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Tuesday, November 3, 2020

A Nonsense Plagiariana For Raymond Queneau (from "Exercises in Style: The Poetic Supplement," Number 262)

     Below is a fresh retelling employing the narrative ma-
terials provided by Queneau's "Notations" chapter in his 
Exercisesreiteration incorporating the opening lines of 
twenty two famous novels drawn from the hundred best 
as determined by the American Book Review.

      You don't know about me without you have read 
book by the name of Exercises in Stylebut that ain't 
no matter. Call me Busman -- or Stately Plump Buck 
Mulligan if you've a mind -- for this is the saddest story 
you have ever heard. (In a sense I am Jacob Horner and 
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.) 
     If you really want to hear about it, the first thing 
you'll probably want to know is where I was born. I am 
a Frenchman, Paris born – Paris, that city of screaming 
which comes across the sky. For a long time, on bright 
cold days in April, with the clocks striking thirteen, 
would leave my bed early so as to catch an S-line bus. 
The platform at the back of that bus is a foreign country; 
they do things differently there. 
     Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of this tale, 
or whether that station shall be held by some grotesque 
skinny-necked twenty-six-year-old commuter in a string-
banded fedora, this page must show. Happy commuters 
are all alike; every unhappy commuter is unhappy in his 
own way. The Contrescarpe-Champerret busrun, past Eve 
and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of boulevard, 
brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to 
Cour de Rome in front of gare Saint-Lazare. It is a truth 
universally acknowledged, that a single commuter in pos-
session of a faulty overcoat, may be in want of a button. 
     Many hours later, as that odd fellow with the unusual 
hat (and the doubtless defective outerwear) faced the 
firing-squad inquisitions of his clotheshorse friend, he 
was to remember that moment earlier in the afternoon 
he became so annoyed when, as each rush-hour rider 
exited the bus, the man standing adjacent to his leg icily 
jostled him. "La-dee-dah! Like lightning I dive, like my 
loins are afire," he thought as he leapt into a just-vacated 
seat. "Surely this is the worst of times. And yet it is the 
best of times, for I am not invisible, man, and if I am 
out of my mind, it's all right with me."

     The novels pilfered, altered and married with the 
narrative are, in the order they are so abused and with
their ranking number in parentheses, The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn (12), Moby Dick (1), Ulysses (21), 
The Good Soldier (18), The End of the Road (34), I 
Capture the Castle (82), The Catcher in the Rye (16), 
The Adventures of Augie March (89), Gravity's Rainbow
(3), Swann's Way (40), 1984 (8), The Go-Between (78), 
David Copperfield (20), Anna Karenina (6), Finnegans 
Wake (7), Pride and Prejudice (2), One Hundred Years 
of Solitude (4), Lolita (5), A Tale of Two Cities (9), 
Invisible Man (10) and Herzog (69). 

Runcibl'ed Spooner: Appealing Peeling

"Skip"* reveals one's fam'ly tree.
He myths ancestral buries.
"Finding Your Roots"
     Scraping peels off lemons, limes,
and oranges. (Not cherries.)
Rinding your fruits
     Moral:
Incest and zest: only one is the best.

     * Henry Louis ("Skip") Gates

Christmas Day: A Mare Egg...

     "A Mare Egg, Her Wrist, "Miss Two 'U'"