CERN Zoo - a DFL real-time review

For a specific purpose (see THEORY below), I have started another of my real-time reviews on this page. This time it is of the stories in Megazanthus Press's CERN ZOO - Nemonymous Nine (June 2009).

I shall be trying to unravel emerging leitmoifs and an eventual gestalt whether or not intended by the authors and the editor (me) - both generally and in specific regard to a scientific theory that has emerged since the book was published, i.e. that the Hadron Collider is sabotaging itself from the future (THEORY: New York Times).

All my real-time reviews are linked from here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/recent_reviews_of_books_by_dfl.htm

An anthology of short fiction comprising these authors (in a random order): Rosalind Barden - Gary McMahon - Amy Kinmond - Tim Nickels - Bob Lock - Lesley Corina - Jacqueline Seewald - Dominy Clements - A.J. Kirby - Brendan Connell - Daniel Ausema - Gary Fry - Mick Finlay - Robert Neilson - Steve Duffy - Geoff Lowe - Stephen Bacon - Rod Hamon - Lee Hughes - Lyn Michaud - Tony Lovell - A.C. Wise - Roy Gray - Travis K. Weltman

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Introductory Prose

This prose is on the very first page of the book and is met before anything else (i.e. even before the title page and contents). It seems to be a 'fiction' all in itself, expressing a time conundrum not out of place with the new theory that the Cern Collider is sabotaging itself from the future (labelled THEORY within this review). This introductory prose also pre-figures some of the stories in the book in short-hand notes and gives birth to the cover image which perhaps can be seen as a symbol of the future nobbling the present.  This power of creative retrospectivity can also be seen in the transmuting within this prose of 'Cern Zoo' to 'Zoocern' (i.e. Susan, the girl's name in the picture): and that is my only spoiler I hope to be included in this whole real-time review by dint of future hindsight. (17 Oct 09)

CAVEAT 

With most of my other real-time reviews heretofore, I have evaluated the stories as well as describing them and attempting to connect them.  Here I have no need to evaluate them as stories, because I chose them to appear in the book and therefore self-evidently thought them to be great well-written stories in themselves as well as suitable for the book as a whole. I am now merely seeking new connections and interpretations during the book's and my own future (i.e. 'today') in and out of context with THEORY that has since emerged.

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Dead Speak

Here we have a tale of intrigue / politics connected with dangers associated with the CERN project - laced with explicitly mentioned 'déjà vu', the flash-past-forward 'dust of centuries' and hubris-Icarus-style and religious faith. An ostensibly open-ended fiction that seemed autonomously to need to publish itself at the start of this book. It now happily seems to be THEORY-in-action.  I suspect few of the forthcoming stories in the book will fit so comfortably with this on-going gestalt, but I keep my powder dry. (17 Oct 09 - 2 hours later)

Since writing the above about 'Dead Speak', its title has been nagging at me ... as if those people we have killed in our future with our ostensible 'bad' ways today will have their final say today, too.  Very telling, in the new context.

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Parker

"Up and down, round and along until after a series of twists and turns, you come back to where you started from."

A relentless impromptu on the physical sensuality, the memories, the necessary decision-making associated with writing with a fountain pen. The indelibility compared to the transient ghosts as liquid stories - and life's hindsight so impermanent, too, as the reader infers the impermanence of our planet itself. We only have today to make things dye permanently. Consideration of the internet ('computer screen') come to mind - and impending doom: the mistakes we make today travelling electronically back towards us...

Thoughts that brainstorm me rather than vice versa. (17 Oct 09 - another two and half hours later).

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Artis Eterne

"There was however one character who was not only a permanent fixture, but whose static presence had a kind of strange dynamism all his own."

The Cerne Abbas pub (its sign outside with doctored image of the famous chalk giant) has, inside its ancient public bar, a 'moment' of moving serenity (as modern times rush past all around) and I shall not delve further into that serenity's nature for fear of spoiling this truly remarkable and haunting story.  I am so enthralled by its now ever-tantalising association with THEORY that I am aghast I never noticed such considerations before today. (17 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)

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The Last Mermaid

This story is a closely-described panorama of lizard skin and fish-tail - and, today, for the first time, I notice, it literally inverts the merging relationship from the book's cover image. It is a word-febrile delight, this story - and presents a menagerie of strange creatures and concepts. Of exquisitely tangible tastes ... smells and pungent desires. And imaginary cures that are really poisons.  Other than its serendipitously mutant depiction of the cover, I wonder how it all relates to THEORY. Perhaps this will become clearer as real-time expires.  The story more readily encompasses the Zoo aspects of this book, as opposed to its Collider and/or Chalk Giant aspects. (17 Oct 09 - another 4 hours later)

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The Lion's Den

"They both saw the lions fall upon him, and then he was lost beneath their colliding bodies..."

This could be the enduring Zoo story of all time (i.e. all Zoo and nothing but Zoo at length) - a substantial experience of supreme stylistic accomplishment by someone who surely must have worked in a Zoo for the whole of his or her life.  As well as its sheer plot-driven power, there are moments of feral wonder and secret machinations well in tune with this whole book's own onward drive. Much video time-shift ... and a photographic angst which reminds me of the frantic day a year ago when I took the photograph that is now on the book's cover because I had to run back a long distance with a borrowed camera to capture the image before my transport left without me. An image that is also in tune with this story in so many inscrutable ways.

I have now discovered that a variation on the theme of THEORY is of this story's essence, giving even more dimensions to it. The action takes place before and after the 1999-into-2000 New Year when the Millennium Bug was rampant, a phenomenon that reminds me of what we have been talking about in relation to the Hadron Collider. And this story's new Memes meanwhile are perhaps quietly roosting like Hitchcock's Birds, except they're not just birds...

"Along the walls, the watching worm-lizards pressed greedily against the windows..." (17 Oct 09 - another 3 hours later)

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Virtual Violence

This short-short fable, as well as being a parody of our modern Health & Safety political correctness, is a very telling view of our continual battle with Fate casting all of us as CernZooans in a Gulliverean way. I defy any reader to deny that this piece is steeped in the retrospectivity of THEORY. This is its opening line: "Jeremy's party ended with an ostrich-egg-sized bump on his forehead and three paper cuts, just because he decided to ban violent video games." (18 Oct 09)

THE ABOVE REVIEW IS NOW CONTINUED HERE: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2009/10/cern-zoo-dfl-real-time-reiew-part-two.html

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