“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning
we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot,
like an individual novel, a book for each person.
—ANAÏS NIN”
Liam Spencer Entertainment Investing • Los Angeles and Bergen •
Liam Spencer Entertainment Investing • Los Angeles and Bergen •
has been described as “a nouveau romanticist,” “a sort of metaphysicist,” “wedded to the arts and constantly reading the subtle poetry beneath the surface of things.” Highly imaginative and intensely curious as a child, Liam has had a lifelong preoccupation with mapping the dimensions of existence, whether those extents lie within or without, in the light or in the shadows, always standing at the periphery of reality and seeing not limits but horizons. His earliest days were spent playing make-believe in and around Desilu’s Culver City studios and storied Forty Acres backlot and it formed in him an early notion that the world is whatever you make of it.
Music has always been a vital force in Liam Spencer’s life and he continues to be a generous supporter of young artists and a backer of music-related projects in the U.S. and abroad. “But when,” he says, “I passed the half-century mark and caught sight of my youth with its unrealized dreams fading in the rear-view mirror, an old literary ambition stirred within me….I resolved to do my woolgathering against a fairy-tale backdrop, to build my castles in the air above an ancient and awe-inspiring landscape where the fingerprints of God haven’t been smudged out by Man.” Liam secured a charming little house in Bergen, Norway, where he is currently conjuring a spellbinding novel inspired by the weird physics of the quantum world. A dark and unnerving excursion into the hedge maze of one man’s romantic disillusionment, The Pretty Follies is a genre-defying work that vividly illustrates the cruel dichotomy between love’s inescapable gravity and the incurable affliction of time.
© 1987, 2020 by Liam Spencer
(an awesome playlist)
(a radiant northern light)
(an astonishing anomaly)
ONCE UPON A TIME, back when happily ever after was still a plausible ending, I wrote a dystopian fairy tale titled “Where the Silly, Sham Blue of the Sky Turns Black.” In it, I endeavored to express, albeit vicariously, how much I loved my then newly former fiancée and to convey by literary proxy what her love had meant to me. I was twenty-one, and it was my first attempt at writing fiction. My hope, naïve though it may have been, was to publish the story and win back her affection. I was renting a beachfront apartment near Pacific Park in Santa Monica at the time and when news reached me that my ex had hastily married the guy for whom she abruptly dumped me I impulsively grabbed the typewritten manuscript and tossed it into an oceanside fire pit in dramatic fashion. All that remains of that story today are the two sentences you see above. Plucked from the ash heap of memory, they are now the opening lines of my novel-in-progress The Pretty Follies.
Taking a cue from Sylvia Plath, who said writing was “a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience,” I’ve supplemented certain parts of the novel with fictionalized recreations of my own vaguely remembered romantic youth, clicking away at the keyboard late at night in cathartic scotch fueled stream of consciousness fugues set to shoegaze music. Many famous novelists have woven their own experiences into the fabric of a fictional plot, based characters on real people. Would Melville have penned Moby Dick if he had never gone on a whaling voyage? Would Hemingway have written For Whom the Bell Tolls or A Farewell to Arms if he had never seen war? It’s doubtless there would be a Great Gatsby without Scott having fallen madly, irrationally in love with Ginevra King. Hell, Kerouac’s in the FICTION section and all he did was change the names. Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish: Aristotle.
My protagonist is fifty-year-old writer and jaded romantic Addison Halifax. Although “Addie” is not a direct reflection of the person who authored him, he may be a reflection of a reflection, like when you stand between two opposing mirrors and see your image echoed to infinity. At once a coming-of-age story and a coming-of-middle-age story, The Pretty Follies illustrates the cruel dichotomy between love’s inescapable gravity and the incurable affliction of time. It reads like a collection of forlorn love letters discovered in a chest of drawers inside a creepy old abandoned house, a house where it is said something sad and tragic once occurred. The novel chronicles the long-term psychological effects of repressed formative trauma. It also delves into the spooky subatomic strangeness of quantum mechanics. On more than one occasion I thought I caught a glimpse of the unsettling specter of Schrödinger’s cat prowling in the candlelit shadows of my living room.
In remembrance of…
BARBARA NEWHALL FOLLETT, a literary prodigy who, in 1927, published her first novel, The House Without Windows, at the age of twelve. Windows is a sort of feminist fable, the tale of an extraordinary young girl who is dissatisfied with mundane pedestrian reality so she runs away from the domestic constraints of civilization and into an idyllic, fantastical communion with the wild, natural world. The last line reads, She would be invisible for ever to all mortals, save those few who have minds to believe, eyes to see. Barbara walked away from her home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on December 7, 1939, and was never seen or heard from again.
―
SHAKESPEARE’s The Merchant of Venice
My earliest romantic memory dates to the first grade. The class had gathered on the loop pile carpeting to watch The Red Balloon on a spring roller projection screen that had been pulled down like a window blind in front of the chalkboard.
DEUS ET NATURA NO FACIUNT FRUSTA
DEUS ET NATURA NO FACIUNT FRUSTA
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
H. P. LOVECRAFT, “The Call of Cthulhu”
I am a follower of nothing and no one. I am not defined by any political or ideological label and I don’t fit the common male stereotype. I believe quantum physics has revealed evidence of an underlying intelligent design to the universe; however, truth does not require belief, nor do facts rely on faith. Don’t give credence to religious superstition just because you’re not schooled in science. A physicist can tell you a hell of a lot more about the nature of reality than a preacher can. I will not waste my time/breath on those who trade knowledge and perspicacity for nescience and mythos, nor will I contend with intellectually challenged conspiracy theorists who assert insipid adolescent notions due to a lack of education/acumen. I am easily bored by people on social media who never express a unique opinion or engage in any substantive dialogue but instead post greeting card wisdom and inane religious affirmations. I can't abide those who have an irrational fear of spontaneity, no sense of romance or adventure; people who lack passion, who miss the moment, whose lives are so unoriginal they’re basically a cliché. An unabashed freethinker and nonconformist, I own my quirks and eccentricities. I live life on my terms and prefer to spend it in the company of fun, bright, creative individuals with eclectic personalities, people who live for the moment, either with a quiet intrigue or a burn, burn, burn like Kerouac's mad fabulous roman candles. This little earth cruise we’re on is an all too brief one, smell the flowers while you can. If you’ve been waiting for someone to save you, YOU are that someone. So be sure to leave room for the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
DOLLY HAD BRACES
