The Explosion of a Chandelier

 

The Explosion of a Chandelier by Damian Murphy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Like any good sleight-of-hand, even the publisher name, "Occult Books," is a deception, at least in the popular conception of what "Occult" means. Here, I think it's wise to refer to the original meaning of the word: hidden from view. You won't find wild sabbats, goat sacrifice (virgin or otherwise), or sulfur and brimstone here. No, this occultation of of a more refined sort. Something far more interesting (and sinister in the trickiest of ways).

What we have here is an exploration of the imagination and the manifestation of the imagination into the "real" world. This world is filled with subterfuge and the already-mentioned slight-of-hand. It is labyrinth whose walls shift. A game where the rules change in unexpected, winsome ways. But it's a make-believe which breaches the wall to that-which-is-hidden. These games and labyrinths create thin cracks in the zones that contain realities.

You'll recall this from your childhood, the imaginative playfulness and discovery of places undiscovered by most of society, the unveiling of the "truth" behind individual identities, the understanding of the true mechanism of seemingly ordinary objects that are much more than they seem on the surface.

Some of us are lucky enough to have survived into adulthood with those same revelatory faculties intact. But we have to work at it. It's a gift, to be sure, but a gift that has to be wrested, nay, stolen from the universe.

The Explosion of a Chandelier is a carefully-encrypted guidebook on how one might access such gifts, if one is bold enough to sieze them! But, like Damian's other works of a similar ilk (The Exalted and the Abased, The Academy Outside of Ingolstadt, and Abyssinia all jump to mind), those who are not accustomed to seeking for hidden things, who have forgotten the very real power of imagination, or who lack the courage to sieze the scepter that cracks the barriers between realities . . . well, they simply do not, cannot, and will not Know. On the surface, they will read a story about young men living in Spain during the age of anarchic revolution, a story about hotels and keys and bombs and chandeliers.

But, trust me, there's much more in there, SO much more! Hidden between the words, behind the pages, and most importantly, inside. Look inside! Don't let your reading eyes deceive you. Or, actually, please do!

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Welcome to the Machine: Olivetti Lexicon 80, 1948

 I learned to type when typing wasn't cool. Before home PCs were ubiquitous. I don't even remember why I took that typing class in high school. I had no goals at that point in my life (outside of scoring the next bowl, getting enough money to go to the arcade, record, and comic book store, and making sure I had time to play D&D). The teacher was the football coach, so I had absolutely no desire to be "in" with him. Besides, he seemed like he really didn't want to be there. I suppose there were a lot of girls in that class, which I saw as a bonus. But as for aspirations to use typing - nothing . . . at that time. Still, I learned. 

Then, I grew up. When PCs became readily available, I was ahead of the curve of many of my friends, who had to hunt and peck and learn the keyboard. Some still do. Old dogs, new tricks. 

And I discovered that I loved to write. I also discovered that I am a primarily visual learner, and secondarily (a close second, if I'm honest) a kinesthetic learner. When I seriously started writing (back in 2000 or so), I found that I liked writing best with a pen and paper. That hasn't changed. I always do my first drafts by hand, then type the results into the computer, editing as I go.

But keying stories into the computer has its drawbacks. With ottokorrekt, one becomes less cognizant of errors. And word processing programs have only recently developed the AI to catch "their" versus "there," "two" versus "too," and so forth. And, honestly, AI still misses many of the subtleties of the English language. It's better, but it's not perfect. Yet we rely on it like it is perfect. I'd say in reading any published book (my own included), I find such subtle errors almost every time. 

Another issue for writers is that the computer is an amazing tool for research. Perhaps too amazing. As this article points out, the computer is a distraction factory. It draws the writer away from actually writing. And if a writer isn't writing are they actually a writer? Don't get me wrong, I use online resources to research as much as anybody else. But to me, writing is a drug. Why do I so often interrupt my ecstatic, sublime experience? Writing with pen on paper is a rushing start to that sublimity. And, of course, one must edit. Most of the work of writing is editing. But if I go to type in my hand-written notes, editing as I go, and am distracted by all the bells and whistles of the computer, I short-circuit the experience. 

So, I'm trying an experiment. It's an expensive experiment. I won't say exactly how much I spent on my typewriter, but let's just say it was slightly less than . . . my computer. To be fair, I bought my computer many years ago. Nevertheless, I sold many books in order to buy this old piece of technology built in 1948. My hypothesis is that having to carefully key in my words will: 1) Slow down my editing process to ensure I'm using the exact right words, 2) extend the sublime experience of writing by forcing my brain to slow down and be in the moment in order to think about needed turns of phrase, added layers of poetic flavor, or to recognize and remove un-needed dross and clunky phrasing, and 3) give a more kinesthetic experience than the chiclet PC keyboard could ever give. 

Will this slow me down as a writer? Absolutely. I'd pose a question in retort: Is that a bad thing? My experience says "no". Quite the contrary. 

There's a bit of a philosophical agenda here, on my part, as well. I've been intentionally limiting my time on social media. Each day I get 30 minutes each on Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram. And I am going to bring that down to 20 minutes each over the course of the next few weeks. I hardly spend any time on Facebook anymore, and that's by design. I recently watched the excellent Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. It gave me pause to think about things I had suspected, but never knew explicitly: the Attention Economy, the way in which we are being manipulated by social media, and the way it affects our real-world behavior. It didn't terrify me enough to shut of all social media. I think social media has it's place. But boy have I rethought how I use social media or, more importantly, how social media uses me. This isn't new. I've been working on reducing my social media use for nearly two years now (thank you, Covid). I've read books on the subject. I've taken a few social media fasts, where I didn't use social media at all for weeks at a time, and I've assessed the benefits for myself. 

An unseen side-benefit of saving for this typewriter was that I was able to put into action my plan to downsize and upscale. This is a continual effort that has a long way to go, but this is a good start to show that I can do this thing! Given that my mom was a hoarder and my mom and dad both bought into the middle-class 1970s - '80s materialist dream (and that I was raised in this environment), being able to make such a fundamental change to attitude was not a given. It's good to have some success in this regard. It emboldens me for the future.

In essence, I want my life back. My analog life. I want more time doing the physical act of writing, I want more time to read physical books (sorry e-book readers, no offense to you, but give me a nice hardback or a ragged, nicotine-stained paperback every day of the week), I want time to sit down and practice my guitar, I want more time at the gaming table, I want more time to blog, I want to do more jigsaw puzzles, I want to be fully focused on my travels, I want to spend more time listening intently to music, like I did when I was a kid. I need to carve out this space in my life, and I'm doing it! The typewriter is one of many tools to help achieve these goals. 

When I took that typewriting class back in high school, I didn't have any goals to speak of. Now, though, that class is allowing me to pursue goals I never knew I had. Way to go, pot-smoking, metalhead, long-haired, spiked wristband-wearing young Forrest. You've come full circle on a more-fulfilling life. You rule. 

Am I leaving the digital world altogether? Heck no. But I'm making a more conscientious choice as to how I interact with that world. I want the best of both worlds!

One final note: This typewriter requires attention. I bought it refurbished, but it needs internal cleaning and maintenance. I sat down for a couple of hours last night, put on some good Fado, and got into the guts of the thing to give the basket a good cleaning. I've got more to do, especially on the bottom. And while you might think this is a distraction from writing, it's quite the opposite. There's something about that repetitive, careful action that drones me into the writing zone where I can think about my characters, my plots, my story. Of course, I keep a pen and composition book handy to write down the things that need writing down. All the time, I know I'm prepping this beautiful machine to take and transform the input that I give it, body and soul!

And for those who have read to the end, the curious, here are a few photos of this beautiful Olivetti Lexicon 80, 1948:

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Full Frontal

. . . of the esoteric denim. Can't wait to see what kind of visitors that title brings in . . .

You probably thought I had given up, stopped sewing, huh? WRONG! I still have a week of social-media-fasting (punctuated by the unfortunate fiasco of Garycon registration going horribly, horribly wrong for the third time in four years - I got on Twitter and FB long enough to express my hot displeasure, then up and left), so I'm trying to take advantage of this time as much as possible. Thing is, I actually have a pretty busy social schedule between date night with my wife every Friday, volunteer commitments every Sunday and most Monday nights, D&D every Tuesday night, and MCC once a month, not to mention other gaming one-offs, etc, etc, etc. Yes, I am busy. Hence the need for a break from social media. Socializing, while enjoyable, takes energy away from me. I recharge alone. Thankfully, sewing the esoteric denim has given me some recharging time!

Sew, where are we? (I can't help it - I'm a Dad). since last post, I've learned a few things, the most important of which is: use shorter lengths of thread. I thought that spooling that sucker out to around three feet would ensure that I had lots of thread to work with, postponing the need to re-thread the needle as long as possible. What I found was, with that long of a thread, you are bound (pun intended) to have thread bunch up and tangle, no matter how carefully you work. It's just (wait for it . . .) bound to happen. Something more like 18 inches works better. Much better.

In any case, here is where we are at:

Okay, so it's a little bumpy. meaning that I didn't have the patch stretched out enough to properly have it lay completely flat against the cloth. Frankly, I don't care. The bulging is sort of a cool effect, and if anyone wants to critique it in person, I'll ask them when the last time was that they picked up a sewing needle. Huh, Cinderella?

This next one was a bit tricky, because I didn't want to cover the white edging with black thread, nor did I want to use white thread. Instead of sewing over the border, like I usually do, I sewed within the border. Probably not the best thing for the patch, as there are now more holes inside than I might have if I had gone over the border, but chances are, this patch will still be stuck to this jacket long after I'm dead and gone. I present to you, The Psychonaut:

I love this little guy. Yeah, it's not the most prettily-sewn patch, but it's mine and I sewed it with my own hands. I wouldn't sell this jacket for a thousand dollars - this is my work of wearable collage-art. $5,000? Let's talk. Of course, I'll turn right around, spend the money, and make myself another esoteric denim. Though at least one of the patches I have is now off the market, so far as I can tell, so this thing is unique!

The two new additions, in combination, compose what patches I will be putting on the front of the jacket for the time being, like so:

In case you're wondering, that's a Frida Kahlo puzzle underneath the esoteric denim. Yes, another puzzle. We can't help ourselves at my house.

AND, the other patch I ordered arrived just a few days ago. I'm calling here Luna Philips . . . for obvious reasons:

She will be the right side of my back-triptych, to come. Now I need to go pin her on and get ready to sew the next patch. Soon . . . soon.

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Faceless Dolls, Weird and Eerie

I admit it: I love jigsaw puzzles and pick the most challenging to try to put together. I'm pretty picky. So, when my parents passed away, I got rid of a puzzle or two of theirs, but I did keep one: a doll puzzle that is creepy as all get up. My youngest son, who loves to help with puzzles, actually pretty much completely finished this one before I had a chance to get to it.

I decided to deconstruct a bit of it.

So much less creepy? Huh? I . . . uh, nevermind.

This is, in essence, a lesson in the Weird and the Eerie as explained in Mark Fisher's excellent work The Weird and the Eerie. The above is an example of the eerie, in which there is an unsettling lack of something. Weirdness, on the other hand, is caused by the presence of that which does not belong. I tried capturing this, at least in theory, by rearranging the faces and creating new ones from the existing fragments of the others, like so:

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

I like all of these for one reason or another, but my favorites are VI, IX, XI, and XX. IX and XI are just slightly off of complete, yet they are complete, just completed by something that doesn't belong there. VI and XX are just plain surreal examples of beautiful dolls consuming each other's faces. And who doesn't like a little Victorian/Edwardian cannibalism?

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The Monsters of Templeton

The Monsters Of Templeton by Lauren Groff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

About my relationship with The Monsters of Templeton . . . it's complicated.

Before we met, I had heard a wide range of opinions about the book. Now, my tastes lean toward the obscure. I don't tend to read the popular ones and I have a bit of prejudice toward them. "If it's that popular, it can't be that good," I will sometimes (mistakenly) reason. And this book, well, this book had gotten around. The town of Goodreads had been gossiping about this one for a while, with opinions ranging from "it's amazing" to "it's a rank pretender". But I saw something as I looked across the room at that pretty, complex cover. And as the voices babbled on around me about the book, I was intrigued. "This is not my normal cup of tea," I told myself. "Heck, this might even be chic-lit. Still . . ."

So we made the acquaintance. I was smitten by the first paragraph:

The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass. It was one of those strange purple dawns that color July there, when the bowl made by the hills fills with a thick fog and even the songbirds sing timorously, unsure of day or night.

"This relationship has promise," I said to myself.

But as I read the rest of the chapter, I became confused and disconcerted. The author seemed in too much of a rush, too eager to get information out. Frankly, she talked too much. I sat back, disappointed, but I had gotten myself into this mess, so I decided to play it through until I could find an easy exit from this uncomfortable situation.

Then I read the last couple pages of the chapter and I became, again, intrigued. The last paragraph affected me deeply:

That morning, before I drew my hand away from the monster, I felt an overwhelming sadness, a sudden memory of one time in high school when I slipped to the country club docks at midnight with my friends, and, giggling, naked, we went into the dark star-stippled water, and swam to the middle of the lake. We treaded water there in the blackness, all of us fallen silent in the feeling of swimming in such perfect space. I looked up and began to spin. The stars streaked circular above me, my body was wrapped in the warm black, my hands had disappeared, my stomach was no longer, I was only a head, a pair of eyes. As I touched the beast I remembered how, even on that long-ago night, I could feel a tremendous thing moving in the depths below me, something vast and white and singing.

So here I was, left to process my feelings about the chapter, on the cusp of a decision: Should I continue, or not? Most of the chapter felt truly shoved in-between those two exquisite paragraphs. The author was "trying" too hard. It was like a Dagwood Bumstead sandwich bookended by the most expensive artisan bread.

I decided to give the benefit of the doubt. Yes, this book already showed some flaws, but I wanted to see the beauty in it, which might have been accentuated by the opening and closing paragraphs' foil against the muddled middle. There is no such thing as a flawless book, I reasoned, and the good parts were so good that the thought of potentially missing more gems made me throw caution to the wind and dive in, head over heels.

I became fascinated by the complexity of the book. As I said in the beginning, my relationship with this book is complicated. There are several distinct voices in this work, many of them speaking from historical documents and journals dug up by the narrator, Willie Upton, in her quest to discover the identity of her biological father.

One of my favorite voices is that of Sarah Franklin Temple Upton, a progenitor of Willie's who struggles with hallucinogenic schizophrenic episodes like this one:

. . . days pass, days pass, dark then light, Templeton glowing in the fog, the brilliance of noon . . . the little shrill girl is back, makes me want to bludgeon my head with a carpet beater until she's out . . . so many ghosts in the water I see now, every day I go down, press my ear close to the water until I drench the small hairs on the lobe . . . beseeching, mournful. The men have bloated skin, and the women's hair has come loose and floats cloudlike behind them, sunnies and pumpkinseed-fish scattered in it . . . a man with my father's face, wrists blooming roses of blood . . . two brothers with frosted lashes and lips, ice skates on their feet, pounding at the surface as if it were glass . . . small Indian girl who looks at me with serene and unforgiving eyes as she floats, naked, bruises like plums on her thighs . . . soldier in olive drab, the stumps of his legs looking tender as a baby's skin . . . young men in boater-hats, young women in tight waists and bellish skirts from before the Civil War . . . summer-camp children with crude leather bracelets on their wrists . . . fat old ice fisherman . . . parachutist from my childhood, the man who leapt from the plane at the County Fair, but his water, not land, whose chute settled on the lake like a flower, filled with the water, dragged him under before the boats could reach him. Yes: every day I see more of them, the drowned ones. It is perhaps not madness: they are so clear, and I am not terrified by them. Is it? I don't know . . .

Of course, I always seem to like the crazies in literature. And there are plenty of crazies in this book. Notice that the title is plural: Monsters. The beast of the opening paragraph is not the only monster in this book. Though the lake-monster trope (along with the ongoing presence of a quiet, seemingly beneficial ghost) gives the work a feel that hints of magic realism, most of the truly inimical monsters are of the human variety. That's not to say that the book is laden with sadness and madness. There are a lot of bright spots, too, a balance of naive optimism and critical pessimism, with characters, situations, and reactions running the gamut in-between. Like I've said, it's complicated.

I was taken in by the variety of voices presented throughout. My biggest concern, the area where I needed to apply the most forgiveness to our relationship, had to do with documentation. The book jumps back and forth between Willie Upton's narration and the documents she discovers in here research. This is fine. But interpolated in the book are several accounts told from different POVs that belong neither to Willie or to those who wrote the documents I've mentioned. Granted, these narratives are told in the voice of the illiterate: Hetty Averell, a slave girl who integrates herself into the family tree, Chief Chingachgook, a native American who figures prominently in the history of Willie's ancestors and who has a profound influence on her research. So one could look past their undocumented stories. But these tales, so "out of the blue," caused me to step back in alarm. It was only after convincing myself that I needed to be a little forgiving of these quirks that I could settle back into the flow of things. Several times throughout the book, I asked myself "where is this coming from"? Sometimes, my reaction bordered on "I don't know you!" but I was, ultimately, able to reconcile things. Still, these episodes left a bit of a taint on my relationship with the book.

Despite these shortcomings, I continued to find some sparkling gems, particularly in the book's strangest passages. Maybe it's the fantasist in me, the lover of magic realism and speculative fiction. Near the end the author fully embraces the speculative (though the speculative elements are NOT the primary driver in this work) by having the main character fully embraced by the supernatural:

My legs moved without me, and I watched them climb the stairs in horror. Foot above foot, so clumsy, as if whatever was in me had forgotten what it was to walk. I felt the eyes of my ancestors, all those pictures, fall on me. As I moved past the guest bathroom I managed a glimpse of myself, and saw my features were dark and veiled. I knew then it was my good ghost, the indirect watcher over my life, that had for now slipped around me. I'd become the yolk in the egg; I'd become one human bone, my body at the marrow and the ghost surrounding it, tense as flesh.

I was impressed, proud even, of the way The Monsters of Templeton allayed my fears that this would be, in any way, dumb chic-lit. It is not. But it is not full-fledged fantasy, either, not by a long shot. It is a mystery, a novel about relationships and fear and friendships and love and redemption and discovery and the search for who we are. Structurally, it is a historical memoir, a fictional autobiography punctuated with biographies. Atmospherically, it is smart chic-lit, a touch funny, magically real, with a narrator as complex as her family history, as complex as the history of the town in which the book is set. It is strange, quirky, at turns brooding dark and blindingly bright, it is an enigma, a puzzle. And I, yes, I'll say it, I love puzzles.

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If you like my writing and want to help my creative endeavors, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!