Mostly Monochrome Stories
by John Travis
The ExaggeratedPress 2009
Having just bought this book, I intend to write one of my real-time reviews...
I shall write here a review of each of the 23 stories as and when I read them, while trying to discover leit-motifs and the book's eventual gestalt.
I am not reading the Author's Note or Simon Clark's introduction until I've reviewed all the stories.
Caveat: There is one story written in collaboration with myself ('Hey Garland, I Dig Your Tweed Coat') and one of the stories ('Nothing') was first published in 'Nemonymous' in 2002.
MY PREVIOUS REAL-TIME REVIEWS ARE LINKED FROM HERE.
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Pyjamarama
...is the place of punishment with which Slink, the protagonist as a child, was threatened by his mother if he didn’t sleep deeply enough. Now, Slink, in late middle age, discovers it wasn’t just a silly story.
This opening Travision makes the particular general or the personal universal or your enemies avuncular or the inanimate directional or text tactile. And all vice versa.
Travis, judging by this story alone, cannot be labelled. I have read much literature over my 60-odd years – but, to me, this is a genuinely ‘primary cause’ seedbed or some ‘first mover’ clockmaking that cannot be called by any expression such as (author’s name)-ian or (genre-generated word)-ific or even (invented word)-esque. Perhaps I’ll think of something by the time my off-kilter kiln is fired up enough. (27 May 09)
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The Guy Who Nailed Himself to the Bench(Dedicated to a stupid little band from Boston)
I’ve now realised why these are ‘monochrome stories’ – the print on the paper shows up black and white. But I have as yet to fathom the ‘mostly’.
Large nails in the previous story; large nails in this.
Indeed, I sense stigmata. This story is like being laid-back in a surreal fairground-ride (where you feel unduly safe), one which takes your breath away until it comes to rest with an anchor of thought that seems to make you think you’ve returned to some form of reality – albeit an entropy that most realities tend to be.
The tramps, the lodgers, the cars, the trains, the supermarkets, the indefinable diurnal objects are all ingredients of what we believe to be reality. This makes me think there is a distinction indeed between one reality and a different, but equally real, reality, both of which realities dream of the other. And literary surreality or weird fiction (which these Truth-Travisions (so far) tend to approximate but fundamentally differ from) are satellites in orbit around a balance of realities that is rollercoaster-oblique but which the author (I infer) thinks is static-straightforward.
“...the lack of light meant he wasn’t sure what he was looking at.” (27 May 09 - 3 hours later)
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Idle Hands...are the Devil’s tools? That’s why my hands are busy reviewing this book. Meanwhile, do many idle hands make light work even lighter?
This is a relatively short empathic monologue-fable which made me want to write this review on my office wall rather than on the computer screen. Are today’s youth all that bad? In the early sixties, one of my Grammar School teachers was rumoured – on his many sick days – to be watching the static Test Card consistently all day on his TV, waiting for the real programmes to start at 5 pm. How did they know? One or two of his truanting pupils spied him doing this through the crack in his parlour curtains. I don’t know why, but this ‘story’ reminded me of that long-forgotten (till now) memory. I wonder if he turned down the Test Card’s musak? The generation gap is between two realities. A gap now filled in with various real and virtual surfaces to paint words on. New culture-breaking words. And we can all become writers...whatever the scribbled nonsense.
“...eat from a can and drink yourself into insensibility in front of an out-of-focus TV set...” I wonder if it’s in monochrome, like the actual reality of the old days was? (28 May 09)
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Nothing
Unlike with most of the other stories in this book, I have been familiar with ‘Nothing’ for a few years. It is close to my heart. I can only say – upon re-reading it just now – it remains a genuine classic for me, a story that should win awards and be filmed or dramatised and anthologised in famous books. The only story that is genuinely successful in depicting dimmer-switch controlled identities – a most beautiful treatment of love and bereavement...
And, in my current frame of mind, this quite short story is tantamount to the noth or nth degree.
A declining intransitive (or intravistive) verb: I noth, you noth, he noths, he is nothing, I am nothing, I was nothing, I had been nothing, we would have been nothing, you nothed, we had nothed, I will noth ... not so much the opposite of ‘become’ but rather its necessary partner in a symbiosis of verbal power. The plurality of both. The singularity of neither.
“...but still he couldn’t be with them, as they filled every room and cranny and nook.” (28 May 09 - 2 hours later)
The Happy Misanthropist
“Time had no meaning; it was just a procession of dark and shade, dark and shade...”Molière, eat your heart out. And Suzy Quatro. I note from Google that this story was first published in print during 2006. But it is one crazy capricious flash fiction of mixed-up Proustian selves for today in 2009. Particularly in the UK!
"Looking from the windows I saw a group of men and women attacking a man in an expensive suit. Looking closely I recognised him as the local MP. That made me laugh, at least.” (28 May 09 - another 2 hours later)
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Dance of the Selves
More Proustian selves? Not exactly. But I shall pencil in a thesis for later this year that shall explore with some rigorous scholarship the angle of selves in this Book of Travisions. Meanwhile, this story is a substantial tale of one of those shops one sometimes finds and often can’t find again, although the protagonist here does find it again. Sometimes stationary, sometimes shifting stationery. This perfect gem of a story, I’m sure, will be found most delightful to all lovers of fantasy, weird, supernatural and horror fiction – and of old-fashioned school pencil-cases or geometry-sets. And to answer this question: ‘All the lonely people / Where do they all come from?’ one must first look to one’s own time-flow of selves as elves, because one will soon feel them attenuate ... to become someone else’s selves? Or worse. "It’s a rare adult indeed who retains any creativity after puberty. Personally I think the world would be a much better place if we were all creative. It’d give us something to look forward to for a start. Bring the magic back into people’s lives, that’s what I say. A bit of magic. Self expression! It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?” (29 May 09)
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The Terror and the Tortoiseshell (A Benji Spriteman Story)
A skittish ‘film noir’ where anthropomorphisals masquerade as detectives and detective’s molls. I’d have thought this perfect for the forthcoming ‘Cern Zoo’ book had it been submitted! The most dead-pan oblique ending that makes normal punch-lines judy-squeezers. A Travisty. [Wasn’t it Angus Wilson, not Arthur Machen, who wrote that Zoo story this story mentioned? Ah, ‘The Terror’ was by Machen. Hmmm.] (29 May 09 - 3 hours later)
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Hey Garland, I Dig Your Tweed Coat (Written in collaboration with D F Lewis)Well, I can’t exactly remember knuckledragging with Travis on this one and which finger is whose. It reads a crazy well. The pen is like the pencil in ‘Dance of the Selves’? And actual black-and-white words are anthropomorphised amid back doubles and rat runs of plot made mock-poetic. Either pretentiously silly or shamefacedly clever. Protagonist’s identity angst seemed very nemonymous to me. Don’t hold back, I say to the two writers. No half-measures. [Sandstorms? Didn’t Alex Garland write something about a beach?]
"But there was the book. Alan saw it standing before the door flapping its pages and rustling its cover like so many cardboard peacocks eager to get between the shelves." (29 May 09 - another hour later)
The Flooding of Mark Wiper
“‘All for nothing. All for nothing.’ I wanted to tell him how wrong he was.”
An inverse or mutant version of the story called ‘Nothing’ – reminding me at moments of the (retrospectively risky) shape-of-a-mountain-building scene from the film ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ ... and of certain aspects of Allen Ashley’s story ‘Life Under Water’. An ironically vicious circle where an artist’s creation can be its own destruction. “Misery breeding Misery”.
You try to build props in a theatrical attempt to underpin your existence. But when they collapse or turn against you, it’s worse than having built them in the first place. That often happens with any artist, especially so-called fiction writers who take these risks on behalf of the readers. The more make-believable these risks, the riskier they are.
“The walk brought back the loneliness of Christmas; the only difference being the colour of the paving slabs, a dull beige here instead of grey.” (30 May 09)
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Self Disgust
This title takes on a new force in the light of the treatment of Proustian selves in some of the previous stories. It is about a beach. It only takes up a page – but what power can be in just one page of prose. This was a vision (for me) of the nature of dying. Frightening enough simply being that.Yet, it was overlaid with a more positive aspect: one’s own selves dying one by one ... to provide an evolution of selves. (Cf. The Close Encounters reference above). There is this tension . There was this tension in the previous story. Nothing is black and white in Travis.
“Waves crawl over discoloured beige sand then retreat in bubbles of gritty foam.” (30 May 09 - 2 hours later)
The Other Exhibition
“The sky, a mixture of pumice grey, purple and orange, hummed at him like a refrigerator.”
Dear Reader of this Review,
Reading this delightful story is like entering an exhibition of my favourite painter: René Magritte ... in palimpsest!
It is simply wonderful. Over-dosing on my own senses for their own sake.
Yours nothingly, Oswald Masters.
“...nothing spoiled by signatures or explanations.” (31 May 09)
To be continued...