Flower E-Book

Ed Atkins

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 136

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'I like eating cold, clammy wraps from big pharmacies that are open late and sell just a few foods like protein bars and powders.' Flower is a book of realistic admissions, likes, dislikes, memories and no-brainer observations, treating personal truth as unavailable – something that must be made up and convincing. Taking cues from confessional literature, his daughter's improvised games, poor internet writing and shitty AI, Ed Atkins, in his first work of non-fiction, equivocates between inanity and divinity, ease and pain, sentimentality and sterility. An anti-memoir, a list, a listless blur – Flower is a highly original, moving and absurd book by one of the most influential artists of his generation, formally inventive and disturbingly of our time.

Leseprobe

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3‘I feel like a permanent conduit has been built between my brain and this book. Atkins is relentless, beautiful, hideously and angelically honest. Sometimes it brought me to tears and I’m not even sure why. It’s the stuff most of us leave out, or wouldn’t even know how to articulate. By which I mean this book has made so much other writing feel like propaganda. It’s heroic. I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from it.’

— Luke Kennard, author of Notes on the Sonnets

‘Every sentence in this delightfully bizarre techno-memoir could stand alone on a page and command allure. Like splicing the miniature divulgences of Édouard Levé with the ominous bombast of Jenny Holzer, Flower makes automatic non-fiction feel like sci-fi, and it’s instantly unforgettable.’

— Blake Butler, author of Molly

‘Flower is propulsive and it doesn’t let up. It’s about vulnerability, sort of, and invincibility: it swings between these poles. It’s about mortality, too, and in that sense humanity. To speak the book back at itself, I confess it did get to me.’

— Isabel Waidner, author of Corey Fah Does Social Mobility

‘You might say Ed Atkins is an old-school modernist. Like Joyce or Woolf, his writing tracks the human mind grappling with consciousness, moment-to-moment. But they never watched it grappling with clammy wraps and smartphones. Flower is funny, confessional, futuristic, hypnotic, suffused with love and loss and drizzled in fizzy cola. I read Atkins to learn how writing can be made new all over again.’ 

— Dan Fox, author of Pretentiousness: Why it Matters4

‘In its hysterical representation of Ed’s demonic internalities, Flower surfs waves of experiencing typically suppressed, bypassed, ignored. What seems at first blush exemplary of contemporary literary modes of postmodern confession quickly cumulates into a free mobility of avid, jagged distraction at a comic-book clip as his exaggeratedly magnified self-awareness refracts and distends. A rhythmically unique flow and a robust “minor work” in the best possible sense: file Flower’s barrage of Ed’s “sexless kinks” under New Forms Of Poetry.’

— Zach Phillips, Fievel is Glauque

‘Suppurations of the skin, disturbances of the gut, tender feelings, weird appetites, love, disgust, prayer: the unbroken paragraph of Flower is a delirious, frenetic, exhilarating voyage through the crevices and byways of a mind and a body, redolent by turns of Woolf, Beckett, Bernhard and yet like nothing I’ve ever read.’ 

— Josh Cohen, author of All the Rage

‘Bubbling over with sensation, Flower revels in the pleasures of incoherence and the wondrous terror of being alive. Atkins uses relentless self-exposure to turn his flesh inside out, revealing its viscera, gunk and goop. A striking and moving exploration of direct experience, Atkins renders the body as a biological machine and site of existential struggle.’

— Martine Syms

‘Finally someone is writing about all the food in drugstores. A paean of appreciation to these freakish purveyors of junk is how Atkins launches his amorous, granular unspooling of outrageous drives and appetites. Flower is the kind of book many people dream of writing: kudos to Atkins for getting it on the page.’

— Moyra Davey, author of Index Cards5

‘Ed Atkins is a radical humanist who rediscovers the human in the most inhuman of states, when the usual supports – ego, language, people, technology, media, food – all fail. In Flower Atkins turns that abjection towards us, in a spleeny anti-autofiction that is his own version of Les Fleurs du Mal.’

— Hal Foster, author of What Comes After Farce?

Praise for Old Food

‘Violent, emetic, immoderate, improper, impure – that’s to say it’s the real thing. Atkins’ prose, which may not be prose, adheres to Aragon’s maxim “Don’t think – write.”’ 

— Jonathan Meades

‘Ed Atkins is the artist of ugly feelings – gruesome and smeared and depleted. But everything he does in his videos or paintings, I’ve always thought, he really does as a writer. He uses language as a system where everything gets reprocessed and misshapen – a unique and constant mislaying of tone that’s as dizzying as it’s exhilarating.’ 

— Adam Thirlwell, author of The Future Future

‘Reading like the accelerated brain patterns of a ravenous soothsayer-cum-scavenger-cum-time-travellingsalesperson, auto-translated into an almost recognizable diction, Old Food tastes of sick period drama, nostalgic for a time just around the corner. As singular as electrocution, it emits from the demented ditches, the euphoric crusts, disappointed hearts and bad gut-feelings as much as the patterned constellations, throbbing with multidimensional love-songs. From inside these erotic and squalid operatics, Ed Atkins revamps the scene of our selves. His writing advances like a daredevil knife-thrower, nervy and elastic, spinning words at the reader’s throat.’

— Heather Phillipson, author of Whip-hot & Grippy6

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FLOWER

ED ATKINS

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For Sally-Ginger10

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‘Soft drinks can be classified into three categories: Cola flavored, fruit flavored, or citrus flavored. The colas, like Coke or Pepsi, are the favorite among real connoisseurs. Ther is nothing like a cola to pick one up or refresh one on a hot day.’

— Simon Thompson, Bluestone14

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphFlowerIllustration creditAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyright

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Flower

I like eating cold, clammy wraps from big pharmacies that are open late and sell just a few foods like protein bars and powders. I like wraps near the skin creams, neoprenes and scrunchies. I also like the wraps they sell in cheap supermarkets and franchise corner shops and mid-tier garages. The cheap supermarket near me sells just a few lunch things they don’t have an obvious lunch bit. The few wraps they do sell are really close to the tills, seemingly on the wrong side of the tills you have to know they’re there otherwise when you do see them it’s probably on the way out, too late to think to buy one. I like wraps fabricated on industrial estates a long way from here that come in nondescript cardboard and plastic sleeves. I won’t register what’s inside the wraps I like it doesn’t matter at all. The best wraps all taste the same: sweet creamed hospice. The wraps I like are best and look like these spent prophylactic alien larvae props. I push them through my mouth. The best wraps are always presented in half with the two halves side-by-side in the sleeve. The cut ends of it are cut on the bias and are on prominent display behind the plastic window at the top of the package. The visible cross-section is not at all instructive. The damp folded ends are hidden in the cardboard bottom like its genitals. This differs from the wraps I tend not to like which are detailed. They have purples and dark greens in. They are performatively healthy and aspirational. These wraps tend to be presented halved with the halves end-to-end rather than side-by-side in the packaging and their ingredients are conspicuously discrete. The cut ends of the wrap are straight and are hidden behind a cardboard centre bit where the label is. Instead, I like the pharmacy ones where it’s satisfying and you can see the striation. There’s usually a bit of wet stuff on the inside of the see-through plastic where the wrap’s touched 16the plastic in transit. I think buying a wrap in a pharmacy is incredible. I once bought a huge wrap in a Walgreens in Manhattan. It came with a sachet of extra mayonnaise tucked into the packaging even though it was already heavy with mayonnaise. I bought it and a thin can of Coke Zero and ate and drank while walking, like an actor. It’s usually a kind of chicken prep inside the wraps I like but it’s so unrecognizable to the mouth and the eye as to be moot, the name, the food question, and likewise the preparation who knows. A wrap is chopped foods folded up in a bib of par-cooked very flatbread. Once folded up it looks like a handmade food tube with hospital corners at the ends to stop the food tumbling out when it’s lifted vertical to eat. I eat it, or someone else eats it, and thinks of drastic things coolly. The best wraps are cavefish and peter forever outside time. That goes for a lot of what’s happening when I’m inside of a big pharmacy. I feel outside of time and outside of my life. I go in to a big pharmacy when it’s dark outside. I buy a wrap and a fizzy drink with my earbuds in listening to my music. My music lends the whole thing a cinematic thing. I’m the crushed protagonist buying a corpse-like wrap and a thin can of Coke Zero on another planet the same as this one. I’ll take my earbuds out to pay unless there’s a self-checkout. A self-checkout’s good for buying food at the pharmacy. The fantasy ennobles whatever and lifts what from the outside looks miserable but is not. When I have food in that’s bad for me I’ll bolt some of it then bin the rest and pour bleach over it in the bin so I can’t fish it out later and eat it, then. I’ll smoke the first cigarette from a new pack then go to the sink and hold the rest of the pack under the cold tap on full or I’ll have a first few pulls on a cigarette and pluck it from my mouth and flick it some irretrievable place. The expression on my face won’t 17change; when there’s no one around I needn’t be convincing. This is very realistic; my feelings happen internally. I’ll have half a glass from a bottle of wine then upend the rest of the bottle into the sink. I like making whatever bad thing irredeemable because I don’t trust future me to be consistent with current me. I know I’m inconsistent and this can be frightening. Self-love is an unobservable phenomenon that cavils forever. I should be punished but not killed outright. I bought a big bag of Doritos in Blackheath in the morning and started eating them in rough stacks outside the shop. I then sharpish turned and emptied the rest into a bin there and used the empty Dorito bag as a shiny mitt to force the Doritos deep into the bin, then. Everything else in the bin groaned and shifted downward. When I’m alone I’ll buy processed foods and unrefrigerated pre-mixed alcoholic drinks. Once, my mouth was full of Dorito pulp and room-temperature vodka maracujá drink outside a späti in Berlin in the summer, great. Cool Original Doritos have a remarkable savoury flavour I can’t place. The bag has a lot of blue and black on it, as well as dramatic photos of the Doritos. Blue and black are inedible executive colours. They mark the contents as exclusive and ambitious. I think it’s Cool Ranch flavour in the US, a thick dressing. I like processing Doritos with my mouth. Saliva piddles moisten while molars pound to a paste. I compress the paste between my tongue and the roof of my mouth to make now Dorito-flavoured and coloured spit leach from it and get into me via ducts. The paste remainder forms a curved cast and this is a remarkable temporary food object. I cut the soft cast object into neat nothings with my teeth then and swallow it easily. I’m just getting rid of shapes down a chute. The thing we all go to Doritos for is the intense flavour and astonishing colour. Dorito flavour is staggering. 18It can be easily decoupled from the corn medium inside my mouth. The flavour and the colour of Doritos cheers me up no end and the lurid smut on my fingers. I like eating all kinds of cheese puffs. They don’t pique my loathsomeness much as they’re just aerated packing material, a deniable foodstuff at the far end of edible. I eat cheese puffs with an urgency that from the outside looks like mechanical efficiency but isn’t it’s just noise in me, it’s squirming almost nothing perhaps pleasure’s dust there’s nothing to it. The cheese flavour of cheese puffs varies within a small window only, whereas actual real cheeses have many different ones. When an ideal of course ghosts I toss the future after it. Silk Cuts are okay when they’re customized: cover over the perforations with a torn-off glue strip from a cigarette paper or you can clamp two fingers over the perforations while you smoke to make it proper strength. I do something similar with my vape nowadays. I part-block a valve near the mouthpiece of the vape with my fingertip and in this way I can throttle the vapour. The vape mouthpiece is musical-feeling, like a child’s first wind instrument. Stuff from my mouth and lips comes off on the mouthpiece and can gather in the breathing hole but I can always get a pin or a sharp pencil and gouge the stuff out and wipe it on a trouser leg. I keep the vape in one of my two trouser pockets. Sharp lint from my pocket can get in the breathing hole and shoot into my unsuspecting throat when I vape it. I like vaping all of the time. My vape provides me with my home planet’s gas mix without which otherwise I’d suffocate on Earth’s mix. As with my voice my exhalation made visible by vape in it is an aspect of me that flees me to be with the world and never to return. I like that there’s formaldehyde in vapes but I don’t like popcorn lung. When the juice runs out I taste burning metal. When the juice leaks 19into your mouth sometimes oh, it’s very obviously poison I’m pulling in. I know about formaldehyde from alien foetuses and big decapitated heads in jars of it but I don’t know about popcorn lung. It’s a very evocative name and an ominously fun euphemism I won’t look up the reality of. I secretly vape on planes, in cinemas, in concert halls; everywhere you can’t vape you can actually very easily vape without discovery. I palm the vape like an inmate. I ensure the little glowing display’s hidden. I look straight at anyone nearby so if they try looking at me they’ll be met by my gaze before they see that I’m vaping so that they’ll immediately look away. This sort of pre-emptive gaze is weird, it repulses others’ sight; it relies on being there first, looking first, and on protocol. I pull on the vape and hold it in for as long as possible so that the vapour dissipates in me. By the time I breathe out there’s no giveaway vape opaquing my breath. In circumstances where vaping’s not really okay to do I take care to pull on it when I’m quite sure it won’t be my turn to talk or laugh for about twenty seconds, which is about how long the vape takes to entirely dissipate in me. During this time I smile and nod while I hold it in. I can do it. I presume it’s fine to vape everywhere or I don’t care if it is or it isn’t. I have the gall to do it in someone else’s house just in front of everyone mid-conversation without asking. If someone says something I feel terribly guilty. I feel for myself via remembered stilled machines still warm to the touch. I’m shadowing myself through a history of my own impersonal sentimentality the pining for which electroplates the meaningless with a rose zirconium-like. I sat alone on a low stool at a low table in a pub lounge and customized a Silk Cut. The table and the stool were genuinely small. There was an empty blue glass ashtray and a drained pint glass marbled with beer foam scum on the 20