Marc Nash's Blog, page 9

Half-Year Book Review

So, 6 months into the year, 42 books read, of which 36 are fiction, with works from Iraq, Chile, Brazil and France among the UK & USA titles.

Here's my video from Booktube summarising the 6 months to date.




Other videos Mentioned
Philip Roth "The Great American Novel & Rana Dasgupta "Solo" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqAV48sdOuU&feature=youtu.be
Jaroslave Kulfar "The Spaceman Of Bohemia" https://youtu.be/OlwSnIept8Q

Ali Smith "Autumn" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfHge45VOMY&feature=youtu.be

Nicola Barker "Happy" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHwKh...
Franz Kafka "Amerika" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ3a8...
Will Self https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCzX7...
Why I won't watch film adaptations of novels https://youtu.be/zGoeqH8-lSM
Book Covers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDfvp5cR8sk&feature=youtu.be

28 More Random Questions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9BNWEDTTbA&feature=youtu.be
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B1nary - Flash Fiction

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1’m standing with the streetlamp sp0tl1ght1ng my n1ghtly catwalk str1ptease.
Bar1ng plenty t0 h00k the j0hns, c0vered up just en0ugh t0 thr0w 0ff the c0ps.
Th0ugh they kn0w us, s1nce un1quely they are fam1l1ar with our faces.
F0r the rest, n0 k1ss1ng, n0 r1mm1ng. M0uth and backd00r rema1n 0ff l1m1ts. 
Access granted s0lely t0 the pr1me 0ne 0f my zer0es. 
0nly in return m1nd f0r s0me 0f th0se pr1nted 0n p0und n0tes. Preferably the 0ne with the f1gure f1ve bef0re the zer0.
Step r1ght up, d0n’t be c0c0nut shy, cum 1nt0 my 0r1f1ce.
0ur mutual l0ve c0ntract, y0ur pen1s, my h0le, ten0n and m0rt1se.
Th0ugh y0ur number 0ne is t0 be encl0sed 1n a c0nd0m at all t1me.
D0uble the length, d0uble the pleasure my guarantee, 0n my h0n0ur.
And y0urs the 1 pr0m1se t0 pay sanct10ned by Her Majesty the Queen’s f1zz0g 0n th0se there bankn0tes, c01n 0f the realm. 1llegal but tender.
Her Maj the l0ne key that turns the l0ck of my chast1ty belt, p0rtal to my vaj.
Payment up fr0nt 0r 1 dr0p d0wn the p0rtcull1s 0n y0ur ard0ur. Deflated l1b1d0 rap1d0. 
0h yeah? Well 1 kn0w a1k1do. Yeah that’s right, beg0ne with y0u. Ta1l between y0ur legs. And when 1 say ta1l, 1 mean of course… 
D0esn’t help bus1ness any. N0 matter h0w many n0ughts there are.
W1th0ut a 0ne bef0re them 1 bear abs0lutely n0 value. 

Pestle And Mortar - Flash Fiction

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My mother was a casualty of the war they call life, or life-giving. Sapper me tore her up from inside. Bayonetted trench warfare as I emerged from gerrymandered dimensions of the tunnel complex and out over the top into the light. I detonated into the world. The medics stitched her back together down there, but she was no longer fit for active services to parturition; a pessary to prop up the collapsed sump and berm. Awarded an honourable discharge, with blood clotted me serving as the dishonourable discharge that emerged from her. She wasn’t fit for much in the way of anything. Shellshocked or gassed, it amounted to the same nullity. She regressed in her behaviour even as I advanced. She got down on the floor and played with my sister’s dolls as if they were Action Men. She pulled them out from beneath her skirt pleats like hand grenades and then flung them across the room. I knew they were representations of me and my unwitting violence heaped upon her, unfriendly fire apparently. I enlisted for a permanent tour of Freudian duty, a casualty of war in peacetime as I devoted my unconscious life to reconstructing the fragments of my cluster bomb that had blasted my mother apart. 
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Passion Dell - Flash Fiction

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The seeping pillow lay spreadeagled against the headboard like a bayonet punctured sandbag. The shit stained duvet was rucked and twisted like mud churned by high explosive. The charred bed linen had been wrenched away, to expose a crater in the mattress, a spring pushing its way through the fabric like a tangle of barbed wire. Crusted sperm trails along the exposed fabric like tracer pathfinding for the marksmen to come. On the bedside table, a tumbler with dog ends like spent cartridges floating in a waterlogged trench. Discarded white lingerie lay over the table lamp, smouldering in its surrender, diffracting the mustard coloured light that drifted gauze-like across the theatre of combat. A hooded gas mask lay on the table, one of its eye holes gashed running the length of the canvas. No quarter, no deserters, no prisoners and no conscientious objectors in no man’s land tonight.

Back In Black (It Never Went Away) - Blank Verse

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Chemical spaying of the black dog sniffing around my mental de-scent, Ureic spray marking my ligneous hide.Lightning volts to chase away the black cloud squatted somewhere across my pateLithium’s little local climatic murrain.Acupuncture needles don’t hurt as muchBut the vision lying on the slab like a stuck pig, Banderillas sprouting in every interstitial direction from my vegetative mire Multicoloured, chromatic, garish markers for trepanning bullish me The mounted picador pricks me, pierces me, permeates me, venesecting blood, lymph and chi flowTransfusing blood black, sable, onyx and jetBlack is the new black, same as the old blackLamentation, mourning, moldEffaced contours of female flesh behind post-nuptial veilsDeath cult zealotry over purityCimmerian, tenebrous, atramentous, places of Stygian gloomChthonic cave interiors, Lignite, bituminous coal, crude oil excreted from Gaia’s bowelsTar and pitch for when you cover up the gouging of mother Earth.Jacobean black bile melancholy Lucifer named for the light, but his visible rays only ignited by the plummet from Heaven,Burning up on reentry, fleeting friction match struck phosphorescence.Black heart black as sin, Goths just playing at itSmokey Robinson’s - Smokey really? - “The Agony and The Ecstasy”Here come the leeches… 

Walking Cane And Able-Bodied - Flash Fiction

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I became tenderly acquainted with death at an early age. A very early age. Before I’d taken my first breath, my twin drew his last. Carried off by midwife pall bearers, while I was borne aloft into light, air and pain. My first wail a lamentation for us both; for my dilating and his collapsed lungs. Death engendered me, he whom I call ‘father’. My handmaiden through life, or I his. My new goon companion, the cuckoo who had usurped my bosom buddy. 
A future headshrinker proffered that I had sawn my sibling off. In a fit of pique a boo hoo (who?). Fratricide in utero. I dismissed it reflexively of course, with that constriction in my throat a phantom emulation of the shared cord that had noosed him off. One into two does not go. Not when it’s indivisible flesh. Gestation’s entrailing guilt, riven at parturition, only became fully fledged that day supine on the couch. The blood they had hosed off me in the delivery suite was not that of my mother, rather that of my brother. The nurse placed heavyweight me to suckle at my mother’s breast, while she insisted deadweight Bruv be laid on the other one (how can a lightweight, or no weight, be a deadweight? Our first exposure to gravity). My mother’s body was lopsided from that day on, grief spiting gravity, so what do I know? My nativity body count lay at two. A brace of husks. Leaving me unbraced and liable to topple over at any moment. Death gave me a bony shoulder not to cry on, but to prop me up. Wearing me in a papoose. Doubling up with my brother’s shadow for a life of twofold stygian persecutions. 

Writing Letters To Dead Authors

6 imaginary letters composed to 6 significant authors to me. A meditation on art and death.

Shortwave - Flash Fiction

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Over…
Over?
Over.
Over and over.
And over.
Over and out.
Maiden over bowled
Over.
It’s over.
It’s all flaming over.
Overt.
Ovary
Oh very
Oh vary
Ovarian
It’s over.
Over and out.
Over all
Overall
Overhaul
Too late in the day to turn over a new leaf.
Head over heels
Arse over tit
My oeuvre
Overrated
And undersold by my overseers
Publishers on manoeuvres
They have me over a barrel
Over-egged
Apple turnover
A leftover vestige of appetite 
Comes over me
Charon row me over to the other side
Man overboard!
The struggle is over
Over and done with
Long overdue
Game over. 

My Top Ten Books

I took part in the Booktube "Top Ten Books" tag and in choosing my all time top ten books, i thought I'd share the results here.

Literary Versus Commercial Fiction Part 405...

Despite us being on the same page conclusion-wise, I just wanted to respond to many of the points Simin Savidge makes in his Booktube discussion video looking at the false division between literary and commercial fiction that has reared its head again during the Literary Prize listing season.

Here is Simon's original video, definitely worth taking a look at.



The first point is that there is no doubt Will Self does stir things up with his provocative statements on the future of literature, but a) I don't think he's pinning it to low sales of his own book and b) while he is what may be called a literary snob, his points about the future of the novel are more to do with technology and how we read digitally more than the descrying the dumbing down of novels. (My profile of Self & his work here). So there is undoubtedly as Simon says snobbery among some readers and that is lamentable if it is aimed at readers who are being accused of not being clever enough to 'get' certain books. But I feel there is an equal tendency for an anti-intellectual tendency, to tear down difficult or complex books as elitist, as not speaking to anyone, as if these books didn't have a right to exist. To my mind that is the same type of snobbery merely inverted.

Simon calls for all books to have an accessibility and while that's true and an end always worth pursuing, I don't agree with his assertion that it is far harder to write books simply and accessibly. How exactly are we measuring the 'hardness of writing a book'? Who can say whether a book written simply is harder or easier than a complex, experimental book? It comes down to the individual writers, some find writing easier and quicker than others irrespective of what genre they write. Besides there is little merit in judging which one has worked harder, because ultimately it's not how much work an author has put into writing their book, it's the end product and what type of read it delivers for its audience. Finally regarding Simon's accessibility point, it's true commercial books reach more people which implies they are more universal; but not all authors write for a universal audience (or any specific audience in mind at all for that matter). Such authors must be permitted to write the books they want to write, to pursue the lines of literary, fictional & stylistic inquiry of their choice and the judgement of first, editors (as to whether to publish them, because they must possess some modicum of commercial potential however small scale) and then the judgement of readers, (for even without an audience in mind, the decision to write a book assumes someone will read it) will determine some sort of external verdict on the work.

The problems arise when readers and critics with a foot in one camp or the other of commercial vs literary, or simple vs complex, start defending their corner by pulling down their opponents' tastes. We all know what we like and enjoy reading, that is we all know our reading tastes, but you have to allow other readers with different tastes. And this is why literary prizes may be more harmful than good, in that fans jump on the debates they prompt to deride something they like that is omitted, or attack something they don't like that is included. Social media fuels the fires. But the thing is, don't take it so personally, a panel of judges listing books is not a slight on your personal tastes. Being a book lover and promoting your favourite authors out of your passion for their work, is not the same as supporting a football team and wearing colours and punching the lights out, or swearing at fans of the opposite team. Or at least it shouldn't be, but we edge ever closer. (This is not a development unique to the book world, same thing in politics, music et al, this ridiculous lurch into tribalism).

Simon states that pretentious books can alienate. Of course they can, but I find many non-pretentious books can alienate me as a reader for lots of different reasons. We either like a book, or we don't. Pretentiousness may be nothing to do with it. I absolutely agree any book has to carry a reader along with it, but as I discuss in my video below, there are many different ways that different readers can be carried away by a book - again we return to tastes.

The different elements of a novel that can appeal to the reader include but not restricted to -

1) Provides escapism
2) Absolute immersion in the real world
3) The story
4) Ideas/ Themes
5) Character - the psychology
6) Character - seeing through the eyes of a different person, sometimes far removed from you the reader
7) Style
8) Language
9) Metaphors
10) Formalism/ experimentalism
11) Me personally, I like discovering new words which authors introduce me to

Of course, in all likelihood it's a few of these taken together that determine the makeup of a reader's tastes, but the point ultimately it has nothing to do with pretentiousness, worthiness or whatever else Simon lists, as these things are not to his tastes, whereas to a reader who veers towards say (2), (9) and (10), the book may never strike them as pretentious or over-worthy.

I was very interested to hear his experiences of being a judge for a literary prize category. But prizes do create problems. How can you judge a collection of short stories against a novel for example? Or as he says, the Women's Fiction Prize is a vital prize, yet the appearance of literary together with commercial fiction on the same broad list -which after all the only criterion is fiction written by women - to my mind makes it impossible for judges to rate the merits of one book against another because they are not trying to do the same things at all. But there again, the notion of rating any book with some sort of putative 'score' is anathema to me. Simon talking about the brief he was given, to select a book that potentially could be in the most hands of potential readers, provided a mechanism that could cut through this comparative rating problem, but makes it one particular type of prize only. Come the next year with a new judging panel, will that same brief be employed? If it is, then really the prize should make that rubric public and if it isn't, then it just makes the whole thing seem quite random from year to year; that was the year that we wanted the greatest potential accessibility for the winning title, but the following year it was some other facet...

So although I agree with Simon's conclusions, as evidenced in my video below, I'm not sure I agree with the specific points Simon made in reaching the conclusion; that none of these divisions matter, let us be all readers to all books and make our own individual choices and not rag on readers with tastes different to your own.