"Erasure"

[fiefoe]

Percival Everett's novel is too post-modern and smart to be truly lovable by the likes of me, but it was consistently interesting.

• This admission pains me only at the thought of my story being found and read, as I have always been severely put off by any story which had as its main character a writer. So, I will claim to be something else, if not instead, then in addition, and that shall be a son, a brother, a fisherman, an art lover, a woodworker.
• I could sell many books if I’d forget about writing retellings of Euripides and parodies of French poststructuralists and settle down to write the true, gritty real stories of black life... The hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it. I don’t believe in race. I believe there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose and slave ancestors. But that’s just the way it is.
• Linda had published one volume of predictably strange and stereotypically innovative short fictions (as she liked to call them). She’d fallen into a circle of innovative writers who had survived the sixties by publishing each others’ stories in their periodicals and each others’ books collectively, thus amassing publications, so achieving tenure at their various universities, and establishing a semblance of credibility in the so-called real world... Finally, however, I was hated because the French, whom they so adored, seemed to hold my work in high regard. To me, a mere strange footnote to my obscure and very quiet literary career.
• The center of the tree is the heartwood. It does little to feed the tree, but it is the structural support. The sapwood, which feeds everything, is weak and prone to fungi and insect damage. The two look the same. But you want the heartwood. You always want the heartwood.
• _The rest tells us what they expect from the beans into which they stare, but “they thought” renders their beans blank. And so we come to dismantling of the endeavor as the endeavor of the text at hand, Sarrasine, not being chosen as a model at all, but accepted as one treated in a way which in turn is a model for the treatment of other texts, as is this text. A reiteration of the obvious is never wasted on the oblivious.
• “Which part bothered you most?” “You, you mimetic hack,” Gimbel spat at me.
• Yvonne looked at me as if my words were getting lost in the space between us. She nodded her head without looking directly at me and went back to her work on the desk.
• “Mystery and Fantasy.” “Named after their fathers. One was a mystery and the other a fantasy.”
• I stopped that when I was twelve. Though I would have been unable to articulate it then, I have since come to recognize that I was abandoning any search for elucidation of what might be called subjective or thematic meaning schemes and replacing it with a mere delineation of specific case descriptions, from which I, at least, could make inferences, however unconscious, that would allow me to understand the world as it affected me. In other words, I learned to take the world as it came. In other words still, I just didn’t care.
• Someone interested in African American Studies would have little interest in my books and would be confused by their presence in the section. Someone looking for an obscure reworking of a Greek tragedy would not consider looking in that section any more than the gardening section. The result in either case, no sale.
• this book was a real slap in the face. It was like strolling through an antique mall, feeling good, liking the sunny day and then turning the corner to find a display of watermelon-eating, banjo-playing darkie carvings and a pyramid of Mammy cookie jars.
• For my father, the road had to wind uphill both ways and be as difficult as possible. Sadly, this was the sensibility he instilled in me when I set myself to the task of writing fiction...  “You don’t sign it because you want people to know you painted it, but because you love it.” He was all wrong of course, but the sentiment was so beautiful that I wish to believe it now. What he might have been trying to say, I suppose, though he never would have even thought about it in these terms, was that art finds its form and that it is never a mere manifestation of life.
• _ “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now,” he said. <> The words had little effect on me, save to announce Gimbel’s disturbed, certifiable, and agitated postmodern state.
• “Of course, if an avant-garde movement ever achieves its purpose, then it ceases to be avant-garde. By the mere fact that it opposes or rejects established systems of creation, it has to remain unfinished.
• Paul Klee nods, sips his tea. He is saddened himself. He has just been expelled from the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. “They are calling me a Siberian Jew.”
  “Who is? Das Schwarze Korps?”
  “Who else? And they are burning any books which contain pictures of our work. They call me a Slavic lunatic.”
  “They’re correct about both of us.”
  Ernst laughs.
• I had a dream. First, of my father telling me the stories of how Paul Robeson once broke into song in Miss Madsen’s Tea Room at the beach and how Paul Laurence Dunbar would stroll the pier reciting poetry
• Often, I would simply cut wood. The smell of it, the feel of it, the sound of the saws, manual or power, tearing through it. I would practice bevels with the router, miter cuts, add to my pile of tapered legs. I wanted to turn on the table saw and rip a plank, but I had to drive to the airport. I had to go see what Lorraine had meant when she said that my sister was dead.
• Even if grammatical recognitions are crude, meaning is present. Even if the words are utterly confusing, there is meaning. Even if the semantic relationships are only general or categorical. Even if the language is unknown. Meaning is internal, external, orbital, but still there is no such thing as propositional content. Language never really effaces its own presence, but creates the illusion that it does in cases where meaning presumes a first priority.
• Poor me! A man without a religion, without a decent lie to call my own. Giving up life for life, loving as I knew I should, and, perhaps most importantly, attempting to live up to the measure of my sister.
• Brown trout emerge from spawning gravels in spring and soon establish feeding territories. Young browns prefer quieter water than rainbow trout and tend to grow at a slower rate. Some spend their lives confined to headwater streams, but most of them migrate downstream to better habitat and feeding in rivers and lakes. Some brown trout live to be twenty years old. Browns are canny, the most wary of trout.

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• The tee shirt I’m wearin be funky as shit, but I don’t give a fuck. The world be stinkin, so why not me? That’s what I says. So, why not me? That’s my motto. So, why not me?
• “Yeah, and yo mama got her own zip code and area code,” Yellow say.
  “Well, your mama work as a roach terminator and don’t need no sprays or no shit, just her breath.”
  “Yo mama look like J. Edgar Hoover,” Yellow say.
  “What he look like?” I ax.
  “Yo mama,” Yellow say.
  “Fuck you,” I say.
  “Fuck you,” Yellow say.
• I be standin outside in the night. A police chopper go by and shine some lights in some backyards and I think, shine that light on me muthafucka.
  I thinks, hey, I’m a chocolate. I be a chocolate in a box o’ chocolates. “Here I be, America!” I scream up at the chopper whats leavin. “Open me up! Never know whatcha gone get!” I hates my daddy.
• “That ain’t my problem,” she say. “You make yo’self some money, maybe you kin buy you a watch.” <> “I ain’t got no need fo’ no watch,” I say. “Time is the white man’s. Time ain’t mine.”
• “Oh, I wanna shoot you. There aint no question bout that,” she say. “I wanna shoot you and let somebody else clean up the blood.”
• I turns on the radio and hear they be talkin bout me. I can see a news helicopter off to the side, but it be from the telebision. I can see the cameraman hangin out and pointin it at me. Hey, I be on the telebision three times in two days. My heart feel all big.

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• Indeed, all lofty themes, religious, political or otherwise, were equal in their being subjects of ridicule or simple askance-looking.
• Academic training catering to such vulgar taste can only promise vulgarity. Rhetoricians are at the root of the decline of Oratory—empty speech for empty heads, pretending eloquence and so redefining the very thing it has killed.
• “Actually, Monk.” His pause was a fat one if not terribly long and I could imagine his habit of looking at the ceiling before speaking. “I’ve taken a lover.” Taken a lover was how he put it. Removed one from the closet? Conned one out of his savings? Taken a lover.
• Having come into what I considered a lot of money, I decided to go see something worth more than money. Granted, not all of it was worth more than money, in fact much of it was not worth the canvas or linen it was slathered upon, but some was and that was enough to put my new gain, rightly and sadly, into place. I thought of Cocteau and his saying that everything can be solved except being, this while staring at a Motherwell that both seduced and offended me.
• I tried to distance myself from the position where the newly sold piece-of-shit novel had placed me vis-à-vis my art. It was not exactly the case that I had sold out, but I was not, apparently, going to turn away the check. I considered my woodworking and why I did it. In my writing my instinct was to defy form, but I very much sought in defying it to affirm it, an irony that was difficult enough to articulate, much less defend. But the wood, the feel of it, the smell of it, the weight of it. It was so much more real than words.
• I couldn’t imagine the man who had run off to New York to have an affair. I knew my mother had read the letters, but I didn’t know when. I knew she wanted me to read the letters. Knowledge of the affair gave me, oddly, more compassion for my father, more interest in him. Even when I considered my mother and her feelings I did not find myself angry with him, though I worried about her pain.
• It is the case, however, that not all radicalism is forward looking, and maybe I have misunderstood my experiments all along, propping up, as if propping up is needed, the artistic traditions that I have pretended to challenge. I reread the paper I claimed to dismiss summarily and realized that epiphanies are like spicy foods: coming back, coming back.
• For the first time I sat back and watched the destruction of my family, not a weird or unnatural thing, indeed it was more natural than most things, but it was a large portion to swallow. My father was dead for several years. My sister was recently murdered. My mother was slipping away on her kite of senility. And my brother was finally finding himself, I suppose, but seemingly losing everything else in the process. I wouldn’t use the cliché that I was the captain of a sinking ship, that implying some kind of authority, but rather I was a diesel mechanic on a steamship, an obstetrician in a monastery.
• It was a parody, certainly, but so easy had it been to construct that I found it difficult to take it seriously even as that. The work bored and had as its only virtue brevity. There was no playing with compositional or even paginal space. In fact, the work inhabited no space artistically that I could find intelligible. For all the surface concern with the spatial and otherwise dislocation of Van Go, there was nothing in the writing that self-consciously threw it back at me. Then I caught the way I was thinking and realized the saddest thing of all, that I was thinking myself into a funk about idiotic and pretentious bullshit to avoid the real accusation staring me in the face. I was a sell-out.
• “I remember you,” I said. “How’s life treating you?” <> “Finer than frog’s hair.”
• We sat in the car and I fumbled a bit with the keys. The scene was strikingly and alarmingly unfamiliar to me. A woman less than seventy was seated beside me, a woman whom I found attractive, a woman whose short-term memory was at least as good as mine. I felt like a spinster and fought appearing too self-conscious.
• (Short story about a black man acing a quizz show:) “You ain’t quite dark enough, darlin’,” she said. She began to rub the compound into the skin of Tom’s face. “This is TV stuff.” <> He watched in the mirror as his oak brown skin became chocolate brown.
• “Thomas Jefferson.”
  “Wrong,” Spades said, unable to completely hide his annoyance. “That’s wrong.”
  “Tom, what is a serial distribution field?”
• “Listen to that,” Bill said. “He asked Mother to burn the papers. Mother’s afraid to boil water too long, lest it combust.” Bill was right. He was as sharp as ever and, as ever, had a better read on Father than I ever could. Enemies always understand each other better than friends.
• I was left alone to care for Mother. I had not known the extent to which I depended on the servant, and I learned that reality knows neither subtlety nor kindness when it decides to “get in your face,” as it were.
• Wittgenstein: Why did Bach have to sell his organ?
  Derrida: I don’t know. Why?
  Wittgenstein: Because he was baroque.
• My grandfather was very bright, but was not notably funny. He realized this and was famous for the funniest line of our family history. He said, “My claim to having a sense of humor is a singular demonstration of such.” I was ten when he said it and even then the layers of logical play thrilled me.
• A trout hiding behind a rock in fast, muddy water might or might not take a nymph fished deep through the riffle. For all the aggravation a trout can cause, it cannot think and does not consider you. A trout is very much like truth; it does what it wants, what it has to.
• But a chair, a chair is its space, is its own canvas, occupies space properly. The canvas occupies spaces and the picture occupies the canvas, while the chair, as a work, fills the space itself. This was what occurred to me regarding My Pafology. The novel, so-called, was more a chair than a painting, my having designed it not as a work of art, but as a functional device, its appearance a thing to behold, but more a thing to mark, a warning perhaps, a gravestone certainly. It was by this reasoning that I was able to look at my face in the mirror
• I didn’t write as an act of testimony or social indignation (though all writing in some way is just that) and I did not write out of a so-called family tradition of oral storytelling. I never tried to set anybody free, never tried to paint the next real and true picture of the life of my people, never had any people whose picture I knew well enough to paint... But the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression. So, I would not be economically oppressed because of writing a book that fell in line with the very books I deemed racist.
• I imagine it was because Tom Clancy was not trying to sell his book to me by suggesting that the crew of his high-tech submarine was a representation of his race (however fitting a metaphor). Nor was his publisher marketing it in that way. If you didn’t like Clancy’s white people, you could go out and read about some others.
• I thanked my parents on more than one occasion for not raising me Catholic. I was thirteen the final time and they finally responded to me by saying, “We’re not Catholic, dear.” The dear was supplied by Mother.
  “Oh, I know that,” I said. I stopped at the door and turned back. “That was a different thank you from my thank you for not raising me as a Christian.”
  “Oh, we know that,” Father said.
  “Why do you thank us for that?” Mother asked.
  “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point,” Father said.
  “I know my reasons,” I said.
• de Kooning: You erased my picture?
  Rauschenberg: Yes.
  de Kooning: Where is it?
  Rauschenberg: Your drawing is gone. What remains is my erasing and the paper which was mine to begin with.
• She was so far from the woman who had told me once that listening to Mahler made her see colors right before she cried. “I see autumn in the fourth symphony,” she said. “Ashen greens giving way to reds and ochre while the sky darkens and the night feels cool.” The same woman whose shitty ass was being wiped by a woman who didn’t know who Mahler was had said that.
• Linda Mallory was the postmodern fuck. She was self-conscious to the point of distraction, counted her orgasms and felt none of them.
• Guilt made for poor cologne. I hated three things on people. I hated the heavy humor of public men. I hated overt and indulgent self-deprecation. And I hated conspicuous guilt. I prided myself in the fact that I had only ever been guilty of the latter two.
• “So, is our old man dead yet?” “Yes, he is.” That seemed to unscrew her slightly and she sat down at the table, rocked the baby.
• “We promise ourselves all sorts of things during our lives,” I said.
  “What have you promised yourself?”
  I looked at her quiet face. “I promised myself once that I would not compromise my art.”
• I reasoned, for lack of a better word, but perhaps no word is better, that if I were to go out into the streets of Washington, say around 14th Street and T, I might find an individual who by all measure was Stagg Leigh and then I could kill him, perhaps bring him home first for a meal, but kill him after all. But there was no such person and yet there was and he was me. I had not only made him, but I had made him well enough that he created a work of so-called art. I felt like god considering Hitler or any number of terrorists or Congressmen.

__ Cane is a 1923 novel by noted Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer.
__ Ernst Heinrich Barlach was a German expressionist sculptor, medallist, printmaker and writer.
__ C’est plus qu’un crime, c’est une faute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Antoine,_Duke_of_Enghien
__ Käthe Kollwitz was a German artist who worked with painting, printmaking and sculpture. Her most famous art cycles, including The Weavers and The Peasant War,