Someone elsewhere today kindly quoted the following words from Brian Eno:

<< Pretension is the dismissive name given to people's attempts to be something other than what they 'really are'. It is vilified in England in particular because we are so suspicious of people trying to 'rise above their station'.

In the arts, the word 'pretentious' has a special meaning: the attempt at something that the critic thinks you have no right even to try. I'm very happy to have added my little offering to the glowing mountain of things described as 'pretentious' - I'm happy to have made claims on things that I didn't have any 'right' to, and I'm happy to have tried being someone else to see what it felt like.

I decided to turn the word 'pretentious' into a compliment. The common assumption is that there are 'real' people and there are others who are pretending to be something they're not. There is also an assumption that there's something morally wrong with pretending. My assumptions about culture as a place where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties make me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It's the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.

Robert Wyatt once said that we were always in the condition of children - faced with things we couldn't understand and thus with the need to guess and improvise. Pretending is what kids do all the time. It's how they learn. What makes anyone think that you should sometime give it up? >>

End of quote.

I am pretentious for drawing philosophical meaning from TV shows such as Big Brother and Deal or No Deal.

I am pretentious for publishing 'Nemonymous' with its experimental ethos.

I am pretentious for wallowing in neologisms over the years.

I am pretentious for making real-time reviews of books.

I am pretentious for blogging my previously published (as well as new) fictions: i.e. those textured exercises in something I pretentiously define as indefinable.

I am even pretentious enough to believe that I would have had many more books published if I had gone out of my way actually to make fiction submissions to publishers and I would now be more famous than the most famous writers of all and that, when I am dead, people will value my work far more than while I remain alive.

I am pretentious enough to write all the above without truly believing any of it.

How could the seasons have changed so rapidly?

I looked at the lady who had been sitting by herself until I came into the room. Would she know the answer? Likely she would not even understand the question.

The sense of territory was hers, although I probably knew the room better. It had once been a tea room for tourists, now a simple gathering-place that the owner offered as part of an open house policy.

As you well know, people have been more and more flinging their front doors wide, in an unstoppable movement of actually trusting each other. It all stemmed from the earlier years when there was that upsurge of geopolitical changes. With the frontiers being uprooted by the onrush of currency unions, mutual democracies and mass nirvanas, so, too, had individuals opened their arms to each other, not in an attempt to retrieve some remnant of sexuality that had been eschewed and rightfully forgotten, but more to prove to Reality that people were generally together - and that at the end of the day it was not going to get its own cruel way.

There was no need for cafes or shops with such a philosophy. In fact, the lady, sitting at the next table had just been handed a good old-fashioned dinner of braising steak and three vedge, to be followed by treacle sponge and custard.

I smiled.

February was a warm month.

She smiled back.

The golden shimmering girders of the sun shafted through the Rose Window between us, making it difficult to discern fully her face in the shifting patterns and colours of light. The shadow speckles of snow flickering across her made me wonder how I could ever forget such a vision of impending nostalgia.

A woman and a boy came into the room. He was evidently not at school because a visit to the dentist had been promised ... and, by the look of it, fulfilled. He took much delight in tentatively chewing an Eccles cake which he had taken from under the dust cover on the owner’s sideboard. The woman said she had not eaten an Eccles cake since she was a child herself and had forgotten how nice they were.

Finishing my stay, I wished all of them a good day and a better one tomorrow. There was no bill to pay, but I left my ghostly presence as a kind of gratuity.

I wondered how many second childhoods I would undergo before reaching the optimum.

(published 'Opossum Holler Tarot' 1990)

It was a handjob, so he had only one set of fingers free to dab at the pouches under his wriggling lashes. Pulpy to the touch, it made the eyeballs bulge from their sockets and threaten to burst out from their wild stares.

“Don’t forget the nose,” hissed Scarlet Lady, again reminding him of her continuing presence at the back of his mind.

He took the fleshy wadge and squeezed it so hard, the sealed nostril bulbs became just snot between the fingers.

“And the mouth...”

He made as if to reply, but instead wrinkled up the lips into a kiss shape: laid them gently to the coldness of the glass. He attempted to tongue...but the shimmering glass had several ingrowing edges across its iceweb surface.

It was the mirror tonguing back at him with a jagged shard that audibly splintered into the soft palate.

He turned questioningly, almost innocently, towards Scarlet Lady, as the light seeped from the laddering black veil that her face had become.

Blood drooled down his chin, as if he had over-filled at the human pump.

He had recalled the windscreen heading towards him at breakneck speed; and instantaneously, with the realisation he and the giggling girl had forgotten to fasten their seat-belts, and had a gratuitous vision that only death in the first few milliseconds of its life could make him forget.

(published 'Dementia 13' 1990)

I've started doing real-time reviews over the last year. i.e. reviewing Collections or Anthologies as I proceeded through the book in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way.

Do you think this is a valid way to review - showing future trends as provided by the pros (rather than the cons) of the Internet?

My view:
It's not only significant for the author of a book reviewed in this way to receive a possible new audit trail of leitmotifs or a new gestalt proposed by another party, but it is also beneficial, I have found from my experience of doing this, for a reviewer to review books in this way. It opens the 'reading eyes', I suggest, in ways in which they would not otherwise be opened.

I've real-time reviewed a lot of recent single author collections here:
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/recent_reviews_of_books_by_dfl.htm

(Published 'Stand' 1990)

Knowing this did not make much sense, even to myself, I decided to strike up a conversation: Anything was better than all that turning in on myself, following my recent bereavement.

“Had many train journeys like this one?”

I pointed to the fields held in view by the train’s delay.

She shook her head, either to indicate a negative reply to my question or to give me no illusions about her reluctance to talk at all. Maybe it was because there were no corridors on the train, no other sign of life other than the fact that there must be at least a driver somewhere towards the front. I’d in fact been the second of the two of us to get into this particular carriage. I pulled down the window and leaned out, mainly because it told me not to do so. This brought the fields into sharper focus and I could just make out the blur of a figure walking slowly along the sky-line, to where the brightness of the late afternoon had been relegated. Night was too early, hustled from bed (I laughed) by the darkening of an unseasonable storm on the other side of the train.

I turned back to my fellow passenger to see if she was now in a more talkative mood.

As the train began to move and the rain spattered the window, I thought she must have silently slipped from the carriage, rather to negotiate the tracks than remain alone with the likes of me.

Then I realised that she had indeed been alone all the time, as I smoothed down the tweed skirt, on resuming my corner seat.

(Published ‘Iron’ 1990)

The town centre was near empty of shoppers. Its covered walkways echoed with the cold steps of no more than a few others.

Fitful waste paper, in all shapes and consistencies of stickiness, had managed, piecemeal, to climb from the wire containers ... and this, despite the wind, if anything, having dropped along the funnels of the precinct.

Trails of quarter-inch proud footsteps, bearing the cross-hatch pattern of heavy boot-soles, were avoided by end-of-day shoppers, gingerly picking their way between them towards the exits.

Darkness, even in these shop-windowed cloisters, crept relentlessly towards the last late-night shopper. And there always was a last shopper, who provided the only bait for monsters born from the common-law marriage of bestiality and sundown.

Today's last shopper on a spree was a teenage girl. She screamed before she saw any monster. She had read her big brother's horror books, Stephen Kings, Clive Barkers, Ramsey Campbells, even H.P. Lovecrafts. She had not understood all the words, but the fear in them had stood out nevertheless and borne the test of childhood's endless past.

The man whom she had passed appeared to her to be a designer antique lamp-standard, so popular in shopping-centres. She did not know that his bones, lusting after flesh to cushion them, were putting out feelers, as they simultaneously planted tapering, crackling roots through the boot-leather, even through the upper crust of civilisation's concrete veneer - heading towards their own mindless version of the Earth's core where unadulterated, unwritten horror flourished with the craving jaws of its own jump-leads.

Not understanding, she did not even realise that the figure she passed was a man at all.

Her elder brother had said the shops stayed open so late on certain nights of the week, you could never find them shut. So, she had taken the last bus to town, in search of her mother's birthday present which she had uncharacteristically forgotten. Maybe she was growing up, just old enough to be relatively independent ... despite the media-led dangers of the world. The concerns of such fledgling adults tended to obliterate earlier, more innocent preoccupations - like remembering birthdays, playing pass-the-parcel or hunt-the-thimble, reading Enid Blyton, Capt. W.E. Johns, Richmal Crompton ... Wurzel Gummidge the scarecrow...

She looked back. The darkness stained the shop windows with moving lines of soldier words, in strict spit-and-polish. Other shadows moved closer, taunting her with a brother's typical back-chat. "Go away!" she screeched, thinking he had followed to frighten his little sister.

She suspected the shops had always been shut and never properly opened - the glorious sunlight only seeping in from the outside as some celebrity had snipped the ceremonial opening-tape with heavy-duty snicker-snackers, clacking, clacking blades, the tape being made of some alien fibrous stuff that could never be cut.

She shook her head vigorously as if to clear it of something. She had been fed too much pap at teenage "slumber parties" - all night films in Dutch Elm Street, the images of splatter flickering over the huddled shapes upon the settees, petting heavily but falling short of humping, desperately seeking carnal secrets amid the concert crescendo of screams from the screen which had no erotic context but pain.

She tried to shake herself free of all this.

Could her brother have tricked her here to test out some outlandish theory of horror which had been bugging and buzzing in his head ever since the fast-forward, sharp-zagged trails of the Evil Dead. Even when he realised that true horror could only be found in books - not videos - the neat straight lines of print merely wound, coiled, rippled tantalisingly towards meaninglessness.

She panted. She was determined not to scream again. That would only tell the monsters where she was. The shop-window dummies stared in disbelief. Many were undressed. She had often wondered why they had such small heads and stylised black-and-white bodies. The nippleless breasts moved as if hands were feeling them from within glove puppets. Flecks of pulsing blood-light stained the inner thighs. The glass between them and her drained the light from the now slow-flashing Coca Cola sign.

The upbedded patterns of the footprints surrounded her like hour-glass cowpats. There never were invisible monsters in Stephen King, she thought. This was more like an old black-and-white B movie. But she had never seen one and could not draw the comparisons which life left clues about at every turn of its pages.

The waste paper, like discarded manuscripts for stories, crawled back to its bins, scaling the wire meshes with the aid of lolly-sticks and can-tabs. They had yearned for the rubbish frights of low budget colour-gore, not the shadowing subtleties of Cat People, Mannequins and Ghosts, all good value at double the cost.

The roots shrunk back, as she suddenly smiled.

Her brother's eyes stared at her from behind the impenetrable shop-front glass where he had found himself trapped inside a dummy, in a dream worse than any of his nightmares.

The invisible monsters took up their print-marks and placed then towards the squally night outside the precinct - where all was boarded up for the night, even the bedrooms.

The lamp-standard man eventually stepped free, his bony roots fully withdrawn from the ground. The man indeed knew that she had forgotten her mother's birthday present - but the best possible present now would be the daughter's return next morning after a night away. He took the girl's hand and chuckled at his own good will.

He did not hear the rattling fingertips on glass somewhere behind, frantic though they were. Nor did the girl.

(Published ‘Trash City’ 1994)