Exercises in Style Read online

  As ill-luck would have it, I came across him once again two hours later, completely by chance, in the Cour de Rome. He was with a friend who was lecturing him.

  ear

  This young man had a mug that was vile, and disquieting. With his plait around his hat. With his glasses. On a bus platform, one day at noon, that’s where he was. Everything about his appearance called for ridicule, inciting mockery. And yet, in examining him closely, I perceived in him that sort of inhumanity that gives the smallest fleck of dust a terrifying quality. We were tightly packed onto that bus platform, and, each time anyone got off or on, this character jostled his neighbour.

  “The overcoat …”

  The overcoat certainly didn’t come from a good tailor and I completely understand why one of his friends had made some comments to this effect. When one wears such a ridiculous hat, there is no chance that the overcoat will be impeccable. The ridiculous fool, let it be said in passing, had gone with a plait instead of a ribbon. This sartorial imperfection had led, furthermore, to a certain disequilibrium as far as social behaviour, an irritability that manifested itself, right in front of me, in the form of an altercation, though on a minor level, with an innocuous fellow. This incident was then resolved by an overcompensation of the rudest sort, that’s to say by the violent commandeering of a place to sit that had recently been vacated. Afterwards came, but some time later, and elsewhere, the question of style.

  he stro

  The stro is a biped with a particularly long neck (which distinguishes it from the bi-stro with two heads but with a neck drawn into the shoulders). It covers its head with pieces of felt skin that it makes by chewing the hair of the animals that it kills and devours after having shorn them with his teeth (this headgear is always what distinguishes it from the stro-son who holds his in his hand) surrounded by a stretch of crudely twisted entrails (some might say plait).

  The stro is aggressive by nature, but a firm bearing will make it beat a hasty retreat.

  “I get on the bus …”

  I get on the bus, the S. I take the bus, the one that goes to the Porte Champerret. There were a lot of people. We were tightly packed in because of the crowd. In fact, there were oodles of people crammed up one against the next on the rear platform of the S bus that goes to the Porte Champerret. To summarise, it was full, a full S. Among the people that were crammed together on the rear platform of that S, there was a man, fairly young, not too old, in his mid-twenties, approaching thirty; his neck was really quite long, serpentine, swan-like, giraffish, abnormal; as for his hat, it was a fedora, without anything extraordinary about it, unremarkable, rather commonplace—except for there was a plait around it instead of a ribbon, [end of ms.]

  How the game is played …

  The game is played with two dice and a board (included).

  If you roll 8 or 4, get on the S bus (84). If you roll 1 or 7, go back to 17 (Parc Monceau). If it is full, go to 1 (miss a turn), otherwise go to the Porte Champerret. Make your way back to Contrescarpe. If you roll 7 or 3, go to 73 (the young man with the long neck) or to 37 (the plait of the hat). If you roll 10 with 6 and 4, go to 64 (squished toes). If you roll 12 with 6 and 6, go to 65 (the quarrel). If you roll 1, go to o (the empty spot).

  If you roll 9 twice, go to the gare S[ain]t-Lazare. From there, with a 3 and 2, go to 71 (the encounter), and with a 3 and 2 to 62 (Button).

  The game is played with [four crossed out]

  The Conductor -----------------------------------Clubs

  The Spectator -----------------------------------Joker

  The Passenger -------------------------------Diamonds

  The Big Bad Wolf --------------------------------Spades

  The Sartorial Adviser -------------------------Hearts

  If the Conductor rolls 3 or 4, he goes to the Parc Monceau (16)

  If the Spectator rolls 7 or 12, he gets on the bus (32)

  If the Passenger rolls 4 or 8, he puts on his large ribboned hat

  If the King of [blank], this is called “Doing the Big S.”

  romotional

  “One day on the platform.”

  “The what?”

  “The platform.”

  “The platform?”

  “Yes, the platform of a bus. You don’t know what the platform of a bus is?”

  “No. First of all, buses don’t have platforms.

  “Well, my good sir, in days gone by they had them!”

  “Oh bah.”

  “One day, then, on the platform of an S-Line Bus…”

  “Of the what line?”

  “Of the S-Line. S-Line. S.”

  “S? The letter of the alphabet?”

  “Yes, number 84.”

  “Oh, I see! The line on which the cars don’t have platforms…”

  “Exactly! Well, one day, on a then still-extant platform of that formerly otherwise designated line, I noticed a young man whose hat…”

  “Whose what?”

  “Whose hat.”

  “Whose hat…”

  “Yes, whose hat. You’re not going to tell me that you don’t know wot a hat is?”

  “Of course I know wot a hat is. But a young man… whose hat…”

  “Good sir, back in the day when buses platformed, young people wore hats.”

  “You don’t say…”

  “Well, my story doesn’t seem to be all that interesting to you.”

  “Please continue…”

  “I’ll spare you the details. The fact remains that an hour later…”

  “A what?”

  “An hour later…”

  “That’s not very long.”

  “Yes, it isn’t very long. That’s what makes the anecdote interesting—otherwise it would be insipid."

  “Anyway… As you were saying…”

  “An hour later I saw him once again in the company of a friend who was questioning the sartorial value of a button…”

  “Of a what?”

  “Of a button. You’re not about to tell me that you don’t know what a button is. A—BUT—TON.”

  “Oh a button! (full of joy) A button! But that’s the only thing that never goes out of fashion! Ladies, gentlemen, purchase your buttons from the F.F.B.B.F., the French Federation of Bituminous Button Fabricators—Non-oxidising! Non-decaying! Non-dissolving!—you have nothing to lose, the one you should choose is a button to use!”

  roblem

  Given

  a) a means of transportation known as a bus that will subsequently be abbreviatedly designated by the letter S;

  b) the rear platform of said bus;

  c) a certain quantity of representatives of the genus Homo sapiens transported by this bus, from among them will be selected

  c') one specimen α of the species coolcaticus with maximal length of neck;

  c") one specimen of the species tepidus that measures up to said maximal length of neck;

  d) the plait surrounding the headwear of α;

  e) a vacant seat at time T.

  Calculate the minimal distance α—β where β is subsequently projected onto γ after having pronounced remarks R.

  II—Assuming that the preceding problem has been solved, with time T having become T' and the means of transportation passing in front of the gare [Saint]-Lazare, determine which remarks regarding overcoat buttons R' are exchanged by Homo coolcaticus A with another representative of the same species C.

  Jesse Ball

  Blake Butle
r

  Amelia Gray

  Shane Jones

  Jonathan Lethem

  Ben Marcus

  Harry Mathews

  Lynne Tillman

  Frederic Tuten

  Enrique Vila-Matas

  nstructions

  Wake up early. Stretch your neck with a neck stretching device. Do so until it is long and supple. Tear a button off your overcoat—one of the lower ones. Make sure to bring your hat. It ought to be tall and tied with a felt cord. Under no circumstances show up with a ribbon around your hat.

  Leave your house. Go to the corner. Get on the S bus. It doesn’t matter much why. Get on, and make sure it’s full. If it isn’t full, wait until another S bus comes—one that’s full. Get on that one.

  Raise up all the indignation you can muster. Hold it steady. Hold it. When someone jostles you, even if no one jostles you, when someone seems to jostle you, make a stink. Don’t let that sort of thing pass, not even for a minute. And if it happens again . . .

  When a seat opens, and I’ll say, ride that bus until a seat opens, you get in it. Get in the seat and sit down. I don’t care if a dying pregnant woman needs to sit down. You sit down. Such a woman—she’ll die anyway, along with everyone on the bus, and everyone you’re ever going to meet, etc., etc. Sit down.

  Now here’s the tricky part. Find your way to that nice spot, the one in front of the gare Saint-Lazare where the demented tailor, the one who imitates a dandy and sits around smoking cheroots, some people call him “Chaffy,” the spot where he spends his time. Walk back and forth near him until he notices your button problem. Try to time it so that you can be observed, so that right when he tells you about your missing button, all kinds of people can listen in.

  After that, for all I care, you can go to hell. Collect your money later at the usual spot.

  Jesse Ball

  oppelgängers

  I walked as far from where I’d lived as I could walk until I wasn’t walking any longer but only standing in a field. The field was filled with carrots and I was holding more carrots than I could hold. I can’t hold all these carrots—I don’t want these carrots, I heard me saying, in a voice. Who has put them in my hands? Just then a bus pulled up. It was an orange bus. I could hardly tell it from the field. I wasn’t aware this was a bus stop and I don’t think I should have to be at one, I thought. Why should I have to be somewhere with carrots and my face again today, this day again facing a machine inside this heat, today being the day it is as forced upon by sun and walls and fields on which I’d never meant to stand. Through the dark orange glass of the window I could see all these other people on the bus were holding carrots too, and they were crammed in and they were glaring. The bus was overcrowded to the point of several dozen forced to stand—nowhere to sit today inside a bus filled with anxious people armed with no idea about the way of now, like me. Regardless, the bus door opened, and regardless, I got on. I had to go on. Where else was I to go? It had always been this way, and I was not one to not follow directions. When I did, I found therein the man standing beside me had on the same coat as my coat, and of course he was standing up and holding carrots like me and was old like me and had my arms and had my face. The man beside that first man too I found shared our expression and our posture and our make. We were all three the other’s mirror this cold morning. I did not look to see about the rest of all those along the aisles, as no sooner had I noticed the men and how they seemed just like me then one of the men made like me threw all his carrots on the ground, right on the feet of the other made like me. Or was the man me? Or was I him? I could no longer tell, though I knew I’d been through this before. I could feel it in me. Held it in me always. Either way the men were screaming and I was screaming even as the bus began again to leave the field, where through the windows all the air held carrot-yellow as I watched where I’d been before this bus there leaving and I could not stop it and never would. The man now with his arms free of the heavy ugly carrots saw where the others of us could not see along the aisle. A free seat had appeared, a hole unfilled among the many bodies where in this thrall he could sit down, and with the other man and me beside him still just screaming not even knowing what words from anyone were coming out he jumped away and fell into his found hole all surrounded by our clasping arms, and as we passed on through the orange fields I could no longer see him. He’d disappeared among the flesh of all the fleshes, another me I’d never brush again, while meanwhile me here and the other still were one against the other, though our screaming shortly thereafter shattered too, stopping up the words inside the each of us unto the silence of the passing of the air among the many faces I’d not had the heart to look upon in stench of carrot rot and all the pressing skin of all our ways.

  It seemed like years between us then. I felt the light of days come in and out and all against me, though in passing sheens I looked the same. A day could not have passed, nor could even several hours, though suddenly I found myself at last no longer on the bus, still holding carrots but not as many, and my stomach full of hell. My teeth hurt. My skin seemed beaten. So many buildings. The sky a bell. I stumbled forth in no clear color and felt a shape and turned around. Then there I was: all young and ugly as I had been on the bus before I’d disappeared, now reappearing in an orange coat, with some strange orange woman on my arm. From in the hole of me against the air I watched the woman put her mouth up to the younger me’s mouth and move her lips. I could hear her words as well in my own head, wound in warm breath: “My love, we need to mend you.”

  Blake Butler

  iscera

  This page was once plant material, crushed and sluiced and pressed through a machine in a warehouse, the process looked over by a man plagued with a skin flaking infection. The man, ankles swelling after the sixth hour on the job to the point that he would loosen his damp shoelaces for some late-day relief (the flesh pillowing over his yellowed athletic sock), would scratch the pimpled back of his hand, his wrist and arm, so liberally that a veritable shower of his necrotized flesh would sprinkle down upon the pages as they flew through the pressing machine. The pages themselves, speeding by—printed on which, the man could barely discern, were the story of a bus trip—became infected with the particulate matter of his sores, wounds which wept in the morning but after a hot afternoon in the warehouse had almost fully dried and clotted. The man found such perverse relief in rubbing a particularly affected spot on his forearm that his wet eyes rolled wetly back and his mouth dropped wide, allowing a line of spittle to gather at his lip, roll down his chin and over his stubble, and drop onto a speeding page, like a button sewn on a jacket, immediately before its entrance into the oven, baking the genetic evidence of his future demise (heart disease) into this very page, this page which you are touching with your hands and which, the older this book becomes, will find its way into a used bookstore after your death (heart disease) and become even more likely to be touched by other hands, hands attached to bodies perhaps ill with the flu, sinus infections, affected by the kind of solid mucus that moves out of the body like a bus pulling out of a station, the empty seat waiting.

  Amelia Gray

  ssistance

  I had printed a second sign, two feet by three feet, for a customer who had told me over the phone the colors were all wrong on the first sign. I agreed to print another and deliver it myself.

  It was extremely crowded on the bus and everyone was in a bad mood. I stood with the sign against my body, frightened someone would break it. Two
men, one with a ridiculous neck, were arguing, and the man with the ridiculous neck took an empty seat. I mention this because I really could have used that seat—the sign that leaned against my leg was being bent by a large man’s stomach.

  I was several minutes late to meet the customer at the coffee shop, but he never showed up. I waited for half an hour. When I looked at the sign, I noticed it was for an art opening at 7:00 p.m. The time had already passed.

  While walking back to the bus stop, I saw the man with the ridiculous neck from the bus again, talking with a friend of his about an extra button on his coat. The friend was the customer. They were outside the art gallery, dozens of people admiring the man’s ridiculous neck and placing bids to caress it. I saw an empty easel outside the door, and unnoticed, put the sign up and ran away.

  Shane Jones

  yberpunk

  He jacked the passengerbus mainframe, but some interface residue snizzled up his data stream slightly, reducing optic input to a distracting 5-D glance at an idiot avatar with a comically distorted head-to-shoulders assembly and spex-ribbon ringing his head like a doll’s bow. It more than figured that 68Gasm would parachute him into the passenger-grid unannounced; typical sense of humor for a four-hour subroutine maxed out of spare giggs. Even while observing this, Queneau detected a noisy lattice overlay just beneath the horizon of his optics, the scuffling of one infoshoe against another, vying to divvy the limited floorgrid. He took little notice. Putting aside static one avatar might offload to another, the scuffle was merely a generic output of the overlay.