‘The David Thuo Show’ by Samuel Munene

A classic of everyday goading. The narrator’s family watch TV together, and their reactions to the shows are a proxy for arguments.

The mother laughs at The Jeffersons because the “short, bald and clumsy” Mr Jefferson resembles the father. The father starts coming home late to avoid The Jeffersons but makes sure to catch Love and Hate. The narrator watches a quiz show and gives the correct answers out loud, because “I wanted to make [the family] feel brainless and annoy them”. Each of the family members has a distinctive laugh, which they use as an extra weapon to annoy the others.

Munene’s neat wry prose produces a subtle but definite tellyish feel, while the atmosphere ‘flicks’ between sitcom, soap opera, and serious drama. When the TV breaks, the repairs take three weeks. The narrator reads “Emotions, a pornographic magazine”. The parents quarrel about having affairs, and the mother leaves the family.

When she returns, she brings a new TV, to everybody’s relief. The real-life quarrelling is over, the proxy-quarrelling can resume. The TV is a chattering object that emits a kind of stabilising wave.

Included in A Life in Full and Other Stories, the Caine Prize for African Writing 2010, New Internationalist, 2010

‘There’s Someone in the House’ by Ludmila Petrushevskaya, translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers

There’s a poltergeist in the narrator’s house but she doesn’t tell anyone, since its activities are low-key. It also seems a bit like a TV itself: “Something has definitely moved in, some kind of living emptiness, small of stature but energetic and pushy” (we’re in the cathode ray tube era, before the plasma screen took over).

For distraction, the narrator “immerses herself” in the “bluish rays” of the television, and thereby “floats off to foreign worlds, becomes frightened, intrigued, heartbroken – in short, she lives.” Naturally, the poltergeist wants attention, and attacks the sound-machines: it trashes a shelf of records so it falls onto a piano the narrator used to practise on as a girl. She then transforms into a being called “the mother-daughter”. To outwit the poltergeist, she destroys half of her possessions. “The television is the worst. She has to wait for dark and then throw it out the window with all her might, [then] carry the remains to the trash in her little grocery cart”. She’s left with her books and records, and a sewing machine. I like how this story explores the weird presences of audiovisual devices – how they change the emotional gravity of a house. I’ve used the same hi-fi for 24 years but still await my own poltergeist.

Collected in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill her Neighbour’s Baby, Penguin, 2011

‘New Year’s Eve Adventures’ by Arno Schmidt, translated by John E. Woods

Schmidt pulls you sideways by the ear into murky and frantic language-battles, clattering around in the sound-drenched possibilities of so-called silent reading. He rarely resorts to telling us what’s happening. The stories spurn orthodox creative writing handshakes such as [X] was [Y] when [Z] occurred. Instead they begin like this:

“(Snipping=snipping=snipping slips o’ paper : if somebody had sung me that lullaby at my clothes basket, how at age 50 I’d be helping construct an index for a 12 volume lexicon of saints . . . ! And glance at the things one more time from the idle corner of my eye : a thing with no guts, but only a spine; (and sometimes not even that : a book, a sick book, a terribly sick book); I took more and more exception to this ALBAN BUTLER !). – “

What is going on here? It might help to know that you’re not supposed to say ‘equals’ to yourself when you see that symbol between the snippings. Schmidt discarded the hyphen in favour of its double-decker cousin, whose mathematical resonance suits the madcap exactness of the prose. He uses other punctuation to startle and contort and hiccup and glitch and pause. “Let us retain the lovely=essential freedom to reproduce a hesitation precisely,” he says. The very deliberate space between the end of BUTLER and its exclamation point above reads to me like a comic gesture, a tilt of the speaker’s head a split-second after their utterance.

In the story, the characters are listening to each other and to the radio on New Year’s Eve. There is some snipping of printed texts and some walking in the outdoors and a return to the indoors, where we see one of them “bent to the lemon glow of the dial”. And another “eagerly directed his large ear to the government=apparatus. / Where, predictably, there resounded the beloved hodgepodge of bullschmaltz & observations by Leading Politicians”.

Having identified the radio as a bullschmaltz delivery unit, the protaganists revel in their homemade sonic-linguistic explorations. I think they’d agree with the philosopher Marie Thompson’s conception of noise as a productive, transformative, inescapable, and necessary thing. Schmidt’s abrasive and invigorating style, where the text feels scrambled but the narrative pulse feels strong, is like a lo-fi recording played through a distorted amplifier to get a thrilling, moreish surface that operates as the perfect antidote to I’m not sure what exactly but I like it.

Collected in The Collected Stories of Arno Schmidt, Dalkey Archive, 2011

‘Machinery and Modern Industry’ by Karl Marx, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling

Speaking of snipping, here we see Marx doing vocal collage. Within a lengthy analysis of the English factory Acts, he pauses to assemble a large number of very short excerpts from a select committee report on mining in 1866. The select committee interviewed mine owners and mine workers about whether or not the recently introduced laws on working conditions in mines were actually being followed, and their answers were recorded in the report. “The whole farce is too characteristic of the spirit of capital, not to call for a few extracts,” says Marx.

What emerges from the rapid question-and-answer snippets that follow reveals, of course, that the mine owners couldn’t give a shit about laws or people or the conditions they force their adult and child labourers to work in:

“Why do you not apply to the inspector?” “To tell the truth there are many men who are timid on that point; there have been cases of men being sacrificed and losing their employment in consequence of applying to the inspector.” “Why; is he a marked man for having complained?” “Yes”

During the collage, Marx throws in the occasional sassy comment, or gives one of the speakers a name like “Bourgeois Vivian”. It’s like reading an experimental radio play for the page, where voices with all their antiquated diction install themselves in your head, right alongside your personal rage about the state of capitalism, late capitalism, too late capitalism, techno-feudalism, etc.

First published in 1889, collected in Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Unwin, 1947

‘The Mad Bell-Ringer’ by Samira Azzam, translated by Ranya Abdelrahman

Alain Corbin’s Village Bells is a classic work of “campanarian history” that presents bells as a technology of regulation and an auditory aspect of collective identity. Samira Azzam’s very short story about a bell-ringer is a condensed evocation of this technological truth. Instead of being located in revolutionary rural France, though, this bell is being rung in at an unknown time in an unnamed location, but it doesn’t seem too far from Lebanon or Palestine.

Abu Masoud is the old bellringer being replaced by a young upstart after a long career. “Abu Masoud and the bell were one and the same thing,” we are told. The sound of the bell is the sound of the old man. But “he was coming apart”. Growing deaf, trembling, weak. The youngster’s not going to get the proper tone – he doesn’t know the right way to strike the bell. But the old man’s losing his touch.

Azzam’s stories in this collection proceed at a measured pace, with much allegorical resonance. I recently saw Adania Shibli explain the not-overtly-political resonance of Azzam’s fiction as a strategic move. When censors read her work in the 1960s, they found no obviously negative depictions of Zionism, and so allowed it to be published. What they didn’t realise is that Azzam’s fictions dared to imagine a world without Israeli apartheid.

Collected in Out of Time, ArabLit Books, 2022

‘The Preserving Machine’ by Philip K. Dick

Doc Labyrinth invents a machine to store music, after having a vision of a paper Schubert score burrowing out of a bombed building, “like a mole” with a “furious energy”. Reasoning that animals possess a survival instinct, he decides to build a machine that converts music into creatures, to preserve their longevity.

The snag is that, much like our present-day racist billionaire innovators, he can’t build anything himself. So he enlists the help of “a small midwestern university,” who for some reason build it and send it to him.

Then we get the mozart bird and the beethoven beetle. “The schubert animal was silly”. The composers’ names lose their capitalisations, and become mere characteristics. Doc makes loads of these animals, and they live in the woods near his house. He has ensured they can’t reproduce. But they can still mutate.

A mutated bach bug is fed back into the machine, producing a score of “hideous, distorted, diabolical” music.

The story reminds me of the Lexicon of Musical Invective, Nicholas Slonimsky’s compilation of critical hatchet jobs of famous composers’ symphonies. Critics, says Slonimsky, tend towards a particular “psychological inhibition: Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar”. As does Doc Labyrinth. He has to learn that music and technology have lives of their own.

First published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1953. Collected in The Preserving Machine and Other Stories, Pan Books, 1972

‘The Revolution’ by A. Naji Bakhti

It’s a chapter from Bakhti’s hilarious and moving novel, Between Beirut and the Moon. The scene is a schoolyard in the city, where an Egyptian boy called Abed with “a deceptively deep, strong voice” stands in the middle of a football pitch and commentates on the matches that play out around him. Abed reminds everyone of an Egyptian football commentator whose voice could be heard throughout Beirut during the 98 world cup. But unlike that guy, Abed uses his commentary to influence the game.

When he finds a loudspeaker to amplify his voice, the emotional weight of his words is also amplified: “he seemed to know strange, intimate matters” about some of the boys, and he puts them off their game by speculating about their family lives.

The loudpseaker remains at the physical centre of the pitch while it becomes a political centre of gravity. When a fight breaks out, Abed turns his commentary upon the fighters, playing them like fools with his expert provocations.

When Abed gives up commentary and takes up football, he kicks the speaker across the ground, and the people are spared from his weird verbal habits. Throughout the episode, the quickfire comedy comes from nested acoustic contexts: the close-range conversation between the boys playing the game, the mid-range commentary through the loudspeaker, and the wider context of the city and its history.

Published in Between Beirut and the Moon, Influx Press, 2020

‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ by Samuel Beckett

Audio tape-art had a big year in 1958. In Paris, sonic pioneer Pierre Schaeffer’s Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète, who made compositions using all kinds of recorded media, changed personnel and became Groupe de Recherches Musicales. In London, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop came into existence, featuring Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire. In Paris, Samuel Beckett finished composing something in English for the first time in years, Krapp’s Last Tape.

This short piece takes place on “a late evening in the future”. A 69-year-old man, who has a lifelong habit of recording himself speaking about himself, sits at a desk, “elbows on table, hand cupping ear towards machine” and listens to one of his recordings from thirty years ago. Impatient and brooding, he rewinds and fast-forwards this recording, then makes a new recording of his feelings about the old one, thinking of himself as a “stupid bastard”. At intervals he walks offstage to pop the cork of a fizzy bottle, down its contents, and return, progressively more drunk.

Beckett thought Krapp’s Last Tape was “sentimental” and described his own voice as “a Beaujolais Galouise pantgasp”. There is a great deal of rummaging, in pockets and desk drawers, but also within the recordings themselves. The tape technology is what makes this rummaging possible. Krapp doesn’t like it, but he has never stopped doing it, like a one-man avant-garde research unit.

First published in Evergreen Review, summer 1958, collected in The Complete Dramatic Works, Faber and Faber, 1990

‘Living with Music’ by Ralph Ellison

“In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live”.

Thus begins the essay where the author of Invisible Man describes everything he hears in his “tiny” ground floor apartment in the early days of his writing career. There’s a lot to be heard, and Ellison – a hi-fi obsessive – gets into an ongoing battle with a nearby singer by playing his own versions of the songs she practises. But their eventual face-to-face meeting takes an unexpected turn.

I was made aware of this essay in the book Phonographies by Alexander Weheliye, who says that Ellison gives us “insight, or more accurately, “inhearing”, into the acoustic geography of [his] apartment”. It’s one of those essays that changed my relationship with domestic sounds, and instilled a permanent urge to visit an audio equipment shop in 1949. This was a time, as Ellison says, when “between the hi-fi record and the ear […] there was a new electronic world”.

Collected in Shadow and Act, Random House, 1994

Introduction

For this selection, I’ve chosen stories that contradict the creative writing maxim: Show DON’T tell. It’s true that inexperienced writers can be tempted to overload their stories with exposition and explanation. But it’s equally tedious when they are so terrified of being accused of ‘telling’ that they dramatize absolutely everything in long oblique scenes. At its best, telling brings energy. It allows the writer to grab hold of a story, to move rapidly through time, to work directly with voice, and to play games with older forms of storytelling like fairytales and myths (Angela Carter’s 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber being a wonderful example of that). Two of the two stories in this selection work with negatives: telling the reader what a character has forgotten, or what people don’t want to know.

‘Infinite Husbands’ by Claire Carroll

This debut collection contains many examples of what a writer can do when she’s not afraid to play around with telling. ‘Infinite Husbands’ is one of my favourites:

“My second husband is hilarious and cruel and devastatingly handsome, with watery blue eyes. He is so handsome that I can’t even think about him for too long as my heart rate rises unbearably, and I have to lie down. He has been missing for quite some time.”

The show-don’t-tell police would be all over this with a red pen: Don’t tell us that he’s ‘hilarious’, ‘cruel’, ‘handsome’! Dramatize these qualities! Show us how he behaves towards the narrator so that we can draw our own conclusions. Use unusual verbs! But that would take all day, and it’s not what the story is interested in.

Many of the narrators in this collection are – as the title suggests – not entirely trustworthy.

First published in The London Magazine and available to read here. Collected in The Unreliable Nature Writer, Scratch Books, 2024

‘The Man on the Stairs’ by Miranda July

Miranda July is the queen of unreliable narrations, and this is one of my favourites. A young woman lies awake in bed listening to the creak of footsteps in the dead hours of the night, convinced that she and her slumbering boyfriend are about to be murdered by a stranger: “He had all the time in the world for this, my god did he have time. I have never taken such care with anything.”

While she waits to meet her death, the narrator chews over various failings and disappointments in her life: her boyfriend (whom she stalked obsessively for years); her inadequately interesting friends; her own many shortcomings. What powers the story is the self-aware, neurotically comic voice. You could argue that because of the subtext, the writer is ‘showing’ as much as ‘telling’. Perhaps good telling always manages to do both.

First published on Fence.com and available to read here. Collected in No One Belongs Here More than You, Canongate, 2007

‘Little Sister’ by Anne Enright

An older sister roams back and forth in time, recalling various incidents from their shared childhood and youth, trying to understand the reasons for her younger sister’s death. She makes challenging statements like “anorexia was just starting then”, and “none of us liked my father, except Serena who was a little flirt from an early age”. Enright has an extraordinary ability to change focus. She describes the intimacy of a kiss where “All the sadness welled up into my face and into my lips”, and in the very next sentence she has zoomed right back out: “We went out for a while as if we hoped something good could come of it all.” The story is only eight pages long, but it becomes like a reel of cotton running away from the writer: “I am trying to stop this story, but it just won’t end.” The narrative voice is bitter as gall.

First published in Granta 75, Autumn 2001, and available to read online here [where, intriguingly or confusingly, it’s listed under Essay & Memoir – Ed.]. Collected in Taking Pictures, Jonathan Cape, 2008 and Yesterday’s Weather, Penguin 2017

‘Girl’ by Jamaica Kincaid

This is another voice-driven story in which a mother harangues her daughter about how to behave. It’s not a realistic scene, but rather a collection of many moments from a mother-daughter relationship as the girl begins to move from childhood to adolescence. The mother is fierce and threatening: “on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming.” But we begin to see that she is trying to warn her daughter, to protect her from hardships she herself has suffered. Indirectly, we can’t help piecing together a picture of a wider village community: recipes, superstitions, prejudices, traditions and fears. The girl tries to object but the mother ploughs on.

First published in The New Yorker in June 1978 and available to subscribers to read here