Errata (3 page)

ERRATA

One of my first thoughts when stepping away from the teaching job was that of pleasure at no more daily shaving.  My 5 o’clock shadow arrives by noon and shaving becomes an unfortunate exercise in scraping sensitive skin.  Also, I have an approximately ten year age differential from how old I look when clean shaven as compared to with a couple days of stubble.  The idea of growing a beard seemed refreshing and possibly defining.  Would these whiskers provide a crisp new visual persona that I‘d been missing out on?  I was hoping to look like a thawed stoic, a charismatic poet in the sepia glow of a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph, or a wise Eastern Orthodox monk, only with scanner chatter to break the self-imposed solitude instead of monksong.  Instead I resembled ridiculous.  No hint of elegance.  Only monastic disorder.  The impression on fares was highly unfavorable.  Glances lead to starts, starts to stares, and stares to discreet astonishment of amusement or pity.  Women clutched their purses tighter than usual.  No less than the Anabaptists would’ve rejected me.  I have a face that calls out for a covering of facial hair, only not too much.  So now I shave twice a week, enough for an almost continual layer of stubble, which represents me most suitably.  It makes one wonder, though, about those born out-of-time because of looking beastly with full-grown facial hair while living during a whiskery period like the mid-1800’s, or vice versa those who appear pinched, maybe weak-chinned, or worse when clean-shaven, living during the peach-cheeked days of the mid 1900’s.  How many fates must’ve been determined, since appearance counts for miles, disfavoring those who didn’t look quite right, much less outright ugly by sporting the facial fashion of the day, how many lovers lost, how many job promotions denied?  In a critical moment, it counts.

Many men have many minds, so shouldn’t many men also be permitted an assorted masquerade ability to wear several varieties of facial hair or none?  The first clause of the preceding sentence references a chapter title from
The Confidence Man
by Herman Melville, which is appropriate because his writing wasn’t always appreciated throughout his lifetime, but his beard certainly was and is, what with the iconic photographs of the bearded Melville remaining his prevailing visual impression.  He knew the power of sporting one’s own Spanish moss during an exceptionally hairy era, using over two dozen different words or phrases of beard description in the novel
White Jacket
, published when he was barely into his 30’s and his writing career was already waning, requiring him to pursue another line of work.

All of this reminds me of a fellow student from my university days, when I lived in a dormitory as a freshman.  The self-dubbed Ulysses, since he was apparently bored with being known as the hardly-
comparable Karl Fuchs, sought to distinguish himself from the others at the small religiously-affiliated college, and like a somersaulter amidst a pack of proper to-and-from walkers, he relished a habit of riding shock-value with quirks like shaving half-and-half so that one side of his face was clean-shaven and the other was a frontier of curls.  It was no surprise to hear Ulysses dubbing cassettes at double-speed with the speakers blasting down the hallway, while he sat in his room calmly studying, ears covered with headphones not plugged in.  Ulysses, literally 1 in 1,000, was actively caught in between and his eccentricities brashly displayed what most of us covertly keep under wraps.  The struggle.  The stretching of oneself in shrunken places.

Day 7

My current relationship with books is a complicated one of necessity, limitation, and cross-use.  I value the written word a great deal, however I have neither the funds nor enough room in my semi-
fastidious little space to support dual collecting.  So (and if I’m to be tried for any crime, let it be this one), chancing a multiplicity of curses, I make the rounds to each of the downtown bookshops and the public library, discreetly slipping out with no more than two new companions at a time, no location hit more than once every two months, hardcovers when possible for their functionality, titles depending on the chance of which unobserved sections lessen the risk of being caught (this has helped to satisfy my obsessive desire to accumulate a little knowledge about everything, slightly expanding my horizons beyond only reading fiction, as I’m prone to do, seeking the escape into a well-told story and having it stir my imagination, as simple, timeless, and naturally necessary as a thirst for water).  One might think this enterprise would cause a build-up of stacks over time except for the sake of my landlord’s neglect.  The apartment floor used to sag in several spots where the foot and a half tall brick piers that elevate the house have lost a significant amount of strength over the years as the mortar has worn away and the rivermud bricks crumbled.  My solution was books as bricks.  They have a limited outdoor life, of course, but the baker’s dozen of books each month find a suitable pragmatic purpose after they’ve served the literary one.  Many writers would surely be offended by this unintended use of their work, but I like to think that those I most cherish would instead be inordinately delighted to play a role in holding up a house, that they might actually subordinate their awards and accolades to being part of a rotating keystone of literature. 

I know Josef Vachal would understand.  Vachal, a Czech who lived through three-quarters of the 20th century, was an all-around renaissance book man.  He wrote, illustrated, and bound volumes that portrayed the heights and depths of the soul and the flesh, conveying a fiercely individualistic world view.  When the former Czechoslovakia became a dictatorship, Vachal, arguably a visionary on the level of William Blake, refused to use his art for the capacity of the state, so he was put to the street, where he survived by wearing multiple layers of clothing and drinking melted snow.  At any point he could’ve returned to a strain of his former lifestyle, but his resolve was firm, though he eventually retreated to a small town in the Eastern part of the country.  I suspect that if, by necessity, he needed to burn books to keep from freezing to death, Vachal did, without hesitation, in the same way he moved from a poetic existence to one of raw pragmatism (it’s an unequal comparison, but raw pragmatism is what also leads me to write this notebook).  Most of us have the liberty to live without this type of bleak distinction, thankfully, and I pay Vachal tribute in a simple ongoing way, with a Vachal Miniature Museum, which is my only precious possession.  Like many artists, he designed small ex-libris for benefactors and friends, book plate prints of only a few square inches to be pasted into a bibliophile’s library, either on the front endpaper adhered to the cover board or the free endpaper across on the recto side.  The ex-libris are also designed as limited edition morsels of art, often numbered up to no more than a few hundred.  Vachal, by any estimation, created a few thousand ex-libris and wood cuts over the years, mostly while centered in Prague during the time between the wars.  The Czechs continue to pursue book arts with an imaginative flourish, and Vachal’s work remains legendary in his home country where artists created in code as a matter of course to slip content past censors. 

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.