The Jumbled Silence
“It is what I can see makes me inarticulate.”
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“It is what I can see makes me inarticulate.”
September 18, 2007
It is no good where we are. Not at all. The argument needs relocating. Just a few blades of grass survive, if that. Sticking out of the cracks between the broken paving.
July 6, 2007
ontology taxonomy phylum genus species type kind sort class pigeon hole peg label Boom Boom Boom Tap Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Tap Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Tap Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Tap Boom Boom pipe smoke in rooms cigarettes cigar butts men seating ladies on their seats in Lyons cafés drumming on desks dads doodling in pencil rain light… [Read more…]
July 3, 2007
The significant buildings of a city, its churches, its cathedrals, these work as the icons of place, they make a particular place recognisable, in this sense they create its soul. Here are the landmarks of the world, in this way, constructed from beautiful local stone; that tend to be beautiful in themselves. But there is a further consideration to… [Read more…]
June 22, 2007
Saw Beckett’s Happy Days. Unending daylight. The apocalypse. A fossilized narrative sense. The ‘story’ has stopped. Or almost stopped. Nothing happens. Or: almost nothing happens. Only a toothbrush and a handbag occur as events along with Willie’s reading a ‘stopped’ newspaper, his body crawling over the rubble.
June 19, 2007
Kafka’s story: the innocent seeming phrases always yielding to contradiction; endlessly, dismayingly; the material beyond the scope of reason. For example, the beginning of the Great Wall of China; something like: “The Great Wall of China was completed …” (ah so, it was finished!) “…in its North Eastern Section.” (Ah, so it wasn’t finished.) One… [Read more…]
June 18, 2007
A surprising number of contemporary British novelists have no ‘voice’. Not to name any names. But compare the Americans. McCarthy; DeLillo; Ford; Salter. The Americans write prose with a distinctive vocal lilt: their books are often works suited to being read aloud. I am about halfway through a sequel to The Graduate. It is by a… [Read more…]
June 11, 2007
A naive argument. Ordinary or mainstream novels walk with an unavoidable limp; ordinary or mainstream novels are hobbled by their associations with dullness. – Is that fair? Ordinary fiction merely confirms what experience teaches. For that is where its sense begins. A mainstream novel succeeds by finding novel ways of teaching us what we already know. It does… [Read more…]
October 22, 2008
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