Ali Smith - Hotel World

Dear Ali Smith,

I love you long time.

Seriously, any time you want. I’ve never really had any homosexual tendencies before but your words totally do it for me. Trains go direct to Cambridge (where you live) from Leicester (where I live) so just say the word and I’ll buy a ticket. If you don’t want me for my body, I’ll even come over to clean your bathroom. I guess it’s the least I can do since this little second-hand books project means that you don’t get a penny from me. I can even put a few quid in an envelope if that’s easier. Do you have PayPal?

Yours always (but don’t tell Cormac McCarthy - wouldn’t want him getting jealous)

Meg.

(and this time I’d throw myself willingly down it wooo-

hooooo and this time I’d count as I went, one elephant two eleph-ahh) if I could feel it again, how I hit it, the basement, from four floors up, from toe to head, dead. Dead leg. Dead arm. Dead hand. Dead eye. Dead I, four floors between me and the world, that’s all it took to take me, that’s the measure of it, the length and death of it, the short goodb—.

Bring me apples, Bring me (something), Bring me hazlenuts, Bring me wheat, Bring me good things, To eat, Kellogg’s Country Store.

The voice still sounded (inside her head all these years later) as if its owner had been brought up on healthy, very good things; it seemed to suggest that eating them every day had made her the successful and socially-upwardly-mobile singer of light classical repertoire that she was, and had got her the morally blameless job of singing on television about these good things precisely for the benefit of others.

a terrible way to lose someone close like we lost her in a department store in the sportswear dept & if we went to the customer service desk we could put a call out fro her over the intercom speakers this is a message for Sara Wilby your family is waiting at customer services could Sara Wilby please come back from the dead ah shit ah

The people who bought prescriptions in Boots the Chemist yesterday are feeling better, worse or the same. Some have colds. Some have infections. Some have nothing wrong with them. Some feel drowsy and ought not to operate machinery today.

See? Isn’t she just amazing?

As you can probably tell, Hotel World is about death; one death in particular but really about all deaths. How it is just normal and life goes on, and that sometimes ‘normal’ really means ‘rubbish’, but that’s how life is.

Totally fucking love you, Ali Smith.

Ali Smith - Hotel World
Publication date 2002
Publisher: Penguin
Price then: £6.99
Price now: £1.50
Purchased from: The dude under the flyover on Oxford Road, Manchester.

From the synopsis: “Brought together - and forced apart - by a bizarre incident involving a dumb waiter, we share their very different experiences of life in the aftermath of death, of pain and sorrow, of hope and love - everything, in fact, that the world dares to throw at us.”

You know what, you should totally read this book if you’ve lost someone recently. It’s one of those books that might help, like Jonathon Livingston Seagull.

Ali Smith - Girl Meets Boy
Publication date: 2007
Publisher: Canongate
Price then: £12.99
Price now: a copy of Winterwood by Patrick McCabe
Purchased from: swapped via Read It Swap It

From the synopsis: “It’s about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations.”

For the second edition of Exploding Helicopters, where I share my favourite bits from a recently read book, it has been very difficult not to simply copy out entire chapters. Ali Smith is one of my favourite writers, because she has this wonderfully understated turn-of-phrase, and she can switch from flippant comments about the globalisation of Inverness to gorgeous passages about a first sexual encounter, its tenderness and electricity. She is awesome. I read her books in a Highland accent in my head too, even though she lives in Cambridge now.

Girls Meets Boy is part of a series of books written by a whole load of different writers, each reworking a particular myth. I don’t mean urban myths like swans breaking people’s arms or chicken carcasses festering in Big Macs, I mean like Greek shit. Ali - I feel like we’re on first name terms - chose Iphis, who was disguised as a boy even up until her wedding day, when she worried that she would never be able to pleasure her new wife without a big dangling schlong. This new version is largely about Anthea and her first same-sex relationship, but it’s also about her sister Imogen, a bulimic who stands up to some super-creepy discrimination in the workplace. But then it’s also about the world’s water supply and how it’s manipulated by big business, and about how we all need to speak out about issues that should never go unrecognised. And it’s about Iphis of course. It’s only a short wee book too. Ali Smith gets it all in there.

“… Then the chosen boys and girls from last week’s programme come back and talk about their blind date, which as usually been awful, and there is always excitement about whether there’ll be a wedding, which is what it’s called before people get divorced, and to which Cilla Black will get to wear a hat.”

“(It’s the fault of the Spice Girls.)
(She chose the video of Spiceworld with Sporty Spice on the limited edition tin.)
(She was always a bit too feminist.)
(She was always playing that George Michael cd.)
(She always votes for the girls on Big Brother and she voted for that transsexual the year he was on, or she, or whatever you’re supposed to say.)”

“Hi. This is Anthea. Don’t leave me a message on this phone because I’m actually trying not to use my mobile any longer since the production of mobiles involves slave labour on a huge scale and also since mobiles get in the way of us living fully and properly in the present moment and connecting properly, on a real level, with people and are just another way to sell us short. Come and see me instead and we’ll talk properly. Thanks.”

“(I feel like we should always be meeting each other on trains, I think inside my head. That’s if we’re not actually on the same train, going the same way.)
I say it out loud.
I feel like we should always be meeting each other off trains, that’s if we’re not actually on the same train travelling together. Or am I saying too much out loud? I say.”

“I wondered if everything I saw, if maybe every landscape we casually glanced at, was the outcome of an ecstasy we didn’t even know was happening, a love-act moving at a speed slow and steady enough for us to be deceived into thinking it was just everyday reality.”