purple motes

Emily Lord on poets, couch potatomen:

All that I'm telling you is based on true reality. I was married to one once and was thrown into the midst of hordes of them. Everyone was a poet or wannabe back in the sixties. I never met a poet I liked. They drink everything and vomit on your shoes and then run off with your raincoat unless it's sunny...then they stay until they've eaten everything in the house. They kept taking my tweezers and pinking shears (god knows why) and their buttons fly off. Once I cloroxed all their ecru India guru garb till they were clean as diapers. They had to roll around in the front yard till they looked beat enough for a reading. We had a first edition of a paperback book that was worth a bundle (August Derleth? some one who wrote about Boston in a genre horror) and one of them took it and sold it and went somewhere, like France. That's just for starters. They want you to cook tacos for them in N.H. when there are only root vegetables to be had. I got two pieces of bazooka gum and an old copy of The Rolling Stone for Xmas from one. I had just painted his entire house after plastering most of the downstairs, reglazed 39 windows and painted them all, made dinner for forty with Chicken comtadine, and real almond mousse junk in a casserole lined with madelaines I had to bake myself in a tilty oven that smelled like dead mice. I did all of the above wearing high heels in an unheated house (and garb). Romantic? Like NOT!! They kiss the mirror and you have to Windex it or you could catch something. The most romantic person I ever met was thirteen. After that you're faking it. (thirteen-year-old is out at the moment. Now in love with pasty thin boy with faded green hair). Marvell was just romancing his self...he was the worm and in the end the poem gilds not the lily but the bulb.

This text, which I have slightly edited, appeared in an Internet discussion forum in 2001. Lacking trust in the great Internet cloud, I printed it out. Thus, apparently, this wonderful treasure has been saved from some benighted webmaster who pointlessly clear-cut space on a server.

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As a young child, I remember pondering with my brothers the idea of digging a hole to China. We considered this to be possible. After all, we understood that the earth was round like a ball. But we figured that digging a hole to China would be too much work. We settled on digging a swimming pool. We dug a small hole that filled with muddy water after a rain.

In 1994, concerned about economic reforms in Russia, I decided to write a Russian novel. Russian popular culture, it seemed to me, lacked hugely popular literary masterpieces like Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, and Stephen R. Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I imagined writing something like Ilf and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs, but updated to reflect subsequent insights from economic history.

You can't swim in that hole we dug. But, if you can read Russian, you can now read the chapters that I wrote of that Russian novel. They probably won't contribute much to Russian economic success. But perhaps some Russian schoolchildren might find them amusing. Here's the English translation of the title and the first paragraph:

The Way to Wealth

Chapter 1

Several years ago in Saint Petersburg I met an American. A lot of those foreigners are running around now, talking with everyone, and no one follows them. I met this American in that new restaurant Pizza Hut. He was sitting next to me, and I noticed that he had on his pizza green peppers, onions, and broccoli. On my pizza was sausage. [more in Russian]

Technical notes: Because I wanted this work to be culturally authentic, I chose to type it using the KOI8-R character encoding. I'm grateful to Petko Yotov's Universal Cyrillic decoder for converting it to CP 1251, an encoding easier to use with MS Windows computers. Babelfish offers Russian-to-English machine translation, but the results in this case are quite bad. So if you don't read Russian, you'll probably have to wait for machine translation technology to improve in order to appreciate this unfinished literary masterpiece.

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