a review in Rain Taxi of Autobiography of a Book

A review of Autobiography of a Book appears in the new issue of Rain Taxi. 

Reviewer Mike Bove calls “Autobiography of a Book, an inventive, fun, and wildly philosophical reading experience.” 

Book asks a lot of questions “and gradually it becomes clear that Book itself, the protagonist and narrative voice, is asking because it really wants to know: What does it mean to exist, and how is life lived?”

Bove also takes note of the book’s design:

“Autobiography of a Book begins with bright white type on black pages that slowly lighten to gray, mirroring the darkness of non-existence from which Book gradually emerges. About halfway through, the pages are light enough to warrant a shift from white type to black. Appropriately enough, Book’s first works in black type are “I am alive.” From here the pages continue to lighten, and by the time the book concludes, they are fully white, signaling Book’s achievement of existence, total and complete.”

Read the rest at Rain Taxi.

Autobiography of a Book as told to Glenn Ingersoll

Autobiography of a Book is now available from Itasca Books. 

 

Autobiography of a Book is the life story of a book. The book must will itself into existence. And by “will” I mean talk. The book must talk until it comes to its end. With every word Book edges closer to its dream, its dream of being what it claims to be, a real, honest-to-goodness book. 

Can a novel that anthropomorphizes language be a page-turner? Glenn Ingersoll’s Autobiography of a Book says, “Yes!” And this reader agrees.

                                                        — Eric Darton, author of Free City

Book came to me as a voice and demanded I type as it spoke. I usually scoff at people who claim their writing is dictated by the muse, so I find it funny to be saying something like that myself. But Book is a character, in both senses of the word, and I was ready to listen and to work. Whatever it said, I was happy to go along. 

Book is imbued with the longings of a body, the vulnerable reality of a Frankenstein’s Monster or a Velveteen rabbit, the pangs of creator and created, and all the fragile, vigorous, shambolic longings of humanity. To read Ingersoll’s wildly inventive prose debut is to be transformed.

— Maw Shein Win, Storage Unit for the Spirit House

Book and I both wondered during the process if a respectable book length would actually be achieved. At roughly 44,000 words, 220 pages, I think it did. Is that short for a novel these days? Not that “novel” is necessarily the right word. I struggle with how to characterize Book. There's nothing fictional in it. Everything Book says happened because Book is all language and anything Book says is undeniably Book, even if impossible. Does Book have human arms and legs? Yes, when Book finds it convenient to imagine so; when imagination is defeated, Book borrows the reader’s hand, the reader’s heart. 

It’s quite a magic trick to read something totally original that also echoes something inside.

— Shannon Wheeler, New Yorker cartoonist, creator of Too Much Coffee Man

Also unlike a novel (perhaps like a life?), Book does not have a plot. Book has ideas, actions. Book has thoughts and more thoughts and tries to work them out. Book’s parts often read as essays. Perhaps that’s the way Book would be most properly classified — as a collection of personal essays, the personal essays of someone whose person is no more (somehow more?) than those essays.

"Those who fear the novel is dead or dying can rest easy. Between the pages of this revelatory revenant—the art form revivified with heart, humor, and layered perception—is a bildungsroman of a book, literally. Think Italo Calvino. Think David Markson. Now remember Glenn Ingersoll." 

— George Salis, author of Sea Above, Sun Below

Because the essays usually read as separate propositions I submitted them in small batches to literary magazines and ezines, in hopes editors would like them, and think them sufficient in themselves. Sixteen did. One editor even nominated for the Pushcart anthology. 

So a book walks into a bar with an identity crisis…, and fractals through one hot, exercised imagination. It’s like Gertrude Stein’s hair setting itself on fire in a crowded theater. What fun! Long a fanatic for Ingersoll’s poetry so no surprise this epic is a stunner. Absurdly original and far out, this baby steams along toward its very sublime amen with muscle, pathos and love.

— Michael Martin, award winning poem-filmmaker and author of Extended Remark: Poems from a Moravian Parking Lot

Please follow these links to journals that include Autobiography of a Book excerpts, most of them online:

Inverse Journal

 

It does no disservice to Glenn Ingersoll to call him the author of the exhilarating Autobiography of a Book, but doing so might be taken as an offense to the Book, which is, as we discover, self-authored, as is the case with so many great works of literature. “Life begins with an utterance. A word. Another word to grow on. A third to give the first two meaning. One more and we begin to have context. We are now in the midst of it. This is living.” Thus the Book begins. Already both its charmingly quirky personality and its erudite intellectual acumen are in play. The Book does not censor its flow of anxieties nor disguise its capacity to be amused at its failings even while remaining committed to its existence; it is imaginative enough to be willing to venture into (and experience) dark and even dangerous scenarios, and (of course) to linger in and fret over its intimate relationship with words and their organization into sentences. Book, after all, has no other existence. Having an existence, meanwhile, means it has context; it inheres in a world—its world—of experiences. It is thus that it accrues personality: “[R]egardless of whatever creation, work of art, or deed has come about, someone has lived. Are we someone? Are you someone? Try to be someone!” So writes Julia Kristeva in the preface to her biographical Hannah Arendt, but it’s something that the Book too might say. Listen well.

— Lyn Hejinian, author of My Life and The Cold of Poetry

Caveat Lector

Hawai’i Pacific Review

Why does the smell of books captivate us so much—that particular combination of paper, ink, glue? Because it’s the scent of imagination and possibility, when, as this book tells us, “I am so new. I am just starting… I am such a promising young thing… Anything could happen.” Including the book in your hands addressing you directly—yes, you, the person reading this blurb! “Dear reader, I need you. When it comes down to it, I want to live. When I am read, I live.” The best part? As you read life into this book, it returns the favor. First it’s your child, then your lover, then you’re switching places, then—but I can’t, I won’t give away the wondrous secrets inside. You’ll never look at a book the same again.

— Hardy Griffin, founding editor of Novel Slices

E-ratio

Witty Partition (formerly The Wall)

[thank you to the editors for the Pushcart nomination]

Book is quite a character and a likable one. I now even think of Book as a friend.

— Alan Bern, author of Waterwalking in Berkeley

Otoliths

The Collidescope

You are now reading a blurb endorsing the gloriously inspired Autobiography of a Book — as told to Glenn Ingersoll. This book wants to know you as intimately as only a book can. This book wants to live in your library with your collected books. Maybe in your biography section. Consider this non-fiction, as it is the true testimony of the book you now hold. It may not speak for every other book, but it offers an incredible journey deep into the pages of itself unlike anything you’ve read before.

 —James Cagney, author of MARTIAN: The Saint of Loneliness, winner of the 2021 James Laughlin Award from Academy of American Poets

Ginosko Literary Journal

A Door Is A Jar

At the core of its winding soliloquies, witty, surprising, in which it muses, complains, splits, burns, gods, the book asserts that you, its 'dear reader', give it life and that it in turn wants nothing more than to pulse its life back to you.

— Richard Silberg, author of Nine Horses and Associate Editor of Poetry Flash

Second Chance Lit

GAS: Poetry, Art & Music

"I love promising. I love imagining. I am ready to offer myself." So says the eponymous book of this book. In an age of high-falutin’ memoir and auto-fiction, Glenn Ingersoll's ingenious Autobiography of a Book pleases with its freshness and naivete, its openness to the world that it comes into. It is a book about being and speaking and wonder. It is a book about the making of a book. How do books exist for us — and we for them? How do we exist for ourselves? Autobiography of a Book teaches as it entertains, provokes and — quite literally — entrances.

—Katy Lederer, author of Pokerface: a girlhood among gamblers and The Heaven-Sent Leaf

Mercurius

Unlikely Stories

In 1644, in Areopagitica, the Puritan poet, John Milton announced that “books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them.” In 2022, the American poet, Glenn Ingersoll has taken Milton’s notion––not to mention the later notion of “the death of the author”––one step further. What if a book awakened and began to speak, to write itself? Autobiography of a Book is an I-based production, but this “I” is not a human author: this “I” is an object, a thing made of paper and words, written words. If a human life begins with a breath, a book’s life “begins with an utterance. A word.” But the book is not “finished”: like a human, it must develop, it must explore infinite possibilities. “I am so new. I am just starting.” Ingersoll’s brilliant concept results in a book about almost everything, including pages “left intentionally blank.” It is, as the book itself tells us, “more idea than construct, more spirit than body.” It is also one of the most delightful and original reads of any season. Who needs an author when one has a book?

—Jack Foley, author of Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Time Line and Eyes: Selected Poems

Over the Transom

The curated reading series Quiet Lightning also included an excerpt that was previously published in Hawai’i Pacific Review.

fresh.ink has reprinted the chapters that originally appeared at Hawai’i Pacific Review.

A fascinating journey! But take courage, whoever opens this book. What begins as a bizarre and charming conceit -- letting the book write itself -- morphs into a true-pitch recording of the subtext running underneath, well, everything. It’s uncanny. Even running underneath everything I do. Bringing into view all manner of creativity, any creativity, any motion, any act, and then calls into question their value, without ever stating that’s what it’s doing. Are these demons of my own device? Are they truly running underneath everything? Can you continue without dealing with the questions? I did write “courage,” and that is what I meant.

—Clive Matson, author of Mainline to the Heart and Let the Crazy Child Write! finding your creative writing voice

**

Book and I thank the editors of these journals for giving Book life. Editors provide readers an opportunity to read something new, and even when editors choose against a particular poem, story or essay, an editor has to read it to make that choice. Every editor is a reader. When Book is read that is when Book really lives. That is the true life of Autobiography of a Book — a reader making it part of theirs.

[See a June 2020 post for an earlier version of this introduction to Autobiography of a Book.]

How did I get to be used?

I google my name. And bing it. I run my name in Goodreads and Amazon. I check in on the state of my online presence. I confirm that I have an online presence. Not a big one. But this Glenn Ingersoll’s footprint compares favorably with the other Glenn Ingersolls, the Canadian musician, the lawyer, the right wing pontificator. 

Recently I thought to run my name at Abe Books, an aggregator site for sellers of used and antiquarian books. I was just bored? I didn’t expect anything to show up. In order for there to be used copies of anything I have written there have to be enough copies circulating that the few people who have one of my books have to decide it’s worth the trouble to try to sell it. 

Thousand, my 100,000 word prose poem epic, was put out by Mel C. Thompson Publishing (a friend in a small apartment in Lafayette), on a print on demand basis. If anyone has a copy it’s because they either bought it from or were given it by me or Mel. There aren’t errant boxes shipped here or there that could be emptied onto a remainder table. 

At Abe Books I find there is a dealer in the UK selling copies of Thousand. Currently they have for sale the whole 10-volume set (vols. sold individually), and they have 20 copies of the set. When I showed Kent he said, “Maybe they don’t really have any copies; they’re just ready to buy it new from Amazon & resell to anyone who wants to buy it from them.” The bookseller does list Thousand as “new,” so Kent could be right. You can get Thousand from Bookshop.org, which also isn’t Amazon, so maybe it’s the same sort of thing. The UK dealer is putting Thousand up on a site for used books, but so what? It doesn’t have to be a used book just because the site is explicitly for used books. 

As of this writing I also find one copy of vol. 1 for sale (“used”) by a bookseller in Montgomery, Illinois. I rather like the idea that there might be a secondary market for copies of Thousand. It implies that there is/was a primary market. 

Autobiography of a Book in Over the Transom

The new issue of Jonathan Hayes’s hardcopy literary magazine, Over the Transom, has arrived. Issue #30 includes six of Autobiography of a Book’s brief chapters:

in which the book invites the reader in at the creation

in which the book pleads, then scolds

in which the book opens up and shows you its parts

in which the book evicts a tale

in which the book passes out blessings like money

in which the book moves quickly through gender to sex

Jonathan Hayes had read earlier published excerpts and asked me if there were any chapters still available. So I sent him a bunch. I have been working with a book publisher on Autobiography of a Book, so these excerpts will likely be the last published separately.

Over the Transom also includes a tribute to Don Skiles, as well as writing by Glen Chestnut, Mel C. Thompson, Klipshutz, and Simon Perchik, among others. Simon Perchik died this year. Perchik’s short poems always contain surprising turns, although I have yet to really fall in love with one. Maybe they stay too abstract for me? When I’ve looked for role models in how to be a poet, Perchik has enticed. He published everywhere. He was methodical about sending work out. I don’t gather that he developed relationships with other poets, though. He remained an outsider. I don’t know whether that’s what I want, exactly, but I certainly feel like an outsider. I have this possibly naive sense that writing poems is what is important, and that somebody somewhere will read the poems if you just put them out there. I have some evidence for this belief, but I think I cling to it because I’m no good at schmoozing or networking.

Perhaps apropos, these lines from Don Skiles as quoted in Over the Transom: 

“I feel certain there are many writers, told in myriad ways their writing is of no significant meaning or use, who face this serious and continuing crisis, the nausea, every day. I want to say to you here, my friend, to continue, to go on …”

Over the Transom is available from Jonathan Hayes, jsh619@earthlink.net

Over the Transom, 120 San Lorenzo Blvd #3, Santa Cruz, CA 95060

chapter from ‘Autobiography of a Book’ in Unlikely Stories

The chapter “in which the book observes the descent of the elevator” appears in Unlikely Stories, Mark V.  

Autobiography of a Book in Mercurius

Three chapters of Autobiography of a Book appear at Mercurius.

The editors write:

Mercurius Magazine was founded in May 2020 with the aim of building a community of writers and artists around the themes of “transformation” and “vitality”. The site publishes a wide range of work, from avant-garde visual poetry to contemporary surrealism and absurdism, literary essays, journalism, short stories and flash fiction. … We seek to take down the barriers between high art, literary culture and current affairs, not by forcing them together in unholy matrimony, but by providing a shared space. … Perhaps Mercurius is less a magazine than an ever-evolving social experiment, a community building project.

Two chapters of Book in GAS

GAS: Poetry, Art, and Music has posted two chapters from Autobiography of a Book, “in which the book admits to a difficulty” and “in which the book observes the translation of favorites”.

new year’s resolutions — so far

I just finished a letter I began a month ago. When I send a copy of Thousand out I include a handwritten letter. My writing is pretty legible, if sometimes ambiguous. A friend recently read “month” when I’d written “mouth.” I suppose I could count up how many copies of Thousand I’ve sent out. These are not paid orders. I am sending out books to people I like/admire. 

I’ve gotten out a few this year. Not a lot. Not much response. I don’t blame anybody for not writing back. I can be a good correspondent, or a bad one. Everybody’s busy. And what does one say? So far I’ve always asked before sending, so the Thousand should never be a surprise. 

I continue to send out work — to submit, goes the lingo. The process hasn’t been rip-roaring this year. But looking back over LoveSettlement posts I see twelve publications. Not nothing! 

The sense of discouragement sets in with the book length manuscripts. 

Autobiography of a Book has now been out to 18 publishers. Eight rejected it. The other ten have yet to respond. At the writing of my new year’s resolutions post Book had only been rejected three times. I have a goal of sending Book to 100 places. Are there 100 places to send it? If Book gets its 100th rejection, I will reevaluate. Maybe at that point I will just post it on the blog or upload a file to a print on demand service.

When I have energy to market a manuscript I default toward Autobiography of a Book, thus the full-length poetry manuscript is neglected. That one is currently titled Nobody You Know. It is out to one publisher. 

#keepyournumbersup … There are 30 places still considering work I’ve sent out since the beginning of July (to pick a recent date). That number includes poems, chapters from Book, and the two book manuscripts. Pretty good. It means I am not neglecting the process. 

The question with which I ended the new year’s resolution post, “I wonder how many readers a published poem gets?,” got a data point in April. 

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

         Thousand: Six Hundred Six

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

         Thousand: Six Hundred Seven

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

         Thousand: Six Hundred Nine

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. […]

         Thousand: Six Hundred Ten

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

         Thousand: Six Hundred Seventy-Nine

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:

         Thousand: Seven Hundred Twenty-Seven

“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.

         Thousand: Nine Hundred Eighty-Nine

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.

         Thousand: Nine Hundred Ninety-Two

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.