mountains peek from clouds. moments before they'd hid well; i can't help but think about all those times, flying through clouds, blindly
Line of Blindness [Tanka]
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Cockscomb Echo [Haiku]
cockscomb flowers stand like brains on a stick; nature echoes strangely
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DAILY PHOTO: Konark Carvings
Night Market [Free Verse]
in the chiaroscuro world of the night market, fruity colors blare in orange, green, & yellow between angular shadows the sun is down; the city is alive, and soon the night market will be lively
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Ancient Stupas [Haiku]
ancient stupas: worn, pocked, and chipped; age makes character
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BOOK REVIEW: Darryl Openworld by Rémi Guérin
Darryl Openworld by Oliver PeruMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Amazon.in Page
Out: July 26, 2022
This fantasy comic book is set in a multiverse where journalists are rock stars, and none more so than the protagonist, Darryl Openworld. It combines high and low fantasy (moving between created / fantastical worlds and our own world – the latter being called the gray world.) It’s Darryl’s quest to solve the mystery of a series of improbable events so that he can get his story, doing so with an entourage of living and dead, human and fairy, and a magician and a magic bird.
At the broad-brush level, the story is interesting and coherent. It’s got the makings of a fine quest adventure with a love triangle on the side. However, when it came to the story details, it was clunky. The biggest problem was a lack of emotional resonance tied to a lack of pacing, a lack of ebb and flow. I found myself on several occasions thinking, “Why is this person being so emotional right now?” I think the author was trying to establish every moment as fraught to the max by showing the characters as being emotional, and because no story can sustain every moment being at max stakes, it just feels like overacting (or that the characters have low emotional IQ, which doesn’t jibe with what we’re told about them – especially not our iron-willed protagonist.)
The art is beautiful and creates a distinct otherworldliness of the other worlds. The one criticism I would present is that many characters had a similar androgenous appearance (including some of the main characters) and it wasn’t always instantly clear who was who.
The book has some unique features going for it. It’s nice to imagine a world in which journalism hasn’t crashed and burned, and where it’s still a respectable profession. But in the end, it wasn’t my cup of tea. Your results might vary. While there were a few small story problems, the bulk of what felt off about it boiled down to feeling like they were trying to keep the emotion dialed to eleven, but that just compressed the emotional arc of the book.
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DAILY PHOTO: Ruins of Ratnagiri [Diamond Triangle]
Cyclone in a Cup [Free Verse]
coffee flecks swirl in a steaming cup cyclonic do-si-dos, swinging and folding, merging into clusters between the cyclones there are highspeed byways cutting across the surface a jitter of the table seems to stop the dance, but then it resumes entropy falls to eventually follow its imperative -- entropy rising: using order to turn all that energy into a lukewarm cup of joe this same fluid clockwork played out in primordial soup to begin the dance of life
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DAILY PHOTO: Sunset at Windmill Viewpoint, Southern Phuket
The Crossing [Free Verse]
A ship crosses the ocean, in the darkness: darkness, black & endless no moon, no stars, just clouds -- thick & low clouds that can't be seen The ship has lights, but those lights know an event horizon Lights sometime glint against the waves, those roiling & undulating waves, and the lights bounce off the ship's hull But no one can see them, because if anyone could see them, the seers would be seen-- unless theirs is a ghost ship, piloted by literal ghosts, or some other agent of observation Maybe there is fog -- not enveloping the ship, (such mist would be felt on the skin of those on deck) but, rather, a fog between where the ship is, and where is should be For it is surely off course, listlessly drifting, all hope arrayed against edges: edges of ice & edges of the world Not that the world is flat, but, perhaps, it's not fully sculpted: maybe nothing lies outside the range of the seen: outside the bounds of experience It sounds crazy, but all kinds of crazy form in a mind submerged in darkness
