A LAST EXIT FROM BROOKLYN?

Dearest Hubert,

Gil here.

I am tartly aware that it has been a long while since we have spoken or written but now that we are both dead perhaps the distances between us are lessened by our necrotic state. That black stone that you carried with you and that eventually carried you off came next to me. And yes, we did both invite that first unwelcome then hated entity into our lives but we were were we not ever prepared to live with the consequences of our own actions artistically as well as physically. Well do I recall those evenings at the Royal and the subsequent nights and early mornings in your '41 Dodge although for me the day I finally got rid of my own car and was on my way back to Brooklyn was my best.  

But I ramble. It's been so long. I did have something that I wanted to talk about with you. You remember those long talks we used to have? Of adverbs? Of the interchangeability of characters? Of Catholicism and Catholic writers? Do you remember my "eye disorder" that I feigned in homage to Joyce?  Good times – the start of better times. Perhaps you remember my obsession with O'Brien's blackly comic work? Enough of that – let's on to the matter germane. Allow me to explain.

When our own black stone brought me here across the Styx I was not quite prepared no I was prepared but I was not ready. The day before the crud in my lungs choked me to death I had had a notice from the good guys and gals at The Dalkey Archive that some guy out there in the grand wide shallows of interconnected nonsense that they call the internet has adopted me as a major character in a parody of my own parody. Some new writer was writing me – not some biography or hatchet job but a real novel – and I did so want to encourage him and peer into his creation. But the stone weighed heavy on my chest that day and the very next it crushed the last gasps of breath from me and all of my creation and brought me untimely on to your domain with things undone.

Since crossing into this shadey place I have boned up on this work of his. I am confused by it. It feels like some of those experimental works that the Brits were turning out in the 60s but doesn't so much as nod to the physical restraints that those brave explorers (Quinn, Johnson, Nye, Brooke-Rose, Heppenstall et al) were all mastered and bettered by – the internet has allowed him to lift some veils for the reader and crush some of the writer's traditional barriers. I confess I am not sure whether he is any good at all but you have to admire the size of his gonads for trying it. The boy's got the balls of an elephant. And he knows his onions but like I say I'm not sure …

OK, get on with it Gil! One of the things he's pointing up is the parallels between ourselves and Trellis and De Selby – now there's a turn up for the book – and me as Trellis! I like this because he plays with the greek word trellos and the character Trellis – the greek meaning mad or insane – sounds a lot like me. And then you become De Selby the mathematician (maybe he doesn't know as much about you as he should) and bizarre philosopher of Flann's inner darkness. It's a nice axis he has there.

He is inviting other writers to take part in the making or crafting of this text as he goes along. Also he has picked up on the bicycle molecule theory and is extending that outward into quantum physics (don't ask – just don't) and that, trust me, is a very neat idea. On top of all this he's taken my crap writer/ out of control character scenario and turned it loose on my own parodic novel. But the thing I really wanted to talk to you about – we've covered enough background now – is his exploration into the nature of that piercing relationship between fiction and reality and how they might be capable of reciprocal influence. We know that art can influence the physical world and clearly the "real" world leaks into art but what he is talking about is a more direct touching – think some of those sci-fi stories where the hero journeys back thru time to change the past and the ripple effects that that has on the then altered present produced from that now changed past. It's like an assignment for a creative writing class – "Your hero goes back in time and kills the young Hitler as he prepares to take the cloth – project the present that your hero returns to find.!"

You'll see why this concern me, how this concerns me, personally! If he is writing me what might he not do to me? And you!

For now I'll leave this with you – it has no doubt come as a shock to hear from me at all let alone that I am dead and have a quandry left back on the farther bank left unresolved. I shall be in touch soon.

Yours, ever (literally now)

Gil

PS – where can you get cigarettes here?

 

Tracey’s IP address

From: Tracey Root, CEO, IP trackers and IT forensics Ltd.

Dear Gilbert, it was really good to hear from you yesterday despite it being so long. And what an interesting problem you gave us. Luckily for you, and as I explained on the phone, we've recently taken on a new member of staff – an IT forensics expert – he fills out the team nicely and his IP skills are without peer. OK so he has done a lot of hacking on his own but that, as it turns out is very fortunate for all of us. Kevin is desperately short of social skills but I'm pleased to report that he's fixed your detective character's wagon good and all and you don't actually have to meet him even though he did say that Crete was somewhere he had never been (I ignored him and he soon shut up).

He said that the detective guy was quite smart and had been using an IP cloaking site to hide where he was coming form when he defaced your notebook site but that behind that he is or was using a static IP address connexion. Fortunately for you the IP anonymizer that he has been using was hosted on a Windows server and he, Kevin, was able to lay what he called a "sticky trap" there so that when he, DD, came back (a clever move of yours getting that pal of yours to provoke him) our Kev could unravel where he was (absolute and naked IP address)and from that access all of the transactions/message pairs that had passed between them. Well, to cut a long story, etc. we have blocked his I address and all of the range of IP addresses that his ISP uses from accessing any of you r sites. In short we've shut his routes into anything to do with you.

Kevin also worked out a pattern to the false IDs that he, DD, has been using and has pre-emptively blocked all IDs that conform to the model he was using. Kev reckons it'll take him a month to work out what has happened and if, and only, if he's a lot cleverer than he has so far demonstrated It'll take him another two to work out how to get around the barriers that Kev has erected. RESULT!

You can post whatever you like on any of the sites you listed for us with impunity but that the new notebook location (http://trellis.wordpress.com/) is particularly well guarded and commenting is locked off over there. Kev says if you have anything particularly sensitive then that's the place to put it. I'd trust Kevin's advice if I were you Gil. He knows his internet onions does Kev – he's an asset.

I hope that this is all in order and satisfies your concerns. No charge, of course, you're family darling and we don't take money from family.

Give our love to Abby

love and kisses

Trace

PS we'll be flying in on the 19th – look forward to our times with you.
PPS "we" does not include Kevin (I do not think he is allowed a passport anymore – i.e. since his last stretch)
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Rewritten – Being again?

MEH.

Moses the merchant becomes Moses the lecturer. Moves from 13 Saint Kevin's St Dublin to a country house in western Massachusetts. A man of business become a man of unsent letters.

ER.

Edward a lord of the manor on the North York Moors becomes a wealthy carefree traveller in Spanish Town, Jamaica, offered £30,000 to marry. He does of course, who wouldn't. More fool him.

RB.

Poor old long suffering Rhett, professional black sheep of Charleston and latterly Atlanta is revived but briefly to find he has a child born in Ireland to a woman he has not knowingly had sex with for years and whom he had left with a frankly brilliant exit line. But the frankly was added for the film version.

GENERAL

Of course prequels and sequels are ten a penny (or rather very much more than that ) in cinema and RB and ER are prequeled – but by different writers – JJ's MEH is retasked completely by SB. Who got the biggest shock? Did MEH (did SB borrow that added middle initial from Michael E. Geraghty) know of Freud? (check Wikipedia) – but maybe – Jewish after all – did MEH ever get the final instalment of the bill (25 shillings and 6 pence). Did SB copy SB? No no no.

OMNIUM! OMNIUM!

OMNIUM? OMNIUM? OMNIUM? OMNIUM? OMNIUM? OMNIUM? OMNIUM? OMNIUM? OMNIUM? OMNIUM? OMNIUM? OMNIUM? OMNIUM? OMNIUM? OMNIUM? OMNIUM? OMNIUM? OMNIUM?

O M N I U M – code? Acronym? Quando? Quanto?

The Book of Dave

Radio4 -  book show – Chancey Other – what about DR – new book – The Book of Dave – OMG – is this related? is this the Dave? a religious text of the future – a cab driver – poor DR – lost his name (to RC) – CO stole his title – DR's factory series stolen by BBC itself – the hero has no name! Is DR involved or is it CO  or is this just paranoia?

Who is Sylvia? What is she?

What is the Greek connexion? Isn't Lazarou a Greek genitive? Where does he live? It's always dark when I'm there and the shutters are closed – shutters? – why shutters? Suggests intense sunshine – or snow? Where is this man's partner? OK it IS nightime but … (Does nightime have two Ts?). He often mentions Greek things when he's talking online with that insomniac vampire in San Francisco. MM is it – yes MM – queer as a four dollar bill indeed – but he does have a full set OED so no fool anyway. But who is the guy in Brighton? Doeshe matter or is he just "local colour"?
How did he get my typewriter? Why? Does he know about Flann's theory? Was it green when I had it? This notebook/place is all questions and precious few answers. How can this be the basis for a new work? What is his interest in or connexion with N.A. Native Americans? Using Tecumseh as his avatar. And an online friend who's Native American – a Lakota. His online life seems to be some kind of lifeline as well as his key research resource.

Did I hear dogs barking? How to get into those Chinese boxes – I must know what he has in mind for his plot. Does he sense me there? Significance of Dave – who is he and why is he very lucky? Dick says he is a black and white guy but how to find out – is it relevant? Has he published? – check!

Why nothing from the Jill woman? Did she get the email? And Finn has been quiet – why? Notebook? Question book more like.

The X file

Hi Finn old pal, it's been very quiet at your end and I suspect that your annual report has something to do with it. In any case I have been fairly quiet too because of familial commitments here. I have not been back to the lair of the Laz since last we spoke – I suspect that he may have noticed my last nocturnal incursion and battened the hatches down fairly firmly (I believe that certain port blockers and creative firewalls are becoming available these days for creatives but doubt he knows of them) . He cannot keep me out for long though. I have my ways in wedged open so to speak.

In fact I cannot dally too long over this email but I realised that you must be wondering how I got Laz to type an X. I shall satisfy your unvoiced curiosity forthwith:

when I turned up in his study he was writing a scene that featured a dialogue twixt my old creation DD and myself as the author of the Stew (his conceit is a deeply nested one). I observed the progress of the conversations and managed to insert into most of my "replies" to DD a mention of my cold sore (the one I have in physical life). I figured that if I kept talking about it – pointing to it – and asking for advice about it then at some time – and trust me it didn't take long – either DD himself or the Laz would have to mention either herpes simplex or Zovirax to shut me up and lo and behold they both fell for it – Laz recommending through DD Zovirax while the leaden DD went into some pseudo medical spiel about herpes simplex and its recurring habit. 

So you see, I have learnt how to manipulate the other, the fictive world that I inhabit, to my own advantage. Perhaps it is a minor victory but not, I suspect, a phyrric one. Watch these spaces for further developments. I hope to begin catch-up tomorrow.

a further explanation is forthcoming

Dear friend, dear Finn (I hope that I might now call you a friend) I was so pleased to have recognised your encoded missive and finally to have had feedback that the fact that I had not – obviously – made myself clear troubled me only a little. I have troubled myself more about it since then however. It is a matter of concern to me. I also now realise that some of my references may be foreign to you – foreign in its original unvarnished sense. I do not know whether you have read, in translation or in the original, any of the author or works from which I drew my original hypothesis. If not then please forgive for burdening you with such inapposite and irrelevant material. I seldom recall to myself when thinking or talking to you that your native tongue is not, of course, my own. In fact I am more aware of lingual divergence when thinking or talking to friends from the US than I am with you.

Having said all that I shall now attempt to explain myself properly.

In English we have a saying that "life imitates art" (source OFO'FWW – genius and sodomite – 1854-1900). This is a shortened form of the original ("Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life") but the kernel of meaning is right. And it is true you know. Only it is not an imitation. It is a seepage, no not a seepage, an active intervention in fact. It is what Flann O'Brien knew and hinted at in "At Swim Two Birds" and that he elaborated in more sinister fashion in the "Third Policeman" – or was it De Selby who knew it and he who used Flann as his mouthpiece? No matter for now. Great writers are ultimately solipsists creating the universes that they inhabit by their will and intellect. Not as lesser mortals suspect in some fictive fashion but in the physical world. Their creative urge pushes out beyond the page and into the outside world. Flann, or De Selby, sensed that this was so and even had some inkling of how it might work. But in those days quantum mechanics was young and barely comprehended – it should therefore come as no surprise that their hypothesis was pitched at the molecular level. In "The Third Policeman" it is explained how constant contact between the saddle of the bicycle and the policeman has irreversibly exchanged molecules of seat and policeman so that the policeman is now part bicycle and the bicycle part policeman. We know now that this is nonsensical: this interchange takes place at the quantum level – it is quarks and leptons that swap sides in their charmed and strange dance of spin and flavour. And if this is true for weak forces like bicycles and policemen how could it be denied that for strong forces like creativity and life itself it must also be true. This then is why life imitates (or appears to imitate) art. Art is a strong force and its quantum components cannot possibly be contained indefinitely. Life, at bottom is made – at least partly – by art. But at what cost we wonder? And what becomes of the quarks of life that end up in the work of art? You see my problem immediately – if this Laz character is good (and trust me he is) then his creation of me is in some way pushing its way into me and my life (hence the youthful spring in my step on the mornings after his literary excursions include me) then in what way will its impact be permanent? What would happen if he decided to kill me off? And finally, what part of my life of me is being left over there in his fictive me – can I do without it?

There is one more thing that I want to discuss with you if you will indulge me: last night I went to his study while he was writing me (I have explained how that works somewhere haven't I?) in order specifically to inspect his typewriter. I had been entranced by this device since first I saw it on the huge partners desk beside the four shoe boxes. It was immediately both familiar and magical. For days I have wondered about it – aloud and in secret musings. It was only yesterday that it hit me – it is my old typewriter – the one I wrote my earliest works on: when publisher's advances would not stretch to computers. I bought it when at college from a small pawnshop in Trellis Street around the corner from my then digs (although I cannot for the life of me recall having ever parted myself from it) and it was a trusty friend all through the drafts and fair copies of those faltering first works. It seemed to me sometimes in those dark dry blocked days that it even helped me out sometimes; drawing my fingers pecking towards particular clusters of letters that would then assemble themselves into a well turned phrase. As now, I had no real muse in the very concrete supernatural way that Johnson did, and my own little conceit was that this typewriter had once been owned by a great writer and had learnt its own writing skills that it could teach me. Would teach if I would only learn from it. The countless hours I spent at that machine!

Anyway, to get back to last night. I went to his study to check. My own typewriter had a unique defect, as I am told do all typewriters. The lower case X (x) had not been cast correctly and the ink from the ribbon would always smudge around the cruciform leaving a tell-tale thickening in the middle of the letter-form. I had to check for myself whether his typewriter had the same malformation (another time I shall tell you how I managed to make sure that he would have to type an x); whether his typewriter was my typewriter. It is.

Feeling emboldened by my discovery I dared more last night than ever before. When the Laz left the room to make coffee I peeked into one of the shoe boxes and bizarrely I discovered there a potted history of that very typewriter. Supported by a private investigator's invoice and various supporting documentation it proves he has traced the full history of my typewriter!

Finn my friend, for now I really think of you as a friend, I have unburdened enough for one day, these nocturnal wanderings tire me – I shall conclude this epistle tomorrow but rather than wait I shall send this first part winging its way to you and hope against hope that it is sufficiently coherent to warrant your attention.

For now I remain
your exhausted friend

GilbertS
(to be continued … )

why shoe box?

why did I call this thing another shoe box? There must be some significance but what? the shoe boxes on Laz's desk? I know I know them but from where? Are they really shoeboxes or are they spoting those looks as a disguise? Like the boxes I keep my notes in for a novel. I know them – I know I know them but from where? Flann? and that typewriter – I know that too. Think think. Is this the 5th shoebox? Is 5 a prime? is that important? why is the typewriter green and did it really glow or did I imagine it? must get back to Finn – not molecular interchange but quantum – bicycle why do I keep thinking of a bicycle? are these things connected? could be. what is in those shoe boxes? why did I shudder when Andreas said "You're a very licky man Dave" – didn't Abby use that exact phrase a day or so back – check – yes she did Am I getting overly suspicious? Probably. Sleep. Get some sleep – tomorrow is another day and tonigh who knows – he may be writing again … 

notes for reply to Finn

not purely textual – concrete – physical

bicycle in 3rd policeman – molecular interchange (but at quantum level) – Flann's theory
fabric – warp and woof – text reality versus physical reality

De Selby – Trellis- trellos -
who is this  Jaakko Hintikka?

Echoes of Eco – fictional woods – realm of the nose? -

can Barthes help us here?  

Finn again

Gilbert, I still haven't figured out your theory, or if it was yours
at all, but of some other entity at some level wanting be to be
written into the fabric. I intended to give your thoughts some time
today, but I'm still laying out a certain annual report.

I think Jaakko Hintikka has thumbed your records. He has said that in
describing a possible world we are free to choose the universe of
discourse it is designed to apply to. Thus possible worlds are always
so called 'small worlds,’ One Umberto was weaving the same plot: "The
same holds for fictional worlds: in order to lead its readers to
conceive of a possible fictional world, a text must invite them to a
relatively easy 'cosmological” task'."

Other than this I know not by now. I must protect my own autonomy.

Finn
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