by Roy Blount
But these offenses are not parallel at all. “The Councilman with the sensitive eyes,” “the compactly muscled Councilman” would be more like it.
A volume, or at any rate a feature story, might be written on why tininess occurs to the Times in this context. Do men or newspapers focus on women’s bosoms, and so on, as a defense against their own secret feelings of smallness? I have always thought I did so out of sheer animal spirits. But it is worth noting that in usage books written by men a recurrent, telling example of the need for judiciousness in use of hyphens is the distinction between small businessman and small-business man.
Incidentally, both the Times book and the Post book are stuffy, not to say huffy, on such subjects as obscenity, adultery and boyfriend/girlfriend. Consider this from the Times book:
boyfriend, girlfriend. Despite the wide currency these objectionable colloquialisms have attained, they should not be used until it has been definitely established that no other term or description will suffice. They are especially distasteful, as well as imprecise, in references to adults.
I still point to what Swift said about proper words and places. But then again who has ever been more distinctively improper than Swift? (And how could Swift have foreseen so proper a place as the Times?) I like Bobby Ray’s book because it reads like some particular person styled it to suit himorherself.
GRYLL’S STATE
IN THE FAERIE QUEEN, book two, a number of men who have been turned into hogs by the enchantress Acrasia are turned back into men by me Knight of Temperance. Gryll is the one who makes clear his desire to become a hog again.
Gryll
Had his fill
Of aspiring, failing short, and wearing hats.
Gryll
Had his fill
Of avoiding fats.
Gryll
Had nil
in the way of an attitude of holier-than-thou.
Gryll
Still
Enjoyed a good sow.
Gryll
Until
He became a hog, was forever laying up everything he might need, and using everything he had laid up—or seeing that it was properly disposed of, or defended.
Gryll
Felt swill
Had things to recommend it.
Gryll
Felt ill
At the thought of returning to a state of mind in which he had to think of himself as a probable threat.
Gryll
Will
Be borne out by history yet.
HOW MISS WREN STOOD IN DE DO’
The Wren’s Nest, home of Joel Chandler Harris, was being maintained as a museum, for whites only.
“YOU DONE YEAR ME say dat de creeturs is got mos’ ez much sense ez folks, ain’t you, honey?” inquired the old man, sighing heavily and settling himself back in his old seat with an air of melancholy resignation.
“Well den, one day when dey wuz a segashuatin’ tergedder, Brer Rabbit up en ’low ez how he gwineter drap roun’ down in town en see wuz Miss Wren ter home.
“Whuffo you wanter do dat?’ sez Brer B’ar. En de yuther creeturs tuck’n sez ’mungs wunner nudder dat dey bleedzd ter ax de same Whuffo.
“Brer Rabbit he des sot der en sorter pull he mustarsh, en look like he know mo’ dan he gwine tell. Twel bimeby he up en sez, sezee, Ef dis don’t bang my times,’ sezee, ‘den Joe’s dead en Sal’s a widder.’
“‘Hit look lak,’ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, dat dem dat knowed de fust thang ’bout de pitchers en de pyapers ’bout de creeturs ’ud know dat Miss Wren’s house is des bilin’ wid ’em. Hit look lak,’ sezee, ‘dat de creeturs roun’ yer done nat’ally tuck’n los’ dey cultchul reckemembunce.’
“Wid dat Brer B’ar kinder got on he ’noyunce, en he up’n spon’, he did, dat he knowed des ez much ’bout de pyapers en pitchers ez Brer Rabbit, en he low dat he gwine see ’em, if hit’s de las’ ack.
“En all de yuther creeturs up’n low dat dey wuz high up fer ter fotch er look at de pitchers en de pyapers deyse’fs. Des den Brer Rabbit lipt up en skaddle off down de road lak de dogs wuz atter im, en de yuther creeturs lipt up en foller long.
“Well ’twant long twel dey fotch up at Miss Wren’s, en Brer Rabbit lipt spang up ter de do’ en knock, blim, blim. En den dar wuz Miss Wren, come ter see who wuz blimmin’.
“Brer Rabbit, he spruce up he years en sez, ‘Howdy, Miss Wren, we come fer ter fotch er look inter dem pyapers en pitchers you got in yo’ house ’bout de creeturs.’
“‘Howdy, Brer Rabbit,’ sez Miss Wren. ‘You en de creeturs mought des ez well des skaddle on back ter whar you lives, kasc we ain’t open ter de cyolored.’
“Wid dat Brer Rabbit drap back he years en make er great ’monsteration.
“‘Now looker yer, Miss Wren,’ he sez, sezee. Ez ter dat, we is got black creeturs yer, en grey creeturs, en spackeldy creeturs, en green creeturs, en creeturs ’bout zackly de same cyolor ez yo’se’f.’
“‘En ah is b’ar-cyolored,’ sez Brer Bar. ‘En b’ar-sized.’
“But Miss Wren she des scrootch back todes she pyarlor en make ter shet de do’.
“‘Tooby sho,’ she sez, sez she. ‘Tooby sho. But dis yer house is fer de creeturs ez knows who dey is, en dey gits in, en de cyolored don’t. En you is de cyolored.’
“En ker-flum, she shet de do’.”
“And what did the rabbit do then, Uncle Remus?” inquired the little boy at length, and with scarcely restrained impatience, for the venerable darkey had relapsed into what gave every appearance of being a deeply meditative silence.
“Now, den, honey, you er crowdin’ me,” he said. “Wen it come down ter dat, I speck ole Brer Rabbit got ter projeckin’ like he natchul self, en Brer B’ar got he ’noyunce up, en sumpen er nudder come un it terreckly.”
“I would surely like to hear about that,” said the little boy. “Shall we make it this time tomorrow, then? Your place, of course.”
ON HEARING IT AVERRED THAT THE WORDS MONTH, ENGLISH, DIFFICULT, SILVER, GARBAGE, TWELVE, POEM AND WOLF HAVE NO RHYMES
Oh two or three times or maybe just onth
A week or a couple of times a month,
I get to feeling a little tinglish,
And speaking all kinds of unusual English,
And things seem easy that once were difficult.
I feel that any old faith’s a terrific cult,
And the sky looks gold and the landscape silver—
I run out the door to go wade in the rilver,
Get all tied up in the wirage and barbage
Of a barbed wire fence and a can of garbage,
Watch the old cow calve and the mama elf elve,
And eat a big lunch about quarter to twelve,
And grab somebody even though I don’t know ’im,
And make him listen to a wonderful poem:
“Now ain’t that a wonder-wonder-ful-f-
Ul dog over there, or is it a wolf?”
MORE LIKE A BUFFALO, PLEASE
THE REVIEWER KNOWS WHAT you are thinking now: “Here is a guy who wishes he could guest-host The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, play the banjo, present his own network special, tie balloon animals, coin catchphrases like ‘Well, ex-cuuuse me!’ and have a live concert album go platinum despite its being banned from all Kmart stores for strong language.
“But all he can do is review books. All he can do is snipe at wild and crazy Steve Martin, who on top of doing all these other things has authored Cruel Shoes (Putnam’s), a five-thousand-word book of quips and quiddities that costs $6.95. Books, this reviewer probably thinks, should be written by people who can’t do anything else: by members of some dusty literary clique who sniff at balloon animals and who ideally have been dead since 1930.”
Pas du tout. The truth is that Edith Wharton could tie balloon animals, but she never did it publicly, for pay, because she couldn’t do it really well. That is, she couldn’t do it in such a fashion as to convey that she was great at it but had b
etter things to do. She couldn’t toss off balloon animals. So she tied them at home, alone, for her own reasons, until the sweat ran down her arms.
And no, one does not review books so as to get at anyone. One does it for the satisfactions of (a) receiving free books mailed to one’s own home and (b) being able, when asked at wedding receptions what one does, to say, “I review.”
As a monologist, Martin is no Richard Pryor or Lily Tomlin (to name the two great stand-up comedians since W. C. Fields) or Lenny Bruce or Randy Newman or Bob or Ray. The best thing about his first big TV special was the New York Times’s preview of it. To read in the newspaper of record that a man was to deliver on prime-time network television a long sketch about turtle wrangling was gratifying; the sketch itself, one felt, was long. On his big-selling live album, Martin performs worn material rather perfunctorily for an audience that seems intent on getting hysterical without grounds. His appeal to the young borders on the bubble-gummy.
But Martin has done wonderful things: the original Saturday Night version of his “King Tut” song and dance (though if “Born in Arizona, / Moved to Babylonia” were the other way around, it would sound just as silly and yet have a point), his swinging-immigrant-guy character (though Dan Aykroyd is even more impressive as the brother), and various transcendent appearances on the Carson show.
Shtick detection is Martin’s prime service. So despoiled is our culture by the false selves of Entertainment that anyone who can take off on show biz dreck as well as Martin does should be recognized—perhaps by a “roast” in which Don Rickles is actually cooked and eaten. Muhammad Ali and Menachem Begin can do The Tonight Show without succumbing to it, but only Martin seems capable of simultaneously doing it up brown and doing it in.
One recalls the night Martin was guest-hosting and Bill Cosby was guesting and Martin, without seeming mean, made it clear that nothing Cosby said was tongue-in-cheek enough. Cosby was reduced to apologizing for clichés. He looked as if he wished he could go off somewhere outside Hollywood and work on his moves. In his stride on the Carson show, Martin has as nimble a straight face under the circumstances as Donald Barthelme has in prose.
Prose, on the evidence of Cruel Shoes, is not Martin’s element: “I decided to secretly follow this dog. I laid about a hundred yards back and watched him. … As I approached, I could hear the sounds of other dogs moving lightly. … I remember throwing them bones now and then, and I could recall several of the dogs seemingly analyze it before accepting it.” The syntax is not that bad throughout, but only one bit (“The Nervous Father”) in Cruel Shoes has what could be called happy feet.
Not that Martin need be expected to write as well as Woody Allen, the only audiovisual comedian whose diction knows what it is doing on a page. At times Allen’s written humor may seem derivative—it needs his face and voice to make us realize “Oh, a Jewish Benchley” or “a rumpled Perelman.” But even in its lapses, it has a ring, it is writing.
Writing is something many a book has done without. Cruel Shoes, however, lacks not only style but also character. Fields, Groucho Marx, and Fred Allen all spoke with decidedly less timbre and snap in print than orally, but each of them produced a readable book or two that at least evoke—if they fail quite to render—the author’s voice. Precious little from Martin’s slim volume would be funny, let alone original, even if fleshed out by Martin’s bunny-ear apparatus and fine awful smile.
One chapter is called “Dogs in My Nose.” It is three paragraphs long and seems to go on and on and on. Further nasal whimsy appears under the heading “Comedy Events You Can Do”: “Put an atom bomb in your nose, go to a party and take out your handkerchief. Then pretend to blow your nose, simultaneously triggering the bomb.” The reader who does not know five fourth-graders with better nose jokes than that is not traveling in a fast enough crowd.
Now, drolleries that do not quite come off may yet be estimable; sometimes not quite coming off is the better part of coming off. But some of these brief sketches suggest Richard Brautigan on a particularly languid day. There are several apparently straight, though furtive (but not furtive enough), poems. There are jibes at leaden philosophers that—although or because Martin was once a serious student of philosophy himself—are leaden (though thin). “Cows in Trouble” and “The Day the Buffalo Danced” are topics worth developing, but what Martin gives us is surely not the way discontented cows would act and definitely not how buffalo would dance.
An item about a nationality called Turds approaches risible flatness, but why “Turdsmania” for the country’s name? Turdsey, perhaps. Turdwana. There is something to be said for this sentence from “Poodles … Great Eating!”: “The dog-eating experience began in Arkansas, August, 1959, when Earl Tauntree, looking for something to do said, ‘Let’s cook the dog.’” But “experience” is not quite the word, the town in Arkansas should be given, there ought to be a comma after do, and “Tauntree” is not a funny name.
In this reviewer’s estimation. Which is not to deny that one would perhaps give up all one’s estimation for the ability to tie a balloon buffalo. And make it dance. Like a buffalo.
Since this review originally appeared, Martin has become a movie star. For the record let me state that I, unlike many tasteful Americans, loved The Jerk, and I think Martin can dance like a son of a bitch. And let me say in all fairness that Bernadette Peters, with whom Martin has a close personal relationship, makes Edith Wharton look like Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
WHOSE WHO?
A people-item journalist takes on the history of mankind.
BEFORE LAST WEEK, A couple of noted precursors reached the postcursing stage: for Java Man and Java Woman, it was the end of something. “We met in a tree,” recalled J.M., “and just totally flipped over each other”—but then came twelve and a half years of rough-and-tumble. “We did the whole number, the bonking on the head, the dragging by the hair, the clawing and the biting and the names. ‘Animal!’ ‘Troglodyte!’ You know.
“Finally it dawned on us this was getting us nowhere. ‘After all,’ we said, ‘we are two fully upright adults. Let’s start acting like hominids.’ Now I think we know each other better. Because we know ourselves better. And we realize we are two very different people.”
So with jaws still ajut and brows still ridged, but personally more together, the Javas announced their separation. Observed J.W., who under terms of the settlement will keep the cave and brood (he, the club): “We were both evolving all the time. It’s hard on a relationship.”
Heliogabalus … Jacob Riis … Magellan … Oswald Jacoby … Luke.
Some millennia the third and second B.C. turned out to be for those Sumerians! That’s the invention-of-writing people. In the old oral days, “ha” had meant “fish”; then came cuneiform, and the fish symbol meant “ha.” No problem—until the Sumerians’ northern neighbors passed from barbarism to civilization.
If you write, you share. The Sumerians, whose lower-Tigris-and-Euphrates stomping grounds lacked stone and metal, turned the new crowd on to Fish and Owl and all the other symbols. Pretty soon everybody was cuneiforming—and there were no more Sumerians to speak of. They’d been absorbed.
“They had the first ‘ha,’” quipped an absorbent Akkadian as he hooked up a nice chunk of metal to a likely block of stone. “But we got the last laugh.”
Eugène Sue … Tito Fuentes … Elena Blavatsky … Georg Simon Ohm.
And I. You heard me. I. I, by the standards of tidbit journalism, may not be a “person.” I may not be “notable.” But I am a … consideration. I occupy space, I breathe, black out; experience systole, diastole, longing, and a “zimmezimme” sound in my ears that I can’t quite identify. I go home at night and face Ciel, and little Uwe and Honoré and Willadean and Umbra and Fleming and Pud and the dog Tippy and old Uncle Pancoast and our life together.
I voted for Kropotkin in the recent mayoral contest.
And I write the items.
Remember that tooth dislodged from Hammu
rabi by Babylon’s then-minister of brick during their late-night “all in fun” bout of tackle-the-man-with-the-tablet? Well, it seems the tooth will not be compensated for along the usual lines. According to a government spokesman, the code does not apply to officially recognized sporting events. In any case, the minister’s teeth were termed “much smaller and browner” than the King’s, after each was removed and considered. The minister was reportedly placed under 777 new bricks, where he will await reassignment.
Maud Gonne … Mary I … George Romney … Jubal Early … Epaminondas of Thebes.
And You? Dear idling soft-news reader. Maybe an electrician? Maybe a Burmese woman? With soft translucent eyes? You can reach me here at the office. We’ll meet, we’ll talk, we’ll grab a couple of Blimpies and get out, get away from all these … snippets of vicarious popularia. This “people.”
And have you noticed that “the people” went out as “people” came in? Bringing with it “people issues,” the kind of person who describes himself as “a people person,” the expression “he’s good people,” and the neutron bomb?
Or have I lost you already? Has your attention span been brought to this—that it can no longer take in more than thirty-five words without a name and a
slug of white space?
Apparently the Yuletide was not all triumph for Charlemagne. What with all the coronation commotion, remarked the Holy Roman Empire’s new head, his family didn’t get a chance to open presents together. “It just didn’t seem like Christmas,” he has confided to friends. “I know it disappointed the boys.”
Vespasian … Wolf Mankowitz … Eva Marie Saint … Li Po … Al Lanier of Blue Oyster Cult.
Back to You. Don’t just sit there reading with your head bent forward: bad for your neck, makes you look like a serf. Take sides. Let them go at it, one on one, and tell me, who do you like? Gato Barbieri or Lazarillo de Tormes? Cher or Moussorgsky? Lon Nol or Hughie (Ee-Yah) Jennings? To this observer, it is Kropotkin over any or all, though Uncle Pancoast plumps for Thutmose II.