The Size of Thoughts
Page 10
And there is Joseph Wambaugh (cumbucket, don’t know my dick from a dumplin), Saul Bellow (candy kid, cunt-struck), Bernard Malamud (dead-to-the-neck), Maya Angelou (dickteaser), William Burroughs (doodle, glory hole), Danielle Steele (dumb cunt), Stephen King (el birdo, cock-knocker), Bellow (fart-blossom), Hunter Thompson (big spit), Coover (flagpole meaning penis), Grace Metalious (frig you), John O’Hara (frig), S. J. Perelman (frigged), Edmund Wilson (friggin’), H. L. Mencken (frigging, crap), Dos Passos (frigging, gash), Larry Heinemann (fuck the duck, crapola), Mailer (fuck yourself, cream), Tom Wolfe (go-to-hell as an adj.), Donald Barthelme (grog), and Robert Heinlein (grok, of course, but also go cart for “car”).
Parnassian sources such as The New York Review of Books are not neglected either—corn-holed and do (in the sexual sense) appeared there, per Lighter. The Atlantic Monthly supplies the first citation for doghouse, musician’s slang for “double-bass” (1920). Esquire pops up as a locus for a rare 1976 use of dog water, which, Lighter informs us, means “clear drops of seminal fluid.” The New Yorker makes many appearances, some for nice old words like brads (“cash”), cluckhead, and cheesy. (Lighter’s crew has, by the way, come up with a sentence employing cheesy that predates by over thirty years the first cheesy citation in the Supplement to the OED. In 1863 someone named Massett wrote: “The orchestra consisting of the fiddle—a very cheezy flageolet, played by a gentleman with one eye—a big drum, and a triangle.”) The New Yorker also substantiates the word fucking used adverbially, thanks to its recent explosion of profanity, and it furnishes two separate nuances of asshole dating from 1993.
For obvious reasons, though, the magazine that is most often quoted in The Historical Dictionary of American Slang is The National Lampoon. Lighter and his crew have combed its back issues carefully in quest of elusive flannel-buzzards, and they have not gone unrewarded. Yet here the editors must have had difficulty at times deciding which words were merely “nonce figuration,” to be excluded from the dictionary, and which words had obtained a “currency independent of the speaker.” The fact that The National Lampoon uses cock-locker or flog the dolphin or get your bananas peeled (all with sexual meanings) is taken to be an indication that this recherché vocabulary enjoyed a currency independent of the humorist during the period in question. It may have; Lampoon writers were expert listeners and diligent field-workers. But they were, as well, habitués of the reference room; in some cases at least, one suspects that they simply pulled down a few slang tomes, found a “ghost word” they thought was funny, and resurrected it for the greater good. P. J. O’Rourke recently told a lunch-table that he owns a whole shelf of unconventional lexicography; he and Michael O’Donohue, another Lampoon contributor and professional slangfarber, were particularly fond of one major thesaurus dating from (he thought) the thirties—by which he surely meant Berrey and Van den Bark’s huge “ephemera”-filled collection from the forties. In this way, out of the dried mud-flats of old reference books, to one-time creative placement in a humor magazine, to further climate-controlled stasis in Lighter’s Dictionary, are some words blessed with “currency” after a single recycling. And the language is happier for it.
Using The Historical Dictionary of American Slang will probably have long-term side effects. A three-week self-immersion in Lighter’s initial volume significantly altered this suggestible reader’s curse-patterns. I swore more often and more incomprehensibly while reading it than ever before; the “Captain Haddock syndrome” was especially noticeable while driving. (Captain Haddock is the character in the Tintin series who, when drunk, showers puzzling nonce-abuse on people: Poltroons! Iconoclasts! Bashi-bazouks!) To a slow motorist (with windows closed, of course, so he couldn’t hear), I would call out, “Go, you little scum–jockey!”- or “corn-pad” or “dirt-bonnet.” None of these formulae is to be found in Lighter (at least, there is no reason to expect scum-jockey to appear in Volume III), but reading Volume I made me say them. Furthermore, under Lighter’s fluid spell I spent several hours working on a matrix of related insults:
(An x indicates an existing piece of slang; a question mark indicates a plausible compound, which may or may not appear in the future. Whether there is any linguistic point to building such a predictive matrix is an open question.)
Some of these behavioral aberrations will pass in time, but it is at least possible that by the spring of 1997, when the final installment of this mighty triptych assumes its place in the library, those of us who have been diligently reading and waiting will discover ourselves to be marginally better people, or at least more cheerful and enlightened and tolerant swearers, as a result of what Jonathan Lighter and his cohorts have done for the massive and heretofore unmanageable dirtball of American slang.
(1994)
1 Historical Dictionary of American Slang (Volume 1, A–G), edited by J. E. Lighter.
The Northern Pedestal
Esquire sent out hundred-dollar bills to writers and artists and asked for contributions in return. I found some old pages I had produced in an altered state, cut them down, and added commentary. Except for several corrected typos, the quoted text is reproduced exactly as it was first written.
In the spring of 1982, having received a piece of unwelcome news, the Subject, a male, aged twenty-five, not a habitual drug-user, smoked nearly a hundred dollars’ worth of marijuana at his portable typewriter. Subject produced a document that is three single-spaced pages long. It begins:
There is that feeble urgency behind all forced mannerisms of finery—haste and pomp cannot coincide.
Six lines later, there are preliminary indications of a disabled rationality:
A logic of the ears, certainty of outer crust. Changing pleasures in misstatements. Maintenance of patternability. Hold on to the camel marts. Feebler lessons in disenchantment, supererogation of the lymphatic spatial asymmetries. Power lessons in discontinuity, retinue of the unfamiliar, flip the reversal tiny efforts of bettering the grimp instinct retractions, flipping up of y behavior patterns, total housal shift unmanageability …
A little further on, Subject accidentally burns his finger:
Odd, dual penetration of pain: veers upward to mind chambers, and through the physical breezes of manual realms. A white veil of pain, but centered, dotlike. Change through further, more rhomboid patterns. Get it round before it fails, or spatial locations nets the prize. It failed. Pods defer to red-shift memory blossoms.
Subject then attempts to analyze his interior state:
I am not so much speechless, as placing further the northern pedestal. Chasten the memory switching houses. Decorum focuses the hiss momentarily, but the roar prevails. A smooth, bouldered impact, torsal conjunction, indwelling machinations; though choice motorizes the wilderness. Corn ligaments of taste-cramp. Changed veldt diagrams of powerhungry tortoise blossoms, of cold trustworthies; noun or verb? Nevermore the chancy apostles of hope. Oh Joyce, you sad intimate. I see your blind bane now. Adam woke. Cluster globe tendencies; meld proliferation. Debug the profanities!
The Subject goes on to spell out exactly what is at stake:
The courts of gyrations exact the reciprocal chinook tapestries. Vestpocket parks of error. Or, perhaps, conversely, victories of fresher tin villages. Vibratations of the seat cushion.
Subject’s girlfriend has fallen asleep on the couch, and a worry about disturbing her with the sound of his typing momentarily intrudes on his reflections:
But doth movement occur, and if so, how can she sleep with same sound: re noise.
Immediately, however, Subject reproaches himself for the use of an archaic construction like “doth”:
Take care to avoid those Simonized orations. Which? doubt begs. But I vanquish and banish him. And so avoid the avoidable. A mush of relapses. Flatness a primer and more sinister virtue. Tender our resignation at coherent sources of Hermetic entrancement. Detest the relief of stupefaction, because only of the mogul’s gurgle.
Presently Subject begins to enjoy himself:
/>
Enticed offshoots of rationality spice the general curve. Drunken soliloquies of spree. Melded enticements. Seasoned intermingling. Dense near-visions. A tongue eruptions, oxygen feist, holdup, metered youth distillation. Change dereliction of patterned playthings. Pull those cotton shadow-pockets into the light. Find the newer presences. Frocked with light, the cave-dweller chimes out the night. Held with motile polliwogs, reason coys at plaything we. Try again, Oh witless raisin!
Soon, though, Subject has some doubts about the medical advisability of what he is doing:
Certain it harms, and virtues not later kiln utterances can’t breach. Regain high gain drift basis. Allow permeables to photoreact to bisections into health arrangements.
And yet, by the bottom of page two, Subject has regained his characteristic cheer:
All goes well. Fortune smiles. Torrid mannequins field northern rotund light blue pained warmness, and misapplied filth. Blending the apple-blossoms of the event. Noticed her unguent catalepsis. Ching the item of motiveless blandishment. A store of future irremediables. Critic spanglers. Or no.
Several minutes later, Subject again becomes aware that he is not quite himself. He wonders if he is perhaps “crashing”:
Notice of infringement. Telltale signals of final-phase ache. Memory shrivels, grows glittered and void. Blackness sheds its paradoxical deposit. One more casualty to finer concentrations. Too powerful to contain such mortal ironies. Veneered hotel migrant vortices. Total mystery midget cone devour fence brigand devourers. Signature of betrayal. Tone-spun disservice, rampant disavowel. Changed prophets of upward disdainments. No higher enervations possible; the myths of disorder cannot moult. Firm dog blossoms oystered rout.
In hopes of reversing his mood, Subject smokes the last of the marijuana. He is moved to reflect further on the possible discomfort of his girlfriend:
Pale sprung-wound home treatment seminars. Found awesome subscription from loneliness. Avoid incurring the doubts of competitors. Love belays a pull at cherished cult vacuum. Swarm of bedevilled blueness, or anise afternoon helter mortal filches. Ah, Stanislawski. Poor Margaret who lieth in the blue of the poned couch, space fails her leg and she must toss till woken. Trees quench their interior field finery.
Then Subject is distracted by some physical symptoms:
But tremors persist, and worsen, and failure begins to inflict larger worries. How do failings quiet themselves to approximate competence? No-one cohered to these rods.
Increasingly enfeebled, his face hanging an inch above the keys of his typewriter, Subject exhorts himself to carry on with his literary efforts:
Toast dread insufficiency or cramp its claws! Find the later shadroed strewings time defrayed. Demonstrate the dream terror vagueness.
But the spell has irrevocably passed:
Clenchings in midtorso. Vision restores. Slowed all conjectured field going functions or rather hope nods.
Tired, depleted, Subject nonetheless ends on a note of muted optimism:
Keep willing the cool intervention.
(1982, 1993)
Wedding
My sister, Rachel Baker August, got married on July 11, 1987. This is a slightly shortened version of what I read that day.
In a few minutes, Rachel and Bob are going to be pronounced husband and wife. These are excellent words, husband and wife—they lean toward each other, they exist in reference to each other, they link arms. “Wife” especially seems druidic and traditional: like “life” but with the addition of the womanly W. “Husband,” despite its traces of Saxon farming methods, makes me think most of “hatband”—and this seems right, if you imagine a conventional movie image of a man in a 1955 hat, with a nice gray hatband. Not a mobster hat, just the hat of a good man—a husband. Boyfriends don’t wear hats.
After my own honeymoon a year and a half ago, I got a phone message at work. It was the conventional pink WHILE YOU WERE OUT message, with the little box next to “Please call back” checked, and at the bottom was written: “Your wife called.” The secretary who had taken the call was not particularly interested in the fact that I had just gotten married; and yet she was kind enough to apply that word and phrase to me. If it had read, “Your girlfriend called,” it would have seemed frivolous and unprofessional; but no, it was my wife, and so it was big-league, it had to do with my home and even my hearth (assuming I had a hearth)—it was about my whole life. And I, her husband, would call her back. I saved that message, because the secretary was pronouncing us husband and wife. The world, whether it cared about our marriage or not, had a slot for us; and in a few minutes the world will have a similar place for Bob and Rachel, and I predict that for them, too, the early moments, when the language that people use to talk about them falls suddenly into place, and the old message pads sing in new ways, are going to be some surprisingly fine moments.
And at the same time, while we get to exercise our categories and conventions in shameless fashion, the two of them now have the freedom, as they didn’t quite have before, to go wild with their own private language, and invent many strange, embarrassing names for each other, with the knowledge that these, too, though kept secret from us, will last— they will last their whole lives, and evolve just as public speech does.
So I’m very happy that Bob and Rachel are getting married. Bob will be a good husband, and Rachel a good wife. They are proud of each other, and this mutual pride is one of the nicest things you can sense about a couple. I love them both, and I love the fact that in this evening of silk sleeves and white chairs, of taut tenting and rustling relatives, their lives are being changed forever, and they are being wed.
(1987)
Mlack
Keyboard work creates a class of unwanted things—one-letter typos, failures of phrasing, bad punctuation. If you don’t want to delete these entirely, you can use the Return key to push them to the bottom of the screen. What gathers, a few lines ahead of the growth bud of your final intention, is a concentrated, enantiomorphic residue; a backward parody of each session’s prose-in-progress. When Larry Dark asked writers for work that hadn’t seen print, for his anthology called Outtakes, I sent him the accumulation at the bottom of the last screen-page of Room Temperature, written on Father’s Day, 1989.
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(1989)
Recipe
The Monroe County Library System, of Monroe, Michigan, asked for a recipe to include in a collection of “Favorite Recipes by Favorite Authors,” entitled Read ’em and Eat.
Take one ingot of unsweetened Baker’s chocolate, remove the paper, and drop i
t in a tiny saucepan settled over an adjustable heat-source. Then unfold one end of a brand-new silver bar of unsalted Land O Lakes butter and cut a chunk off roughly comparable to the piece of Baker’s chocolate, which has by this time begun to smear slightly. (An old stick of butter has too much refrigerator flavor in its exposed end.) The butter will melt faster than the chocolate. Entertain yourself by breaking the ingot of chocolate into its two halves and pushing the halves and the subsiding chunk of butter around with the tip of the butter knife. Then abandon the butter knife and switch to a spoon. When the unmelted chocolate is no more than a small soft shape difficult to locate in the larger velouté, shake some drifts of confectioners’ sugar into the liquid. You’re aiming for a bittersweet taste, a taste quite a bit less sweet than ice cream—so sprinkle accordingly. But you’ll find that a surprising amount of sugar is necessary. Stir idly. If the mixture becomes thick and paste-like, add another three-eighth-inch sliver of butter; to your relief, all will effortlessly reliquefy. Avoid bubbling or burning the mixture, which can now be called sauce. Turn off the heat, or turn it down so low that you don’t have to worry about it. Spoon out some premium plain vanilla ice cream. Lately this has become hard to find—crowded out by low-fat premiums and Fragonard flavors. But you want the very best vanilla ice cream available in your area; you have to have that high butterfat content for it to be compatible with the chocolate sauce. Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for. Once cooled, it will make a nice sound when you tap it with a spoon. If you want more tappable chocolate sauce and you have already covered your scoop or scoops of ice cream with a complete trelliswork, simply turn over one of the scoops and dribble more over the exposed underside. Eat with haste, because premium vanilla ice cream melts fast. Refrigerate the unused sauce right in the original saucepan, covered with tinfoil, with the spoon resting in it; that way, when you put it back on the heat-source, you’ll be able to brandish the whole solidified disk of chocolate merely by lifting the spoon. It looks like a metal detector.