Nineteen More Sentences

I paid a second visit to 826 Valencia today. This time I wasn't there to purchase any piratey things, although I did purchase Issue 12 of McSweeney's Quarterly.

My specific purpose in returning to 826 Valencia was to leave behind the anonymous calling card I once mentioned. While browsing among the spy glasses and pirate dice, I spotted what I was looking for: a pile of unopened mail. I waited until the cashier's attention was diverted and then as inconspicuously as possible (which was not very), I dropped atop the stack of mail a standard business envelope with a single folded sheet of paper inside. On that page, in the form of one long, unindented paragraph, were the following nineteen unrelated sentences:

It all started with one simple question.   Enoch drew his rifle and held it.   It was the first time he beat his father at anything.   Some stories are better left untold.   Scat.   Call me Ish Kabibble.   Finding a parking place that morning should have been the least of her worries.   I never did understand “reality TV” and that right there was half my problem.   You look at any picture of Charles Manson and what do you see?   Not again.   Think of it as the next Great American Novel, the best whaling novel since "Moby Dick"—except much shorter, only one hundred and forty pages, and set in West Texas, and there isn't any whale.   The first time Jason spotted her she was walking her dog backwards through the snow.   If you really wanna know what happened, I’ll tell you the whole freakin’ story, even the part about getting kicked out of "Exit-Here Academy" and what happened after JayDee tried swallowing half a bottle of pills, but if you start giving me any of that Holden Freakin’ Caulfield crap, then I’m outta here and you’ll never know why they both had to die.   Harrison first showed it to her in the front seat of her father’s black Lincoln Continental.   Could I possibly be any more charming?   Arguing with her in a crowded bar, that was my first mistake; following her home in my green VW was my second; but killing her, that was no mistake.   What my sister lacks in talent, she more than makes up for in enthusiasm.   I never should have gone through that door. You come to me at night while I am sleeping.

Whether that sheet of paper ends up in the hands of Dave Eggers, a student prodigy, tutor, or clerk, or merely gets tossed unread into a waste basket, I have no way of knowing. My role in the fate of that sheet of paper began with an idea and included weeks of thoughtful revisions, right down to the precision of the sixty-three words of sentence 13. But my role in the fate of that sheet of paper also ended with its delivery (and its authorship is our little secret).

Whether the eventual recipient considers it an exercise in experimental writing or some "dadaesque joke" hardly matters. What's important is its potential. If fate chooses, then perhaps someone will discover it and conclude, like Philip Roth once claimed, "that if ever a unifying principle were to be discernable in the paragraph it would have to be imposed from without rather than unearthed from within."

I admitted nearly two months ago that the notion of literary creativity springing from such a serendipitous event as the one Philip Roth claimed as inspiration for his first nineteen books (see the Afterword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of "Portnoy's Complaint") gave me two really great ideas. Now you know the first. It's just possible that you can guess the second.