Scent , livre ebook

Comma Press - Dinesh Allirajah

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

184 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Before his untimely death at the age of 47, Dinesh Allirajah was one of the most versatile and accomplished writers working in the North of England. Whether as a performance poet, literary critic, wry social commentator or masterfully understated short story writer, his work was always international in scope, but local and personal in touch. Witty, irreverent, and intricately observed, his writing was informed by everything from raregroove jazz to experimental theatre, crime noir to stand-up comedy. Yet it always felt, and continues to feel, bespoke to us as readers. The short stories, in particular, allow us to eavesdrop on the most intimate, unattended moments in their characters lives. Here, we get to know outsiders migrant workers, beleaguered mothers, old and unwanted regulars in a pub that's facing a refurb people being slowly ushered into the background, or kept at a distance. Yet it is on these peripheries far from where everyone else is looking that Dinesh finds his stories, here that identities are reconstructed and renegotiated, here that we learn the most about ourselves. Spanning over twenty years work, this definitive volume presents a through-line of Dinesh's compassion, activism, and literary perspicacity; a clarion call to find essential beauty - in art, music, sport, life - and to pass it on.

Sujets

Diaries

Short story

Poetry

Informations

Publié par	Comma Press
Date de parution	26 mai 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781910974629
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

To Evelyn Allirajah
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Comma Press.
www.commapress.co.uk
Copyright © remains with Dinesh Allirajah and Comma Press, 2016.
All rights reserved.

The moral rights of Dinesh Allirajah to be identified as the author of this Work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

‘The Longhand Option’ first appeared in Beta-Life, edited by Ra Page & Martyn Amos (Comma, 2014). ‘Easy on the Rose’s’ first appeared in Closure, edited by Jacob Ross (Peepal Tree, 2015). ‘The Prisoners’ and ‘Overnight’ first appeared as Flax #023 , edited by Sarah Hymas (Litfest, 2011). ‘Scent’ first appeared in ReBerth: Stories from Cities on the Edge , edited by Jim Hinks (Comma, 2008). ‘Items One to Seventeen’ first appeared in Orbis #145 (2008). ‘A Different Sky’ first appeared in The Book of Liverpool, edited by Maria Crossan & Eleanor Rees (Comma, 2007). ‘A Memory of Sap’ first appeared in the pamphlet Liverpool Fragrant Project, a response to Jyll Bradley’s residency at the Liverpool Botanical Collection (Liverpool Culture Company, 2007). ‘The Words to the Tell Them’ first appeared in Moving Worlds , Vol. 9#2 (University of Leeds, 2009). ‘Towelling Elbow Patch’ first appeared in Maps & Metaphors, edited by Dinesh Allirajah (British Council, 2006). All of the following stories previously appeared as A Manner of Speaking (Spike Books, 2004): ‘The Final Mr Benn Twist’, ‘San Miguel de los Helados’, ‘The Frank Sinatra Joke’, ‘Giving Away Soap’, ‘Microdrama’, ‘Blue Hazey’, ‘The Shaman in Norman’s Shoes’, ‘The Café Storch Piece’, ‘Dirty Feet on the Saint’, ‘The Sun, One Saturday’, ‘Child I’, ‘Rubbish Zorros’, ‘I Used to Get Lost in Manchester Too’ and ‘Child II’. ‘In Dreams’ was commissioned by the Spark Collective for the event ‘Video Positive’ (1997).
Dinesh’s blogs first appeared online at http://realtimestories.wordpress.com. The ‘Bashful Alley’ poems (pp245-248) were originally commissioned as a series of poems about an alleyway in Lancaster, as part of Reading Lights for Light Up Lancaster, edited by Andy Darby and Claire Dean (Litfest, 2013). ‘Into, Into’ appeared in Dead Good Poets: The Book (Headland, 2005). ‘Shouty Nut Soul’ first appeared on the CD Reclaiming the City (Yellow House, 1999). ‘Out Vout A-Go-Go’ first appeared in Fertile Ground (Runnagate, 1996)

Lyrics cited in ‘Towelling Elbow Patch’ from ‘On My Knees’ by Theotonius Gomes.

Many thanks to SuAndi (NBAA), Dave Ward (Spike Books), Catharine Francis (UCLan), Phil Hargreaves, Rob Dainton, Glynn Wright, Michael Murphy, Nikhil Kapur, Rashid Iqbal, Farah Sayeed, Mohammad Khalil, Levi Tafari, Ben Smith, Phil Parkinson, Marty Muscatelli, Cathy Butterworth, Clare Owens, Adrian Challis (Spark Collective), the McGrath Country Singers, the Rhine Poets collective, Gemma Doswell, Francesco Mondada, Eleanor Rees, Robert Shephard, Bryan Biggs, Kadija George, Jacob Ross, George McKane, Duleep Allirajah, Jo Lane and Vic Clarke.

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges assistance from Arts Council England.
Scent
The Collected Works of Dinesh Allirajah
Foreword by George McKane
Afterword by Duleep Allirajah
Contents
Foreword by George McKane

The Short Stories

The Longhand Option
Easy on the Rose’s
The Prisoners
Overnight
Scent
Items One to Seventeen
A Different Sky
A Memory of Sap
The Words to Tell Them
Towelling Elbow Patch
The Final Mr Benn Twist
San Miguel de los Helados
The Frank Sinatra Joke
Giving Away Soap
Microdrama
Blue Hazey
The Shaman in Norman’s Shoe’s
The Café Storch Piece
Dirty Feet on the Saint
The Sun, One Saturday
Child I
Rubbish Zorros
I Used to Get Lost in Manchester Too
Child II
In Dreams

Real Time Selected Blog Posts, 2011-2014

The Single Moment
‘The Practice of Art isn’t to Make a Living. It’s to Make your Soul Grow’
– Kurt Vonnegut, from A Man Without A Country, 2005.
The Power of Invisibility
Coffee Spoons
Katherine Mansfield: ‘A Dill Pickle’
F. Scott Fitzgerald: ‘Babylon Revisited’
The Physics of Language
Capturing Snowflakes
Ernest Hemingway: ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’
Interesting Times… Sun… News of the World…
Peripheral Vision
Margaret Murphy: ‘Low Visibility’
Isaac Babel: ‘The Aroma Of Odessa’
David Constantine: ‘Tea at the Midland’
The Hermetic Space
Hassan Blasim: ‘The Reality and The Record’
W. W. Jacobs: ‘The Monkey’s Paw’
What Do You Want To Know?
What do you Mean Funny? Funny How? How am I Funny?
Kate Chopin: ‘The Story of an Hour’
The Hate Inside The Inkwell
The Agonies and Alleyways
The Claymatian Inside
Where Can I Order A Sleepy Bell-Boy?
I’ll Be C-ing U
Sunrise Over Wavertree
‘The Sea has Neither Reason nor Pity.’
Banal Fabulous
Nobody Mentioned The Ted Stockings

The Poems

Bashful Alley
Before the Bluebells
This Poem
Rights & Humanity Film#2
On Girl Nine
Tags
Curling Towards Sleep
Driving Her Around
I Said, Excuse Me
The Imperfection of Language
Into, Into
Shouty Nut Soul
Lone Re-Arranger
Dig That
Next Thought
Out Vout A-Go-Go
Shaft Gets Shagged
The Heard World (Rwanda Now)
The Ultimate Passenger Picture Show
Very Likely
Zong

Afterword by Duleep Allirajah

About the Author
Foreword
Dinesh Allirajah: writer, poet, performer, blogger, teacher. Din: son, father, partner, football fan (well, Spurs fan really), beloved friend.
What follows is the first major gathering of Dinesh’s work – bringing together the many varied and wondrous strands that made up his writing, from rare-groove-inspired poetry (developed with performance groups like Liverpool’s Spark Collective), to the ‘story-as-stand-up-routine’ (displayed in ‘The Frank Sinatra Joke’), to the restrained and understated short fiction that Dinesh effortlessly mastered. Din took it all in. And Din gave it all back. A breathless raconteur, an off-beat stage presence, an author who tantalised us with just enough, no more. His influences and his styles were so diverse and eclectic that to throw them all together in a single book might seem contradictory, inappropriate even; there were so many incarnations of Dinesh. But gather his works together we should. Preserve them and read them we must.
So, sit down and relax. Close your eyes just a moment. Float a little. Where’s my passport? Do I have enough money? Wouldn’t it be marvellous to travel back and forth in time, to sit and drink in bars and coffee houses with musicians and poets, artists and actors – those who played a role in forming Din the writer, and wove their way into the tapestry of all our cultural histories?
Stay seated and open your eyes. Pick up this book. Like Scheherazade – the ‘poster girl for the performative act’ as Din called her, fulfilling the ‘agitprop function of staying alive’ – these stories and poems and blogs keep us alive.
Great writing, Din argued, resonates. It ‘slows to the pace at which its readers live [...]. We connect to the characters in their taking and losing of breath [...]. We come to an understanding that this life we’re holding in our hands, this apparent fiction, is our own.’ Din’s words make us connect – to characters, contexts and settings around the world. From Vegas, where one raconteur masterclass begins, to Clermont-Ferrand, where the punchline is delivered. From Gdansk to Dhaka, from Cuba to Sri Lanka. But always returning to his adopted Liverpool.
Din’s poetry blends an intoxicating mix of conversation, rhyme, jazz and bebop (many of his early pieces were written with musicians), but in his prose he’s happy to turn the music down a little, and to introduce us to his other friends in the café – Chekhov, Poe, Tolstoy, Kafka. We shake their hands and Din tells us to pull up a chair, be part of the conversation, part of the scene. While keen to salute and reference his heroes (from Sonny Criss to James Joyce, Linton Kwesi Johnson to Ivor Cutler), he never forgets the people he has met on the way. He’ll be captivated by chance encounters with characters on the street, he’ll name and describe in great detail ‘ordinary’ working people – from bar staff to hospital staff - and he’ll give them as much time and respect as he does Calvino, or Hemingway, or Maupassant. Whether inviting us to join Scott and Zelda at the Ritz for cream teas, or dragging us into some run-down Liverpool pub for a gimlet, Din is equally at ease.
Read this book, many times. It will fill you with wonder and spirit.
I worked with Din many, many times. He was a close friend. Best man at my wedding. Fellow performer in arms.
And I loved Din. No. I love Din. Always.

George McKane, Yellow House, April 2016.
The Short Stories
The Longhand Option
The first wind of Rosa’s visit arrived shortly after breakfast.
Dill was clearing the last of the dishes from the kitchen table when he felt the buzz of a message alert under his right thumbnail. He pressed his thumb onto the table and swiped across. The hologram screen began to appear but glitched on a coffee stain. Dill gave the surface a wipe down and tried again, this time opening up his inbox screen between the fruit bowl and a jar filled with BrekFast Cheetz energy bars. His new message was an automated notice from the Courier Blimp Company to expect a delivery, sent from Rosa’s address, later that morning. He was about to scroll down for more details when the table sounded an electronic trill, like a scale of a xylophone, indicating another message. This one was from Nat:
Dad – gran just buzzd me. D’you know when she’s gettin here?
Another xylophone scale: Nat again.
ps any more Cheetz bars in there?
Dill grabbed an energy bar, leaned out of the kitchen into the corridor, pushed open the door of the living room and tossed the bar inside. He heard a ‘Thanks Dad’ as he closed the door again.
Emma passed him in the corridor.