—-
Welcome back to DC’s Writers Workshop. This is the eleventh in a series of days on the blog where writers who are part of the blog’s community will present work-in-progress in search of the opinions, responses, advice, and critiques of both readers who don’t normally post comments here and local inhabitants of this place. I ask everyone to please read these works with the same attention you give the normal brand of posts here and respond in some way in the comments section below. Obviously, the closer your attention and the more you’re able and willing to say to the writer the better. But any kind of related comment is welcome, even a simple sentence or two indicating you read the piece of writing and felt something or other about it would be helpful. The only guideline I’m going to give out regarding comments is that any response, whether lengthy or brief, praise filled or critical or anywhere inbetween, should be presented in a spirit of helping the writer in question. I’ll be responding to the work too in the Comments section towards the end of the weekend. So, I guess all of that is probably clear. Giving support to the artists of different kinds who read and post on the blog has always been a very important aspect of this project, but this workshop series represents one of the first times that aspect has been made formal. This weekend’s workshop features Thomas Kendall — writer and one of this blog’s longtime distinguished locals. He asks for any thoughts, support, or criticism you can give him. I thank her greatly for entrusting his work-in-progress to us, and I thank you all in advance for your kind participation. — D.C.
*
These are two chapters from the first draft of my novel. In the novel they’re separated by maybe three to four chapters that take place along different but interconnected time lines one of which is completely fabricated. Since they’re separated like that I thought it might be important for the opening of the second to mirror the first tonally and stylistically so that they work to inscribe their remembrance on the reader. I want the timelines to ring. Firstly I don’t know if I’ve managed to do that and secondly I’m wondering if a commitment to this is essentially wrong thinking, that maybe I can remind the reader of past events in a clearer or more subtle way.
I’m going to have to think about when I start the long, no doubt arduous (ardour less? Hopefully not) task of redrafting is what to put a red pen through. I can get carried away with trying to make my prose chiropractic and I worry that some of the sentences in here might be standing on needless ceremony… like this one that’s just about to, or is trying to, consign itself to the past.
You see what I mean? At times the writing is deliberately parodic of itself for reasons narrative, although maybe not so much in these sections hahaha. DISCLAIMER AFTER DISCLAIMER READY TO START DISCLAIMING ITSELF.
The first chapter opens after David, having turned up to a birthday party uninvited, has hurt himself and been taken to hospital where he is having to stay overnight….it’s unclear whether the injury was caused intentionally or if Henry’s younger brother had something to do with it. David is a mute. — Thomas Kendall
(1993)
David is asleep on his back in a narrow hospital bed situated among five other in-patients’ beds who are likewise either asleep or worse and whose prone forms are similarly cubed in little isolative tents. The curtains which divide each patient from the other are topped with bull rings attaching them to an overhead rail that imperiously maps the room. It is four thirty am. A ceiling fan with several of its blades missing copters like a Sycamore seed above him. David stirs faintly, his eye opening and blinking in slow recurrence upon the ceiling fan, the mash of his eyelids and milky suck of eye gumming the image as if ruminatively drawing upon a teat.
—David’s dream, about an ocean that had stopped and before which his father and mother and the dead twin who had followed him stillborn into this world were all telepathically ‘talking’ about their favourite flavour of pizza, retreats now to a small windowing glint. The dream folded and passed like a secret note between brain functions before inserting its absurdities into some trace memory eject of the last twenty four hours rendering said memory’s hidden affect revisionist and counterfeit.
The last swelling remnant of his dream being of his, in the dream, identical twin brother asking him with a smile that David had felt, even within his dream, would be impossible to recreate on his own face, whether he, David, had ever tasted death. This moment being the exact point at which the dream’s flex had over extended breaking the surface of sleep.
—David’s brain glitches and ravines, his consciousness shooting up from under a quickly draining pool of sleep so that his sudden wakefulness emerges as if thrust into a wholly foreign and terrifyingly present, thus context free, world.
—The ceiling fan which blooms and lulls him back into the accented darkness.
—There is a dissonance held between the hectic speed and hum of the turning fan and the serene elegance of its rotation in his dream filled eye. This partially due to the remaining blades being evenly spaced apart in pleasingly mathematical relationships so that the fan’s form seems unbroken and less synaptically harried than that of a fully equipped or less evenly remaindered fan. A grace hypnotically at work in the constancy of distances whatever speed the fan may reach.
– – My mother doesn’t like anchovies….my mother is a fish…
—David thinks ‘why did i…’ before drifting out and further forgetting amid the flat low wattage hum of the room’s ventilation system.
—The ceiling fan’s blades continuing to glide around their unchanged axis above him though they, the blades, seemingly accrue and lose speed at various points during their revolutions as the fan tilts horribly in his perception.
David closes his eyes as the world and his history continues to erect itself behind them. He opens them up, confirms where he is. David closing his eyes and sighing and wondering with his first fully articulated thoughts how far he could get from his current prostrate position before being forcibly escorted back to said position. David opening his eyes and lifting his head in the direction of the light’s dispatch from the door, the soft cuboid of which he can just make out through his curtain and which reflects lengthways between the three to four similarly curtained beds in front of him. To the right and left of his bed David can see precisely nothing.
—David cycles his legs out of the quick of the cover and sits up on his plank like bed. His bruised body sort of sloughed painfully around his fencing bones, his occipital spine bent in the shape of an old fashioned walking cane. Tentatively David lets the oval of his big toe spread a cloud of heat across the marbled floor.
Henry walks around more stunned than numb, in general, he thinks. It’s 4:45 am but the distinction is important. It’s roughly the same type of qualitative difference that one might be tempted to state lies between that of seeing and watching. At least it would be, a temptation to state that, for those types of people who spend a great deal of time and effort attempting to make these little semantic differentiations to themselves in order to get closer to some internal, highly personal, lexicography that they secretly hope might outlay some kind of key to both themselves and the world (though the two tend to get confused in this types head) which is something Henry definitely does.
—In this case stunned doesn’t imply the same enervating, dead anti-sensation that numb might though at it’s surface a ‘stunned’ person’s demeanour might very well resemble a numb person’s face’s total evacuation of feeling.
—However, Henry thinks, whereas numbness might stand in relation between the act of remembrance (itself qualitatively different to memory which is far more involved and emotive) and the plain lumpen fact of emotional sensation’s replacement with an inert spiritual death by degrees, to be stunned is more like being jammed at a procedural level. There’s too many frequencies and they’re all equally loud and internally generated to pay any attention to understanding one.
—The contradiction at numbness’ heart lying in the fact that the real pain and torture lies not in the encroaching numbness but, rather, in the phantom sensations of feeling within that numbness as in the famous cases of lost limbs.
—Numbness of course only detectable to something feeling, to the feeling thing that is pushed up against it, so that the real open ended wound of the numb persons ‘pain’ is their residual memory of the pain that may have been instrumental to their incipient numbness, however buried and impossible to face this real pain is, coupled with an increasing fear of further having to live with losing what little feeling of residual pain (the awareness of being numb or unfeeling) is left and then ultimately having to live only with the degrade of that memory to remembrance. Henry unhappy with this memory/remembrance divide though it’s correct at its core he thinks.
—Henry gets up to check Jude. He’s lain out in bed in his favourite metal t-shirt. He’d been all but fugue like since they left David at the hospital but he’s snoring away, tearing through sheets of mucous in sleep.
The door clicks open, Fiasco’s home from working/drinking at the crows.
– – Was he there? Shouts Henry.
– – Yeah, he was there.
—Henry doesn’t ask anything else about his father.
David has robed the curtain around his forearm and is currently surveying the ward, the long draping medical green of the other similarly tented beds/’boudoirs’ cultish looking in the darkness.
—There is a TV playing married with children or some other gaudy sitcom at a low, indistinct volume in one of the other cubes. In the flickering editions of light from the TV’s rapid camera cuts David can make out a man sat up in bed with one starred hand lying static and darkly fisted in his crotch. The light from the TV grows brighter or lingers in an unbroken shot so that the man’s outline emerges as an after image, more burnt onto the darkness than actually there. The man is wearing his own dressing gown as opposed to the thin blue, pigmented by a thousand collated night-sweats hospital issue that David is currently sporting.
—The arm that isn’t ending blackly around his, the man’s, crotch slides in degrees from its position on his thigh. A TV remote clatters against the floor. The man’s shoulders and neck follow the weight of the hanging arm. The hand in the crotch pulling a hard left as if steering suddenly away from something fast and oncoming.
—David holds his breath. No one comes. He walks to the door avoiding the light and then turns back to the curtain with the man. A sustained burst of canned laughter from behind the curtain increases in intensity as David’s hand reaches towards it. His hand feels at the curtain then releases it, sending a fluttering pulse towards the ceiling.
David stares down a corridor that is empty and fascinatingly rowed on either side with windows full of a night dumped with stars, stars heaped and combed through like spilt sugar while the corridor with it’s graphics of space and air rendered blocky by artificial light, dims out onto endless repetitions of itself. He steps outside the ward door.
—So far, so good.
Henry’s watching Fiasco’s jaw move in and out along the roll of his molars like a possessed chest of drawers between each chaotically slammed word/staccato ran on sentence as Fiasco explains to him that a man in the pub paid him in speed, made him
– – meaning me, Fiasco,
take a large quantity of speed from the end of the mans knife while loudly declaring
– – the man that is
That he was fucking animal
– – A fucking animal, that’s what he said. A fucking animal. Voice like Bob Hoskins.
– – You got any left?
David is outside the hospital. Whether this qualifies as an escape he’s unsure of. It hasn’t answered his question either. He looks across the town. There’s no reason either way so he starts walking. David walks downhill reciting the lyrics to ‘down town’ in a deadpan monotone in his head.
—He walks without thinking to the playground near Henry’s house. The soft tarmac of the playground dimples under the press of his feet. His feet are bare and dirty, a hardened whip of chewing gum spiralling out from between his two smallest toes. David is tired. His head hurts. He considers the swing, the slide, the merry go round. He walks across the swing, the saddle of which is unevenly hitched up on one side with chain foreshortened around the horizontal bar, and on past the slide letting his hand feel the slide’s warbled, paint flecked surface. David stopping and pressing the flat of his hand onto the slide but there’s no stored warmth left there. David leans against it and looks at the merry go round for precisely the amount of time it takes for it to resemble a U.F.O. Two to three seconds.
—David steps over the thinned trunk of the slide. He colours the small percentage of his self into one of the triangular portions of the merry go round. The merry go round divided into eight of these open ended quadrilateral triangles. The merry go round is a pie chart representing the social and metaphysical functions of merry go rounds in the mid 90s through an illustrative lay of beer cans, fag butts, emptiness and young disturbed men.
—David’s feet lilt around the ground, the merry go round renumerating its surface on the abacus of his ribs. The dark dwindles, a steadily inclining spread of morning sunlight rising over his torso, tucking him in
– – Everything is backwards.
(1993)
Henry’s house is situated at the smoothly bowled dolly westernized crotch of two intersecting hills connecting one council estate to another. A deliberately pointless social u bend the uppermost left incline of which the cloud banked sunlight touches with visible, multi-planed, beams of light whose angles of deployment alter and shift every five to six minutes or so depending on cloud mass or wind variance. The clouds acting like a kind of child’s viewfinder for the light, their overlaid mazily tiered arrangement around spaces lagging between them creating these synonymous strangely diamonded absences that rotate through occlusion and convergence so that the narrowing juts or wide spotlight of the beams trickle or burst in a roughly circular, mindlessly searching pattern.
—Henry is sat under the roof of his porch. The porch roof is a visor of shadow made by an over hanging gutter and slanted roof. The porch consisting of that and a foot high step/concrete block that needs to be climbed to knock with any semblance of authority against the front door but which one has to step back from in order not to appear overly threatening or aggressive were anyone to actually answer the door. Henry appreciates this feature, has reason to believe that there was some underlying ‘socio- psychological’ reasoning behind it.
– – Infantilism of the visitor as trope in council states, political meaning thereof…
—He’s made a casual study of all the houses steps in the surrounding area and they all share this feature.
– – Home advantage through physical elevation, an important consideration in low cost areas? An essay…
—The block/step also capable of comfortably seating two to three people, he notices, with maybe an added fourth casually leaning the small of their back against it, perhaps extending their arms across their friends’ laps one hand, why not two?, clasping the top of a neatly frosted bottle of beer.
—Henry has never had four people he’d regard as friends gathered at his house and he’s never bought bottled beer.
—- – —-It’s a false economy.
It is six am. Beer tastes awful now, especially from a can. The light continues to trend in the well covered dip of his garden. Henry’s bombed two hits of body hollowing speed. This a half hour before Fiasco declared that he needed to go to bed hence the consideration of the step. He’s meant to wake him up in a little bit maybe even accompany him into work for some formal introductions if he’s at all fit to.
—Fiasco’s managed to wrangle Henry a trial shift at the Crow’s next week. Henry’s debating it. He has a hypothetical beer with his dad. He can’t see it happening.
—Henry lights a cigarette and pulls the smoke as far into his lungs as he can. He holds it there. The sense of warmth Henry feels inside, a glowing interior trim posing as the edge of it’s its own mass, is the excision of some interior dermal layer. Henry imagines two small mushroom clouds rising in a mirrored plume under the squinting eye of his heart’s sun.
– – That’s not how biology works.
—The lungs he sees as one of those pendants.
—I got no quality control
—He exhales/inhales. He pulls the door behind him, stands.
—Fiasco’s inside desperately trying to lock his eyes shut, he’s got a grand total of four hours before he needs to be back at work for a split shift totalling eleven working hours. He’ll be in the pub ten till four, seven till midnight. He lives an hour’s walk from the pub so….
—Walk an hour, sleep an hour or….ugh
—His saliva is all matted, if you can call it saliva. It’s like the percentage of whatever saliva is minus the h2o or something, something closer to the fibrous texture of rolled around snot than he’s willing to realise.
– – That’s a good line. I’ll forget it. I just did. What was I thinking? Really what. What time is it?
—His eyes flick to the VCR’s display.
—Fuck, fuck, fuck Fiasco’s body moans on the hangnail of the sofa, cushions shredded by the thrash of his trainers under the wrinkled material of the spare never washed duvet which he has taken as his right. The undeniable shittiness of which, like everything else, is made into a badge/medal to accompany the heart staining his sleeve. All of his thinned skin being the sleeve btw. Fiasco’s body worms on the hook of a dawning and damaged sobriety, his organs pushing through the shit of his body.
The end of the cigarette pricks Henry’s knuckles with an itchy heat. The light in the garden moves from ambience to bravura. Strange remembrances of his father now, probably error strewn or else tonally filled in with his grandfather’s presence.
—Henry remembers his father with a yellow plank length spirit level in hand (Father’s knuckles baggy and swollen, rowed like the faces of alcoholics frowning at something just beyond the bar). Grey grains of metal, flaking paint, the inset bubble slipping around the chamber. Spirit level. His father’s other tools looking like toys in as much as Henry had imagined being able utilize them as weapons but it is the spirit level, entrancingly named but boringly configured, that he sees now with that uncanny, split frame, quickness of a memory less recalled than extracted like a rod from some internal reactor. He feels the absence of its extraction, the pull of it into vision, the hole in his self its quietness had plugged flooding with space.
—His father’s hands there, no face, definitely his father’s hands though (those faces along his hand gurning out at him) showing him the bubble sliding around. His knuckles grained like the metal. Under the yellow paint there was iron, under the skin, dirt. Questions of constancy, of dirt and metal. Spirit level, a bubble trapped in the dead centre of two extremes. Used to measure horizontal or vertical planes. A reality linear unto itself but interconnecting with the other planes of an object (some stairs, a cabinet) that Henry couldn’t visualise until his father slotted them together and even then Henry couldn’t see how it was made. His father sighing, taking the object apart, letting Henry try to figure it out. Henry making a mess of it, awkwardly getting one joint stuck in another, bending a screw so that when his father tried to take it apart the wood cracked as if in censorship at the soft curses his father’s lips kept absently forming.
Henry flicks the butt of the cigarette into the neighbour’s garden and joylessly lights another. A ragged scaffolding of light turns the rest of Henry’s garden into a dark skip as the clouds lurch soundlessly above. Each object the beams catch upon suggests a secret hidden in the contouring, coded fields of light suspended around them though these abstracted horizons are merely rebuffed concentrations of the light’s monotonous nature rendered in visible but suspect dimensions across other reflective/refractive surfaces and these objects in truth emanate nothing but their own inviolability. Henry sees it that way and doesn’t. The garden looks amazing or dull, special or, he doesn’t know, ‘average’ or something. Every appreciation is interrogative. He smiles, sort of, his lips shaped into an equal sign balancing another disconnection, another rift. He knows every time he thinks he ruins something. It’s as if his way of thinking supernaturally ages any sensation his body approaches. These sensations degrading rapidly: judge, jury, executioner; a face being eaten by a sentence of time, a kitsch horror at play in the mundane, words finally. Words like broken toys assembled into brief novelties resembling play, a linguistic cube functioning within its messily stickered logic. Hands will wring themselves over these items, why won’t they work as play? Finally you grow bored of toys but they continue to manifest in the empty associations they leave behind. Banana skins and skates at the top of the stairs, brake pads cut, rails suspiciously removed from stair banisters. The words become possessed toys trundling towards you like toddlers (but flying occasionally and demonically across the room at you) and stuffing your mouth with suppositories as you begin to talk more and more shit. These toys ‘in production’ as we speak. Toys manufactured on a line, arms attached to heads. Toys whose stumps are impossible to cauterize. Cauterize being a word, words being stumps, stumps being stakes.
—Henry’s thoughts are a physical presence in his body and they believe this body the way a mental patient believes in their strait jacket I.E in fits and starts.
—The world’s a hard sell and the word’s a soft cell
—He’s not amusing himself. Always this urge to dominate the experience, the fear of it turning into a horizon even as it disappears beneath a hand one cannot chance to peek under. A repeated loss of faith diminishing whatever might have been captured so that one does not even bother to look after your own disbelief. Henry displaying a real midas touch in which value or beauty becomes entirely attendant to a utility approaching zero, the useless sameness of everything he might light upon. Each supposed depth merely another surface initialling the total.
—For instance the light in the garden now, an anointment of light, under which heather and tomato vines make a palsied sign of the cross over the soil in a just started breeze; the truth of haloes in the soft matrixes of the garden and Henry feels only the laborious overturning from an uncomfortable yet mentally associative chill to a quiet bodily pleasure felt in alien light. A sensation separating, shipping away from his thought into a caging trace of distance. The day getting away from him.
—I can’t stop, I must stop.
—Again the allusion isn’t funny just reflexive. He flannels his face with a forearm. His hair is stuck up and concentrically sweated through. The sweat like the pulse of a radar with nothing on its sonar.
—Henry extends a hand opening and closing it in the light. He exhales unconsciously. The gesture isn’t meant to mean. The light coats the hand in a thin glove of heat and the world for a moment has a quality of indifference less dialectically aggressive than usual. Henry makes himself feel unopposed and meek. He knows its lame. He looks back towards the house.
– – Don’t think about anything.
—Henry is walking to the playground at the top of the right hand hill. He might sit on the swing, smoke on top of the slide’s ladder. It’s an extension of the hand’s unknowing. There are degrees of pointlessness. He has to go farther, farther into the forms of nothingness, far enough, he thinks, that it might at last exceed the reach of his searching.
—-
*
p.s. Hey. So, yes, as I basically said in the intro up above, please give some time this weekend to reading and then giving your thoughts on Tomkendall’s new fiction. Even a few words from you would be very helpful. I really appreciate your participation, and I’ll be giving my thoughts about the work towards the end of the weekend. ** Allesfliesst, Hey. Oh, drat, it’s a virtual certainty, barring international calamity, that I’ll be in LA visiting and doing Halloween spooky house research with Gisele and Stephen when you’re here in Paris. That sucks. What’s the official reason for your Paris trip, if there is one? I was at an art opening last night too. Jean Luc-Verna at Air de Paris, crowded but not so much so that I couldn’t get in, but, oh boy, the mugginess. It might as well have been raining. Very cool about your impending performance. Do you have to memorize a script or just access your theoretician side and free associate? I hope it gets vidded then uploaded, obviously. And I hope you were able to check off your ‘duties’ of yesterday one by one. Especially the door. Doors are important except when that word is the name of a rock band. ** Tomkendall, Hey, it’s the man himself and of the hour! ‘TMS’ comes out on November 1st, so the wait isn’t too long. I don’t think there’ll be any excerpts before that. It’s not very excerptible. I’m still trying to figure out how the hell I’m going to read from it at events. Anyway, happy and proud to have your work here this weekend, man. I hope it goes greatly and as helpfully as possible. You’re the best. ** Empty Frame, Hi. Well, do you mean starting now or do you mean I could only have ever seen the filmic output from one country? I’m thinking it’s the latter. If so, with no hesitation, yes, France. If I’d never seen Bresson’s films, I don’t know what would have become of me. In second place would be … I think the USA. Third place, hm, Japan, I think. Fourth … Germany, I guess. I’ll stop there. My allergy effects go like this: First, I start feeling a tingling that turns into numbness in the body part(s) that are touching the non-organic clothing. Then I get a weakness in my legs and arms. If I don’t remove the clothing at that point, I flush red and get a really bad headache, and the glands in my throat swell up painfully. I don’t think I’ve ever not removed the offending clothing at that point, so I don’t know what happens next. It depends on the color too. Dark colors are the very worst. With white, it’s the mildest. For instance, whenever I sleep in a hotel bed, I get mild allergies, and if the sheets are even mildly colored, I spend the next day with a headache and feeling kind of weird. Also, it depends on the body part. My legs are the least effected, which is why I get to wear non-organic jeans, although I have to wear them very loose, and even so they give me mild allergies until they’ve been washed a bunch of times. The most quickly effected body parts are my neck, arms, hands, groin, and feet. That’s probably a lot more information that you were asking for, sorry. Hope the married Greek did you up good. ** Pilgarlic, Man, that Tybee life sounds nice. Oh, ‘peeps’. Is that the same ‘peeps’ as in the marshmallow ‘peeps’? I got kind of mixed up on the DBT thing. It’s not a box set, it’s a ‘deluxe’ limited edition version of ‘The Big To-Do’. I just tried to find a pic of it, but I couldn’t. The cicadas might even learn something from Coil. Never underestimate whatever it is that makes their teensy brains — if they have brains in our understanding of that term — work, I guess. Nice, beachy weekend to you. ** David Ehrenstein, Lovely Belmondo rhapsody, sir. A total pleasure. Oh, that makes complete sense about the rerelease being timed with the Almodovar, of course. I’m very curious to see ‘Contagion’. Great reviews over here from its Venice Film Festival showing. ** James, Hey. Thanks for the good words. It’s okay ‘cos it made me realize I need to thicken my skin re: the novel’s reviews, and hopefully I can do that, ha ha. Oh, cool, a spirit lifting blog entry from you. I’ll go luxuriate in it once the p.s. is history, thanks! I should share the good vibes. Everyone, writer/.d.l. James has a new entry on his blog that you might want to check out. In his words, ‘It’s about working at Circle K when you’re 22, fresh out of college, floundering. It’s about huffing Reddi-Wip when no one’s looking. It’s about parking lot ghosts, and Ben Nighthorse’s sweet chopper. It’s about jerking off while considering the Ice Boys. It’s about loving your mom … ‘. Sounds pretty tasty, right? Go here. ** Tosh, Hey, T. I’m really glad to hear that your uncle is getting a lot better. Yeah, thicker skin is my aim. I think I’ve managed to thicken it a little. Anyway, thank you, kind sir, for the commis. ** L@rstonovich, Hi, bud. Glad you liked the Belmondo, and heck yeah about the co-star stuff. So, you’re unplugged now, right? So, if you see these words, it’ll be on the other side of your creative windfall. What happened? What did you do? Are you okay, ha ha? Never have read that Eno book. It’s one of those perpetual ‘intend to’ things. Sounds awesome. I’ll check Shakespeare & Co. first. All right, give us the good word when the internet feels safe again. ** 5strings, In Pavement’s case, I always thought it was rocks with their asses out. But you know me. Dino Jr. is awesome, of course. You listening to the old or new stuff? Besmirching the godlike Melvins?! Say it ain’t so. May a bar of soap end up in your mouth, ha ha. Hard Rock Cafe makes a reasonably mean veggie burger. Props from me to it for that. I always seem to end up sitting under Lita Ford’s undershirt. The French Eric Roberts … that was ‘mouthful of coffee spewing’ funny, man. Wtf?! Before Eric Roberts’ horrible car accident requiring extreme facial reconstruction in the 80s, he was just about the cutest guy ever. Impossible to believe, I know. Bob Mould wrote lying bullshit about me in his recent memoir, so I’m avoiding things to do with him at the moment. Maybe his balls’ shrinkage explains the lying bullshit, ha ha. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hey. Yeah, you’re right. That’s so weird. The first time I read through the comments, I saw yours, but when I went through them the second time to do the p.s., I somehow scrolled around weirdly and it got lost between the cracks. Sorry about that. I fear that happens sometimes. Anyway, as I meant to say yesterday, that’s potentially great news about the NYC run for the theater piece, obviously! Hope the money falls into place. It would be great if you were in NYC when I am. I could actually finally just hand you that weirdly elusive, ever getting lost prize you won here a ways back. ‘Stavisky’ is great, no doubt about it. Personally, I wouldn’t rate it up with ‘Marienbad’ or ‘Providence’ or ‘Muriel’ or ‘Mon Oncle’, but that’s not to say it’s not fantastic and that you should definitely see it. I’ve seen ‘Moderato Cantible’ and the color (his first) Melville. Neither is a masterpiece. I think ‘MC’ is the better of the two. Both are worth seeing if not necessarily worth chasing down with too, too much effort. ** Steevee, Hope the Cronenberg interview comes through. I’ve heard mixed things about his new one, but the positive reviews seemed more trustworthy than the disliking ones. Man, waiting for editors to get back to one sucks, but, yeah, you know how it goes. Hopefully you’ll hear something by the beginning of next week if you haven’t yet. ** Wolf, Hey. Interesting about the Belmondo vs. Delon thing. I can’t remember if there was a similar actor thing in the US when I was growing up. There were big music rivalries. Like it was Grace Slick or Janis Joplin, one or the other. I was a Grace Slick kid 100%, and I still am, even though I have induce amnesia about everything she’s done in the last thirty years to stay loyal. Dude, you’re killing me with that pancakes stuff. My computer is shorting out due to mouth fall out. I’m way into myrtilles. Myrtille muffins, holy shit! I have to make myrtille pancakes now, that’s just all there is to it. I’ll have to borrow a pan from someone. And maybe a campfire too. And I will, as God is my witness. Oh, wait, as Someone is my witness! ** Sublethal, Hey, man. ‘Stacking’, hm, I’ll look that up even though I don’t have an Xbox. I like that not quite closed mouth thing too. Actually, even complicated guys do it, and when they do, it’s just so poignant. What are your writing projects like? You mind saying? New Lynne Tillman, yeah, I love it. A favorite of this year. And Kavan rules, obviously. I really like Red Lemonade. I spend a fair amount of time there. In fact, I spent some time there yesterday because a fine writer who is also a d.l. of this blog posted some of his novel there. Yeah, I think it’s a terrific project. What do you think? ** Bernard Welt, Hey, B! Happy to see you! I’ve missed you! Oh, aren’t you nice. Yes, you are. I’m glad you’re all better and that the Uncanny class plus possibly, hm, astrology caused the upgrade. Gooder than good to see you. I’ll greedily await your unstressful, unbusy moments. ** Kyler, Hey. Yeah, Paris is amazing that way. Six years later, and I’m still all wow. I’m like the characters in ‘Groundhog Day’ who aren’t Bill Murray. I should download the ‘Stavisky’ soundtrack. I have it on vinyl, but my vinyl lives in LA. Okey-doke, you have a fine weekend, my friend. ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul. It hardly gets better than ‘Pierrot le fou’, that’s for sure. It’s weird that you went to the zoo because for some completely inexplicable reason, I had Simon & Garfunkle’s ‘It’s All Happening at the Zoo’ or whatever it’s called playing relentlessly in my head yesterday, and I don’t even like S&G;, and the Paris zoo is closed for refurbishing. Happy about the good week of writing, man. Very bon weekend. ** _Black_Acrylic, Belmondo is kind of the ultimate cigarette smoker among his many other virtues. Gosh, I hope L’Anarchiste lives up after all that waiting and hoping. ** Bollo, Hi, J. I need to get the new Believer. Thanks for giving me even more reason to. Jan Verwoert, very cool. You’re djing the closer? Do you need to make the people dance? I hope not, but I’m sure that if you do, you’ll make them dance interestingly. Wow, I can see why that is driving you insane. That’s awesome. Everyone, this is driving Bollo insane in a good way, and, having just watched the beginning of his insanity’s source, I think I am now insane in the good way too. You want to take a chance and join us? ** Creative Massacre, Hey. Oh, so it’s kind of like the WWE retirement home show but without the retirement part or something? Hogan is still wrestling? That is scary. If he can still do it, I want Rowdy Roddy Piper to come back. I’ll check for clips. Thanks, pal. How are the plans for your big move going? ** Chris Cochrane, I haven’t cemented my November NYC arrival date yet. I have to coordinate with HP about that. So, afternoon of the 12th means I would need to come to NYC on the 11th, I guess. I think that should be fine. Give me a day to make sure. Uh, there’s someone at the Wire that Gisele has contact with, and I’m seeing her in a few hours, so I’ll ask her who it is. Brandon Stosuy at Pitchfork. Uh, I need to concentrate on possibilities. I haven’t yet. I will pronto. I’ll send you my agent’s address by email. Feel better, and have a rarin’ weekend. ** Sypha, Hey. Well, it seems like I’ll be in NYC from about the 11th or 12th through the 15th. Yeah, I can see the interweaving for sure. I like the idea of them interweaved with a fantasy novel. I can sort of imagine it, but it’s also mysterious in a cool way. ** MANCY, Hey. Good about the Seattle embrace. I guess enjoy the transitioning if you can. Soon enough you’ll be a Seattle old hat, which will no doubt be nice, but crossfade periods always seem to end up being really memorable for some reason. ** Sailor, Hey, Sailor! I’m really glad you came back. Awesome! Hope you have great weekend! ** Misanthrope, He’s only let himself go, career-wise, although, I guess if you’re a certain kind of person, you might think he has become a respectable citizen. Always happy to almost make you almost vomit, man. Well, unless what you were going to vomit was nutritious and would improve your life by having been fully digested. Maybe you can get one of those tennis balls on a tall bendy stick thing for inclimate days like these. Cars are the devil. Mine is actually very kind, though, or so I hear from a great distance. Sucks dude. The money, the car. You deserve better, man. ** Okay, everybody, please peel your eyes and sharpen your senses and spend some of your weekend with the workshop-lodged works of Mr. Tom Kendall, thank you very much! I’ll see you in the comments arena when Sunday starts getting dark, and I’ll see you back here on Monday.
Now available in North America 
*
Tom, is this about AIDS?
I'm also curious as to you disinclination toward diaogue. Is the entire novel a recit? (This is not a criticism, just a question.)
Nice evocation of semi-conscious states.
Latest FaBlog: 9/11 and a Half
Dennito, sorry to tempt you thus with my pancake conversation. Fucking bear started it. I made some vegan pancakes the other day but much as it pains me to admit, i just don't think vegan pancakes can work as well as traditional ones. It's tough. They were kinda bland. On the other hand, i made some lasagna yesterday that i reckon are now a strong contender for World Wonder 8; i have somehow invented the recipe for the best bechamel sauce you could imagine. Turns out that even though my artistic talent have stalled to a Sartean neant, i'm still a fucking genius in the kitchen. All is not lost.
Tom:
First of all, let me congratulate you, both for having the testicular fortitude to throw your fine work to us cruel beasts, and secondly for the quality of and obvious effort involved in creating said Fine Work.
I will have to digest it more and perhaps read it a few more times to comment on the general structural issue you mention, regarding time-frames.
So far, i really like it and am quite impressed, honestly. I won't go on about how clever and stuff it is, but rather let you know the points that to me raise some questions:
(i spotted a number of typo/spelling/grammar errors but whatever, those can get edited)
I really like the tone of it. I admit to being a sucker for everything scientific-sounding, and the cold descriptive sentences hooked me. I suspect they're not exactly hooky by nature, though, and even though i loved them i thought some might be too long and complex synctactically; i find that surgical description works best with short, rigorous sentences of pretty basic construction: they can then give the text a steel-like rhythm that contrasts nicely with the subjectivity of the other passages, and create a good dynamic. (All those points apply to the first part mostly, note)
On the other side of that in/out – subjective/objective dynamic, the broken-up bits of dialogue/internal monologue really work, i think. I find them compelling and powerful; maybe there could be more of them? Scattered through the more traditionally prosed paragraphs?
On the whole, i wonder how easy it'll be to read a succession of similar chapters; i like that it's all quite demanding and at the same time i did get a bit lost a few times. Partly 'cause i'm kinda thick (regardless of appearances), but i feel there could be more, i don't know, "anchors"? Elements that some kind of common ground can reach out through… I don't really know how to phrase that, or even explain it. But after having read the whole thing twice i felt that the fiction was floating, which was a strength as it makes it intriguing and challenging, but could also be a weakness if say a hundred pages are going to follow one another in a similar way. But then again maybe it's the opposite, and having more to chew on will actually cement the whole thing together. Mmh. That's quite possible, actually. Quite curious to see how a chunkier amount of that novel works out.
Anyway, congratulations. It's brave work, really interesting (i don't mean that in a "..mmhh…. interesting" way!) and clever. I'm pretty sure you've got some long headfuck hours ahead of you, so good luck with that!
A letter from Little Jerry Salinger
@ Bollo, yeah I saw that PONPONPON clip the other week. I could never quite get into the madness of J pop, but that, well. The point at 1.30 when she farts out the cartoon shapes. It like really opened my eyes.
Thomas (Tom?), great post, lots to chew over in this excerpt. You have many beautiful descriptive passages here, too many to list my favourites I especially liked –
'The words become possessed toys trundling towards you.. These toys ‘in production’ as we speak. Toys manufactured on a line, arms attached to heads. Toys whose stumps are impossible to cauterize. Cauterize being a word, words being stumps, stumps being stakes..'
There was a secondary description in the original passage of words as demonic toddlers but I think the toy analogy is strong enough to stand on it's own. I understand the complex language is a comment on the inability of words to capture the essense of a thing but it can get exhausting trying to work out what is happening.
I agree with a lot of what Wolf says re: anchors. The text is disorientating (intentionally, i think) and there are metaphors within metaphors within wild, dizzy descriptive passages which can get really dense and hard to follow.
'The clouds acting like a kind of child’s viewfinder for the light, their overlaid mazily tiered arrangement around spaces lagging between them creating these synonymous strangely diamonded absences that rotate through occlusion and convergence so that the narrowing juts or wide spotlight of the beams trickle or burst in a roughly circular, mindlessly searching pattern.'
I think a stronger structure, a sequence of events that guide the reader through each characters movements would 'anchor' the piece and keep it moving through the story. Maybe you could write the individual strands one at a time before breaking them up so each thread retains it's own plot and direction?
With breathing space, the gorgeous descriptive passages will have more impact and the reader won't get as lost in the exhausting labyrinth of words (until you want them to..!)
Really enjoyed reading through this, you pack more original desription into a paragraph than most writers do in a whole novel. Can't wait to see how it progresses!
Thanks for sharing,
Sailor x
P.S Dennis – How could I not return after such a fabulous welcome? 😀 Hope you're having an inspirational weekend! x
No bra you're thinking of Crowbar j/k.
Malkmus' ass would have to be a rare gem.
Khaki, tattersals, 'nilla milk.
I've been listening to a good mix of Dino Jr.
"Forget The Swan" to "I'm Over It" etc.
They fucking wail dude.
HAHA I think I just caught a Dadaist lightening-bolt offa Buzzo's fro.
I like the Melvins ok.
I'm just not the rocker I used to be.
I really like 80's ballads and sad indie these days.
Indie boys at 40, gotta love it.
I think David Coverdale will be making an appearance in the novel.
I'm seriously considering going vegetarian.
I'm way into beans and love tofu.
Yeah, I like veggie burgers made with black-beans.
I have a Puerto Rican cousin that makes a banging mess of black beans.
The only thing is, if I go vegetarian it's gonna be vegan.
I would do it for health, but dairy's starting to gross me out.
I'll have to give Hard Rock's veggie-burger a go-round.
LOL it's like it's meant to be.
I like Lita's music. I've Kiss Me Deadly and Shot of Poison on the ipod.
I wonder what the like reverse groupie action was like with her?
"Like Steve McQueen, all I need is a fast machine."
I see guys with that Steve McQueen look and I just stop right there and insert a finger into my ass.
I don't know about Eric Roberts, he's got a kind of creeper-charismatic look about him.
So was he like an action-star?
He's on those intervention shows now for Cannabis Addiction – PD NOS
Oh really? That's weird. I didn't know he wrote the Daily Show theme.
Oh dude, I heard they're making a remake of They Live!!
Off to check out TKendalls work.
Salut
PS. Been reading Last Exit to Brooklyn, it's a riot!
Eric Roberts was never an action star
I was dreaming of this painting just before the second plane hit Night Burn
oops here it is – the artchive is a great site btw Night Burn
tomkendall – I like the technical but not clinical tone, reminds me of ttle Auden more than a little bit. Year of 13 Moons's abbatoir sequence has a similar 'warmth.'
Watched Anthony Minghella's travesty version of Talented Mr. Ripley. Clement still has the advantage with Plein Soleil and Delon's 'dissolute Riviera opportunist.' How the hell did AM think he was improving novel by adding two characters?
DavidE et al – hav e you seen Barry Pepper in RIPLEYS GAME?
Hi Dennis
i have a dark disco side that appears every so often, its very offensive. i might just play ponponpon over and over again.
but i think some electronica and hypnogogia to start the night off.
@ BA
anyone farting cartoons is doing something right. jpop is my dirty secret. erm off to listen to some burzum and noise now carry on…
Haven't seen the Cavani. But I adore the Minghela, even though he softens Ripley.
And here's why.
Matt, Gwyneth and Jude are reunited this weekend in Soderbergh's Contagion.
And it's Philip Baker Hall's Birthday.
Meanwhile Cliff Robertson has left the building.
impressions of a first reading:
this is a real roller-coaster of a novel
the word to word is a leap of faith
the severity of the metaphoric implodes in the form of the page
i think if properly weeded and framed you'd have a sort of cubist thrill ride
maybe have several people read it aloud and listen for the natural tendencies in the music of the story
i think this process may help in cementing the desired expressions
i think this work is evidence of a paradox of the provocative and the mechanical
the effect of the work is like finding a crystal on a dusty shelf between say Kesey and DeLillo
ThomK, great work man, anxious to read it again and again
A number of year sback I had a Ripley-a-thon at my house. I had a Japanses laserdisc of Purple Noon and a DVD of The Talented Mr. Ripley I shwoed them back-to-back. Great fun.
Tomkendall, First of all, this is great stuff on a sentence-by-sentence level, original and very interesting. I usually don’t care for description but this doesn’t seem like description for description’s sake. My sense was rather that the method behind the prose here has its own importance, an importance that’s at least equal to that of what’s being narrated. And I felt that this impression of mine was supported throughout the text such as in the little meditation on the importance for certain people of making slight semantic distinctions in order to orient themselves vis-a-vis the outside world, if in fact the world really is outside for them in the first place. That sort of thing was enough of an anchor for me, to use a term that’s come up in earlier comments.
As to your specific questions, I feel like I haven’t seen enough to say much that is helpful. You’re asking whether there’s a noticeable parallel between the first and second sections here. They did seem of a piece in tone and style but I of course don’t know whether the intervening chapters present a contrast in this respect. The image of the clouds in the first para of the second section reminded me of the image of the fan in the first of the first. It occurs to me that if you really wanted to underscore this you could move those images to the first sentences of each and work backwards from there. Idk if that’s helpful.
Let me point out that just because a reader notices that two passages mirror each other doesn’t mean he necessarily understands what this is meant to convey. So if this is something it’s important to pick up on maybe you should do something more to make the connection clear, if possible? Your question presents an alternative, whether to use this mirroring device or some other means. Does it have to be an either-or thing?
If your question boils down to should you be direct or subtle, I would say be as direct as you can without violating what you’re essentially trying to do. Personally as a reader I’m always willing to take pains as long as there seems to be some point to them. But as soon as I get the feeling I’m being fucked with (unless of course that IS the point) then I’m outta there.
Dennis, Oh yeah, young Patti Smith and Natassja Kinski, hubba hubba. My nose fetish is tingling. Good luck with your “research” on spooky houses in LA this Hallowe’en.
tom, just some very short remarks on your text because i only had time to read it once: very carefully crafted sentences, the complexity and heaviness of (almost) every one of them quite alluring. like alan i'm not into extensive description normally, but it's interesting how description seems to be less the 'flesh' for a narrative skeleton here but more like the main dimension where narrative movements occur as twists every now and then. i like that, conceptually. the question is (and i only repeat what wolf and alain have said), how to make that work on the level of engaging a reader. i must admit that reading through those two chapters was quite a struggle for me. there were parts of sentences that gave me pleasure, while reading the whole text was more like work. that's not per se a bad thing, of course, and it tells at least as much about me as about your text. i hesitate to draw conclusions also because i don't know about the rest of the novel: if these two chapters similar in style and rhythm are contrasted by a different style and rhythm in others, their complexity and heaviness may be just great. if the whole novel is kinda like that, then breaking up the homogeneity in terms of rhythm, pace, tone etc. at least in certain places might be something to consider. sorry for not being more specific, this is just an impression. good luck with the novel — there's a lot of good work there, obviously, and i think it's all about opening it up at some points for readers to be able to enjoy its intricacies.
dennis, so the bad spell hasn't been broken, huh? well, one day i'll hunt you down and we'll have that dinner together, if i have to kidnap you and tie you up with organic rope and force-feed it to you. just kidding, nevermind, there'll be another chance. we will visit a friend in paris who quit her teaching job in tokyo because she thinks the situation is too unsafe (she has a 9yo boy, so that's an understandable decision). we spontaneously decided to say hi. a few days in autumnal paris did't seem half bad (just saw "midnight in paris" last night, and there are some things i've been wanting to discuss with gertrude stein for a while, so…). — the performance has no script, so there is nothing to learn. seems like i just have to be who i am and do what i usually do. on friday night we spent more than an hour searching for christoph schlingensief's grave. the cemetery wasn't even that big but my friend had only a very vague description and since there is no gravestone with a name on yet, all we had for identification was the info that s.'s wife had planted an apple tree. the tree was short and thin as a twig but we finally found it. and got out of the cemetery shortly before it was closed.
Hey guys,
David Ehrenstein, thank you it's not really about AIDS though… I'm curious to see why you'd make that reading? The lack of dialogue is partly down to the section on show focusing on individual characters and also party down to the fact that i don't think i'm too great at it and easily get embarrassed (as in life haha)
Wolf, Thanks a lot and I hear you about 'the anchors' thing, it's something i've been working on a lot but i guess i still have a long way to go. I've tried to mix and match the novel formally so that
the reader doesn't get too stuck in the morass of this kind of prose. There's some pretty broad comedy at play in a few sections to offset this kind of stuff.
Sailor, hey nice to meet you. I've bookmarked your blog to check out later cause it looked so interesting. Thank's for the kind words and i think you've made some pretty astute points. I think if i graft some of the prose to the body some more it might help anchor it?
Hey David, thanks man. I've not read any Auden but i'll check some out.
5 Strings, thanks man! I'm gonna need someone help me edit and weed though…
Alan, thanks for your thoughtful and sustained response. You've nailed what i was trying to do with the descriptive passages, to me at least they're the real inquest of the piece. In terms of the mirroring structure I think i need to think a little bit more about exactly what effect I'm going for and what i want it to produce in reader…
also maybe my questions at the beginning of this piece weren't so smart or helpful to anyone reading it. Thanks again man
phew. I didn't realise how long the piece i put up here was! Sorry! Thanks to everyone
@TK nice to meet you too! I once read somewhere that there is an evil voice inside every writer, cackling maliciously at everything you write, whispering that it sounds ridiculous and isn't any good. When you say you aren't too good at dialogue, embarrassed etc it says lots to me that I recognise. Shut the voice up and plough through, get down exactly what you wanted to say! Honesty is really fucking powerful.. Sx
Hi Tom,
Thanks for putting your work up here today. I've read it through a couple of times with a gap in between, and here are my thoughts:
Firstly, you do a good job of grappling with that business of conveying the infinitely-recursive fussiness of a sleepless/stoned/concussed state, where everything no matter how mundane becomes complex and hard to manipulate. The challenge with this is that one usually has to judge it very finely not to drive away most readers. Gombrowicz is a master at this sort of thing, for instance. If you haven't read it, you might get a real useful jolt out of his book 'Cosmos'.
Secondly, I didn't clearly apprehend many links or reflections between the two sections. Very possibly this is because I was distracted by some of the issues I'm about to come to.
Thirdly, there are a number of s/p/g/meaning problems in the text which I feel need to be dealt with. A 'bull ring' is the arena that a bullfight happens in, not the nose-ring bulls are led about with, which confuses the image you're going for there. Considering the slide, 'warbled … surface' doesn't make sense to me. 'Council estates' becomes 'council states' later on. My own conviction is that when trying to convey the contending sensations of elusive states and a character's experience thereof, it's vital to first be concrete and lucid with language before obfuscating to taste and requirement with narrative devices. For instance, I was distracted by the shifts between your use of basic present tense, the present participle ("David closing his eyes and sighing…") and the past tense (the second sentence of the second para), and if these were intended as devices to convey some specific sense, I couldn't detect what sense was intended. I found that, or (to take another example) colloquial intrusions in the narrative voice, fairly frustrating.
That said: in the main I like your piece and found it rewarding to read. I enjoy the slipperiness of your characters' predicaments and their morbid contemplations thereof. I would like to know more of David's thoughts, and hopefully other parts of the M.S. allow me to learn. Imagining the processes of a mute is fascinating and deserve fuller treatments than allowed by, say, Stephen King. 'Downtown' (one word) was an inspired touch.
I thought it might have been about AIDS because there are evocations of illness — and I never not think about AIDS.
hey Allestflies, thank you for the reading and comments. The novel is made up of alternating chapters (between times, 3rd person narration and 1st person narration, tone etc etc) and what i'm hoping to do is through those switches break up this tendency towards abstraction that I find hard to rein in once i start.
DFG, that Cosmos book looks perfect for what i'm trying to do thanks for the recommendation. Also thanks for the close reading of the text, I get grammatically confused a lot and the second sentence that switches time would read a whole lot smoother if it was (were? haha) consistent with the first. cheers.
Dennis, Thanks so much for supporting all these great writers. I have been off line for fifteen days, first at Burning Man and then moving into my Venice home. Really missed your blog but had a blast going off the grid and reintroducing myself to myself! Looking forward to seeing you in October…also, wanted to know if you had an email address I could send you a note of a more personal nature to…and if you received the copy of Mad Anatomy that I sent?
Hey TK! – Man I was/am so excited for today. Problem is we have a long lost friend visiting today and I just dont have the time to dedicate to your writing that I need. What I will say is I read it once and I think it's quite superb. I want to see more, of course. I love how your sentences while metered and, to my eyes, perfect (in the way I think all great stylists (DC, Lutz, Didion, Carver, Kristof ….) also reach beyond their internal clock or rhythm/ balance where they kinda feel like they are going to spin out of control but then they just hit/end at this sweet spot. What I mean is your sentences are BMX guys on a half pipe just kinda spinning in the error, and they look like they may die, but then they land their trick. I hope that makes sense.
Here's some examples of what grabbed me.
"-David’s dream, about an ocean that had stopped and before which his father and mother and the dead twin who had followed him stillborn into this world were all telepathically ‘talking’ about their favourite flavour of pizza, retreats now to a small windowing glint."
and
"Henry’s watching Fiasco’s jaw move in and out along the roll of his molars like a possessed chest of drawers between each chaotically slammed word/staccato ran on sentence as Fiasco explains to him that a man in the pub paid him in speed, made him
– – meaning me, Fiasco,
take a large quantity of speed from the end of the mans knife while loudly declaring
– – the man that is
That he was fucking animal
– – A fucking animal, that’s what he said. A fucking animal. Voice like Bob Hoskins.
– – You got any left?"
and
" He colours the small percentage of his self into one of the triangular portions of the merry go round."
xoxo
Mark
oops, a couple typos but I don't have the where with all to fix them. What I meant to say was that your sentences, like the sentences of other great stylists are basically perfect, but then yours kinda reach beyond that perfection and go crazy and loose in this great way.
Hey Tom: I'm another one of those people who won't have time time this weekend for much detail, but I think your narratorial style and voice are very sure and mature, and certainly carried me along. I think (like Dennis) you've set yourself a few limitations that are in the nature of the project, so it shouldn't be approached through generalities of what maybe makes fiction work or not; it feels very coherent and measured to me. Alan is as always a very sharp guy to have looking at your work, I must say. Anyway, thanks; it's exciting to feel like this is real, serious stuff we're getting to see before the world at large.
WV: "blexpel" – I wish this were a polite word for "throw up."
"copters like a Sycamore seed" had such a great sound to it anyway, but i didn't know what a sycamore seed was, and when i google-imaged it it made the simile even better. and that's emblematic of the whole piece, the attention to detail and precision of language. bravo
-postit
Hey Dennis,
Hope you're doing well. Back from the conference on Thursday AM, and then busy busy catchup cuz I'm flying back to the UK tomorrow for a month to hang out with my folks and catch up with pals. Should be decent (touchdown sometime on Tuesday afternoon) but man I wish they could just put you under general at the boarding gate and roll a narcotized you on in some kind of crate. My experience of planes sucks. Going to be weird as hell to see the UK again, definitely.
Hey Tom. I've been in a bit of a weird mood this weekend,so I'm gonna apologise in advance if my comments are kinda all over the place or if my critical faculties aren't as organised as they should be but I wanted to leave a couple of notes because I was deeply impressed with the stuff you've posted here.
Firstly, as a few people have mentioned,some of your sentences are fantastic. I like how the longer and more sprawling parts (which are magnificent and rich and twisting) are punctuated with shorter,more clipped prose. The mix between some of the longer parts that start some of the passages and then the more restrained lines helps create this density that feels really intricate and well knotted. It adds a feeling of confusion that's disorientating and dreamy in a real powerful way. I also like how it feels that the idea if framework or the suggestion of physical structure (curtain rails,roofs,arches,angles) seems to be mirrored in each section. It gave me the sensation as the reader of being guided or moved around a maze that the rest of the piece created. For me,that mirroring works very well as a way of narrative propulsion and also for me makes the two sections fit together really strongly. In my opinion it feels like it works subtly but solidly. Hope that adds something or helps you in some way,and if not I just want you to know that this stuff is great and I'm really excited to see what becomes of it. Great stuff,man.
Thomas x
Tom, let me say first that I enjoyed this fragment of a longer novel as much as anything else ever presented here. Only absentee Joseph Goosey's hilarious monologue by a tv watching homosexual objectophile surpasses it for clarity and sheer fun. But if Joe's short piece is part of the unclassifiable whole sitting among my saved downloads from my pre iBook days, its' function is kite's -tail to a more grandiose work of almost dadaist comedy.
iIf misa has not piped up by now, we haven't heard from the one paid d.l. editor / proofreader on DC's. I can only speak as a helpful amateur.
Could explain what you mean by "chiropractic prose?" In the opening paragraph, I was slowed to a halt by "isolative", a nice enough word but not overlt usable. Sentence beginning " curtains … rooms" could survive a little pruning. "A ceiling fan … copters above [him} is the bones of a potentially lovely sentence.
I could go on in this needlessly close, niggling vein but I refuse! Your intentions are unknowable, I guess, but after a sprightly attentive reading through the rest of the dual chapters was a pleasing experience, to say the least.
Good luck to you Tomkendall
Tom,
Hey. First, and rather obviously, thank you a lot for giving all of us the chance to handle your work. I've found it to be a really engaging process, and I've gone through the work carefully, and my take is going to be full of questions, or at least a main question, and then speculations and propositions based on those speculations that may or may not be relevant much less useful.
The overriding question to me is about the voice, which I find very complex, maybe distractingly so in certain ways. First question/assumption: it has no set or fixed location, does it? I mean, it's a meta-voice, a slippery chorus of different perspectives collaborating within a single voice? I.e., at times it seems to be yours entirely — a writer playing extravagantly with style –, and at other times it seems to come from Henry but with heavy modulations and interference, and at other times it seems very removed and abstract, almost like notes you've scribbled in the prose's margins to remind yourself of what certain sentences or passages should be doing, and at other times, but most infrequently, it seems to be Henry's 'pure' voice/thoughts in which you take a totally hands-off approach. Does that make sense at all?
If so, it's a bold and amazing effect and strategy, but I'm not certain that it's functioning as well as it could. I like that it's jumbled, but I think it might be too jumbled at times. You know my particular interest in and style of editing, and, of course, take that into account because my approach might be inappropriate, but if I were looking at this work from an editorial perspective, I would weed it out somewhat, and I would also think about reformatting it a bit to make the prose and its constant shiftings and siftings more user-friendly. It's hard to address the issues that I think might need addressing because I don't know how the novel begins, or how it fills in the area between these sections, nor, of course, how it ends. I think it might help offset the density and very mixed quality (of these sections at least) if you were to consider, at the novel's beginning, distinguishing the different aspects and positions taken in the voice. Maybe separating the different strategies such that they have paragraphs to themselves and breathing space in-between initially to familiarize the reader with the voice's complexity, whereupon the voices could merge into the multiplicitous, chunk-like paragraphs you're working with a lot in this section of the novel.
One thing you do, and I think it's an interesting idea while finding it kind of problematic as well, is that sometimes you'll start a long sentence with a beautiful, poetic description of an action and then end the sentence with a kind of explanation or analysis of what happened earlier in the sentence. I tend to love the poetic stuff, and I think you do it just beautifully and originally and excitingly, but I'm not as into the way the explanations kind of deaden the poetry's effect. Examples of what I mean taken from the early part:
'The dream folded and passed like a secret note between brain functions before inserting its absurdities into some trace memory eject of the last twenty four hours rendering said memory’s hidden affect revisionist and counterfeit.'
'David’s brain glitches and ravines, his consciousness shooting up from under a quickly draining pool of sleep so that his sudden wakefulness emerges as if thrust into a wholly foreign and terrifyingly present, thus context free, world.'
(cont.)
To me, if you lost the last parts of those sentences, they would be more resonant and effective. Or, in the following case, it happens in two sentences rather than one. For me, the first sentence is really effective, and the second one, other than a couple terrific phrases like ' … less synaptically harried … ' seems mostly unnecessary to me. The mechanics of the fan are interesting, but I feel like the beautiful conclusion of the first sentence ends up being overly explained. I imagine that's your intention in some way, and I find that intellectually interesting, but I guess I want to hold onto the 'dream filled eye':
'There is a dissonance held between the hectic speed and hum of the turning fan and the serene elegance of its rotation in his dream filled eye. This partially due to the remaining blades being evenly spaced apart in pleasingly mathematical relationships so that the fan’s form seems unbroken and less synaptically harried than that of a fully equipped or less evenly remaindered fan.'
I found myself wanting to surrender entirely to the novel's voice with its varying locations and its influxes of the 'telling not showing' strategy because I find that jumpy approach so interesting, and yet, when sentences and groups of sentences like the ones I picked out arose, I often ended up stalled out a bit, questioning why the 'telling' needed to be there, and wishing that the showy pleasures were less qualified. I did a little exercise for myself, and I'll repeat it here to show you what I mean, and I hope you'll forgive me for manipulating your prose in the process. For instance, here's another early sentence:
'The ceiling fan’s blades continuing to glide around their unchanged axis above him though they, the blades, seemingly accrue and lose speed at various points during their revolutions as the fan tilts horribly in his perception.'
And here's an edit of the sentence that I undertook to see what would happen:
'The ceiling fan’s blades continuing to glide around their unchanged axis above him, the blades accruing and losing speed as the fan tilts horribly in his perception.'
That's not as interesting as your sentence by any means, but I found that losing the deliberate authorial and distancing touches like 'though they' and 'seemingly' brought what I like most about the sentence as fully into the foreground as my instincts seemed to want it to be. I guess my thinking is that if you thin out some of the sentences or sentence groupings where there's a cutting back and forth between the image itself and the narrator pointing out points of interest in the image, and regulate that mixture a bit more judiciously and perhaps with more clear divisions between the perspectives, the terrific coursing, tumbling quality of the voice at large might be smoother, and the shifts might have less of the jarring feeling of hitting speed bumps at times.
(cont.)
Of course, if my original idea of what you're doing with the voice is wrong, then none of this stuff will be applicable at all. So, I guess mainly I would like to know how you intend the prose/voice to function?
If I were to go through and mention all the fantastic, beautiful, strange, original and lovely instances of writing and imagery in this piece, I would fill up the comments arena on my own. I love your writing. Your voice is something special and something entirely yours, and I hope my questioning of certain things you're doing here contains implicitly within it how much I respect your writing, and how exciting I think this novel is and also seems totally destined to become. Thanks again a lot and love to you, Tom.
Hey Tom,
Really lovely stuff here. The depiction of semi-conscious states, and especially the bits about 'numbeness' in the first chapter, are wildly evocative and affecting.
In fact, I think that I only have one criticism, and it might not be a criticism at all….at the beginning of the second chapter, the description of the scenery is such that I actually have no idea where i am— I've been on council estates before (I'm from the US), but the descriptions of the topography/geography is almost needlessly long-winded and confusing…However, I feel like if this sort of confusion and 'maze-like' effect is what you're going for, then the first bits of the second chapter are quite amazing, as they do the job quite well. The anonymity that the confusion creates is tonally brilliantly.
Otherwise, I'd say that I don't mind the interiority of it. I tend to write in a very interior way, as well, and find books that deal more with characters' interior states to be infinitely more rewarding in the end.
Cheers, Tom. I know we'll read more great things from you soon.
Dennis!
Sorry I haven't posted since the day before the mix day, it's been wild over here in my neck of the woods. Thanks for posting that, and:
*thanks to all who listened/hung out with the music for a while. i know it was kind of a dark, weird mass of music, but it's a sound i'm really digging at the moment*
and of course, Dennis, thanks for your positive feedback. Hope that the aural pummeling didn't contribute too much to your iffy times in the past days.
Oh and in terms of those iffy times: I hope that they are passing. You are amazing and fuck a hater.
The thing about the George passing is sad. I found out the morning after an excellent day, and it colored everything that happened, but in the end, I just stared at the sky a bunch and thought about the weather diaries.
Later tonight, I'll be hanging out with KK & Dodie and so on, should be a good time.
xoxotrees
PS- Are these writing workshop days for strictly fiction-related stuff? Just wondering. Have only been here long enough for a few of them.
hey hey,
Mark Gluth thanks man, that bmx image is so nice… cheers
Bernard Welt, thanks man.
Post it/anonymous- thanks dude, still wanting to see more of your work.
Thomas M: oi,oi thanks a lot man. When you up in London next? Did you know secret chiefs3 are playing in October?
David, thanks. By chiropractic i just sort a meant that the sentences bend and fold all over the place or press into a knot or something. cheers
Dennis, thanks for such a long and involved reading man. You're right about the voice and what it's trying to do. The erasure of the poetic affect is purposeful but needs to be turned down and I think the instances you've picked are good examples of moments where that strategy isn't beneficial to the piece. The extract is from the latter middle section of the novel and i'm going to think long and hard about how I might re-edit the opening so that the piece orients the reader into this more merged voice. There's a trick in the novel that i'm trying to pull off and which can't be extracted from these two sections but which sorta explains the voice's lashing around.
This workshop has been really useful and I've got an awful lot of editing ahead of me but it feels good to know there's something there to winnow into.
Trees, Thanks dude. Is there anywhere online i could have a read of your stuff?
Tomkendall, Interesting exchange between you and Dennis. I did feel that the erasure he picked up on was something you were going for, and I thought it was distinctive and interesting, so I hope you’re not led to erase your erasure! Though of course you won’t be, you obviously have a well-developed sense of what you’re trying to do here. I just wanted to add that I’m looking forward to reading the finished novel, and in the meantime if you want to share any more drafts you can always send them my way.
Thomas:
Due to job exhaustion, I need to be brief–BUT–
As I've said on nearly every writer's workshop post, I don't feel comfortably being critical (positive or negative–not that negative is needed in your case) and always just try to encourage whoever has done the writing. I've read some of your stuff before because you've granted me the honor. I've always thought your writing was impeccable. This case is, obviously, no exception. So, if you could forgive me for not getting into specifics, I just want to let you know that I greatly admire your writing. Alongside other things, I really enjoy your short, almost aphoristic and poetic sentences like:
The light continues to trend in the well covered dip of his garden.
He colours the small percentage of his self into one of the triangular portions of the merry go round.
Every appreciation is interrogative.
Hands will wring themselves over these items, why won’t they work as play?
There are degrees of pointlessness.
Is this piece another piece from the novel extract you sent me a while back?
So, due to mental fatigue, I'd like to just reiterate that I really find your writing to be incredible.
Thanks for sharing it!
Jesse
This comment has been removed by the author.
Hey Tom,
I'm a bit late to the party here, but wanted to quickly throw in my two cents for whatever they're worth. First, I thought your prose was amazing, the word to word movement, the poetic descriptions, the imagery. I was in its thrall and thoroughly impressed. So mostly and mainly, congratulations! You're a really exceptional writer.
You said you thought you wanted the timelines of these two sections to ring. It's hard to say how effective that is without reading more in context. When they're right next to each other like this, I did catch some echoes and underlinings in terms of style and bits of content, but even then it was very subtle. I suspect that if they're spread out from each other in the novel that the ring would be muffled and maybe even muted for the reader. I think it's okay if this sort of thing is more subliminal. But if you feel strongly that you want the echoes to be immediately present for the reader, then I think you need to be more forthright. Maybe some of the content more obviously parallels each other? And if you're after planting this idea on the reader's radar I think it needs to come most strongly in the first few graphs. I like the ring of the playground in the second section but so much reading time has passed when it occurs at the end of the section that I worry it gets lost.
I agree with Dennis that some of the sentences – which are often rapturous when taken alone – could be trimmed down on occasion to help the overall flow of the sentences. In particular, I felt that Henry's reveries (the first one we saw especially) would be more potent if they were shorted and sharpened.
For some reason the my mother is a fish Faulkner reference jarred me and I thought was unnecessary, but the Beckett inversion I liked.
I loved the graph about Fiasco on speed and the way the dialogue breaks in throughout that. Really brilliant.
The time it took for the merry go round to transform into the UFO and "The gesture isn't meant to mean" were two things among many others that I thought were terrific.
Hope that helps & congrats on what I'm sure is a wonderful novel. Hope you'll share more of it with us soon.
–Jeff
Hey Dennis,
Going to see Swans tonight, which is as good a musical way to commemorate 9/11 as I can imagine. Heard they're playing 2.5 hour sets and testing epic new material. Sir Richard Bishop opens, which should also be good.
I wanted to circle back about our Skype chat. I'll be here tomorrow (Monday), Tuesday, and early Wednesday (EST). Then I'll be away until the following Monday. Whenever is fine, just wanted to let you know my upcoming schedule.
Hope all's well
This comment has been removed by the author.
This comment has been removed by the author.
I went to a Borders in Connecticut on its final day. You'll be glad to know they had several copies of HORROR HOSPITAL. While the CDs and DVDs were almost entirely gone, there were plenty of books left. In fact, the "gay fiction" section, most of which seemed to consist of the gay-male equivalent of chick-lit, was almost entirely intact.
the Belmondo post reminded me how hot I used to be for Godard release – it was just a different time. Pardon my fuck V. comment the other night – I was forget this is somewhat public forum. Sent an email via facebook to Ira, after I remembered his name to see if he wants a copy of the cd, sat down with a a friend and came up with a promotion strategy, where's the cute free intern slave to help me out…?
have a good week
Oh YUM!
Pour toi Chris
Thomas – Really didn't spend as much time w/ your work as would have liked, but for what it's worth I really like your writing.
As others have noted, your sentences can be really beautiful and impressive.
I think your representation of various internal states/thought processes was fascinating and apt… I really look forward to reading this more carefully when I have the time.
Hi Tom, thanks for posting your story—I always enjoy reading other people's work and reading yours has got me hyped up and inspired about writing in a lot of different ways. The main “hook” that kept me reading were the sentences and descriptions, some of which were extremely arresting and new to me. The idea of an opening and closing eye “gumming the image as if ruminatively drawing upon a teat” is really cool–comparing an eye to a mouth fills my head with all sorts of ideas, and for a few minutes I stopped reading just to think about that sentence for a bit.
For me, there were maybe 3 or 4 or 5 sentences like that on every page, and that was the most fun thing for me about reading your piece. I won't name every sentence I liked, but a couple of the images which were really unforgettable for me was the image of “the spread of morning sunlight rising over his torso, tucking him in” and then the next sentence “Everything is backwards.” Also the image of the character smoking a cigarette and imagining “two small mushroom clouds rising in a mirrored plume under the squinting eye of his heart’s sun” is something that I can't get out of my head, it's really beautiful and inspiring.
A lot of the sentences were very difficult for me to read and digest—it took me a while to work my way through the piece, and I had to reread some paragraphs several times. I think a lot of that is due to the basic sentence construction, which for me was a bit jumbled. I think the main thing that would trip me up was how interrupted some of the phrasing was—where you would say something and then qualify it, or undercut it, or add another detail—the sentences kind of curlicued around, is I guess what I'm trying to say. I felt like some of that was emminently justified, because the basic content of the sentence or image is so original, and you're saying so many things at once—but some of the sentences seemed like they could be made shorter and clearer without losing any of that.
Besides that, it's hard for me to say much about your characters or the plot. I could get a general sense of what was going on, but if I had to explain it all or summarize the story, I would have a lot of trouble. Basically what I picked up on (or assumed, either correctly or incorrectly) was that David is in bed in a hospital, easing in and out of consciousness and dream and semi-consciousness and memory. I picked up on the Faulkner reference so I started reading the story in a similar way to how I read As I Lay Dying, just from the point of view that the “narrator” is this sort of fluid consciouness that is going to drip and flow all over the place.
The character has dreams about his parents and an identical brother who died at birth. He thinks/remembers about a person named Fiasco, with whom he snorts some speed. And then he's out of the hospital, maybe in a dream or in a memory, and he's in Henry's backyard/playground.
The second part is about Henry, who either is friends with or lives with Fiasco. Henry is also on speed, and to me it felt like you were evoking a slightly fractured state of thinking because Henry is on drugs—in a similar way that David's thinking is slightly fractured because he's in the hospital, or drifiting in and out of wakefulness.
Anyway—I'm sorry if I screwed it all up and I'm misreading everything. In any case, it's sometimes helpful to know how other people might interperet your story. But thank you again for putting this story out there, it really did fill my head with ideas, and I enjoyed reading it. I'm going to go back through and read everyone else's comments, and yours as well—have a good week!
@postitbreakup
Hey man, I saw your comments from earlier and I just wanted to let you know I'm thinking about you, keep your head up…
Things will get better, it's inevitable. I know when I get super depressed (and I've had sucide attempts and stuff like that) I've learned that my thought process in that state can become pretty compromised sometimes, so I try not to listen too hard to what my brain is saying. I'm sorry to hear you're going through a rough time right now. But things will get better, you'll feel better. Until then, I'm sending out a whole lot of love your way…take care
Tom, Hmm, okay, I'm just going be as frank and as honest as I can and please don't see it as deflective somehow because this is the truth (and it's not a bad thing, I don't think):
You and I write so differently, or at least my idea of how to write a piece of fiction and your idea of same are so different, that I'm afraid that any criticism I might give would really be nothing more than, "You should write it this way and not that…"
I just can't get my head around how you do what you do. Really, I think it's a good thing. A good thing that we do things so differently. I admire your writing, the way you are able to string these exquisite sentences together. It's something I just can't do and wouldn't attempt.
So to avoid that, I'm going to pretend (as best I can) that I'm solely a reader who's picked up your book and in no way someone who also writes and give you my thoughts in that respect.
First, there are areas where there is unnecessary clarification:
"The last swelling remnant of his dream being of his, in the dream, identical twin brother asking him with a smile that David had felt,…"
"The arm that isn’t ending blackly around his, the man’s, crotch slides in…"
It was clear in both instances who you were talking about without having to point it out. Those extraneous clarifications just ruined the rhythm of th sentences for me, kind of put up stop signs that needn't be there.
As I was reading this, I kept repeating to myself, "Now that's a bit much" over and over. I think there's a tendency, even within sentences, to over-tell. Sometimes there's a flurry of adjectives that I think would be better if it was only one or two poignant adjectives.
Also, I'm wondering if you hadn't considered for the characters' thoughts more of a Joycean stream-of-consciousness technique rather than saying something like, "Henry thinks…," then going on with what almost seems like a philosophical treatise on a subject.
(Fuck! See? That's what I meant about us writing so differently and having such different ideas about what writing is. I just realized I'm pretty much telling you to write differently and I don't think you should. But I'm not gonna erase this comment. (Because I'm lazy.))
I wonder a bit about Henry and David. Their backgrounds, that is. They think awfully deeply about really insignificant, mundane things. I found myself almost getting bored reading some of these ruminations (more because I thought they were way too long and almost academic in the telling than that they weren't interesting or necessary per se). Whereas my interest piqued when things were actually happening (David getting out of bed, Henry talking to Fiasco, Henry smoking his cigarette).
Sorry for the crappiness of this. Like I said (about 50 times), your style is so foreign to me that I almost can't say anything without implicitly saying, "Write like me and not yourself." And there's reason why you should do that at all. Your writing's great, especially on a sentence to sentence basis. I guess I'm just wondering about the efficacy of so many philosophical ruminations on so many little details of regular, boring life.
Dennis, My car's 16 years old now, so it's just regular old wear and tear. It hasn't given me any other problems. Still sucks though.
Oh, there's nothing respectable about Alex James! (Or so I like to think; otherwise, he'd be totally unfuckable. ;D)
Eating is such a chore anymore. Anything with sugar and/or flour just makes me feel like shit. So vomiting's kind of good. Unless it's big, fat steak! RAWR!
Tom, I meant, "And there's NO reason why you should do that at all." 😀
hey hey,
Alan, I don't think im going to change the strategy completely but I do think I'm going to have to think a lot harder about when to deploy it. I may well take you up on your extremely kind offer, thanks man.
Jesse, hey man! Thanks so much for your kind words. Yeah it's from the same novel, one day it'll be finished.
Chilly Jay Chill, Cheers dude. I think the mother is a fish reference is a little bit jarring too, i kinda wanted it to be a throwaway signal but yeah not sure it works.
Mancy, thank you.
Chris Dankland, good to see you around and thanks for taking the time to read the work. I have a long process of re drafting ahead of me.
Misanthrope, Hey misa! thanks for your feedback and i think those sentences you point out are unnecessarily weighted. As for the style if it's not your thing at all then that's cool, 'different strokes for different folks etc, and i can completely understand why some of the stuff im doing might not appeal to certain readers. To my mind it makes it even nicer of you to struggle through the whole piece and to write such a thoughtful and self qualifying response. I've got a lot of work to do on this but hopefully by the end i'll have tempered some of the less friendly aspects of the style.
Just wanted to say thanks again to everyone and to Dennis for hosting this place. CHHHHEEEERS
Ciao Franco, grazie dei complimenti e del commento! In effetti durante il sonno la mente razionale va a dormire e si entr totalmente in uno spazio senza tempo dove è possibile ricevre insegnamenti e intuizioni.Non a caso il detto: “dormirci sopra”, quando si ha un problema di cui non si trova una soluzione.Anche Leonardo da Vinci per quel che ne so, usava il sonno e il sogno, come fonte di isipirazione per le sue invenzioni.Un abbraccio Anna
hope you guys can answer my question you know i had an emotional affair and i am back with my husband?trying to work things out i have be totally honest with him the question is that my heart is with my emotional affair but the rest of me mentally is with my husband how do i get back the love for my husband i want it back so much and i am finding so hard to let go how do i do this please its just so dam hard any advice i love thank you or is it to late for me we were separated for 1year
Your words about your mom touched me so deeply. I am so thankful for her amazing spirit – because you reflect is so well. The things you wrote about are so rich with meaning and I'm sure that she is looking down on you and your family with admiration. Prayers and blessings to you.
Calling all cars, calling all cars, we’re ready to make a deal.
Hmm. I can see the case for The Plan, but even then it only spoilers things up to the episode "No Exit" and could be easily watched between "No Exit" and "Deadlock". In fact, watching it before the final episodes would be preferrable. Razor, on the other hand, fits nicely into its chronological space circa Season Two despite airing right before Season Four.
I keep coming back to this post because its one of my short-term goals for this year; however, I need to think about it. I want to make sure that I have the time to devote to this project. I will be creating a few ebooks within the next few months some will be free, and others I’ll will be paid. They will deal with nutrition, fitness, and simple recipes related to natural beauty products.
Merci beaucoup pour vos conseils. En ce qui concerne l’agar-agar, j’en achetais avant dans les magasins bio, mais j’ai trouvé que le prix de 1 euro les 25 gr était plus intéressant dans les magasins chinois en général (TANG) à Paris . A bon entendeur! Longue vie à votre très intéressant site.