After a Lost Original

Gathered, Not Made: A Brief History of Appropriative Writing
Raphael Rubinstein

Homer

red desert

Once there was a girl on an island. She was bored with grownups, who scared her. She didn't like boys, all pretending to be grownups. So, she was always alone, among the cormorants, the seagulls... and wild rabbits. She had found a little isolated beach... where the sea was transparent... and the sand pink. She loved that spot. Nature's colors were so lovely, and there was no sound. She left... when the sun went down. One morning... a boat appeared. Not one of the usual boats, a real sailing ship! One of those that braved the seas and the storms of this world. And, who knows... of other worlds. From afar, it looked splendid. As it approached, it became mysterious. She saw no one aboard. It stopped a while... then veered... and sailed away... silently, just as it had come. She was used to people's strange ways... and was not surprised. But, no sooner back on shore...
there! All right for one mystery, but not two! Who was singing? The beach was deserted. But the voice was there... Now near. Now far. Then it seemed to come from the sea, an inlet among the rocks, many rocks that... she had never realized, looked like flesh. And the voice at that point was so sweet.

Who was singing?

Everybody. Everything.

the difference between the romantic and the fantastic

The uncanny describes a zone of indiscernibility between fact and fiction, reality and artifact. Its destabilising and upsetting potential relies on the very uncertainty of the correct appraisal of a stimulus as accidental (natural) or intentional (artificial).

[Jan Niklas Howe, 'Familiarity and no Pleasure. The Uncanny as an Aesthetic Emotion', Image and Narrative, 11.3, 2010, p. 58]

dead carpark / pegwell/ hovercraft

pegwell

lead