by
Maggie Smith
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GOOD BONES
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
the infamous poem [i do like it]
The sexual-tourism-in-Cambodia idea has undermined my faith in the project, but the difference between a professional and an amateur is that a professional pushes on in the face of discouragement.
lol
You return to the Arabic map of Texas, hoping for PKDian plot-twisting. But wait a minute. Wait a minute. If the Arabic in Your Name Here is just an act of compliance with some edict from the Department of Homeland Security, it’s not unmotivated, not in fictional terms, because it’s just a page in a book, like an ad for Dell in Time or an ad for Brooks Brothers in the New Yorker. People don’t write to John Updike saying “you lazy talentless son of a bitch, what the fuck was that quarter-column pic of a Brooks Brothers shirt doing in your story, it was completely unmotivated, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the characters, and what about the bookrest and reading lamp, John, you’re over the hill. Finding your inner Breton, John? I don’t think so.” The Arabic, the map of Texas, were forced on DeWitt. But in that case, you’re not reading the great Philip K. Dick alternative universe spin-off, whether one where the Moors kept Granada, conquered the New World and settled Texas, or one of creeping paranoia dashed off by a rabid writer high on Pedigree Chum.
lol
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.