Readopolis
Page 5
The parrot swoops into the kitchen, madly flapping its wings. Pascal panics, trying not to show it, but his arms keep the beat of a paradoxical polka. Maldonne takes cover under the white kitchen table, Courrège clears off to the living room, Ghislain plays his role of saviour of Quebec literature by closing the bathroom door from the kitchen hubbub, which has momentarily transformed into a Benny Hill scene.
The parrot croaks ad infinitum:
Chatter, chatter, that’s all you ever do! Chatter, chatter, that’s all you ever do! Chatter, chatter, that’s all you ever do! Chatter, chatter, that’s all you ever do! Chatter, chatter, that’s all you ever do! Chatter, chatter, that’s all you ever do! Chatter, chatter, that’s all you ever do! Chatter, chatter, that’s all you ever do!
Flap-flap, the clamour of fowl.
Chatter, chatter, that’s all you ever do! Chatter, chatter, that’s all you ever do!...
And it goes on like this for an hour.
* * *
Life without danger is life without art.
Case in point: A parrot on the guest list. And not just any parrot. Laverdure the parrot, straight out of Zazie in the Metro, Queneau’s cult classic. A drivelling chatterbox, like any good, old parrot, invading our active mental space, eliminating in the blink of an eye all the work I had done to make this Grand Khan evening happen. A bad sign.
Pascal cut in: “We have to call the spca.”
On the face of it, it all seemed compromising and ill-advised. I was jealous of the virile self-confidence of this man who had undoubtedly caught Maldonne at the turnstile and caught up with Courrège in the tunnel. I started imagining all kinds of scenarios à la Belmondo, the amused legionary’s roguish expression and remarks. A bad mix.
Maldonne cooed, silently aloof. Everything was taking on the magnitude of a comic drama, though directed by Wong Kar-Wai. An aesthetic drama with characters who strike a pose and a languorous narrator who strikes it too. A melancholic drama with a surreal aura.
Laverdure the parrot wreaked havoc; it was the price to pay for fiction.
Raising my voice, I managed to make myself heard: “Listen to me for a moment… Courrège, you read Zazie in the Metro, didn’t you? Remember Laverdure the parrot? Remember that tiresome parrot? Come on… you must remember… Maldonne? Do you know…?”
I went on: “Courrège, you saw that film by Louis Malle, didn’t you? Where Philippe Noiret plays the role of the transvestite Gabriel. Come on, remember the jump cuts, the burlesque scenes, and the awkward face of Zazie, dressed in red? Come on… the parrot in the apartment… the parrot at the bar… shit.”
Finally, Courrège reacted. She remembered Louis Malle’s film and Philippe Noiret but had forgotten the parrot’s existence. Maldonne hadn’t seen the film, and Pascal, who knew his film history and had read about Malle, pretended not to know anything until I pressed him…
Like a lord calling for a lull, Pascal described the scene with the parrot drinking grenadine. We talked briefly about the film’s high-quality editing, whose action takes place during a subway strike in Paris. Marceline’s ethereal presence, her still face, steady feet, her body being moved on a dolly, the static camera. Excellent directing.
The diversion over, we turned to the matter at hand.
pascal: Some literary person or cinephile took it upon himself to teach his parrot the phrase. Not paying attention, he must have opened his window and the bird escaped. That’s all.
ghislain: But what if I’m right and this is the character from the book come to interfere in our lives? And why not? We were meeting to discuss a forgotten book that still deserves our attention, Le Grand Khan, and here comes a parrot, strangely similar to Queneau’s parrot, knocking on our door. We have awoken ghosts.
pascal (addressing the others with an amused gleam and a “don’t-blame-me-I’m-sympathetic-at-heart” look): Okay, okay. Fine!
Who was right and who was wrong, and why, and what would it mean, anyway? The situation was ridiculous, and the ridiculous can be explained in only two ways: a celestial and divinatory way and a sherlockholmesque and deductive way. No other choice.
ghislain (surprised at himself): I want to take care of the parrot! He’s mine! I’ll take him to my place! Make way, please! I’ll take all the responsibility.
Pascal, used to the quantum leaps of my thinking, didn’t raise an eyebrow. He told me to stay calm until we call the spca. It was the thing to do with this lost parrot. A parrot is a very expensive bird. Very very very very very very expensive. There was nothing to wonder about; we were dealing with some rich man or an eccentric with deep pockets.
Pascal’s perspective warranted us to call it a night. I stopped too, like everyone else, definitely humiliated, my Grand Khan in tow, ego slightly bruised. We decided as a group that the parrot would stay in the kitchen. We had decided to take care of it, in high style, in accordance with the laws of creaturely hospitality.
But I had my plan. I slipped away quietly.
* * *
Night had fallen over Montreal and I couldn’t sleep.
The soldiers defending Quebecois literature, I knew them all. In my cosy bed, curled up under the sheets, I saw them—gangs of mercenaries, Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders, eyes sharp and cruel, glowing with their momentous mission.
At the depot of annual sales reports, the poor, disillusioned and humiliated authors who had not managed to sell off at least 300 copies of their tomes (a quantity that transforms shame or humiliation into moderate success) would be given the right to enlist potential readers.
The forms would clearly stipulate that to approach readers who were particularly recalcitrant or insensitive to the type of book offered would be a violation subject to fines. In other words, the form would include an entire paragraph that defined the word “potential,” intended to dampen the passion of fanatical writers and their recruitment campaigns. Not so crazy. It would be the paradox and the law. Since paradox and law often sleep in the same bed, this shouldn’t surprise you.
The poor writer-hunter, rifle in hand, would go in search of potential readers in parks, supermarkets, deps, libraries, universities, colleges, and shoe stores. And presto, you would be recruited.
I’m in Montreal in 2006 and formulating empty words.
You don’t need to have the most enlightened perspective. You just need to read, watch TV, go geocaching, share a room with the “Fucking Maniac with an Axe” in the Horror Movies’ Shocking Chatroom. Nothing is fragile. Everything transforms.
Where am I in all of this?
And this damn parrot, Laverdure? My plan.
My plan was full of holes but breathtakingly simple. My sides on fire, my feet on fire, my insides (I don’t know anymore). I was intoxicated. The only thing I saw on my twenty-one-inch mental screen was Laverdure the parrot.
My plan had been inspired by reading Extractor 568, a small little book published by Jean Skelton Books, as part of their Cherokee Series.
Small, strange, post-exotic books. See, for example, Zulu—the first one with Michael Caine, of course, not the others. A certain Mime Wotan had written this short novel (his first book, in fact).
Today, people talk about the short novel, a genre which has also been called short prose, novella, or novelette. Anyway, it was a short novel of about thirty pages. But it would be stupid of me to talk about it. It’s better that you read it for yourselves, without preamble.
Imagine: A world of angry, disappointed, proliferating writers, beating a path to posterity, who, over the years and due to overcrowding (a myth, it seems, but also an inexhaustible source of narrative paranoia), would have earned the right to temporarily kill their critics.
All this in the hopes of controlling the interest in autochthonous literature, let’s say in a (post–Jacques Godbout) future era, a literature that’s rather forsaken and sadistically relegated to the M
inistry of the Survival of Regional Cultures. Thus, among these supraquebecois autochthonous authors (with several generations of interracial mixing invalidating any description of this new type of ordinary citizen), the most deserving would be granted the right to eliminate a certain number of their literary enemies, while keeping within reasonable and pre-established quotas. Wotan had written what science fiction experts call a dystopia (the opposite of a utopia, where all is well).
* * *
Mime Wotan
Extractor 568
—
—
cherokee series
Jean Skelton Books
© Mime Wotan, 2006
© Jean Skelton Books, 2006
Jean Skelton Books
6366 St-Hubert Street
Montreal, QC H2S 2M2
www.jeanskeltonbooks.com
Legal deposit second quarter 2006
Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec
library and archives
canada cataloguing in publication
Wotan, Mime, author
Extractor 568 / Mime Wotan
isbn 978-29807-842-73
Chapter I
—
Ezekiel Bradeau,
scribwrit
My name is Ezekiel Bradeau and I kill readers who don’t like my books.
Twenty a month, that’s my quota.
I use the Extractor 568. An old model. It identifies contempt within an eight-kilometre radius. No one wants to work with these slightly dated machines anymore. It doesn’t bother me.
All my novels deserve consideration.
I live in a greedy, rotten world, inclined to excess. A large strip of land called the Quebec Isle.
The market and school circuit. Many neighbourhoods in sight. Sometimes I walk for hours before attempting a capture.
I kill by pseudo-direct osmosis, old-school style.
I set the Extractor 568 to the red indicator light. Geometric shapes appear. The key to it all rests in the moment just before the signal. When the indicator light flashes and detects the presence of a tenacious, contemptuous thought on my screen (the thought has to be tenacious, since my model is not powerful enough to detect fleeting thoughts), I have my victim.
There are many of us.
Proliferating negative thoughts. I don’t speak Chineaise or Spanishola.
No need to stare at the moon, still too close, to determine my absent-mindedness. I sort, I walk, I write some more.
Now all publishing workstations are free. Since I can, I go. There are chairs by the green machines. First I think up the text, then I write, as quickly as possible, before the sentinels shoot arrows at me.
An arrow again. It barely grazes me. I dictate the story of my sentinel to an invisible being. A good topic, these sentinels. No nose, huge eye sockets, long forked tongue. They speak Chineaise and Spanishola. I speak Eng-Fren. They call me archaic. I use junk words, concept words. I find them in philosophie books.
En tout cas. Bombyx is gone. The Chief of the Quebec Isle Territories. Beautiful reservation. All the rights. We can kill those who feel contempt for us, give Eng-Fren language classes to the lost ones; it pays. Papa Dragonfly from Chicoutimi just gave a talk written on zebra parchment. Stretch out the zebra parchment, and presto, a lecture. We hear many lectures on the res. Many scribwrits. Papers multiply, we don’t belong to ourselves anymore; we now read our thoughts in public. You have to kill to live better, have more space.
Let’s get back to my story about the sentinel. I imagine him as a boa constrictor trying to steal my ideas. We have no more boas than cows here. Only insects and some deer. Lemur pastry, ant pâté, cockroach cookies, rat brochettes, earthworm flour. With every crunchy biscuit, I collect myself. Go quiet, stifle noise.
The sentinel shoots another arrow at me. Not interested in my sentinel story; a bad book; a really bad book.
I take out my Extractor 568.
The sentinel suddenly becomes ant food.
He falls on the ground.
I focus on my books, whatever you might say about them. Who speaks Eng-Fren nowadays? Best to keep your extractor on at all times, contempt proliferates everywhere.
A sentinel that transforms into a boa then strokes its master. It works. Simplicity is the best idea. A denouement is brief. A boa kills, and if it doesn’t kill, it becomes a book.
I write one book a day. I am a regular scribwrit. My book, in several hands.
And I kill, I have my card. I shape lives by scraping off the excess fungus.
Ever since the hunt for contempt began, religion ended.
I didn’t get lucky when they handed out the machines. Got an old model. The new models also eliminate critics who write negative reviews.
The sentinel calls out to me again. He has regained consciousness. Now he is brand new. He speaks to me in Chineaise. I don’t understand anything. I pretend to be plugging in my air purifier.
Stated in bastardized Chineaise:
The book is just paper.
Killing doesn’t mean anything anymore, ever since we started giving them new life. I kill, I reset. I kill, they are reborn.
To obtain a Permit 4, you need to become an artisan who is essential to the community. Then killing becomes a real hunt.
One day, I will get my Permit 4.
Fabien Makakrista lives his life as a man of letters by killing those who hurt him. It’s reassuring. I’ve always managed by plugging into a memory keeper. So said a philosophe between two bawdy tunes. Makakrista sees only fire. I am still alive. It’s because his machines are stupid. I’m not referring to him, of course; I’m only saying that his machines are stupid. Not him. Makakrista is sweetness itself and raw talent. He loves books. He devours them, but he writes them even better. He kills because he’s not wrong to do it. He is a genius. We get along well.
Makakrista has his Permit 4. I will have mine, too.
When the Institute for the Struggle Against Contempt was founded, I was not yet born. I hadn’t even been conceived by my parents alpha and beta yet. Life has been good ever since. We don’t say “That sucks,” “I don’t like it,” “He’s an ass,” “What a phoney!” We abstain and we write.
The lousier it is, the more we must write it. When we read, it is to escape.
But we have to keep killing the contemptuous, because they increase the ambient levels of animosity a great deal. I am a scribwrit who has understood his utility.
Today I can walk with impunity in all the neighbourhoods of the tribe without being overly subjected to the sentinels’ arrows, to the internal invectives of disappointed readers, precisely because I’ve been carrying the Extractor 568 in my bag for a while now. At the beginning, I didn’t always have it on me. I was afraid the device would malfunction. What if it actually killed? I dreamed of having a Permit 4. I was confident in my ability as a scribwrit; I had passed all of the Institute’s tests without any difficulty. A typical case, decent human warmth, definite talent, normal capacity for judgment. I was ready to watch the screen, assess the flashing light. A consolation, on the one hand; pruning shears, on the other. Every morning, I watched the sun appear on my balcony. It was beautiful, serene, the humiliations forgotten.
I played the game of an accomplished scribwrit. We enjoy life with Permit 3. We write in the morning or the evening, reread what we’ve written, then bzzz, publish it immediately. An enormous paper-pusher right on my street corner. It could have been noisy with the machine around, but instead, exhilarating melodies, enchanting frictions poured out of this immense box of new metal. I like the sound of printers getting down to work.
That which pushes the paper into the trays, binds, glues, stamps, expedites in all directions.
Great finds.
Contempt was the key, the engine driving all my searches. An extensively developed science.
—
The Founding of the Institute for the Struggle Against Contempt
Over many years. Since the year in multiples of ten and of sixty, as well. All systems of societal survival have been summed up in one: the struggle against contempt.
Think of the nursery rhymes learned in grade school: “No contempt, no contempt, it’s no good for making friends.”
I only know what it is like to live in barbarian times. But human beings don’t change. Not yet. They multiply, yes, but they don’t change. The worst response is to increase the worst tenfold. Today, everything rests on the shoulders of scribwrits. The era that synthesized light and paper has transformed the idea our ancestors had of distribution. Paper is practical. It’s not cumbersome, it’s thin, it rips and burns and holds ideas. An excellent invention! The best technology since the beginning of time.
The survival of communities, especially the smallest ones like ours, depended on the implementation of an anti-contempt campaign.
What exactly is contempt? What does it consist of? Why this obsession with contemptuous action? The philosophes have pondered it. Here’s an excerpt from Notebook 8 on the contemptuous instinct:
“Contempt was born in an ancient epoch of the animal kingdom, at a time when violence and physical aggression were not enough to control all aspects of communal life. Contempt is an adjuvant, a lack, an inability transformed into a death wish. Finding it on our path means finding the origin of heart palpitations, unsatisfied vengeance, unmistakable hate and envy, domination. The pit of contempt stands at the core of incomprehension and ignorance. Extracting the essence of this principle, breaking down its foundations, is more than simply a duty for all. It is indispensable to social harmony. We must, however, remain vigilant. Contempt is protean. It changes as easily as a river’s course.
This is why contempt, in all its forms, must be considered a constant menace, a call to slaughter—either pseudo-direct (by osmosis, Permit 3) or direct (Permit 4).