Lacuna, Blog 1: Bookstore

It’s one of those corporate ones, maybe, still standing after Hurricane Dotcom flattened the landscape, then that virus shut down all the supply chains, turning non-corporate retail outlets into killing fields and leaving shoppers to huddle at home clicking up everything from suppositories to llama kibbles. In addition to the fact that this bookstore is still open, another bit of evidence that it’s corporate is that it has a café with a coffee bar behind which numerous bedraggled, masked “baristas” race around in clouds of steam not being paid much. Anyway, it’s a pretty big place, lots of floor space, so you think maybe you could work off a few of your daily ten thousand sauntering up and down the aisles having the occasional look-see at the occasional book, appreciating the snappy titles or the confrontational ones or the ones offering “self-help.”

You like these ones a lot, the self-help books, not so much because you’d ever buy one, but because they make life seem open-ended, as if nobody’s ever stuck being who they just are with all their dark compulsions and bad eating habits and self-pity and laziness—their failures, their cowardly recusals. Heartily and proprietarily these books brush away the defeatism inherent in self-knowledge, promising measurable regeneration without any dark night of the soul, offering a cartoonish kind of dragon-slaying experience, the dragons being thoughts like: “Well, I’m going to die anyway someday or other so I might as well go out and get good and drunk.” Or “I’m ugly and stupid, but at least I can be thin about it.” Self-help books represent a brand-new tomorrow, with emphasis on the word “brand.” There are bound to be follow-up books along with demonstration videos and plenty of gear and equipment coming down the line to facilitate in a sequenced and protocol-y and, of course, monetized way the maintenance of one’s hard-wrought transmogrification.

Eye-ing all these slickly produced books strategically arranged on the shelves so that the ones by the especially well-known, widely adored, and heavily corporatized psycho-medical gurus are cover-out, one sees in one’s mind high above corporate America a lemony-orange sun rising all smiles above a purplish horizon tinged with dreams and can-do messages about life. The long and short of it is you can’t help but feel really smart walking down one of these aisles, smart enough to pick yourself right up by your bootstraps and finally make something out of your particular sojourn through time and space. You’re filled with the gusto of can-do, you self-determining self-improver, you!

Of course, somewhere down a dark service corridor in the back of your brain where a kind of sad-sack janitor walks around muttering to himself, you’re perfectly cognizant of the fact that if you did buy one of these books and put it to its proper use it wouldn’t be self-help at all, since somebody else cooked it up for you. Somebody with a Ph.D., of course. That goes without saying. After all, you couldn’t have cooked up all that self-help stuff yourself. It takes science, and you’re not smart enough to develop your very own empirically grounded self-improvement program. No way. This is what the janitor’s muttering about in that service corridor in the back of your brain, and he’s right but, well, who listens to the janitor?

Eventually, having self-helped your self-esteem by wandering down that particular aisle, you find yourself in another one, the aisle where the really smart books are—the cookbooks. They’re empirical, that’s for sure. There’s nothing more empirical than cooking. And those people don’t have to be Ph.D.’s for you to know they’re smart. Look what they’re cooking!

Tantric Ox-Shank Kabobs!

Wow!

And this one: Mau Mau Cuisine Made Easy!

Or: Woke Food.

Or: The Wonders of Cricket Flour—Fabled Meat Tarts and Pies!

Now you don’t feel so smart, do you? One has to be really smart, you think, to appreciate cricket flour enough to eat it. You can sort of even hear that janitor muttering to himself back in that service corridor. His voice is getting a little louder, isn’t it?

What was that? Who’s a dumb-ass?

Better get out of there before you start being able to hear the other things he’s saying!

Having quickened your gait straight across the store to the periodicals section, you find yourself in front of one of several magazine racks. Of course, you look for the high-brow magazines over on the far right, the ones with the really smart editors and the well-educated readerships and snappy writers with vocabularies filled with swanky words like incontrovertible and suss and wonk and metric and choc-a-bloc.

Recalcitrant, even.

Supposititious.

Multiplicitous, God help us.

Being a writer yourself, maybe, you pick out a really sharp-as-nails magazine and scan the contents for the one or two poems, say, or a good short story, all written as everybody knows by very smart writers and, in the case of the poems, poets who are so smart that you better not go near them. The poets, being prone to indirection, write long indirect poems about, say, being in a museum in Egypt or somewhere and suddenly realizing their ex-wife is just like an anonymous sarcophagus maker who used a special technique that allowed him to build watertight sarcophagi without nails—using dovetail joints, that is. No glue, either. It’s that one obscure fact, of course, that reminds this very very smart poet—along about in the thirty-eighth quatrain or so—of his ex-wife.

The one about he didn’t use glue.

The sarcophagus maker, that is.

Or the short story writers. Their story is about a guy who gets tired of sitting all day in his basement in the Hamptons and instead takes a cab to the United Nations where he talks for about an hour with a janitor in the lobby and learns that the subway has been shut down because a body was found in an unused tunnel and it may be Jimmy Hoffa’s, although everybody knows it isn’t, Geraldo having cleared that one up ages ago. Nevertheless, he has it in his head, our hero, that he might go find that tunnel and have a gander for himself, but he doesn’t and the story ends with him having gone and gotten the janitor a cup of coffee and now he’s on his way back to find him and give it to him, but he ends up drinking it himself.

All these stories amaze you because, for one thing, they adapt themselves perfectly to their assigned column inches and they fit beautifully around the very sophisticated cartoons and ads. Also, some of them have lacunas. The lacunas are very often the best parts, or they would be if they weren’t lacunas. Usually, they represent passages of time—say, six months or so—after which the main characters return from a trip or something completely changed. It’s never explained why they changed, of course, or even where they went on their trip—Egypt, maybe—because the lacuna was only that—a lacuna—not really the middle section of the story. It just says they went on a trip. Then there’s a kind of skippage of lines and an asterisk and then, after another skippage, it begins again: “When Chase got back from his trip . . . “

The magazine, you imagine, doesn’t always have enough column inches to accommodate every story’s middle section, so lacunas are a very meta, sly, post-modernist way of allowing the story to fit into a limited number of column inches and have the lacuna represent a middle section. You wish you could write stories like that, with lacunas and all, stories that were good enough to publish in spite of the lacunas, or even because of the lacunas, because—well, obviously.

Be that as may be, after cruising through the stories, you go back and re-read the poems. You should always re-read the poems. Poets nowadays are crazy smart! For instance, in this one poem I was telling you about the poet found that really abstruse and unapparent connection between an anonymous sarcophagus maker and his ex-wife—the one that had to do with there being no glue—while he was strolling through some random museum in Egypt. It’s as if he went all the way over there, halfway around the world, just to find that very obscure museum down a back alley of a street along which the rooftops of the houses reminded him of old musty books opened up and left face down on a table. That image by the way is in the seventeenth quatrain, which is actually seven lines long due to poetic license and all.

Anyway, what a distance to go just so he could write that cleverly irregular and long poem with variable-length lines, full of technical terms for sarcophagi and the rites of Osiris, and ancient glues, and menstruation rituals among the peoples along the Nile in around 1200 B.C.E. Writing about all that stuff is the only way he could possibly get it right about his ex-wife, who by the way and according to the ninth line of the poem’s thirty-second quatrain, may or may not have had a pretty heavy flow. You can’t write about that sort of thing, really—your ex-wife, that is—without being in some obscure museum somewhere finding out more about Egypt and ancient menstruation rituals than anybody particularly wants to know.

In the back of your head, of course, where the janitor is, or should be if he weren’t taking his union-contract-mandated coffee break, you know all these writers and poets are actually professors, probably of Creative Writing, and were probably on sabbatical and decided to go to Egypt and visit obscure museums, determined to write a few really kick-ass poems along the way. But in the front of your head you think of them as poets with really good, flourishing . . . well . . .  careers.

Poets—you know? With careers.

Poetry careers.

That’s the neat thing, you think—that’s the admirable and even the enviable thing: as poets, no less, they have careers. The professor part doesn’t matter. Of course, that’s a career, but in his mind at least—the poet’s, that is—it’s just a kind of launch pad of a career for the other more exotic-seeming one, the one as a poet.

Getting published all the time and all.

In swanky magazines.