Work in (very slow) progress
Mar. 7th, 2012 07:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceI am working my way through the archive: boxing up manuscripts that were held in plastic bags, peering into folders, going "ooh!"
Like that.
So I have this long-term project to write a novel, an Aids-memoire, about the whole caring-for-Quin thing. It's taken me ten years so far not to finish it, after ten years not even starting it. As I have no work at the moment - well. Maybe.
But I just rediscovered the beginning. It's called Unplugged: or, The Physics of Forgetfulness.
What can I tell you, that you don't already know?
You've been in, you've been out. In and out of love, in and out of fashion, in and out of doors. In and out of hospital: in-patient, out of all patience. Intrigued, outraged; in deep, out of your depth. Infatuated, outspoken. In flagrante, outré.
I don't know what you don't know, except that you can't know this, what happened, how we went along. You weren't there, we weren't connected.
Have you ever been unplugged?
BEDROCK
The Bed that held him like a burnished cage burned on the marble -
- which I guess tells you more than you really need to know about Quin's taste in decoration, that he would have his bedroom floored with marble. Black Italian marble, to be precise, veined with red and silver. With a hypocaust beneath, because he said the British climate wasn't fair on such a rock. It needed to be kept warm, he said, we owed it that much. Like the legionaries on the Wall, he said, it had come too far and lost too much to be treated cavalier now.
That it kept his feet warm also as he padded barefoot around the flat was immaterial, beneath his notice. To have mentioned it would have been beneath contempt.
That he'd had small trouble in inveigling us into laying the floor for him, heaving slabs of marble like navvies and then crawling all across them with spirit-levels, getting it right, making it perfect - well, that perhaps tells you something that you really do need to know.
Like that.
So I have this long-term project to write a novel, an Aids-memoire, about the whole caring-for-Quin thing. It's taken me ten years so far not to finish it, after ten years not even starting it. As I have no work at the moment - well. Maybe.
But I just rediscovered the beginning. It's called Unplugged: or, The Physics of Forgetfulness.
What can I tell you, that you don't already know?
You've been in, you've been out. In and out of love, in and out of fashion, in and out of doors. In and out of hospital: in-patient, out of all patience. Intrigued, outraged; in deep, out of your depth. Infatuated, outspoken. In flagrante, outré.
I don't know what you don't know, except that you can't know this, what happened, how we went along. You weren't there, we weren't connected.
Have you ever been unplugged?
BEDROCK
The Bed that held him like a burnished cage burned on the marble -
- which I guess tells you more than you really need to know about Quin's taste in decoration, that he would have his bedroom floored with marble. Black Italian marble, to be precise, veined with red and silver. With a hypocaust beneath, because he said the British climate wasn't fair on such a rock. It needed to be kept warm, he said, we owed it that much. Like the legionaries on the Wall, he said, it had come too far and lost too much to be treated cavalier now.
That it kept his feet warm also as he padded barefoot around the flat was immaterial, beneath his notice. To have mentioned it would have been beneath contempt.
That he'd had small trouble in inveigling us into laying the floor for him, heaving slabs of marble like navvies and then crawling all across them with spirit-levels, getting it right, making it perfect - well, that perhaps tells you something that you really do need to know.