typos

[Image: “D1 / typo incident,” by Zoolette Des Bois on Flickr.com. Used under a Creative Commons license. Edit to add: the sign seems to be a marker at this location in London, on a particularly bad day I guess.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

if i have made, my lady, intricate

if i have made, my lady, intricate
imperfect various things chiefly which wrong
your eyes (frailer than most deep dreams are frail)
songs less firm than your body’s whitest song
upon my mind—if i have failed to snare
the glance too shy—if through my singing slips
the very skillful strangeness of your smile
the keen primeval silence of your hair

—let the world say “his most wise music stole
nothing from death”—
you will only create
(who are so perfectly alive) my shame:
lady whose profound and fragile lips
the sweet small clumsy feet of April came

into the ragged meadow of my soul.

(E.E. Cummings [source])

…and:

Based on my experience of life, which I have not exactly hit out of the park, I tend to agree with that thing about, If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. And would go even further, to: Even if it is broke, leave it alone, you’ll probably make it worse.

(George Saunders [source])

…and:

Descriptions of Heaven and Hell

The wave breaks
And I’m carried into it.
This is hell, I know,
Yet my father laughs,
Chest-deep, proving I’m wrong.
We’re safely rooted,
Rocked on his toes.

Nothing irked him more
Than asking, “What is there
Beyond death?”
His theory once was
That love greets you,
And the loveless
Don’t know what to say.

(Mark Jarman [source])

…and:

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self…

I wind my experiences around myself and cover myself with glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.

But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed, I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me I am my own mistake.

(Thomas Merton [source])

[Read more…]

[Video: the “Red Room” scene from the last episode of Twin Peaks. I’ve adjusted the starting point to begin at what’s relevant to this post; if you don’t want to watch the whole thing, you can stop it at about 2:04.]

I have zero training as a typist, but type pretty fast anyhow just from, well, practice. No doubt someone with real experience would look over my shoulder and wonder why I use my pinkies (or whatever) so seldom, why I make my fingers reeeeeach so much, and so on. It all works out pretty good for the most part… except when I’m sort of flying along, tappy-tappy-tappy, and looking at some source material rather than at the screen, and one or more fingers drift just a littttttle bit to one side. What results looks vaguely like English, and if I check the keyboard I can trace it back to see, Oh yes, the left hand got out of sync there, or just the index finger or thumb.

I had one of those moments earlier today. The word I was typing in a comment box: manuscripts. What actually came out: nabyscruots.

Which, oddly, fit the context. That’s exactly what the damn things are sometimes. It’s not quite right, this nabyscruot. Maybe if I poke at it a little it’ll turn into a real manuscript.

It occurs to me now that this is actually the voice in which The Muse speaks: she doesn’t speak to artists and writers in our native languages, but in a sort of nasal, distended voice which sounds almost like gibberish unless we listen really, really hard*. Which would explain why it’s so difficult to answer the seemingly obvious question, “Where do you get your ideas?”… and so frustrating to try. If we answered honestly, our listener — many times, at least — would have to strain to “get it.” It’s so much easier to speak in metaphors and plainspoken shortcuts, the equivalent of the subtitles in the above video.

People ask me where I came up with the idea for the book I’m working on now. I tell them, “truthfully”:

I’d just finished writing a mystery. While working on that book, I’d read mysteries almost exclusively.
The first non-mystery I read afterward was Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils.
Visiting a Borders store in New Jersey — the first Borders I ever went into (and it’s now one of the ones about to close, sigh) — I decided I wanted to follow The Old Devils with a classic which I’d never read.
Thinking, as I wandered into the back left corner of the store: Huh. There’s one. How come I never read Le Morte d’Arthur? Wonder if it’s at all like all the other King Arthur stuff I’ve ever seen? Wonder if it’s at all like that movie the Pythons did?
…
“The [first-draft] End”!

But that’s pretty misleading. In fact, I have no idea how I connected all the pieces (including not only The Old Devils and Le Morte d’Arthur, but ales, motor homes, archery, and the rest of it). I just listened, really, really hard.

But we can’t just say that, can we?

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* Or think of the old Lassie TV show. The dog’s barking frantically, almost apoplectically, jumping up and down and falling over, and all the thickheaded human can say is, “What is it, girl? Did Timmy fall down the well? No? You hungry? You wanna go for a walk?”

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P.S. Here’s the backwards-talking little man from that Twin Peaks episode, explaining how to talk backwards — before, of course, the sound and video editing crews step in to play your backwards-talking voice backwards. (Got that?)

Perfectly Mistaken

Useful Typos, and the Voice of the Muse