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| Illustration by Catrin Morgan in The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus |
While hooning around the internet (I do a lot of that these days while lounging at my nursing throne. That and reading) I was pleased to see that:
i) Ben Marcus is publishing a new book called Leaving the Sea — A New Collection of Short Stories in 2014.
ii) Granta has just republished The Age of Wire and String in a new edition with illustrations by the awesome Catrin Morgan (a PhD student at the RCA. I saw her speak a few months ago at the annual Falmouth University Authorial Practice Forum and it was great to hear someone talk so very intelligently and thought-provokingly about images and time). See a a review of the book here.
iii) On Ben Marcus's own blog there was this interesting piece of text from a never-completed questionnaire with David Markson:
The title of your book, Reader’s Block, draws attention to the fact that a reader can fail at something too. The book evokes something not so frequently discussed: readerly ability, willingness, motivation. While it would seem dangerous to become nostalgic for a time when reading was a skill and not just the opening of a slack orifice, it does create a challenge for an artist who happens to work with language. Is being demanding a function, or a necessary result, of writing artistically? If the actual ability to read and decipher a sentence is diminishing, does that concern you as a writer? And do you have a particular relationship, at least in theory, to readers?It reminds me of thoughts that I was having while making this some time back and which I would still really like to take further.
