the new emotional blackmailer's handbook

Friday, April 22, 2011

setting the scene ... the anthony powell "method"

The noise of the cannonade round about was deepening. An odour like smouldering rubber imposed a rank, unsavoury surface smell on lesser exhalations of soot and smoke. Towards the far side of the town --- the direction of the harbour --- thin greenish rays of searchlight beam rapidly described wide intersecting arcs backwards and forwards against the eastern horizon, their range ever reducing, ever extending, as they sliced purposefully across each other’s tracks. Then, all at once, these several zigzagging angles of light would form an apex on the same patch of sky, creating a small elliptical compartment through which, once in a way, rapidly darted a tiny object, moving like an angry insect confined in a bottle. As if reacting in deliberately regulated unison to the searchlights’ methodical fluctuations, shifting masses of cloudbank alternatively glowed and faded, constantly redesigning by that means half-a-dozen intricately pastelled compositions of black and lilac, grey and saffron, pink and gold. Out of this resplendent firmament --- which transcendentally speaking, seemed to threaten imminent revelation from on high --- slowly descended, like Japanese lanterns at a fête, a score or more of the flares released by the raiding planes. Clustered together in twos and threes, they drifted at first aimlessly in the breeze, after a time scarcely losing height, only swaying a little this way and that, metamorphosed in to all but stationary lamps, apparently suspended by immensely elongated wires attached to an invisible ceiling. Suddenly, as if at a pre-arranged signal for the climax of the spectacle --- a set-piece at midnight --- high swirling clouds of inky smoke rose from below to meet these flickering airborne torches. At ground level, too, irregular knots of flame began to blaze away like a nest of nocturnal forges in the Black Country. All the world was dipped in a livid, unearthly refulgence, theatrical yet sinister, a light neither of night nor day, the penumbra of Pluto’s frontiers. The reek of scorched rubber grew more than ever sickly. Bithel fidgeted with the belt of his mackintosh.

“There’s been a spot of bother about a cheque,” he said.

to be read slowly, but not too slowly ...

... although i had to skim a half a page of conversation because the old fox had reported it in f-f-f-french !

trumble dips a toe into the molten lake of colour

http://angustrumble.blogspot.com/2011/04/some-thoughts-about-yellow.html

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

mystery object explained

a good friend was recently held motionless in this "tailor-made" cage for some desperate "last-ditch" radiotherapy sessions

as she's now absorbed the maximum dosage, so the cage has become redundant

and because she's twiddling her thumbs at home a hundred miles away, so i'm showing a strictly limited amount of sympathy by taking her cage out on my rounds