Valerie and Other Stories

Valerie and Other Stories by Colin Insole
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's become so commonplace that it's almost laughable - short story collections are, for the most part, labelled "uneven". And, I get it, this is usually true. Pick up just about any short story collection and you're going to find at least one story, possibly more, that you will consider a dud. Such is human taste. And I'm a frequent user of the "uneven" label in my reviews, as well.

But this collection isn't "just about any short story collection". And when I use the term "uneven" to describe this collection, I am most explicitly not referring to the quality of the stories. Every one of the stories in this collection is remarkable and most of them are exceptional. The word "uneven" only refers to the tonal differences between each tale. They are all "of a piece" in that there is a thread of "voice" that sings throughout, but that voice is sometimes a distant echo, sometimes a ghostly shout in the ear - but a quietened shout, like the muffled sound of someone being smothered with a pillow combined with wind chimes down a country road. There is a quaint quality to the despair, more than just a veneer to the rot underneath - a kind of sprightly rural squalor, red agaric mushrooms whose consumption produces both mind-opening beauty and horrific shadow creatures in equal measure. The combination is alluring and repulsive at the same time, not just in the vivid descriptions that Insole unfolds, but in the emotional spaces of raw feeling that the characters inhabit. We are taken in by them because they are us in all our complexity of shameful ugliness and triumphant beauty, shouting our heady defiance at a cosmos that will, ultimately and inevitably, crush our life-force from us.

This is quickly evident in the first story, in which a mystical experience leads to self-deceit and a multi-layered betrayal in "The Hill of Cinders," which took several unexpected turns; many of them of an emotional bent that left me reeling when i thought back on some of the more foolish choices of my own youth. Five red stars falling from the sky for this weird tale.

I am rarely stunned by fables, and "The Binding" is no exception, though the writing is exceptionally good. I like the witchiness of it, but I am so over the tone of "fabulism" that I can't get too excited about it any more. I'm waiting for a fable that will prove the exception. Perhaps I was jaded by so many stories as a child. Nevertheless, I am not so jaded as to give this story less than four stars. So it is. This was the first big tonal switch in the collection, as I mentioned above. It threw me, at first, because of its seeming abruptness, but then Insole's storytelling carried me along to a satisfactory conclusion.

"The Slaves of Paradise" is a lush story of anguish told by an artist who accidentally, clumsily betrays his lover and the French resistance. The imagery in this story shall haunt me for some time. It is beautiful and tragic, in equal measure. The horror of stupidity and lack of attention to detail are on stark display here. This story will make you feel uncomfortable for every time you've accidentally hit "reply all" or forgotten an important appointment or made an unguarded remark to the wrong person about someone close to you - but in this case, the embarrassment is fatal. Five stars of utter shame.

"Dance for a Winter Moon" is heartbreaking, even when you know exactly what's coming. There is a strong sense of foreshadowing and inevitability, and you'll find that you were right all-along about what was going to happen. Still, the emotional impact is gut-wrenching. And getting there is half the fun. Read this paragraph and tell me you aren't going to enjoy the horrid ride to the bitter end:

The night had given up its pretence of glamour and beauty, its tinsel tricks of moonbeam and sentimental star glow. Little flurries of frost or dirty snow scudded in the air, as if the firmament was swollen with their filth and they dropped like lice from an old mattress. She remembered her father pulling away the roof slats and painted wooden fascias at their home in England. They were rotten and stinking, riddled with the nests of vermin and choked with chewed paper and scraggy tufts of wool. The churning escape of the creatures had sent ti all floating down like ash into her hair. Scrape away the cheap veneer, the inky indigo of the sky and it would peel and flake like chewed wood or wallpaper to root out the hiding places of the stars and reveal them in all their monstrosity and malevolence."

The title of the next story, "A Blue Dish of Figs," evokes the image of a carefully-crafted still-life painting that contains far more symbolic meaning than its banal subject matter. One can say the same of the protagonist and her life. It is crude and shapeless, awaiting the touch of an artist's hand to add color and give life. That artist is a child who teaches hidden wisdom to her Teacher. Five stars for a story where pedantry is turned inside out and the inversion of the social order creates a passageway to meaning.

"Salammbô and the Zaïmph of Tanit" is a masterful tale in the decadent strain of Huysmans. Beauty is a fair mistress, but jealousy is more adamant. Like all good decadent tales, sumptuousness ends in nightmarish squalor. Five stars

"Dreams from the Apple Orchard" is a story of beautiful decay, of fissures in social unity (a theme that Insole revisits often), the beautiful, frightful interstices between the sanguine constructs of friendship and fruitfulness. Set in Eastern Europe right before WW II, this is a solemn foreshadowing of things to come. Brilliant and brutal. Five stars. I loved this story.

"Valerie," shows a world of mystique, beautiful and terrifying, in the lanes and hedges, the interstices; magical portals. What a darkly-beautiful, beautifully-dark story. I am reminded of Rikki Ducornet's The Jade Cabinet and The Fountains of Neptune, tonally speaking. Yet another shift!

It is in the lengthy denouement of "Valerie" that some aspects of the tale come into clear focus, while others are blurred. The effect is like looking through binoculars at a hazy distant landscape. The broad strokes may be beautiful, but on closer examination, there is rot beneath. But the rot holds it's own beauty. This was an amazing novella, and the only piece original to the collection. It is for good reason that it lends its title to the book. I found myself, again and again, revisiting my own childhood (though it was quite different from the narrator's experience, at least in terms of my family life - thankfully!) and the wonders of discovery. On further reflection, though, I thought "what if this is an unreliable narrator"? And the thought exploded in my head like a literary kaleidoscope! If true, this story gains multiple levels of meaning and emotional depth that I had not considered on my first read-through. The implications are staggering and left me intellectually dizzy, drunk on possibilities.

In the middle of the final story, "The Abdication of the Serpent," I admit, I asked where this story was headed, doubtful of its outcome. But by the end, the meandering labyrinth finally made sense. It's a murder-mystery undergirded by myth-building, and a coming-of-age, but not the age typically associated with such stories. It is a coming-of-age for a character that has reached old age. It is, in summation, a fine, fine story. One that deserves a reread and will stick in my head for some time, especially for the "release" of the ending, which opens up a sea of vistas and gently pushes the reader's ship out into the soft waves - a fitting end to the book, which felt like a new beginning.

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Two Stitches Forward, One Stitch Back

. . . on the back patch, that is. Took about two hours, but didn't make a ton of progress. No matter what I do, I inevitably have excess loops that I need to either cut or tie off or some combination of the two. Did I mention that impatience is one of my virtues? Well, here's where I left off tonight:

Note that the quality of light is different than in previous photos. That's not because of my camera. It's because my wife told me about a super-bright light she uses when sewing. Holy cow, does that make a difference! I was able to thread the needle on the first try twice in a row! And I could actually see what I was doing without having to do a contortionist act!

On the other hand, as I said, I continue to waste a lot of thread unnecessarily, like so:

So, I may not have skill, finesse, or patience, but I make up for it all in sheer spite and willpower. Such is the power of the esoteric denim: built by sheer doggedness!

If I have time tomorrow night, I shall probably work on the left side, from the bottom up, and see if I can make it as far up that side as I did up the right side tonight. Saturday, I'm out of town all day, so I won't have any time to sew. Maybe a touch on Sunday, we'll see. And Friday night is date night, so that's a no-go, too. Has to be tomorrow night or wait until next Monday. I sometimes think of the time I've put into this and how long it would take me to do the same if I were not doing a social media "fast". Ugh. I'd be sewing until the Fourth of July before I made good headway.

Back to the Back

The esoteric denim project continues. I spent about an hour and forty-five minutes stitching the bottom part of the big back patch onto the jacket.

That long? Oh, heck yeah. I'm not a fast tailor by any means. My wife could have whipped this through in twenty minutes. But it's not her jacket! My time = my sacrifice = my work = my satisfaction. Besides, I'm trying to learn how to get a line of stitches going without getting loose loops caught up in my "current" thread. Or, I'm trying, at least, to catch things earlier. It's a pain when, ten stitches down the line, you realize that you've caught a loop in the slack well behind your stitch. I'm not about to rip them all up at that point because . . . did I mention how much inanimate objects and I hate each other? Why, yes, I did!

So, I just cut my losses. Literally. Here's the "spare" that I cut tonight:

That's probably a good three feet of thread there, for perspective. It's my contribution to destroying the planet. You're welcome.

I'm not too worried about the aesthetics of my stitching, though. All the beautiful stuff has been done already: I just need to affix it in a halfway competent manner. Halfway. Okay, maybe a third of the way. But who's really going to be critiquing my stitching when their eyes are distracted by this?

And, more especially so, when they look at the details, like this:

Aren't those guys the best?!?!? Incidentally, as I am told, the Latin reads:

The Demon World
Astrophilus sees, Xenologia knows
These two philosophers have come together from lands unknown to discuss matters of the aether and of those creatures which come not from heaven or hell but crawl forth from the lawless darkness

Ouroboros Complete

It only took me another hour and forty-five minutes, but the first patch on the esoteric denim is affixed. Ouroboros complete!

Now, only nine more to go! I think I'm going to tackle the big back patch next. It's a lot of stitching, but I have that sucker pinned down pretty good. I'm going to have to tuck the lower corners and hem them in, since the back panel tapers as you get closer to the bottom. That should be a fun trick. Or not. In any case, I'm not going to have as much time to sew this week as I did last, so I better get to threading. Speaking of which, I can attest that threading the needle is, indeed, the most difficult part of sewing. I swear I'm going to cross my eyes wrong and they're just going to loll out of my head and onto the floor.

For now, though, time to read more Sarban and Deleuze. Oh, and I need to find a market for the poem I wrote. Yes: poem.

I might be getting used to this social media "fast". I might even be thinking about extending it. Hmm . . .

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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!

Sew Much to Do

On Christmas day, I opened a gift from my children, a black denim jacket. Yes, it was something on my wishlist, but I was still pleasantly surprised to open the gift! I had been plotting and planning for some time to patch up another denim jacket. I have a long history of patched up denim jackets, going back to my high school days when the order of the day was Motorhead, Ozzy, Anthrax, Black Sabbath, and Venom patches. My last denim jacket was my nerd jacket, with patches of a killer robot, Cthulhu, Marvin the Martian, and a crew patch of the Nostromo.

This time, I wanted to indulge in my love of esoteric imagery and symbolism. I've got all the patches I want (so far) and with my abandonment of social media for a month, I have time. I'll try to keep up-to-date on this as I go.

I started by pinning the patches to the jacket. I'm saving that photo for later down the line, when I'm done, but suffice it to say that it looks really punk, with safety pins all over the place. Something you'd see at a Cramps show, but not. Because none of the patches are about bands. Most are simply esoteric imagery that I've taken a liking to, except for two exceptions: One from the film The Wicker Man (which is, arguably, esoteric in and of itself - cultic, at least), and one of Frank the Bunny from Donnie Darko (ditto earlier comment about TWM).

Now, I am no tailor. And I am not a man of much patience. So, this exercise is a bit of a sacrifice (pun intended) for me. I'm fine with (most) people, but when it comes to inanimate objects, we have a love-hate relationship, meaning we love to hate each other. But I committed and no one is going to do this for me (and I wouldn't want them to, anyway), so I started.

Let me say from the get-go that anyone who doesn't appreciate the term "threading the needle" has never attempted to thread a needle. After about a dozen tries under an intensity of light that alien abductors would be jealous of, I was finally able to get that darned thread into that little metal void. I doubled up a string of thread about as long as my wingspan, tied off, and set to work.

Here it is: Stitch #1, in progress. This is the Ouroboros surrounding an all-seeing eye, symbols of alpha and omega and the sun and moon, a patch I bought (along with all the others) on Etsy. It looks like I snatched up the last of this particular design. Good timing! Coincidence or confluence? You decide.

I stopped for a moment to put on some music I had recently been turned on to that I thought would be great for sewing, but my phone started updating and my wife couldn't do the financial stuff she needed to on the computer (thanks, Republicans, for allowing capitalists to ruin internet access for the rest of us). So, I turned my phone off and worked in silence. Well, okay, not silence. This song was playing through my head the entire time, one continuous mental loop. Maybe I have a long-buried memory of my Mom sewing while Abba was on the radio, I don't know. It made a good sound-track . . . in my head.

Note in the photo above that I had only pinned this patch at the top. I continually tried to flatten it as I went. I was hitting a pretty good groove (how can you not, with that ear-worm of a song?) until I noticed that the patch was not where I wanted it to be. It had slid toward the front of the sleeve, totally off center, because of the way I had been sewing it. I thought I was about a quarter of the way there.

Dang it.

Well, I took a seam-ripper to it to undo over half of what I had done to that point, then I pinned that sucker down with safety pins.

Grr!!! This is a clear demonstration of the love-hate relationship with inanimate objects that I mentioned earlier. My brain is much better than my hands. If I could only get the two to work together . . .

With this inquisitional pinning-down of the patch, I started again. This time (yes, Abba was still playing in my head), I was able to make a bit more progress.

Looks like I'm about a third of the way to getting this one on there.

Despite this mutual antagonism between man and material, I found my first session both frustrating and rewarding. There were moments that were, frankly, meditative. I lost track of time for a while (a feeling I seek in my life, truth be told) and realized that when I ended this session, it had been about two hours. It felt much shorter, and was, on the whole, much more enjoyable than I might have expected, going into it. I'm guessing that I won't get the esoteric denim completed by the end of the month, but . . . maybe. My intent is to have it done by Garycon so I can wear it there and start the Satanic Panic all over again - like the Ouroboros itself, One Eternal Round.

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

Social Media Pre-withdrawal Anxiety

In a few short hours, I will, as previously-threatened, stop using Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for 1 month. My only "social media" will be Goodreads, and is that really social media, by it's strictest definition? Sorry, but you purists will have to suck it up. I'm not bailing on books and discussions surrounding them for a month! I'm not a Luddite!

As I was driving home from work tonight thinking about the upcoming "social media fast" (while listening to a podcast and some music of course, and seeing how good of gas mileage I could get by driving smart - 33.4 mpg!), I thought about the many projects I have lined up (a few of which include some soon-to-be-posts to this blog that I have been putting off for literally years). I imagined sewing the patches on my esoteric denim, writing my long-overdue post about my and my wife's trip to England, Austria, and Germany, reading more, and doing some cool RPG stuff (think Nick Cave and David Bowie meet Dungeon-Crawl Classics and Carcosa, respectively), I was hit by a wave of anxiety.

This wasn't your "I forgot to do laundry" level of anxiety. This was "I might need to take the next exit" level of anxiety and it seemed to come out of nowhere. Thankfully, I didn't panic, just got into the slow lane and enjoyed a more leisurely pace (after all, how do you think I got 33.4 mpg?).

I thought about this for a while. Obviously, something was bugging me, badly, and it had to do with the upcoming fast. But what was it? Am I worried about missing the news? Nope. I listen to NPR every morning when I wake up. Besides, after the travesty in the US Senate and the idiocy of Brexit, I don't have a taste for much news right at the moment. Was I worried about not being heard? Nope. I've got this here blog and Goodreads for that. Maybe I was worried about missing something important? No. One of my intentions doing the fast was to miss stuff, even some important stuff. Was it fear of boredom? Oh, no, not at all - I have PLENTY to do, stuff that I really want to do, for the month.

Then, it dawned on me. I am anxious about being "alone". Now, I enjoy a good flesh and blood social life. My wife is great and, after almost thirty years of marriage, we are still together and enjoying marriage, even with its ups and downs. We have a date night every Friday night (okay, this week's was last night, when we went to see Riverdance at the Overture Center - it was awesome). And I am very involved as a volunteer with my church group. I get on google hangouts (long may it live) every Tuesday to do RPGing. And I (usually) hit one Wednesday night game a month, in addition, and a Saturday game occasionally. Throw in all the events we have going on, a monthly date night with friends, kids and grandkids coming and going . . . you get the idea. I am far from alone.

Where did this fear of being alone come from, then? Ironically, I think it came from overusing social media in the first place. I have an addiction. I am an addict. And I need a freaking break.

When we visited England last July, we went to one of the most beautiful little villages I have seen in my entire life, the picturesque village of Bibury, I had been wanting to visit this village for many, many years. My computer desktop background was a great black and white photo of the beautiful stone houses known as "Arlington Row" way back in the early 2000's (I'll post my own images this month, though they're not great photography). Our tour guide, Alistair, one of the great guides for the (VERY much strongly-recommended) Kooky Cotswold Tours, dropped us off and we wandered for a good half hour or so, just bathing in the relaxing quaintness of it all. It really is a little slice of heaven.

When we met back up with Alistair, I mentioned to him that I had been looking forward to seeing this sight for ages. I asked if anyone lived in the cottages (I thought they were publicly-held-type buildings) and he mentioned that people lived in them. I expressed my forlorn desire to live in one of those cottages, and Alistair surprised me by remarking "yeah, it's beautiful and all, but it would be kind of like living in a fishbowl, wouldn't it? All those people coming by all day long wanting to peek inside your windows and strangers constantly taking photos of your house. I couldn't live with that." I told him I hadn't thought about that. As we drove on to go see a couple more lovely towns, including Stow-on-the-Wold, we remarked at how lovely these towns were, and Alistair remarked again that, though they are beautiful, living in them would feel like living in a fishbowl.

I thought a lot about this as we continued on, the thoughts not diminishing my enjoyment of the peace at all, but the cautionary phrase "living in a fishbowl" continued to resonate with me.

About halfway home from work today, after my initial anxiety attacks, it dawned on me: I've become inured to living in a virtual fishbowl. Like it or not, when you are on social media, all kinds of eyes are on you. I find myself sometimes taking on a bit of a performative persona, like I'm on stage (and I suffer from horrible stage-fright!) and "another me" comes out. Not someone who is entirely NOT me, but someone with both exaggerated and overly-subdued characteristics that don't always reflect how I am in person (though, to some extent, they do - they're just magnified or minimized by that performative feeling).

So, really, it's time for me to take a break. I'll be back in March. At least back on Twitter. Facebook? Probably not. Instagram? I'll probably mostly lurk there, like I do now. And, after my great purge of Twitter a moth ago, I'm probably going to do another great purge. I'm under a thousand people I'm following now. Depending on how I feel when I come back, I might cut another 500, who knows? Maybe 700? I dunno. In any case, I'll be back, but . . . cautiously. I don't want to become addicted to being a performer again. That's really not me. And, most of all, I want my time back. I want to be able to be bored and have to find something to do. I want to slow my pace, rather than thinking I have to  be checking Facebook and Twitter in between every other thing I'm doing. I need some breathing room, and this is me pushing clutter away, starting at midnight tonight. Don't worry - you'll be the beneficiary of some cool stuff, as a result. And I'd love to hear what you have to say in the comments section of each post. Seriously! Because while I don't want to be in the fishbowl, I do want to stay engaged with old friends and new and interesting people. Except bots. Bots suck.

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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!

Carpe Diem

As you may have gathered from my recent reading, I'm feeling a bit of social media fatigue. I honestly think that the internet *feels* fundamentally different for me in the last couple of years. The decease of Google+ and the incredible RPG community that existed there is one of the primary factors. We just haven't quite gathered in other places like we did there. And, frankly, none of the other options excite me nearly as much.

There's also the matter of having a lot of things on my "want to do" list that don't get done because it's just way too easy and comfortable to slip into the worlds of social media where I don't need to do much work to be entertained. But, you know, I miss having to work to be entertained. And I've got a lot I want to do, some analog, some digital.

Last summer, my wife and I took a trip to Europe. While I didn't completely disengage, I did take a big step back. And it felt great. I was more "in the moment" than I had been in a while. I realized that I really miss that. I need more Carpe Diem in my life, and I can't find it when my eyeballs are on the screen all the time.

Now, this isn't a Swan Song to online life. Far from it. In fact, many of the projects I want to work on will show on this blog. I need to document our trip to Europe, for example. And I now have all the patches I need for my "esoteric denim" project that I've been teasing on twitter. I keep a bullet journal, and there are three or four projects, some of which will only take a matter of a couple of hours to do, that keep popping up as undone. These things, which I find incredibly rewarding, are slipping through the cracks of time. Ironically, many of them will manifest here on this blog, but because of my social media time, they don't. get. done.

So, it's time to do. During the month of February, my social media will consist of two things: Goodreads (because it is a part of my core belief that reading is fundamental to an enjoyable and informed life) and this blog (because many of my undone projects have to do with blog posts I've been wanting to do for years now). You won't see me on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. I may never come back to Facebook. In fact, it is likely that my account will sit there, moribund, for a long time. I still want it up so that old friends can regain contact, but I'm nuking the app from my phone, for sure. Twitter I like, and I will be back, though I've cut the number of people I'm following from over 4,000 to (just) under 1,000. And Instagram - I'll stay there, but mostly as a lurker to watch my favorite artists, tattooists, etc. I suppose I will post comments on youtube once in a while, since I listen to music constantly on there. But the only real "social media" I'll be using in February will be Goodreads. So, if you really want to hear from me, those who have my snail mail, my phone number, and my email addy (you know who you are) can contact me, no problem.

And, of course, you can check back here. I promise there will be more content here. And when I'm not working on blog projects, I'll be working on that esoteric denim, working out (I've caught the exercise bug the last few months and I feel great!!!), writing gaming materials (watch the blog!) and short stories, and finally nailing down the handful of songs on guitar that I've begun working on, but haven't put in enough discipline to master. Oh, yeah, and I need to get ready to run games at Garycon!

So much to do, and, as I learned when my parents both passed away within a couple of months of each other back in 2018 - LIFE IS SHORT!

Carpe Diem, indeed!!!

As a reminder, if you want to contact me via real, hard, physical mail, you can do so at this place, minus the carrots, of course!:

9^0^3^E^i^s^e^n^h^o^w^e^r^A^v^e

J^a^n^e^s^v^i^l^l^e, W^I 5^3^5^4^5

U^S^A

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