(video credits: Caitlin Smith, video, music, sampling. Rebecca Pellett, fabulous vocals.)
Sheila Heti, Won’t You Please Let Me Use Your Short Story Towards Our Mutual Artistic Gain
An Open Letter
FROM: Caitlin Smith
c/o Toronto’s Tiniest Alligator Farm
The Darkest Northern Tip of Dupont Street
Toronto, ON
TO: Sheila Heti
c/o The Lovable Depths of Cyberspace
January 19, 2010
IN RE:
“The Woman Who Lived In A Shoe”
a short story by Sheila Heti
from The Middle Stories
as a proposed component of
Caitlin Smith,
Tiny Alligator Large Band,
“And All of Your Animal Tendencies”
A Concert-Length Song Cycle
on Thursday, April 15th 2010
At the Music Gallery in Toronto
Dear Ms. Heti,
It didn’t seem quite right for a collaboration as monumental as ours to begin with a businesslike email, coffee, or a standard-issue handshake. I would be disappointed if you turned out to be such a dinner-and-a-movie kind of girl. And anything fancy like ordering the delivery of dozens of long-stemmed roses to your door would be a waste that neither of us could afford, as we are going to need to save our pennies for the Innovative Artistic Works that we will make together.
I’ve been sitting up here quietly on my Alligator Farm all winter, reading books and ordering obscure seeds from online catalogues. In the middle of the night, when I’m sure that no one who matters is looking, I’ve been pulling on my big rubber boots and creeping out into the frozen fields. After stabbing at the ground a little with a paring knife I’m usually able to make a dent big enough for a few seeds, which I drop into the ground before I get too self-conscious and chicken out. Safely back inside the Farmhouse, I tuck myself in and dream about outlandish stage productions and overwrought counter melodies.
But the problem with planting Alligators is that they tend to grow, whether one is ready for them or not. Quite without realizing its impact, I seem to have booked An Alligator Show, and now require enough music and lyrics to fill that space between after dinner and going to bed on one particular evening this coming April.
And so the need for us to finally meet has grown more urgent. On Thursday, April 15th, when we present “Caitlin Smith, Tiny Alligator Large Band, And All of Your Animal Tendencies”, we would be greatly honoured to include your story “The Woman Who Lived in a Shoe” as one of our chosen Tendencies. On the program, it fits somewhere between songs describing The Tendency to Daydream About Unattainable Things and The Tendency to Overestimate Novelty. We will also employ a poem by John Updike (“Vibrations,” or the Tendency to Wander in Order to Avoid Thinking Deeply About Things), and a poem by Sappho.
Generally, the evening will explain what a terrible thing it is to be in one’s late twenties, and the kind of girl who needs to make orchestras but also wants to make unremarkable grown-up things, like paycheques and cookies with cream-cheese icing. It will further explain that this feeling is magnified when one tends to be the kind of girl who can only approach things indirectly, in the most emotionally-obfuscated and intricate way possible, so as to make them feel more artistically worthy. Insincerity is a terrible waste of beautiful things; too much sincerity has proved nerve-wracking and costly.
Your story is in good hands for this evening. My Alligators are the best of their kind. I always let one of them, the most special of the bunch, play the bassoon for our concerts. Frank Zappa mentioned that “the bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has the medieval aroma, like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball…I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing the bassoon.” I like Frank’s distorted sense of nostalgia. Also I like the way the sound of the bassoon matches the trombone section exactly, but also changes it completely, like baking booze into cake.
The proposed musical setting for your story is a little bit on the odd-metre side, as your words are oddly-metred, and so setting them in odd metres makes them sound even. It will be offbalance and whimsical like this Tango, and sentimental like this ballad. It will also contain elements of largesse and populism. There will be three singing Alligators, a record number for our Farm, which also further raises the stakes for such an evening.
And so I implore you, Sheila Heti: won’t you please let me you use short story for our mutual artistic gain?
Yours with an appropriate amount of sincerity,
Caitlin Smith
