Hold my hand as if you love me, stupid.
So where is that pride you have too much of ?
No stars lose their shine despite what you did
and flowers still bloom for fools out of love.
Catherine Eisner
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| Photo credit : Ievgen Chabanov |
Tuesday, 9 December 2025
Saturday, 15 November 2025
Skin Job. A Self-Narrative Assignment.
Just last week I was astonished to learn a fiction of mine from my ‘Fugitive Pieces’ file had surfaced at my publishers (Salt).
Its title? Skin Job. A Self-Narrative Assignment.
https://www.saltpublishing.com/blogs/house-magazine/skin-job
Yet I was all the more astonished when I opened the page to note a name familiar to me from my distant past. The publishers’ announcement states: ‘Erica Wagner joins the Salt list → ’
https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/wash-9781784634018
Yes. Curiously, I look back and find my fiction, The Cheated Eye, alongside Erica’s (Pyramid) in The Catch collection of prize-winning Asham Award stories. The competition, the very first when launched in 1996, attracted over six hundred entries of which the judges selected thirteen which were published together with commissioned stories by Kate Atkinson, Rachel Cusk, Louise Doughty, Candia McWilliam and Deborah Moggach.
See here the story behind the Asham Literary Endowment Trust in memory of Virginia Woolf:
https://www.thresholdsarchive.org.uk/the-story-behind-the-asham-trust/
•
Catherine Eisner believes
passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary
craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and
psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and
ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines
Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from
psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive
recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry,
rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and
the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
Wednesday, 5 November 2025
FOUND! Wisdom Spun in Gossamer: Spiderivable Radials
My young nephew, Ernst Bienek, is torn between his passion for arachnids and his fanatical devotion to mountain biking, enthusiasms that no doubt explain his extraordinary new theory whose working title is Spiderivable Radials for optimised tensegrity of structures. I understand he is still perfecting the proofs of his discoveries yet he’s also keen to invite other theoreticians to share their thoughts on his propositions.
So here you are first to read of his arachnoid derivations.
Or perhaps you already know the premise of his findings?
Ernst sketches it out like this . . .
In sum, the Spider’s Web and, essentially, its Radial Angles yield an Optimal Correlation of
Number, Structural Economy and Tensile Strength
Significant Median Angle of Cobweb Radials is ≈12.7°
a division, which, within 360°, equals 28 Radials.
Consider then the Spokes of a Mountain Bike Wheel (Optimum Lightweight/Strength/Spokes Correlation)
Number of Spokes = Median between 24 and 32 = 28
The Significant Number is 28 radials
Spider and Man are in perfect accord ?
 |
The dome of the Pantheon, Roman 2nd Century Temple, has 28 Radials. Some two thousand years after it was built, the Pantheon is still the world’s largest unreinforced dome. Photo credit: Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji Wikimedia Commons |
Can we then assume the ‘lacing’ of a cobweb and the lacing of a mountainbike’s wheel spokes have a preordained correlation identified some two thousand years ago, when considerations of strength and economy of means were formulated for the dome of the Pantheon — the temple dedicated to ‘All the Gods’ — now one of the best-preserved of all Ancient Roman buildings?
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29 Radials (near mean-optimum) Photo credit: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos |
 |
|
Ernst asks: What did the Ancients know? What does the spider know? |
You are reading it here first.
A recent study of cobwebs (2021)* shows that extracted geometrical numeric values can elucidate how spider web utilisation has the potential to guide development of optimised fibre oriented reinforced composite structures for constructing such figurations as shell structures, pressure vessels and fuselage cones for the aviation industry. The statistical results depict the opening angle utilisation by the spider for web construction, and the cumulative mean of all collected samples shows that the favourable angle of the spider for orientation in web construction is ≈12.7°.
* Journal of Composite Science
Tuesday, 23 September 2025
Found! Poésie trouvée (Part 6).
I have touched upon, in earlier posts, the peculiar jolt one is dealt when a specimen of poésie trouvée is stumbled upon.
So it was all the more surprising to discover such a specimen lurking in my own prose.
Simply, it’s a paragraph from my novel concerning the fortunes of Klara and narrator Éveline who – against all expectations – find themselves falling very much in love.
As to rhyme, it’s an unconscious pairing one might say.
A snatch of dialogue. Klara speaks first . . .
 |
Two Graces. Detail from Antonio Canova’s Neoclassical sculpture (1814), commissioned for Empress Josephine and now exhibited in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. (Source Wikimedia.) |
‘We agreed. Agreed. For both of us.’
Klara drew close to me.
‘We are not looking for what we do not want. Because . . .’
‘Because we have found what we . . .’
‘Need,’ she pronounced throatily.
‘Need.’
For more examples of poésie trouvée see my earlier posts . . .
That Cry in the Night
Immured Mustard Field
The Unsought Text
A Touch of Fever
Monday, 1 September 2025
A Reissue from the Harcourt Archives! Adhoc-ism: The Art of the Impromptu.
Reissued by Éditions Studio Harcourt in a facsimile of the now unprocurable first edition, Verity Askew’s popular standard work (1948) – Adhoc-ism: The Art of the Impromptu – remains an informed, entirely novel and exhaustive treatise on a neglected interwar cultural subcurrent, including new structures and patternings such as ‘Cut-ups’, Découpage, Papierausschnitte, Merz, ‘Flourishes’, Pataphysical Illusions, Conjurings and Happenings with an Appendix devoted to ‘past and present’ (interwar and circa mid-1940s) exemplars of this Dadaistic style. An edition to be cherished; to be had at all quality booksellers.
First edition. Original trompe l’oeil dustjacket (1948).
Tuesday, 26 August 2025
‘Hostage in Peking’ Sonnet circa 1968 ‘A Vacuum of Hell’
In July 1967, journalist Anthony Grey was imprisoned by the Chinese People’s government for 27 months of solitary confinement endured in the basement of his house whose exterior was daubed with anti-imperialist taunts by the Red Guard.
It was his ‘vacuum of hell’, a torment magnified when he was forbidden possession of his books . . . until he discovered an instruction leaflet in his bathroom cabinet attached by ‘an elastic band round a bottle of T.C.P. [trichlorophenylmethyliodosalicyl] liquid antiseptic . . . I eagerly absorbed the literary elegance of such phrases as: “Influenza, as a precautionary measure during epidemics, use night and morning as for colds.” And “Mouthwash: use daily diluted with about five parts water after meals.” And “Chilblains, aching feet, athletes foot: freely apply undiluted.” ’
Had this discovery been for Grey a sort of Damascene moment, one speculates, an encounter with his lost Rosetta Stone preserved in the bathroom cabinet, so long deprived of such emollient wording in his own cherished tongue, the language of Shakespeare?
And, therefore, at such a moment in his ‘Forsaken Place’*, did he subconsciously attempt to deconstruct the paucity of those T.C.P. instructions – savouring each phrase in iambic pentameter – to contrive a testament to his hard wrought defiance in our time-honoured Shakespearean Measure?
Did he pummel some sort of sense into those inoffensive words? I rather suspect he did.
January’s a danger month, Mother,
particularly when its germ toxins
take hold, with forty-four hurts deep in the
membranes of strict preventative routines
take hold, with forty-four hurts deep in the
membranes of strict preventative routines
night and morning, so no foreign body
might escape into the system or leave
a feverishness to see multiply
the severe dampness of one’s handkerchief.
So extra help is needed that counteracts
threats of dirt-embedded skin necrosis
or incubated unwanted side effects.
Let Nature ease discomfort . . . if you start this
extra internal action early enough
you’ll have a real chance of throwing it off.
*For further reflections on ‘Lazarine Literature’ and ‘The Forsaken Place’ see:
Friday, 1 August 2025
A Child’s Definition of Humanity.
You’re IT. Pass it on.
it, it, pronoun, the neuter of he, him, (and formerly his), applied to a thing without life, a lower animal, a young child . . . in children’s games, the player chosen to oppose all others; (colloquially) the ne plus ultra; that which answers exactly to what one is looking for; an indefinable crowning quality by which one carries it off – personal magnetism . . .
•
See also
Deposition of a Rebel from the Cross
•
Catherine Eisner believes
passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary
craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and
psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and
ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines
Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from
psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive
recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry,
rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and
the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
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