An attribution to Jorge Luis Borges was omitted in error from the Fall 2009 issue of Prairie Schooner, leading to an admission of the un-attribution (and our deepest apologies to all and sundry) in the current Spring 2010 issue. Though drunk with regret, we nonetheless enjoy the Borgesian nature of the erratum. (We’re thinking particularly of his books of fiction that delighted in fictional books.) In that spirit, we’re hoping that you’ll all contribute a fictional erratum for consideration for publication on the Prairie Schooner’s Twitter feed. (For example: Erratum: Due to an ink shortage, all poems in this issue are featured on blank pages.) We’ll post our favorites as tweets throughout the day on April 26, 2010, Jorge Luis Borges’ wedding anniversary (which hinges on a kind of error itself: though when he married Maria Kodama on April 26, 1986—he blind and near death, she a sprightly 49—he was not divorced from his first wife, Elsa Astete Millan).
Please submit your original fictional erratum, suitable for framing as a tweet (140 characters or fewer, including the word “Erratum” and the colon after it), to Timothy (tschaffert2@unl.edu) between now and April 25. We ask that you begin your piece with Erratum: and follow it with a piece of invention. (For example: Erratum: An incendiary piece of anarchic prose was mistakenly attributed to its author, who had hoped to avoid the lynching that resulted.) Your tweet, when posted, will not include your name (unless, of course, your name is part of the creative expression), but we will re-post the festival winners, with proper attribution, here on the Prairie Schooner blog. (Though it may seem in the Borgesian spirit to plagiarize Borges himself, or to simply cut and past the tweets of others, we ask that your entry leak pure from your own supple little brains. But if we do accidentally tweet something ripped-off, we’ll declare the theft a legitimate exercise in Dadaism. And we’ll then issue more errata.) We will crown a festival winner, who will receive a free subscription to Prairie Schooner (or an extension of your subscription, should you already subscribe), plus something else nifty to-be-decided.
Again:
1.Write a fictional piece of erratum that begins with Erratum: and fits as a tweet (140 characters or fewer, including the word “erratum” and the colon after it);
2. Email it, along with your name, to tschaffert2@unl.edu
3.Subscribe to our Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/theschooner) in order to enjoy the Erratum Festival of tweets on April 26.
Want to brush up on your Borges? Here’s a useful link:
http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_links.html
In closing, here’s another example of how your Borges Festival tweet might look: Erratum: We attributed wit to the poetry of T. B. Smudge but we regret that he wrote with serious intent. Our apologies to our readers.
...The Fun-es-t story is a memory lost in a labyrinth of a milion mirrors looking to the west
of a garden path...
Posted by: Mirkozz | April 26, 2010 at 01:35 PM