The empty house had the floor of one of its rooms strewn with flowers and a smell of earth and greenness all through its downstairs all night. Each morning for the next few days I scraped them up together, carried them into the garden and left them on the paving in the corner where they dried away to something nearly nothing and blew nothingly around in the paved yard for the rest of our time in that house.
Two teen siblings live off-grid, navigating difficult circumstances, with a slow reveal of the nature of the society they’re on the fringes of — a near-future dystopian surveillance state.
They don’t see the world the same way, and they come to exercise resistance very differently.
Gliff, by Ali Smith, depicts a tender sibling relationship. It's also a love letter to language. (Because. Words are knowledge. And knowledge is power.) "It was always exciting to me the number of things a single word could mean." Very Alice in Wonderland. Naïve, to surreal effect. "You are bullying me with words longer than the length of my life, she said."
One of the epigraphs (from Valeria Luiselli) appears to apply less to the characters than to Smith's motivation: "it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity." Smith demonstrates a lot of clarity regarding the state of the world today — surveillance, data collection, real estate economics, manufacturing and warehouse practices, consumerization of education (and the devaluing of knowledge) — and there's good reason to be angry about it, as the gap widens between the haves and the have-nots. The privileged "were smoothed as if airbrushed, as if you really could digitally alter real people."
But Gliff clearly takes some inspiration from Aldous Huxley. Beyond the permutations of the words "Brave new world" heading the later chapters, there are nods to that dystopia's indoctrination methods and soma.
She's still speaking: all took stuff. We had to, we all had body shit and we loved Patchay, best of the painkillers, just zapped it, blanked it out, blanked us out too. We all took it except her and she had this word for us, for it. She'd sit against the wall and watch out for us while we were on it, and she'd always say what we were was gliffed. We reckoned she was riffing on the old word spliff. So we all started calling it, whatever we took after that, gliff.
I love that Patchay is also a play on pace, Latin for "peace."
[I hate that I can't google a confirmation that Smith intended this, as the AI that generates overviews is clueless, and Google expects me to articulate searches in natural language, and I resent that our natural language has changed to be something that machines can recognize, why in my job search do I need to build a machine-readable CV shouldn't you build a machine that reads what I actually need to say. I remember when I first searched terms on internet and they were boolean and unnatural in a different way, often my queries were simplified, broadened, but it was mostly using an artificial system of operators to frame my natural thought, I don't know what my natural thought is anymore, maybe I modified my search practices to conform to the principles of the technology in play, but before the internet I could walk into a library and would have to consider how my question, if I had one, might be categorized, what subjects it encompassed, what ideas intersected, and if I had a specific question, I could ask a librarian, or an expert, they might know, but more likely I would engage them in a discussion about the subject, and new information might come to light, and new associations would spawn, facts may be confirmed but ideas could be explored and pursued rather than shut down, our current "natural language" machine searches anticipate a certain kind of answer, the answer is already contained in the question. I wonder how our grammar is changing, you'd think it would be more careful, to formulate searches with more precision, how sensitive is AI to our grammar, surely it knows the rules of grammar but does it understand how sloppy we are and under what circumstances we tend to get it wrong, we're so dumb we won't even notice when AI misreads our question to answer something else entirely. When I'm searching for something, it does not necessarily mean I have a specific question in mind, I have what Edward de Bono termed a "fuzzy situation," a kind of (pre-?)word cloud in my brain, and I'm looking for associations more than answers, even if problem-solving strategies typically involve distilling a specific question from all the fuzziness. I guess my issue is that I don't have a problem to solve, a question to answer, I'm interested in exploring, and it occurs to me that this is, broadly speaking, a male-female divide (or it used to be, in an earlier version of studies on gender dynamics, fuck, how old am I, oh how angry am I, how much clarity do I have now), men fix things, women want to talk about them, and this is what happens when men fix the internet. For the sake of this rant, I reformulated my search as "is the naming of patchay in Ali Smith's gliff a play on the latin word pace and what evidence is there for this" and AI returned: There is no evidence in the provided literary analyses or reviews of Ali Smith's novel Gliff to suggest that the naming of "patchay" is a play on the Latin word pace. In fact, the name "patchay" does not appear in any of the search results, which extensively discuss the wordplay surrounding the novel's title, "gliff." I wonder if the search result will have evolved after this post is published to acknowledge my original thought, I wonder also about the comprehensiveness of the "provided literary analyses or reviews," who provided them, what do you know anyway.]
A lot is left unanswered. Was the siblings' abandonment deliberate or accidental? What's the other sibling's story when they part ways? Who's running this world? How did we let this happen?
Why would people do that? she said.
People are people, Leif said, people are mysterious, why does anybody do anything?
