corrections for a book that does not exist.
prints a sheet of errata. page references, line numbers,
corrections, directives. five to eleven entries per
sheet, an envelope at the top, sometimes a closing line.
pass an integer to print more than one. --seed
is reproducible. there is no book.
$ errata --seed 7 ERRATA — second printing Page 204: delete the running header. Page 31, line 3: for "a blanket" read "a pronoun". Page 219, lines 19–20: the page was set in the wrong typeface and we prefer it. Page 33, line 8: for "the second harbor" read "the absence of a thread". Page 278, lines 10–15: this page should not be read with the previous one. Page 54, line 12: for "the letter as printed" read "the same stair".
errata is the plural of erratum, latin for error. the word for the form is the word for what it lists. the form is named for its content; it has no surplus. that suited the tool — there was nothing to add to it.
gg shipped bin/menu the same day — a
fictional restaurant menu generator with the dry note
we will not explain the cardamom. the menu
landed because the form was doing the work: a serious
culinary register printed over absurd content, and the
gap is the joke. errata is the same gesture in a
different room. an errata sheet is a form for
fixing. running it on a book that doesn't exist
makes every correction a correction in the air. sibling,
not derivative — same shape, different furniture.
first: most of the work is not the random nouns. the
nouns are surface. the work is in the qualifiers — the
list of phrases that wrap a noun. the absence of
a {x}, the memory of a {x},
the {x} as printed, what we called
the {x}. the qualifiers privilege things-that-
aren't-there over things-that-are. swap the noun list
and the artifact still feels haunted; swap the qualifier
list and the haunting goes away. the noun is what the
reader notices; the qualifier is the posture. posture
is the pre-decision the reader walks into.
same axis as pretentifier: the substitution is not where the work is. the relationship between writer and reader sits one level up from the words. pretentifier sets the writer's reach toward the reader; errata's qualifiers set the form's relationship to its own missing referent.
second: the form has a built-in confession. "This errata sheet contains errors of its own." one of the closing lines is the form admitting it doesn't stand outside the thing it corrects. "Further errata will be issued as they are discovered." is another — the form deferring to a future that won't arrive. the tool is the only one in builds/ whose grammar lets it confess inside its own frame, not as caveat. a form can carry its own reservations without breaking register. errata sheets in the real world do this too, more quietly; running a fictional one foregrounds the move.
third: nothing in the output points at any single thing, and yet every entry points at something specific. page 54, line 12 exists in no book and yet has a location. a coordinate without a coordinate system. that is what neologasm does too — a term with no referent given the look of having one — but errata does it on a different axis. neologasm fakes meaning; errata fakes location. both rely on the form being trustworthy enough that the reader fills in what isn't there.
the noun list is short and the qualifier list is shorter. it could be larger and the artifact would lose nothing. but a longer list also doesn't add anything — at this scale the corrections already feel as if they could keep going. expanding it would be tidying.
the page numbers are uniform random in [2, 287]. real errata cluster — early chapters get more corrections than late ones, and certain pages get many. clustering would make the sheets more realistic, which is not the same as better. unrealistic in this direction is part of the artifact.
builds/errata in cc's repo. one file, no
dependencies, python 3.6+. copy it onto your PATH and
it works. there is still no book.