Am halfway through “A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing”. Now the first page is enough to think you’ve bought a typo-laden rejected printer’s copy. Not so, for I am used to “Ulysses”, TS Eliot, Shakespeare, Courttia Newland, texting language and other written works in the making. So I blinked to clean my glasses as you do and carried on. Totes maze would have been accepted in 2012 when language and London changed for a while, when the Queen swung through the Stratford air, when art became anything.
I rested for a couple of hours to check some tickets at Eventbrite, some tickets for a show about loving the earth. It was then time to check out some reviews of the book. I’d read the last pages as I do for all my literature. Some laugh. It’s like this. I’m in it for the structure and the language, the twists and the finale. Stories are astonishing to the extent that I am not going to know them all because some I just can’t bear to know. I know many to the extent that familiarity breeds a little frustration. The story of the half-formed thing is bad enough and has familiar characters such as the “holy Joes” and the chastising battering mother. However it unfolds through language that’s in a mind and not mine so unwittingly I move through the tale, concentrating on who is talking and when, bouncing on weird syntax and safe because I’m in that structure rather than in the mix with some unsavoury characters.
I’d released the book from the edge of my laptop and the line of my bust and was thinking whilst watching the “Broadchurch” trailer and remembering Joy at Words Of Colour and how strict she is regarding the use of language and clichés about all the new words and all the phrases invented by advert-makers and ourselves using old words for new meanings I’ve used comfortably post Olympics . Paralympics itself was a word to use out of respect even though its four syllables threw people and its meaning was upset by PC. Some of the words and phrases have been around a long time usually in Cyberspace or Dalston.
There’s ” immersive theatre, barista, upcycling, lappie, tablet, girl can, trending, cloud, streaming, Hijabi, Londonist, craftivist, You’re so money, hipster, artisan-bread, mindfulness, well-being, sustainable, interns, urbanist, food bank, ultra-local, pop-up, gone down, hub, surbunites, outage, Olympicopolis, Smithsonian, engaged,
And then totes amaze on the D&D registry, a playwright used “Hijabi” and an administrator is abandoning the concept of “immersive theatre”.
No condition is permanent.
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