Essays

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

Two Gromits

By Darragh McCausland.

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Some time ago, at the end of my working day as a special needs assistant in a school for children with autism, I found myself considering a pair of small objects. Ostensibly, these objects were very similar. They were made by hand using a type of modelling clay called Fimo, which is basically a fancy plasticine, and were each about two inches in length. Both were representations of Gromit, the famous dog from the stop motion Wallace and Gromit films. I say ostensibly, because qualitatively, there was a significant and complete order of difference between them. This was amazing to me because I could not put my finger on what it was, what tiny adjustment of the clay, what fractional detail, or details, caused one of them to be something that the other was not. I turned them over in my fingers, and it seemed to me that one was a likeness and nothing more, impressive and accurate. But the other was… well, it was something more. What caused this phenomenal and total difference? The question burned, and without an immediate answer, it seemed to me like magic.

Now, I had something to go on in my search for an answer. I had observed the genesis of both Gromits, at the hands of their separate creators, who were very different from each other. The more ordinary of the two Gromits was made by someone like myself, a Special Needs Assistant working in the school. Inspired by the boy’s efforts, this man in his twenties with a clear knack for arts and crafts had picked up the Fimo and whiled away his wet lunch break working on the figure. To get it right, he worked from a variety of models, a Wallace and Gromit magazine, and some Google image search results. He was proud of his finished work, enough to snap a cheeky picture of it on a digital camera to send on to his girlfriend, before he laid it with ceremony on a little bed of bunched up lilac crepe paper in a desk drawer. And in fairness, by itself, his finished figure was impressive. It was accurate in its proportions, its colour and its pose. Yet, later that day, when I retrieved it from its lilac safe place so I could compare it with the less ordinary of the two Gromits, it looked lifeless next to its partner. That Gromit, the artful one, had been made by a fourteen year old boy with autism.