Marc Nash's Blog, page 11

Comma As Muck - Editorial Battle Royals over the Comma

Before the social media age, I didn't know what an "Oxford Comma" was. But thanks to the wonder of people with too much time on their hands on Twitter, I know realise I have not only always rejected the O.C., but I will fight anyone who says I have to use a comma before the word 'and' in any circumstance, as part of a list or not. I vaguely remember being told at school that you don't put commas before 'and', which is odd, because I was probably that first generation of pupils who were given no grammar training at all as it had been dispensed with as we were to learn our mother tongue more organically. What grammar I picked up was through having to learn French and Latin in secondary school.

As a writer, I've never really thought much about grammar. I used to write stage plays and there you have to think very hard about commas, colons and ellipses for the actors who have to speak your dialogue. Since moving to prose, I've mainly written flash fiction, where with just 1000 words to play with in a story, grammar doesn't weigh too heavily on the whole.

But (another vague rule was never start a sentence with 'but') as I received my novel's proof copy edit back from my publisher last week, all of a sudden I've had to think very, very hard about grammar and in particular the humble comma. In the edit, there were no more than ten words changed, deleted or added throughout the whole book. there were maybe about another 5 tense change edits. Some style guide edits around brackets and whether the full stop went inside or outside and also if you ended a bracket with a question mark, do you still need a full stop outside the bracket? And the rest of the edits - commas deleted and commas inserted. I was asked for my comments on the proposed edits...

Dave Eggers has written a novel entirely in dialogue, but he doesn't employ speech marks. Instead each new speaker starts with a dash.

Will Self has written a book without paragraphs (and even changes narrator mid sentence and without warning).

Mathias Enard has written a book without a single full stop, that's right, the whole 500+ pages is one sentence...

These are not random acts or examples of sloppy grammar. They have made these decisions consciously for stylistic reasons. And in reviewing my proof, I realised that though probably born from an organic sense, the vast majority of my use of commas was its own stylistic decision.

The novel is quite conversational in style. Three different narrative voices to be precise. Each differentiated from the other. So a uniform style guide across the board is not going to work. They use pauses for dramatic effect, for emphasis. A comma is always going to work better for this than a semi-colon or colon, even if they're rattling off a list. (To my mind, a semi-colon is always suggestive of a magician about to reveal some great trick, which may not always be appropriate in a sentence, maybe it's less of an outstanding revelation and more a natural corollary). A comma can indicate where the emphasis of a sentence should fall, important if a sentence is building up to some climactic reveal or suggestion such as at the end of an argument, or outrageous statement. A comma can also lend temporality to certain verbs and actions, such as "re-emergence", "festering", or here in the case of "trailing", conveying the sense of a repeated happening, which over time has yielded a certain effect or understanding.

Been trailing here long enough now to put the names to the faces, the faces to the aspects of the mothers 

Which brings me to a reason to delete commas. Phrases like "of course", "you see", "only", "since", "well" and the like, usually sustain a comma. But when the speaker (in the cases of my three narrative voices, an internal voice) is in full-flow, is being declamatory, commas in these cases only slow the flow. When one of the voices uses the phrase "of course", she may not be supposing and weighing up the alternatives, she is using it for emphasis as if there are no other possibilities. Confident, assertive, a comma absolutely works against this. One of the characters has written her words in a diary, so she has already largely processed them between the event she is reporting and coming to set them down on paper. She is not ruminating, she is leaving herself a fully-realised story, with morals and cautions to avoid mistakes in the future. Another voice exists only online, where grammar is rarely strictly formal. The third voice, (non-human), is putting forth an argument in rhetorical fashion, as if we the human race were slow kids at school who just have to listen and take our medicine as she delivers it. Pace and tone fundamentally determine the need for pauses or run-on sentences. Sometimes the speaker offers a seeming space for the listener to consider what has just been said; other times no such opportunity is permitted, because to the speaker's mind it is self-evident. The tension for the reader is whether these narrators are trustworthy and their words reliable; that for all their assertive flow, are there perceptible cracks in their confidence which might undermine the veracity of what they say? Commas can't do all the work behind such tension, but they are indispensable to it. A comma can hint at insincerity as much as bluster.

Although we read silently, we still do hear it at some level inside our heads. I always have a draft explicitly where I read aloud to try and see how reading it might be for the reader. Sometimes you have to help the reader, to give them pauses to catch their breath, or cogitate on something you suspect is going to reverberate in their mind. Here the humble comma is most helpful in breaking up the run of a sentence and providing the reader a chance to get to the end of it. Such commas must be careful not to work against the logic used in the previous paragraphs, but they are still important for helping the reader along. I use the phrase "the everyday arpeggio of parenting", which because of its plosive sounds can leave the reader a little breathless, so I use a comma to let the reader catch their breath before completing the sentence "inevitably thrums and frets my stretched nerve ends".
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So there you have it. No more than 15 notes on words, but page after page about commas needing to be instated or inserted ones needing to be removed. I really came to see my own novel in a whole new light, that of the microcosmic at the level of the sentence. No doubt in future I shall still write with an innate and organic sense of grammar, but in the revisions and edits, I shall have to think about every comma in this way once again.

Nebenstimme - Flash Fiction

At night he composed his musical scores amid the discomposed and the decomposing. That mound of bodies heaped in the camp’s “Pathology Department”. Where the deceased were harvested for chimerical medical trials, their flesh sown for decorative ornaments to give as gifts to Nazi Frauen. Even the Germans didn’t dare enter this human tannery past sunset. For fear of ghosts. Though he took up residence there, precisely because all was unutterably still for him to pen his movements. For he couldn't concentrate in this concentration camp. To hear the music in his head, he needed to be away from the diminuendo outside. Of groans, gurgling stomachs consuming their hosts and relentless recitations of the mourners’ Kaddish. The only ghosts to be had, were the shuffling wraiths of the still living skeletons. 
Emerging from the charnel room with the dawn, he would clutch a new tune inscribed on the toilet sheets he’d solemnised from the dysentery sufferers. Dodging the sleepy sentries, he slipped his latest opus to the conductor of the camp orchestra during the shambling gathering for roll call and any unused candle tallow. Their neighbours in the file rounded on them both. 
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- In this place music is an affront. Your orchestra an abomination - My friend, music lifts the spirit. It offers hope there is still beauty and refinement in the world - Modest ain't he? You’re no better than parasites. Like our Rabbis, you were only ever provided any means through the generosity of patrons, people who toiled for their money and who you cozened funds from, in the myth it would redeem their souls - Ah, good to see the art versus business dichotomy still rages on in a place where neither hold much in the way of currency - So you admit it? Besides, how can your music have anything to do with refinement, when you lock yourself up in that heinous room of all rooms to write your notes? It can only but be permeated with the benighted spirits of the departed there. Your dead muses. I bet they light your way at night, it’s their fat you use for those candles isn’t it? - No sir, absolutely not. How could something so profane be associated with the making of noble art? - You are still nothing but a ghoul - No sir, a golem. To uplift our hearts in order to conduct us into survival - To conduct us into the afterlife more like. Die Totentänze. Do you expect us to dance a muzurka as we work in the quarries? Or perhaps demand that we waltz on into the ovens to your accompaniment? A little chamber music as tribute to our three-to-a-bunk barracks? Or maybe you have written a march for our victorious host to parade triumphantly out of this camp as we overthrow our captors? - Those with art and beauty in their hearts will stand more chance of enduring through the greatest hardship than those without - Oh really, will your uplifted soul float above the gas in the chambers and preserve you pure air to breathe? - No, but it will help preserve pure air for those that come after us to breathe. To know that from such an abyss, the human spirit could still soar. 

Lexicoplasty - Flash Fiction

When the executive order came down the line, the words listed for expurgation were redacted in the textbooks beneath tape, until new editions could be run off the presses. However, the prodrome initially developed online, where the revised lections 404’d and only cached unbowdlerised versions remained accessible. Coding experts were called in to try and resolve the issue.
A librarian at Philadelphia’s Perelman School of Medicine was the first to notice the phenomenon in print. One of the sanitised words ‘vulnerable’ fluoresced from beneath its concealing black strip and radiated its defiant presence like any of the emergency exit signs throughout the hospital. Curious, the librarian ran a battery of tests to detect whether there was some sort of contamination in the printers’ inks, or even the presence of radioactive material. In other medical volumes, the word ‘diversity’ similarly glowed in an array of differing colours under their shrouds.
It was only when the books were checked out by students and researchers alike, that the pathology revealed itself in full. Words deliquesced from the page and vanished. The odd letter here and there remained in forlorn isolation, but all medical knowledge had been trepanned. The university’s mathematicians swiftly dissected the pattern of the remaining characters; they were the lone nine letters not contained within the original proscribed words. 
The academic linguists grasped the diagnosis immediately. Word necrosis. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 14.2px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 14.2px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000; min-height: 15.0px} span.s1 {font-kerning: none}
“Language is organic. You can’t simply excise and disassemble parts of it without secondary effects, or in this case, viral metastasis. You have to think of the alphabet like DNA, forming the amino acids of words, aggregating into the protein chains of sentences, the cells of paragraphs, discrete anatomical structures as chapters, finally building the corpus as a whole. This was venesection without coagulant. The executive just lobotomised the body politic’s healthcare”.  


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Based on the prompt from "New Flash Fiction" journal which was as follows: 

Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the Center for Disease Control from using seven words in their official documents: The words are as follows: “evidence-based”, “science-based” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” and “fetus.”

Write a 300 word flash fiction using some or all of these words

Four-Minute Warning - Flash Fiction

We had got flabby after the withering away of mutually assured nuclear destruction. Replacing the four-minute warning with our own cosy version, the Bucket List. Taking our own sweet time. Indulging presumed pleasures rather than confronting the other pole of the spectrum, the non-continuum, that of our demise. 
When knowledge of the new imminent extinction event broke, the world soon reverted to type. Full panic mode which should have been enough to paralyse us in place in unremitting contemplation of our gathering cessation. But now, pluckily folk sped up their ambitions and deviated off the inventory into far more extreme vistas. Time for a first taste of the blood of another human on the tongue. Or the thrill of totalling automobiles in the stock car race at the end of the world, or the exasperated exhilaration of finally hurling a Molotov Cocktail at the Town Hall. However looting held no appeal, since what was the point of wearing diamonds for just two days, nor would people be needing stockpiles food where they were heading. 
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America and other tribal societies opted to pay off old scores and grudges. All except in one locus. Great Britain remained calm. An equipoise not borne of any T-Shirt slogans, or even the reputed stiff upper lip grin and bear it mien. Rather the nation had experienced a previous occasion for playing out of its collected grief, with the death of their Princess of Hearts. That was the circumstance in which they had mourned for their own unfulfilled lives, so that they had nothing left to give a second time when they were directly threatened with expiration. 

The Wind Cried Mercy - Flash Fiction

When you prick yourself on a rose briar. When your cat scratches you in play. When you're stung by a bee. When you stub your foot on a forest stone because you're embosomed with your phone cursing the patchy signal. Pain used to bear a twin constituency, travelling along bifurcated tracks; the first paroxysmal path straight up the trunk road to the brain to alert to danger, demanding of immediate double declutch and reversing away from the hazard; the second, a slightly more sedate ache’s progress up the dorsal by-road, analysing the scenery and triaging the body’s response. But that was when the cause of the pain was external. Now with the agony emanating from within, there is no manoeuvre I can undertake to withdraw from its source. Since the source is me. I can fold myself over in two, I can grasp my stomach and squeeze myself, I can ram my eyes shut, but nothing can countervail the spasms. External objects never convulse you. They are hard and unyielding. The body is soft until it locks its muscles and garrottes your organs in peristaltic waves of pain.
I wish the doctor had never told me. I experienced the pangs yes, but I could always see them out eventually. But now I know what they signify, I cannot dismiss them through sheer gritted endurance. I might ride out the throb, but its lasting consequence still attends my conscious mind. The coronation of my imminent death. Heralded afresh with each piercing jag. 
Symptoms and side effects: Chronic fatigue. The divine diapason of the dawn chorus when I am prostrate in my bed, signalling the night has flogged me sleepless. Breathlessness. The delicately vibrating spider’s web, with captured raindrops holding the vista of the world held in their prism fair takes the breath away. Tremors and increasing ataxia. The passing of the clouds in the sky, with their intricately amorphous borders I try and trace the ends of but can never quite fix. Swelling and inflammation. The vibrant colours of the snapdragons in my vase are almost too vivid for me to behold for any protracted period. I try and sketch them but my hand shakes too much to capture them. When the blossoms shrivel and die they resemble nothing less than human skulls and so it is not only their lost colour that is sundered in the calvary of my mind. 
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I lie down on my temporarily cease-firing stomach and inhale the grass in my garden. It smells extravagantly luscious. Complex. A mosaic of aromas. Nature’s musky spoor. I have never smelled it quite like this before. Sure I have been struck by the waft of newly mown grass, releasing its joys of being alive in Spring, once trepanned by the metal blade to incite further insurgent abundance. My nostrils, my mouth, my brain ingest such pungent vigour. And mock me for it. For the cut grass grows new hydra heads and will persist. Yet I will be decollated and asunder. There is no efficacy that other human heads persist beyond me for their finite span. Only now do I grasp this sumptuous fragrance, glean the pulchritude of life, but it will all be snatched away from me. I am only allowed a fleeting glimpse. The grass scolds me thus. It prompted rapture not a moment ago, now it only spites me with anguish and the sting within. And the grass, which does not rustle and whisper but rather hollers, is correct. This life that I desperately crave now that I know it is being withdrawn from me, to what end? Seeing that when I blithely possessed it, I was unaware and unappreciative of what it was for? What it offered. I barely occupy its bounties and benedictions, so how can I lament its passing? Yet I'm crying. Crying at beauty. Or crying for beauty. Crying at death. 

Romance Languages - Flash Fiction

“I love you” tasting bile at the back of my throat.
“Je t’aime” tasting saltiness on the inside of my cheeks
“Ich liebe dich” tasting blood on my tongue
“Ti amo” tasting defeat on my teeth
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“Te ubesc” tasting betrayal on my lips

Still - Flash Fiction

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My child was finally out of me. Yet the convex salience of my belly still bore her cameoed imprint. No phantom amputee this, I did not still feel her to be inside. I was like the snake who had swallowed prey whole and my body accordingly distended around the shape of my ingurgitation. Yet now that digestional absorption was complete, the evacuation passed as scurf, my hide had not recoiled its elasticity to resile me sinuously lithe. And for what? We had both been destroyed by our co-habitation. For my child had been stillborn. She was the phantom amputee.

The Island Of Stability - Flash Fiction

As dead as the dinosaurs. Though not of course coeval with them. In laboratories chemists create super-heavy elements which exist for mere milliseconds before transforming back into more stabile arrangement of protons, neutrons and electrons. Such elements, if they ever existed in Nature, have such rapid decay rates that they have long ago become iron, lead, radon and the like. Their half lives played out into immutability. Why do the scientists bother when these elements have such a short lifespan, they offer no practical use at all? Because they quest after an ‘island of stability’ at some point on this spectrum, where elements exist with increasing half-lives that mean they have a much more stable existence, only no one has figured out how to create them, nor found them existing naturally. 
Such decay would have taken place by the time man appeared on the earth, but hey who’s present to say what time is at this pre-temporal stage? We use carbon dating and other radioactive decay metrics to back-define chronology, so this cavil still holds in real time. Not that there is such a thing of course. Experienced time is not stable. Only in mathematical terms is it regularly sequenced and segmented.
Ug had mined some lead by cracking open a rock. Unsurprisingly he was unaware that it was a radioactive isotope of lead (210), as he used it for a pillow to cradle his head at night. His body absorbed its decay and would have sparked off carcinogenic mutations within his body, only the era’s low natural life expectancy meant he would not outlive the lead’s twenty two year half-life that would have ravaged him unto death.
Ug pointed to the animal skins on his feet with the very spear that had smote the beast. Unk just assumed he was boasting and flouting his fortune from the recent hunt. Ug danced from one foot to the other, waggling the raised one in Unk’s direction. Unk’s blood was rising at the perceived continued sleight. Ug emitted some sounds, but Unk just shrugged his shoulders, or scratched his head, or held his hands out wide while crinkling the lower features of his face, the precise gestures not having been set in mutual comprehension as such. Ug threw himself at Unk’s feet, then struggled to lift one of them off the ground, sending Unk into a frenzy of hopping trying to keep his balance. Ug pointed at the scars and scabs and blisters on his confrere's foot, then pointed to the skins wrapped around his own and emitted some more sounds to convey the comparative weals of skin. Look Unk, we went through all this yesterday, remember, the petroglyphs? Unk smashed him over the head with his club as his final indecipherable and yet inviolable thought on the matter. 
Wait, hold on a minute Sonny Jim, I can smell it on you. Spliff. Skunk. Yes you do. Marijuana. Sinsimilla, Mary Jane. Grass. Cannabis. Bud. Weed. Collieweed. Reefer. Chronic. Blunt. Draw. Ganja. Herb. Whacky tobaccy. Oh this is hopeless. Let me open my Urban Dictionary translation app… What? Give me a moment here. Is that ‘dope’ as in isotope 13 or 15? Come on, throw me a bone here please. Open your mouth wide and enunciate clearly. As if any imaginary doobie between your lips would fall out… Do you mean ‘bad’ in the sense of isotopes 6, 8 or 10…? Damn youth and their rapidly mutating argot. Or is it ‘ergot’? Either way I’m getting a migraine… Not least think about how much money you waste on that stuff. No not waste, ‘spunk’. What? Money, you know, money? Oh sorry, English as a second language. Bank (isotope 72). Swag. Scratch (isotope 52). Dosh. Readies. Moolah. Lucre. Lolly. Loot. Booty (isotope 107). P’s. Spondoolicks. Skrill. Ah we have lift off! Docking with the mothership. Docking your pocket money might be an idea… Hold it, I’m an ‘askhole’? What the hell is ‘askhole’ when it’s at home...? Oh here we are. Hmmmm. You’re lucky I heard that right first time mistah, see you can enunciate when you choose to… I may be your mum, but even I can see that’s a fauxpology. See not quite as beyond redemption as you might think… How do you spell that…? No, nothing, guess Urban Dic hasn’t even caught up to that one yet goddamnit… Would you care to enlighten me as to its meaning…? Pretty please…? Oh, so it’s just the silent treatment now is it? Words fail me….
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A Bucket List - Flash Fiction

The milkmaid entered the barn carrying a three-legged wooden stool in one hand, a metal pail in the other. She set down the stool, sat down and decorously arranged the hem of her bodice and smoothed the apron of her dirndl. He wasn’t sure why she was clad in a bonnet, surely it wasn’t as protection from squirted milk? Perhaps it was a covering against straw from the thatch above. Whatever its purpose, it conjured up in him images of hair nets worn in bakeries, that trepanned the wearer and in doing so changed the proportions of the face in unwholesome manner. Always enough to put you off your bread. Now it further induced in him the image of bank robbers who pull stockings over their faces to distort their features. No, enough of this bane, hair is meant to be witnessed! The milkmaid untied the straps of her bonnet under her chin, threw the linen away carelessly and shook out her liberated tresses with such flourish that necessitated a reprise of her raiment redress.
She brought her hands to the cow’s teats. She started plucking and drawing then back and forth like organ stops. The sound emitted was the metallic syncopation of the milk striking the metal sides of the bucket. I shuddered at the thought of her hands working me with such vigour, although the cow was seemingly unmoved by any discomfort in the contact. You were briefly stirred by the tribadic association of two females, however the alien nature of the udder, looking like some sort of deep marine creature shattered any imagining of the human mammary. In addition the stream of jism whizzing evoked by the unending jet of milk was further off-putting and confused any desired picture with him at the centre of it. And finally the soundtrack. That strange stretto effect as if the liquid percussion bifurcated into two notes on impact. To your ear it elicited somewhat the same as that of the men’s urinals with all that entailed. So while the milkmaid’s dress may be playing host to milky white drops resiling from the pail’s steel sides, no happy correspondence can be drawn because of the many occasions of urinary splash-back I had encountered. 
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First, second (too passive?) or third (voyeur) person perspective? Sounds other than human?No animalsKeep in mind the visual qualities of fluids (colour)Consider precise motion and vigour of hands at work in symbolic activityThe images (both experienced and imagined) held before any scenario even starts can knock it off kilter through less palatable associations

Funeral Rites of JZKU-712 Flash Fiction

Both the digital recorders and our own analogue bodies inform us that gravitational force on planet JZKU-712 operates more strongly than that of our own. We deduce that is the main structural determinant of the aliens’ spherical body shape. They do not have protruding (facial) features as such. The distinctions are to be found in the patterns of tiny raised surface nodules or speckles which vary from individual to individual. We assume this is is also functional, in providing more surface friction to enable their locomotion. They operate with two modes of motion, by bouncing with a forward movement, or by orbiting, in which presumably they give themselves to the gravitational force of each other and large objects in order to cover greater distances. To see this is rather beautiful, like dancers or ice skaters passing on a partner to another, though of course they lack for open hands with which to do so. 
We have also observed their funerary rites. The point to keep in mind is that all stems from their body shape. They have no need of rectangular coffins and graves as we do. Nor do they opt for interment in the ground or cremation by fire. Instead they have what we surmise is a rather touching send off that engages the whole community with grace and due dignity and won us over form our initial irreverent treatment of their race as glorified basketballs. 
The first thing that obtains with death is they seal the departed up in a transparent membrane, which is also perfectly round. This is for the wake, which takes the form of each individual spending time with the deceased before gently and precisely rolling them on to the next mourner. The actual interaction can seemingly take many forms, from their form of whispered locution, which can best be approximated by the sound of letting air out of a ball, through to gently nuzzling or a slightly firmer contact which can induce rotational spinning of the decedent. Now you can see the reason behind our initial irreverence.
But from the wake we move to the funeral ceremony itself. The late individual has ended up with geometric precision unnoticed by us, right in the epicentre of the community. They all move to form a series of concentric circles radiating around the corpse orb. With military exactitude, they all start bouncing on the spot in rhythm with one another. That tempo changes repeatedly, but not a single creature misses its beat, the transitions are mellifluously smooth. The volume is not deafening, this is not a tattoo, instead it is clearly respectful. We conceive of this as their form of lamentation.  
Then on to the funeral march. No pall bearers and no jazz bands to serenade the way. Rather the concentric circles break up as everyone moves into one long single file, with the deceased at its head. Again, with flawless uniformity, each rondure takes a single pace (if ‘pace’ can be applied to brings of curvature), so that the file nudges forward exactly one pace, with the deceased at the head also rolling one pace only. The march inches forward with heart-breaking (to us) agonising slow solemnity. We imagine no individual can feel a personal grief out of whack with the rest, for to do so would be to send the decedent ricocheting off in the vanguard.
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Finally they arrive at the burial grounds (‘burial’ again being an inappropriate term). It appears to be a lake of some sort. There is a gentle lap, but it is certainly not tidal. For lined across the water are rows and rows of spherical corpses to which this one is added. The lack of tumultuous swell means that just as with our graveyards, the dead retain their position in the ranks so that private grief can be visited upon them at a later date. While we infer the membranous skeins to be waterproof (and also to  prevent any damage of an inert entity being rolled, nudged and all other funereal impact given the lack of rigor mortis), we have no idea if the corpse decays within. Do putrefying gases within provide the flotation upon the water, where we might presuppose gravity to otherwise press them down into the depths? Whatever the physical processes at work, there is an undeniable delicate propriety to their final resting place.