Garry Thomas Morse
Autor von Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus (The Chaos! Quincunx)
Über den Autor
Bildnachweis: photo of Garry from his publishers' website
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Werke von Garry Thomas Morse
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Wissenswertes
- Geschlecht
- male
- Nationalität
- Canada
- Wohnorte
- Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada
- Berufe
- poet
- Organisationen
- Talonbooks (Online Marketing Manager and Poetry Editor)
- Preise und Auszeichnungen
- Governor General’s Poetry Award finalist (2011), Discovery Passages.
- Agent
- Talonbooks
- Kurzbiographie
- Garry Thomas Morse has had two books of poetry published by LINEbooks, Transversals for Orpheus (2006) and Streams (2007), one collection of fiction, Death in Vancouver (2009), published by Talonbooks, and two books of poetry published by Talonbooks, After Jack (2010) and Discovery Passages (2011), finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry.
inor Episodes, his second book of fiction, concerning surrealist and speculative genres, is forthcoming from Talonbooks in 2012.
Grounded in the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Desnos, Ezra Pound, Jack Spicer, Rainer Maria Rilke and his Native oral traditions, his work has been featured in a variety of publications, including Branch Magazine, Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, CV2, dANDelion, filling Station, memewar, Poetry is Dead, subTerrain, The Vancouver Review and West Coast Line. Morse is the recipient of the 2008 City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Artist and has twice been selected as runner-up for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.
Mitglieder
Rezensionen
Diese Rezension wurde für LibraryThing Early Reviewers geschrieben.As other reviewers have [in a sense tautologically] remarked, if this book is not your cup of tea this book will not be your cup of tea.
It is definitely my cup of tea, which I suspected from descriptions of its contents, which is why I requested it from Early Reviewers. I was not disappointed. It's also published by Talonbooks, which I knew from my lit-studies in a previous life is a major Canadian publisher of [mostly] Canadian experimental literature.
The links to Surrealism are well-deserved. Morse's prose proceeds and cubes up reality in a dreamlike fashion, looping and leashing out in totally unexpected directions / dimensions and bringing back and serving up word-combinations and images such as innocent readers may never have seen or read before. There are characters who persist (at least as much as they do in dreams) and a plot one can follow ... if you're into that sort of thing.
If you are looking for characters you can "identify with" and stories that reflect the way the world "really is," you should probably avoid this book. If on the other hand you have been fascinated by those moments between sleeping and waking where you seem to be hosting someone else's thoughts, I urge you to dive in and enjoy.
The best way to enjoy a book like this one is, I think, to just relax and marvel at Morse's linguistic fireworks. They may do something to your brain -- and that can be a lively pleasure.
My review is unforgivably late. No excuses.… (mehr)
It is definitely my cup of tea, which I suspected from descriptions of its contents, which is why I requested it from Early Reviewers. I was not disappointed. It's also published by Talonbooks, which I knew from my lit-studies in a previous life is a major Canadian publisher of [mostly] Canadian experimental literature.
The links to Surrealism are well-deserved. Morse's prose proceeds and cubes up reality in a dreamlike fashion, looping and leashing out in totally unexpected directions / dimensions and bringing back and serving up word-combinations and images such as innocent readers may never have seen or read before. There are characters who persist (at least as much as they do in dreams) and a plot one can follow ... if you're into that sort of thing.
If you are looking for characters you can "identify with" and stories that reflect the way the world "really is," you should probably avoid this book. If on the other hand you have been fascinated by those moments between sleeping and waking where you seem to be hosting someone else's thoughts, I urge you to dive in and enjoy.
The best way to enjoy a book like this one is, I think, to just relax and marvel at Morse's linguistic fireworks. They may do something to your brain -- and that can be a lively pleasure.
My review is unforgivably late. No excuses.… (mehr)
1 
tungsten_peerts | 5 weitere Rezensionen | Jun 16, 2013 |
tungsten_peerts | 5 weitere Rezensionen | Jun 16, 2013 | Diese Rezension wurde für LibraryThing Early Reviewers geschrieben.MINOR EPISODES/ MAJOR RUCKUS presents a pair of surrealist novels. This author's form of surrealism is much more Georges Bataille than André Breton. The prose is so unexpected and the imagery is so dense that the text is difficult to read. As other reviewers have noted, if you enjoy this kind of prose, you likely already know about this book. It has a very small potential audience, but those readers are likely to enjoy this text. Unfortunately, this is not a literary style I enjoy, and I could appreciate this book only at a technical level.… (mehr)
Diese Rezension wurde für LibraryThing Early Reviewers geschrieben.Right from the start, there are some brilliant sentences in this book, even if the overall action takes some dynamiting to break into. This is odd, because on the sentence level things are far from psychedelically unclear--the surreal is like a lucid, programmatic psychedelic--no outtasite or gabba gabba hey, just the chance meeting of the sewing machine and the umbrella described like you're sitting down to dinner. This book is surreal for sure. The reporterly impossible. More factual clarity, less overall plot logic.
This lack of narrative thrust can cause you to tune out when Morse's inventiveness, exuberance and humour flag, which is relatively infrequently. Some of his bon mots are downright straightforward: "There are countries where you can do as you please and countries where you can think as you please. But I doubt there's anywhere you can do both at the same time." Some are much more freeqy, and it's nice that you can zoom out and glide over the waves when taking it action by predicate gets too chunky. Joycean, in that sometimes you wanna unpack and other times just get word-wasted.
There are tired ideas, especially in the realm of the prurient--stogies and dicks, someone calling a vagina a flower repeated several times with authorial emphasis like it's a novel point of characterization. The "episodes" in the first half, relating the escapades of a global monopoly capitalist fuck/trickster wizard called Minor, are actually a bit longer on balance I think than the chapters of the second half, which is loosely a parody of SF in which humans are called "Dulklings"; but really it's a fairly seamless transition, except that the second half is aliens on top of the first half's secret agent schtick. All of these are more tones than threads, anyway, regions of the palette, since it's hard to follow the action in any realistic way.
The first half is less over the top, perhaps--there are still more of the small, natural reactions to crazy crap that make you smile at the ballsiness--Minor gets sniped, a flower springs up, but it's the way he brushes it away with annoyance that convinces--the quotidian reaction making it almost a silent film, a raised eyebrow on the face of a Chaplin or somebody. The real reaction would be screaming catatonia, and too many authors would go too far into the alternative and just effuse us to death Pynchonian; but here the characters are true denizens of their milieu, something rarer in fiction than it might initially appear, and give us the reactions of, like, really arch action heroes. Oh! It's camp! And Minor is an antivillain for our times who puts the Baudribbles and drabbles in DeLillo's Cosmopolis to shame.
I hope I'm not making this sound dry. Surrealism is an acceptable reaction to a surreal world in which each of us acts not in his interest every single day. It's not as good a reaction as rage, but it's more than adequate, and some rage does poke through the surr. here. But more humour: I lolled or lqarled* like double digits of times reading this, which isn't an experience I usually have with guys that think they're funny. And it helps you deal with the fact that each episode ends inconclusively, a draw match conducted for obscure purposes between shifting identities moving in mysterious ways.
BUT do let me note good sir that each episode also advances the plot, a little, which speaks to craft considering there hardly is a plot. Each time, the weird truthiness you've developed regarding who a character might sort of be and what capable of shifts, or the balance of power is overturned (even though you didn't get that you know F or Bebe Lala or Lax Laxness was in the ascendency until they got comeupped) or you get a new angle on how the laws of freaky fysics might reveal another wrinkle.
Major Ruckus, the second half, gives you more opportunity to glide and murmurate, which is not a bad thing, kind of like running through the surrealist Louvre or something (running through museums in general always a good plan, btw. O synaesthetic repast!).
Hey, you're the dude in the chair and you can read this however you want to and I don't think you'll have much trouble finding a way that you can enjoy.
*laughing quietly and relatively long… (mehr)
This lack of narrative thrust can cause you to tune out when Morse's inventiveness, exuberance and humour flag, which is relatively infrequently. Some of his bon mots are downright straightforward: "There are countries where you can do as you please and countries where you can think as you please. But I doubt there's anywhere you can do both at the same time." Some are much more freeqy, and it's nice that you can zoom out and glide over the waves when taking it action by predicate gets too chunky. Joycean, in that sometimes you wanna unpack and other times just get word-wasted.
There are tired ideas, especially in the realm of the prurient--stogies and dicks, someone calling a vagina a flower repeated several times with authorial emphasis like it's a novel point of characterization. The "episodes" in the first half, relating the escapades of a global monopoly capitalist fuck/trickster wizard called Minor, are actually a bit longer on balance I think than the chapters of the second half, which is loosely a parody of SF in which humans are called "Dulklings"; but really it's a fairly seamless transition, except that the second half is aliens on top of the first half's secret agent schtick. All of these are more tones than threads, anyway, regions of the palette, since it's hard to follow the action in any realistic way.
The first half is less over the top, perhaps--there are still more of the small, natural reactions to crazy crap that make you smile at the ballsiness--Minor gets sniped, a flower springs up, but it's the way he brushes it away with annoyance that convinces--the quotidian reaction making it almost a silent film, a raised eyebrow on the face of a Chaplin or somebody. The real reaction would be screaming catatonia, and too many authors would go too far into the alternative and just effuse us to death Pynchonian; but here the characters are true denizens of their milieu, something rarer in fiction than it might initially appear, and give us the reactions of, like, really arch action heroes. Oh! It's camp! And Minor is an antivillain for our times who puts the Baudribbles and drabbles in DeLillo's Cosmopolis to shame.
I hope I'm not making this sound dry. Surrealism is an acceptable reaction to a surreal world in which each of us acts not in his interest every single day. It's not as good a reaction as rage, but it's more than adequate, and some rage does poke through the surr. here. But more humour: I lolled or lqarled* like double digits of times reading this, which isn't an experience I usually have with guys that think they're funny. And it helps you deal with the fact that each episode ends inconclusively, a draw match conducted for obscure purposes between shifting identities moving in mysterious ways.
BUT do let me note good sir that each episode also advances the plot, a little, which speaks to craft considering there hardly is a plot. Each time, the weird truthiness you've developed regarding who a character might sort of be and what capable of shifts, or the balance of power is overturned (even though you didn't get that you know F or Bebe Lala or Lax Laxness was in the ascendency until they got comeupped) or you get a new angle on how the laws of freaky fysics might reveal another wrinkle.
Major Ruckus, the second half, gives you more opportunity to glide and murmurate, which is not a bad thing, kind of like running through the surrealist Louvre or something (running through museums in general always a good plan, btw. O synaesthetic repast!).
Hey, you're the dude in the chair and you can read this however you want to and I don't think you'll have much trouble finding a way that you can enjoy.
*laughing quietly and relatively long… (mehr)
7 MeditationesMartini | 5 weitere Rezensionen | Dec 5, 2012 |
MeditationesMartini | 5 weitere Rezensionen | Dec 5, 2012 | Auszeichnungen
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However, the plotlines are secondary to wildly inventive language and a great deal of ribald humor;.It is a little as if Stand on Zanzibar had been rewritten in the style of Finnegan's Wake.… (mehr)