ILX Book Group: A Short Story by a Terrible D-bag

I think he's patronisingly trying to do her "voice", but I can't be arsed to read all that shit.

From this story:

Simultaneously, Nigora's husband - Laziz - arranged his elbow in a scalene triangle, pleasantly uncomfortable, on the rim of the perpetually open driver's window.

If this sentence works well for you, you might enjoy this story. Otherwise, be warned.

arranged his elbow in a scalene triangle

i kinda like this, but nothing else in that sentence.

Has anyone read "Politics" by this d-bag? I've not, but apparently it's written in a faux-naif style, which sounds teeth-grindingly irritating...

This piece has lost me after the first, what, five paragraphs? I'll struggle on for the sake of this thread, but I probably wouldn't if I stumbled across it in a newspaper.

Um, elbows, to the best of my knowledge, have but one identifiable point from which two lines diverge, making them insufficiently endowed with points and lines to be arranged into a triangle, scalene or not.

fucking hell it's spelt curlicuLes you illiterate nonce

No. It isn't.

no it isn't?

lol xpost

I mean, it's still shit writing, but not because of geometrical similes or correct spelling.

Yeah, OK whatever, it is I who is illiterate etc etc.

Back to why this is actually shit, any story where you can visualise the author mechanically plotting how next to win your interest or sympathy is a bad story.

Um, elbows, to the best of my knowledge, have but one identifiable point from which two lines diverge, making them insufficiently endowed with points and lines to be arranged into a triangle, scalene or not.

-- Aimless, Saturday, September 22, 2007 5:40 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

totes true, but i imagined the lines to be both parts of the arm and one part of the windowsill.

yes story is v v annoying and basically ban ppl who use lists in fiction pls, like unless they are actually good at it

Results 1 - 10 of about 94 for curlicules. (0.16 seconds)

;_;

Results 1 - 10 of about 142,000 for curlicues

^^^my point entirely, 94 is puny

This is it, dope from the fly kid
The Ice mic is back with the high bid
Suckers you've lost cos players you're not, gangstas you ain't
You're faintin', punk, if you ever heard a gunshot
Yo, the pusher, the player, the pimp gangsta, the hustler
High Roller, dead pres folder
Is cold lampin' like a black king on a throne
Evil E...turn up the microphone
So I can ill and break on the rollin' tape
Another album to make? Great
Islam turn the bass kick up a bit
Hype the snare, now I got a place to sit
And ride the track like a black mack in his 'lac
Hit the corner slow where the girls are at
And kick game the way it should be done
How you gonna drop science? You're dumb
Stupid ignorant, don't even talk to me
At school you dropped Math, Science and History
And then you get on the mic and try to act smart
Well let me tell you one thing, you got heart
To perpetrate, you're bait, so just wait
Till the press shove a mic in your face
Or you meet Boogie Down or Chuck D
Stetsasonic or the Big Daddy
And they ask you about the game you claim you got
Drop science now, why not?
You start to sweat and fret, it gets hot
How'd you get into this spot?

You played yourself...
Yo, yo, you played yourself...

[Verse 2]

I'm no authority but I know the D-E-A-L
When it comes to dealin' with the females
What you got they want, cash is what they need
Slip sucker and they'll break you with speed
But you meet a freak, you try to turn her out
Spendin' money's what I'm talkin' about
But you fool out, your pockets got blew out
And after the date, no boots, you got threw out
Mad and shook cos your duckets got took
Call her up, phone's off the hook
But who told you to front and flaunt your grip?
You can't buy no relationship

You played yourself...
Yo, homeboy, you played yourself...

[Verse 3]

I'm in the MC game, a lot of MC's front
And for the money they're sell out stunts
But they claim that they're rich and that they keep cash
Yo, let me straighten this out fast
Two hundred thousand records sold
And these brothers start yellin' 'bout gold?
You better double that, then double that again
And still don't get sooped, my friend
You think you've made it, you're just a lucky man
Guess who controls your destiny, fans
But you diss 'em cos you think you're a star
That attitude is rude, you won't get far
Cos they'll turn on you quick, you'll drop like a brick
Unemployment's where you'll sit
No friends cos you dissed 'em too
No money, no crew, you're through

You played yourself...
That's right, you played yourself...
You played yourself...
Yo, yo, you played yourself...

[Verse 4]

You got problems, you claim you need a break
But every dollar you get you take
Straight to the Dopeman, try to get a beam up
Your idle time is spent tryna scheme up
Another way to get money for a jumbo
When you go to sleep you count Five-O's
Lyin' and cheatin', everybody you're beatin'
Dirty clothes and you're skinny cos you haven't been eatin'
You ripped off all your family and your friends
Nowhere does your larceny end
And then you get an idea for a big move
An armed robbery...smooth
But everything went wrong, somebody got shot
You couldn't get away, the cops roll, you're popped
And now you're locked, yo, lampin' on Death Row
Society's fault? No
Nobody put the crack into the pipe
Nobody made you smoke off your life
You thought that you could do dope and still stay cool? Fool.

You played yourself...
You played yourself...
Ain't nobody else's fault, you played yourself.

;-)

C'mon, gimme a break, I've just got back from a football match, my brain is still in "YOU'RE WORSE THAN CRYSTAL PALACE" mode.

It looks like he was pandering to Zadie's well-known megajones for for B/W fuck-or-fight comediess. And yes he is also a bit shit.

Nigora, as a girl, always identified with the minor characters. She always sympathised with the rejected, the marginalised, the small.

Classic example of first sentence = "OK, yeah, you are trying to manipulate us, we get it", second sentence = "YEAH WE FUCKING GET IT STFU"

a metronome becoming hysterical beside her

this is total shit no matter how you dress it up!

I got as far as "lying on his own emission" and had to stop, this is pretty turgid stuff. And yes the metronome line is awful.

I mean, if we're gonna micro-manage, Its window-frames contained no glass whatsoever just doesn't need that final word. There are many examples of this. Believe me, I'm an expert on over-writing; it's been the criticism all my teachers/lecturers/peers have drilled into me down the years, and consequently it's one of the things I first look out for.

Yes I was about to say there was only one other person I could imagine using the phrase "lying on his own emission".

...and you'd love it, really o_0

who gives a fuck what movies fictional characters watch?

i dunno, people who read books about fictional characters probably

If the movie has some sort of significance in that character's on-page development, then perhaps it's worth an inclusion, but a list of movies is useless.

i got as far as that list so i don't know whether it increases yr knowledge of the characters but a list that goes:

The Lady Eve

The Philadelphia Story

Sullivan's Travels

When Harry Met Sally

Roman Holiday.

Pretty in Pink

The Breakfast Club.

Coppola

Scorsese

Peckinpah

Lumet

Kubrick

Polanski.

okay, so every character in modern literary fiction would watch 80% of these. again, who cares?

The reader is expected to regard these movies as iconic pieces of a shared cultural heritage, sort of like westerners can safely be expected to know various bits and pieces of the Bible. This expectation is, of course, bilgewater. Particular movies don't occupy such a large cultural niche. Instead there's just a generalized Hollywood fog over our brains.

I think some people are taking the very ILXy position of concentrating too much on the content of the film lists and not enough on the formal device of the list-making. (Which turns out fair, because the formal device of list-making doesn't really seem to be, umm, living up to itself here.)

Most of the criticisms here just amount to this being a little out of its time: it's like reading Clarice Lispector or something!

The pregnant dachshund is terrific, though, if you kind of suspend judging the logistics and the prose around it.

And I think I've only ever read one prose description of female genitalia that wasn't awful, and if I remember right that one was funny, so I'm not going to hoist the common standard to get annoyed by this one.

It occurs to me now that I never worked up a ton of patience for Lispector, either, but she could score more than this -- like how the final five words of this graph save it all:

And she considered the cruel necessity of loving. She considered the malignity of our desire to be happy. She considered the ferocity with which we want to play. And the number of times when we murder for love. She then looked at her mischievous son, as if she was looking at a dangerous stranger. And she was horrified at her own soul, which, more than her body, had engendered that being so apt for life and happiness. And thus she looked at him attentively and with uneasy pride, her child already without two front teeth, his evolution, his evolution under way, his teeth falling out to make room for those which bite best.

this is just flat.. awfully detached

i recall liking lispector very much but haven't read for a couple years.. but her stories didn't seem so overwritten to me. these days, i don't trust writers who aren't ever funny!

OK, I've finally scrolled down to the bottom. Nothing is worse than a story without a tale to tell, which tries to get by through psychological profoundness alone. In this story's case, the profoundness is almost completely lacking, with crude concepts cynically placed in stark juxtaposition rather than weaved into a fabric.

Nothing is worse than a story without a tale to tell

skeptical-borges.jog

I'm just saying, a story has gotta have a STORY, this is just a quasi-panoramic tableau of a 'life', with miniature 'storylets' combined in a no-way satisfying insight into one of life's 'minor characters' (yeah we GOT THAT THANKS). The very best stories have plot, thrust, and direction. This doesn't, and it doesn't even do what it wants to do! The artifice is clear; the rivets are unpainted.

I'm not made on stories to be honest. Except Nabokov, obv.

made on = mad on

Yeah, but you don't have to appreciate the subtle tinctures of prose-writing to divine quite how lumpen this work is. Enrique, if we're being honest, set it up as a straw-man; he could tell that nobody, but nobody, would wholeheartedly leap to its defence. I'm sure things CAN be said in its favour (Nabisco liked the daschund bit, for instance, and ultimately that's a plus-point for me), but, even if you're not crazy about short stories, you'll know that writers like Roald Dahl and Hoosteen kick the living shite out of this.

skeptical-borges-with-skeptical-woolf.jpg

Independent of how well this works, any kind of dictate on what a story has "gotta have" is not only weirdly anti-literature, but more or less sets you up to be embarrassed by the library-loads of great stories that aren't really interested in ... narrative, or characters, or conventional dramatization, or any of a million other things that are as silly to count as necessities of lit as it is to say "a song has got to have drums." But maybe you mean "arc" and not "story," in which case I'd object less.

PS "quasi-panoramic tableau of a life" aka "characters sitting there thinking about themselves" describes a scary amount of early Modernist lit, a lot of which is a whole lot better than this ("in or around December 1910, human nature changed" -- nobody has yet fixed the date when it changed back, which presents problems for a lot of writers)

skeptical-worf.jpg

xpost Ha, I'm in that position where I'm inclined to defend it just because I'm not comfortable with the kinds of criticism it's getting on here -- honestly it's a bit airy and overreaching and ZZZ and actually surprises me as something Zadie would be snagging for a collection: is there some kind of theme to this collection that we're unaware of, one that might explain this work a bit more? Mostly I think that (a) the beginning expects us to be more fascinated by the idea of modern Uzbek sex-lives than anyone who knows humans is likely to be, and (b) the arc of the end, which I somehow feel like nobody here really got to except in an already-skimming mind-made-up way, does not come down as elegantly as it would like to

It doesn't set itself up like a piece of early Modernist literature, though. It sets itself up as what I'd (possibly erraneously) call a story, with, as you rightly say, an arc - a progression either emotional or physical which describes a transformation. There are 'arc-lets', little progressions, but nothing pleasurable congeals in the overall.

Your first paragraph is true, and there are lots of very great pieces of writing that don't adhere to the rule of an 'arc' or a 'story'. This writer isn't dextrous or imaginative enough to even contemplate pulling something like that off successfully; I imagine him to have merely attempted a plain and simple 'short-story', neglecting, unfortunately, to include the 'story' part. My issue isn't so much with his medium as his execution.

xpost

I don't think the expectations are skewhiff; a skilful writer can find beauty and intrigue in almost anything they choose to present; the issue is, as I say, with the deadly combination of insistence, incoherence, and lack or imagination.

*skillful/of

It doesn't set itself up like a piece of early Modernist literature, though / I imagine him to have merely attempted a plain and simple 'short-story'

vs.

IT STARTS WITH A SERIES OF NINE LISTS
MADE IN THE MIND OF A WOMAN IDENTIFIED SOLELY
AS SITTING IN A SHOP, THINKING

Yes, it has gimmicks. Bad ones.

I mean, this story is probably the least good Thirlwell I've ever read, and I'm not even close to big on Thirlwell to begin with,* but let's not start imagining the guy does not have some basic sense of what he's attempting, style-wise.

* he has this workshoppy quality I can never handle where someone seems too interested in his characters as characters and his prose as prose, and -- weirdly -- not enough in himself as an author setting these things in front of you for some kind of purpose: this is a problem with this story far more than whatever Granta stuff of his I'm half-remembering right now

xpost - LJ, I don't know what you read, but -- smarty educated Don that you are -- I'd think you'd recognize this style as not nearly unusual enough to be gimmicky

The Night-time/Day-time Dialogue between Nigora and Laziz bits are fantastically gimmicky. He doesn't have any direct speech except in two blissfully counterbalancing night/day interludes? That's a gimmick. The opening lists are gimmicks. Surely?

nabisco's point is that modernist prose is an over 100 year-old "gimmick" LJ.

In fact it's kind of hard to imagine what gimmicky writing could be any more.

Also, you've argued at once that it's both 'not unusual enough to be gimmicky', and also by no means a 'plain and simple short-story'. Am I falling short of some middle-ground here? Are my definitions of 'plain and simple short-story' too broad? From my perspective, the piece is a short-story that concerns itself with the making of a character, but it doesn't succeed in describing the character's growth, and therefore fails in its attempted progression, coming across as artificial and clumsy rumination propped up by some needless gimmickry. NV, sometimes the 'gimmicks' can seamlessly weave themselves into the story, become part of its overall structure, but here they seem oddly disjointed. Like I said, the execution is the main issue, making the 'gimmicks' stand out like sore thumbs.

skeptical_cat.jpg

I know how this is going to end, this is going to end with Nabisco being right and me promising to 'read more short-stories'. Which is good, because this coming academic year I'm studying American modernism (imagism and objectivism especially), although my focus will probably be on poetry.

(a) the idea that not having much direct dialogue in a story is a "gimmick" is patently demented

(b) there are a million things outside of convention and tradition that are nonetheless not particularly unusual or gimmicky, like wearing kilts or not having a bass player

(c) like I said, I'm not particularly into this story; I just happen to think your weird claims about what constitutes a gimmick and what stories have to have are faintly batshit, and you should rethink them lest you are tormented by the angry ghosts of Borges and Barthelme and Woolf and basically a good 35% of well-remembered writers of literature since the end of the 19th century (note that Ben Marcus is WAY bigger than you and looks generally in shape)

(a) the idea that not having much direct dialogue in a story is a "gimmick" is patently demented

Yes, true. I didn't say it was. Having the dialogue in those two postmarked 'compare and contrast, yin and yang, night and day' sections, however, is.

(b) there are a million things outside of convention and tradition that are nonetheless not particularly unusual or gimmicky, like wearing kilts or not having a bass player

Yes, true. When they're done garishly, unnecessarily or crudely, however, they're gimmicks. A footballer wearing a kilt rather than a pair of shorts would be a gimmick. A symphony orchestra playing Bach with a bagpiper would be a gimmick.

(c) like I said, I'm not particularly into this story; I just happen to think your weird claims about what constitutes a gimmick and what stories have to have are faintly batshit, and you should rethink them lest you are tormented by the angry ghosts of Borges and Barthelme and Woolf and basically a good 35% of well-remembered writers of literature since the end of the 19th century (note that Ben Marcus is WAY bigger than you and looks generally in shape)

I should, er...read more short-stories?

Borges is a little misguided, IMO. His ideas on dead authors and universal codes, honourable as they are, seem a little too idealistic to me.

NOBODY HERE DISSES BORGES UNLESS THEY WANNA GET SHIVVED

no fuck I'm thinking of BARTHES, sorry, scrub that

Barthes is quite intentional with his structuralism tho. He isn't claiming to find a hidden secret, he's using an invented toolkit to look at kulchur and stuff.

Yeah, and the toolkit is really fun to use for a bit, but try applying it to your favourite works, and watch the life drain mercilessly out of them. Barthes' LZ, which I've dipped into, is thoroughly intriguing for about 2 pages' worth of analysis, as each word is 'decoded' and its isolated significance sought, but it quickly becomes SOULLESS.

Oh God no. He's playing. It's all totally about playing.

I'm not saying his experiments were without worth! God, it's actually really useful to have Barthes as a control against which to judge your own opinions on reader affectation. He's an iconoclast, and an intelligent man, whose method is undeniably consistent, and interesting. I think he's wrong, though. It's as if Geir Hongro were an on-running experiment by another ILX mod: playing, yes, consistent, yes, but someone you'd agree with? Diplomatically, not always.

by 'another' I mean 'an'

And yeah, he challenged a staid, snooty critical tradition, with the likes of TS Eliot being self-righteous reactionary wankers, but I don't think his system of killing the author and crediting the reader does justice to the fictional process.

dammit this has turned into one of my seminars, me the only one talking as bloody usual, as all the others sit back and let the motormouth waste minute after minute

(nv, you're the professor, help me out here)

lol i'm pretty far from a professor louis, but thanx for that.

I actually get what you're saying, if there was an imaginary reader who took Barthes as gospel it would be kinda wrong-headed. But I don't think there are many of those peeps outside of University English departments, and probly not too many there nowadays.

the content of the lists is important to me cos it's important to the story cos nigora theorises on life from the films.

the conclusion she draws (which is really the conclusion smarty-pants adam draws) from the films is bullcrap, but also bullcrap coz it doesn't accord with the films. i won't get into whether we buy her as a character.

everything is stated flatly and as fait accompli. as i said, i never studied literature and need things explained to me, and maybe this sort of writing makes me wonder what i *do* like in a piece of writing.

i do know that woolf said fiction was all about building characters, and he hasn't done that. i know that many fictions are notable for more diaphonous things like atmosphere, and he hasn't achieved that. some old-timey bastards like a good story -- nuff said. i think there's something to be said for reading fiction to learn about other cultures and ways of life. i didn't get that despite it being ostensibly the purpose of the collection. nor was i struck by any real emotional, moral or intellectual insight -- which is more than okay, generally, these things are hard to come by, but the whole piece seemed to me to comprise blandly put statements on some hefty questions for one so young as adam thirlwell.

oh right and also the guy was at my uni the same time as me and goddamn if i'm not a jealous bitch.

I think he's wrong, though.

so does pretty much everyone. including barthes himself.

lol quitney reveals the truth

(NV: While all that went on I was listening to the 15-minute noisefest on the end of 'Everything Picture'; perhaps this might explain my frantic scrabbling.)

Ah, he must have been published in the MAYS, which has in the past been edited by Zadie herself. I've entered that two years running, came close to getting in first time round. I've kinda figured out what I need to do this year, though (write simpler, be more user-friendly, less indulgent).

i do know that woolf said fiction was all about building characters, and he hasn't done that...the whole piece seemed to me to comprise blandly put statements on some hefty questions

^^^^^^this

Max, I wasn't saying it like I was the only one. My whole class agreed! Leavis, however, was a different proposition...

NRQ, the fact you haven't studied literature is as much a blessing as a curse; your criticisms are unpretentious, heartfelt, and (I'd say) generally OTM. All you need, really.

Quitney dude I agree with pretty much everything you're saying but if you're going to analyse your own reaction to 'writing' then it's probably best not to do so in relation to a piece everyone here agrees is mediocre to downright bad.

oh right and also the guy was at my uni the same time as me and goddamn if i'm not a jealous bitch.

GUESS WHAT'S GOING ON THE ILEPITAPHS THREAD!

Kindly put.