September 2015

How to Write Experimental Fiction in Five Easy Steps

By Christopher Higgs.

‘It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.’

– Alain Badiou, Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art 

Step One: never render visible.

‘Clarity,’ Trinh T. Minh-Ha tells us, in her book Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, ‘is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power: together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order.’

Order cannot be other than sickness.

Release limpid syntax. Abandon and forget all the workshop groupthink about plot unity character unity setting unity and theme unity of plot character setting theme character setting or theme or unity. Those elements are enemy combatants.

From MOTHERBABYHOME

 

 

By Kimberly Campanello.

To Ann, Finally…

By Alice Butler.

Dear Ann, you were the danger secretary too. You put the secret in secretary. I think of you clocking off from your typist job at the Royal College of Art, and catching the bus to your Notting Hill bedsit, where you would tap away at the manuscript of your first novel. It was named after that painter you had a crush on: Adrian BERG.

Dodie longs to write like Kathy Acker, but I wonder if Kathy Acker longed to write like you.

Adding Colour

 

By Dominque Cleary.

 

One Sunday, in the spirit of de-cluttering his life, my father mentioned a first edition book for which he had no further use. It probably was the only one he still owned. He told me the author was Wallace Nutting. I hadn’t heard of him so didn’t react. He hadn’t offered it to me outright so thought he might give it to one of my siblings who live abroad. But then he told me he had only recently read it, he would probably not read it a second time and that I might find it interesting. I told him most people don’t ever read the first edition books they own. They just collect them like trophies.

Frames

By Daniela Cascella

1. Click, Slide

Between 1938 and 1940 a teenager student attends a series of art history lectures at Bologna University in Italy, in a dark small classroom with tall desks and a screen behind the teacher’s table: a classroom like a desert island, in the heart of a night with no more light. The lecturer bears the unreal aspect of an apparition. ‘He was, in fact, an apparition.’ On the screen: slides of early Renaissance paintings by Masolino and Masaccio, faces and limbs caught in expressions and angles that draw and embody a partial architectural space, and appear as hinges between people and history, people caught unguarded on a screen by means of formal arrangements of gestures.

•

It’s a convergence of sense, split across frames and punctuated by clicks.

It’s a trying to think through fractured forms and jolts of history, click, slide, click, slide.

•

Try to think transience, to linger on the impalpable quality of the light projections, the barely audible yet punctual clicks of the slide carousel, interferences of apparitions, rhythms and gestures.