Following the previous post on Fénéon's Novels In Three Lines, I walked past this - entries in an as yet entirely incomplete compendium of narratives involving different minimally identified 'characters'.
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Following my entry about Cormac McCarthy's powerful book The Roadhere, Ant Hampton mailed pointing at a Guardiancomment piece by George Monbiot which uses the book as a starting point.
have you read felix feneon's 'Novels in Three Lines'. Fantastic.
Since this message didn't come from a number stored in my phone I was puzzled. I could see it was a New York number though and my brain was soon spiralling the list of possible senders of this kind of info, who also (a) happen to have my number but (b) whose numbers I don't have saved. A tricky contemporary problem of sets and subsets - not the first time I've stared at my phone thinking 'who the fuck would send me that'. I was even wondering for a brief moment if this message was some kind of viral spam dreamed up by a weird (or desperate) publishers. Mystery still unsolved I succumbed and texted back to say:
Sounds cool. Who is texting me btw?
(Best to deal with these things head on). To which the reply was:
Graham. New phone.
So that was all solved.
The book - collecting Fénéon's sequence of three-line items for the Parisian daily Le Matin in 1906 - does look like a really great catalogue of super-boiled, narrative poetics and I'm looking forward to picking up a copy. It's translated by Luc Sante too whose Low Life (about historical drink, drugs and other pleasures in Manhattan) is extremely good. Graham (admitting that he had time on his hands) even sent a picture of Novels In Three Lines later. Second time since I started this notebook that someone sent me a picture of a book. Here's a link to the previous.
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Mike Harrison just posted some interesting notes on Long Relay, and blogged this story last week in which an apparently random action gets supposedly explained, and then after years of further research, unexplained again. A new idea of scientific progress.
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This Storm drama here, unfolding in the background 24-7, is pretty gripping too.
Workshop in Amsterdam at AHK the last couple of days, working with Edit Kaldor on her pilot research project about contemporary dramaturgy. Forced Entertainment's Bloody Messis a case study and the 13 students are working two weeks around the piece, exploring practically. It was a pretty intensive/exhausting two days of focus for me and now they continue with Edit alone, headed towards showings next week.
What I liked most perhaps was the potential for miss-hearing and misunderstanding; the ways in which instructions in this context are often taken in unexpected directions. This, for sure, happens more in this workshop situation than in FE rehearsals - since a workshop like this one is a temporary group of people drawn from different disciplines, all with their own baggage and concerns, and who in any case have very different levels of familiarity with the aesthetic of the performance work they're looking at. I really liked this combination of unruly-ness and hesitation though. I liked that there's a friction, a pulling into new places as well as a sensitivity to the rules and frames that are set up, and the work - produced in between these things - was often really strong.
Watching the workshop in the morning yesterday I was already talking with Edit and making temporary assumptions about what material could be useful, and what was destined for some sort of revision or scrap heap. But I tend to be slow, and rather than act immediately on this set of inclinations we tried to keep things open, throwing some of the less defined material into a couple of open-ended improvisational structures, 'just to see'. This was the highlight for me.. Seeing the stuff that had been unclear at first get space and time to be something, to make its potential clear. And seeing how this process also unlocked other material, other potential in the work. I had to remind myself a bit how valuable it can be to take time, to work with things, to see where they can go... instead of making snap judgements. Know nothing as a kind of operating principle. Or maybe know as much as you can and then try to forget it for a while.
(All this of course, in a context where there's a totally absurd short amount of time. So in this instance 'taking time' means pushing something for an extra hour....)
The girl working the counter at the chip shop stands with half closed eyes and looks bored out of her mind, constantly flips flops the chewing gum in her mouth from side to side, each move done with a strange sidewards autopilot flick of the lower jaw - a manoeuvre that makes her look like some kind of lizard.
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On the train, months before, some kid on the train plays up and makes mischief to the great annoyance of the lone parent on duty, who streams constant and impotent verbal warnings while the kids' feet are all over the seats, his yells are all over the carriage, his fingers are all down in his brothers mouth.
You'll be in trouble if you carry on like that, you'll catch it. You'll get in trouble, I'm telling you. She pauses, making no emphasis at all. You'll get it. You’ll get punished. I'm warning you. I'll punish you.
The punish word kicks the kid from physical antics to some expanded verbal phillosophical mode. What is punish? He says Mam, mam, I don't know what punish is. She ignores him but he somehow knows that the audience of passengers are on tenterhooks. Mam, he says again. What is punish? What is punish? What does punish mean? She's no wannabe lawyer though, no amateur philosopher, and just won't be drawn into these kind of word-game conjectures or definition rows; her answer is just a long look out the window.
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Will be in New York soon, but have already missed this show of pictures by Kohei Yoshiyuki, which is a shame. Guardian article about it here.
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