by
Helen DeWitt
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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
So I thought: Right. So what I did was, first I invested in poker software to familiarise myself with the game. I then registered with Casino.com. Now, I will say that it was uphill sailing, I experienced more setbacks than I would have anticipated, to be honest at one point I was £2500 down and I thought what the fuck am I doing. But that was before I understood online poker, which is not like ordinary poker.
The important thing is to wait until it is 9 a.m. in New York to make sure the traders are at work, because those are some very smart players. Those are some people you do not want to come up against. What you want is to play against the kind of people who have no job, the kind of people who are drinking at 9:00 a.m., either they have been drinking all night or they are the kind of people who start as soon as they get up, and you’ll be all right. Once I got the hang of it I won £10,000 in three months. The only reason it was not more is that kind of player does not play for high stakes. It is a slog getting the money, but it is there for the taking.
it didn’t start too well at the border. there was almost an international incident. I rushed through a police line nearly causing them to draw weapons -too lazy to shoot and my clown like shouts of ‘toilet! Toilet!’ and no doubt the extreme look of terror on my face -after local water drank due to that special kind of forced local kindness lead to a rapid digestive process if not immediately dealt with post haste a suicide bowel bomber, think body without organs, would be on their hands ...and feet-face etc etc.....all very friendly it is/- i am nervous slightly---... walking briskly stopping for invitations of sweet tea etc..- though the incessant giving of tea overlays fear- lots of laughs and small children either trying to steal my wallet or look at my lack of facial hair…i keep my chin close to my chest- an old boxing tip and also learnt from a van damme film i saw on a turkish bus trip from istanbul - this reduces the chances of a wire being slipped over your neck by ninjas or jihadist posing as street traders or simply sneaking up from behind. On top of this the slightly unusual chin chest look creates a sympathy for this foreigner afflicted with such a strange affliction. oh the courage to ravel when so ravished by life’s cruelties...added to this I am also pretending to be german which is funny as my deutsch meets the same level of those kurdish workers who returned after working in deutschland post ww2 or fled from saddam’s oh so 80s gaseous genocide attempts. so far my charade is working - mein charade is gut machen? apologies to the germans///
the body without organs line always get me
Sometimes you do things people totally don’t get. Like, why would Jake Noszaly ever not fly first class? Why would you conceivably not fly first class London-LA? Something you discovered by accident, if you fly Virgin Atlantic, Premium Economy, Upper Deck, 76A, phantom passenger in 76B, it’s very very very very quiet and you have 13 straight hours to work. So you buy two seats in Premium Economy to guarantee the phantom, you prebook 76AB, you put down the arm rest. You like the anonymity of quasi-economy, you like the way the seats remind you of a movie theatre on a slow afternoon. You don’t need to lie down because you don’t want to waste the 13 straight hours on sleep, 13 hours without a break, no calls, no e-mails, just food, drink, hot towels. You once wrote a screenplay by taking 4 LA-London London-LA flights back to back. You once wrote a screenplay by taking Amtrak down to San Antonio and then back to LA and then back to San Antonio because you’d worked out a fix and then back to LA and then you could probably have finished it at home but it felt so good, sitting on the train with the smooth juddering of the wheels on the tracks, the serendipitous fragments of conversation, you went with your instincts and just got on the next train back to San Antonio. People thought you were nuts. When you’re writing you don’t want to talk to people.
The feet look after themselves. The mind contemplated sometimes Le Suicide, sometimes the verbal interactions which might coax £1,300 from the world, while the feet crossed the High, walked down Oriel Lane, turned into Merton Street, passed between Merton and Corpus into Christ Church Meadow, and proceeded down the Meadow to the Isis.
Freshers were being taught to row. It seemed a pity that my financial difficulties could not be transferred to a rowing fresher.
He says: We have balboas. We have bahts. We have drachmas. The slack-jawed hermaphroditic spawn of Bretton Woods.
love her
It goes on being very quiet. This is what the pieces of paper buy.
This was the thought: that it would not be necessary to make phone calls for a very long time.
I stacked up the notes again. There was bewilderment and joy. Dust floated in a beam of light. I had tried so many sentences on the kinship system, and received so many sentences in return—if there were sentences that would extract cheques or even duly completed forms from the system, I had failed to find them. But here was a transaction I had managed. I had replied to each sentence with a sentence, and the sentences had brought us to a hotel room, connected bodies, transferred a duty-free bag of notes.
when she deposits 5k pounds worth of foreign currency lol
So I must have sat inside. He said he would like to go outside. We sat at a table in the open air. There is a slab of slightly wavy chestnut brown hair falling from a side part to the jaw, and chestnut brown eyes, and a curling red mouth, it is my idea anyway of a 19th-century Russian. I imagine him galloping about the Caucasus or strolling up and down the Nevsky Prospect in a wasp-waisted uniform, challenging people to duels. Another time, another place.
:)