• Complain

W.N. Herbert - Omnesia

Here you can read online W.N. Herbert - Omnesia full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2013, publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

W.N. Herbert Omnesia

Omnesia: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Omnesia" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

W.N. Herbert: author's other books


Who wrote Omnesia? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Omnesia — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Omnesia" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
W.N. HERBERT
OMNESIA
[ REMIX ] Omnesia is Bill Herberts melding of omniscience and amnesia, the modern condition of thinking we can know everything about our world but, in actuality, retaining dangerously little. This doubly impressive new collection published in twin editions, the alternative text and the remix approaches and evades such flawed totality. For the past seven years Herbert has wandered from the Turkic west of China to the barrios of Venezuela; from Tomsk, the Athens of Siberia, to the heat of Hargeisa, capital of Somaliland, an unacknowledged country. These are travels to translate and, in more than one sense, to be translated; brief encounters with poets and poetics outside the Eurocentric norm; looking-glass meetings, omnesiac pilgrimage. Along the fracture lines between east and west in the Balkans, Greece, and in Jerusalem, across the cultural gaps that mark the north and south of the British Isles, Herbert teases out, through tensions between lyric and satire, English and Scots, formalism and experiment, what it is we hope to mean by home, integrity, or authenticity.

Herberts Omnesia is riven by the anxiety of incompletion: it is two variations desiring to be one theme; doppelgngers haunted by the idea of a whole neither can embody or know. Which one are you reading? The very form of Omnesia is innovative and intimately related to his creative concerns. The book comes as two distinct books, dubbed the AlternativeText and the RemixThe two books arent halves of one whole. The real poem might be stranded in the limbo between them, ever out of reach (in some ways this aligns Herbert more with a poet like John Burnside). There is no definitive or original version. That seems to me to be an attitude and ideology worth taking forward into the 21st-century Scotland
STUART KELLY , The Scotsman.

COVER ART Flying Squid Express (2012) by Mark Husmann In Memoriam
Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac Gaarriye
(1949-2012)

CONTENTS
  1. Picture 1
Dear reader, I apologise for the position Ive put you in. Not just you, but the bookseller, the reviewer, and the various assessors through whose hands one or both aspects of this book has or have had to or will pass or passed and indeed my publisher, who pains-takingly produced two mirror versions of it, one of which you are, probably with increasing reluctance, reading now. And to what end? Our culture is as happily full of mash-ups, remixes, and directors cuts, as it is of variorum editions of novelists, poets and playwrights. It is entirely possible in the world of e- (and p-) publishing to imagine any book having several versions, supplemented by additional materials through websites or pamphlets. So, I wondered, why not write a book which absorbs that flexibility into its basic structure? Hence Omnesia, a book in two volumes and neither, its title both a portmanteau and a sort of oxymoron, pairing omniscience (You must know everything) with amnesia, an often traumatic condition of forgetfulness. (In fact, for me, being in the world is also like this perhaps thats why so much of this book is on the move, between tones and genres as much as places, not quite at home in any of them.) So writing a book of poetry becomes both punk experiment and prog system. (In fact, for me, being in the world is also like this perhaps thats why so much of this book is on the move, between tones and genres as much as places, not quite at home in any of them.) So writing a book of poetry becomes both punk experiment and prog system.

That is, I go with the emphatic flow of its inspirations, I forget everything a poem should be, and improvise its subjects, its themes, its forms and tones, but at the same time I am constantly trying to orchestrate these into a whole, thinking of them as sections that contrast, complement and speak to each other. This echoes my reading experience, in which any book that has moved, troubled or changed me begins to exist as one version in my head, and another in my hand. To the extent to which it has such an effect, it becomes my book, and begins to be imagined as a collaboration between myself and the author, or by a sort of third mind that knows what we both know. Then, when I re-read the actual book, I find there is so much I have forgotten, or overlooked , or mistaken, that it has become yet another book. These two versions then enter into further dialogue. While I was writing Omnesia or rather while I was lying on a bed daydreaming before an event at the Curt Festival in Galway I began to wonder if these various dynamics could be embodied in two physically distinct but twin-like books.

In my first Bloodaxe volume, Forked Tongue, I had suggested the principle of And not Or to position a poetic of variousness in a market that favours (if not fetishises) concision and restraint. All my books since have been doubled linguistically, stylistically or thematically. Omnesia takes that principle one step further: the various sections in each volume mirror, juxtapose, continue or contrast. Hopefully, they make one sense read in isolation, and a further read together. What this interrelation does not appear to be is a dialectic it is not that debate between thesis and antithesis which our media loves, creating pantomime oppositions in order to pitch common sense against complexity. Its more like the dance between ideas we encounter in the ancient mode of strophe and antistrophe, each step taking the step it echoes and reflecting it onto another level: the epode arises from this, not as a matter of logical synthesis, but as news from nowhere.

Of course, you neednt concern yourself with this unless it engages you: this volume can be read by itself, and only if you are at all moved, troubled or changed need it be considered in conjunction with its non-identical twin. I hope you are (moved, troubled or changed), not least because it will double my sales, a consideration I should confess occurred to me almost immediately after the principles outlined above. Even the forgetting of something, in which every relationship of being towards what one formerly knew has been obliterated, must be viewed as a modification of the primordial being-in; and this holds for every delusion and for every error. HEIDEGGER I think you dont believe half the lies Im telling you. WILLIE CLANCY

The first shells half sat on sand-coloured tiles, my grandparents fireplace surround, receiving the squat stubs grind, doups of decades of Grandas failing puff a stand-in, really, for that globe on a chrome stilt, like Ost Berlins communications tower, Corso Streets own Telespargal: a top button sliced open its steel floor from which ciggies tumbled like failed Bond villains to an oubliette of ash. Its successors washed up years later on a seventies tide in throwback restaurants, or spun toward us like shuriken saucers in teppanyaki bars, each bearing the browned-off stump of a former inhabitant or her neighbour wee Aphrodites of Loch Fyne, giant extracted pencil erasers of Fraserburgh, nipples of queenies, thumb-flesh of kings.

In the mouth they were soft fibre, nut butter, like the engorged gills of oyster mushrooms. The last time I stared at their fluted spaulders was on a little chapeled island where experts prised open coffins shells on the little skeletons of pilgrims medieval Lucies, eyeless hominids, hobbit-Catholics, peregrines caught mid-flight from Finisterre, their holy route now shielded from our feet, our eyes by historys nacre, that slug-slow translator of mendicant and seeker whatever they savoured, no matter their sins or skills into drifters, tourists. And on every sternum like an emblem as if grafted by a byssus onto bone, that fossil wing, fanned hands-width shelter for each souls nub: a scallop.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Omnesia»

Look at similar books to Omnesia. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Omnesia»

Discussion, reviews of the book Omnesia and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.