Triggered by ‘A Man Too Mean To Be Me’ (Part 7)

‘Grandfather Clock’

All such triggerings linked at the bottom of the page here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/a-man-too-mean-to-be-me-2022/

Triggered by ‘A Man Too Mean To Be Me’ (Part 6)

‘Bad Bananas Caper’

Part 5 here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2023/02/27/triggered-by-a-man-too-mean-to-be-me-part-5/

Part 7 here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2023/02/28/triggered-by-a-man-too-mean-to-be-me-part-7/

All such triggerings linked at the bottom of the page here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/a-man-too-mean-to-be-me-2022/

Triggered by ‘A Man Too Mean To Be Me’ (Part 5)

‘Ladies’ and ‘Shumble Hall’

Part 4: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2023/02/26/from-a-man-too-mean-to-be-me-part-4/

Part 6 : https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2023/02/27/triggered-by-a-man-too-mean-to-be-me-part-6/

All such triggerings linked at the bottom of the page here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/a-man-too-mean-to-be-me-2022/

A Man Too Mean To Be Me

Incunabula Media 2022

WHERE TO OBTAIN HERE: ** https://etepsed.wordpress.com/a-man-too-mean-to-be-me-2022/ **

Plus one review at that link.

Triggered by ‘A Man Too Mean To Be Me’ (Part 4)

‘Six Musketeers’ ‘North Monday’ and one more from ‘The Absence’

Part Three here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2023/02/25/stories-from-a-man-too-mean-to-be-me-part-3/

Part 5: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2023/02/27/triggered-by-a-man-too-mean-to-be-me-part-5/

All such triggerings linked at the bottom of the page here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/a-man-too-mean-to-be-me-2022/

Stories from ‘A Man Too Mean To Be Me’ – Part 3

‘Passiflora’ and ‘Fillings of the Sky’

Part One here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/02/24/stories-from-a-man-too-mean-to-be-me-incunabula-media-2022-part-1/

Part Four here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2023/02/26/from-a-man-too-mean-to-be-me-part-4/

All such triggerings linked at the bottom of the page here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/a-man-too-mean-to-be-me-2022/

Axes of Discordance by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

“They had patterns in their head, and they projected them onto the world.”

This novelette flows beautifully. I understood all of it, despite me never being in Bangalore nor learned about its customs, its clans or churches. It has SF and HPL and much else in this ring world and the occult running through its veins and music performance that happens in a flow of word and note with the off-syncopation of some devil drummer. So much to tell you, so much I shall leave for you to read yourself, so much that I thought I could never empathise with — the as yet unrequited love-world of the narrator and fey lady Cloudy, and their foe Francis X. Which the shadowy third? A fine climax to this book. I was there compos mantis, praying mentis, with every reference of literature with which it teemed. It made me feel that I was there and understood it all, even if other parts of me didn’t. I wrote this in a spurt, having read this work’s engaging darknesses now transcended.
Veres’ Fogtown, Zelenyj’s Deathray Bradburys, Satyamurthy’s Axes of Discordance,… which the shadowy third? That clinging shadow again.

“all the discords and hobble-footed disjointedness Francis was leading us into, something that needed to burst out and balance things out, some daemon or genius,….”

“‘broken, possessed and stolen/toys before the shrieking furies’.”

“But who was the shadow? Who was the third,…”

end
Desmond Francis Lewis

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Full context here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/02/06/come-tomorrow-by-jayaprakash-satyamurthy/

A Threshold Hypothesis by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

“It’s never a dream.”

This is a continuous co-vivid dream indeed, a palimpsest of stated specific SF and other literature and history and what a city was, is and will be, and the reader is addressed as you as part of a collusion like I’m being told that you’d think I am making you think this or think that – another fourth wall or threshold transcended, and I sensed that whatever it was that inspired me during my self-seen heyday of writing a weirdmonger’s story-particles in the 80s and 90s must have read ahead to this work with, inter alia, its night soil workers and talking to old men in pubs, and I have been inspired all over again.

Experiments with Last Balconies, Big-Headed People, Elbows etc.

Florence Flannery by Marjorie Bowen (1924)

“‘You seem to spend a power of time by the pond,’ she replied. ‘What are you here for?’
‘I’m waiting for something,’ he said. ‘I’m putting in time, Mrs Shute.’”

This is a highly strange and, for me, meaningful, story of a carp pond and a coincidence of names by an author with her own near namesake Elizabeth Bowen, whose work I cherish. I now cherish, with a shudder, her near namesake’s words by reading this work today. A carp that is a man that is a tench, I guess, regarding all my past reviews of John Cowper Powys. The name of FF is scratched on a window in a seaside house to which another woman — a feisty London chorus girl with sluttish ways, also bearing FF as a name, now Mrs Shute — is brought in marriage by a Mr Shute, and she is disappointed by the downtrodden house and its grounds. And she is even more disappointed, to say the least, by the connection with another woman called FF with a backstory that straddles oceans, and a man called Daley or Paley who, having settled in the house’s grounds, more or less embodies that tench, here called carp. It was as if I, too, was destined one day to arrive at reading this story, and so it has been. Another coincidence or material synchronicity? But not before Mrs Shute (the FF who straddles 300 years) sells her sole riches in the form of a diamond to buy “a carpet wreathed with roses, a gaudy dressing-table and phials of perfume, opopanax, frangipane, musk, potent, searing, to dissipate, she said, the odours of must and mildew.” Toward a carpthartic ending…

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Context of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/21/womens-weird-more-strange-stories-by-women-1891-1937/#comment-26553