‘OHSO’ by Mike Bushnell
Published by Scrambler Books
Reviewed by Richard Brammer
- This entire book, this massive book, is set in Futura like a Wes Anderson movie but with even more detail than a Wes Anderson movie.
- For a man who, I read once, doesn’t like adjectives there are some amazing ones: ‘oh what an ignorable day it has been’ (p32), for instance. I think adjectives are a problem for the poet perhaps more so than for the novelist. The poet sees these really dull patterns of attributive adjectives doing nothing to help the word that they’re modifying, or conversely, doing too much. When a poet uses an adjective he/she has to be careful. They want language to enact itself rather than to only describe something. For a man who, I read once, doesn’t like an adjective Mike Bushnell is extremely adept at using them when he uses them.
- This book pulls off many paradoxical tricks. It looks simple on the surface but it requires work on the part of the reader. Something like how a Foxygen song requires work on the part of the listener. Don’t worry, it’s worth it, you’ll be richly rewarded. This is illustrated not least in how the reader has to try to parse the largely unpunctuated flow of language, a flow that does nothing if not open up the possibilities about what you’re seeing there on the page, when to keep on reading, when to mentally put back in the punctuation, all the syntactic ambiguities that occur as you skim across the text and then go back and read it again and again and again.
- This isn’t some academic ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ style exercise in academic, linguistic dryness though. The writing, despite how you have to parse it, is entertainingly readable and frequently amusing, playful and punning - see ‘roots grow where she’d dyed’ (p. 43).
- Sometimes the text just collapses (‘a collapstrophe’?) into pages of computer code (What is it? XML? It’s not HTML is it?). I haven’t done it yet but I sometimes wonder whether I could somehow paste this code into a XML viewer and it might reveal a whole new set of secret poems encrypted into these regular pages of code that I never would have seen otherwise. Someone try it.
- The computer code is interesting from a point of view of language too. Language itself, particularly in spoken registers, being no different really from a cut-up code that has to be parsed and which can become confused, which needs optimising sometimes, which can allow multiple readings. Like flipping a radio dial (God! I must be old) and picking up fragments of communication.
- Don’t be fooled by point 3 though, or by point 6. For all the language as computer code, language as seemingly random fragments, as noise on the page, look closer and this language is actually quite heavily patterned with frequent parallelism but this parallelism is hidden in the blocks of text. Clever stuff. I told you it was paradoxical.
- Poets/Poems from the 20th Century that this reminds me of No.1: e.e cummings (an obvious case for this one, on rare occasions the words even start to break into syllables across the lines).
- Single lines/phrases sometimes emerge from the text and you suddenly see what it is you haven’t been seeing. It’s like staring at a Mark Rothko or like people tripping on acid in the Sixties with The Magic Roundabout on in the background and staring at magic-eye posters when they first became popular.
- Poets/Poems from the 20th Century that this reminds me of No. 2: These phrases/lines that emerge are fantastically imagistic, take ‘pepsi throwback next to keys’ (p.63), for instance. This is like Ezra Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ but updated for the 21st century.
- At pretty much 500 pages long, this book should be exhausting but instead remains enduringly fascinating and readable. At the end, the author says: ‘Thank you for getting this far in OHSO during this age of digital distraction. If you read to this page from the beginning then you know more about me than I can tell you here’. Personally, I think this doesn’t go far enough and that if you’ve read to this page from the beginning then you will more likely no more about the universe than anyone can tell you (“everything is baby universes” p.467).
- For me, this book isn’t a linear read. It’s like Frank O’Hara’s vast, sprawling posthumously released ‘Collected Poems’ where the editors went and got everything he’d written or jotted down, even stuff he’d written and stuffed into drawers. Or like Bukowski’s vast collected poems. OHSO is a book that you could keep dipping back into and out of forever, pass it down to your freaking children and grandchildren even. Go back to it. Keep going back to it. Plus, it’s not even his collected poems. It’s just one book but this is the feeling I’m getting from it. I’m writing this review now but I’m not finished with this book yet. In fact, I think that me and this book have only just started. There’s enough in OHSO to inspire another thousand different reviews, another thousand different readings. This book is colossal, monstrous, illimitable, infinite, measureless so take steps to own a copy why don’t you. In fact, I think they should put a copy of this in every hotel room drawer.
22 Notes/ Hide
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