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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Saturday, March 07, 2009 - 02:25 pm:   

World Wide Web - And Other Lovecraftian Upgrades
by Gary Fry

Humdrumming Ltd - 2007

=============
(Possible Spoilers)
(I have not read the Introdction by Mark Morris or the Afterword by Gary Fry)


World Wide Web
A long story that I really enjoyed. It seemed to encapsulate for me why I have took sustenance, all my life, from the type of literature represented by both Proust and Lovecraft.
Jung and Big Brother TV reality.
Not exactly culture and trash - but this dichotomy is at least touched on here. One transcends the other (as explicitly demonstrated by this story in form and content).
The relationship of the boy with his Mother in this story is Proustian. The catharsis is Lovecraftian.
The story is about a web and is a web. A web of interconnections.
Black static of technical things these days (a theme of much modern horror literature, not only Fry's).
This is also a story of meta-horror and inter-generational adolescent problems, including another discommoding Dad. Awakening sexuality. And a vastly-canvassed Quatermass-like finale with detached cosmicity.
A tale of chemistries within us all.
The Horror writer whom the boy meets reminds me of Elizabeth Bowen (if anyone has read my essay 'Towards The Drogulus'). This is what Fry writes about him:
"Philip's fractured narrative had starkly conflicted with the elegant prose he employed in his fiction. And he'd experienced some terrible episodes in life - the events of the Second World War among them..."
Another key passage: "...the chalk paintings were merely embellished fancies, their form rooted in the genuine fears of people..."
This story is of breasts and spiders.


(to be continued)
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Saturday, March 07, 2009 - 02:53 pm:   

"Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue."
Henry James from 'The Art of Fiction' 1888
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.96.241.143
Posted on Saturday, March 07, 2009 - 03:04 pm:   

That's beautiful, Des.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 10:14 am:   

Unnaturally Selected
Hilarious and apocalyptic (if not apocryphal) M.R. Jamesian skit on various philosophical and scientific and economic tenets with monstrous results...
The credit crunch becomes larger than life?
I do believe language is life, btw, like Peter Crowley.
[On page 1 of this story: 'reactionary' is not the opposite of 'conservative. And who is Richard?]
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 10:51 am:   

I've just applied to the Haunted River Internet Busybody Overseeing Eye Corporation (yes, the one run by the self-appointed guardian of everything deemed worthy enough upon which to expend such disproportionate and ill-guided rancour) and got official permision to respond to you, Des, so here goes:

Richard? Fuck knows. An error, alas.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 01:21 pm:   

Thanks, Gary. I'm going to write a story about reactionary Richard, then. The same Richard as in your story.

I've just come back from a gorgeous morning walk (with my wife) between Frinton on Sea and Walton on Naze and back again, with an all day breakfast in the middle. I'm in a good mood. Greetings to all readers of this thread.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 03:24 pm:   

The Servant of the Order
Larger than life again - from that Aickman story into a Fry-Ionesco written, Lucien Frued / Max Ernst painted Lovecraftarama playing on the Necronomicon's potential existence as a fiction or non-fiction book...but not both?
But why go to all that trouble? The cheque could simply have been stopped?
I enjoyed this literary absurdity, and it also seemed to fit in with my current activity of reading many other stories centred around a zoo for 'Cern Zoo'. This one a miniature zoo but not necessarily of minaiture exhibits!
Somehow it seems apt that this story was published by an outfit called Humdrumming ... still throbbing inside my ears like an ever-bloating tuneless tinnitus of Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
"...her jowls jangled jauntily..." Nwoooo!
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 03:25 pm:   

Frued = Freud
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 04:27 pm:   

I've just come back from a gorgeous morning walk (with my wife) between Frinton on Sea and Walton on Naze and back again...
==============================

This is a photo of me from this trip this morning:

frinton
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 04:46 pm:   

Nice tracksuit, guv.

Of course I'm only commenting positively on your sartorial elegance because I'm a parochial, ass-kissing cronyboy.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 05:06 pm:   

It's not a tracksuit. It's my best coat with the corner of my brown jacket hanging out ungainily from underneath.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 05:07 pm:   

ungainily = ungainlily (strictly)?
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 05:14 pm:   

If I say it's a tracksuit, it's a tracksuit okay. It's no use protesting. Just because everyone around you is calling it a coat and pants it doesn't mean that it is. That's why I'm hear - to pelt cabbages at you and remind you that, while all those around you sing the praises of your frankly mediocre attire, the truth is that you're the best dressed man since Cary Grant. Er, hold on . . .
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 08:08 pm:   

There Is One Too Many Or One Too Few
I like serious. I like funny Horror stories but basically I like serious. This story is serious. And it's seriously good, I'm not afraid to say. I was drawn into it by the protagonist being like me when I was young (if I can be 'unnemonymous' for a brief moment): a working-class only-child who didn't step on pavement cracks! This story although it is serious has a life-line link to the previous 'absurd' story: i.e. Picasso in a window (I seem to recall). (Maybe Lovecraft, too, but that's not obvious). And there is an echo, too, of Picasso art in the self-viewing via a dictaphone recording (an old Horror device of something being left behind by the protagonist to tell the narrative of self in his own language after he is dead and with immediacy (Cf. our debate on 'I' stories in the review of 'The Impelled')) and a mirror: "Oh God, at the moment I don't know what's inside and what's outside me!". And language underpins the reality of this story: "With words, we're able to arrange memory and perception..." and when there is a slippage in language (a fate akin to Mr Krook's in 'Bleak House' and also Cf. Peter Crowley's tenet in the previous story) then there is a slippage in reality here, in the actual structure of reality. Perhaps into a cubist nightmare. This story has really spooked me.
[I didn't know one of my favourite writers, (Anita) Brookner, was a composer of music! Or was this the way the protagonist spelt the name?]
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 08:09 pm:   

Sorry! I got the title wrong.
There Is One Too Many Or Two Few
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 08:10 pm:   

Actually the title in the contents list is different from the title at the head of the story.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 08:12 pm:   

Oh hell's bells. Bruckner, yes. What an idiot.

But hey, stop being so critical! Remember where you are and who holds the keys to the basement! :-)

Glad you liked the tale. Even gladder you're liking the book.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 08:15 pm:   

>>>Actually the title in the contents list is different from the title at the head of the story.

You sure? Check again?

It is 'THREE Is One Too Many or Too Few'.

That's his OCD, that is.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 08:16 pm:   

Ah yes, the contents page title is incorrect, alas. The story title is the one I meant.

The typesetter did the contents page, and I should have checked it properly.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 08:23 pm:   

Sorry I got the title *differently* wrong despite the contents one being wrong.
And the Peter Crowley reference is a reference to 'Unnaturally Selected' not to 'the previous story'.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 08:35 pm:   

I think it's time we called it a night, mate. :-)
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Sunday, March 08, 2009 - 08:46 pm:   

Yup. Tomorrow is another day. Good stuff.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Monday, March 09, 2009 - 11:31 am:   

"The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it."
-- John Fowles 1964 (from 'The Necessity of Nemo' in 'The Aristos')

In The World
Starts with a quote from that geezer Merleau-Ponty. Seriously, it waa a very apt quote as is, I think, mine above for the story's ending.
Fry's stories seem to use traditional horror genre devices and philosophy in a mutually transcending way, so neither is off-putting to any exponent or fan of each.
This is a story of a pre-credit crunch Estate Agent working for the intriguingly named 'Intention Estates'! There unfolds a SF-trope of an alternate world (amid the horror tropes) that, in some intangibly effective way, symbolises (before its time of this story being first published in 2007) the current credit crunch itself - and the human emotions that go with it.
I think I may have identified the leitmotif of this book: faces at windows imaginary, real or painted. Also, perhaps, shapes seen out of the corner of the eye (Fritz Leiber?). People blubbering amorphously behind the front door.

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

BTW, I have ordered 'Sanity and Other Delusions', this morning.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Monday, March 09, 2009 - 11:34 am:   

>>>BTW, I have ordered 'Sanity and Other Delusions', this morning.

You're a star!
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Monday, March 09, 2009 - 01:16 pm:   

Out of Body, Out of Mind
Just read it. Merleau-Ponty ... Picasso ... Poe ... Blackwood ... Lovecraft. This is a story where the leitmotif I identified above comes home to roost in several places, but here I sense that the protagonist himself is the face in the window --- as he suffers a Lovecraft-tinged angst and visionary cubist-perception about his girl friend, his Mum and his discommoding Dad.
This story has a plot paralleling Stephen King's 'Duma Key' but is essentially Fryesque. However, if Fry sometimes 'shoe-horns' certain ideas into the fiction (as some I believe have said), this story is indeed an example of that in a negative way, I'm afraid. But as I've made clear, I hope, in most of his stories (read so far), Fry's methods certainly work for me. But here I also found the ending artificial.
[Aye Aye - I I - Eye Eye: Cf. my comments on 'The Impelled' vis a vis 'The Tell-Tale Heart.]

============
Off to the dentist soon. I'll probably read the last story in the waiting-room.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Monday, March 09, 2009 - 01:38 pm:   

Yeah, a mad experiment, that one.

Funnily enough, Des, King has a tale called 'N' in his latest collection which is about OCD and monsters.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Monday, March 09, 2009 - 01:45 pm:   

"Each of the alphabetically-arranged booklets was open at the section listing titles beginning with the letter N."
from 'The Servant of the Order'.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Monday, March 09, 2009 - 01:50 pm:   

Ooh, yeah. Weird. :-)
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Monday, March 09, 2009 - 06:15 pm:   

Bodying Forth
A splendid Golden Age SF tale or one from an August Derleth anthology - a poignant and horrific 'transmogrifiction' of interlocking dimensions where the gateway becomes he who passes through it. But I may have misinterpreted it - but I am a phenomenologist and spend playtime with Husserl (and maybe that geezer Merleau-Ponty should he join my gang).
That 'gateway' is an all round vision of pitiful monstrosity (a prickly Tate Modern exhibit) that comes to life under Fry's amazing description of it towards the end of the story.
At my age, I can certainly empathise more readily with the 75 year old protagonist than I do with those young men from Bradford in some of the other stories. Not 'bodying forth' so much as 'bodying out'! You will see my eyes one day at the windows of death's gateway - as the protagonist sees the eyes at the window of the soul that belong to the poignant 'gateway' creature. I am free-wheeling here. Whatever I think, it is a good yarn. A nice coda to the Lovecraftian "Faust Symphony" that is this book.

"Upgrades"? Well, it's got my name in there and three-quarters of the letters of 'gary' - leaving 'up'.
A fry-up?
There seems something very positively appropriate about that.
Onward, soon, to 'Sanity & Other Delusions'.
des
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Monday, March 09, 2009 - 06:18 pm:   

Thanks for the quickest review in the history of reviews! Delighted you didn't hate it!
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Monday, March 09, 2009 - 08:22 pm:   

I've now read pieces by two other readers and interpreters of this book: i.e. the Introduction by Mark Morris and the Afterword by Gary Fry.
I enjoyed both, particularly some of Mark's humour and insight. I can now see I got the fry-up wrong. It should have been vindaloo! And Gary seems to think 'Bodying Forth' is quite a different story to the one that affected me so poignantly.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Monday, March 09, 2009 - 08:27 pm:   

I'll have to reread it in 25 years or so . . .

Actually, I'm seeing more and more the significance of your big issue about intentionality.

These reviews have been an enlightening experience for me. Thanks.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 07:40 pm:   

Thanks, Gary.

Have you heard of Merleau-Ponty's 'patient hatchings':
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/patient_hatchings.htm
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Friday, March 20, 2009 - 09:02 am:   

Hi Des,

Yeah, come across this before. M-P was interested in how elements of the perceptual field presuppose one another, that it's not possible to perceive, say, a tray without a context, a framework, a background. That's not to say that everything simply needs a boundary. M-P meant more than this. He asks in Phenomenology of Perception for us to think about examining the front of a house. We don't, he asserts, assume it's a stage-flat with no back and sides because of the contextual field in which it's placed. The trees behind it, we know, have a view of the rear of the house. We view the trees via our bodies. The trees' physical incarnation coupled with ours pitches us in a lived world in which the house is also present. Thus objects take on multi-dimensional life. (Perhaps you need to read the whole of PoP to fully get what M-P is about here, given that, like his view of existence, it presupposes a thorough understanding of his notion of the 'body-subject'.)

In 'patient hatchings', M-P was trying to show, I believe, how these pre-reflective elements of perception might be disrupted, the better to show us how non-reflexive consciousness of the lived world functions. It's like the defamiliarisation of the Russian Formalists.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.145.36.243
Posted on Friday, March 20, 2009 - 09:28 am:   

Thanks, Gary.
I'm ever an amateur pursuer of such matters and this is all grist to my mill!
I have a book on Russian Formalism that I read in the late Sixties. I think I'll grab it out of the log cabin and re-read it1
des
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.20.31.211
Posted on Friday, March 20, 2009 - 10:05 am:   

With apologies to the Haunted River Internet Busybody Overseeing Eye Corporation:

'Out of Body, Out of Mind' tried to deal with this issue: the island in the lake, the parents' hats, the girlfriend in the attic . . . things dislodged from the lived world.

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