Still Paris
The legendary Sam Jordison at The Haggerston in London. Sam’s “Still Paris” is on p. 511 of We’ll Never Have Paris.
The Cross, the Crosshatch and the Swoopy Lines
The novel begins and ends with a hiccup. The first of a whole patchwork of intertextual winks and nods; Hodgson invites us to draw comparisons with Proust’s madeleine. Only, where Proust’s reverie is particularly French and particularly sweet, Hodgson’s traumatic spiel is kicked off by a bodily function that is universally embarrassing. In an interview, he has spoken about the hiccup as a legacy of mankind’s aquatic ancestry – a memory buried in the genes, perhaps – but it is also undoubtedly overcoded with a whole range of social presumptions. We think of nerves, of drunkenness, of our own bodies rising against us. Hiccups disrupt language. They are always inappropriate. There is never a good time for them.
Joseph Darlington reviews Andrew Hodgson‘s Mnemic Symbols.