Gas Station Carnivals

[Nemonymous]

GAS STATION CARNIVALS – As we proceed from the Purple to the Crimson Woman, and further paranoia concerning the reality of our own motives excellently conveyed by this classic story of both Horror and Absurdity and by entwining Narrations of Night Club and Sideshow and by deeper Sideshows of meaning (fitting for our world of Credit Crunch entertainment-seediness or of ‘The Swords’ by Robert Aickman), we simultaneously know by means of Magic Fiction (“art-magic delusion”) rather than the more common form of literature often known as Magic Realism that Gas Station Carnivals (described by Quisser as an archteypical reality we can’t avoid) actually do exist (even if they don’t).
A miniature Ferris Wheel no taller than a bungalow-house (as the story describes) and, having lived in a genuine bungalow-house since 1995 (with two bedrooms in the roof with dormer eyes), I feel guilty as if I’m a brazen Showman. A writer should surely not be such a Showman but, rather, a Monk (like MG Cardin’s Monk not MG Lewis's Monk!) selflessly intent upon close-ordered textual exegesis. I must now return onward, with some trepidation, to that very story, The Bungalow House....
“And any room that I enter may become a sideshow tent where I must take my place upon a rickety old bench on the verge of collapse.”

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

“And any room that I enter may become a sideshow tent where I must take my place upon a rickety old bench on the verge of collapse.”

[Nemonymous]

This is an extract from my current on-going review of the TEATRO GROTTESCO collection:-

GAS STREET CARNIVALS

"Beside the miniature merry-go-round, which never moved an inch and always stood dark and silent in a remote rural landscape, there would be a miniature Ferris wheel (no taller than a bungalow-style house, Quisser said),..."

Whilst the previous Teatro stuff was central to the plot, the stuff depicting the writer of nihilistic stories, his grappling with serial negations as well as with his stomach trouble, here the same writer presumably with the same stomach ailment grappling with almost a doppelgänger, between whom and whom we ask which was the culprit of negating a woman artist and her paintings in the Crimson Cabaret, which of them drank mint tea, which wine, who told of the 'gas service carnivals' - and who faced the wiles of art-magic as well as the illuminati and esoteric scientists?

But, for me, Sideshow Des, the glory of this story is not this time in all that writerly teatro stuff, but in the sheer vision of the gas street carnivals themselves, these carnivals in isolation - so haunting, so darkly and delectably Aickman-like, the seedy backdrops as dowdy entertainment, backdrops as appendages to the gas stations.

The miniature, the freakish and the desolate, so real, so naggingly true, so brilliantly conjured up, that I feel I am the boy who grew up to remember these carnivals, even if they never existed at all.

Dr. Fingers et al.
All of us, myself included, part of "a crowd of deluded no-talents--", the art critic and literary critics in obeisance to the source artist or author, those principals of deposit who in turn bow, in the half light, to the interested reader that is you.

"...the frayed electrical cords that trailed off from the base of each lamp and, by means of several extension cords, ultimately found a source of power at the gas station,..."

(I shall now read my 2008 review of this story shown above on this thread.)

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

This is an extract from my current on-going review of the TEATRO GROTTESCO collection:- GAS STREET CARNIVALS "Beside the miniature merry-go-round, which never moved an inch and always stood dark and silent in a remote rural landscape, there would be a miniature Ferris wheel (no taller than a bungalow-style house, Quisser said),..." Whilst the previous Teatro stuff was central to the plot, the stuff depicting the writer of nihilistic stories, his grappling with serial negations as well as with his stomach trouble, here the same writer presumably with the same stomach ailment grappling with almost a doppelgänger, between whom and whom we ask which was the culprit of negating a woman artist and her paintings in the Crimson Cabaret, which of them drank mint tea, which wine, who told of the 'gas service carnivals' - and who faced the wiles of art-magic as well as the illuminati and esoteric scientists? But, for me, Sideshow Des, the glory of this story is not this time in all that writerly teatro stuff, but in the sheer vision of the gas street carnivals themselves, these carnivals in isolation - so haunting, so darkly and delectably Aickman-like, the seedy backdrops as dowdy entertainment, backdrops as appendages to the gas stations. The miniature, the freakish and the desolate, so real, so naggingly true, so brilliantly conjured up, that I feel I am the boy who grew up to remember these carnivals, even if they never existed at all. Dr. Fingers et al. All of us, myself included, part of "a crowd of deluded no-talents--", the art critic and literary critics in obeisance to the source artist or author, those principals of deposit who in turn bow, in the half light, to the interested reader that is you. "...the frayed electrical cords that trailed off from the base of each lamp and, by means of several extension cords, ultimately found a source of power at the gas station,..." (I shall now read my 2008 review of this story shown above on this thread.)

Rationale: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.ph...007#post123007

Thank you for these reviews as always, Nemonymous. This story in particular struck me... very Lynch-esque.