"A twist of the knife" by Peter Jones

An audio book of about 30 short stories - some just 2 sentences. Many are plot-driven, the plot too easy to guess. Sometimes I guessed an ending, decided that it would be too obvious, then found I'd guessed the ending correctly. "Meet me at the crematorium" kept me interested for a while, but the best was the Roy Grace story. It had a decent plot (though not as cunning as I'd predicted - I thought the man lied about having his stamps stolen to get the thieves in trouble with their boss) and I liked the final line.

I gave up listening to the book about half way through.

Other reviews

• goodreads

"The written poem" by Rosemary Huisman (Cassell, 1998)

On the back cover is "How do we recognise 'a poem' (including apparent contraventions, such as the 'prose poem')? Once a poem has been recognized, what are the interpretative conventions brought into play for reading it? And especially, how has the spatial arrangement on the page become 'meaningful' in its own right ... What is the origin of the line as the primary generic sign of poetry?" which is promising. I also like the way the author explains a term (e.g. semiotics) the first time she uses it.

What is a poem? Basically, if you don't use line-breaks you have to exaggerate some other indicator of poetry (which change through the years). Or get the text published in a reputable poetry magazine.

She sees the layouts as borrowing ideas from Art/Music, the Body (breath, pleasing the eye) and other Language uses

Reader expectations

She agrees with the idea that there were 3 main changes in reading from 1500s to 1700 - oral to visual, intensive to extensive (i.e. reading many books rather than one book carefully), communal to private reading. Readers lag behind writers, "so it is not until the late nineteenth century that 'Romantic' assumptions are the norm of reading" (p.143). The popularity of prose fiction pushed poetry back until the old (pre mass media) reading practises became useful again - "separated by a thousand years of 'Romantic imperialism' in which English poetry was usually written in syllabic metres, contemporary poetry (for the most part) and Old English poetry both based their versification on the rhythm of conversational English, a rhythm based on the regularity of stress not syllable" (p.1)

The purposes of lineation

• "to reduce the information load in lines, and hence to facilitate semantic concentration ... William Carlos Williams is usually credited with developing the very short printed line ... Given the tradition of [the line as] a unit of information ... [it's] likely to receive, per word, more than the usual amount of interpretive attention" (p.76)
• "to promote syntactic ambiguities ... Hand in hand with the reduction in length of lines went the reduction of punctuation (This has become the norm in modern French poetry but is still less standard in English practise)" (p.77)
• "to produce a counterpoint between syntax and semantics through enjambment ... With the shorter line, the traditional relation between line length ... and grammatical unit ... could more readily be manipulated" (p.77)
• [using] horizontal and vertical display, so as to realize semantic choices directly. She points out that we look for meanings in indentations. Traditionally, lines indented by the same amount have the same end-rhyme. It was also fairly common to have the main voice non-indented, and a contrasting/answering voice indented. This tradition continues, the non-indented lines being the lyrical "I", or more authoritative.
  The thematic connection between lines that are equally indented may only be temporary. Later in the poem the indentation rules might be different.
  Gaps between words can denote hesitation. Random indentation can denote confusion. A new line is begun when renewal is mentioned.

Miscellaneous

• "Bernstein asks 'what preserves the insulation?' [of one category from another] and answers 'power'" (p.13)
• "If the classification changes from strong to weak, there are two basic questions we should always ask: which group is responsible for initiating the change? Is the change initiated by a dominant group or a dominated group?", Bernstein, Pedagogy, p.30
• "the prose poets went in two directions: some ... wrote narratives, fables and metafictions; others associated with the budding language poetry scene" - "A Norton Anthology of Post-Modern American Poetry", Paul Hoover
• "visual poetry has appeared four times in Occidental art history as an extensive movement - during the Alexandrine period, the Carolingian renaissance, the Baroque and our own day", Geoffrey Cook, Visual Poetry
• "the visual poetry of the twentieth century falls into two distinct periods ... 1920s ... futurist/dada and 1950s ... concrete" (p.154)
• "no English pattern poems are known from the entire eighteenth century", Geoffrey Cook, Visual Poetry
• "Change in twentieth-century English poetry most commonly has been associated with changes in French art and French poetry" (p.38)
• "[Bohn] suggests a new association emerged of the verbal genre with painting, displacing the stronger association of the genre with music (which had been dominant for the Symbolists)" p.46
• "Why did a (literary) genre which was still assumed to be essentially oral by many of its practitioners and critics come to be primarily signified by a literate device? What were the social origins of this line?" (p.61)
• "'language poetry' is the logical end point of print poetry" (p.76)
• "lineation in English poetry ... is clearly not established for late Old English poetry in the mid-eleventh century and that it is well establish ... by the end of the fourteenth century" (p.101)
• "This conventional identification of virtuous writer and good ploughman is no doubt widespread by the late fourteenth century" (p.109)
• "the principal effect of print, up until, say, 1640, was not to make poems fixed printed texts, but rather to 'privatize' handwriting" (p.129)
• "John Masefield, at the beginning of the twentieth century, felt that, with Romantic, individualistic assumptions now the 'natural' mode of interpretation, poetry had lost its appeal to a wider audience" (p.152)

"with one eye on the cows"

Bath Flash Fiction Volume Four - 137 stories chosen from 3,123 entered for their 2019 competitions. Sharon Teller's "Her safe word is 'circus'" is perhaps the least mainstream. I liked "Show falling upwards" and many others - generally a good standard.

"Frieze" by Olga Dermott-Bond (Nine Arches Press, 2023)

Poems from "Barren Magazine", "Ink, Sweat and Tears", "Magma", etc.

The poems suit my tastes - discontinuous, with gaps neither too big or small; subject matter that isn't the be all and end all. Several poems involve the process of close study, as if looking at something behind glass - in a museum or gallery; pinned down, excavated, or a memory. There are 2 pages of notes.

I like "We don't need infinity". I think "Milk bottle" is neat - "... pressing the silver coin down ... Above me, the fat-rimmed lip of the bottle ... I have been taught not to answer back, not to question the world of empty men, tight-necked, stout-shouldered ...I silence them with a rolled-up scroll, filled with my very best handwriting"

p.49 is a Golden Shovel. p.50 is a sonnet - loose rhythm and rhyme that become looser. "Aftersun" (another sonnet) is about helping someone who has sunburn, but the language is very flowery ("Space-travelling light has tangled too deep, entered your body, turned cool-water skin into a forge ... there's nothing I can do to unblemish this") so I presume it's about something else too - "I promise you next time we'll be more careful". I like "Picking Raspberries" - "Sometimes I'd find a perfect pink chandelier ... as soon as I eased it away, I'd be left with a tiny orgasm of jam that couldn't wait any longer ... absurdity of soft hair". And "I remember that I too, have seen a bat crawl by morning light" works for me - "mouse-body hidden by the funeral-circus tents she was hauling"

There are scattered images I like too - e.g. "my heart stupid as a lamppost, waiting for you underneath it every night" ("Wardrobe"). Less convincing are p.36, p.40, p.59.

Other reviews

• Guardian poem of the week

"Grey area" by Will Self (Penguin, 1993)

Short stories. Neuro-diverse before the term was common.

• "Between the conceits" - there are 8 ordinary-seeming people who between them control the London population. It's a sort of game, the Londoners used like chess pieces. The methods are minor (getting thousands of people to snub colleagues one morning) and the aims unambitious - getting the Londoners who they control to enjoy a day off.
• "The Indian mutiny" - A teacher gets the indians in his class to keep discipline in the classroom. The narrator - Ayrian - is allowed to join. When the teacher has a nervous breakdown, the narrator ousts him. He's taken to hospital and kills himself a few weeks later. The narrator feels guilty.
• "A short history of the English novel" - a couple find that London's waiters are frustrated writers, with brilliant ideas for novels.
• "Incubus of The impossibility of Self-determination as to desire" - a husband (a prof) invites a female student to stay with his family for a few nights. He gets drunk - "The synaptic gimbals had been unslung and Peter's slendidly meticulous gyroscope of ratiocination fell to the jungly floor of his id"
• "Scale" - it's in a few sections, each one centred on a meaning of scale that the main character (separated father; opiate addict) is affected by. He lives by a model village. In one section he dreams seeing his cottage in the village, going in and seeing a model cottage within a model cottage, etc - "My most acute anxiety, as I traversed the model village, was that I would be sighted by a human, I was aware that I could not be much larger than a sub-atomic particle, and as such I would be subject to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Were I to be in any way observed, not only might I find the direction of my journey irremediably altered, I could even cease to exist altogether!"
• "Chest" - smog/fog is so bad that cars benefit from radars and people carry around oxygen.
• "Grey Area" - an admin person in a big organisation writes minutes, etc. Her period is 2 weeks late. I struggled to get through the 31 pages.
• "Inclusion®" - an anti-depressant drug is secretly tested on the public. It has the effect of making people interested in things they'd previously thought tedious - curling, etc. One patient, an artist, starts to paint again. He (somehow) realises what's going on. There's an explosion at the secret factory. Reality is distorted. The story is related using diary/journal entries and reports. I like the ideas, but 50 pages was rather too much.
• "The end of the relationship" - A woman leaves her partner, who's been having an affair. She meets a friend, a taxi-driver and a shopkeeper, all about to break up. She returns to her boyfriend with champagne. He tells her to go away - she's the contagious cause of break-ups. She goes to an old friend, whose husband broke up with her that afternoon.

I like several of the formalist/conceptual structures of the pieces, and the details are fun. It's hard to care about the characters. Many don't care about themselves.

Other reviews

• goodreads
• Kirkus reviews (Evidence of a savage talent still exists in this melange, but the mesmerizing quality of Self's earlier sordid, in-your-face images is too often absent—while what remains is pedestrian, if not downright dull.)

"Reptile Memoirs" by Silje Ulstein

An audio book, set in Norway.

2003: At the start a woman is with another - a lover? No, only a metre long. A new baby? No, a snake. Liv Ulison (training to be a nurse?) shares a flat with Ingvar (epileptic) and Egel. After seeing a 6m Python on TV they've decided to buy one.

2017: Marium Lind, a mother, wife of politician Tor, is with her 11 y.o. daughter Iben at a shopping centre. They argue. The girl disappears off. The mother goes home after a long drive. She doesn't like to be considered a trophy wife. She runs a business.

A 60 y.o. male detective, Roe Ossvik now works in Kristiansund. He watches a video of his interview with an alleged rape victim (a neat way for us to be introduced to him). He had a daughter who died.

Liv gets closer to the snake, Nero, feeds it live mice. She keeps its old skins, tries to understand what it's saying. One evening it says "Liv". She sleeps with it for comfort rather than with boys. She doesn't like it to be brought out at parties as a novelty. She sneaks home a kitten for it. Then a rabbit.

PoV changes to a snake, hatching, growing.

When Liv gets home late she finds that Nero is being shown at a party, and that Patrick (her estranged brother - later we learn he used to have sex with her) is there. She moves out. She's angry with her mother because she believes Patrick's version of past events.

Marium and Tor (in his 50s) are interviewed. Tor is interviewed by August, (who chatted up Roonya?). Iben isn't Tor's child - he's sterile. She's the result of an unsolved rape. Perhaps that rape is a clue. While CCTV is studied, it's found that Roe was near when the girl disappeared (later we learn he talked to the girl, telling her how bad her mother was).

Liv briefly meets an art student, Anita, who paints her. Liv meets her later. Anita's pregnant, in a partnership with Bik, who hits her. Liv poses for her. They make love. Anita decides to leave Bik. Liv gives/sells the snake to Carol so that Anita can move in. When she does, Bik hassles her. Dave, a drug dealer, gets rid of Bik for them. In return Anita has to help with a mugging. While Liv is looking after the baby, Nero kills it. Dave rapes Liv so she kills him. Anita and the baby's charred body are found in a destroyed house. Anita had phoned her father for help but he'd turned up too late.

She gets back the snake.

Roe interviews Carol, telling her about the evidence.

Marium is Liv. Carol is Dave's mother. When Roe interviews Liv she knifes him and escapes. Roe is Anita's father. Marium/Liv visits Carol. She's holding the girl captive. The snake kills Carol. The others escape.

Bik confesses to setting light to the house.

"she smiles to herself" is in this novel and many others.

Other reviews

• good reads
• crimefictionlover
• Kirkus reviews (populated by many unpleasant characters doing unpleasant things, the novel loses focus at critical times. ... An original but flawed thriller that never rises to the level of chilly.)

"Dear Rwanda" by Isabella Mead (Live Canon, 2023)

A pamphlet with poems from Magma, Bridport short-lists, etc, and winners from the Wells (judged by Simon Armitage) and Ver Poetry competitions!

Given the credits I thought I'd be more impressed. Lots to like all the same. We learn about their schools, Fanta, and the use of bottletops. There's a feeling that Nature is permanent, that cars and technology will come and go. It takes a while to work out their customs. My favourite piece was "Genocide Memorial Week" (highly commended in the Bridport Flash competition).