Revival

I've revived this blog. The previous posts are very old, but honest. I guess they aren't well written or concise. I don't value long blog posts as much as I used to. It seems to me that shorter posts are more digestible and thus better. Tonight is saturday and I stayed in which makes me feel very lonely and bad.

I read all of Sasha Fletcher's when all our days are numbered marching bands will fill the streets & we will not hear them because we will be upstairs in the clouds.

This is my review of Sasha's book, written without composing myself and just speaking to what I'm thinking.

Sasha's book is sort of a novella and sort of a collection of attached micro-fictions. It functions. For what that's worth. There is no sense of catharsis, there is almost no sense of conflict either. Sasha's book deals with two issues, physicality and transcendence. Much of the book is preoccupied with two facits, that of an interpersonal relationship, and that of a terrestrial confusion. Sasha is very concerned with the weather, which exists in the air, and the manufactured state, which is something that we contain on the ground. To speak to the latter, passages relating to the construction of a garden, or of the police as a body to be ground into a beach, relate a sense of mis-appropriation. This is mirrored in Sasha's appraisal of the weather, which is something that happens in the sky. Sasha tries to communicate between the terrestrial, and the astral, by invoking bird imagery in way in which the narrator controls birds, or keeps birds in their mouth, or understands the movements of birds, but places them in terrestrial landscapes. He seems daunted by the ability to move plants from the form-space of earth into the space of air. While invoking the parable of the Titanic, it seems as though the fable of Jack and the Bean Stalk would be more appropriate - As Sasha is particularly interested in the idea that we can create structures, and that we can create structures to house ourselves in the astral fields. This is exemplified in Sasha's creation of plants made out of organic passages. Although, nothing seems entirely organic, or everything in the universe, cruise ships, ice bergs, etc, is organic as it is filtered through Fletcher's organic scope.

As I said, conflict exists as secondary function to Fletcher's contrived garden, (pictures of plants drawn on cardboard planted in the earth). There is no struggle in Fletcher's work except a struggle to comprehend Fletcher's prose, which shifts and accepts impossible irregularities (ex. a cop coming through a water faucet) as a normalcy to be accepted if not understood.

Where Fletcher's book would seem to succeed is in this conflation between the authorial voice and the direction of the text. While the book all but fails to construct a resonate narrative, the text manages, and deftly, to contort the reader's understanding of plot structure towards a dream-state in which a method of '...this happens, which resulted in this, which happens and then, and I did this...." which satisfies as long as you can give yourself over to the ride.

So ultimately, willingly, I gave myself over to the current, (and considering Fletcher's use of water and rain as an image and motif, current is appropriate) and in giving myself to the work, the work was not inclined to give anything back to me, but to drag me out to the middle of an ocean, or in the scope of the novella, a lake, and thusly quietly drown me in the procession of imagery and action. Considering the title, a procession, like a parade, like a marching band, feels sufficient. And I would recommend the easily ingested book to anyone fed up with the overinflated sense of plot and narrative most commonly attributed to the novel.

Fletcher, as a disclaimer, is a friend of mine, although I was not sold on the book to begin with, as I felt the overtly long and clause-heavy title could be most easily read as a contrivance. But to read the book as a contrived experience between both the reader and the author, an active exploration of the themes of fate (fate as in the fate of the river to flow into the ocean) and action, (as in the action of throwing oneself into the river) - I did, in fact, enjoy the book and can draw from it not just a sense of odd belonging in a universe of creation and phenomena vying for unspecified relevancy, but a place of illogical assertion creating a sense of site specific relevancy for a young lover whose motivations are led by confusion at the natural world and a reluctant sense of self-accountability for the very creation of such bizarre situations as being in love with a person and striving against all things to create a space for such a love to 'take root'.