"Pond" by Claire-Louise Bennett (Fitzcarraldo, 2023)

It was originally published in 2015 by Stinging Fly. Stories from The White Review, Stinging Fly, Harper's Magazine and New Yorker. The numbers in brackets are the page counts.

• Voyage in the dark (0.5) - some girls watch a handsome man. The narrator waits in his garden for him to return home.
• Morning, Noon & Night (17) - A UK woman who lives in a cottage has routines to get through the day - chopping food, etc. She got permission from the Catholic church to use a little patch of land to grow vegetables. She was an academic. Asked to talk at a US university she chose to talk about Love and disintegration of selfhood, referencing Sappho and Nick Cave. She met a man there and they visited each other for 18 months, mostly for sex. She got a job at a bike repair shop. She buys 2 tapestries thinking that they're sparse because threads have fallen out. When they're delivered by a man she notices that the other threads never existed, though the canvasses are framed, so they must be finished. The story is peppered with phrases like "in fact", "by the way", etc.
• First thing (0.5) - woken by the ratcatcher who s/he'd summoned, the narrator forgets how s/he takes his/her coffee, and copies the decision of the ratcatcher
• The Big Day (14) - The neighbour's having a little party to show how they've restored cottages, including the narrator's. The narrator's not sure why s/he's visiting before the event that they're not going to. The narrator's angry for half a page - "quite frankly I would be disgusted to the point of taking immediate vengeance if I was brought to a purportedly magical place one afternoon in late September and thereupon belted down to the pond, all my myself most likely, only to discover the word pond scrawled on a poxy piece of damp plywood right there beside it. I'd be hopping". The narrator imagines what to say if they were the guest speaker. They tidy up after the event. Phrases like "due to the fact that", "for the reason that" recur. Emotions are rather detached, e.g. carrying a rusksack the narrator writes "I think I'm right in saying that it felt very consoling" and "I appear to be a very culturally oriented sort of person They write "I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English"
• Wishful Thinking (0.25) - someone wonders if they've had breakfast
• A Little Before Seven (7) - It begins with "I was cleaning out the fire grate first thing and as I dropped the pan vertical so that the ashes released into the bucket below I was distracted by an observation that was general comical yet profoundly concerning: I rarely acquire any enthusiasm for the opposite sex outside of being drunk. It was soon obvious that this particular observation wasn't simply a fleeting instance of light-hearted self-derogation and as it achieved increasing firmness in my mind I felt incredulous and a bit put out that urgent tidings such as these could have remained distant for so long". Two pages later she wonders if this is why she drinks so much. The wordiness is all part of the voice, the persona. That said, you can have too much of a good thing. For instance, the "I rarely acquire ... drunk" sentence could be replaced by "I don't fancy men unless I'm drunk". Doubling the word-count without adding more content is a gamble. In this piece, I don't think it pays off.
• To A God Unknown (1.5) - She's about to have a bath. She opens a window. A leaf blows in. A storm's brewing. She knows it's an old one. She disconnects lamps for safety, has a bath, empathises with the storm, reconnects the power.
• Two Weeks Since (0.5) - 2 horses in fields. 2 observers? A horse gives/gave birth
• Stir-Fry (0.1)
• Finishing Touch (6) - she hosts a party, calculating about how to sit on the ottoman (which contains old bed linen) and hoping certain guests will turn up. The best so far.
• Control Knobs (16) - The 3 detachable knobs on her hob are breaking one by one. She reads a story about a women who becomes the last person alive and has identity problems. Disappointing.
• Postcard (0.5) - Frogs and vaginas
• The Deepest Sea (11) - Perhaps not a story, but it has more overt autobiographical details than the other pieces have. She has different fountain pens for different purposes. She is trying to write this piece in green ("clandestine dealings") but it's coming out in black. The landlady's clearing out - "she came to my door and asked me about two large bags of empty bottles which have nothing to do with me, but of course one has to be very careful about how one communicates that something has nothing to do with one so as not to get the people it has everything to do with into hot water". Amongst the junk are her Ph.D thesis notes and a letter from a man - "And yet it is that, the defeated aspect of desire, hopes dashed and ragged, which in the end outlives any exalted pronouncement striving towards the eternal". It was while he was explaining to her the meaning of "cantilevered" that she'd realised it was over.
• Oh, Tomato Purée! (0.5) - Squeezing the last bits of fresh stuff out past the crusty old stuff
• Morning, 1908 (9) - she goes for a walk, sees cows, a young man, a gate, and has a little epiphany - "I wasn't quite myself; or perhaps, I was myself more than ever"
• The Gloves Are Off (11) - A male friend arrives, to have a shower. She's outside somewhere - "seeing oneself being looked for wrenches the heart oh ever so gently and must be one of my favourite occurences". His shower is broken. She'd talked to his landlord to get it sorted out. While he showering she thinks about the thatchers who from her roof had ogled the girl in the next cottage, speaking to each other in Irish, which she doesn't understand. When her friend returns she gets him to help tidy the garden. She becomes obsessive. He's forgotten. "I believe that's where I lost my heart". Then there's a page of near nonsense - "None flim flim on that here cavorting mainstay ... Oh, the earth, the earth and the women there, inside the simpering huts, stamped and spiritless, blowing on the coals, Not far away, but beyond the way of return"
• Over and Done With (4) - she enjoys burning the holly. She feels more confident about dealing with social events.
• Words Escape Me (4) - it's raining. She opens the top half of the door them doesn't remember why. She writes in the dark. "And then, for the first time that day, just as it was ending, I knew where I was - I was beneath the ground". It ends with "sooner or later, I thought, you're going to have to speak up"
• Lady Of The House (16) - She thinks about what kind of monster is beneath the rowers she saw. Later she writes "Not a metaphor, nothing like that - I'd never want the monster to stand for something, that's for sure". She's returning to her cottage after a night with her lover. She thought of leaving something so he'd be reminded of her during the day. "Side-by-side we're in completely different worlds." Later she texts him about the moon. He's in the cinema at the time. At home she irons his shirts. The landlady warns her that she may need to move out because the cottage is being sold.
• Old Ground (1.5) - Thinking back again to when she was a girl. "She closed the earth over the green papers". Nas this anything to do with the earlier green ink and imagining she was "beneath the ground"?

Men (or at least memories of them) arriving then going (having delivered something or provoked an insight) often feature. At one point the narrator writes "Look here, it's perfectly obvious by now to anyone that my heads is turned by imagined elsewheres and hardly at all by present circumstances". Her focus on objects and detail may be a reaction to this. Just when she seems to be about to address a personal issue often she veers off. The standard symbol of House as Self works quite well - the roles of chimneys, doors and windows.

Other reviews

• Andrew Gallix (Her soliloquies are peppered with asides to an implied reader – “if you want to know” – cheekily drawing attention to the amount of information being withheld. )
• Meghan O’Rourke (The stories shun conventional narrative devices (like plot), instead dramatizing the associative movement of the narrator’s “mind in motion.” ... “Pond” tries to reach insight by way of defamiliarization ... You might be wondering — at times I did — why any of this is any good. Sometimes the writing doesn’t quite coalesce into transporting insight ... Despite its occasional unevenness, “Pond” makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. )
• Diane Stubbings (Our sense of who this woman is and why she has retreated to a remote village on the west coast of Ireland is gleaned through glancing asides. ... Later in the story, we get an intimation of what it is about the pond and its lack of depth that irks her. She tried to lose ‘a broken, precious thing’ in the pond and found the pond not deep enough for the deed ... Time and again, her thoughts return to things that are buried or hidden, to the ways in which the layers of the past are embedded in the present moment. It’s a preoccupation that touches on her own history as well as that of the Irish people. She both yields to these histories and resists them. ... One piece of writing that Pond seems to be all the time pushing against is Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 account ... The influence of Samuel Beckett’s early prose work on Pond is palpable. )
• Linnie Greene (Fractured, voice-driven, and prone to modernistic meanderings, Pond is the sort of avant-garde opus destined to put its author on the map alongside modern-day prose stylists of the highest order.)

"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.)