by Roy Blount
“Well,” says the woman, “I hate to inconvenience you. As a matter of fact little Janie and I need to stretch our legs, don’t we Janie?”
“Bletch our blegs, bletch our blegs.”
“Tell you what. I’ll have a smoke while you’re gone and when you get back I’ll teach little Janie how to whistle.”
Is that so hard? Okay, okay. Is it impossible?
What if graciousness became a widespread habit? It would offset a lot of smoke in the atmosphere. There are more powerful carcinogens around than cigarette smoke, and self-righteousness may well be one of them.
Then too, umbrage is as fierce an addiction as smoking. So let me address the user and the bluenose who get wind of each other:
Eschew tense snappiness, which is bad for the blood pressure. Welcome the chance to blow off steam, not snidely but with eloquence and gesticulation. Hand-waving and a brisk flow of words help clear the air. They also provide some of the satisfactions of smoking. And you never know when Ted Koppel will happen by and invite you both to go on “Nightline.”
Can Brunswick Stew Be Upscaled?
I AM THE FIRST to admit that Brunswick stew, which I think the world of, lacks the mystique of chili. I don’t admit for one minute that the Southwest has any notion of real barbecue, but I will admit freely that those folks out there have generated more mystique around their chili than Southeasterners like me have around Brunswick stew.
You never read about Brunswick stew-offs, where people compete to put the finest, hottest, most natural, and hairiest (figuratively speaking) ingredients together into the most definitive bowl of mushy, tangy, reddish-brown-with-yaller-specks stuff.
This is partly because, what kind of hat would you wear to a Brunswick stew-off? And partly because Brunswick Stewoff sounds like the son of an Anglophiliac movie agent.
“Chili” is a sexier term than “Brunswick stew.” If you doubt it, try saying “chili-chili-chili-chili-hoo-pah!” in a bouncy, finger-popping kind of tone and then try the same thing with “Brunswick-stew-Brunswick-stew-ick …” I don’t think you will get as far as the hoo-pah. No one enjoys setting out toward a hoo-pah and bogging down.
On the other hand a long slow rolling “Bruuuuuuhn-z-wick stoooo” has resonance. So if the Brunswick stew industry (should there be one) were to hire the right public-relations firm, and change the name slightly so that someone could throw in a lot of extra hot sauce and market Third-Degree Burnswick Stew, it would probably become commonplace within the next few years to find out that your daughter is rooming with a former stew princess at some fancy college.
But I would hate to see Brunswick stew blown out of proportion. I think that’s what has happened to chili, frankly. Chili to me is like peaches: even out of a can it’s not bad. In fact that’s the only way I ever had it until I was twenty-three years old. That’s why you have to make a mystique of chili, to justify not eating it out of a can.
Whereas Brunswick stew isn’t put out by Hormel; it just crops up, at barbecues and in barbecue places. No one knows what is in it. It may be a by-product of the hickory-smoking process — resulting when small animals running somewhere with ears of corn in their mouths tumble into the open pit.
And sometimes it’s not good. Sometimes. I will urge some people who have never had Brunswick stew (nobody but a Russian has never had chili) to try it, and I’ll tell them it’s named for General Lionel Brunswick, who discovered that you can mix anything with okra, and I’ll assure them that boy, do they have a treat in store for them. And then it will arrive and it won’t be good, sometimes.
That’s why I’m glad Brunswick stew doesn’t have the mystique that chili has. Anybody who has ever glanced at an in-flight magazine knows what goes into authentic chili: antelope chunks, hand-chewed Guatemalan cumin, individually seeded and dried chili peppers (only the ones that point upward on the bush) from the Aiyaiyai region of Oaxaca, and no beans, because chili in a can has beans. But no one, even the Brunswick family, can say for sure what goes into Brunswick stew, or what doesn’t.
Which means that I can be authoritative about it. When people complain that this Brunswick stew I have touted them onto is not good, I can roll a bite of it around against my upper palate, gaze off into the middle distance with my eyes closed except for tiny contemplative slits, and observe, with no tinge of defensiveness, “Yeah, this is a little off. Prob’ly used a rabid squirrel.”
How to Read the New York Times
THE FIRST THING I look for is whether I am in it. Many mornings — the majority of mornings — I am not. This fuels my belief that the Times has me black- or at least brown-listed. Every writer who is neither rich nor a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters has a right to this belief. William Styron is in the Times nearly every morning, being either reviewed or quoted. Sure! He probably goes skiing with those guys!
The second thing I look for in the Times is something juicy. This may seem quixotic. I realize that the Times gives the impression that it doesn’t want to admit that there actually is anything in the world that Weegee would have liked to photograph. But when there does occur a murder or an accidental squashing that the newspaper of record cannot in all good conscience overlook, the Times always comes up with good obscure details. Several years ago the Times ran a story about a helicopter crash that killed twenty-one people being transported to Disneyland. A witness was quoted as saying, “Two small gears and a dime hit me on the chest.”
I don’t mean to outrage traditionalists, but I recommend looking in the Times for signs of writing that is not wholly institutional. It’s there. It’s like little rustles of life in the forest primeval: it’s there if you look for it.
But don’t tell anybody.
Living with Wizardry
I WAS TALKING TO a grade-school teacher the other day. She said some of her students were wholly nonplussed by the concept of clockwise, and she had figured out why: all the timepieces they had been exposed to were digital.
What is Western culture going to do without the concept of clockwise? How are newspapers going to identify people in group photographs?
The one just to the left of the water pitcher there is Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: The one to her left — not to your, the reader’s, left, which is to say what has just been referred to as “the” left, but rather to her. (Mrs. Thatcher’s) left — is Earvin “Magic” Johnson. Okay, now, keep moving in that direction in an orbital manner, so to speak. Pretend you are revolving around the ice sculpture there, and …
Whatever else may be miniaturized in the years ahead, it won’t be photo captions.
But I haven’t got time to worry about the impact of electronic wizardry on newspapers. I am too busy worrying about the impact of it on me.
In my own home.
There is a word processor in my home.
“Word processor,” indeed! That thing doesn’t know what words are. A word, to that thing, is whatever comes between spaces. That thing would just as soon process tbldgk as it would mellifluous. Unless it has some kind of correct-spelling program in it, in which case it would probably refuse to process tbldgk on the grounds that there is no such entity that fits between spaces. So you see, this essay could not have been written on that thing.
But I realize that is not your, the reader’s, problem. So let me ask you this. You have a VCR in your home? You have any children in your home that drink Kool-Aid?
In our case, by all firsthand accounts, no particular child was involved. It was one of those spontaneous Kool-Aid spills that happen. But only children were present. It cost S270 to fix.
One jelly glass of Kool-Aid tips itself over into the VCR, and there goes $270. You know why? Because when it comes to these electronic things, there are too many angels in there dancing on the head of a pin. If man had been meant to compress so many angels that he could drown $270 worth of them with one glass of Kool-Aid, he would have been given children who might be pinned down and held liable for such sums.
; Had the VCR been a Stradivarius, the Kool-Aid could have been wiped off with a sponge. If it had been my Royal standard manual typewriter, bought used nineteen years ago, nobody would ever have noticed. You’d have to spill a pot of chili into my typewriter to make it operate any worse than it does already. Can you imagine what it probably costs to spill a spoonful of chili into a word processor? I don’t even want to think about it. Forget I mentioned it. And I like to eat while I’m working.
My wife, Joan Ackermann-Blount, and I both write. At home. A cottage industry. Our 115-year-old house in the Berkshires used to be a parsonage. It had too many angels dancing in it already, before electronic wizardry started crowding in. But I had some faint idea of how to deal with those angels. I could imagine why the house creaked where it creaked (someday, unless I am just saying this, I intend to shim up the old floorboards), and why it leaked where it leaked (because New England pipes get a kick out of freezing when they are owned by someone from Georgia), and what made that skittering sound within the walls (an escaped hamster named Sherry, or her ghost).
The more electronic our home becomes, however, the more it becomes the department of the electronicians. If an electronician tells me it costs, say, $1,140 to fix a word processor that has had Kool-Aid spilled into it, how am I going to argue? It’s like being kidnapped by savages and told I’m going to have to paint my head blue. What am I going to say? “That doesn’t sound right to me”?
I’ll tell you what doesn’t sound right to me. That word processor we’ve got now. When you type on it you have to be gentle, and it makes a little twiddly noise. (I don’t want to twiddle out a story, I want to bang one out. I want to be saying to my typewriter, “Take that! Take that!” Because I know my typewriter is going to be saying back, “Yeah, right.”) And when the printer prints, it makes the sound of someone doggedly running a fingernail back and forth over the teeth of a comb.
So how did it get into our house?
Well, I’ll admit, I have gone back and forth on this word processor question. For years I said, firmly, “Nope. Not me. Just give me a stub pencil, an eyeshade, and a wet whistle, and I can turn out as much copy as anybody else can on one of these futuristic deals that require eighty books of instructions and a backup generator.”
People would say, “I actually find I write better on a word processor.” I’d say, “Uh-huh. Isn’t it a shame Flaubert didn’t have one?”
But then all the newspapers in the land and half my friends converted, and I started saying, “Well, I guess it’s coming. We might as well face it. We are all going to be using one of those gadgets someday.”
Then someone said, “Yep. They say it more closely approximates the workings of the human mind.”
And it occurred to me: who wants to approximate — if mine is any example — the workings of the human mind? I know my typewriter doesn’t want to. The great thing about my typewriter is its native toughness. Every couple of years it seems to be getting crankier than usual, but then a bent screw falls out of its insides and it settles back down. None of these screws has had to be replaced. In four places, my typewriter is held together with duct tape. My typewriter is from the old school, and doesn’t want to wade through a lot of fancy convolutions. My typewriter is always saying to my mind, “Hey, let’s tighten this up.”
So the next time somebody said, “I actually find I write better on a word processor,” I said, “Uh-huh. That’s what they used to say about drugs.”
But then the whole question of storage and retrieval came up. It was explained to me that you could pump cratefuls of information into a word processor, and those angels would tamp it all down into a little disk, and when you wanted any of it back you just pushed a button and those angels would find it for you.
That is something my typewriter will not do. My typewriter sits in the midst of stacks and clumps and windrows of information-filled paper. If I were to ask my typewriter to retrieve something from all this mess, it would look at me as if I were out of my human mind. I can usually find what I am looking for, myself, but when I come up with it I feel like I have finally caught a rabbit after chasing it through flocks and flocks of chickens.
And there are feathers all over the house. My store of information threatens to overwhelm, without in the least enlightening, the household. I have files that creak louder than the floorboards do, folders that shed worse than the cats. Sometimes I feel bad about this.
So when Joan — who hates a digital clock because it doesn’t have a face — and my son John — who won’t even use an aluminum bat — started saying we ought to get a word processor, I thought, well, no cottage industry can afford to drag its feet. And it’s hard not to drag them when there are papers up to your ankles. Maybe we ought to modernize, I thought.
Then we talked price. And I started yelling, “No! No! It’s right here in the Bill of Rights somewhere, that no citizen shall be required to lay out two thousand dollars in order to express himself! And what happens when people start splashing Kool-Aid around?”
So Joan bought a word processor on her own.
That’s why we have it in our house.
And a script I wrote is filed away in it. Because that way, when I have to make revisions, I don’t have to re-bang out the entire thing. I can just twiddle in the revisions and, presto, let the printer plickplickplick out a new whole.
Only the revised script is due now. And there is something wrong with the printer. Its old ribbon is exhausted, after one run-through, and it refuses to accept a new one. (My typewriter doesn’t give up on a ribbon until it has been reduced to ribbons.) So what am I supposed to do? Take a series of photographs of the script as it appears in segments on the word processor’s screen, and mail those in? The electronicians have been summoned.
As I await these divines, I am feeling less guilty about my mess of papers. One thing about my mess of papers, I can always get my hands on it. In fact I have to dig out from under it every time I get up from my typewriter.
And I am always finding things I never knew I had. For instance, I just found a copy of the Times from December 7, 1968, which I saved because my son was born the day before. And look what else was happening that day:
PUBLIC TO TAPE-RECORD IDEAS FOR NIXON
White Plains, Dec. 6 — Aides to Richard Nixon are planning to try out electronic listening posts in Westchester County and Alabama later this month as a means to let the President-elect hear from “the forgotten American.”
A spokesman at Mr. Nixon’s New York office said today the pilot projects were designed to test “a means of finding out what people are thinking and what the issues and problems are.”
Volunteers for the project in this suburban county … said they were planning to take tape machines into schools, colleges, town meetings and rich and poor neighborhoods to record the attitudes of people who want to reach their Government. …
What if Nixon had stuck with this program, and expanded it to the point where he was tape-recording everybody in the nation except himself? What if our government had placed a tape recorder in every American home?
I think I am going to go mix up a pitcher of Kool-Aid.
Men, Women, and Projectiles
Salute to John Wayne
A FEW YEARS AGO, before nakedness became old hat, I was standing near Times Square looking at an opaque storefront behind which, according to a boldly lettered sign, you could talk to a nude woman. It wasn’t the kind of thing I would do, but, I stood there wondering what it would be like, what I would say to her, whether she would feel obliged to respond.
As I began to move on, I found myself surrounded by green arms: an army colonel and a staff sergeant materialized, passed each other and me at the same time, and exchanged crisp salutes.
Although these two may have been the only servicemen in the entire midtown area, their eyes did not meet. You can tell by looking at a person’s eyes whether they are meeting someone else’s. Both men were in fact angling their attention toward t
he TALK TO A NUDE WOMAN sign, but at any rate each of them addressed himself, quite properly, to the uniform, not the man.
I sensed an epiphany, or at least a déjà vu. Except that there seemed to be an element missing. I turned back to the storefront. What if the woman were actually quite good company: hearty, secure, at peace, her skin tautly billowy like a flag?
Still, you might be at some pains to give her the impression that so far as you were concerned, she was not the only fish in the sea. And she might want to convey that although you might be with a large accounting firm, and her own occupation was being talked to nude, she was not your bit of fluff.
It hit me. What was missing.
Then she came out, slightly but not unfetchingly crosseyed, and wearing — something loose. I can never, except where they are revealing, describe women’s clothes. But hers reminded me of the time in seventh grade when I showed up at my girlfriend Amy’s house unexpectedly the afternoon before a Methodist hayride I was taking her to and she seemed more domestic than she did at school. She smelled of hand lotion, something I did not understand the appeal of. Her hair was wet, and she was wearing the kind of flapabout clothes one’s mother wore while giving herself a home permanent. Then, through fabric, I descried the unsegmented line of Amy’s whole flank. I didn’t recall having seen that line, moving and unbroken by band or ruffle, before.
Amy, flustered, offered me a Coke. While she was getting it, I sat down. Her orange-and-white cat jumped into my lap and started kneading my crotch in an embarrassing way. I half stood, but the cat clung. I pulled at the cat, the cat sank its claws into me, and I was hopping, hunched, trying to wrangle the cat loose, when Amy came in with my Coke.
“Mister Fluff!” she cried, and her eyes filled with tears.