Whenever I meet flesh-encased authors, I need to be careful not to refer to them by the book-embedded appelations I hold of them in my head.
Alex Preston is of course Alex ‘TBC’ Preston. Not because he is forever awaiting confirmation, but because his name is, for me, synonymous with This Bleeding City.
So how annoying when these livingbreathing writing folk then go and produce further novels, requiring redrafts of psychic categories. It’s a bit like someone you’ve always comfortably imagoed as Julia Collins suddenly calling herself Julia Bhattacharya just because some bloke’s put a wedding ring on her finger.
So Alex ‘TBC’ Preston should now go by the name Alex ‘The Revelations’ Preston, which the baptism aggrandisement monitor in my head seems to be having problems letting through.
Until that is, we got together to read and talk about David Foster Wallace’s ‘Incarnations of Burned Children’. Everything in this discussion felt revelatory: from Alex’s incantatory, almost keening reading of the story, to the way in which we locked into our deciphering duties like two wild-eyed talmudic scholars or Ismaili Shi’a Imams in training.
DFW repays this very detail-oriented, personalised, whole-hearted reading of his work. But don’t all texts, and people too, for that matter?
To slightly misquote the medieval Sufi writer Abu Hafs Umar al-Suhrawardi: “To listen to the text means to listen to God; hearing becomes seeing, seeing becomes hearing, knowing turns into action, action turns into knowing - that is ‘fine hearing’.” And reading.
Revelations indeed.
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Hi there,
Very fond of this entire project - thanks!
I’d like to let people know that there are some nice free short story recordings on the Comma Press website. Especially of note are the David Constantine short stories - he’s a lovely reader of his own work. http://www.commapress.co.uk/?section=StoryBank
Thank you.
I was entirely unprepared for this.
The title should have clued me in, of course.
Hope it wasn’t too harrowing for you, Fern. It’s strong stuff.
Knowing that DFW was a fan of David Lynch, my mind immediately builds out a David Lynch movie sets when reading one of DFW’s stories. This powerful story( and the perfect reading of it) pulls me into that frame of mind almost instantly. The bird in the oak and the swinging door conjure up the opening and final scenes of Blue Velvet. That contrasted with the intensity of what happens in the story is very much “Lynchian” as well. Great stuff. Thanks so much for this podcast. Quite good!
oh god, yeah, i recall this story… it was horrible, horrible. wonderful reading of a nightmare story. dfw was amazing.
as a parent, you are vigilant, yet bad things still happen. you can only do your very best and hope never to see the very worst.