~OR~
[Nothing
going to dinner to hear news to his house to my house to the coffee house
going on.]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 14 January 1659/60. Two weeks in, I thought I’d see what this would look like if I used the eraser tool in Photoshop instead of the highlighting tool in Word. I like it better, but it’s more time-consuming to generate, so I might end up sticking with the “blacklighting.”
5. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013
Read the whole series on Storify (and be sure to check out the Pro Publica report Cole links to at the end, which is both thorough and non-ideological).
Teju Cole has gotten big on Twitter the right way (in my humble view): using Twitter as a creative medium. His growing follower count is an indication that there’s a real hunger for this kind of thing; I do hope more writers will follow his lead. While I’ve personally grown a little weary of his relentlessly grim small fates, there’s no denying their literary quality and inventiveness. And I do love his occasional Twitter essays (or whatever you want to call the above, which is less polemic but more devastating than its predecessors). A just-published essay, “Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole?” by Sam Twyford-Moore cites and quotes from a couple of Cole’s other Twitter essays, in case you missed them.
[the swan how high
how much the sword
a cunning swine played cards
where I went to hunt]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 13 January 1659/60
There is — I’ve come to feel — a text within the text, made up of the words and phrases that lodge most firmly in our minds as we read and the hidden relationships we sense between them. Can it be brought into the light and given at least a minimal coherence? If so, what if anything might it tell us about the parent text?
I think this shadow text is based in part on semi-conscious, momentary misinterpretations which we are continually correcting automatically as we read. It’s of a piece with those false ideas and associations we all harbor based on misunderstandings that were subsequently corrected, sometimes very quickly, but still too late to prevent such shadow ideas from persisting, showing up in dreams and sometimes even influencing conscious thoughts. (This is, in part, how propaganda works.)
If I were able to read with perfect focus, perhaps a shadow text would not develop, but the imagination is an unruly beast, and fluent reading gives it latitude to stray to one side or another as I proceed, like a dog on a long leash inspecting things of interest while its owner plods straight ahead. It has, in other words, its own agenda. To recover the text within a text, do we not also need to be dog-like and follow our ears and noses more than our eyes? Certainly we need to be more active. Investigation may even require that we bark and listen for a response.
[I drink with a seaman,
a half moon and a barber,
play harp for a bit of meat
and send broke thoughts.]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 12 January 1659/60
we ran through the streets of Rochester
with the police hot on our heels
cops shouted our names through bullhorns
but careful hands passed us through the crowd
like children under the protection of the village
we slipped into an alleyway and were gone
[Being captain, I leave late,
and—a game grown great and very tame—
with a pair of snuffers and a pair of shears
I see the small pox home.]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 11 January 1659/60
It has been hard
to sell magic—
will a time come
when it can’t
be given away?—Elaine Equi, “From Lorine”
[The first sphere of wire
through heat of the sun
drank a star.
In his silk cloak, the chairman made
the rest of the day a bed.]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 10 January 1659/60
Mid-January, & the bear
who hasn’t had
a meal in two
months, & won’t for
another three, half-
wakes to chew
sticks into soft
chips—bedding
for the cubs who
will soon be born
& squall
& nurse.
She may leave the den
to eat snow or merely
dream of it.
Her heart beats
eight times a minute.
But from the fastness
of her dark
unhungering body
milk will flow.
I’m indebted to a blog post from the North American Bear Center, “Lily Makes Bedding,” for the detail about chewing sticks — which sounds as if it was new discovery for the researchers. (The bear in the poem is on more of a Pennsylvania hibernating schedule, however.)
