All Gods Angels, Beware! - Quentin S Crisp (Part 2)

CONTINUED FROM HERE: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/all_gods_angels_beware__quentin_s_crisp.htm

A Cup of Tea

"I would read a section like this before I had to rest myself by looking up, only to find myself in a world of the 'dull smoke-coloured light from Hell'. Then I would turn back to the book feeling almost as if I were choking on fumes."

I wonder if the writer of this letter would be disingenuous enough to deny the Proustian quality of his communication to one with whom he used to share cups of tea. I'd boast about it, if I were him.  It's a gem of this literary genre.  Ranging from the Tibetan Dead to Lovecraft to considerations of self and Proustian selves within that self and selfhood talking to selfhood - and the photographic light that just one cup of tea can fleetingly contain upon its spinning meniscus of valued memory (cf. the use of light in the book 'Traces').  Memory is often better than now, a 'now' with even one's Job Centre moved to another town, better than the homelessness owned by another Karakasa as seen without memory. I wonder if he posted this letter he wrote or filed it somewhere with his P45. (25 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later).

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Asking For It

"Once in London, on my way back from visiting a friend in Greenwich, I had a rather unpleasant experience."

Yet this relatively brief story (compellingly told and enjoyably read) takes place in Tokyo.  A troubled protagonist stalking our sympathy or even empathy. He's almost a bit like Erstwhile Joe doing a bit of haunting for its own sake. I shake my keys at him. (25 Oct 09 - another 3 hours later GMT)

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The Fox Wedding

"He had created his own world of words and could not stray beyond its verge."

A substantial and extremely powerful text comprising a smoker's dual-directional narrative of an exquisitely conjured-up Japanese 'genius loci' - trotting with foxy powdery geisha-girls - laced, in contrast, with the cute salaciousness of girls from bottom-of-the-range novelty stickers - and a studied empathy with semi-consciously stalking the stalkers (cf. 'Asking For It' and 'Troubled Joe') while self-disgust becomes layered with a mazy sense of literature desperately attempting to neutralise (insulate? cauterise?) itself by point-of-view (yours as well as the narrator's): an alley within a building.

"It was like a tide rising in my chest." (26 Oct 09)

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Mise en Abyme

A densely textured text that is impossible to 'spoil'. To say it is merely Escherean or Alicean is to diminish it. Not a Venn Diagram so much as a Venn Psychopomp. Seriously, I'm hugely impressed by this philosophical exercise in 'The Synchronised Shards of Random Truth & Fiction' (many potential readers will flinch at that, but don't!) - and not only, for me, because it is in tune with Nemonymity (that I have been nurturing for forty odd years) but also with the 'retrocausality' (now here in surround-sound!) hinted at by earlier topical references to the Hadron Collider...and more, much more. A Swiftian 'Baffles and Fables'.  Traces upon Traces. Stalking stalkers. Proustian selves. Here is a short selection of unspoilers:

"Creating the many worlds of his fictions, the writer should, theoretically, stand outside all of these fictional worlds in some transcendent universe of ultimate reality."

"...prompted him to write a letter to the newspaper expressing his personal and vocational concern at the recent malfunctions in reality that had been the cause of such global panic and bafflement."

"...but I wonder if it would not be more helpful if, instead of looking at particles or forces, we saw instead that we live in a universe of doors, windows, corridors, rooms, stairs and ladders."

"A similar pattern, however close in design, would not suffice; the pattern had to be identical."

"...his heart palpitating as he wondered whether they were following his movements or he was following theirs;"

"He almost believed he could hear this second self breathing..."

The breathing is accentuated by the as yet uncoughed-up phlegm, I guess. Soon, we will not need to know which of us is the true "Metascribe". One of them will probably be dead!  (26 Oct 09 - two hours later)

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Italiannetto

"Eventually I managed to select a toy which was a kind of inverted plastic cone for shooting ping pong balls in the air and catching them again."

It is not easy to say this. But this is my favourite story (so far) in this book. I shall resist the temptation of saying it may also be one of my favourites of all-time, in case the moment has grabbed me too hard.  The plot and style have an Elizabeth Bowen-esque elegance coupled with fracture. Its lead actress - 'Aunt' Annette - has the same power as I imagine Elizabeth Bowen herself to have had in real life. All seen through childhood's eyes. Then again by his same eyes when older. Retro-shadowed, as he gives an interview, when older still, about the stories the once-child-he-was later wrote. A dual-palimpsest Proustian Remembrance of Things Past.  Trace upon trace. Sheer delight, like the rich knickerbocker-glory I should not finish, but I will - today.  Pigging on Crisp, because I can't help it.

I was brought up in a Penny Arcade of the Fifties, by the way. Almost. (26 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later) 

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Suicide Watch*

"...for whom the horror of existence becomes a maddening double image."

This is 'cast' in the book's context as another item of fiction, indeed a seeming story of substantial length. When 'real-time reviewing' previous books, I have eschewed any Author Story Notes or Introductions and so forth so that I can alone approach the fiction texts themselves uncluttered by any 'extraneity-creep'. If this author has pulled the wool over my eyes, by casting his 'Author Story Notes' as just another Story, I shall find it very difficult to forgive him. With that preamble, I can safely say that I am convinced in myself that I was destined to read this last piece as I must have been retro-destined to read the whole book itself. If wool has been pulled over my eyes, it is morling wool, not shorling. There are 'puppets from ancient children's TV', that 'were-sheep' again, accruing and accreting bits and bobs, some involving Vishnu's maw and ready-mades and other artwork from one of the story's 'characters' (Karen).  And it is all so tangibly moving.

It would be so easy to 'spoil' this story with an extraneity-creep like me describing it further. Suffice to say, it compellingly encapsulates and gives further variations on the theme that is this book.  Indeed, I wish that theme to subsist holistically, holographically, photographically, spiritually, without... without what? And perhaps I should tear all the pages from this highly-honed beauty of a physical book and pin the pages round my walls....and shake my keys at them.

A reader's love for the book he's just read (and indeed truly loved) expressed as a series of suicide notes.

"...even though you are safe and cosy, chatting over a cup of tea, you are not actually safe at all..." (26 Oct 09 - another 3 hours later).

END

*Sorry, I mis-typed this title here yesterday, now corrected. It changes nothing of what I said. A compliment to this 'story', but it is a fiction that artfully reads like autobiography - and in hindsight is even more powerful today than when I read it yesterday. My overall favourite in this wonderful book, however, is likely to remain 'Italiannetto'. (27 Oct 09)