The Longcut by Emily Hall (2022) is set in America in contemporary times.
The narrator works in an office, and her work is boring. She says all day she moves the status of projects in an excel sheet from “in progress” to “completed.” During the evening, she can’t sleep.
She lives in a studio apartment, because she is also a part-time artist striving to be a full-time artist. She is lost on her way to an art gallery for an interview. She walks around in circles, all the while in deep reflection about her art.
She doesn’t know what her art is, or how to articulate her art to anyone else. Who is she an artist for? What is her art? Is it taking shape into something comprehensible? Does it matter if it’s not?
How is her art relevant in her world, in her local world and in her wider world? How can she know the answer if she doesn’t know her art and what it represents?
She resists answering herself – is that because she doesn’t know her own art, and doesn’t know herself?
She writes, ‘My further following of this vein of thought was almost certainly ready to lead me to a point of paralysis at which my wanting to resist anything partaking of business as usual would also want to resist any kind of tolerance for the nonusual, to resist what people or viewers of art wanted or felt affection for, leading me to the conclusion – as it horribly and paradoxically did – of having to make reasonable or normal or business-as-usual objects.’
Got that, readers? That is the state of her mind – confused, random, and anxious.
This is a stream of consciousness novel. Does she know the answers to her own questions about her own art? No.
The Longcut is a short book of 120 pages – mainly about words and meaning, thoughts and meaning, reflection and meaning, the meaning of her art, and the meaning of herself.
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MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009). She lives in Paris.
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