Edmund Woops Debut Novel REISSUED!!!!!!!!

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Really enjoying it so far though. Very odd book, don't think I've ever read anything quite like it.
Funny you should say that, as I found it's remarkably similar in style, tone and content to a novel I once read, published in the sevent-...

Nah, just kidding.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
I notice that the title can be read as referring not only to lights in the normal sense, but also to light, i.e. low-tar, cigarettes. (Lambent & Butler, presumably.)

@woops I notice you wussed out of doing X in the chapter of alphabetical paragraphs! Couldn't you have had something about Xenophon sending Xerxes a xenophobic Xerox?
your copy of the book doesn't have that paragraph? weird. must have been a misprint...
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
just looked into it and apparently Tea's correct that the official manuscript skips X in the alphabet chapter. so what's the deal with mine then.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
just looked into it and apparently Tea's correct that the official manuscript skips X in the alphabet chapter. so what's the deal with mine then.
He explained to me why he did this in a private correspondence, but only members of the Special Cool Secret Club are allowed to know.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
i've been reading this slowly because although short it feels very dense and hard to predict. you get the sense that if you skim through a few pages you're likely to miss a great unexpected paragraph or turn of phrase. some weird historic commemorative plaque or secret passageway or altercation. its very interior and poetic but i've been reading it in kind of a "stupid" way, as a sort of picaresque. may be the wrong approach.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
i've been reading this slowly because although short it feels very dense and hard to predict. you get the sense that if you skim through a few pages you're likely to miss a great unexpected paragraph or turn of phrase. some weird historic commemorative plaque or secret passageway or altercation. its very interior and poetic but i've been reading it in kind of a "stupid" way, as a sort of picaresque. may be the wrong approach.
I've been reading it slowly too. It's not a criticism, on the contrary in fact, but the lack of plot (I assume, unless one emerges in the second half of the book) frees you up from from wanting to charge ahead and read it more quickly, missing stuff. It encourages slow reading, which I like very much.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
a great read. was going to quote all my favorite passages here but there ended up being too many to keep track of. for me the protagonist's Weltanschauung was both incredibly relatable at times and a sort of unsolved mystery. which i think is exactly what i want. i do wonder, why anne and gerald, out of all the billions of people the protagonist probably encountered in his endless wandering around the city? what about them makes them such essential foils for him?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
i do wonder, why anne and gerald, out of all the billions of people the protagonist probably encountered in his endless wandering around the city? what about them makes them such essential foils for him?
Edmund, as the author, has of course created Anne and Gerald, so they are dependent on him for their existence.

However, Edmund as the narrator is himself anonymized or depersonalized almost to the point of ceasing to exist - a cypher, a gestalt entity, a falling tree that no-one hears - or would be, were it not for Anne and Gerald to provide some sort of anchorage point to reality.

So the two parties are mutually ontologically co-dependent.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Good stuff, Tea.

It's a novel with a map, but not any sort of map you can follow to find your destination. Similarly, the Framework, another kind of map (related to the internet? I dunno, I've still got a few chapters to go, maybe more will be revealed) accessed through a device that the narrator discards and crushes underfoot at one point. It's all very disorienting, like there is some sort of map or grid there to follow and guide you, but it's impossible to use. The whole things like some sort of scrambled A-Z map that only ever helps you get lost.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Good stuff, Tea.

It's a novel with a map, but not any sort of map you can follow to find your destination. Similarly, the Framework, another kind of map (related to the internet? I dunno, I've still got a few chapters to go, maybe more will be revealed) accessed through a device that the narrator discards and crushes underfoot at one point. It's all very disorienting, like there is some sort of map or grid there to follow and guide you, but it's impossible to use. The whole things like some sort of scrambled A-Z map that only ever helps you get lost.
Thanks Benny. I was pretty high on various things last night, which might account for the, uh, theoretical tone of that post.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
You should get high more often then. I only ever dare to post more hi falutin, possibly drastically off course, theoretical ideas about literature when I've got at least 5 beers inside me, like right now in fact. Time for a siesta.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
You should get high more often then. I only ever dare to post more hi falutin, possibly drastically off course, theoretical ideas about literature when I've got at least 5 beers inside me, like right now in fact. Time for a siesta.
I'd happily take it up as a full-time vocation were it not for, well you know, job/child/relationship &c.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
The other day my little boy (aged 2.5) packed his little backpack with some, I presume, vital items.

Here you can see a mouse toy (made for him by my mum) and a certain book.

rowans_backpack.jpg
 

woops

is not like other people
The other day my little boy (aged 2.5) packed his little backpack with some, I presume, vital items.

Here you can see a mouse toy (made for him by my mum) and a certain book.

View attachment 11834
Then it goes to work on the unborn.

latest
 

luka

Well-known member

Pound & Co.​

August Kleinzahler​

  • Questioning Minds: Vols I-II: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner edited by Edward Burns
    Counterpoint, 1817 pp, $95.00, October 2018, ISBN 978 1 61902 181 5
In 1882, the year Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams were born, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter, a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. It wasn’t as good as a Remington but it was cheaper. Nietzsche was losing his eyesight, probably as a result of syphilis, and hoped the Writing Ball would help. But first he had to master touch-typing. He soon gave up on the experiment. But he noticed that when he wrote down his thoughts on the Malling-Hansen his writing style changed. It became tighter, more telegraphic and aphoristic. ‘Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,’ a friend said to him. ‘You are right,’ Nietzsche answered. ‘Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.’
 
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