by
Helen DeWitt
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I still came from Dublin and my name was still Richard. I had been trying to get into one of the 362 struggling Dublin boy bands, but my problem was I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to be the cute one or the moody one. Because of the intense competition you had to start specialising very young; that’s a big decision to make at 17. I kept putting it off and meanwhile younger guys who had got their act together were going to auditions and getting lucky.
ahh this is so classic dewitt i love it
You’re just a Bolshevik, you’re a theory nerd, you’re an avant-garde situationist manquée. Your view is that your stepma was behind the times. You read Kathy Acker, you warmed to Blood and Guts in High School, you think your stepma should have published a limited edition of 100, preferably in matte pastel (you loved the matte pastel), with her black-eyed broken-nosed glamour-puss pic on the back cover. She could have been an Emin or a Lucas, she had the chance to be transgressive, the chance to be transgressive while at the same time getting White Cube shows, programme notes citing Adorno, a shot at the fucking Turner Prize, and instead, look, this is someone who wrote a whole fucking doctoral dissertation in New Historicist shtick on Jacobean City Comedy and yet she just accepted the, she owns a flat in Chiswick because she scored a heroin deal which could conceivably also have been a feminist thing to do in the 80s, but there’s this literary purism
You know you’re just blaming the victim.
You’re a romantic at heart.
You want writers to be rebels, revolutionaries, you want them to break the machine or be broken.
It’s not that I think children should be seen and not heard. Why stop at children? How many adults generate utterances equivalent to the paragraph of Spinoza one could have read in the time taken up by the utterance? Chances are the utterances of Spinoza himself would not have achieved equivalence, because I can read 900 words a minute and it is unlikely that Spinoza could speak at that speed, let alone speak at that speed while maintaining the level of excellence of his writing.
[...] Quenya and Sindarin (two Elvish languages) are the only two which are useable—that is, it is possible to write in them if you don’t want to talk about credit derivatives or leather fetish lesbian triangles. Tolkien did not provide a comprehensive grammar and vocabulary of every language spoken by every bit player. No. What he created was something more startling: desire. The language of the Wood Elves, Nandorin, is represented by only thirty words or so. The reader constructed by Tolkien is consumed with longing for the nonexistent language of these nonexistent wood dwellers.
Or a reader might raise his head from the book. He sits on a bed in a tiny bedroom surrounded by paperbacks. He thinks: I sit here reading about adventure; why don’t I walk out the door? Sometimes he has spent too long in the land of the lotus-eaters; he takes a step to the door, picks up another book, returns to the bed. Sometimes he walks through the door. He hitchhikes, backpacks. Yes he does.
She would like to leave home, but being a 12-year-old smart-ass she has of course read Lolita, Zazie dans le métro and Candide. White market labour is closed to 12-year-olds, which leaves drug dealing, theft, prostitution with paedophiles and a literary career. She does not feel up to inventing a language (though she does dodge the Stockholm Syndrome vis-a-vis legal guardians through a diary written in code, a cunning mixture of Chinese characters and Arabic verb forms).
lol
- Readers are, in fact, ostriches. They have problems of their own and they read to forget about them. Lovely glamorous Arabic would not only not make them forget their problems, it would remind them that there are all kinds of problems they can do nothing about. So there might be a small untapped market of mute inglorious McJob-bound Miltons, but there is no money to be made by writing a runaway bestseller. No. But there is money to be made by persuading the CIA to fund the project, as increasing the pool of potential intelligence-gatherers in languages of importance to national security.
You’d have liked to have made the movie of The Da Vinci Code, you gave it a lot of thought because it would be a challenge, writing a screenplay that would do justice to the intellectual complexity of the book. You weren’t sure you were ready to work with a studio again, so you walked away from it. When you saw what they did with the material you were sorry you didn’t take it on.
lmao
The average snake sticks to a diet of eggs, mice, insects and small birds; it does not recognise a small deer as a challenge. A python sees a small deer and thinks: Right. One minute there are two objects: a python and a small deer. Three hours later there is one object: a python with a deer-shaped bulge. A week later there is a rather larger python without the bulge.
Well, we all know about nature red of tooth and claw, but there are limits. Only thing is, somebody forgot to tell the python. And whatever it is they forgot to tell the python they also forgot to tell the Python. Rache approached mathematics the way a python approaches an animal of awkward size: with a mean look. She would open Topological Vector Spaces and glare at the page. Three hours later it would all be over: you’d be looking at someone with a text-shaped bulge in the brain. Then she would look up and smile. The kind of smile that says ‘Deer? What deer? Now how could a little old 25-foot python like me eat a deer, don’t be silly.’ The kind of smile that reminds you that the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
<3
If you go to Paris and talk to people they will often tell you they are passionate about le cinéma, which directors do you like, you say, and they say they love Woo Dee Al Lang and you are impressed and embarrassed because you have not seen that many Chinese films and this is a director you have never even heard of, you’re embarrassed to mention Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou and while you’re trying to think of something to say that will show you’re not just a butterfly something at the back of the brain says suddenly: Woody Allen! He likes Woody Allen! The guy was born in Tangiers, but he came to Paris when he was six; he’s French. The French love Woody Allen, Allen complains about the fact that American audiences don’t get him, the French love him, and this is a guy who’s French. Ask him about Jerry Lewis, tell him you love The Nutty Professor, do it, do it, go on, I dare you, but you do the decent thing and merely engage in polite chitchat about Purple Rose of Cairo, Crimes and Misdemeanors and so on and so forth.
lol