Saturday 28 December 2013

Old year/new year (The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman)







An excerpt:



The peep-show proprietor was blind and lame but he certainly knew his way about the town and led me unerringly to a small bar so deep inside the fisherman's quarter the streets no longer bothered to keep up appearances and relapsed thankfully into slumminess.  We sat down at a marble topped table and, without waiting for our order, a black brought us two glasses of the crude spirit that passes for brandy among the poor.  He left the bottle on the table.  The peep-show proprietor emptied his glass at a draught.
   'The purpose of my display,' he remarked, is to demonstrate the difference between saying and showing.  Signs speak.  Pictures show.'
   I filled up his glass again for him and he thanked me by leaning across the table and comprehensively stroking my face with his gnarled finger-tips, as if learning my dimensions before sculpting me.
   'Who sent you?' he asked abruptly.


ooo



"Is not this whole world an illusion? 
And yet it fools everybody."

                                                          Angela Carter




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