by
Helen DeWitt
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Peter said, Please.
He tried to think of the sort of thing Americans say.
He said, It would mean a lot to me to work with someone who admired Bertrand Russell.
He said, It would really mean a lot to me.
The statement seemed, if not meaningless, then uselessly imprecise.
(The first book had made all this money. Why could he not use the money to buy what he wanted? Was that not the general point of having money in the first place?)
He said, I’d be happy to switch the percentages round if that would help. You’d be very welcome to take an 85% commission.
This was undoubtedly precise but was perhaps not the sort of thing Americans say. Jim said he was happy with the normal 15% commission.
Peter pressed the palms of his hands to his eyes.
Gil checked the listings in Time Out. He had saved up a list of films that he wanted to see for the first time in New York (Jules et Jim; Breathless; Battleship Potemkin; La Dolce Vita; Bicycle Thieves; The Leopard; all of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, because if there is a season you want to be able to immerse yourself in the oeuvre), holding out, somehow, in the face of often almost irresistible temptation, till the age of 22. And now, by an amazing piece of luck, Jules et Jim was showing at the Tribeca!!!!!
footnote: There was a second list of films which he had had to downgrade to “Okay to watch in Iowa,” because he did not want to come to New York and look completely uneducated, but he had never felt good about it. He had mental conversations with an interlocutor who said “Wild Strawberries? Are you telling me Wild Strawberries doesn’t deserve first-time-viewing-in-New-York? Are you serious?” to which Gil would mentally reply that it was not a question of the artistic merit of the film, on which, as someone who hadn’t even seen it, he was unable to comment, but a question of what felt right for the viewing experience. That was the mental reply, but he felt bad about relegating Bob le Flambeur, The Crow, La Ronde, Wings of Desire, La Strada, 8½, Solaris, plus much of Hitchcock, much of Mamet, all of Tarantino and others too numerous to mention to the Iowa League. He wished he had grown up in New York, so these invidious choices would not have been forced on him, but what was he to do?
The third list of films, obviously, was the list of films set in New York. But we digress.
ugh
It’s true. You definitely got the feeling, holding these objects, that they had been in a room with a crazy guy, or rather a guy with the potential to be crazy who was trying to keep madness at bay. The writing was small and precise and clear, this slightly pedantic European handwriting that you would normally never see. Reading a typescript, you would miss this: it was like hearing excellent English spoken with a foreign accent. You saw the effort that had gone into the excellence. Precision, a bulwark. (The word “bulwark” was in fact on one of the cards.) You could see that maybe the visibility of the effort had to stay there for the completion, or even the continuation, of the work.
Gil had met Rachel in the gift shop of the Van Gogh Museum in the heat of the hype. She had picked up a paperback, Vincent Van Gogh, een leven in brieven.
He had seen her across a room but kept his distance. If you have never been to Amsterdam before and maybe never will be again you don’t want to smear the paintings with a lot of boy-meets-girl stuff. There were paintings on the walls that had been in a room with a crazy guy, a guy who never sold any paintings; you want to be alone with the craziness. He walked from room to room, seeing her across each room, keeping his distance.
X and I are smiling. We are both charmed by the flowered velvet. X’s hand moves up my thigh. I have noticed this tendency to reductionism in X before. The text is infinitely variegated, the subtext always the same. I tried once to resist this by accusing X of believing in final causes — that for the sake of which the rest is there — but it didn’t work. X said I took everything personally. X takes nothing personally: X discussed the deconstruction of teleology and put a hand on my knee.
What is a subtext? You may think of it as a movement in the circumambient language, whose presence you divine by distortions and ripples in the text; what lies between the lines is as invisible, as plain to the eye as the breeze which stirs the leaves of the copper beech in the quadrangle, the high wind that toppled trees in Hyde Park. And we know that the disruption is not in one direction only: the text is a kind of windbreak.
There is a text which I could insert at this point which begins ‘I’m not in the mood,’ but the reader who has had occasion to consult it will know that, though open to many variations, there is one form which is, as Voltaire would say, potius optandum quam probandum, and that is the one which runs ‘I’m not in the mood,’ ‘Oh, OK.’ My own experience has shown this to be a text particularly susceptible to discursive and recursive operations, one which circles back on itself through several iterations and recapitulations, one which ends pretty invariably in ‘Oh, OK,’ but only about half the time as the contribution of my co-scripteur. I think for a moment about giving the thing a whirl, but finally settle on the curtailed version which leaves out ‘I’m not in the mood’ and goes directly to ‘Oh, OK.’ X and I go upstairs.
When I was at school my teachers used to get mad at me because I never did any work, & later the Fossil used to throw up his hands in horror because I’d never read Racine or Balzac or anyone like that, he’d start talking about the musician as homme cultivé — I used to say to him, If you would like me to compose an opera based on the Phèdre of M. Racine I shall be happy to examine the work in question, otherwise I have not the slightest desire to read this, I have no doubt, excellent play. This used to drive the Fossil insane. He would trot out some remark about oeuvre séminale de la littérature française, frankly it was amusing to see him boil up, well there was an element of truth in it but it was also the fact that I simply could not read more than a page — no, a sentence — without some piece of music coming into my head. I really did try to read Phèdre once & I got as far as Depuis plus de six mois éloigné de mon père, j’ignore le destin d’une tête si chère, & then all of a sudden this string quintet of Mozart’s that I had heard the night before came into my head & half an hour later it finished & I was still looking at Depuis plus de six mois éloigné de mon père, j’ignore le destin d’une tête si chère. This always happened whenever I tried to read something so I never read anything, but now it was pretty quiet in my head.
One day after walking in the country I came back & walked down her street — I heard the opening bars of Chopin’s fourth Ballade in F minor. More than ever was I conscious that I had wronged her — I felt that I must apologize — in agony I walked up and down outside the door, waiting for her to finish — double octaves in the bass melted into the air in a legato of the most perfect unhurried simplicity — I saw suddenly an insuperable difficulty. It is regarded in Japan as a common politeness to take off the shoes on entering a house — but I have always been careless of clothes, I remembered suddenly that that morning I had not been able to find any socks, that I had put on a blue and a red, each with a large hole at the big toe — I could not appear to Mlle Matsumoto like this. Like a madman I ran through the streets of Tokushima, I found a shop, I bought a pair of socks, in my mind I heard the Ballade approaching the arpeggiated chords before the end, I flung down a few yen & ran off, I darted into the precincts of a nearby shrine — no one in sight — I took off my shoes & the old socks, bundled the latter into a pocket, put on the new, put on my shoes, dashed to the house of Mlle Matsumoto. She had come to the moment of stillness before the final explosion. It came to an end — gathering my courage I knocked — she came to the door — I must speak to you, I said, you must allow me to apologize — she gestured for me to enter — I removed my shoes & followed her — we entered the room with the piano — I stood before her, every word of Japanese left my head, I poured forth my reflections of a decade & when I paused she said
Then the inconceivable had happened which is that Thom Yorke sent an e-mail inviting them to do a gig. Keith said they should just do it, fuck the fucking contract but Darren and Stewart
So then Keith was very quiet.
Never a good sign.
Given Keith’s known propensity to hit things other than drums.
So Darren said they would record the song.
Keith tried to explain his concept and Darren and Stewart kept arsing about and then Sean the keyboardist sussed that it was an arsing about session and then Keith put down his sticks.
Darren, Stewart and Sean sussed that the beat was gone.
Keith, says Darren. What the fuck.
Keith disengaged from the scaffolding of things that could be hit that made noise. He stood up.
He walked across the floor while Darren, Stewart and Sean varied the theme of What the fuck. He took the mic from Darren.
In addition to not being a songwriter Keith was not a singer. He dragged the lyrics of the song over reluctant vocal cords and spat them into the mic.
Fucking great man said Darren who did not want another guitar percussioned to subatomic particles against wall, floor, chair, his head. Yeah fucking great said Stewart who had also lost 3 guitars and Sean hastened to protect his keyboard from berserk drummer syndrome, Fucking great, insane, totally fucking crazy man
Keith handed the mic back to Darren. He turned and walked out the door.
[...] She ran into a girl who said someone had offered to pay her rent for a year. He wanted to take a photograph of this view as seen from the interior of an apartment in which someone was living in a completely natural way. All she had to do was move in and furnish it the way she would naturally. His idea was that she would be engaged in some kind of activity, ironing napkins or something like that. What he wanted was to juxtapose this ordinary, everyday activity with the traces of this steel town.
Ordinary! Everyday! She could see that the girl was completely gobsmacked.
The girl was an art student. She did not even have an iron. She did not even have paper napkins, if she had people over for a meal she would tear off paper towels. But as soon as she moved in she bought an iron and an ironing board, and she bought some cloth napkins, and if you are going to have cloth napkins maybe you need a tablecloth so she bought a matching tablecloth. And maybe she would have reverted to natural behavior, but Ivo kept saying, I just want you engaging in some ordinary, everyday activity, something like vacuuming, or dusting. So of course then she had to buy a vacuum cleaner and a dust cloth, and of course Ivo would come over to experiment with the light at different times of day so she would feel the apartment had to look presentable for the kind of person who thinks vacuuming is an everyday activity. So she became fanatical about housekeeping, she would vacuum, she would wash all the dishes and put them away, she bought a teapot and a creamer and a sugar bowl and a little tray and a glass plate for cookies.