Symbo-dumps and Spatial form

[moved to https://litrefsarticles.blogspot.com/2025/12/symbo-dumps-and-spatial-form.html]

Lavenham

You may not have been to Lavenham (Suffolk - follow the link to see photos) but you've probably seen it in Harry Potter films. In medieval times it was a wealthy town (in the UK top 20) but now fewer than 2000 people live there. It has over 300 listed buildings and still feels medieval.

When I visited the Guildhall (built around 1530) it had recently been raining. The building overlooks the square where John Lennon and Yoko Ono filmed part of "Apotheosis".

The oldest building goes back to the 1300s. The bookshop isn't so old. It sells far more than books. John Constable's school (dating from the 1500s) is round the corner. The setting for the "Hay Wain" is a drive away

More similes/metaphors from novels

Here's a continuation of a list I posted in June. Without the context it's rather unfair to assess the following fragments. From what I recall, they're mostly in the author/narrator's voice. Do they work in prose? If they fail, why? Would they be more suited to poetry or stand-up?

1. "We hide in our own pleasure" (Jodi Picoult)
2. "truth vibrates when it's drawn across the bow of pain" (Jodi Picoult)
3. a calf in the road with "the affronted look of someone caught looting" (Nikki Gemmell)
4. "Daisy wore a clingy black dress with a neckline so deep it could tutor philosophy" (Harlan Coben)
5. "breathing like a ruptured accordian" (Stuart MacBride)
6. "slithering about like a snake in a sack of milk" (Stuart MacBride)
7. "he removed the covering from the sandwiches like someone removing their cap for a passing hearse" (Andrew McMillan)
8. "trying to pin down her last abode was like attempting to discover the whereabouts of Atlantis with a boyscout's compass." (Jane Costello)
9. "sweat-pants with an arse so saggy you could bungee-jump off a suspension bridge with it" (Jane Costello)
10. a noise like "I'd poured battery acid on a dalek and chucked it down a mountain" (Jane Costello) (character-PoV)
11. "He liked the noise of business and politics, it was an adult reassurance, like the chatter of parents on a night journey, meaningless, fragmentary, and consoling to the sleepy child on the back seat" (Alan Hollinghurst)
12. "Hank's eyes dart about like scared birds trying to find a place to land" (Harlan Coben) (character-PoV)

For me,

• 1 would work in a poem.
• 2 doesn't work because a bow is drawn across something, not the other way around
• 4 sounds like parody - maybe it's supposed to
• 5 is effective - short and expressive
• 6 puzzles me. Why a sack of milk?
• 8 is fun
• 11 has a ring of truth - a comparison that might be harder to make the most of in poetry.
• 12 has been used before - which may not be a problem

Recitativo secco and poetry

I know very little about opera, but I think "Recitativo secco" is what opera singers sometimes do between songs - minimal orchestration: more talking than singing. In musicals they would talk.

I can't find much online about the pros/cons of recitative. It can involve a few instruments. "secco" (dry) is the most minimal style. Here are a few quotes -

• "It increases the interest of Scenes which, deprived of the resources of the Orchestra, might become tedious: but it seriously diminishes the amount of contrast attainable in effects of colouring and chiaroscuro" (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Music_and_Musicians/Secco_Recitative)
• secco recitative gave way to full recitative by 1820 in serious operas, and became standard in comic operas during the following decade (New Grove Dictionary)
• "Typically, the earlier the opera is, the easier it is to distinguish between recitative and other operatic sections, such as arias or ensemble pieces" (https://www.operasense.com/tag/recitativo-secco/

In books like Tim Steele's "Towards a winter solstice" the rhyme/meter keeps ticking over even when the poetry's having a rest. In free verse books like "Bycatch" (Caroline Smith) (a good book) there are stanzas (indeed, whole poems) where the line-breaks carry on even though the text is prose. It's like those joggers who run on the spot waiting for the lights to turn green.

So what's wrong with talking instead of (gratuitous?) singing? What's wrong with passages of prose? Maybe

1. the work feels more of a unified whole if the music/form is sustained
2. there is a hierarchy of arts - music is higher than words; poetry is higher than prose - and people prefer the higher arts
3. there's a thin-end-of-the-wedge fear - if you start leaving out line-breaks where will it end? Flash?

Let's deal with those issues in literature -

1. The haibun form is hybrid. It hasn't really taken off - perhaps because people feel they should stick to the rules of having a prose travelogue and a haiku. People are more flexibly combining prose and poems nowadays. However, I don't think the hybrid forms are going to be popular any time soon.
2. Are hierarchies breaking down? Rhyming poetry doesn't have a status advantage over free verse nowadays, but I think that poetry still has a higher status than prose. Flash's status is rising in the prose world.
3. Given the 2 points above, I can see why authors don't slip some prose into a poem, or combine prose pieces and poems in the same book (I think John Updike did it, but it's rare). That said, the border between free verse and prose is becoming more porous, with some writers (Carolyn Forche, Michael Loveday, etc) re-categorising some of their old poems as Flash. I can imagine a day when people who would have produced a poetry book in the past could write a book of Flash instead, using much the same material.

Comedians in novels

I've talked to a few amateur stand-up comedians, including those who've attended comedy workshops. I've watched many stand-up shows (including some open-mic ones) and can see how it's a fertile source of literary material. The author's problem is how to cope with the "tears of a clown" cliche.

Joseph O'Connor's short story "The Wexford Girl" has an obsessive joker, and I've read other short stories about sad stand-up acts. Novel-length attempts are rarer, not least because so many jokes are needed. I've read/heard -

• "Good Material" by Dolly Alderton - Andy (35, a comedian who does a lot of other bit-jobs) has been gently dumped. The PoV is shared by him and his ex. It's like a Nick Hornby novel.
• "A horse walks into a bar" by David Grossman (Jonathan Cape, 2016) - Dovaleh, 57, is doing his act. We're given it nearly verbatim - his life-story rather than jokes, though he has jokes ready when he needs them. The audience trickle away. In the end it's only him and a judge he'd invited along. They'd been schoolfriends, etc., though they've not met for decades. The judge and comedian take turns with the PoV.

In both we learn tricks of the stand-up trade. Confession and self-humilation on stage can be like an author's performance in a novel where life and art mingle - how much of it is therapy?

Margate and Canterbury

This charity bookshop with stained glass in Margate used to be a bank - I took the photo from its first floor. "The Margate Bookshop" nearby has an excellent range of poetry books. There are some interesting arty shops and markets in the "Old Town"

It was only when I arrived in Margate that I found out that the Turner Contemporary Gallery's there. This sculpture's dress is in the form of cowrie shells. One of Gormley's statues is nearly visible through the window. It was half-submerged way out at sea when I was there. An old swimmer had just entered the water by it.

Canterbury cashes in on Canterbury Tales (one is set only a mile or so from my house in Cambridge). It's an interesting city to walk around, especially if you like eating and drinking. If you prefer history, there's still more than enough to see. Were I a student again I'd be tempted to go there.

Canterbury too has decent bookshops, including an Oxfam bookshop and the inevitable Chaucer bookshop.

The main point of my trip was to attend "The Sampler" (part of the Canterbury Festival) with Barry Fentiman Hall, Jessica Taggart Rose, Maggie Harris, Katy Evans-Bush, Rosie Johnston, Connor Sansby, Poppy Cockburn and Mat Riches. There were some good poems (my favourite was about the Gormley statue) but I didn't stay to the end because the event looked like it would last 50% longer than I expected. The open-mic readers weren't the only ones with time trouble. Not for the first time, the ones whose introductions went on longest were the ones whose poems I wanted to fast-forward through. In a competition where poems can't be longer than 40 lines, winning poems can be a lot shorter than the maximum allowed. I think the same might apply at open-mics.

Rewriting the classics

I've seen Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead". I've read Joyce's "Ulysses". I've not seen Disney's "The Lion King". These works all allude to earlier texts - some more explicitly than others. For the reader/viewer some of these works are enriched by knowledge of the original but can stand alone, whereas others almost require pre-knowledge of the original.

In the last few months I've listened to two fairly recent novels that rewrite a classic from a different Point-of-View, sometimes injecting anachronistic concepts -

• "James" by Percival Everett - I've not read "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", which remains (in revised ways) controversial. James (Jim) is Huck's slave friend.
• "Julia" by Sandra Newman - this uses much (maybe all?) of Julia's dialogue from "1984". Julia is Winston Smith's girlfriend. By presenting her words in a new, more feminist context, they take on new meanings. This idea (of not changing the original words or action, but letting them take on new interpretations) is used to a greater or lesser extent by other works of this type.

I enjoyed both novels. Knowing the original means that there are spoilers, though the treatments continue to offer surprises. The authors needed to decide how much the original work would be used as a constraint - how closely their book needed to track the events of the original. I suspect that they didn't want to contradict anything in the original - it's better to leave an event out entirely rather than bend it to fit the new plot. The picaresque nature of Twain's work eases Everett's task in this respect. Julia isn't so central a character as Jim, so Newman had more space to work in - more back-story to add. Reviews of "Julia" often comment on the ending, which goes beyond the time-frame of the main body of "1984".

Some of the satisfaction of reading such novels derives from recognising the borrowings from the originals. My memory of the originals is hazy at best. I found myself at times wondering whether details were in these books because they had to be (being in the originals) or whether they were significant additions by the author. Did the original Julia work in Fiction section of the Ministry of Truth or is this a meta-fiction twist? Did Jim really tell Huck that Huck was his son?

I've recently listened to "The Family Chao" by Lan Samantha Chang. It parallels "The Brothers Karamazov" though I only realised that when I read the reviews afterwards. I think it works fine as a stand-alone book. It deals with son/father conflicts in a family of Orientals in the States. I've not read "The Brothers Karamazov", but reading the Wikipedia summary of it I can see how close the parallel is. It's clever - Chang had to find analogues for many features, in the way that Joyce did.