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On The Blink
Have you ever been on the blink?
The narrator isn't unreliable... the universe is. It is on the blink.
Reality isn't reality... it is fiction.
Nothing is truer than fiction though, is it?
Praise for On The Blink :
“Zak Ferguson’s On The Blink is (may be) a toothache-induced hallucination, a frantic meditation on self, on writing, on the passing of time. At times minimalist—nearly white pages flicker like images in a zoetrope—and at other times an effusion of language and ideas, the book evokes/invokes Joyce and Burroughs, tripping through the past, tripping over memories, spinning out tales of child-murderers, movies, the Whitehawk Woman, Brighton, brothers, and a remote cabin. Above all, On The Blink is about making sense of a life not lived in a straight line.” – Patrick Parks, Author of TUCUMCARI
"Zak's experiential text is deceptively simple; it takes the form of shards of a monologue that begin with outlining his daily routine before something or someone (a ghost?) starts to splinter his habits into images and fantasies. The text draws us in, to find our own ghost staring back; in Zak's delirium we find our own, but this isn't therapy, its magick. I loved it." -
Tom Bland, Author of CAMP FEAR
“‘by doing means existing.’ ZF's ON THE BLINK is convulsive, cryogenic, a vortex of immobility's, an armature of spontaneously halting machine, erasing machine, writing machine. reality is on the blink & knows combusting it.” – Louis Armand
The narrator isn't unreliable... the universe is. It is on the blink.
Reality isn't reality... it is fiction.
Nothing is truer than fiction though, is it?
Praise for On The Blink :
“Zak Ferguson’s On The Blink is (may be) a toothache-induced hallucination, a frantic meditation on self, on writing, on the passing of time. At times minimalist—nearly white pages flicker like images in a zoetrope—and at other times an effusion of language and ideas, the book evokes/invokes Joyce and Burroughs, tripping through the past, tripping over memories, spinning out tales of child-murderers, movies, the Whitehawk Woman, Brighton, brothers, and a remote cabin. Above all, On The Blink is about making sense of a life not lived in a straight line.” – Patrick Parks, Author of TUCUMCARI
"Zak's experiential text is deceptively simple; it takes the form of shards of a monologue that begin with outlining his daily routine before something or someone (a ghost?) starts to splinter his habits into images and fantasies. The text draws us in, to find our own ghost staring back; in Zak's delirium we find our own, but this isn't therapy, its magick. I loved it." -
Tom Bland, Author of CAMP FEAR
“‘by doing means existing.’ ZF's ON THE BLINK is convulsive, cryogenic, a vortex of immobility's, an armature of spontaneously halting machine, erasing machine, writing machine. reality is on the blink & knows combusting it.” – Louis Armand
293 pages, Paperback
Published January 2, 2023
2 people want to read
About the author
Zak Ferguson
41 books9 followersZak Ferguson is an Autistic, mental health-suffering much despised entity, barely a person, just an irritable itch, on the earlobe, on the fringes of your conscious-self; whose reality consists of words, literature and the pretensions garnered from art.
If you like literature that expands your perceptions of art, specifically within literature, that tests your patience, that entices, arouses, annoys, irritates, breaks into your machinations of consuming literature- try and read him; that or at least if you want to try literature that confounds, upsets, and semi-forms itself as entertainment and all such and sundry as accepted and marketed in the full-fledged market place of book-building and publication... then Zak is probably somebody you'd like to beat around the head with, said book, and tell him what a waste of time it was...
If, and this is a BIG if, this is an experience you wish to partake in, if only to get a chance to beat him publicly/privately...read his stuff.
His previous publications have been, EAT YOUR KEYBOARD (no longer available) Mr. Nick (no longer available) A TASTE OF FEELING (no longer available) and his latest, most boundary pushing novel, What Mr. Wants Mr. Gets (which is readily available).
He plans to re-release his Eat Your Keyboard series in the coming future as a huge omnibus titled, THE SYSTEM COMPENDIUM, release date 2020.
A TASTE OF FEELING has also been re-released, alongside its follow up, under the new title, Volatile Voices, Volatile Universe, later this year.
He exists online in some vague form. On INSTAGRAM under some name or other...and TWITTER...under another name based around his issue with sweating... He is also the Editor/Founder/Co-Head of the innovative press Sweat Drenched Press.
( www.www.sweatdrenchedpress.com)
Zak lives in the seaside town of Brighton.
(He doesn't get out much)
If you like literature that expands your perceptions of art, specifically within literature, that tests your patience, that entices, arouses, annoys, irritates, breaks into your machinations of consuming literature- try and read him; that or at least if you want to try literature that confounds, upsets, and semi-forms itself as entertainment and all such and sundry as accepted and marketed in the full-fledged market place of book-building and publication... then Zak is probably somebody you'd like to beat around the head with, said book, and tell him what a waste of time it was...
If, and this is a BIG if, this is an experience you wish to partake in, if only to get a chance to beat him publicly/privately...read his stuff.
His previous publications have been, EAT YOUR KEYBOARD (no longer available) Mr. Nick (no longer available) A TASTE OF FEELING (no longer available) and his latest, most boundary pushing novel, What Mr. Wants Mr. Gets (which is readily available).
He plans to re-release his Eat Your Keyboard series in the coming future as a huge omnibus titled, THE SYSTEM COMPENDIUM, release date 2020.
A TASTE OF FEELING has also been re-released, alongside its follow up, under the new title, Volatile Voices, Volatile Universe, later this year.
He exists online in some vague form. On INSTAGRAM under some name or other...and TWITTER...under another name based around his issue with sweating... He is also the Editor/Founder/Co-Head of the innovative press Sweat Drenched Press.
( www.www.sweatdrenchedpress.com)
Zak lives in the seaside town of Brighton.
(He doesn't get out much)
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 21, 2023
On the Blink is told by a nameless narrator, one who claims to have forgotten his name, a man without an identity or purpose. Beginning as a meditation on Descartian mind/body duality, it segues into questions of being, becoming, and time, questions suddenly interrupted by a new set of existential considerations, wrapped in the mantle of a manuscript from a stranger about a disorganized life. The narrator mulls over his “Body dictating over mind,” in that “Motion produces many more mental motions”; in essence, there is no mind without sensory stimulus. The puzzle for the narrator is that while his mind is a tabula rasa, his motions and reactions are instinctual. Although the narrator asserts that forms have functions, if rote habit enacts thoughtless intuition, does the result constitute an existence, a desirable state of being? The onset of consciousness seems to consist in resisting rote.
The rhythm and pacing of the novel’s narrative mimics a slow awakening. It begins with a sentence or two per page, the empty space below each sentence indicating silence, room for meditative thought before moving on to the next page and its statement or question. The pages slowly build in amount of text per page, the silences shortening. The narrator’s coma-like existence made up of dull repetition is enacted across the pages by the phrase “I get up. I adhere to the old routine,” the same phrase accruing line by line, page after page, until the entire page is filled with it. Then, in the mode of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” from Kubrick’s The Shining, the pages display the same phrase in different patterns. The repetition abruptly stops and the narration restarts, a couple of lines per page. In existing in a zone of unthinking rote repetition, identity is lost or unnecessary.
This quagmire is disrupted by the arrival of an anonymously authored manuscript. The manuscript’s narrator is also unnamed, but the narration is written in a Caribbean-sounding dialect by a gay man born in England’s Brighton in 1967, who occasionally refers to reading James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. In other words, unlike the narrator who is reading the manuscript, the manuscript’s author is steeped in identity. And his chosen place to read Baldwin’s novel is the woods where a man raped and killed two young girls: people who, but for the act of murder, otherwise would be anonymous in an impoverished city, an act which insured all three would be given an identity.
Manuscript turns its focus on the narrator’s younger brother and his dysfunctional parents, unemployed chronic smokers and drinkers. The younger brother, Sam, whom the narrator has lost contact with due to his own dissolute life, has become an artist thanks to the encouragement of a neighbor, a single woman who kept her distance from the neighbors but adopted Sam in her way by encouraging him and doting him with love, a quality lacking in the narrator’s home and the homes of his neighbors. Through love, Sam was given an identity and a goal attached to that identity.
The narrator of this manuscript realizes that although he lacked what Sam was given, he at least took up the responsibility of trying to provide some semblance of trying to provide for Sam what his parents were too lazy, inept, and self-absorbed to give him: some sense of dignity and self-respect, encouragement to go to school, and nonjudgmental explanations of the birds and the bees once puberty struck, rather than the shame and disgust he, the older brother was presented with. Thus, the anonymous narrator can be seen as a kind of surrogate partner working in out-of-sync tandem with the woman who cultivated Sam’s interests and talents. The narrator, though living in poverty still, seems to be emerging from his own drug-fueled coma that stalled his life, shaping from the written observations that form his manuscript a type of hope, a vague reason to endure. There, the manuscript stops.
At this point, the narrator of On the Blink must assess the factors that have left him at sea in his own life, obscurely aware that the manuscript he has just finished holds the key to exiting the existential stasis he has created for himself. He has become the sort of person who gets in his own way and must now find a way around that.
The rhythm and pacing of the novel’s narrative mimics a slow awakening. It begins with a sentence or two per page, the empty space below each sentence indicating silence, room for meditative thought before moving on to the next page and its statement or question. The pages slowly build in amount of text per page, the silences shortening. The narrator’s coma-like existence made up of dull repetition is enacted across the pages by the phrase “I get up. I adhere to the old routine,” the same phrase accruing line by line, page after page, until the entire page is filled with it. Then, in the mode of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” from Kubrick’s The Shining, the pages display the same phrase in different patterns. The repetition abruptly stops and the narration restarts, a couple of lines per page. In existing in a zone of unthinking rote repetition, identity is lost or unnecessary.
This quagmire is disrupted by the arrival of an anonymously authored manuscript. The manuscript’s narrator is also unnamed, but the narration is written in a Caribbean-sounding dialect by a gay man born in England’s Brighton in 1967, who occasionally refers to reading James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. In other words, unlike the narrator who is reading the manuscript, the manuscript’s author is steeped in identity. And his chosen place to read Baldwin’s novel is the woods where a man raped and killed two young girls: people who, but for the act of murder, otherwise would be anonymous in an impoverished city, an act which insured all three would be given an identity.
Manuscript turns its focus on the narrator’s younger brother and his dysfunctional parents, unemployed chronic smokers and drinkers. The younger brother, Sam, whom the narrator has lost contact with due to his own dissolute life, has become an artist thanks to the encouragement of a neighbor, a single woman who kept her distance from the neighbors but adopted Sam in her way by encouraging him and doting him with love, a quality lacking in the narrator’s home and the homes of his neighbors. Through love, Sam was given an identity and a goal attached to that identity.
The narrator of this manuscript realizes that although he lacked what Sam was given, he at least took up the responsibility of trying to provide some semblance of trying to provide for Sam what his parents were too lazy, inept, and self-absorbed to give him: some sense of dignity and self-respect, encouragement to go to school, and nonjudgmental explanations of the birds and the bees once puberty struck, rather than the shame and disgust he, the older brother was presented with. Thus, the anonymous narrator can be seen as a kind of surrogate partner working in out-of-sync tandem with the woman who cultivated Sam’s interests and talents. The narrator, though living in poverty still, seems to be emerging from his own drug-fueled coma that stalled his life, shaping from the written observations that form his manuscript a type of hope, a vague reason to endure. There, the manuscript stops.
At this point, the narrator of On the Blink must assess the factors that have left him at sea in his own life, obscurely aware that the manuscript he has just finished holds the key to exiting the existential stasis he has created for himself. He has become the sort of person who gets in his own way and must now find a way around that.
Displaying 1 of 1 review