Transversal Review By Jim Meirose:
“"GET OFF OF ME!" I Shout "I CANT SILLY! I'm YOU!" She says. I hate when they say that. I need answers.”
Got your attention? This is plucked raw from “Transversal”. In this text, Fin Sorrell shows you to paint a picture of a place where everything and everyone is/are portrayed as absolutely real and absolutely unreal simultaneously, seamlessly. Sorrell steps up pushing at your face this tall “bone” core wrapped in fresh raw food ready to be devoured. What? Eh? How can one not stop dead and read such a thing through? It’s worth reflecting that this text seems the kind of output that’s produced when, as I suspect, the author engages in “building” the story from “n” number of separate elements which, after their fusion and the story’s absorption by the reader, provide an experience far deeper and wider than that which the author would have produced by simply producing monolithic linear “draft” after “draft” using what I see as a kind of classically embraced “brute force” method of producing a text in much the same way a sausage is produced by the “brute force” effort of forcing the “vague idea” that there “ought to be a sausage now” through the “first through final drafting machine” of the linear grinder. Using this analogy reflects the taught-everywhere that texts are produced as monolithic objects extruded from the writer in a linear manner, first a full draft front to back, then a second front to back, etc., for as many as are necessary until the author is “exhausted” rather than done. Or, “Sick of the thing” rather than satisfied with its creation. The old saw “A poem is never completed – it is abandoned” is as ridiculous as the ridiculous catch phrase “kill your darlings” which all beginners take as gospel from the Gods. Writing students are taught to accept the fact that the most they can expect by way of personal satisfaction from this kind of “writing” is exhaustion or guilt at having given up (abandoned) work after work in frustration, but out of some sense of duty, they must carry on. Totally ridiculous.
Sounds like a death march to me.
At this point I pause, and <spit>.
In no particular direction, of course.
All this intro just circles the subject, but—it may be telling, however, because pondering “Transversal” was what sparked that whole line off. That the way it’s put together provokes thought is putting it mildly. And that’s a big positive. Text should provoke readers; not just lay there. Images like Sorrell’s “A herd of small, white cows tramples through the shallow water onshore, they hang their heads to drink.” That stops you, makes you want to linger, want to see more.
But, it’s not at all essential to know how Sorrell’s text was constructed to get a kick from the read. If you do, then you will enjoy it in one valid way. And if you don’t, you’ll enjoy it in another. Totally tangible, but in as many ways are there are readers. In “Transversal” you’ll find things to ponder, like, what does “a baseball field look on my face” look like? Or what’s “The pain of having your “balloons removed” feel like. Or—imagine the spectacle of “Pterodactyl rage”
Let’s go further, but; here’s some quotes to set the mood.
Here’s Joyce on Finnegans Wake: "The construction is quite different from Ulysses where at least the ports of call were known beforehand…I work as much as I can because these are not fragments but active elements and when they are more and a little older they will begin to fuse of themselves."
Also Joyce (from Finnegans Wake): “…indicating that the words which follow may be taken in any order desired.”
And, Sorrell, in an intro to “Transversal”: “Feel free to select chapters, and read them at random. I stuck to my poem as the bone structure, where I dumped on meat and cheese, and salad and made a sandwich of a story, so don't fret…”
So. The way is staged, so, now. Getting to the meat of the review of “Transversal!”
Following the suggestion of the author, I read at random. One consistent feeling each reading through this or that area’s stretch of text invoked was the sense that I was less “reading” than reaching in and feeling around a definite concrete reality represented by words and sentences, and thinking from moment to moment that yes, I get what is going on here—but always—the definition of what’s going on slipped away and became false requiring the hunt for another to kick in again. And moving forward it surged on this way. This may sound undesirable, but no—it was quite stimulating. The sense was of a pleasurable hunt forward through the imagery to see what’s there; no, not that, but maybe this time—and again and again surging like that—and the feeling of the whole thing might sound too simply put—but it was fun. Reading this brought me back to when as a teenager on summer vacation I and some friends would search our way through old-school auto salvage yards piled with fascinating mechanical rubble—some immediately identifiable, (smashed Caddy DeVilles—the remnants of road trips gone bad—could have come straight from “Transversal”) others not, but all absolutely tangible and real, once the necessary pause focus and examination was applied. (Oh, yes—and on one particularly memorable July afternoon a decomposing dead dog carcass was discovered too (Like this from “Transversal – “an experimental, drugged body…made from scraps” where such as “A pencil costume dives into the water next to us, this guy’s been wearing his costume everywhere…” may be found after a deeper dig.). And the human (assumed) characters in Sorrell’s reality are, like the landscape and stuff littering it, shifting the who what and why of what they are, in time with the overall scenery they inhabit—“Grizzly” , the “I” of the narrator—even the “…hunter's body…a habitat, as it dries above.” “Transversal” is packed tight with this stuff.
And on plot; yes, there is one. There’s a crash. Automotive is assumed. But, well—oh yah, there’s death, for sure. But, well—on second thought maybe not. But, on the other hand, maybe—but never mind all that. At the end, a complimentary midnight snack awaits. That alone makes it all worth the trip.
Get “Transversal”