Procrastinating.....

I have a book review to write and I don't want to write it. The book has taken me weeks to read. It's an experimental novel. It doesn't have a plot or characters or even grammar.

Of course I'm work-shy. But more than that, I'm afraid of looking a fool.

The history of modern art- going back to the beginning of the 19th century- is full of examples of often distinguished critics coming a cropper over work they didn't understand. There is the chap from the Edinburgh Review who rubbished Keats, there is Dickens coming out of the first pre-Raphaelite exhibition overwhelmed by the depravity of it all, there is Ruskin accusing Whistler of "throwing a pot of paint in the public's face" and getting sued by his victim.

Poor Ruskin. He was an intellectual giant and what are the two best known facts about him? (a.) He was so horrified by the discovery that his wife had pubic hair that he was unable to consummate his marriage, and, (b.) Whistler made him look like a twat.

And when you get to the 20th century there's this running battle going on between the cool guys who get it and the silly old noddies who don't. I've always been mortally afeared of being thought a noddy. It has led me, in the past, to embrace experimental work (Hiroshima, Mon Amour, anyone?) which on cooler reflection I think overcooked and silly.

So this is a day for procrastination. Obviously I have to read my LJ Friends list first. And Ailz has just marched in and asked me to type up the notes I took at the Frankenstein tutorial last weekend. Hooray, that will eat up another half hour.

But the moment will finally come. Judgement hour. I will be judged for my judgement. I will walk into the panelled examination room with the grim-faced spectres of modernist heroes- Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Picasso- lined up around the walls and the judge will slap Che Elias' The Pagan Ellipsis on the table and say with an ill-disguised sneer, "well, what do you make of this lot then?"

That Review of That Book

I don't normally do this, but I guess I've raised expectations, so here's what I finally wrote about the Elias book.

THE PAGAN ELLIPSIS by CHE ELIAS. Six Gallery Press, 2255 Tilbury Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15217. ISBN 0-9746033-8-4.

It took me a long time to read this book. It's a work of fiction (I guess) but it doesn't use any of the traditional hooks. There's no plot. There are no characters to speak of. It kicks off, it continues for 300 pages, it ends.

But I stayed with it. At times I got really cross, but something about it- its chutzpah, its unpredicability- kept me turning the pages. I didn't think I was going to understand it any better by the end than I did after 20 pages (and I was right) but I still didn't want to miss any of Elias's tricks.

It reads like automatic writing. Maybe this effect is precisely calculated, intensely laboured, but I doubt it. The randomness feels too real to be faked. The way I imagine it, Elias charges at the narrative, fingers dashing across the keyboard, not pausing for thought, accepting whatever word his subconscious tosses up, capitalising at random, switching tenses and narrative voice, dropping one story before it's finished and picking up another. Sometimes he sounds like James Joyce, other times he's more like Daisy Ashford (9 year old author of The Young Visitors.) Occasionally he becomes completely incoherent. Dreams, fantasies, self-analysis, fragments of verse are tumbled together like clothes in a washer.

Picasso said he'd spent a lifetime learning to paint like a child. Elias seems to be on a similar jag. By writing fast he by-passes the inner censor, the inner critic, the inner grammarian. Nothing is too filthy, nonsensical or stupid to be said. Awkwardness equals innocence equals beauty. The result is an extended portrait of consciousness, of a particular consciousness, more daring, careless and tripped out than anything I have ever read.

P.S. This will eventually appear at New Hope International Review On Line
http://www.nhi.clara.net/online.htm