SIDESHOW AND OTHER STORIES

[G. S. Carnivals]

I am finally the proud owner of number 192 of the chapbook. (I simply couldn't wait on those Durtro blokes any longer.)

[darrick]

well cool beans, G.S.C.

tell me how you like it. i read it all in one night last week. it was pretty powerful. subtle and grand as if the old master is settling into his stride. few ultra highs and few ultra lows, very even keel. i like how certain themes and words are interwoven throughout the book. Sideshow also felt more personal, and i liked that. although i do miss the more intense horrors of his earlier work (i'm sure you know which ones i mean).

D

p.s. i've just about finished scrawling NN everywhere on my body in black crayon. it looks good...

[Kevin]

I have copy #6 of the paperback version.

[Andrea Bonazzi]

Signed chapbook #337 is here!

[Nemonymous]

SIDESHOW, AND OTHER STORIES - Having reached the end of this ‘story’ and its nightmarish metafiction, I felt paranoiac and like a literary vampire, sucking on its words and depleting what I read, draining it like one of the lavatories in THE TOWN MANAGER. Anyway, this ‘story’ starts with a coffee shop where that previous story ended. All is indeed Show Business, ie. writing these critiques is Show Business, writing “dreamlike vignettes”(as this ‘story’ pejoratively describes as a certain form of story) and I suppose all our cavorting on the Internet here is Show Business, in this sense, too – but by championing the Intentional Fallacy this at least absolves any “autobiographical wretchedness” (as this story puts it).
This story – forgetting any pompous paranoia for a moment – is a wonderful ‘musical’ symphony of such self-ridiculing (?) “dreamlike vignettes”, with almost random (meaningless?) movement titles just like the Horses’ names used as a paperchase in one of the ‘vignettes’ .... touching on Global Warming and the Cern Experiment and Reincarnation as monstrous animals...
There was 'renting' in ‘Purity’, but now seeking a home one fears for its very homeliness!
Like the ‘Purity’ Ghost (cordless TV) and the ‘Town Manager’ lamp, the “stars themselves burn low with a dim flickering light.”
“Everything is ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.”
The reader here is his own self-important ‘sideshow’ – but that is another story!
Classic stuff.

[Nemonymous]

This is an extract from my current on-going review of the TEATRO GROTTESCO collection, but without my having first re-read my own real-time review of it in 2008:

SIDESHOW, AND OTHER STORIES

"I began to travel frantically from one sideshow town to another, each of them descending further than the one before it into the depths of a show business world."

...like the previous story's existential tontine of the Town Manager?

Foreword
I. The Malignant Matrix
II. Premature Communication
III. The Astronomic Blur
IV. The Abyss of Organic Forms
V. The Phenomenal Frenzy
Afterword

The budding gestalt of this work, seemingly a quite compact short story, is made up of the above five vignettes as foreworded and afterworded by the first person narrator (a writer in crisis) who allows us to read the manuscript (with its own - ostensibly different - first person narrator) containing those five vignettes written by an older seeming man, a sort of casual mentor, a fellow writer, whom the first first person narrator met in a cafe, a fellow writer who left this manuscript behind, which makes me think the sideshow world they both inhabit and decry is made into a deliberately complex patchwork of visionary matters, whence nothing can be gained except the ability to be confused by contiguous titles and dry, crammed meaning which hides an empty centre of meaninglessness, with the two writers thinking all the time that this text with such visionary sounding titles holds the secret of the universe. And so the first first person narrator, intellectually rented by or to the second first person narrator, was encouraged to take up his writing again when he got home, because he didn't need to think about accessible communication or popular entertainment, but merely to feed his insomnia with pretentious texture and the sense of philosophical fulfilment in by-passing the sides of all sideshows with loaned or mortgaged thought. The ultimate exercise in hoax and counter-hoax, each writer hoaxing the other, until the two 'half brothers' became a whole - the master penman of our age - having once mock-raced against each other with the statistical form of thoroughbred horses and the inevitability of a dead heat at the finish line, a dead heat "in which the stars themselves burn low with a dim, flickering light that illuminates an indefinite swirling blur, wherein it is not possible to observe any definite shapes or signs."
A masterwork in meticulous deviousness with a sideshow of a reviewer equally devious in exposing or optimising it?

(I shall now read my 2008 review of this story which is shown above in the previous post on this thread.)

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

This is an extract from my current on-going review of the TEATRO GROTTESCO collection, but without my having first re-read my own real-time review of it in 2008: SIDESHOW, AND OTHER STORIES "I began to travel frantically from one sideshow town to another, each of them descending further than the one before it into the depths of a show business world." ...like the previous story's existential tontine of the Town Manager? Foreword I. The Malignant Matrix II. Premature Communication III. The Astronomic Blur IV. The Abyss of Organic Forms V. The Phenomenal Frenzy Afterword The budding gestalt of this work, seemingly a quite compact short story, is made up of the above five vignettes as foreworded and afterworded by the first person narrator (a writer in crisis) who allows us to read the manuscript (with its own - ostensibly different - first person narrator) containing those five vignettes written by an older seeming man, a sort of casual mentor, a fellow writer, whom the first first person narrator met in a cafe, a fellow writer who left this manuscript behind, which makes me think the sideshow world they both inhabit and decry is made into a deliberately complex patchwork of visionary matters, whence nothing can be gained except the ability to be confused by contiguous titles and dry, crammed meaning which hides an empty centre of meaninglessness, with the two writers thinking all the time that this text with such visionary sounding titles holds the secret of the universe. And so the first first person narrator, intellectually rented by or to the second first person narrator, was encouraged to take up his writing again when he got home, because he didn't need to think about accessible communication or popular entertainment, but merely to feed his insomnia with pretentious texture and the sense of philosophical fulfilment in by-passing the sides of all sideshows with loaned or mortgaged thought. The ultimate exercise in hoax and counter-hoax, each writer hoaxing the other, until the two 'half brothers' became a whole - the master penman of our age - having once mock-raced against each other with the statistical form of thoroughbred horses and the inevitability of a dead heat at the finish line, a dead heat "in which the stars themselves burn low with a dim, flickering light that illuminates an indefinite swirling blur, wherein it is not possible to observe any definite shapes or signs." A masterwork in meticulous deviousness with a sideshow of a reviewer equally devious in exposing or optimising it? (I shall now read my 2008 review of this story which is shown above in the previous post on this thread.)

Rationale: Le NŒUD de Ligotti - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK