Thousand - reviews at Goodreads

There are now two reviews of Thousand at goodreads.com. 

The review by Steve Masover appeared October 25, 2020. Steve wrote a review that would make a great cover blurb:

Exuberant! Unbounded! Inexplicable, but why would you want to? Hilarious! Disconcerting! Lascivious! Delectable! You can't make this stuff up, but Glenn Ingersoll did, one hundred words at a time.

The review by Jim Murdoch appeared March 2, 2021. Jim’s review is generous and thorough:

When, in 2013, I reviewed Fact, Glenn’s tiny (i.e. physically small) collection of short poems, I said it wouldn’t be for everyone. The same proviso is true of the, by comparison, gargantuan Thousand. To be fair that could be said of every book ever written so let me drill it down: if you got lost on the second page of The Unnamable or found your head spinning after a few lines of ‘Howl’ then Thousand is probably not for you. To be honest I’m the kind of person who finds the word “epic” off-putting no matter what you’re talking about but an “epic prose poem” just sounds like hard work and that’s exactly what this book is which is not a bad thing in itself unless you’re afraid of hard work; hard work can be rewarding. 

We could argue about the fine line between poetic prose and prose poetry all day long but I couldn’t find many books that chose to call themselves “epic prose poems,” and, at 476 pages, Edgar Qunitet’s Ahasvérus is the only one that came close to matching Thousand’s 100,000 words. 

That said just because a book’s big doesn’t make it a tome and just because a poem is long doesn’t make it epic. What makes a poem epic in the traditional sense? The Bedford Introduction to Literature describes the genre as follows:

An epic poem is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily involving a time beyond living memory in which occurred the extraordinary doings of the extraordinary men and women who, in dealings with the gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants, the poet and their audience, to understand themselves as a people or nation.

 and as much as I didn’t expect to be writing this that’s not a bad description of Thousand (only prosier) since much of the action takes place out of time and across multiple dimensions. All that’s missing is a tardis. What I expected to find in the above description was talk of the hero’s journey and although there are heroes in Thousand—a Jesus Christ for one although not any Jesus I recognise—there isn’t a central heroic figure, an Odysseus, Beowulf or even an Alice to follow through these many wonderlands. Most of the characters are ordinary-ish folk when they’re not leprechauns, river goblins, seventeen-armed angels, three-headed giants or transcendental butlers. 

Why a prose poem though and not a novel? I don’t have an answer for that but this comment from Glenn raises some interesting issues:

I understand that many readers wish words were invisible, that their meanings would instantaneously and without ambiguity translate to their minds the important stuff—the story, the scene, the conflict. That sounds like a philosophy of prose. Poetry wants you to notice the way it’s being said as well as what it’s saying. – Fact: an introduction to the poem poems of Glenn Ingersoll

There is a story here—many stories—but the stories, if you’ll forgive me, aren’t the whole story. Thousand doesn’t follow a traditional linear narrative. Sometimes you notice the transition but often not. One minute we’re jogging along nicely in the third person then POW! a narrator appears out of nowhere and PFFT! vanishes as mysteriously. One minute you’re reading about two sisters, Emily and Eula, then the story veers left and the next thing you know it’s inside a radio that Eula turns off. Or sometimes the narrative just arbitrarily jumps to a new story, like someone changing the TV channel on you without asking. Usually you know when this is about to happen because Glenn helpfully begins the new storyline with “Once upon a time there was a…” a dog (most often it’s a dog and sometimes he’s called Prince or Sir) or a cat or a boy or a chimneysweep or a caiman. 

This continual switching of stories—none of which are brought to a satisfactory conclusion—reminded me of Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller which I gave a rather mean-spirited 3 stars when I reviewed it not because it wasn’t well written but because I felt cheated and I realised this was going to happen again and again. The same goes for Thousand. You’re continually getting short-changed and what’s more annoying is there isn’t an obvious thread (none I picked up on) linking the stories. Yes, characters do reappear like the sisters but they’re not developed. The same with the dogs, the angels, the leprechauns… we spend a few pages following them then something shiny catches our narrator’s eye (I use the term “narrator” loosely) and he’s off again which is really annoying because there’re so many good ideas here crying out for development and resolution. My favourite begins (sans the helpful ‘Once upon a time’):

The girl pulls open the door and steps into the white room. She steps around the naked figure and kneels on the floor before a white box. From the pocket of her

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jacket she takes a small gold box. She pops the lid on the box and dips a finger in. An ant climbs onto her finger and walks rapidly around it. The girl puts her finger into the keyhole of the white box. When she removes the finger the ant has stayed behind. “I don’t know why people don’t talk to you. You’re standing there and somebody comes by and doesn’t say anything to you. It’s like you weren’t even there. That’s rude. I hate rude people. I won’t talk to them. They can just go to hell, that’s what I

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think. They can just go to hell.” The girl pushes herself up, slaps imaginary dust from her pantyhose, and straightens her cap. She’s not wearing a cap. It’s something else. […]

         Thousand: Six Hundred Eight

The girl is wearing tan slacks, no cap, a button-up shirt. Yes, it’s clear now. There are no bats or purses. White room like a doctor’s exam room. A table covered with white paper, a white stool with wheels, a

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couple white cabinets. Everything white. Including the figure in each room’s center. White like a worn out hospital sheet, maybe, not white like a white person. Not person-like, the girl tends to think, if she hasn’t managed to ignore it completely, letting each voice play like a slight variant of the same bad radio program, advertisements for the Way of Anxiety. […]

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The girl pushes herself up, slaps imaginary dust from the knees of her slacks and centres their carefully ironed creases. With measured steps she passes again around the complaining creature, closing the door as she leaves the room. In the next room there is another white box beside another naked figure.

This scene is repeated with slight variations several times and reminded me of Beckett’s late prose and also his play Catastrophe. Predictably we learn little about what’s going on here. Later we’re told her uniform has the letters ORO stitched in gold on all the “labels” (lapels?) which stands for Official Rotunda of the Others but that’s it. The next thing we know she…

finds herself standing on the hard packed clay of a desert highway. “Knock knock,” she says. The tables are gone, the chairs are gone, the

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walls are gone. The stars are so bright she can see by them. More or less. She scuffs her shoe against the road and raises a puff of dust. The arm that rounds her shoulder and the kiss that touches her cheek should surprise her, she will think later, trying to remember everything. Wouldn’t that be one reason it makes sense to regard this all a dream? One of many reasons, that is. “Welcome to the place between places,” the voice says, a voice sleepy as a kiss. “I am an angel.”

The angel leads her to a settlement of tents outside a city. The residents, although they don’t speak her language, take her in and appear friendly. They bathe her, supply appropriate clothing and let her spend the night. In the morning she finds she can understand them. It turns out the tent-dwellers are waiting to queue to gain access to the city which may or may not be a place of education. Anyway she gets in and meets a dragon who offers to be her teacher:

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“When the pupil is ready, the teacher will come,” the dragon says, holding up a claw. Impaled on the claw, the girl sees, is one of the dried ticks. “No,” she says. “Then never mind,” the dragon says, tucking the tick back into the fold of its ear. The dragon lays its head on the floor, tucks forefeet under chin, and closes its eyes.

And then we’re off at a tangent and, apart from a brief mention later, we never learn of her fate or, indeed, the dragon’s.

The book began life as an exercise. Glenn determined to produce one hundred words a day every day for a thousand days. Quite a feat. Of course other writers have worked like that before, the Australian Gerald Murnane for one. Glenn began in May 2010 and wrote on his blog, “There is, so far, no plot. A plot of some sort may begin to accrue. I suspect it will. In my writing I tend to pull all the parts together, even if I am also trying to push them apart.”

The work that appears on the blog is not written ahead of time. I write it. I post it immediately after writing it. This is not to say the posts go up completely first draft. I write, read the work over, revise (occasionally extensively), reread until it works for me, then post. But I do not write ahead. – thousand explained some more

The final entry was on January 21st 2013. Over the three years there are several entries tagged thousand process but none, sadly, tagged thousand explained. So what is it about? Does it have to be about anything? Can it not simply be the sum of its parts? I have mixed feelings on this. By all means expect your readers to bring something of themselves to the work but how much is fair trade? Five percent? Ten? Towards the end of Thousand meaning is discussed and it’s worth sharing a bit of that:

         

Thousand: Nine Hundred Eighty-Eight

Understanding is overrated. Have you ever watched a foreign film without subtitles? Or read a modern poem? If it really doesn’t matter whether you understand you can appreciate other things. The music in language, say. Birds sing in the trees and we’re told they do it to attract a mate. Is that everything? It’s a lot, sure; everybody knows that who doesn’t have a date for Saturday night. But singing’s probably a pleasure for the singer, too. Maybe birds are sending sophisticated messages, messages we have yet to decode. I’m not saying we shouldn’t bother seeking meaning. Except sometimes.

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Indeed, sometimes you need to let go the frenzied grasping after meaning. Take pleasure in mystery. Live in it undispelled. Ignorance as sensuous experience.

He acknowledges that we’re all “meaning-making animal(s)” and it’s hard “taking your hand off the wheel of the relentless inner drive and shedding the fear that meaninglessness will hurt you.” He’s right. I found it immensely hard.

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A dream doesn’t mean what it presents as nonsense. It really means really profound shit. There’s a good reason you dreamed that. Right? Well, that’s your mind. Working away. Coming up with gods and symbols and finding faces in burnt tortillas. That’s your mind.

I said at the start this is not a book for everybody and I stand by that because not everyone—and I include myself at the head of that list—can unlearn how to read the way they’ve been reading for the past, in my case, fifty-five years. It’s like the first time you heard microtonal music. It just sounds wrong. Like a piano badly in need of tuning. And yet an out-of-tune piano has a flavour that isn’t unpalatable. It can even be comforting especially if you grew up with a piano in a house that never, or hardly ever, got tuned. This book plinky plonks along quite merrily and doesn’t take itself too seriously. As Glenn himself concedes:

As a story it’s probably more frustrating than rewarding. I’ve enjoyed writers like John Yau and Clark Coolidge who write things that seem to be fiction sometimes, but the words refuse loyalty to any single narrative. The reading is fun for the sounds and the surprises and the wit rather than the what-happened-next of a plot. – thousand in thirds

Meaning, of course, doesn’t only indicate a level of understanding but also a degree of appreciation, an emotional as opposed to an intellectual, connection. This I do have. Reading Thousand was something I went through, something I experienced and although I’ve already forgotten much of the specifics the overall experience will stay with me. That means something. You cannot read this book and not be affected. You might not understand it or be able to grasp the bigger picture but that shouldn’t be regarded as a loss. When Beckett was overseeing Jessica Tandy’s interpretation of Mouth in Not I he told her he hoped the piece would work “on the nerves of the audience, not it’s intellect.” Thousand has a similar logorrhoeal feel to it. Although it was written in bite-sized chunks I think it was a mistake to publish it with breaks. It’s a single paragraph, a wall of words that ideally, to my mind, should be read in a single sitting although who would have the stamina for that I’ve no idea.

At time of writing the book is free to download at Smashwords and I would encourage you to give it a go and not be like I was the first time I started this and quit after five hundred words. Gird up your loins, grit your teeth, pee before you sit down to start and don’t even think about reading it if there’s background music on or the kids are still awake and acting up.