DF LEWIS: editor, publisher, writer and reviewer of fiction. First novel published at the age of 63 (2011). Creator of ‘Nemonymous’ (from 2001). Author of works from ‘Weirdmonger’ (1988) to ‘The Last Balcony’ (2012). Inventor of gestalt real-time reviewing (2008) &c

The design (by Garry Nurrish) throughout ‘Weirdmonger’ (2003) by DF Lewis

Real Books Rock … as do Barges and their Captains.

Photo taken in 2013 on the Tendring Peninsula coast:

Book Stains

A photo taken this morning for my SOUL STAINS article HERE.

“I feel that the souls of original writers — for the more original a writer is, the more powerful is the pressure of his projected soul — are real presences that have their dwelling inside the printed pages of the author’s books;…”
– from ‘The Inmates’ by John Cowper Powys

“Every book has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”
— from ‘The Shadow Of The Wind’ by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Real books on this morning’s sunlit shelf…

Sculpture by Tony Lovell

Links to more of my rocks and books in the comment below.

This morning’s walk…

Manet’s Balcony et al

Manet:

Russell Connor:

Niewoehner:

Magritte (The Last Balcony?):

Lies

There was a piano in the room, its two lids closed. It wasn’t a Steinway exactly nor an upright and I wonder if Winifred Atwell or Mrs Mills would have found it suitable for their singalong medleys. Whatever the case, I imagined it to be haunted by all the piano-players that had once run their fingers over the black and white keys. The room – an old-fashioned doctor’s waiting-room in a Victorian house – was not itself haunted. It was the piano that had the ghosts inside.

One lid was over the wires and hammers and the other protecting the keys. A cross between a concert grand and old ‘joanna’, neither one thing of another, with a slight taint of mechanical organ using a piano ‘stop’ to mimic Richard Clayderman or Liberace or Semprini or Ferrante & Teicher…

I lifted the business end key-shutter, squatted the stool while twisting down its height control to my size and then prepared to play ‘The Theme from “Exodus”’, a tune that charted on 1960s Radio Luxembourg  – now played whether as an exorcism or simply a way to release the ghosts, give them their ‘grand’ exit. Some of them had been patients of the dead doctor who once practised his surgery in this suburban establishment. He told lies to his patients, gave them placebo panaceas, white tablets with no ingredients but chalk.  They had sat patiently in this room waiting to see the dead doctor, staring into the distance or mindlessly glancing at stale colour supplements that rested on their laps with old West End Shows depicted on the covers.

The room still had the scars of irritating toddlers on the wallpaper and the gas fire in the chimney breast – a white bone grid, now blackened and up which the lit gas had once climbed gradually but hardly giving out any heat. The lamp-standard gave out more heat, it always seemed!

I came to the end of ‘Exodus’ with a flourish.  But I realised that the whole performance was its own lie. I had no idea about music or how to play it. I just wanted my own back. A new Genesis.

Like Joe Henderson, my middle name was Piano – but I watched  the white keys crumble into dust. And the black keys grew soft but without losing their integral shape: moulded from honey made by sick bees.  Seemed a funny thing to think.

I called out: “Mrs Mills! Mrs Mills!” I knew the old receptionist-cum-nurse. She used to do everything for the dead doctor, booked the patients in with a weak smile and booked them out with a glance of finality; she even issued prescriptions with bad handwriting, and whatever else was needed.

Another lie. Mrs Mills was me.  Even though I played the piano like Eric Morecambe not my namesake.

I fell off the stool, from thinking about it. I had been side saddle anyway, not astride or squatting. Toy balloons on the carpet didn’t break my fall. Floyd Cramer will come and kiss me better. He was always better than Russ Conway. I never liked pianists smiling.

Not black lies, I assure you. But mere fibs or white lies.  The ones that didn’t stick.

[A slightly edited version of my speed writing exercise last night at the Clacton Third Thursday Writing Group]

A lovely park bench

Pointing to his blank story, proud it’s printed on real paper.

Miniature Sun-Bather

My morning’s walk nearby…

I have now spotted a miniature sun-bather in the first one, beside the balcony rather than on it!

There is ALWAYS one dream left in even the deepest and longest and darkest sleep.

From my new prose piece today here.

Beyond Hiraeth

• BEYOND HIRAETH

  Disturbing Fiction Collaborations with me!   – collaborators listed below – a selection of collaborative stories written before the Turn of the Century. The contents are complete below and the manuscript prepared, although there may be one or two more should I be able to contact the writers involved.
  If anyone knows a publisher who would be interested in putting these into a book….

  .

  The Sound of Children – DF Lewis & Anthea Holland (fantasque 2000)
  Variations on the Vile – DF Lewis & Richard Gavin (Book of Dark Wisdom 2003)
  Knuckledraggers, Inc. – DF Lewis & John Travis (The Zone 1999)
  Popper’s in the Wine – DF Lewis & P.F. Jeffery (Lateral Moves 1998)
  In the Belly of the Snake – DF Lewis & Paul Pinn (The Edge 1996)
  I Consume That of the Edge of Exquisite Taste – DF Lewis & Craig Sernotti (Not Dead, But Dreaming 1997)
  The London Fairground – DF Lewis & Allen Ashley (The Heliograph 1999)
  Harvest Time – DF Lewis & Gordon Lewis (Enigmatic Tales 2000)
  Three Suns For Yesterday – DF Lewis & Jeff Holland (shown on-line)
  Don’t Drown the Man Who Taught You to Swim – DF Lewis & David Mathew (Redsine 2002, Paranoid Landscapes 2006)
  The Fat Bat – DF Lewis & Scott Urban (Octobyr 1998)
  Tale With Unknown Collaborator – DF Lewis & Carlton Mellick (shown on-line)
  The Slippery Pearls – DF Lewis & Mike Philbin/Hertzan Chimera (Masque 1995)
  NITS – DF Lewis & Paul Bradshaw (Voyage 1999)
  Tungus – DF Lewis & Jeff Holland (Rictus 1995)
  The Shoal – DF Lewis & Lawrence Dyer (shown on-line)
  The Moon Pool – DF Lewis & M.F. Korn (Eraserhead Press 2001)
  The Quest of the Mouther – DF Lewis & Rhys Hughes (Visions 1997)
  The Swimming Pool – DF Lewis & Tony Mileman
  Disaffected Blood – DF Lewis & David Price (Unhinged 2000)
  Tiny Hooks and Dainty Door-Keys – DF Lewis & Mark McLaughlin (Flesh & Blood 2003)
  Mary’s Broken House – DF Lewis & Dominy Clements (shown on-line)
  The Winged Menace – DF Lewis & John B Ford (The Evil Entwines 2002)
  Finnegan Awake – DF Lewis & Simon Woodward (shown on-line)
  This Flight Tonight – DF Lewis & Gary Couzens (Substance 1994, Second Contact 2003)
  Remission – DF Lewis & Anthea Holland (Roadworks 1996)

  .
  There are many other such collaborations and the above represent a selection.

  .
  The multiple collaborationss with Stuart Hughes (published as BUSY BLOOD (2012)),

  with Gordon Lewis (published as ONLY CONNECT (1998) and A MAN TOO MEAN TO BE ME (2012)),

  with Tim Lebbon (hopefully to be published in 2013 as LET’S EAT MONSTERS)

  and with Marge Simon THE HORN’s LAST RITE (currently seeking a publisher),

  the WORDHUNGER collaborations now published in print.

  .

  • 

    The Marge Simon DFL-collaboration site here:

    Collaborations with Marge Simon

    Seeking publisher for…. ‘THE HORN’S LAST RITE’ by Des Lewis and Marge Simon – fiction collaborations conducted transatlantically by paper post in the early nineteen nineties.

‘Morwyn’ – John Cowper Powys

Above is my copy of ‘Morwyn‘ by John Cowper Powys that I bought new: i.e. the Sphere Books  ‘The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult’ edition published in 1977, the novel’s first publication having been in 1937.

The front cover has this sub-heading: “The Classic Novel of a Terrifying Journey into Hell” but the sub-title on the inside title page is ‘The Vengeance of God’.

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My first edition of PORIUS by John Cowper Powys (1951 Macdonald: London):

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My review of ‘The Inmates’ by John Cowper Powys HERE.

My favourite quotes from ‘The Glastonbury Romance’ by John Cowper Powys HERE.

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MORE OF MY JCP BOOKS SHOWN IN ‘COMMENT’ BELOW…

The Lost Whovian Woofers

This is part of one of the best book covers I’ve seen for a while – by Howard Watts for TQF #43

My RTRcausal of this book’s fiction HERE.

Books in Ruins

 

Yesterday, as shown above, I walked around Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, taking photographs.

Today, I visited St Botolph’s Priory, Colchester, Essex:

 

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Meanwhile, I have planned, for later in 2013, to revisit Glastonbury, Somerset and its Abbey Ruins

since first going there on holiday with my then young family in the late 1970s.

I had then become entranced with Glastonbury’s ‘genius loci’ as a result of reading the

massive novel ‘The Glastonbury Romance’ by John Cowper Powys, a book which I have now

re-read in the last few months.

And this has made me think that buildings are preserved even as ruins, people

as statues, nature as trees, coastlines as rocks… so why not the written word as real books?

.

Books not only in but proudly as Ruins.

Ruins for their own sake.

As well as trees, statues, rocks, and authors actually become their own books…real books.

Real people in eternity.

.

“I feel that the souls of original writers — for the more original a writer is, the more powerful

is the pressure of his projected soul — are real presences that have their dwelling inside

the printed pages of the author’s books;…”
–from THE INMATES (1952) by John Cowper Powys

A shortcoming well-harnessed is stronger than a strength unused.

One creature’s ‘last balcony’ is another’s abandoned gargoyle-tree.

Some rocks continuing to metamorphise into books…

Treeward

Madness Personified

This novel — ‘The Inmates’ by John Cowper Powys –  promises to be HILARIOUS … worrying, too. Worrying in itself regarding the nature of insanity, but also worrying in that nobody has really reviewed it in detail since it was published in 1952. I have started my review HERE.

Looks to be another haunting ‘sanatorium’ story like ‘The Magic Mountain’ by Thomas Mann and ‘The Hospice’ by Robert Aickman.