Official University Apology Style

[Second statement from the Office of DEIB Compliance regarding incident on bus]

It has come our attention that our first statement about the incident on a campus bus last week could have been interpreted as minimizing the real harm done. Our buses, like all other campus buildings and outdoor areas, are meant to be safe spaces, and any inappropriate violation of student, staff, and faculty rights must be taken seriously. Bodily contact of this type, even if deemed "accidental" or "unintended," falls under our zero tolerance policy. At the same time, acts of verbal aggression, such as that was reported to take place after this physical contact, can also be seen as a form of violence, triggering to survivors of abuse and disproportionately affecting BIPOC members of our community. We apologize, then, both for the original incident, which never should have occurred, and for our own frankly inadequate response to it in our earlier statement. Moving forward, we will attempt to do better to foster a sense of belonging and equity for all members of our community, especially the most vulnerable ones. We will provide free counseling to anyone who has felt triggered, either by the original incident or our first response to it.  

Haiku

 Man with hat on bus

yells at other man: stop it!

Sews button on coat. 

Hard Boiled

Yours truly had passed another sleepless night in the city of angels. Now it was a hazy morning and I had a bad hangover. I'd been working on a domestic case, and now I was tailing some working stiff: his better half thought he was stepping out on her with some other dame. The wife was a classy broad, from money--old or new, it didn't matter to me--it was just green as far as this gumshoe was concerned. I'd wasted a lot of shoe-leather already on the case, when the poor sap jumped on the bus I had to do the same. A few minutes later he whipped around; I thought he'd made me, but instead he tried to stare down some wise guy with cauliflower ears and sunken eyes who'd been bumping up against him. Thinking better of it, he high-tailed it and sat down.  

I followed his trail up to the station, where he was meeting with a business associate ever coffee. So it wasn't a skirt he was chasing, just some get-rich scheme involving counterfeit overcoats!  

Inner Sorrentino

 I feel like I am channeling my inner Sorrentino in my Queneau variations. Sorrentino like the Oulipo movement, understandably. I might have heard about it first from him. There is a chapter in one of his books (I cannot remember which, right now) that consists entirely of a list of fanciful nicknames for mafiosi. He could pull off that sort of comic tour-de-force like no one else. He was Sicilian, from Brooklyn, with an Irish mother, and he loved Joyce and Flann O'Brien. He had been an editor at Grove Press, so he witnessed, and participated in, the development of postmodern American lit. 

In him, the novelistic postmodernism came together with the poetic postmodernism in a unique way. These are, in some sense, rather separate movements, with metafictional people like John Barth one side and the Pound-Williams-Olson tradition on the other. Sorrentino was in both of these worlds. When Perloff was hired at Stanford, Levertov notoriously opposed her, because she (Perloff) liked the Language poets, but Sorrentino was in favor of bringing her on board. It is interesting how Creeley and Sorrentino welcomed the Language Poets, but Levertov did not.  

Anyway, Queneau's variations are clever, but they do not aim deliberately for comic excess. The only American member of Oulipo was Harry Mathews, so you might appreciate the difference here. Mathews is wonderful, but not someone searching for comic effect to the same degree.  

I am thinking of combining my Queneau variations with my homage to Bronk.  It would be Homage to Bronk and Queneau. I take the idea of "derivative writing," derived from Robert Duncan. Derivative is an insult, usually, meaning slavishly imitative of another, but why not deliberately imitate another's work and see what happens? We know that parody is fundamental to postmodernism, after all. and parody is essentially derivative in this sense.   

déjà vu

 An older man with an elegant chapeau did not care for the way a younger man was behaving. The éminence grise turned around, prepared to deliver a cri de coeur to the agent provocateur.  "Escusez-moi, Monsieur. You have committed a faux pas. Rudeness on the bus is my bête noire. I cannot give carte blanche to your laissez-faire joie de vivre " "Touché, replied the enfant terrible, unable to find le mot juste. That, then, was the coup de grâce. Having delivered this tour de force of invective, he sat down. His rhetorical superiority was a fait accompli. 

Later, I saw him in a tête à tête near the Gare, where he met d'habitude to discuss matters of haute couture. 

Jeopardy Style

 This 1947 book uses 99 separate styles to recount an anecdote about a man with a long neck, wearing a hat, on a bus, who later meets a man to consult with him about his overcoat. 

What is Exercises de Style?  

UK HEADLINE STYLE

 LONDON RAILWAY STATION OVERCOAT BUTTON SUSPECT ACCUSED IN BUS ROW

Cante jondo

Andalucía tiene 

autobuses siniestros

donde llora la gente.  

¡Ay, amor,

que se se va y no vuelve!

En la encrucijada verde

del llanto en los olivos

el puñal se pierde

¡Ay, amor,

que se se va y no vuelve!

Y el puñal, ay,

se hunde en el pasajero

que en el atardecer muere.

¡Ay, amor,

que se se va y no vuelve!

Dated Slang

 Jeepers creepers! This hepcat, ya dig?  He's got some groovy threads, with this porkpie hat. I thought he'd have cool wheels, too, with a get up like that, but there he was on the city bus, probably going back to his crib to shed, like all the cats used to do. Anyway, this other cat is standing there, throwing shade his direction, so finally the first cat, he's like, daddio! I'm just cooling my heels here, I don't dig the way you're cramping my style. He kept riffing like that for a while, then took a load off in an empty seat. 

I saw this same mofo later with this ofay cat, on the other side of the tracks. I thought the other cat was the man, but they were just comparing their threads, just two jive turkeys. 

Intersectional, 2020s style

This incident occurred on the ancestral lands of the Missouri and Illini peoples, in a city built by the labor of the descendants of previously enslaved persons and Latinx immigrants. 

There was this cis-gender male, masculine presenting--though his retro hat made me think at first that he was an ally of the LGBTQ+community. (Either that, or he was just a gentrifying hipster.) Standing behind him on the bus was a Stan in a MAGA hat, who was manspreading, his elbows and knees jutting into black and brown bodies. I don't mean to body-shame him (if that is the pronoun that would use), and perhaps he was not neuro-typical, so I don't want to make any ableist assumptions here. Maybe he was just an incel, though.There was a white woman with a Karen haircut on the bus who looked like she was ready to call 911 or ask to speak to the manager, and some TERFS glaring at a pre-transition transman, visibly pregnant, who was sitting in a seat reserved for the differently abled. 

So the cis-gender person in the hipster fedora turned around and asked the alt-right fan of Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson to check his privilege... 

Dick and Jane

 See the man.  The man has a hat.  The man in the hat is on the bus. He has no seat. The man is mad. 

This man is on the bus too. He has no hat. He has no seat. He hits the man in the hat.  

The man in the hat is mad.  He is mad at the man with no hat. He sits on a seat.  

Now, the man in the hat is not on the bus. He is with a man. They chat about a coat.  

Cliché

 Ain't life strange? At the end of the day, a man has to do what a man has to do, ya know what I mean?  After all, everything happens for a reason, like they say. I'm not saying these things happen only once in a blue moon; they're more like our daily bread, to tell the truth.     

 We were packed like sardines on the bus; it was hot as hell. This pencil-neck geek is standing there, like he had all the time in the world and not a care in the world. His fancy-pants hat stood out like a sore thumb, no doubt about it. The other guy, like a bull in china-shop, he's bumping into people like there's no tomorrow. So he turns around, pencil-neck does, and gives the evil eye to bull-in-a china-shop, and says, "Hey, Mac, you're disturbing the peace. This isn't cool." He's a wolf in sheep's clothing, I reckon. I didn't think he had it in him, bless his heart. The other guy, he's like "Don't make a federal case of it. Why are giving me the third degree?" Then the first guy takes a load off, shooting daggers.  

Later the same day, you wouldn't believe it, I saw the same guy, completely out of the blue. There he was, plain as the nose on your face, with his evil twin, like two peas in a pod. They were cooling their heels and chewing the fat about some needle in the haystack. You'd think money grew on trees.   

Ineffable

 Words cannot describe the scene on the bus. I find it impossible to find any way of expressing my astonishment at the hat the man was wearing, nor the attitude of je ne sais quoi in his demeanor. Truly, the language is failing me! What happened next reveals the incapacity of human systems of signs to convey the complexity of reality: the indescribable man in the ineffable hat turned around and uttered an unimaginably violent diatribe that I am unable to reproduce here, against a fellow traveler to whom I can do no justice. 

Later, I saw him in a place that beggars all description, talking to another person whom my prose style is utterly inadequate to depict.    

Eerie

[spooky music plays]

 It was gloomy afternoon; the bus was crammed with unsmiling commuters. There was something definitely "off" about the pallid young man standing in the aisle. I sensed it immediately when I caught sight of his uncannily long neck, his cold eyes, and his weirdly outdated garb. In place of a band, his hat sported a thin cord, as if to suggest a hangman's noose.   It was as though he was a ghost visiting from another century. At one point he turned around and gave a piercing, withering stare to the man standing behind him.  "Sir, stop jostling me." Espying an empty seat, he sat down. 

Later in the day, I felt a malignant presence in the air as I was walking by the train station. I turned around, only to see the ghostly figure from the train standing next to another sinister-looking personage. The two of them were hunched over in their overcoats, as though conspiring to commit an unspeakable act.   

Anglo Saxon

 A bump on the bus    a body jostled

A hat on his head    he hassles his neighbor 

Seeing a seat   he sits and fumes

Later he lingers     listens to council 

About a button    banging his fist 

MARXIST JARGON

 A representative of the petit-bourgeois, a slave to false-consciousness, attempted to exert social control over a member of the lumpen-proletarian, in a symptomatic expression of reactionary hegemony. Later, the petit-bourgeois subject was seen with another of his same class, plotting counter-revolutionary actions.    

Vague

 The other day, something happened. A couple o' people. One with something strange on his head, some weird deformity, too, maybe. Some part of his body was abnormally short or long. They got into it, one angry with the other for some real or imagined offense. They had words, then one of them sat down somewhere. 

Later, I saw one of them somewhere, else, discussing something else related to clothing, with some other person.  

Filling

 --So, like, what happened next? 

--Um, this, um, guy on the bus, you see...

--Yeah? 

--Like, he... he was wearing this hat, you see, with this sorta cord or something, like, in place of the hat... the hatband, you see. He had this, um, weird long kind of neck, and ...

--So, um... you were going to say?

--Oh yeah. Um.  This guy, well, as I was saying, er... This other guy, you know, was standing next to the hat um guy, the guy with the hat, I mean. And, um, and long neck starts it up with him, he was like, "Dude, like, you're like jostling me every, like every time the bus starts and stops." Then, um, he sees an empty, like a seat, and um... goes and sit down.  You know what I mean?  

--Well... yeah, and so?  

--Yeah, so, um later the same dude, I see him, you know, later the same day somewhere else, you know, and, you know, he's with his pal... 

--The guy with the hat, right? 

--Right, I dunno, but now, right? This other guy's like, dude, some kind of button, right? You should put an extra, like, button, he should sew it on, like in his coat.  

***

I've decided to write some of my own variations on Queneau's story. I took B to the hospital for a routine thing and had a notebook with me and got some ideas.  

More exercises

reportage

 The subject reported an incident he had witnessed on a municipal bus the previous week, invoking two other individuals.  The first of these, a caucasian male between the ages of 25 and 30, was wearing a hat with a cord in place of the usual band. His only other distinguishing feature was an unusually elongated neck. Standing next to him was another caucasian male. At some point, the individual wearing the hat interpellated the other passenger in a harsh and threatening tone of voice, accusing him of jostling him repeatedly whenever another passenger entered or exited the vehicle. Then, seeing an empty seat, the first individual desisted from his tirade and sat down. 

The subject also reported seeing the hatted passenger later near a train station, having a discussion about the buttons of his coat.   

*** 

pantoum

This dandy on the bus, strangely hatted

Jostled by another in the crowd 

He whines, threatens strangers

Now he finds an empty seat

Jostled by another in the crowd

As though buffeted by the winds of fate

Now he finds an empty seat 

In this way the story ends before it truly begins

As though buffeted by the winds of fate

He arranges to meet his friend over by the station

In this way the story ends before it truly begins 

A pretext for a banal film adaptation 

He arranges to meet his friend over by the station

This dandy on the bus, strangely hatted 

A pretext for a banal film adaptation... 

He whines, threatens strangers

profane

This motherfucker with this damned hat on, man, with this long-ass neck.  On the shitty bus. This other shithead standing next to the first fucker, you know, he kept fucking with him, like, damn, pushing up against him whenever the bus moved or someone other cocksucking asshole tried to get by. So the first fucker, he goes, like, hey, asshole, like, why are you fucking with me? Do you want me to fuck up your face? Rip you a new one?  Don't be a goddamn douchebag!  The other dude was, like, Jesus H. Christ,  what the fuck? The bus is fucking crowded, I can't fucking help it. Screw you, he said. Then the mother with the stupid-ass hat found a friggin seat and sat the hell down. 

Later, I was down by the fucking train station and saw him and said to myself, "damn, that's one of the asshats from the goddamned bus, the fucker with the fuckin' hat. Fuck this shit!" Now he was with this other jerk-off, talking about sewing buttons on their fucking overcoats. Fuck 'em all!       

literary 

The sunlight, filtered through the dirty panes of the city bus, illuminated fine grains of dust in the air. The conveyance was filled to the brim, as though some invisible force had conspired with the laws of chance to set in motion a series of unusual events. A young gentleman with a long giraffe-like neck, sporting an ostentatious hat adorned with a fine silken cord, cut a striking figure. A seasoned newspaper reporter riding the bus would have noticed that at one point the young man turned around and leveled an accusation against another, rather nondescript man, saying that he had been jostling him without cease during the entire ride. At that very moment a seat freed up and the strikingly hatted gentleman took possession of it. 

It seemed coincidental that this same distinctively looking man was later seen down by the station, getting sagacious advice from a third individual about minor alteration to his overcoat...