The Ghosts of Jay MillAr by Jay Millar Page B

of course speaking in French which is difficult to translate offhandedly). ‘I have arrived as quickly as I could in order to publish it’And he handed Rimbaud his favorite pieces of writing, one sheet at a time. Such were the many twists of fate he had experienced since he began working at the photocopy shop, and it was not the last. The author noticed that his publisher’s tastes did not exactly coincide with his own, as he chose to publish work that was more flowery and wigged-out (as he had referred to it in his journal) than the outrageously violent pieces Rimbaud preferred. ‘I wish to give copies of these to each one of my friends’said the man. ‘Please, if you are to help me’Rimbaud placed the pages into the machine and printed fifteen thousand copies on recycled paper, each one stapled at the top left hand corner, as the man requested. He did not bother to say anything, but thought to himself how ridiculous it is to print fifteen thousand copies of anything, let alone some rambling scraps of writing done in fits of loneliness or exultation. But it was all in a day’s work, he thought, and one must earn one’s living at the expense of ’les feux de la monde’. He wasn’t even pissed off that he had never given his consent to this man (was it a man? he wondered) to make free copies of his work to give to just anybody (’who knows who will read it?’ said his excited publisher several times over the hum of the machine) but then again, Rimbaud hadn’t bothered to get permission to write them either. At last the razor-sharp sound of the photocopier came to an end. In the dead silence that followed, Rimbaud handed the man his printing, took his money, and accepted one copy of his new book, for, as the man said, since they had done business together, they were now friends.
    Perfectly Ordinary Dream #1922 (December 12,1954)
    As a young man, Cravan worked in the hippest libraries
    in town, both serving drinks and as a kind of mental
    co-ordinator. He was quite there in the sense that he
    had become accustomed to his own happiness, content
    to be earning a living doing something he rather enjoyed
    for a change. Hiding in the dark corners of rooms fill’d
    with books and journals, he could read telepathically
    what and as he pleased, his feet resting upon a shelf, a
    pen scrawling leisurely across one page or another. It all
    depended upon who he felt like BEING at any given moment,
    Miles Davis or Ezra Pound, Patrick Cobain or Drum Nick
    the sailor. Just then, the fat man sitting behind a large
    wooden desk began to complain loudly. Cravan was
    apparently not doing his job satisfactorily, and, well,
    admitted the clerk with a certain flabbiness, was simply
    not very good at doing anything at all. ‘Fine!’ shouted
    Cravan at the top of his bowel’d lungs, at first thinking he
    would simply quit the job altogether, then thought the
    better of it, for what else could there be to do with one’s
    life? ‘Here, sir, are your Maps!’ He slammed the rolls of
    paper onto the sweating man’s desk, scattering his charts
    and graphs, his pages and pages of accounted figures,
    everything flying into the air like so much dust. Throwing
    the lightest blow of his life to the man’s face. Not even
    capable of denting the grin, Cravan turned on his heel
    and disappeared into the darkness forever.
    Perfectly Ordinary Dream #1962 (September 17, 1985)
    The fall couldn’t even wake him up. Luckily,
    the movie followed him down… in Slow
    Motion. Easiest thing he ever done, ever.
    Imagine waking up so deep in the gut, cover’d with
    snow from the inside out but finding it warm. Then             [ JOHN
    imagine not waking up at all. There were so                           BERRYMAN …]
    many windows in the place when we