Thursday 27 September 2012

Marc Nash In Da House - Friday Flash


"Marc Nash in da house people!"
Who?

marc nash is in his house, sat at his writing station. That place where more often than not, marc nash is to be located.

"Marc Nash, license to illeism."

marc nash isn't ill. marc nash is in the pink actually. And in the writing zone, on a real word tear-up.

"No, 'illeism'. I thought you were a master of words?"

marc nash credited you were using hip-hop speech. marc nash would suggest this points up the difference between the oral and the written word. Idiomashupsticks.

"So, why does Marc Nash constantly refer to himself in the third person?"

marc nash does no such thing.

"You don't say."

marc nash does say.

"Ipso facto ipseity"

marc nash proposes that just sounds like meaningless insufflation. It suggests a string of words, but scratch under the surface of noise and there is nothing there.

"Yes, better off leaving that sort of thing to the master. Tell me, referring to yourself in the third person is usually symptomatic of a deluded sense of self-importance is it not?"

Like any writer, marc nash's significance in the world is to be measured by the number of autographs and size of royalty payments. marc nash states here and now that these amount to none and pin money. Although clearly marc nash hopes that this will rise in number. But for the purposes of this intellectual exercise, therefore marc nash is not full of jumped-up self-importance. If only you could see marc nash's words written down, rather than vaporising through the microphone, you'd see that marc nash is always stated in lower case. marc nash has no presumptions above his station. marc nash's station remains that of the humble writing desk.

"Well that's another side of illeism, that it represents a sort of modesty, of not laying claim to yourself as an 'I' as somehow not meriting it."

marc nash would always start with the etymological root of any conception such as this. 'Modesty' is related to moderate, stemming from the Latin for both 'measure' and 'mode'. marc nash's writing is not 'measured' in any sense. Nor is it confined to mere modes of writing or genre.

"Oh but then surely Marc Nash must acknowledge the Structuralist argument that the writer is entirely a product of his own circumstances of upbringing, education and experiences and therefore has no free will in what he writes?"

marc nash rejects that conceit by the simple statement that marc nash has eschewed both his upbringing and inherited value system.

"Oh come on, what could be more tramlined than rejecting the values of your parents? Rebellion is utterly defined by what it is set up in opposition to. You have no say in what you create, maybe that's why you cannot lay claim to a first person identity with any surety? Or maybe it's a residual shame at what that first person represents and trying to distance yourself from it however vainly."

If marc nash may be permitted to take your argument to its logical conclusion, he finds only reductio ad absurdum there. Since you seem to be saying marc nash is merely some sort of automated word Turing machine, with a finite word store in memory laid down during his development, and a set of imbibed texts from other writers which he then proceeds to spin round like a washing machine word cycle to spew out 'new' texts of his own non devising?

"Well you are a self-confessed huge fan of music and isn't that what musicians do? Stand on the shoulders of their recent ancestors, armed only with a box full of records and reference and cut up and create afresh? But the idiom is finite."

marc nash offers that although words have rhythms, they are not closed mathematical systems. The possibilities for word combinations is endless.

"Is Marc Nash seriously having us believe that he refers to himself in the third person because it confers some sort of objectivity? That the subjective voice of Marc Nash thereby naturally feeds into a more universal truth?"

It is not for marc nash to say what is truth or not. It will be the verdict of the readers of marc nash texts.

"Which you've already conceded are few and far between. Perhaps this third person thing is more about trying to establish a brand? The need for self-promotion has hollowed you out away from your texts and into just the commodity of your name."

Who says marc nash is my real name?

"It's the names on the spines of your books."

marc nash books exist only on the ether in e-readers. They have no spines. The books of marc nash are fictional bodies.

"That sounds like dissociation to me. That Marc Nash is so cut off from reality and other people indeed, that he has wholly dissociated himself from the normal frames of reference, including how we address ourselves to others. You may be worryingly psychotic."

marc nash creates fictional beings on virtual paper. This does not make him schizoid, merely imaginatively creative. However, the fiction is enhanced because clearly these characters are representative of the mind of marc nash. marc nash is spilling the seed of himself into texts, but they are refracted versions of himself, therefore not quite fully-fledged first-person iterations. marc nash accordingly refers to them as 'he' or even 'she'. These characters are more important than the author marc nash, therefore the author marc nash cannot accrue more status than his characters. Ergo marc nash can only be third person like them, for to be first person would overwhelm and diminish them. Added to that is that marc nash (author) is not even marc nash's real name, but merely a nom de plume. In that sense, marc nash is truly a third person to whoever the first person "I" is that lies behind the persona conjuring up 'marc nash'.

"Well that makes two of us then, since I'm not a real radio DJ and this 'interview' is merely an idle daydream on your part as you both procrastinate and leap ahead to the ridiculous fancy that you will attain such status as to engender radio interviews."

marc nash has left his house and is on route for the pub.

"This next one is a dedication, De La Soul's, 'Me, Myself and I'."

11 comments:

Alison Wells said...

Super super, love the subject and what you do with it. You can dodge your own linguistic celebrity too. I really like the bit about hollowing out your name for fame and where we stand, outside or inside our work and in relation to what has gone before. I really like the play with the storytelling itself, once you are in the mode of a story the writer and the reader has taken a stance & the piece fictionalises as we read as we enter into that contract with 'Marc Nash'. Good work Marc/marc.

ATOS STORIES said...

Ha ha ha. Very very funny and clever...And I've just looked up illeism. Brilliant.

Icy Sedgwick said...

Thoroughly inventive and eloquent as always, though I would expect nothing less, Marc...if that is indeed your real name...

Tony Noland said...

Tony Noland approves.

John Wiswell said...

The most furious, obtuse and inventive self-interview John Wiswell can recall from his recent memory.

Steve Green said...

Steve Green says "Wonderfully entertaining Marc."

He also says he had to google one or two words again, including 'Illeism'.

Steve Green was also very amused reading this story.

Heheheh!! (Steve Green laughs...)

Aaron said...

I had to look up illeism, too! This was a dizzying interview, to say the least. Very amusing.

Katherine Hajer said...

This was sooo cathartic to read. I used to hang out with a knot of people who thought that simply throwing existing texts in a blender and presenting them to an unsuspecting public (okay, typically they were performance art pieces at galleries, so say "half-suspecting public" to be accurate) was the height of art. They were rather condescending of people who wrote stuff the old-fashioned way.

Anonymous said...

Jack Holt thinks this is a very fun piece with the best title this week (or possibly ever).

Sonia Lal said...

LOL Funny! What an insane interview. LOL

Cindy Vaskova said...

Cindy Vaskova thinks she should take notes of how to conduct an interview!

This was a super clever read Marc, fun and rich with fancy words :-D! Brill.