"George Alec Effinger - City On Sand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

“So, Sidi Weinraub! You sit out under all skies, eh?”
Ernst started, blinking and rapidly trying to recover his
tattered image. “Yes, Ieneth, you must if you want to be a
poet. What is climate, to interfere with the creative process?”
The girl was young, perhaps not as old as seventeen. She
was one of the city's very poor, gaunt with years of hunger
and dressed in foul old clothes. But she was not a slave—she
would have looked better if she had been. She earned a trivial
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 The City on the Sand
by George Alec Effinger


living as a knife sharpener. Behind her she pulled a two-
wheeled cart, dilapidated and peeling, filled with tools and
pieces of equipment. “How does it go?” she asked.
“Badly,” admitted Ernst, smiling sadly and pulling a soggy
bit of scrap paper from his pocket. “My poem of yesterday lies
still unfinished.”
The girl laughed. "Chi ama assai parla poco," she said. “‘He
who loves much says little.’ You spend too much time chasing
the pretty ones, no? You do not fool me, yaa Sidi, sitting
there with your solemn long face. Your poem will have to be
finished while you catch your breath, and then off after
another of my city's sweet daughters.”
“You've seen right through me, Ieneth,” said Ernst with a
tired shrug. “You're right, of course. One can't spend one's
entire life chasing the Muse. Wooing the Muse, I mean. If you
chase the Muse, you gain nothing. Wooing becomes a chief
business. It's like anything else—you get better with
practice.” He smiled, though he was dreadfully weary of the
conversation already. The necessity of keeping up the
pretense of sexual metaphor annoyed him.
“You are lucky, in a way,” said the girl. “Pity the poor
butcher. What has he in his daily employment to aid him in
the wooing? You must understand your advantage.”
“Is there a Muse of Butchery?” asked Ernst with a solemn
expression.
“You are very clever, yaa Sidi. I meant, of course, in the
wooing of a pretty girl. Were a butcher to approach me, a
blood sausage in his hands, I would only laugh. That is not
technique, yaa Sidi. That is uninspired. But these poems of
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 The City on the Sand
by George Alec Effinger


yours are the product, as you say, of one kind of wooing, and
moreover the weaponry of another sort.”
“So poems still work their magic?” asked Ernst, wondering