Anonymous Writing Group II: criticism thread

Mr Black piece now coming off a bit The Curious Incident Of The Lanchester In The Night-Time. It doesn't work so well for me but others should definitely elucidate me on what draws them to it

Mr Black is pretty good, I think. The numbers thing isn't particularly overdone but there's a danger of making that yr character's defining characteristic and crowding out other elements. I agree that "Hitchcock-style" is a bit off, because it reads like the author is using it as convenient shorthand for the sort of effect they want to create, and I'd be wary of that.

But the writer writes well, the only issue I have with the writing itself is that there are a couple of action, action, action lines - the opening line would be a lot punchier if it were just "Mr Black is very fond of numbers", the rest doesn't really illuminate very much and gets in the way of the sentence. Ditto this line:

He spent years working late nights, bringing the right people coffee, attending the right pubs and acquiring the right accent and wardrobe to get it

^^^ This also suffers from the same problem of feeling a little like a list, I'm sure you could find a more elegant way of conveying something similar.

Second line is great and there's a lot to like in this piece. The voice on the end of the phone is short on personality though, if something is about to go wrong then that person needs to be a lot less mild.

Vertigo, guys.

Oh it was you then :P

Haha no I didn't submit anything

Half-sarcastic sense of coyness

LJ I'm pretty sure the point is to critique the work for the author's benefit not to justify liking it to you.

Nothing wrong with a list, nothing wrong with mr black #2 lacking personality, both v much harmony to the melody imo

xp no difference

re: the opening line would be a lot punchier if it were just "Mr Black is very fond of numbers"
I agree it would be punchier, but if the idea is to simultaneously communicate the visual of what Mr. Black is doing in the opening, there's really no getting around it, and raising Hitchcock suggests that the cinematic approach is fully intended.

re: "How does an interconnected extra-terrestrial society react when a part of itself is suddenly called Mrs McCloskey?"
In a Borgesian universe, they'd all be Mrs. McCloskey and therefore the name is once again meaningless as having no name at all. In this universe, they react by drooling, which I think achieves the same thing by showing rather than telling.

re: "What difficulties does it represent for the customer when they go to partake in a simple transaction, (buying a car) and are faced with an unlimited repository of cold, inhuman, malevolent logic from across the void of space..."
I like where this is going, but this doesn't require that Mrs. McCloskey be an alien or even a robot. This works better if Mrs. McCloskey is an inanimate rock, e.g.

"Always reject the first offer... Always reject the first offer..." but Mrs. McCloskey, not offering anything, just stood there, as did the sticker price.
The pamphlet full of advice the prospective buyer memorized quickly revealed itself to be powerless against Mrs. McCloskey's firm negotiating strategy.
"Walk away, and they'll be sure to crumble." She walked away, and turned back to see if Mrs. McCloskey was crumbling. Nope. Mrs. M was a literal rock. Across the way, though, she spied Mrs. McCloskey's son, Leroy, crumbling from the repeated assaults of an irate couple, apparently fed up with the McCloskey family brand of hard bargaining stoicism, which by now must have been rubbing off on her as well, since despite witnessing erosive violence visited upon Leroy, she felt no sediment.

haha amazing post! Writer continually adapting story in response to interrupting critics is a good idea for a piece in itself...

I agree it would be punchier, but if the idea is to simultaneously communicate the visual of what Mr. Black is doing in the opening, there's really no getting around it

But why convey this right at the start though? I'm not saying you shouldn't, but I don't get the sense that it's necessary, especially as they're fairly standard everyday things to do. The nervous adjustment of the tie I like, but that stuff can be later in the paragraph. There's something about the rhythm of three of these things one after the other that stretches the sentence out - you need to have a really good reason for doing that otherwise you're unnecessarily deadening the impact of the first line.

I am entirely pro-list writing but the best lists have great rhythm to them, or what Ward Fowler upthread calls the shape on the words of the page - the explanation of how Mr Black got where he is today lacks that kind of shape and rhythm. It could even be a bit more anecdotal.

The cinematic element is a tricky one - you don't really need to write camera angles into this, but equally there's loads of terrific visual interest in the shapes of the numbers and then the sudden cliff drop as they start falling.

I'd probably avoid using paranoia and entropy in the same sentence, there's something a little Pynchon thesis about it - just straight out fear or terror might be better than paranoia. I can see where you're going with the entropy though (I think).

Harold Lovell Stands At The Edge Of The Water

by Malik Rehman

Harold Lovell stands at the edge of the water. The water looks black, from above, shaded by the trees that fringe it, and the cliffs on the far side. Reflected on its surface is the ruin of the research facility Harold used to work in, before the fire that closed it down, before motorbike accident that cost him his fiancée, before the deaths of his parents and the creeping despair that prevented him from rebuilding his life. He scratches absently at his ear, letting his eyes wander up to the buildings perched on top of the cliff, close-windowed and splashed with red warning signs, not really seeing them. The cold rubber of the glove on his hand reminds him that he came here with a purpose, and it’s one he’d better act on quickly, or risk losing his nerve.

Slowly, he reaches into his pocket and draws out the trap. Inside, the tiny brown house mouse scrabbles unhappily, looking for a way out it hasn’t found in six hours of trying. Harold looks away from the mouse and down into the water, hoping to see the silver flash of a passing fish, or any other sign of life, but today nothing moves. The air between the trees is quiet and still; no birds or insects make these dark pines their home. His hands tremble.

One desperate plunge and the trap is immersed. He pulls door of the trap open enough to let the water in, without letting the mouse escape. Panicking, the mouse struggles, fighting for life. He holds the trap and forces himself to watch as the water closes around the mouse. The cold liquid closing around its head, the last breath of air burning in its lungs, no way out. No way out. But that’s how it is with death, sooner or later there’s no way out. Better a quick death by drowning than a lingering death from cancer or heart disease, better than feeling your body and mind atrophy and fail. And there’s a chance, just a chance, that for this mouse drowning isn’t the end. Be brave, he whispers. He’s heard that drowning is painless, but it seems nobody’s told the mouse that. With a gasp, it expels that last precious pocket of air, and takes in water. Harold can feel the fear slithering in the pit of his stomach. He almost changes his mind, but he steels himself and keeps the trap submerged until the mouse gives a final kick and stops moving, eyes still open. The moment of truth. Holding his own breath, he waits. Breathing because his body won’t let him go without oxygen, he counts his pounding heartbeats. A hundred. Two hundred. His arms ache from holding the trap at full extension. His eyes start to water, and he fights the urge to vomit.

A twitch. The mouse twitches, twitches and moves. Begins to fight again. For five minutes he watches in awe as the mouse swims frantically, paws sliding against the plastic. He was right. They were all wrong, and he was right.

Still shaking, he draws the trap from the water and drains it. Exhausted, his tiny victim, bedraggled and shivering, coughs liquid and collapses. He walks back to his car, making slow progress as he stops every few seconds to check it hasn’t died. Triumph courses through him, but cannot quite banish the nausea. Harold drives home.

It takes three days for the mouse to die. He has decanted the creature into a small cage, which he watches like a cat. On the first day, it doesn’t eat and moves little. Harold opens the cage and strokes the mouse every so often, feeling for warmth and life beneath the soft fur. On the second day, there’s a marked improvement: the mouse is eating and making a proper nest for itself, though when it retreats inside to sleep, Harold panics and prods it awake again. On the third day, though, its breathing is laboured and its movements are stiff. Its fur starts to fall out. By nightfall, the flesh has started to drop from the bones in a black slough. Harold notes the details in his diary, vomits freely in the downstairs bathroom, and buries the remains in a ziplock bag beneath the camellia on his back lawn. The poem Helen had read at their mother’s funeral comes into his mind and he chuckles, saying the last line aloud: May God hold you in the palm of His hand. Inside, he flicks on the kettle and the loneliness catches him, a lurching feeling as if he’d been walking and encountered a step down that he hadn’t seen, the world fallen away beneath him. His tears are brief.

The second mouse he leaves in the water. He doesn’t dare transport the liquid to his house, so he rigs up a fish tank beneath the surface of the lake and transfers the mouse into it. He visits twice a day. Four days in, it’s conclusive: the death of the first mouse was triggered by its removal from the water; this one lives. After a week, stricken with sympathy, he releases it into the lake, reasoning that if it stays in the water it will continue to live, but a mouse doesn’t reason the same way as a man. It scrambles up the shore and disappears beneath the trees. Stupid mouse, thinks Harold, and then Sorry, mouse, under his breath. He wipes something from his itching cheek with an angry arm, and curses how lachrymose he’s become, these last few years.

Three months, two more mice a squirrel and the neighbour’s chinchilla later, Harold stands poised once again at the edge of the water. His affairs are in order. He has made his last purchase at Tesco, he has listened to his last episode of The Archers, he has visited the graveyard and said his goodbyes. He has sat for a long moment by the camellia bush, feeling the grass beneath his hands and remembering its extravagant blossoms. He leaves no notes or messages. The only person to leave one for is Helen, and he doesn’t want to tell her he’s dead, and he doesn’t want to tell her he isn’t, so he says nothing. It will be months before she notices his absence, anyway.

Without the rubber gloves encasing his arms to the elbow, he feels naked already, but he unbuttons his jacket. Steps out of his jeans. Peels off his underwear. The breeze feels unfamiliar as it lifts the hairs on his legs and chest. The air is cold: it’s October and the leaves are falling, and the water is even colder. Standing ankle-deep, Harold looks down at his feet, white and distorted in the shallows. If he turns back now, he knows, he will he lose only them. Could he bear it? For a moment he’s paralysed, but remembering the blackening flesh of the animals he drives himself onwards. The mud is thick between his toes, cold and sucking and full of sharp objects that slice at his feet. Every inch deeper brings the thought of retreat: knees, thighs, balls, belly, chest, shoulders, neck. The trees and sky are shivered by his body as he passes gently through the mirrored surface, step by cautious step, and into another world.

Oh yes, season six. Yes.

First sentence of next one needs dicing but it too was brilliant besides.

season six was brilliant alright, just kind of enchanting and amusing at the same time. i write a lot of tv summaries for my job and i find them weird and interesting in themselves, love the idea of using them in this way.

i liked Season Six but sort of wished there'd been more movement in it - one could have swopped episode 18 with episode 2 without any particular effect. it wouldn't have had to be a movement towards greater loopiness, but... towards something. (also the way that the poem was always in a relationship with an A-name made for a strange feeling of substitution)

Also really into Harold Lovell but thought the lyricism was a bit too reflex on occasion - "step by cautious step", scratching "absently" at the ear - and that got in the way of what's a very neat use of cliché/set-phrase to express thought (be brave, fight again, it's conclusive, marked improvement, steels himself, full extension, etc). it's also missing a "the" before "motorbike accident" imo.

Harold is great, intriguing and evocative.

Would lose this exposition though:

" the research facility Harold used to work in, before the fire that closed it down, before motorbike accident that cost him his fiancée, before the deaths of his parents and the creeping despair that prevented him from rebuilding his life."

could be changed to "the research facility Harold used to work in, before the fire." – the rest is implied obliquely and/or you can bring in the other details later, feeding the reader little bits of plot at a time.

Also a little unsure about the "But that’s how it is with death," bit. Get that these few sentences are highlighting a key idea in the piece but it seems a bit HELLO MESSAGE HERE.

I liked Harold too - though I agree it could have some paring. I think Stephen King wrote one of those oft-quoted (tweeted) bits of advice that I've seen loads of times, saying to go through your pieces and remove all adverbs. One of those "rules" that is worth keeping in mind, in that piece I reckon you could lose a few and it makes it stronger. Like "scrabbles unhappily" - prob all scrabbling is unhappy?

I feel like stylistically you could maybe allow more tinkering too, like it is quite straight up in its telling of the story, I feel like some twists in how things are revealed might boost this a bit - sorry if that's vague advice, just my two cents.

I'll happily scrabble to disagree on the last part- the weird is in the happenings, no harm at all stylistically in the telling being straight imo, contrast/tension doesnt strike me as an issue there.

King's version of adverb advice is coloured by his anecdote of his first article on a junior basketball team game coming back to him practically halved by redlined adverbs and his realisation of how much better it was by their omission. Would always agree. An adverb or pronoun is almost always a copout when i try to use it.

Ismael couldn't live without pronouns

It's not even contrast/tension - I just think some sentences could benefit from being fleshed out a bit, I guess.

EG "It takes three days for the mouse to die. He has decanted the creature into a small cage, which he watches like a cat."

I feel like here you have scope to do something with that, but as is it's a bit on the nose, watching like a cat is sort of a cliché that you could turn to your advantage with a bit of tinkering, especially given it's a mouse that's being watched.

I'm not sure what Season Six is, but I'm not sure I mind about that. Is it a short story? Presumably a poem? Either way I really like it - I agree with C# it could benefit from a bit more forward motion or narrative direction but the meta/poem bits are fantastic.

There's a fine line between this sort of thing and Charlie Brookerism and this piece only really slips over that line with the masturbation bit. Otherwise it reminds me of Barthelme's Will You Tell Me?, which the author should definitely read if they haven't already.

Benson puts a gun to his head. Erica has to dispose of a body.

great work bobby s

Quite liked - nay, really liked Harold's epiphany. Agree that if anything it's underwritten, but it gripped me with its succession of ideas & its fusion of the commonplace & absurd - the surreal spirit shining out. 900 more pages of that and who knows, perhaps you have synthesised a universe

I mean, it covers about 40 pages in 1000 words. As a short story or vignette it's good but expand it and it could be amazing, although countering this, perhaps it works best as a vignette because we don't have time to work out Harold's eventual design before he himself is barefoot at the water's edge

It's interesting that we've had three mental anguish/water's edge incidences.

Four, mine is implicit but 'turtles' is a joycean callback/hint

so who wrote the "mr black" story then?

"but I don't get the sense that it's necessary, especially as they're fairly standard everyday things to do"
let's break it down:
"Mr. Black, currently clutching a coffee"
coffee drinker, narrows down the age a bit; he's not just holding the coffee -- he's clutching it -- high strung dude

"nervously adjusting his tie, pulling at his collar,"
works on office job likely, probably not the boss, though, and he's already at work, not drinking coffee at home

"is very fond of numbers"
dude is the fastidious sort, and because of the preceding info, we already have some idea why he likes numbers, and his job is likely number-based.

If it's just "Mr. Black is very fond of numbers", then you're left thinking Mr. Black is some kind of number pervert at first.

i would like to read a story about a number pervert

These are I think the last three pieces I have. If I've missed any give me a shout.

...
by Zak Evans

brevity, in parts: a new hermeneutic

(lively)

in september of last year a letter was penned by a resident of the okarns state correctional facility in purple crayon. struck through with schizophrenic allusions it was addressed to a nearby judicial functional whose job it was to oversee first amendment issues as they related to the local incarceration community. she had recently scribed a sweeping response to three pressing appeals concerning prisoner hygiene as objet trouvé, radical emancipation from Cartesian dualism, and the prolific use of highly specific threats in fictional texts. in each case she had ruled for a restricted reading of civil rights - finding that the state's right to punish criminals took precedence over their self-expression. naturally this made a number of people very unhappy. a civil rights litigator promised to defame her in the press. a certain academic leftist philanthropist withdrew funding from her "pet" project - papier-mâché crafted birds, cats and fish for the prisoners meant to substitute for traditional animal-assisted therapy. "for fuck's sake, mandy," he texted her after the local okarns press ran excerpts from her manifesto. "if they can't make true art what good are sloppy wet paper dogs?"

for the benefit of their disposition, she might have answered, but the poorly scribbled letter had fastened her attention.

five lizards have tacken control of local authority
beware they shapeshift
feds can't be trusted - part of the lunar conspiracy
eject all anticipations imminently

the prisoner had spent the last decade quietly serving time for the stickup of a neighborhood electronics shop. he had made it down two blocks with an armful of discmen when a nearby beat cop overtook him. the weapons charge, stolen merchandise, and handful of industrial grade laxatives and cannabimimetic schedule I cigarettes gave him fifteen years. not a peep before yesterday, and now a paranoid letter that did not quite seem like poetry. it was unsettling. plus, she could sense a fever coming coaxed along by the anxieties of her work.

the phone rang - caller-id indicated a former lumberjack savant turned state prosecutor; her mentor.

"you screwed the pooch now," he cooed over the phone. they always fell quickly into tense banter. "the prisoner's union is up-in-arms, leaders are calling for your head."

"we gave it to the air-controllers so i'm not going to let a few grifters tell me what to do."

the lumberjack picked up on some fear behind her bluster. "you don't sound so sure."

"they took away my animal money," she said mournfully, and then, as though it were an afterthought, "what do you think about lizards?"

"cold blooded, scaly, poisonous?" he offered.

"assuming the roles of important government figures?"

"stay away from the psilocybin," he cautioned and then he was gone, the line dissolved into static, blocked by a tunnel or a water tower.

Breathe
by Caroline Vareilles

The needle pricks. I feel metal scratching on bone. Pain to prevent pain. Why do this? Weakness, vanity?

Take that out. There's no danger here. I'm in good hands. Making myself more important than I really am. Painting myself in the centre of a tragedy. The anesthetic is local, I'm numb.

I weighed him up when I saw him. How he spoke, how he spoke back. Not trust exactly - I trust no-one except myself - more a guy who looked like he knew what he was doing, and didn't care that much about selling it to me. He looked along his straight nose at me, through his expensive glasses, drawled in whole sentences. He didn't say it, but if he wasn't treating me, he'd be treating someone else and it was the same to him. The loss would be mine.

They closed in, wrapped me in cotton, swaddled me. Deliberate of course, regressing me, putting me in their care. It's because I see it that it works. They know what they're trying to do. I choose to submit, let my muffled ears believe they're underwater. Sink down, only my blind face exposed.

Swabs on my eyelids, but even so the spotlights alarm. A needle can only reach its length, but this bright white light spears through everything. I go to screw up my eyes but they're already screwed up. While I'm taking this in I find out it's begun. My head jerks sideways. The wrong senses are telling me the wrong things. I don't feel the impact; the shadow tells me I'm on my side. He's cut me already; but I learn this from the taste of blood. When he saws bone I can hear it.

It goes on. I realise I no longer know for how long. I can't tell where they're at. We talked about nose. It can't be anything else. I make to ask but the cotton fills my mouth. Something tells me my jaw is clamped shut. I don't even know if it's me or them.

Breathe, squat on the bottom, deal with it later. Strong arms take my legs and press them down, and tell me things I don't hear. Breathe.

Dolly

by Karine Fitzroy

Wristphone back on the table and duvet restored - at least able to sleep through irresolution and the botched wisdom of second thoughts now - Dolly dreams and wakes on the morning of her second date with Victor, although it might be more accurate to call it a ‘ramble’, as Victor has done repeatedly, with a marked avoidance of any romantic jargon. Poor kid’s trying way too hard. Course, Dolly does that too - tries to live a plotted life with some kind of narrative cogency - and she now realises with God’s clarity that what she really wants to do is stop caring about herself in any way whatsoever. Call it the inverted drunkenness of the death-row prisoner or the masochism of an intelligent duchess - Dolly is not Victor’s date but his clown - she is others’ entertainment, and her fall is the commodity sought most ardently by every admirer, him included. Her fall! as she dives headlong from the bed and crashes noisily amongst shoes. Her fall, as she kicks the floor, gets up, spin-dives again, flattening loose rolls of carpet and almost breaking her knee. Her window, which she runs to and in lieu of herself or of Genevieve flings through her best hat, looping stupidly onto the head of a neatly-suited schoolboy who gives a great whoop and begins dancing the dance of a cruel cunt, performed at the pavement, as if marauding it or preparing to inflict his arse-boils on it, threatening each paving-slab with some form of occluded extortion, firing porn-rays out of his socks as his shoes fly off and he begins actively moulding his environment into mounds of greasy beef that he can penetrate not with his cock but his pointing, wagging fingers - no you can’t! - and so as cars and telegraph poles are reckoned into patronised nothingballs of sexual ignominy, the Shamer in the Hat is farting his way into the sky, spasmodic leg-flicks reminding us all he still wants to dance, preferably upon our faces or our excised urogenitary tracts, or both, all while singing the song of his alma mater or perhaps one of the shittier hymns. “Bahb” he flaps, “Bahb, gahb flohg.” He gits in Dolly’s bathroom sink now, gits right in her face, only 16 but already has 51% of her assets, so he lowers his balls into her face-cream and hugs himself. “Jurrr” he thinks aloud. His head cranes around and his eyes fuse shut - now he only responds to the fear-pheromones, and wherever they are found so will be his fingertips and the lists they massage unwanted employees out of and frot algorithms against possibility into. Laughing down Dolly’s pussy he begins to fade from view and the hat, still rotating with the sort of jaunty inertia that gets children murdered by home invaders, settles over her crotch. She whips it away with irreplaceable showgirlship and tears into her clothes drawer. It’s a beautiful day! and she’s dressed for the fucking heath and its stupid horny trees.

But there aren’t any conditions that come with not caring about oneself and soon Dolly is dangling her legs out of the window, covered in yoghurt, wondering how many pigeons will feed by noon. Remembering belatedly that she has to be outside Victor’s house by eleven, she shoos away a pair of wasps (but not before allowing one of them to sting her hand) and skips to the shower, flecking her room white, as if some slight mould has chosen this day to envelop and claim the materials of her life. Showering is brief, rusty and badbacked, and Dolly falls uncertainly into a gorgeously mottled green and brown summer dress that she can’t remember wearing before (but can remember receiving, from her mother, whom she didn’t speak to last week). Feeling the delicious stink of guilt she gathers her transport pass and wallet, pops them into her neoprene slingbag before gazing for the final time from the window, just in case there’s anything, she supposes, that might do her the wrong kind of mischief out there in the sunny world.

This is why we fantasise about jetpacks: Dolly has this, two more and then a short walk; she does not like walking. She gazes out, perpendicularly, shopfronts and branches darting back into a staid history, curses the slightest pause between stops, makes room for the neatly-suited schoolboy who noisily mock-barfs into her lap, twice, before she turns around and puts her fist through his head and out the other side. This only seems to encourage him, however, and now with pieces of brain raining down over Dolly he gets up and produces a long-barreled revolver from his inside pocket, with which, pants around ankles, tie still immaculate, he embuggers himself. “Gubb. Covcov.” His erection grows and then falls off, becoming a larva of some sort - no, a queen termite, engorging itself on the grease of the bus floor, shivering with forces beyond its power and then exploding in a ricy granule-burst - a million tiny penis-termites converge upon Dolly leaving trails of stale pus, stop an inch short of her foot, rise vertical and salute, before pouring up the schoolboy’s leg, across his blazer, single file up his neck and now into the hole in his head where they replace his missing brain-matter. His eyes, which have been boggling around on the floor of the bus, ricocheting from shopping-bags and walking-boots, gathering flyshit, bounce fortuitously up to where his penis used to be and affix themselves, a second pair of balls, ocular and erotic, pulsing, bulging towards Dolly, pupils dilating...and this is where he pulls the trigger, the bullet flashes forward through his rectum, reduces both ball-eyes to blood-soup, smashes the front of his bladder off, as all the seminal fluid in his prostate ejaculates at once all over the roof of the bus and he falls backwards over the railing, down the stairs with a bump, in his final action managing to press the stop request button. Of course, nobody wants to get off or on, but the bus stands there anyway, for at least eight seconds.

The rest of Dolly’s journey proceeds more or less in the same manner, excepting for a blissful interlude waiting for the number 387 which is full of ladybirds and swifts catching the ladybirds and some ladybirds surviving by crawling up her dress, which she encourages. Inside her dress, she supposes, a dream of some kind is occurring, where ladybirds escape forever into eternally-enclosing leaves or each other’s shells, stacking up into a giant polybird which can never be killed. She looks up now at the swifts and wishes to grasp one by its tiny feet and fly to nowhere in particular except high. Perhaps so high she won’t have to let go. At this point-

Zak Evans piece shot through with a lysergic & unsteady intensity that I very, very much enjoy. its writer shouldn't worry about quality & just keep churning this stuff out until it congeals. really spry, really charged. bloody excellent. again, a sense of the surreal (papier mache prisoner pets!) intruding in on the paranoid metarealist swirl of a prison-complex its guardians & paymasters no longer know how to handle. strikes me it could grow into something important. n.b. fyi I know who wrote this but I'm not telling

Breathe is a terrifying & really well-written experience of cosmetic surgery; a concern apposite to my own writing, and done superbly here, conveying the weird mix of confusion & precision that accompanies the experience of being sedated & altered. "I go to screw up my eyes but they're already screwed up" is a brilliant line. Today's stuff is great, what can I say?

Id read a zak evans novel, i think.

Not gotten to rest yet.

Sea Nettle - 'course, coursing' doesn't work for me because the two meanings (if indeed there are two) aren't distinct enough. Every word counts more in poetry than anywhere else, and here repetition misses a chance to enrich that stanza.

The lines 'And understood familiarity as a feeling / But not a concept,' are too self-consciously analytical imo - we already know the speaker is like that from the rest of the poem. What I'd like is to throw in something more recent, or from the present; it's not clear whether this is a contented look back or a wistful one, and imo in this case the ambiguity actually isn't helping because it leaves the possibility that the time spoken of is inconsequential. I think just a hint of bitterness, tragedy, regret or whatever would add a layer of tension.

Argh Ismael you are rolling these out too quickly!

I don't have much to say about Harold except a) I really enjoyed it and b) that is one hell of a hardy mouse, possibly unrealistically so.

Shades of DFW about the Zak Evans story - loads of long sentences here but the writer is absolutely in control of their material. Lizards taking over the government is a cliche, but maybe that's the point and the note-writer can be blamed for that. I'm not convinced that the dialogue feels particularly natural, though.

I think I know who Zak Evans is as well.

b) that is one hell of a hardy mouse, possibly unrealistically so.

shaking my head @ u here matt

Flippin' 'eck, I'm MILES behind on these!

Haha oh dear, I just read it again. I am clearly not in the right frame of mind for close reading today.

Right, the poems. I liked them both, stylistically, rhythmically, but I thought 'Blackfriars' was by far the stronger of the two. 'Sea Nettle' is a fab title, but the poem lacked specificity. Everything was relateable in a general way, but there wasn't a single image or sense to bring you deep into the teller's experience - you couldn't see, smell or taste it, and with a title like 'Sea Nettle', I was expecting something tangy. What was the music that was playing? What did the nostalgia centre on, what did it feel like?

'Blackfriars' I loved, especially 'look into my eyes to see my eyes'.

Shades of DFW about the Zak Evans story

pynchon surely

Blackfriars is my favourite of the two poems. I love the first two stanzas, get the HRO connection, whoever raised that, but I think the author makes the bathos of it work in an amusing way. I think the last twist in the sonnet is somehow in the wrong direction though – it's obviously supposed to take the reader somewhere else but it's a little general. Maybe it's just "Alone and afraid... Naked" I don't like... It feels much less wise than what precedes it.

I'd like to see where the Zak Evans story goes... the prose is so inventive that the narrative (reasonably straightforward) buckles under it a little bit. But I think that's probably an unfair criticism given such a short excerpt.

Dolly, I found a little difficult to bite into but after the second read it's difficult not to appreciate the intensity of some of these images & descriptions. I think it would be helped by more of a focus on rhythm and the music of it... Made me think of Burroughs. I imagine not everyone would agree on this but I feel that when you get those kind of body horror semantic orgies in Naked Lunch there's a real swing to it... The sounds and pace of images overlapping each other grips you and makes it easier to suspend the need for a straightforward narrative. Could this be improved by slowing down the action in some places, including pauses, contrasting complex with simple, etc. etc. Could be I just need to read this at 10am with some more caffeine in the blood

Wow, still processing most of these. The standard has been crazy high esp for WIPs as I guess many of these are.

Dolly was otm I think in its depiction of a partic emotional state, that fatalistic abandon that's kinda despairing and jubilant at once? Liked how she's constantly besieged by capering, malevolent boy-children, that rang true as well; and of course the imagery is wonderfully pungent.

Feel like there used to be more stories in this vein, when you read anthologies from the 70s eg vs today you see a lot more of this kinda balls out surrealism. If its being produced now I don't know it, anyway. Would like to read more.

Blackfriars - I don't understand this at all I'm afraid. I liked the middle, the idea of being revived straight into an argument about the thing that revived you is pleasing to me. But it's just floating there in a puddle of custard, I can't work out the connection between the bits.

Mr Black - this is fabulous, I love it. The numbers thing not overdone at all imo, because you've managed to introduce them all in different and interesting ways. It isn't quite the 'appeal to all the senses' rule, but it's something close to it by drawing on all different contexts to serve the story - the three grey hairs, the sensual shapes, the 700 windows.

The other guy also being Mr Black was something I liked at first, but now I'm not sure I do. The story is jammed full of dry humour as it is, I don't know that a funny name gag is necessary.

The first line - clutching, nervously adjusting - looks like a mistake once you reach the end of the piece. Surely he starts off at ease, then becomes clutching as the market drops? The nose pushing air around is a great line - it captures quickening breath as well as the nervous energy of a cornered rat.

Hitchcock-style doesn't seem to me to fit either - it is the looking-down-the-stairwell thing in Vertigo though, wins is surely right. I think it's the right image, it just seems like wrong way to capture it.

In a similar vein, is he a pubs man? If I'm right and he's not, you could recast this detail to add a little extra colour to the character.