Gabi Losoncy Second Person (2017)
Gabi Losoncy was one of the names with which I was not familiar from that first splurge of Amphetamine Sulphate titles, hence my only just getting hold of Second Person now, having figured I may as well bag the lot given the standard which has been established. It's a bit of an oddity even as an Amphetamine Sulphate book, novella, chapbook, whatever you want to call it - one of those monologues habitually labelled intensely personal when we're not quite sure what else we can say, but actually quite broad in its aim in so much as that Losoncy seems to be addressing each and every one of us individually in hope of establishing the sort of relationship which might almost categorise Second Person as self-help literature. At least that's the first thing that came to mind.
Losoncy is also, broadly speaking, an artist working in sound, performance, or somewhere in between, so I gather, although I'm unfamiliar with her work, of which Second Person seems to be both an account and an instalment. The text is precise, but unusually dense, written in long, long digressive sentences packed tight with information. Read at normal speed one experiences information overload whilst accumulating an impression of understanding; so it works, for me, a little like A.E. van Vogt of all people, although coming from the opposite direction - a rush of information rather than too little or deliberately vague. If possibly not absolutely essential, there is nevertheless something to be gained from a slower, more measured reading, thus reducing the manic word salad to more easily digestible details. Whether read as a literary waterboarding or as introspective analysis at the lesser velocity, meaning is transmitted, and transmitted in sufficient quantity as to make it worth reading, even if I wasn't always clear on the import of what I had just read; which, oddly, also reminded me of trying to read A Brief History of Time; and while a cynic might equate the above analysis to I didn't understand a fucking word but I should probably say something nice innit, I would refute this by pointing out that not once did I find myself bored, or inclined to skip to the end in search of an explanation. So yes, I found the narrative so intense as to render it quite difficult to translate in a literal sense, but it was obviously doing something which I liked very much.
Gabi Losoncy was one of the names with which I was not familiar from that first splurge of Amphetamine Sulphate titles, hence my only just getting hold of Second Person now, having figured I may as well bag the lot given the standard which has been established. It's a bit of an oddity even as an Amphetamine Sulphate book, novella, chapbook, whatever you want to call it - one of those monologues habitually labelled intensely personal when we're not quite sure what else we can say, but actually quite broad in its aim in so much as that Losoncy seems to be addressing each and every one of us individually in hope of establishing the sort of relationship which might almost categorise Second Person as self-help literature. At least that's the first thing that came to mind.
Losoncy is also, broadly speaking, an artist working in sound, performance, or somewhere in between, so I gather, although I'm unfamiliar with her work, of which Second Person seems to be both an account and an instalment. The text is precise, but unusually dense, written in long, long digressive sentences packed tight with information. Read at normal speed one experiences information overload whilst accumulating an impression of understanding; so it works, for me, a little like A.E. van Vogt of all people, although coming from the opposite direction - a rush of information rather than too little or deliberately vague. If possibly not absolutely essential, there is nevertheless something to be gained from a slower, more measured reading, thus reducing the manic word salad to more easily digestible details. Whether read as a literary waterboarding or as introspective analysis at the lesser velocity, meaning is transmitted, and transmitted in sufficient quantity as to make it worth reading, even if I wasn't always clear on the import of what I had just read; which, oddly, also reminded me of trying to read A Brief History of Time; and while a cynic might equate the above analysis to I didn't understand a fucking word but I should probably say something nice innit, I would refute this by pointing out that not once did I find myself bored, or inclined to skip to the end in search of an explanation. So yes, I found the narrative so intense as to render it quite difficult to translate in a literal sense, but it was obviously doing something which I liked very much.
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