Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

Ephemera

90 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 Ephemera 91 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. 92 Ephemera 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...