Morsels

or, … hmm, no, I think morsels sums it up

Morsels on a beach, according to Substack’s own image generator. They’re certainly … something.

It’s the weekend as I’m writing this. I'm nestled in the corner comfort of my favourite local café, nursing the perfect dose of caffeine. It’s lovely here, and though the weather isn’t so lovely, the signs of autumn sure are pretty.

Autumn in inner Melbourne. Pic by me.

But-anyway |

I wanted to do something different this week. The last two posts—one dream; one diary entry from Renn, he of Brae’s meteorite—might be the kind of reads your inbox awaits, or they might not. (I hope they are, but … I understand. We can still have this relationship, can’t we?) So to change things up, I’m going to comment on a few short things—some morsels.

I’m calling this post Morsels, because, err, that’s the term I just used to describe what this post is about …

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A sliver of housekeeping

I did a little organising. I made a Table of Contents for Brae’s meteorite, to help the newer reader—or aid any previous reader—wanting to get their bearings.

It even has a little logo. Look how circular it is!

I will include a map there too, at some point soon. I love maps.

I also made and pinned a Welcome post for any new readers that find themselves on my homepage. I know what it can feel like arriving fresh at someone else’s Substack. You need a compass upon arrival sometimes—or, at least I do. So, this is that:

I'm new here … Where do I start?!

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A cyclopean favour, if I may

A what?

Last week, I posted the latest entry to my novella, Brae’s meteorite¹. I have a generous number of subscribers now and I’m deeply grateful for each and every one of you; this small thing and place of writing has grown more in a couple of months than I could have ever expected (again, thank you!), but I wanted to ask a favour. If you have read that entry, or any entry, or any post, and the post intrigued or interested you, then it would mean oh-so-much to me if you could hit the Like button, if you haven’t already.

This isn’t a request for an ego boost, but more for me to better gauge, well, engagement and content. To help me shape things. Of course, if you don’t like the post, you don’t have to do anything.

To be extra special, you can even leave a comment. Like maps, I love comments; hearing thoughts or critiques or insights are fuel to my inner furnace. I’m writing these stories for you, the reader, as much as I am for me, the writer. This realm still feels experimental, but I love the notion of it being a shared journey².

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A thing I read that made me think

A favourite writer of mine is Terry Freedman, who writes

Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life

³. Last week, Terry posted a short commentary and nano-review of Nabokov's Lolita:

Every so often I experiment with writing six word reviews: a form of nano (ultra short) writing borrowed from the genre of flash fiction. To be honest, I don’t think you can do anything justice in six words, so I’ve added a commentary to expand on my thoughts.

My review:

Beautiful writing, shame about the content.

It’s a great post⁴, expanding upon that short review, stimulating some excellent comments, getting readers over at Terry's page considering their opinion—as well as swaying a few (myself included) to go read the book.

Within all that, I happened to mention that late last year I tried to read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Sadly, I only made it half way through the book. It's very rare for me to relegate a book to the Did Not Finish pile, but that's where it's currently sat.

Terry suggested I share my own nano-review in my own post, so I'm doing just that, right here:

/ Did not finish; could not parse /

A selection of the different book covers for Gravity’s Rainbow, as featured in Goodreads. I have the middle one, which I’d argue is clearly the best cover.

To expand: It’s a deep, intricate book, but it’s a difficult read. Well, for me it is. Though the prose is layered, incredible, skilful, I found I needed to spend around five minutes per page just to work out what was going on, flipping back and forth. It’s a huge book. It became time consuming to make meagre headway, and that’s when there are still all the books left to read.

To give you a flavour, here’s a single sentence:

Up in the city, the arc-lamps crackle, furious, in smothered blaze up the centerlines of the street, too ice-colored for candles, too chill-dropleted for holocaust … the tall red busses sway, all the headlamps by regulation newly unmasked now parry, cross, traverse and blind, torn great fistfuls of wetness blow by, desolate as the beaches beneath the nacre fog, whose barbed wire that never knew the inward sting of current, that only lay passive, oxidizing in the night, now weaves like underwater grass, looped, bitter cold, sharp as the scorpion, all the printless sand miles past cruisers abandoned in the last summers of peacetime that once holidayed the old world away, wine and olive-grove and pipe-smoking evenings away the other side of the war, stripped now to rust axles and brackets and smelling inside of the same brine as this beach you cannot really walk, because of the war.

Yes. A. Single. Sentence.

Let me conclude my experience in the third person, via in no way an attempt at an approximation of the style of Pynchon:

Sometimes, when reading, when blurred lines of text suffused eyes scouring page on page as fingers moved and took and turned limp edges, the coarse worn texture of memories set by another down long lines inked with hammer-stroke, the letters scarred from wearied motion, each one a cold descent to words not yet pressed, he sought out notes alit from previous encounters, hours and hours of land with fog diminished by knowledge’s searchlight, finding only that land inhospitable, uninhabitable, a place he could not linger.

Which is nonsense to say: there are online guides (guides!) on reading and approaching the book. That’s too much studying for me right now. I will return to it some day, I hope.

(Terry, how about one of your Experiments in style posts in the style of a specific author? Perhaps you already did that?)

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A dreamorsel

Yes, that’s a thing. Dreamorsels are the notes I keep every morning about my night-time visits to otherworlds and terrors⁵. Some get turned into stories, but most remain as dreamorsels. Here's the rather benign one from this morning, penned before that yawning ball of fusion crested the horizon:

…Walking with Josephine along a beach. Removed a bottle of talcum powder and proceeded to coat my legs with far too much talc. Covered in it. White as ash. Fine powder leaving trails on the sand; clouded footsteps. Why would I talc my legs? They weren’t even wet. Then (but of course!) we descended into a pool hall in Germany, searching for a table. Jam-packed with people. Still paranoid about leaving talc everywhere. Lost Jo—somewhere in the clothing racks.

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In closing

I’m going to leave you with the sublime opening lines of Human Island by Claudia Befu, published last week. It’s a beautiful, thoughtful piece. I hope you take a moment to read it in full.

The jade-green kelp forest floats in the crystal-clear water. Lying on her back, Nova allows the swift currents to guide her through the corridors lined by algae stems, stretching their slender arms toward the sunlight. When she closes her eyes, the chlorophyll green light sips through her eyelids, coloring her thoughts, and she floats like this for a while, wrapped in the ocean’s waves, enjoying the silence.

So those were some morsels of varying sizes. Hopefully they have been thoroughly consumed, no trace of them left. Until more grow back, that is. (But it’s dangerous to get too close to the morsel tree. Far better to let those fruits fall and be washed up on the shoreline, to be lapped at by salt waves, to be ripened by time.)

A morsel tree (Buccellam fictitium). Sketch by Midjourney.

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What about you, dear reader? Do you have a morsel to share? Are you a fan of morsels? Do you also keep a dreamorsel diary? Have you read Lolita, or Gravity’s Rainbow, or some other such book that you’d love to discuss?

Scatter some comment-seeds, such that together we can watch them grow into future morsel trees.

1. Over here.

2. I’m sure Renn would, too, were he real, and here, and something other than the storyteller in my mind.

3. Terry, I suspect this post has been inspired by your Start the Week posts.

4. Right here.

5. Sometimes terroirs. Though never terriers. I’m more of a cat person.