barb is struggling with an article, so i wrote her that i'm sending her some very positive writing angels i happen to know here in new york. With the publishing and newspaper industry being what it is these days, they're just hovering around manhattan, flapping their wings & doing nothing - so they're going to zip over to china right now and they're actually incredibly excited to help the great barbara demick with her work - so here they come! Their names are Mississippi and Hudson (it's a little known fact that writing angels are all named after rivers; no one knows why - )
I'm thinking of giving two other writing angels to Margaret – these would be, i think, the Thames and Amazon –
Though perhaps there is some Indonesian river that might be better, but i don't know any offhand and if i did, i wouldn't be able to pronounce or spell them.
The Thames is always very picky about people remembering to put the ‘The” there- he hates to be called Thames, and even more- hey thamesy, get you angelic butt over here – which Mississippi has been known to call out on a slow day.
And he REALLY hates being called Thames to rhyme with james. It’s Tems, he says – THE tems.
Oh yeah – the tems they are a changin’ – Miss. mocks him.
Actually I think it’s a bit of a crush… she really ought to know better, and she does, but this is guarenteed to get The Thames’s attention. He gets all focused on La Seine, who, of course, wants nothing to do with him.
That’s why they call me the MIGHTY Mississippi, Miss. has often been heard to utter after a particularly difficult project finally ends, like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
"And then He just KILLED him," Miss. will still mumble from time to time. "1079 friggin' pages - and then He just KILLED him. why didn't he tell me he was just going to KILL him?"
He killed himself, Amazon points out.
same diff, mutters Miss.
"Hey, at least he lived long enough to know he was a famous successful writer," said Amazon, who was still smarting over losing the writer of Confederacy of Dunces to suicide, before his book was even published. "you didn't have to trudge all over manhattan with that fucked-up, obsessed, depressing mother for eleven goddamn years."
"well, i don't understand why you got him in the first place, he's from new orleans, he should have been mine, i was right there in the first chapter,' Miss. complained for the thousandth time, though it was true, one suicidal writer was more than enough, and in fact they all had so many of them.
'it was a scheduling thing - you were off doing something else at the time, dear,' murmured Amazon, who thought better than to point out that Miss. had always tried to claim every southern writer in america, and half the northern ones too. Miss. did have mark twain after all, and there was no living with her after that -she took full credit for his name, not to mention all of huckleberry Finn, a book which Amazon and Nile privately hated.
They finally had come up with a lottery scheduling system which actually was an agreed-upon fiction that the other writing angels used so they could occasionally get gifted american writers who were so dispropotionately from the south or clustered around the mississippi. "F. scott Fitzgerlad, for god's sake? who knew the mississippi ran through the Twin Cities?" Volga had complained more than once, though with all those Russians ("oh, you think
American writers are depressed? don't get me started!") he really had nothing to complain about.
I suppose Yangzte was rather hurt i hadn't sent him, Barb being in China and all, but this nation-blind casting sometimes had all the logic of busing in Boston. ("and there was another one - HUGE amount of effort and Boom! down he goes," Nile remembered, when this discussion was going on the other day. Of course no one remembered what she was talking about. "Common GROUND," Nile almost yelled "pathbreaking book about race in New England? by that guy - anthony - anthony "
"See? You can't even remember his name - Those high-profile political books are always the first forgotten, i've never understood why," someone said - i think it was Ganges, who is known to speak about once a semester; he's worn to exhaustion with keeping Salmon Rushdie alive and in wives.
"Anthony Burgess - "
He's mine, said The Thames; he probably didn't mean to sound haughty. "Clockwork Orange." (The angels whose writers had had their books made into films by Stanley Kubrick had screenings once a month with wine and cheese.)
"or - well, some name like that. anthony, something -- gardner? and then he died. Killed himself. "
"Darling, they all die eventually," said Amazon mildly, lighting up another cigarette. "Goes with the territory."
They were all silent a moment, contemplating The Great Design Flaw, as Miss. always called it. What could they do? The master had his off days.
"Lukas!" Niles abruptly sang out. Huh? said the others.
"Lukacs? he's mine! and he never killed himself. he was quite a survivor, all things considered -- all those purges and the Hungarian Revolution," said Volga indignantly. "don't get him started on Marxist theory!" said Hudson in a loud whisper. Nile glared at Volga. "J. Anthony Lukas and his book isn't forgotten, you can order it on amazon and it became a classic --"
But with that she quickly stop speaking. Discussions on just what was and what wasn't a classic had caused so much disruption that it had been banned as a topic, then finally as even a spoken word - and, of course, Amazon.com as the source of selling books was something Amazon didn't really lay claim to, but she couldn't help being proud of, even a little smug. This particularly galled Mississippi - she and Amazon had never gotten along (perhaps because their namesakes might have once been the same river? though each heatedly denied this -) and it was something like sibling rivalry. Nile had more than once pointed out to Miss. that no website could use her full name as a business, it was just too long and hard to spell.
Though why the booksellers hadn't chosen "Nile" - which was even shorter, was a mystery Nile pondered quietly to herself.
"Everyone knows I have all the good writers," Miss. pointed out. 'Oh, let's not start that again," said Nile. "Mais oui, c'est vrais" La Seine chimed in - she was a great fan of American writers.
Nile doesn't require this 'the' business that The Thames (and La Seine) insists on. Though it has always baffled her that she's called "The River Nile" in all the literature. "I mean, no one says "The River Mississipppi, no one says the River Amazon, no one says the River Hudson - -so why am I always 'the River Nile"? i don't get it," she complained one slow night over Christmas break, when no one needed them because all the writers with children couldn't write with the kids home on school vacation and all the writers who didn't have children were too depressed to write -- except for The Thames' mystery ladies, they wrote every day like clockwork, but then they hardly needed him at all, by this point - pd james and ruth rendall and the other British masters, mistresses rather - and The Thames privately wondered if sometimes they weren't getting a little extra help from the other direction, especially that Rendall, man, was she dark.
"I think it's because you're in the Bible" said Hudson helpfully. He has a great appreciation for biblical exigesis, given all the seekers after truth who had made their way up his wide passages to found new spiritual colonies in America. Hudson is a very versatile angel - for awhile there, he also had several painters under his wing, but the painting faded, quietly breaking his heart, while writing in his neck of the woods got COMPLETELY out of control. he had so many geniuses on his list that he could be gracious and modest at all times. It was just a fluke, really, that there was no writing angel named "East" -- it was an untenable name for an angel, though unquestionably a very important river in its own right - (just not 'write') (:) Also, Hudson had endured so many centuries of snobbery from The Thames that he never got an attitude with anyone.
Some days, for all his brilliant writers in Manhattan and Connecticut and Brooklyn and even New Jersey, he just missed his painters. He'd get very quiet, and go watch sunsets over his valleys. Sometimes Nile would join him, just for company. His shores were so unlike her namesake's that she found them thrilling. Hudson appreciated her company more than he could ever tell her. He was extremely shy with ladies, espcially long, dark, mysterious ones like Nile, who ebbed and flowed her banks all the time and had five-thousand year old sculptures buried inside her. "when it comes to losing art," hudson thought, "i really should take a tip from Nile. She's never mentioned it once."
So they would sit there, looking at vistas of gold and pink and not say a word. This went on for centuries.
"It comes and it goes," was Hudson's motto, though privately i've heard it said that he never quite recovered from washington irving's sleepy hollow tales, practically having to dictate them by hand, and others have commented that he was coasting - literally - on all those seemingly new york writers who had actually only come to NYC from many other places -- though no one would ever have said this to his face, not even The Thames, and certainly not La Seine, who actually envied Hudson - and Miss., too - more than she could ever admit, and was constantly baffled by the French writers who managed to make it in translation into english, something she could never get over feeling was a complete waste of time for everyone concerned. if you couldn't read it in french, why read it? was her thinking - and it wasn't thinking she did in english, it was in french.
But now suddenly it seems to me that there’s someone else who did this, angels named after rivers- I think I read that somewhere once, but I don’ t know where- cs lewis or something like that? I can’t recall.
oh well, this is just some silliness i did with my day, inspired by an email to barb.
