INDICTABLE SUBORNERS by David Bromige

with a foreword by Bouvard Pécuchet & an afterword by Stephen Ratcliffe

2003, 56 pages

 

 

INDICTABLE SUBORNERS

 

And hands comb some one annual rainfall in the silence after laughter in Brandenburg. In the unlikely event, lust for salvation woos the marginals, looking for some surrogate Sunday won’t remove come Monday. Contemplative, one head high on an ash-heap is in a telegram by way of Hello from Doncaster. The recurrence tells itself over and over, it makes part of the instant, recognition. Event and clarity shake and make up in clear weather some little distance from the center of Fenwick. If we witness our world every evening from the remove of its circumference, how are we identical with ostlers in jodphurs when the iamb kept hoofing it along? Gluing frames of film together, an editor means to indicate either the passage of time or simultaneous occurrences in Hooverville. The pattern of the kitchen linoleum was identical with that in the house she had grown up in, the bright patter she kept up lulling analytic thought and usurping the role of the agent, a conniving at their own victimization. In the past, people drew dots forever before the comma came in a small boat, a skull for a tiller so that the man handling it painfully imagined a ton of trouble to share with the place-name of...

 

from CRACKING THE CODE

an afterword by Stephen Ratcliffe

 

For the listener, hearing David Bromige’s “Indictable Suborners” for the first time is like finding yourself in the funhouse with unlimited access to all the rides:  the hall of mirrors with air holes in the floor, the rollercoaster slides, the giant turntable that spins and spins until everyone but the one braced at the center slides off. It's fast and funny, each new sentence a surprise (Jumping ahead—or somewhere, anyway—lands me on the square called Kierkegaard), and with no discernable narrative continuity you settle back for the ride.  And then, suddenly, you crack the code. That is, you begin to discover patterns in what at first seemed a barrage of ideationally unrelated (and unrelateable) sentences, sentences that often as not seem to hover somewhere between sense and nonsense...