word for the Publisher name of this book - which is in reality should be MEGAZANTHUS PRESS - with their own much better version of MEGANTHUS !!!  I shall now adopt the new name. Cool

Comments

Bibliography of the 'Weirdmonger' Book (2003)

Thursday, 7 August 2008 10:34 A GMT+01

STORIES IN THE 'WEIRDMONGER' BOOK (2003) BUT NOT INCLUDED AS STORIES AVAILABLE ON-LINE:-

>The Abacus

Whispers From The Dark #14 (1995)

 

>Always in Dim Shadow

Exuberance #3 (1991)

Frisson Vol 1 No 2 (1996)

Sackcloth & Ashes #6 (1999)

 

>Angel Of The Agony

Necropolis #18 (1994)

Nasty Snips (MT Book) (1999)

 

>Apple Turnover

Dead of Night #9 (1994)

 

>Back Doubles

Black Tears #2 (1993)

Black Moon #4 (1995)

 

>Benoko

Gothic Light #7 (1993)

New Dawn Fades #14 (1995)

Hadrosaur Tales #8 (2000)

 

>Big Ship, Little Ship and Brown

Substance #2 (1995)

Stygian Articles #6 (1996)

At'mos faer (Kadath) (1997)

 

>Bloodbone

Deathrealm #13 (1991)

Best of DF Lewis (Tal Publications) (1993)

 

>Bobtail

Dementia 13 #10 (1993)

Elder Signs #1 (1997)

Dark Legacy Vol 3, i (2001)

 

>A Brief Visit to Bonnyville

The Third Alternative #7 (1995)

 

>Caretaker

Atsatrohn vol 3 no 6 (1993)

Contortions #1 (1996)

Nasty Piece of Work #11 (1999)

 

>The Chaise Longue

Gravity’s Angels (The T Party) (1998)

 

>The Christmas Angel

Grotesque #6 (1995)

Parasol Post #18 (2000)

 

>Dark They Were and Empty-Eyed

Nyx-Obscura #1 (1995)

Visionary Tongue #3 (1996)

At’mos faer (Kadath) (1997)

 

>The Dead

Elegia vol 2 no 3 (1995)

 

>Dear Mum

Dream #26 (1990)

Parlour Papers #1 (1993)

 

>Digory Smalls

Dagon #24 (1989)

Twisted #1 (1996)

 

>Dognahnyi

Flicker ‘n’ Frames #12 (1991)

Best of DF Lewis (Tal Publications) (1993)

Earwig Flesh Factory #3/4 (2000)

 

>Effervescent

Palace Corbie (1995)

 

>Egnis

Scheherazade #8 (1993)

Palace Corbie (1997)

 

>Encounters with Terror

Weirdbook #29 (1995)

Dark Horizons #34 (1993)

 

>Find Mine

The Vampire’s Crypt #14 (1998)

Peeping Tom #29 (1998)

 

>First Sight

Dark Regions Vol 3 No 1 (1995)

Lathered In Crimson #4/5 (1998)

 

>Gongoozler

Heliocentric Net vol 2 No 1 (1993)

Psychotrope #3 (1995)

 

>The Hungerers

Imelod #17 (2000)

 

>The II King

Ocular #18 (1998)

 

>In Unison

Stygian Articles #3 (1995)

Black Rose #2 (1998)

 

>The Jack-in-the-Box

Exuberance #3 (1992)

Best of DF Lewis  (Tal Publns) (1993)

 

>The Last Prize

Albedo One #5 (1994)

 

>The Merest Tilt

Mystic Fiction Vol 2 No 4 (1994)

Beyond The Brink #9 (1995)

 

>Migrations of the Heart

Dreams and Nightmares #39 (1993)

 

>A Mind's Kidney

Severin' #4 (1993)

Footsteps #2 (1996)

 

>Padgett Weggs

Tales After Dark #2 (1986)

Fantasy Macabre #15 (1993)

 

>Queuing Behind Crazy People

Night Dreams #7 (1997)

 

>Rosewolf

Eldritch Tales #26 (1992)

Roadworks #6 (1999)

 

>Salustrade

Alternaties #13 (1993)

Year’s Best Horror Stories (Daw) (1994)

 

>Scaredy & White Mouth

Chills #8 (1994)

 

>The Scar Museum

Palace Corbie (1996)

Strix #17 (1999)

 

>Season of Lost Will

Hobgoblin #2 (1991)

Dark Horizons #33 (1992)

 

>Second Best

Vicious Circle #2 (1993)

Eclipse #6 (1998)

 

>A Selfish Strain

Scar Tissue #13 (1998)

Drift #96 (1998)

 

>The Sun Setting

Never printed before

 

>Shades of Emptiness

Never printed before

 

>The Shiftlings

The White Rose #16 (1990)

Dreams & Nightmares #37  (1992)

 

>Small Fry

Never printed before

 

>Small Talk

Alternaties #16 (1994)

 

>The Spigot & The SpeechMark

Deathrealm #28 (1996)

 

>Sponge and China Tea

Dagon #26 (DF Lewis Special) (1989)

Year’s Best Horror Stories XVIII (1990)

 

>The Stories of Murkales: Twelve Zodiacal Tales

Dagon #20 & #21 (1987, 1988)

 

>Stricken with Glee

After Hours #16 (1992)

End Of The Millennium #11 (1999)

 

>The Swing

Visionary Tongue #9 (1997)

Dread #4 (1998)

 

>The Tallest King

Cerebretron #6 (1988)

Sierra Heaven #1 (1995)

 

>Tentacles Across the Atlantic (The Story)

Stygian Articles #7 (1996)

 

>The Terror of the Tomb

Heart Attack #2 (1992)

 

>Todger's Town

Cthulhu Cultus #15 (1999)

 

>Tom Rose

‘Signals’ anthology from 'London Magazine' (Constable Books) (1991)

 

>Top of an Angel's Head

Barfly #2 (1996)

The Fractal #6 (1997)

 

>Uncle Absolutely

Foolscap #12 (1992)

Visionary Tongue #11 (1998)

 

>Valedictory

Gateways #6 (1993)

 

>The Walking Mat

Sugar Sleep (Barrington) (1993)

After (2000)

 

>Wall Pack

Dagon#26 (DF Lewis Special) (1989)

 

>Waning

Oasis #62;63 (1993)

 

>Watch the Whiskers Sprout

Cthulhu’s Heirs (Chaosium) (1994)

 

>The Weirdmonger

Back Brain Recluse #11 (1988)

The Dream Zone #8 (2001)

 

>Welsh Pepper

Vandeloecht's Fiction Magazine #5 (1992)

Year’s Best Horror Stories XXI (1993)

 

>Wild Honey

The Stylus #1 (1993)

 

>Wiles

Dagon #26 (DF Lewis Special) (1989)

Comments

Cone Zero Author Identification Competition

Monday, 28 July 2008 6:53 P GMT+01

CONE ZERO AUTHOR IDENTIFICATION COMPETITION

 

A prize of £50 (GBP) by PayPal from Nemonymous to the reader who guesses or assesses (by whatever means) the most correct authors of the stories in the CONE ZERO book..

 

The authors themselves are not eligible to enter.

 

Deadline: March 4th 2009 (when authors are due to be revealed).

 

If there is a tie, the prize will be shared.

 

The Editor’s decision is final.

 

Please write to bfitzworth@yahoo.co.uk with your choices. If you do not receive an acknowledgement of your entry within a week, please try again.  You can enter the competition up to three times, but each entry will be treated separately.

 

The story titles:

"The Fathomless World"

"The Point of Oswald Masters"

"Cone Zero" (page 23)

"Cone Zero" (page 33)

"Cone Zero, Sphere Zero"

"An Oddly Quiet Street"

"Always More Than You Know"

"Cone Zero" (page 129)

"Going Back For What Got Left Behind"

"Cone Zero" (page 147)

"The Cone Zero Ultimatum"

"Angel Zero"

"How To Kill An Hour"

"To Let" 

 

The authors in a random order:

Neil James Hudson

Colleen Anderson

Jeff Holland

John Grant

A.J. Kirby

Eric Schaller

Kek-W

S.D. Tullis

Stephen Bacon

Sean Parker

Dominy Clements

Bob Lock

Grant Wamack

David M Fitzpatrick

..................................................................................................................................................................

Comments (3-0)

Purple Patch Of The Day

Sunday, 27 July 2008 6:41 P GMT+01
 
I've started a new thread here:
To be continued there.
Details below of first post=
======================
 
I define 'Purple Patch' as an item of Purple Prose, one that does not stick out like a sore thumb but gains a foothold by enhancing or infecting or enlightening or darkening its surroundings of Prose in a positively Textured way.

We want no lean or hungry prose in this thread (like Hemingway!) but Proustian or Ligottian with a meaningful (or even meaningless!) richness that tentacularly or insidiously or gorgeously or obliquely haunts you or eats away...

My first choice is a random one from an Elizabeth Bowen short story where the word 'conversationally' is basically what the passage is about.
====================


Thomas proceeded conversationally like the impeccable dentist with an infinitesimally fine instrument, choosing his area, tapping within it nearer and nearer, withdrawing at a suggestion before there had been time for a wince. He specialized in a particular kind of friendship with that eight-limbed, inscrutable, treacherous creature, the happily-married couple; adapting himself closely and lightly to the composite personality. An indifference to, an apparent unconsciousness of, life in some aspects armoured him against embarrassments. As Janet said, he would follow one into one's bedroom without noticing. Yet the too obvious 'tact', she said, was the literal word for his quality. Thomas was all finger-tips.
From 'Foothold' 1929 by Elizabeth Bowen

Comments

The Bread Fence Lets The Rations Through

Saturday, 26 July 2008 1:50 P GMT+01

Published 'The Asphalt Jungle' 1998

  

The city was so sprawling and populous that I began to believe - perhaps unaccountably - that coincidences could never exist, a thought which reminded me of Diamante Fillul, one time spaced-out street-walker and feaster-with-panthers.  The last I had heard about her was that she had retired to a basement flat rather than face what she called "the outrageous randomness of city life". 

            Whilst, in her heyday, she would have been the soul of any party - indeed the central hub of the well-adjusted generously oiled wheel of social activities spinning and humming gently around her - now, she was purported to be a shivering wreck.  Yet, evidently, she had a story to tell before she died - and if I was not the first prying person to knock on her door since the coming of her late-life crisis, I still could not have felt more like an iconoclast: shattering a vesperal calm that had been set up around the precincts of Diamante Fillul's presence: an iron lung of mock silence, a conch of sounds that perhaps only I could hear.

            Nobody answered the door.  I would need to go away and come again:  next time I must choose the optimum moment more by haphazard chance than by the careful weighing of cross-currents and potential flashpoints.  But, then, to my unrehearsed surprise, the door opened a crack.  On greased hinges.  My newspaper may get its story after all. 



The spice canals between the trade-stars in that particular part of space were well charted.  Along such common-law circumscriptions of route, the starships plied: in the shape of the Narrowboats which used to wend their leisurely way along real canals in the Old Country.  Yet these bore a blister pod over the stern-bridge to keep the air sweet for the starship's Skipper.  And Skippers on the spice trade were now women because, during the Wars of Correction in the Tenable Universe, men had retreated to the homes where, in truth, men had always belonged.  Consigned to their earths.

            Diamante's husband was indeed a man, thus just one more forgotten creature comfort.  And today, she negotiated the book-value tracks of space, needing only a light touch on the tiller as her craft chugged along them.  Her bosom rose and fell beneath the check T-shirt, whilst the outcrop of her buttocks tightened the jeans, yet with no hint of soft-worm.  This was unlike many women of Diamnante's acquaintance who had wept bitterly upon discovering such an excrescence bulging in the cross-sections of their laps: to the extent of being forced to resume frocks and skirts as their apparel. 

           

Assuredly, Diamante Fillul was no anonymous broad.  She had been involved up to the neck with the leading lights of the city, privy to secrets as well as the sweet nothings whispered into her shell-like ear.  If scandal was abroad, Ms Fillul would not have been more than a few lashes' breadth from the eye of the storm.  Now retired, she just might be willing to puncture the ghostly speech-bubbles that still hovered around her bed amid the echoes of her lovers' ghosts.  Or so the newspaper for which I worked hoped.

            Why they sent me, of all people is anybody's guess.  I usually ran Poet's Corner, wherein spry verses on the latest season of the year (all written by yours truly) would appear on the inside pages under several fictitious by-lines.  Perhaps...  But, surely not, they could not have considered me in the sexy romantic role, wheedling titbits from her in competition with the fly loveplay of handsomer, healthier men than I.  Even at this moment (as I tried to prize the door wider against the chain-lock so prudently in place), I could feel my confidence seeping away.



The departure star was now simply a single white spark in the otherwise empty hemisphere of the universe behind Diamante and, being a threadbare area of space, there was only the destination star in front.  Men would have found the loneliness to be a cousin of despair.  She felt it, too, however, as she screwed up her face in a wild desire for the craft to go just a little bit faster than the standard four miles per hour.  Yet, she smiled at the absurdity.  Centuries ago, man had dreamed of dashing between worlds faster than light, in hyperdrive missiles that would GO GO GO and almost catch up with themselves in the past or future - or even in the nowhere days that some call the present moment.

            Then, however, the "speed" diseases became evident.  Nobody had thought speed could result in a raging randiness.  Men were dragged from their ships in a state of near bestiality, so over-sexed that they would rampage about, their members five foot high, desperate for an assuagement that no amount of manipulation could supply.  They ended up beating their privates to a living pulp on space-station lavatory walls.  Even women began to be affected to some extent, when they began to discover shrimpish coily worms growing where such things should not grow and to suffer itches deep down inside themselves that nothing but nothing could scratch away.



"Ms Fillul, can you spare me a moment of your valuable time?"

            In fact, I knew her days were spent mooning, dreaming of a past that had become little more than the words which memories had become.  An Anita Brookner with blinkers to shade her, to fence her in..

            "Get hold of any diaries, any papers, Charlie," my editor had urged.  I had shrugged, as if to question the whole project, nevertheless promising to do my humble best.

            She did not answer my question.  I looked down and saw a foot in a gold-braid slipper wedged between the door and the door-frame.  She did not want me to shut it, did not want me irretrievably to cut her off from this new love-hate relationship.  Equally, she did not remove the chain.

            "Can we speak for a while?"

            "Only for a while."

            Her voice was older than I imagined.  Perhaps even a child's voice would grow croaky through disuse.  I knew it would be difficult to interview a voice: faces are far more important.

            "I was interested in why you've shut yourself away at a secret address?"

            "Not as secret as all that, evidently, my dear."

            "Even so, have you anything you can tell me?"

            "The city used to be such a beautiful place, my dear..."

            "Call me Charlie."

            "I'd rather not call you by anything quite so personal as a name."

            She tried to shut the door but her own foot did not budge.  I was rather irritated with myself for interrupting her first train of thought, but I need not have worried for it all then started to pour from her stale soul.  She had relished the meaningful relationships that had grown up naturally within the well-oiled machinery of street and building: every seemingly insignificant brushing up against a stranger in a lift; the gentle kisses of slight acquaintances greeting and parting, in tune with some larger plan other than their own motivation; pregnant silences that were meant to last from early evening into the darkest parts of the night, being broken only by the casual backfiring of a maladroit delivery van;  knowing looks passing across crowded rooms between erstwhile lovers or between people who were soon to become lovers once they had spoken to each other for the first time; polite introductions that were bound to be made; marriages planned by parents even before they knew they would bear shadows let alone children; estranged spouses re-visiting the haunts of their earlier love-making, tearful at the coincidence of seeing a couple in the same chimney-corner wearing a striking resemblance to their younger selves; foreigners in the night, exchanging glances...

            "But what went wrong?"  I asked.  "The city is still the same place.  I'm one of its inhabitants, same as you."

*

As with all ploys of people like human beings, there inevitably came the sledgehammer to crack a nut.  It was decreed, from a power house higher than common man could dream, that all spaceships could go no faster than four miles per hour.  Diamante remembered the early days of the legislation, with a concatenation of heated debates during her childhood.  Now, she was party to it: one of the specially bred individuals who would spend the whole of her life just a single spice-trip into space.  True, she had submitted herself to a series of lobotomies, but none had really taken hold, because she kept finding her real between-the-ears self returning to the front of her skull, just like a bad penny.  There was, however, a series of clitorectomies which did take hold, at least temporarily. 

            Diamante's life-time ship was the good boat "Coincidence" (better than “Serendipity” any day, she claimed), now chugging along on all cylinders.  Its weed-hatch needed clearing out regularly because, in the Tenable Universe, space had much more consistency than space anywhere else - sown with microscopic particles of dead civilisations that once thrived in huge glandular cities on the flat mulch worlds skimming in fungal circles. 

            Pumping out the bilge was another task to which poor Diamante had to attend.  Upon hands and knees, she needed to suck out the cosmic purée from the purpose teats on the underside of the engine, hold it in her mouth and, when it was convenient, gob it into the chemical toilet, along with her other daily off-loads.  The muck there would then automatically jettison itself into space through the underhull gills as soon as the stink was sufficient to cause such self-generated gurgitation.  The engine ran on fuel which was recycled by feeding off that very stink.



I could not keep up with her exact answers but, working for a newspaper, even on Poet's Corner, had not left me without a certain art in reported speech.  The voices of the crowd had apparently changed, she maintained.  They no longer sung in unison.  Glances became furtive.  Gestures obscene.  Even the clean-living and respected used uncouth words.  Conversations full of small talk, people having forgotten the tantalising art of innuendo.  Coincidences clashed and crashed their gears, became mere tautologies, simple unrelated incidents in the smash and grab of survival.  Nice people became a rat race apart.  Worst of all, love became only a succession of one-night stands...

            "But, surely, one-night stands were your job.  Nothing to be ashamed about in that, by the way."

            That statement was where I went wrong with Diamante Fillul.  Even through a passionate series of clients (as she preferred to call them), she had originally felt a thread of continuity.  But, in today's world, she thought that even going steady with one lover, the bed-clothes were left oily, greasy, even bloody.  King Random reigned.  The flashpoints of interrelated destinies were dead and gone.  The city had become a mob, at best a crowd, never again to be that audience who once clapped the performance of life in a unison worthy of the collective unconsciousness that had been their birthright.



Diamante finally learnt not to question anything.  She just plugged on, her desperations concealed beneath the inner skull's post-surgical detritus.  She needed much, but eventually the simple need was enough.  Whilst she yearned for all manner of satisfactions, such yearning became an end in itself.  She merely consumed the spice food that she was meant to be freighting in "Coincidence" from star to star, knowing nothing but this must be God's way.  And as the food depleted, so did all hope of arrival.  Yet the mind's despair was enough to staunch the mindless boredom.

            The spice canals are still in existence for any historian to view, were there any active historians left.  The hypothetical banks and towpaths have become so eroded, they form the leading edge of a new Untenable Universe, where anything can live or happen once such untenability takes purchase and becomes second nature. 

            The ancient space lanes are no doubt full of all the old romance of trade and exploration, but nostalgia is never viable when nobody has any memories at all or, more pitifully, if memories have nobody to wield them.  Meanwhile, Diamante's home-based husband developed into the couch potato of all sofa sausages, because any pace from foot to foot gave him the hots so bad, he'd rather indulge his laissez-faire than let everything harden up again so painfully.  He'd rather simply loll there, dreaming of the past and of the day when Diamante might return from her trip.  Thus, the male race became mere butcher's rubble around a shrinking roseworm.  



The foot disappeared.  The door shut.  All too quickly for me to react.  I needed to speak again.  Urgently.  Realisation had dawned too late.  No letter-box through which to call my all-important message.  A non-directory number, too, I later discovered.  She had probably been disconnected, anyway.

            The message?

            "THE BREAD FENCE LETS THE RATIONS THROUGH."

            It meant nothing, of course, like a line of avant garde poetry.  But it was the highest common denominator: the title at the masthead of the piece I wrote about her, one in which we had both appeared: a connection worth cherishing, if nothing else, a coincidence possibly in the making.  It was only later that I saw through her disguise and recalled that I, myself, had been party to one of her one-night stands, in the old days, when I was healthier and, hopefully, handsomer than today.  I had been, indeed, one of her so-called clients.

            Soon after my visit to the door of her basement flat, a chance visitor discovered Diamante Fillul quite dead, one of her gold-braid slippers stuffed into her mouth so that it would fill the gullet.  He, too, the visitor, had probably known her, too, as a client, in the old days.  If only Diamante Fillul had fully appreciated such green shoots of synchronicity - such vegetative resurgence of creative serendipity - she may not have seen fit to kill herself at what she had evidently considered to be her optimum time for death.

            I shall try to lose myself in the sprawling city, leaving my piece on Diamante Fillul somewhere - yes, on a wooden park-bench in a randomly chosen part of the city - for a lonely person, for someone carrying a paper bag of stale breadcrumbs for the pigeons, for anybody (you, for example) to pick up and read before consigning it to the bin.  Meanwhile, I'm still on my spice kick, if now in inner, as opposed to outer, space.  Lust is easier that way.  And far less physical.  Poetry Corner was just a cover, a meaningless metaphor of words that let the walls through.  Despair, you see, soon becomes a parthenogenesis of hope ... hopefully.   Just give it time or a dose of tumescent tachyons. 

Yours, Charlie.  Still a trifle spaced-out.   





“Coincidence is a craft on which we can actually work, not a faith built simply upon the act of putting-yourself-about.  Excuse the colloquialism.”
 Rachel Mildeyes (from THE ART OF REAL DRAMA) 









        

 

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Attack on 'Intentional Fallacy' by MFS

Friday, 25 July 2008 11:05 P GMT+01

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Clacton Collaboration (5)

Sunday, 20 July 2008 5:00 P GMT+01

OUT OF TIME

by Clacton Writers' Group (July 2008)

 In years to come when, or if, anyone asked, “Who was it who thought of the question?” no one would be able to provide the answer.  There was no hint in their conversation that they were about to start sharing memories or recount embarrassing situations.  But once the question had been asked it became the inevitable course for their inebriated talk.  They would not remember the question had been asked in that drunken way so common during the latter stages of an evening in the “White Pelican”.  That decidedly tricky yet innocent way in which really difficult questions are always asked.  Asked as if the answer would not bring pain to the teller.  So, it was asked and as alcohol had lowered their guards, they would answer the question, “When were you out of time?”

Pete decided to get his confession over and done with.  He’d been so embarrassed by his situation at the time that these days he didn’t dwell on it any longer than necessary.  In fact, to be honest, the story still held a whiff of shame so strong that it made him shudder whenever the incident flittered into his conscious.  Hence his reluctance to recount it, however fleetingly – and so he never dwelt on the detail.

“It was soap box night at the Sup-up”.  He set the scene before anyone else had time to draw breath.  “We got 5 minutes.  I’d done everything right.  Got a great hook, the rational and I’d rehearsed in front of the mirror until I was word perfect.  And it was good.  I was passionate, serious and engaging.  My subject was important, real and relevant to everyone.  I asked the pertinent question: Why do 99 ice-cream cornets cost £1.20 when they should cost 99p or be called £1.20’s? I then went on to ask other associated questions which involved the mismatching of names and monetary amounts. It was the best theatrical performance of my life. But horror of horrors, I’d forgotten that it was ‘Time Voyager’ night as well. I realised at length that my audience was getting restless and low mumblings became loud protests. Many had travelled from different decades, and some from different centuries. It dawned on me that I was in the wrong time period for at least part of my audience, no matter what I’d said. I left the stage to the sound of jeers and confusion. I had also broken the rules and had run out of time and so couldn’t deliver my planned masterful finale. It was humiliating.”

“I was there,” Simon laughed. “You ought to have seen the face of the chap who had come all the way from the sixteenth century when Pete went on about the penny farthing bicycle. He thought he was facing an argument in favour of transubstantiation and hadn’t a clue what Pete was on about. It was the funniest thing I’d seen in a long time.”

“Well at least I know what transubstantiation means, unlike you, you moron!” Pete was getting annoyed, a not unusual occurrence when in his cups. “So lets hear your own embarrassing ‘Out of time’ moment. This should be interesting.”

Simon was beginning to look pale. He knew Pete’s temper of old. He tried to dredge up a suitable humiliating moment of his own which at least matched, or even surpassed the one his friend had just recounted. It was time for appeasement. He hit on the very thing. “Do you remember the time we were in Spain twenty years ago? I made a right fool of myself then. Talk about being ‘Out of time’!”

“Spain, you say? Tilting-at-Windmills, eh? Don Quixote, wasn’t it? A bit like fighting against giant clocks rather than wilndmills! All is out of kilter in Spain, anyway! Bull-fights being just an anachronistic echo of humanity’s brutal past.  But do go on, Simon.”

Pete was pleased he had managed to find a chink in Simon’s armour, even before Simon himself had humiliated himself with the biggest self-inflicted chink of his own, namely that he had once addressed a whole army of Spaniards in Seville thinking they were English tourists, viz: “I don’t want to interrupt your holiday too long, but there is something you need to know about the Spanish.”

Simon had looked around surreptitiously to ensure no Spaniards were over-hearing him and continued:

“Spanish time travel is not like our time travel.  No big jumps from decade to decade that our friend Pete talks about in the ‘White Pelican’.  No vast shifts between generations.  No star-travellers leap-frogging millennia. Spaniards just side-step between minutes or even seconds. There they are. Then they are gone. Then they are back, some clutching guinea-fowls, others straddling a couple of sovereign states simultaneously, yet others waving red capes. Spaniards need to shift real quick to dodge any bulls. Being ‘Out of Time’ puts them in danger of being gored...”

Pete laughed.  But laughter soon died. Pete was astonished to see that Simon’s audience had suddenly disappeared. Only to appear almost immediately behind him, wheeling their arms relentlessly clockwise as they shuffled (rhythmically clicking and ticking) towards him.

Luckily, Simon managed to learn a lesson in body-strobing from the Spaniards and was able to focus this ability eventually by stabilising it back towards the Sup-up (ten years before it had changed its name to the ‘White Pelican’). 

Soap-box night was in full swing and there were no memories of Spain as they hadn’t yet happened.  But Simon, as he stood on the soap-box to deliver a new drunken tale, suddenly saw a girl at one of the tables and felt himself falling in deep deep love.  This was Sylvia. He vowed to himself that if in future he went on holiday abroad, he’d be going with her, in preference to being accompanied by his old pal Pete.

“What about your confession, Sylvia?” asked Simon, hoping to get some juicy tit-bits to tease her with later (or earlier) when he knew her better (or worse).  She had been twiddling her hair whilst Pete and Simon had been talking about their embarrassing ‘Out of Time’ moments.  Sylvia just wanted to keep quiet and not have to enter into this particular conversation.  She started to fiddle with a beer mat whilst staring at her white wine Spritzer.

“I haven’t got one,” she replied, hoping that was the end of it.

“Bet you have,” smiled Simon. “Come on, tell us.”

“Ok then but it’s a bit boring.  I go to a line-dancing group as you know.”

“That’s embarrassing in itself,” Simon chuckled.

“One night they were playing ‘Boot Scooting Boogie’ and I had just brought some nice new cowboy boots.  The problem was I was so busy admiring them that I forgot to do the ‘Kick, Ball Change’ step and Mavis tripped over me, crashing to the floor.  She had to sit out for the rest of it, I felt awfully guilty as it wasn’t long ago that she had a hip replacement.”

“More like the ‘Kick, Fall Crash’,” Simon smirked.

“Stop interrupting me, Simon.” She wasn’t pleased with his constant teasing. “Anyway, I was in all of a flutter after that and completely out of time for the rest of the evening.  Talk about stomping in the wrong direction.  Mavis wasn’t the only casualty.”

Everyone was now laughing at the thought of Sylvia bowling down members of the local line-dancing group because she was out of time.

“What about Nathan?  He hasn’t mentioned his moment yet.” Sylvia was determined that the attention was turned away from her.  Nathan was a new or old target, she wasn’t sure which. She was getting really fed up with Simon.  He used to go on holiday with her often at the beginning of their relationship but now he kept going off with Pete on time-travel trips and coming back drunk.  She didn’t know when and where he was going to pop up next with his body-strobing.

“My worst one was quite some time ago,” said Nathan.

“Like you went … It happened when you were a lot younger?” questioned Pete.

“Or you went back a long way?” Simon, always quick to spot a second meaning, asked.

“Both.  I was actually 19 and I went back to the mid-sixties.”

“2360?”  Sylvia didn’t want to miss out.

“No, 1967 actually.”

The other three gasped aloud.

“19, and you went to the 20th century?”

“Were you drunk, or what?”

“What about the wars?  They had lots of wars then.  I know, I’ve studied that century.  There were two world wars, a Fleet Name thingy, two break – no, gulf wars and … oh, it was awful.”

“Load of bollocks,” said Nathan, “1967 was called the ‘Summer of Love’ and if it wasn’t for the people then this world would be a far worse place.  They changed the world in the twentieth century.”

“If I wanted bloody history,” said Simon, “I’d go back myself and find out.”

“Why don’t you?  I’ll come with you,” Nathan, normally non-confrontational, challenged.

“Not interested that much.”  Simon realised he’d been caught out and, worst of all, a quick glance at Sylvia and he knew she’d just changed her opinion of him – downwards.

“I wanna know what happened.  Why don’t you two give your mouths a rest and let Nathan excercise his, ‘specially you, Sylvia, you wanted to know … or was that so you didn’t have to explain your ‘Out of Time’ any more?”

Simon was about to protest, but one look at Pete and he shut up.

“Well, it was in a country called America and I got involved in some sort of youth movement.”

“Like the cadets?” interrupted Pete.

“No.  There was a lot of political revolution coming from the youth.”

“See, told you that it was warmongering.” Pete scowled at Sylvia, who snuggled up to Simon.

“It was just, well, no one knew they were changing things.  It was after those two big wars you spoke of but before Vietnam, I think.  Anyway, the young people started taking over the music world and all sorts of things were said and protested over.  You had to be there to understand.”

“And you were,” said Pete.  “So what’s this ‘Out of Time’ thing of yours?”

“Well, it happened when I went to this big music festival called Woodstock.”

“Ah,” interrupted Pete.  “I know all about that, some farmer’s field in rural America hosted loads of the top musicians of the day and four businessmen arranged what turned out to be the biggest musical event of the century.  They...”

“Who’s telling this?  You or me?” Nathan asked coldly.

Pete looked sheepish.  “Sorry,” he muttered.  “Go on.”

“Pete’s right,” Nathan admitted.  “Woodstock was one of the major events of the 20th century, certainly in the music world.  I think most of us who were there recognised that even then.  It was a turning point; a point where it became obvious that a quarter of a million people could live in harmony.  For three days at least.”

“And the happy-drugs helped,” muttered Pete.

Nathan shot him a glance.  “Anyway,” he continued, “I’d only just arrived there and, unlike Pete, I hadn’t studied the century.”

“That’s why you didn’t know that America entered the Vietnam war in 1965,” commented Pete,

“No, you’re right, Pete, I didn’t.  Although, come to think of it, that makes sense, given some of the music that was played at Woodstock, especially Country Joe McDonald.”  He shook his head.<