red and blue. Also, perhaps, straight, and gay) which can actually bring the reader to orgasm. Guaranteed. I can’t imagine anyone from 12 to 92 who wouldn’t want a copy. It might not become a classic, but the novelty should put it into the Waldo category. Don’t you agree?
Jack Vance suggested your usefulness to me because I am more or less a concept person. The details are how you might be of service. (Who was it who said God was in the details? I believe a famous painter. Perhaps Rubens.)
I’ve got the interviews, and can have them transcribed. But the editing, the order, and that kind of thing I’d like you to do. I’ll pay you, of course. Reasonably well. Are you interested, or at least, somewhat curious? Do say yes.
Claey
HELLO OUT THERE IN ELUSIVE UNKNOWN SPACE.
I have written a deconstructivist novel, called Gone, or Minus. The subtitle will be Quattrocento Beauty. Others have tried. Roland Barthes for one. But you can’t really read him. Mine you can read. It’s as accessible as the shattered (missing) object in cubism, and the atonality of music. It’s a charming, shabby, intimate, accessible, sexual, disconcerting novel about freedom. There are six characters, and they’re all gone by the end. Just gone. (Not dead.) All that’s left is an omniscient frog. It’s not like Beckett, or Pirandello either. Mine are not searching (although they are of course alienated). Also, all six are female, from 18 to 88.
(Where they go doesn’t matter so much as that they leave. It’s a book about leaving, in fact.)
I need some help. There are times the idea becomes too looming. I feel that instinctively. If you could highlight those areas in yellow for me, I would be grateful.
I can pay. I got a grant.
Are you free?
(Not ultimately, but to do this job?)
Fisher Smythe, PhD
2
olives
Arlette had worked on sixty-four books by the time Harbinger found her. She’d chosen those books out of hundreds of queries, maybe more. She placed ads in writer’s journals, on bulletin boards, and in bookstores, but most of the mail came from strangers who had gotten her name from clients and friends. She found out very quickly that the world was full of unwritten books, ideas, and intentions. Many people, old, young, educated or not, poor, rich, in-between, wanted a book that was theirs.
Almost every day, she received letters about books. These letters were her life. They were her friends and her children. They were her secret mantra, her addiction, her way of living. They were funny and sad and alive, and she waited for them, often saving them to open at very particular moments: at three o’clock on a winter Wednesday when nothing else could possibly happen, or at six on Thursday nights in the spring. They were rituals, small holidays. She carried them with her on trips and when she went visiting. Parceling them out each day like vitamins. She saved each query in a file, for no particular reason except that she liked getting so many letters from strangers. She didn’t want to let them go. And she answered them all, trying to say something more than No.
She often chose which manuscripts to take by how the packages felt. If she could feel something inside the envelope, some sign of life, if the handwriting had a portent to it, if a certain heft was there, or a lightness, or if she just liked the way the envelope looked—the placement of stamps, the color ink, the texture of the paper—she’d take it on.
She had some rules. No violent books. No books where the author used flags or love stamps on their query letters. No books that were racist or sexist or stupid. No books with light in the title, or dolphin, dog, or whale. No books that made fun of Jewish mothers. No survivor stories. No books about rocks, or money, or rockets, or rivers, or snow. No books with characters named Pops, or Peeps, Mary Lou, Anne Marie, Jean Marie, or Jean. No books with titles in Latin. No books with the word sweet anywhere in the text. Or testosterone or self-love. No books that she could forget too quickly.
Harbinger came to her through a friend of a friend. She could tell, by the overly polite professional way he called her Miss Rosen, that he was trying hard, but she knew too that his book was probably not very good. In the beginning this feeling about authors bothered her. She knew good books were rare, although everyone who came to her more or less believed that theirs, the story they chose to tell, would be the way they would at last receive their due. The rest would logically follow: recognition at long last, and grants, good jobs, rewards, and then, Eternity.
At first what amazed her were the stories, their range and subject matter, the countless ideas people had for their books. Some wrote novel after unpublished novel. Others had an idea, and just knew it should be a book. Some loved Asian history, or Einstein, or making chairs, or egg recipes, or researching revolutions, or why some people sneezed and others didn’t, how people prayed, what wellness meant. They wrote often, no matter what their lives were like, no matter what got in the way.
Arlette was a person full of doubt. She doubted she could do very much except fix a sentence, replace one word with another: celadon for light green, ecstasy for intense happiness. Even her changes, her reordered paragraphs, were never absolute. She knew they could always be better. So could her life. She imagined herself otherwise, a person she would never be, confident, sure. Unambivalently idealistic, committed to large goals, alongside elegant, memorable sentences. She wanted, if she was entirely honest, to sit in a room—it didn’t matter where—and write: every story she knew, every story she didn’t know. She wanted to describe earthy strangers, married lovers, Jerusalem, Jackson Heights, white peaches, home-care workers, the hands of young children. She hardly wrote at all.
But it was always somehow there, right below the surface. She imagined it would begin with the weather: a Turgenev storm maybe, wet but not too cold. Jerusalem dampness, melting to light pinkish sun. Dampness that held the smell of kerosene. Sun would hover behind clouds, perceptible but barely. She pictured characters having a picnic under an ancient tree, twisted and beautiful, an eternal tree along a rill. The muezzin would climb up onto his tower, and his sounds would cover the picnic, adding eternal song.
She could smell light dust, and greenness. Her characters would eat bright red luscious tomatoes, milky white sheep’s cheese, and shiny olives wet with garlic and fragrant oils. They would carry their bread in colorful handkerchiefs. Sometimes, she imagined her characters fighting. She did not ever actually begin in earnest although she often took notes, and wrote ideas, and names in particular, along the margins of magazines, on envelopes and bills, which she would then save in a file marked “Jerusalem, One Day.”
She always took notes on trips. She would jot down names of small-town beauty shops, Hair-em Salon, or Hair Today, or of strangers she’d meet on buses, Middle Easterners in particular, Jiryis Jiryis, Vartanoush Guroyian, Aryeh Moore, thinking someday she’d weave them together into a coherent, melodic narrative wail, set on top of Jerusalem’s hills, replete with Hasidic bike boys and Hadassah ladies gone wild, Arab olive wood sellers and Palestinian philosophy PhDs, German doctors and thin Swedish tourists. Jerusalem seemed like the only real place for her novel. Not for its holiness, though holiness never hurt. But because of its crazy contradictory powers, its deep memorable fragrance, and its ancient white stones. And the unlikely lovers so possible there, Coptic clerics and Danish dancers, white-garbed nuns and Swedish men, young handsome rabbis, long Dutch girls, dark Palestinians in complex ménages. It was, for her, a place of beauty, of pain, of humor and presence.
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