melancholy occurrence

<p><em>melancholy occurrence</em> is the latest in a series of texts through which John Seed investigates the appropriation and reconfiguring of historical materials. Previous volumes in the series include <em>Pictures from Mayhew</em> (Shearsman 2005) about which Allen Fisher said: ‘The substance of this work is astonishing vivid felt with a considerable and sensitive intelligence.’ Its successor <em>That Barrikins</em> (Shearsman 2007) was commended by Iain Sinclair for its ‘reverse archaeology’: ‘His close ear and neurotic sensitivity to the way a line breaks reveals how in the desperate grind of the city confession aspires to the condition of song.’ And David Caddy commented on the most recent <em>Brandon Pithouse</em> (Smokestack 2016): ‘The singular fragments juxtaposed and in disjunction accumulate to produce a deeply moving montage of statistics and documentary experience. The rhythms and cadence of the vernacular emerge in both pain and humour…’ (<em>Tears in the Fence</em> 2016).</p><p><em>melancholy occurrences </em>: accidents and disasters random events contingencies chance coincidence everything that a Western propensity for generalisation explanation and meaning pushes to the margins. These are we might almost say moments of an anti-novel brief narratives in a larger anti-narrative. They certainly owe something to a sustained reading of the <em>nouveau roman</em> and in particular the wonderful (and neglected) writing of Claude Simon.</p><p>Elective affinities to Roland Barthes are also signalled from the beginning especially his reflections on how the haiku resists interpretation. It is intelligible and means nothing: ‘The haiku’s task is to achieve exemption from meaning within a perfectly readerly discourse (a contradiction denied to Western art which can contest meaning only by rendering its discourse incomprehensible)…’ (<em>Empire of Signs</em> 1982).</p>