Errata Read online

  I collect these ex-libris, one a month, and I pay, no question I pay dearly, to an Eastern European antique dealer who does business, in a manner of speaking, next to my preferred bookshop. She’s notorious in the French Quarter, this blistering-tongued pint-sized harridan, Miss Dora. Her shop’s vitrines are stuffed with colorful oyster plates, intriguing phrenology heads, dusty 19th century prosthetics, and a beckoning 30% off sign, so the unsuspecting are brilliantly drawn in, unknowing that all they’re feasting their eyes upon have held residence in the grimy windows for decades, also unknowing that a certain outcome awaits, one that’ll likely cause an unparalleled vertigo rather than a light stammer in manner. The routine is rote. Enter a bright-eyed browser, primed and seeking a potential deal. Expecting a business to exist for the charge of making sales. If Miss Dora were a different dealer, alluring rather than harsh in her housedress, and this a different setting, say Paris during the Belle Epoque, then Miss Dora might greet each occasional man or woman, the frocked and defrocked, with a knowing smile, and then invite the interested party in from the sidewalk, after which the inside latch would be flipped, the games would commence, and the orifices would be filled.

  This, however, is not that particular type of business which does no business, but rather one which does no business because Miss Dora is merely too disagreeable to ever sell anything other than a stray piece. She’s a seasoned street fighter with a still-intact old world Russian accent, and she hits hard, fast, and dirty. The customer opens the door and steps in. What do you want?! Well, I’m interested in… What do you want?! I saw a nice piece in the window that… How much do you wish to pay?! I, uh… No, now you leave! Peasant! You know nothing!

  The chastened has-been customer retreats from the barrage, the door is slammed, and one more countenance of confusion shuffles away. Having once been struck loopy by this myself, but seeing that Miss Dora stocked several small interesting woodcuts (at the time, knowing very little about the Eastern European tradition of ex-libris and book arts), I waited and prepared. I learned names, art periods, price estimates, and again entered the shop, this time with purpose, holding steady through the initial verbal onslaught, and then feeling satisfaction when she paused and corrected me, Yo-sef! That is how you say the name! You come here! Let me tell you about Josef Vachal! You sit! And so my Vachal Miniature Museum began.

  Another artist (solely of the pen) constricted and threatened by the prevailing government, two decades after Vachal and over 5,000 miles away, was Cuban expatriate Guillermo Cabrera Infante. I’ve only read one of his novels, Three Trapped Tigers, but it was invigorating enough that I was thrilled to recently come across an engaging and provocative interview published in The Paris Review a couple of years ago. All of the New Orleans bookshops are unified in tucking away their literary journals, no matter the caliber, in the nethermost regions, such as under a back table for the cat’s curling-up quarters or strewn across an upper floor next to cartons of National Geographic back issues. Doesn’t this suggest a mutually unspoken allowance for these journals to go away by any means necessary? Let’s call it what it is, an unwritten sign indicating, Barring A Purchase, Kindly Get Rid Of These. With that being the case, it was little trouble to divest the bookshop next to Miss Dora’s place of a couple of The Paris Review issues, including the one featuring the Cabrera Infante piece. He’s lived in London for almost 20 years, in exile from his home country of Cuba, perfectly typifying a life in between, though in his characteristically punning way, he might’ve instead said in bedouin were the phrase to have come up in The Interview. However it’s expressed, he physically inhabited Havana, now he does the same in London, and his memory and mind bridges the gap. In a general sense of the same plucky way that Miss Dora lives with the strange ease of a captivating deficiency of civility, Cabrera Infante writes with mischievous arrested restraint, both of them contrary but satisfying by their mutual rituals of imposition. Not standing on ceremony courses through them. They can’t help it.

  Day 8

  In the same way that I met Hannah, in which the digressive soul of the streets was disrupted by a seemingly routine fare that quickly charmed my limited soul, The Pelican entered the picture and blew it open in opposite fashion. I‘d heard of The Pelican from a few beaten male fares, they told stories better not remembered about having the misfortune of randomly and roughly being taken into custody at the 8th District French Quarter Station, expecting to leave with lighter wallets, but horrified at being worked over by an officer in a shabby animal costume. These perps (the idea apparently was that anyone without the means to buy his civilian status back was an automatic perp) were not booked, only taken in to serve as a break in boredom for the rest of the evening shift who cheered on the seabird pugilist. Who would believe the adamant charges of battery by bird made by a victim picked up under the guise of public drunkenness? The costume gave the officer anonymity from his nightmarish beatings.

  More recently, I‘d also been told rumors from fares about the 5th District cop who literally pistol-whipped out the teeth of neighborhood men, collected them, and then, referring to his nickname Half and Half, wrote ½ as a teeth mosaic in the dirt of empty lots by their sidewalks to remind the residents of his brutality. A civil servant who wore his ethics the way buildings wear rain. No anonymity by costume sought in this case, because in the 5th they do what they please. I hoped never to come in contact with either of these cops, but soon the two of them reached congruence when, after dropping off an illustrious foreign gentleman named Mr. Baygim Dalreshtav, my next fare at Burgundy and Kerlerec Streets announced himself immediately (as baleful as the previous customer was courteous) with, Drive, asshole, I need 2613 Dauphine, but I see what you’re up to. Next time I catch you out here, you’re gonna owe me a cut, you stupid fake motherfucker. Don’t think you can avoid me. I’m the fucking Pelican, okay, and you don’t pay up, then I get my licks in and you start losing teeth. For now, my car battery’s dead, so you’re gonna haul ass to Dauphine and you’re gonna wait for me there. I gotta certain person to see, and you’re gonna fucking wait. Give me all your damn 20’s. Now. Taking capitulation for granted, he proceeded to grab the wad of 20 dollar bills I yieldingly extended, ripped them in half, precisely down the middle, pocketed the right-side halves, and handed the left-side halves back to me, saying, Here’s half, the other half comes later. You’re definitely gonna wait now, aren’t you, you dumb shit, so drive. The roads are terrible, sure, they’re paved with bullshit and bones, so whattayou expect? That’s the rub. Don’t be stupid or you’re fucked. C’mon drive, asshole. It’s The Pelican’s fucking birthday and it’s time for a little fun.

  I was filled with alarmed disquietude at this one man scorched earth campaign, his pendulous chin waddle making him resemble a malevolent pelican with no need of the costume, so it didn’t hit me until we arrived there, a mismatched duo, stormy and shifty. The 2600 block of Dauphine Street. I’d purposely looped this block several times a night, every night, for the past few weeks, hoping to see Hannah again. Once it struck, as I pulled up to the requested address, right in front of a modest house, not quite as tight to the sidewalk like the others, my face crashed and I sank, trembling and realizing that, though I didn’t know her exact address, this must be it. We were at the spot where she’d flagged me down, and he knew her, knew where she lived. An air of menacing improbability about the three Scorpios meeting. Constellation, The Pelican, buried, dirt, rub. Call the burial, dirt rest. C, t, b, d, r.

  Though it seems like this is where the genesis of a poor stain began, in actuality, the gradual accumulation of cruelty and brutality that seeped from the folds of The Pelican originated long before, building over time for a certain eventuality, now calling out to extract the swift payment due. People like me aren’t the extractors, though. We have no retributive resolve. We’re the ones who stand back silently and witness. I later heard allusions to more of The Pelican’s unsavory repertoire, inciden
ts far more sinister than I imagined, ranging before and after being dumped in the 5th District from the 8th, and I became so light-headed that it was necessary to sit down for a minute. It should have been no surprise. I’m not looking to flatter malice when I say that he bore the faces of a dead conscience and a contemptuous force. His eyes were fringed pools of suffering, as if from an accumulated permanent unrest. Was he born malignant or did something wall him up over the years? This is a question better diverted.

  Day 9

  There’s a strange sensation one finds at this quiet hour, a sensation of fleeting shadowmotion. Although it seems like we breed minute creatures of all types in New Orleans, these particular sudden scurries are embedded within the pages of my daily record as if each letter is a plant moving discreetly in accordance to external stimuli. Also plant-like, but in its own fashion of no-longer-dormant verticality, the text creeps upward while also rooting into the earthy paper, making embossing look simplistic by comparison. I should mention that my relationship with the revision of this disclosure-in-print is unusual. The act of rereading (what with harsh critiquing and thoughts of mortification while trying to wrestle loose tangled disciples on the page), appears to cause literal wounds to the text itself, mortal cuts that lay the groundwork for regeneration. My means of revising isn’t typical, but more so setting forth kinesis by a light breathy human fluid, moistening the gears like a consent-syllable, activating the potential transmutation of the letters as motion machines. The trick’s in coaxing overt emergence, participation, and the revealing of unexpected scenarios beyond their otherwise ongoing covert scratchy repetitive motions, repetitive motions of creaky calculation as if encased in barely-yielding limestone for the ages. For example, a c that limits itself to a rote course of crude 90 degree counter-clockwise turns every few seconds, boomerangs around, stretches out to a crooky line before returning to its curled up shape, as if attempting to express the range of its variety of sounds or to eventually unscrew itself from its paper mooring. A T that drops its crossbar halfway, flips its left arm across to the right to thicken, curves downward to form a b, flutters to fold over and shift to its family member d, and then undoes each step to engage in its upward rise back to its early glory near the top of the vertical line, a servant in a regimented role of containment and finality. An R that lifts its leg, rushing to strike and hold the dignified leftward profile of an ancient Semitic head. This is only the beginning. If the anima of the alphabet is unleashed, then the letters are free to follow their respective natures to fresh calligraphic agility like a perpetually recasting lunar cycle of new moons or an inventive body artist, to conjoin by fusing and forming composite symbols, to cannabalize, to manifest as divisible letters, all of this accumulation resulting in a natural outcome consisting of a dissolving service at readability and communication to a gradual code-like script of purely wondrous plumage. It stands to reason. As the letter’s bent, the word’s inclined. Others will follow none of this, of course, preferring to keep mute, birds that wish to remain in their cages, anxiously demurring. Most of them, though, welcome the means of expanding their potentialities. A Theatre of Objects reclaiming its essence. The new languages exclaim, We’ve always had these capabilities, but one becomes accustomed to an underused capacity, so much so that any true tendencies have been revealed only as twitchy shudders, certain but little more than still.

  If you’re able to read this (at least initially, in which you too will likely wound the text with your opinions), my notebook must’ve been unearthed, and I wonder if that which you’re now privy to remains cold clarity or an impenetrable animated labyrinth, a nocturnal rebus reestablishing the primacy of image over text. Whether or not the words have become reborn as strange passages, the meaning remains the same. I‘m not certain which version you’ll see, so no matter what you read and whether or not you’re able to read it for a second time, the meaning remains the same. The meaning is not mundane. The mundane remains the same. Each same is not the same. Now that your head’s been filled with notions of a notebook that rewrites itself, creating its own fluid text to expand its existence, be reminded that heresy begins at home and imagine how I must feel, what with my own humble fumblings.

  Day 10

  Thinking of the second entry and speaking of illusions, I’ll be petty enough to impose upon you, not as a provocation, but as a throwing up of hands to say that I generally consider dialogue in print, regardless of intent, whether existing as a narrative-propulsion, means of contrived versimilitude, or of manipulation akin to movie music, to be faulty because it’s usually reality-based and not often the most useful of strategies, rarely allowing for transcendence. On the contrary, the point of dialogue in literature shouldn’t exist to imitate reality (which typically results in diminishing reality because literary realism is often so patently unreal, but rarely compellingly so), so the usual heavy amount of dialogue offers a conflicting philosophy, plus there’s a certain expectation of what it must resemble when encountered by the reader. Few novels are ever improved by an infusion of dialogue, let’s not deceive ourselves. The more dialogue in a story, the less illuminating the story tends to become, page by page eventually receding to no more than lumps in the throats of then ever-silent speakers and the unfortunate reader. Frankly I’d warmly welcome the replacement of dialogue by the author speaking with personal qualities. Also, isn’t what we do far more interesting than what we say? Or when an author deftly inserts non-fictional elements? Why not articulate the accompanying internal dialogue? Also, what about the lives of objects, of seemingly inanimate everyday objects we take for granted? Their stories and quiet lives are seldom reflected upon. For example, a needle pirouetting and skating gracefully to etch a past remembrance while its counterpart thread ribbons through the air around it, whip smart and feisty as if joining in a spring festival, or a house out of breath and wheezing while flexing its bricky legs, an infusion of the irresistible subsurface life, no less and often longer lasting than that experienced and displayed by humans. I suppose this infatuation with dialogue, this desire for creating paint-by-number still lifes in print (in contrast to claims otherwise, we North Americans aren’t interested in the truth but are smitten and often smited by tall tales portrayed with the trappings of solid bearing, we want to be duped, to be misled, we’re gratified by deception, we crave sham mourning and rigged mirth, on the other hand, despite being written in a fatigued rumpled manner and stuffed with sentimental weeds, consider this a notebook of true aim with no glancing regard for spectacles), this clutching for realism, comes from the distorted and abused Writing 101 maxim show, don’t tell, in which dialogue plays a sizable role because it’s easier to plug narrative holes and bridge with dialogue rather than in artful fashion. As if the grand tradition is called story-showing. To step past bemusement, major credence and a firm reply comes to us from the French poet and essayist Mallarme who stressed, To paint, not the thing, but the effect it suggests (likewise, underappreciated American author and Oulipian Harry Mathews encouraged, Don’t tell the story, tell the telling of the story, by the way, thanks are in order to Mathews and Mallarme for their present role under the house). Mallarme was also greatly interested in indeterminacy of form and used the term constellation to refer to his poems-of-chance. One star that never formed was Livre, Mallarme’s book to be read in any random page order desired. Another like-star in this constellation, one that may well be discovered in a sky-to-come is Messiah, Bruno Schulz’s conception of an interchangeably-paged tale, with no less than a part called The Book.

  Returning to advocacy, a thoughtful reader (not that I’m expecting the potential reader of this to be thoughtful, but thorough) might have an obligatory response, What about the part I read only a few pages back, Day 2 of 22? Wasn’t that an actual event that you’re conveying with dialogue to drive the narrative? It’s a reasonable question, but regardless, this isn’t a novel (if it was, I’d be driving the narrative the way I inefficiently drive my
cab), and if it sought that reach, you’ll recall that my encounter with Hannah was essentially a monologue, not a dialogue, and was included because I wasn’t seeking to mirror the event but instead to capture, dismantle, and shape it. It isn’t until a later time, after the different elements of an episode linger in memory, that the banal curtains of reality’s balanced proportionality dissolve or are unevenly filtered by the benefits of time-tainted misremembering, and an element (say, a phrase, smell, or passerby) initially thought of as insignificant and unworthy shows itself and rises to the top of one’s recollection. Plus, writing of meeting Hannah took place over one brief section, not an ongoing chatter. I’ll grant that sparing use of dialogue gives a writer the ability to create an artifice of reality, enough to satisfy a reader by slipping in a hint of exalted authenticity. But, if we’re going to be bound by any dictum, when why not Maugham’s, There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

  Again to reinforce the impression that technique doesn’t have to be tunnel vision, it should prove useful to provide a model of the exploration

  of often-ignored vitality. As a schoolteacher Bruno Schulz not only told fantastical stories of the pulsing lives and histories of objects such as a pencil or water jug but also captivated students with his tale of half and half, about a knight and his horse both cut in two but continuing to wander the earth. This illustrates Schulz’s interest and negotiation with an out-of-season murmuring mechanism to awaken and fulfill the repetition of unspoken births, and one can easily predict dialogue’s role in those stories. That said, eradication of dialogue is certainly not expected, but I’m perfectly willing to accept and gleeful to regulate a reduction of dialogue-in-print. After all, I’m not referring to dialogue on the level of Socrates or Paul Valery, a few obvious exceptions of careful regard and non-still life motivation, but realize that 99% of the time dialogue is a mere anemic glimpse of perceived reality (which is odd since most everyday discourse inspires little reverence, yet its written version is so plentiful one would think the incapable banality was the only way to declare legitimacy), essentially reducing literature to surface, that is weakened disposability, and it often leaves one passive, bored, and preferring instead to browse the local section of the newspaper or take a walk for a preferable boon of the less predictable. One could make a better argument than the one I’ve made, but my sensibilities are distinct if nothing else. I apologize for the relentless hectoring tone, though. I feel like I’ve been doing little more than reaching into a basket of newly-picked berries and flinging them at you, one right after another, without pause, while yelling, What about this one or this other one?, giving you no time to catch and taste a single berry because its mate follows too quickly behind it.