by
Helen DeWitt
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
He says: Think I may have lent this one to a friend. I was too tired and emotional to know what I was doing. I’m trying to channel Gogol through a similar haircut, woke up the next morning and it was Lermontov and not covered by the insurance and the nose was missing, AAAAAAARGH (drinks beer which has arrived then says more calmly) I was thinking of bringing a book but it seemed too much like bringing a prop or a calling card, you know, prominently displaying Deleuze/Guattari, like, Hey! Look what I’m reading! I’m an intellectual! Or adopting a cool stance, carrying the significant object tucked inconspicuously under one arm, and then it’s just all too much, deciding what to display inconspicuously
lolll
He says: In Australia there’s this compulsory friendliness? You try to talk about metaphysics and people say Don’t be a downer. You try to talk about Dostoevsky and they say Look, the sun is shining. We can go to the beach. What’s the matter with you? They lie there sunbathing like these reptile creatures.
One night he sent an e-mail with an attachment, the document he had sent Simon. I opened it avidly, and at first, yes, this was the voice that had possessed me for years, this was that world, here is a Brixton squat party, here he goes home with a girl and smokes heroin, here he takes a late-night bus with a tart with a crack habit, here is the voice that melts the icebound brain.
I read on. I don’t know. Here are accounts of deaths he covered at the Coroner’s Court for a news agency, and these are in the cold dispassionate prose of Flaubert. Here are other pieces, a writer mainlining Burroughs or Miller or Genet. A writer who can write like Flaubert and Burroughs has something bigger than a reader of e-mails would guess, but I don’t know how to wheel and deal for it. Not with Simon, not with my sharpshooting friends, not with the betazoid. I don’t think you can wheel and deal with Simon by mentioning Flaubert. I think Flaubert is the kiss of death. I think Zola is the kiss of death. I think Burroughs is the kiss of death in the world of wheeler-dealers, which is the only world I know.
Meanwhile he talks. He says: I should stop drinking, it would be good to do it, you know in Russia they think beer is a soft drink, there’s the attitude that if you’re not doing it till you black out it doesn’t really count. He says: I don’t need it, it’s just another way of doing things to excess. He says: I can go into a social situation and people are just standing around awkwardly and I can see how to make it work, 1 2 3. Click. Just like that. But then I want to turn around and undo it, 3 2 1. Alcohol isn’t really a way of making it work, it’s a way of resisting that impulse to pull it apart again.
luke!!
He doesn’t understand. He reads Miller, Mailer, Joyce, Bukowski, Fante, Bataille, he reads Celine’s Voyage to the End of the Night, he reads Genet, he reads Burroughs, he reads Krapp’s Last Tape, why can’t he find a publisher who publishes the kind of book he reads? Every single book he reads is a published book. He’s not calling up manuscripts in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room of the British Library, setting them out on foam rubber rests, wearing white cotton gloves to handle the precious pages, thinking WOW, WOW, WOW, nobody has EVER seen ANYTHING like this BEFORE, disturbing the silent travails of the other toilers in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room to announce the discovery of this AMAZING book called Ulysses!!!!!!!!!!!!!! He’s not sitting up in somebody’s attic, hunched over a dusty forgotten trunk with barely legible notebooks open on his lap, ESTRAGON, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot, plummeting down nearly perpendicular stairs to ask the uncomprehending household WHAT is THIS???????????? only to get the indifferent reply, Oh, that’s just some shite of Great-Uncle Sam’s, you want it? sure, sure, take it, you’ll be doing us a favour, we’ll be needing to chuck all that when we put in the jacuzzi-loft-extension, to be honest. He’s not reading typescripts he pulled off skips, struggling to read between the bird shit and the fag burns. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t want to get it. He reads Bernhard to stop trying to get it.
It’s the second week in December. Snow falls each night and is cleared each morning from the streets. The Germans are unashamed of efficiency in the clearance of snow, though the Deutsche Post disowns the Führer and all his works by sending every third letter astray. [...]
:)
A mailbox sprang open. It had 100 messages, only 20 for penis enhancement.
lol
I was marooned for the first four weeks of term in the morgue shift at Chez Michel. 10:30–17:30 Monday–Thursday. A shift which coincided with an unsurprising number of lectures. Michel had not had the vision to see that a waiter whose appearance called to mind Kafka, Liszt, Rimbaud and Egon Schiele could be an asset to the evening shift.
in hindsight im really glad i went to that random museum in amsterdam or wherever to see photos of egon eschiele
But look. What does Jameson (Fredric, not John) have to say? Neurosis is simply this boring imprisonment of the self in itself, crippled by its terror of the new and unexpected, carrying its sameness with it wherever it goes, so that it has the protection of feeling, whatever it might stretch out its hand to touch, that it never meets anything but what it knows already. In other words, forget it. In other words, step into the floating world.
lolll
She likes the sound of “$3 million for a screenplay.” It is mentioned a few more times. How good that sounds.
But Fitzgerald, didn’t Fitzgerald like the sound? And Faulkner? Was that not the big draw? The thing that wrote The Sound and the Fury died young, and a drunk named Faulkner turned up to claim the prize that it had won.