Erasure

by Percival Everett

I remembered how much like a bicycle she had felt in bed.

The center of the tree is the heartwood. It does little to feed the tree, but it is the structural support. The sapwood, which feeds everything, is weak and prone to fungi and insect damage. The two look the same. But you want the heartwood. You always want the heartwood.

I felt an inch tall because I had expected this young woman with the blue fingernails to be a certain way, to be slow and stupid, but she was neither. I was the stupid one.

You’re in a boat and your motor cuts out, but you’re in shallow water, but you’re wearing two-hundred-dollar trousers, but your ride to the airport is just about to drive away from the beach. Why is this a legal issue?” I shook my head. “Because it’s a matter of Row versus Wade.”

hermeneutic

four of my books including my Persians of which the only thing ostensibly African American was my jacket photograph. I became quickly irate, my pulse speeding up, my brow furrowing. Someone interested in African American Studies would have little interest in my books and would be confused by their presence in the section. Someone looking for an obscure reworking of a Greek tragedy would not consider looking in that section any more than the gardening section.

The reality of popular culture was nothing new. The truth of the world landing on me daily, or hourly, was nothing I did not expect. But this book was a real slap in the face. It was like strolling through an antique mall, feeling good, liking the sunny day and then turning the corner to find a display of watermelon-eating, banjo-playing darkie carvings and a pyramid of Mammy cookie jars. 3 million dollars.

Anyone who speaks to members of his family knows that sharing a language does not mean you share the rules governing the use of that language.

“You don’t sign it because you want people to know you painted it, but because you love it.” He was all wrong of course, but the sentiment was so beautiful that I wish to believe it now. What he might have been trying to say, I suppose, though he never would have even thought about it in these terms, was that art finds its form and that it is never a mere manifestation of life.

don’t mean to disparage or belittle what you do, Gimbel. I don’t know what you do.”

It’s incredible that a sentence is ever understood. Mere sounds strung together by some agent attempting to mean some thing, but the meaning need not and does not confine itself to that intention.

A metaphor cannot be paraphrased.

Effeminate behavior, I learned when young, served as no measure of sexual orientation.

The house’s creaking found rhythm and I counted the cadence of the groaning, complaints, stiffenings.

infinitesimal.

It’s okay to say you’re pro-choice, just as long as you don’t say you’re for abortion.

I had been playing for about thirty minutes, making safe pass after safe pass when I found myself considering the racist comments of Hegel concerning Oriental peoples and their attitude toward freedom of the self when I was bumped into the lane and so appeared to be cutting to the basket and the ball was thrown back to me. I threw up a wild and desperate shot which had no prayer of going in; it was ugly. A member of my team asked me what I was thinking about and I said, “Hegel.”

the seductiveness of the verbal engagement which Veiento so disparaged was the reason why so many pupils, namely young men like myself, grow up to be idiots. That the young would rather be entertained by tales of the extreme rather than the mundane is not arguable.

Academic training catering to such vulgar taste can only promise vulgarity. Rhetoricians are at the root of the decline of Oratory—empty speech for empty heads, pretending eloquence and so redefining the very thing it has killed.

credo quia absurdum est

So, tell her if you want to. It’s not going to make much difference to anybody but you.” “So, you think I’m only concerned with myself.” “I didn’t say that either. But, basically, that’s true of all of us.”

Often humans will seek to improve the habitat of trout in a stream by providing some kind of structure under the water. People will sometimes dump anything in the stream, think that the fish will want to take shelter in it. Car bumpers, shopping carts, dog houses. Generally fish prefer the smooth curves of nature to the hard edges of humans. But more importantly, if the structure is not proper and is not put in the right place in the stream, the flow of the current might find an erodible bank and so cause more harm than good.

was slightly well off and that I really didn’t have to teach for a while. This was good, as I couldn’t bring myself to accept the slave wages over at American to teach a survey course to kids who didn’t care a hill of beans about Melville, Twain or Hurston.

I thought of Cocteau and his saying that everything can be solved except being,

I knew that I could manage nothing more that a perfunctory scribble and I didn’t want to see that, have my silly romantic notions shattered by a lack of imagination.

In my writing my instinct was to defy form, but I very much sought in defying it to affirm it, an irony that was difficult enough to articulate, much less defend. But the wood, the feel of it, the smell of it, the weight of it. It was so much more real than words. The wood was so simple. Damnit, a table was a table was a table.

What do you call two black men trying to get a cab in Washington, D.C.? Pedestrians.

“In the later stages, moving will be difficult for her. Her personality will disappear. She’ll lose her abilities to think, perceive and speak.

I slapped a mosquito and flicked it from my arm. Father laughed. “They take the blood and leave the itch. It’s a tradeoff. She gets to feed her eggs and you get to remember how good it feels to scratch an itch, how good it felt to not itch.”

We had a bottle of merlot, but the flavor had been badly affected by the citronella candles we were forced to burn.

There are as many hammers as there are saws. A misplaced thumb knows no difference.

Her most lucid moments seemed to occur when she first awoke and after that there were any number of cracks in the surface of her world through which to fall.

A trout is very much like truth; it does what it wants, what it has to.

But the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression.

hated the heavy humor of public men. I hated overt and indulgent self-deprecation. And I hated conspicuous guilt. I prided myself in the fact that I had only ever been guilty of the latter two.

There isn’t anything so bad that seeing something worse won’t make better.”

“Does my mother know who you are?” The nurse nodded her head. “Much of the time. That’s not unusual though. I don’t mean anything to her. I’m just furniture.”

I resolved that I could not let the committee select Fuck as the winner of the most prestigious book award in the nation. I had to defeat myself to save my self, my own identity.