Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

Ephemera

Two Postcards

I have two picture postcards I picked up in Hannibal, Missouri. One has two boys equipped, as you'd suspect-Tom and Huck. Straw hats, bib overalls rolled at the cuff, bare feet. Backs to us, they are watching a steamboat, of course, cruise by on the Mississippi. Illinois, the card's caption says, is in the background. The other card shows the stern-wheeler Delta Queen, the last authentic steamboat, as it plies the same river. The view is from Riverview Park, Inspiration Point. They are old cards, maybe forty years old, published by the Becky Thatcher Gift Shop and printed in the USA. I got them in a bank that had been converted to a bookstore. The vault had been given over exclusively to the works of Mark Twain. The bookstore owner, a retired banker himself, swore the Huck of the postcard was his father. Hannibal is a strange town, stuck, as it were, in time. Stranger still since the time in which it is stuck is a fictional one. There are other such strange places like this-Green Gables, Sunnybrook Farm, Chincoteague Island-that have started out as actual places only to become fictional places and then became, well, real ones once again. Readers who journeyed to them in their reading now visit for real. The time of the fiction must be maintained within the present time. Life becomes a kind of perpetual permanent pageant. Hannibal also maintains an additional petrified, parallel time. Along with the reeenactors of Twain's books there are reenactments of Twain's last visit to his hometown a century ago. Then, he watched the fence being whitewashed by children recreating the children he created. Today you can see the same fence, the same whitewash, and children dressed the same way as they work. But also you see a "Mark Twain," a facsimile of Mark Twain, watch with you, see what you see.

General Delivery

Letters are from another time. I don't simply mean that any letter as an artifact preserved from the time of its making is from another time. Or that these letters written a century ago by Mark Twain and "S. L. Clemens" survive into our own present. I was thinking of the Letter itself, the technologies of its manufacture and distribution. Letters are like those stern-wheeled steamboats, floating museums, and almost as rare these days. Post offices retain that ancient feel as well despite their immersion in the systems of computers, scanners, and automated sorters. I ask that my postcards be hand-cancelled, the time and place of the actual transaction affixed by an antique rubber stamp and ink, the two-step thump of pad strike then stamp stomp. The Letter is handcrafted, hand-handled, hand-delivered. The PO, then, is a portal back to this past, a post of the past, a node of the analog embedded within the instant transmissions of the age. I am thinking of the Post Office, not the post-Post Office of the present Postal Service. When I vacation in Maine, I send my hand-cancelled postcards abroad with the request that my correspondents reply via General Delivery, attaching the addresses of nearby POs. During my stay, I return daily to the windows at Stonington, Deer Isle, Little Deer Isle, Sunrise, etc., and ask if there's any mail for me. And I love that the clerk is not surprised I am asking, asks my name, and turns to the pigeonhole that might contain the possibility. Wherever I go, I ask for the mail. You never know. I never know. Something might be waiting there with my name on it.

Counting Words

In his letter titled "A Private Word," Mark Twain informs his correspondent that he has "spilt 48,000 words in 34 days" during his stay in York, Maine. A century later, words don't count and aren't counted in exactly the same way. I haven't seen a photocopy of the actual letter. Is it a holograph? I am reading a typescript from a print taken from an e-mail. Was it typed? Twain invested in the gadget, right? He was one of the first "writers" to type. I like to think of several machines in cases among the trunks lugged to that beach. It would have made the counting easier, standardizing the line length and the number of lines per page, making it a snap, then, to average and add. It is strange when you think about it-that the business of writing would be settled then by such piecework. Paid by the word! How styles might have been even more deflected if the wage scale was by the letter, a wholly different kind of padding. It is much more rare today to be paid by the word. The piecework has been exchanged for the negotiated price of a finished product. You can see Twain counting up the coin at the end of the day, satisfying a need, perhaps, to demonstrate that a concrete thing was under construction. The typewriter answers that nineteenth-century need perfectly-like repeating rifles, sewing machines, harvesters, machines that build other machines. With a typewriter you could get some production going. Twain would have loved this machine, the one I am using right now. Right below this line, in the borders of the opened window every word I type is duly counted. There are two numbers actually, pulsing and flashing, one representing the total number of words typed and the other the number of the word closest to the blinking cursor. This word-word-for example, is word #919, a mere pittance compared to the summer's production noted by Twain. The irony is that it is so much more efficient now to count but that the words don't count in the same way anymore. Another irony is that I have set up this incredible typesetting machine to replicate the look and feel of the nineteenth-century typewriter. The font, the margin settings, the leading-all mimic a product of the century before. I even have a font that counterfeits the varying pressure of various key strikes-the a lightly struck by the left pinky finger, the lasso of the e filled in by what appears to be a heavy residue of ribbon ink. Of course these letters we are looking at are copies anyway, the originals sent and perhaps lost long ago. Carbon paper, another blast from the past, has been reduced to a fossil of the cc in the e-mail address field. The editor of this magazine has asked for 1,000 to 1,200 words on these 250 (give or take) words written by Mark Twain. This is word #1105.

Lots

When he died, Nick Karanovich had the largest private collection of Twain ephemera in the world. He was a middle-school principal in my hometown, Fort Wayne, Indiana. At auction the collection garnered the estate $1.4 million, and a dealer from Texas carted off the remaining unsold material in three North American moving vans. I visited Nick's house once. From the outside it looked like all the other houses in the suburban track development-a split-level with an attached two-car garage. The garage wasn't a garage. It was the fireproof vault where he stored the paper. It all started when he stumbled upon a first edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at an estate sale. The room, the garage that was not a garage, was windowless and the temperature and humidity were controlled. There was hardly room to walk amid the boxes and files and cases stuffed with papers and books. Just a narrow pathway from the door to a wooden desk in the room's center, a desk with an authentic provenance as a launching pad for so many Mark Twain missives. I sat where the writer sat in a chair where he purportedly sat, or I almost did since I was really sitting deep inside a specially constructed bunker that simulated the experience by bringing together this desk and chair. It was another machine, that room. It too trafficked in time travel. Nick had constructed it to operated like a nuclear pile, hoping to accumulate some critical mass of Twainia. But it was all already decaying, doing the half-life two-step in the other direction. I love the fact that the other letter found in Maine, a letter never known nor possessed by Nick Karanovich, seems to be about returning something, a razor, and an exchange of money. Long ago that message was set in motion. Now these little pieces of time have been found and are circulating again, a paradox of entropy as well as its proof.