Alphabetter Juice

by Roy Blount, Jr.

  Willy-nilly (from “will he, nill he” or “will ye, nill ye,” meaning whether he or you intend to or not) is already an adverb, as in “The earth is drifting willy-nilly toward shriveling up like a roasted peach,” so let’s not even consider willy-nillily.

  But a band whose lead vocalists are actors lip-synching to recordings made by real vocalists might be said, suggests Jean Strouse, to perform Milli-Vanillily.

  m · M · m

  It’s the first letter that Helen Keller, who was struck permanently deaf and blind at the age of nineteen months, learned to pronounce. She was ten years old and had been mute. Her principal teacher and eventual life’s companion, Annie Sullivan, had connected her to language and the world by spelling things out in her palm with fingertips three years before, but Helen remained incapable of oral speech until another teacher, Sarah Fuller, “passed my hand lightly over her face,” as Keller would recall in The Story of My Life, “and let me feel the position of her tongue and lips when she made a sound. I was eager to imitate every motion, and in an hour I had learned six elements of speech: M, P, A, S, T, I.”

  Four years later, when she was fourteen, she and Mark Twain began a long and highly conversant friendship. “He made me laugh and feel thoroughly happy,” she wrote, “by telling some good stories, which I read from his lips.” She would put her forefinger to his lips, her thumb to his throat, and her middle finger to his nose. “His voice was truly wonderful. To my touch, it was deep, resonant. He had the power of modulating it so as to suggest the most delicate shades of meaning, and he spoke so deliberately that I could get almost every word with my fingers.” In all she wrote twelve books. Twain called her and Napoleon the two most remarkable people of the nineteenth century. “I suppose there is nothing like [our friendship] in heaven,” he wrote to her, “and not likely to be, until we get there and show off. I often think of it with longing, and how they’ll say, ‘there they come—sit down in front.’ I am practicing with a tin halo. You do the same.”

  mediablur

  It is summer of 2008 and I am in an airport, trying to read a story in—I mean on, on my laptop—the online New York Times about the rare white Chinese river dolphin. It has finally been driven “functionally extinct” after surviving for twenty million years. I would like to feel outraged about this. But I can’t focus, for all of the other …

  I can almost make out what CNN is murmuring, the Arctic or maybe Iraq will melt by 2040 …

  … almost make out what a teenager is whining through studded lips into her cell phone—something involving the term shazbot, which according to Urbandictionary.com (I looked it up) is “an exclamation of displeasement” coined by Robin Williams on Mork and Mindy …

  … almost make out the announcement of what is causing the latest extension of our flight delay (either “weather” or “whatever”).

  And look! The people in—I mean on—the news and the people surrounding me are running together!

  That shifty-eyed man over there may be a defector oozing polonium, that glazed-looking youth may be on the verge of keeling over from taco-related E. coli, that haunted-looking woman may be the notorious one, poor anonymous soul, who was reportedly kicked off her flight early in the week for lighting matches to cover her toxic farts. I feel for her. Shouldn’t planes have a farting section?

  And shouldn’t airports have a reading section? In the midst of this low-decibel bedlam, how can anyone concentrate long enough to read anything?

  Maybe, up there on the TV screen, I can keep up with the crawl. Got … to … focus … on … the … crawl …

  The crawl says: 60 percent of Americans polled would be “enthusiastic or comfortable” with a presidential candidate who is female or black.

  That’s good. We should not rule out candidates categorically. Ah, but someone has popped onto the screen who is wearing a Cautionary Look.

  Wait a minute! Is that not the same bland necktie … the same bland jacket … the same bland face of the man who was trying surreptitiously, just moments ago, to blow his nose into USA Today over there by the recycle receptacle? Now he’s on TV? My bearings all shot, I lurch over closer to the screen. There must be a message in this. Maybe this man is cautioning me not to get on this plane.

  No. He’s cautioning us all—all of us worldwide—to be skeptical of poll results: “People tend to tell pollsters what they think they want to hear.”

  I recoil from the screen, from the notion that a scientific sampling of the American people, too, can lie.

  Maybe it’s not true. How, after all, can we know for sure? From polls?

  What if a pollster were to ask me, “Do you think people tell pollsters what they want to hear?” Having heard the news, I would have to say yes. Which would not be what the pollster would want to hear.

  A conundrum. But what is this on the screen? It’s a dolphin. A dolphin in China. Evidently, one as-yet-unextinct dolphin remains. But—this dolphin has an enormous human arm thrust down its throat! It’s not enough that they’re overfishing dolphins to extinction, they’re torturing the last survivor? Is there at long last no decency …

  When I lurch back toward where I can make out what CNN is saying, CNN has broken for commercial. Shazbot!

  Wait. I have brought up CNN online. It’s all right, this dolphin story. It’s good news. The dolphin I saw was one of two blue dolphins who were choking on plastic they ate off the side of their aquarium pool. No medical instrument known to man could access the blockage. So, for a change, something sensible was done. A media figure was summoned:

  The world’s tallest man. All seven foot nine of him. And he came, from the flock (of what, yaks?) he was herding in Inner Mongolia. The great long fingers of the great long hand at the end of his great long arm reached in beyond the dolphin’s gag reflex, seized the bit of plastic, and brought it out!

  Consider the uncheesiness of the world’s tallest man. He could be abiding here in this airport flock, in the course of touring as a paragon, being herded hither and yon across waves of indistinct communications. But no, there he was in Mongolia, sticking to his herding, the work he knows best (must be yaks, sheep would not be enough of a challenge for him).

  My laptop interrupts—urgent, battery running low! On-screen CNN is putting forward a product that will give me a hand—no, go away, don’t need it—with my erection. The previously dysfunctional man’s newly rosy wife there, didn’t I sit next to her between here and Cincinatti? She wasn’t rosy then; our eyes never met; nor do I want them to now.

  Another announcement: my flight is delayed again, this time, as best I can make out, “for equipment.” The man who just sat jiggily down next to me, plugged into his iPhone, doesn’t realize—I assume he doesn’t realize—surely he doesn’t realize—that he is humming.

  Come get me, world’s tallest man.

  me-fear

  Charles Hoyt is the author of Witchcraft (Southern Illinois University Press) and “a descendant of Susanna Martin who was hanged as a witch for walking through a Salem rain without getting her feet wet.” He played piano with Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, and Eddie Conlon. He has this interesting theory about what he calls (and I concur) “the vile misuse of I,” as in “They took my wife and I to the movies”:

  This, I believe, is not only false gentility, but an example of me-fear; me is the badge of early childhood, and like other childish things, it becomes embarrassing. I recall vividly the fate of a colleague of mine, in 6th grade: having muttered something like “Me ’n’ Jim went down to the store,” he was immediately crushed by our teacher: “Oh, ho! Me went to the store, me did!”

  Me-fear is not a universal condition, certainly not in professional football. Rex Ryan, coach of the New York Jets: “I’m man enough to be me.” Terrell Owens, the noted National Football League pass catcher: “I love me some me.”

  I am told on good authority that a guy on a reality TV show once referred to “Gretchen and I’s relationship.”

  memory, ins
titutional

  My friend Veronica Geng told me that when she was an editor at The New Yorker, the magazine published a short humor piece of hers not close to the front, as was the usual practice, but farther back, in one column down the middle of a single page. The week that issue came out, there appeared at Veronica’s office doorway the magazine’s longtime City Hall reporter, Andy Logan. Veronica did not know Ms. Logan well, but she knew how deeply woven she was in The New Yorker’s fabric. Born Isabel Ann Logan, she had taken “Andy” while at Swarthmore, in tribute to the New Yorker pillar E. B. White, who had been called Andy since college because everybody named White who went to Cornell when he did was called that in honor of somebody, I forget who, named Andy White. Logan had been a New Yorker writer since 1942. All this aside, Veronica thought Andy Logan was cool.

  And now here she was to fill Veronica in on the background of her piece’s placement in the magazine: the rarity of that placement, the editorial thinking that must have gone into it, and the tradition it perpetuated. The first piece so published, Logan informed her, was back in the late thirties, a few years before Logan came to The New Yorker. It was one of several brief humorous sketches by John O’Hara about a character named Pal Joey.

  Veronica would of course be aware, Logan went on, that O’Hara had gone on to expand those sketches into a novel, which inspired a Rodgers and Hart Broadway musical, best known for including such standards as “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and a movie starring Rita Hayworth, Kim Novak, and Frank Sinatra—by no means at his best—in the title role.

  Then Logan paused, said “God damn, I’m interesting,” and disappeared.

  metanarrative, pig and possum throwing

  Like, the cultural assumptions underlying a story. Black-and-white movies don’t mind coming right out with these. Victor Mature, a crook, to Brian Donlevy, a cop, in Kiss of Death: “Your side of the fence is as dirty as mine.” Donlevy: “With one difference. We hurt bad people, not good people.” The movie, a good one, colors outside those lines in various ways, and its crowning glory is Richard Widmark as the leering evil guy Tommy Yudo, whose chuckle is like a snarl. But the moral framework is there, so we can enjoy the kissing and killing and so on.

  In the postmodern era, we are meant to go “Yeah, right” to moral frameworks—to be radically skeptical of metanarratives. And whoops-a-daisy. According to Wikipedia (which is good enough for me when it comes to something like this):

  Thinkers like Alex Callinicos and Jürgen Habermas argue that [Jean-François] Lyotard’s description of the postmodern world as containing an “incredulity toward metanarratives” could be seen as a metanarrative in itself. According to this view, post-structuralist thinkers like Lyotard criticise universal rules but postulate that postmodernity contains a universal skepticism toward metanarratives; and this “universal skepticism” is in itself a contemporary metanarrative. Like a post-modern neo-romanticist metanarrative that intends to build up a “meta” critic, or “meta” discourse and a “meta” belief holding up that Western science is just taxonomist, empiricist, utilitarian, assuming a supposed sovereignty around its own reason and pretending to be neutral, rigorous and universal. This is itself an obvious sample of another “meta” story, self-contradicting the postmodern critique of the metanarrative.

  That would seem to cover everything. But. What if, for the life of you, you can find no metanarrative? Some years back I wrote a book about being a Southerner in the North. As I trudged from city to city trying to induce people to buy that book, I was called upon to explain what non-Southerners regarded as characteristically Southern phenomena. In Wellesley, Massachusetts, a lady handed me a printout of this article:

  MAN FINED FOR TOSSING PIG OVER HOTEL COUNTER

  AP

  WEST POINT, Miss. (Dec. 6, 2006)—When pigs fly, indeed. Kevin Pugh, 20, of Cedar Bluff, has been fined $279 for tossing a pig over the counter at the Holiday Inn Express in West Point on Nov. 12.

  Pugh pleaded guilty Tuesday in city court to a charge of disturbing the peace.

  West Point Police Lt. Danny McCaskill has said Pugh didn’t know the employees of the hotel. There was no evidence intoxication was a factor. No one was hurt, including the pig, officers said.

  “This was the silliest thing I’ve ever seen,” McCaskill said. “Almost every officer we had was involved because the incidents kept happening at different hours.”

  McCaskill said Pugh was accused of walking into the hotel and throwing the 60-pound pig over the counter.

  “He said it was a prank,” McCaskill said. “It must be some redneck thing, because I haven’t ever heard of anything like it.” McCaskill said there have been four late-night incidents involving animal-tossing at West Point businesses. Twice a pig was tossed and two of the incidents involved possums.

  All four of the disturbances took place between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., McCaskill said.

  Pugh is accused in a second animal-throwing incident at a Hardee’s restaurant. He has pleaded innocent to disturbing the peace in that case.

  “Why would they do that?” the lady wanted to know. I had the feeling that if Wellesleyans had a clear-cut second-person plural she might have said, “Why do you-all do that?”

  I was tempted to make something up. This man undoubtedly belongs to SPOT, I could have told her. Society of Pig and Opossum Throwing. They do a lot of good things, too—raise money for new fire engines and so on. And most of the throwing is ceremonial and open to the public. They throw pigs and possums back and forth to each other, and it is something to see, especially the catch-and-release action, which must be accomplished in one motion so the tossed animal will not get its bearings and bite the receiver. “Hot possum,” they will cry, or “Hot pig.” Up North, I believe the game is watered down to “hot potato,” which is a good indication of the difference between North and South. But some SPOT members, if they don’t get to bed early enough, are bad to indulge on occasion in what might be seen as extracurricular pig or possum throwing.

  But saying that would have contributed to misunderstanding between the regions. I assured the lady that this story, to the best of my knowledge, was an isolated instance, or, okay, a series of isolated instances, not amounting to a trend or custom. She wasn’t satisfied. She looked at me as though she felt I was covering something up. Maybe I should have just said, “Y’all don’t ever pay a hotel bill that way in Wellesley?”

  Truth is, I was curious about the story myself. So I did some Googling.

  That news story, it turns out, circulated internationally. Here is the Romanian version:

  PORC ARUNCAT INTR-UN HOTEL

  Oana OLARU

  Kevin Pugh, in vârsta de 20 ani, din Cedar Bluff a primit o amenda de 279 dolari pentru ca a aruncat un porc in hotelul Holiday Inn Express din West Point, informeaza site-ul abclocal.go.com. Pugh a pledat vinovat pentru deranjarea linistii publice, iar in urma incidentului nimeni nu a fost ranit, nici macar porcul.

  Din declaratiile politiei, se pare ca Pugh a intrat in hotel si a aruncat pur si simplu un porc de 27 kilograme la receptia hotelului. Locotenentul Danny McCaskill a declarat:

  “A fost cea mai mare grozavie pe care am vazut-o vreodata. Acuzatul spune ca a fost o gluma, insa nu inteleg ce fel de gluma e asta, pentru ca nu am mai auzit niciodata de asa ceva.” Locotenentul a mai declarat ca nu e prima data când in orasul West Point au loc astfel de incidente: de doua ori s-a intâmplat sa se arunce porci, iar in alte doua incidente au fost aruncati oposumi, si toate acestea s-au petrecut intre orele 2 si 4 dimineata.

  And here, the Slovenian:

  EZ PULT JE VRGEL ŽIVEGA PRAŠIA

  Zanimivosti, 6:11 7.12.2006

  Amerian Kevin Pugh je moral plaati 279 dolarjev kazni zaradi kaljenja miru, ker je v nekem hotelu v recepciji ez pult vrgel prašia.

  Policijski naelnik Danny McCaskill je povedal, da 20-letni Pugh ni poznal zaposlenih v hotelu, prav tako pa ni bilo nobenega dokaza, da bi bil pijan.

  V incidentu ni bil ranjen nihe
, niti letei, približno 30 kilogramov težki praši.

  “To je najbolj smešna stvar, ki sem jo kdaj videl,” je priznal

  McCaskill in dodal, da je Pugh prašia vrgel zaradi šale. Policija je tisto no, ko se je to zgodilo, med drugo in etrto uro zjutraj naštela še štiri podobne izgrede, v katerih so eno osrednjih vlog igrale letee živali: dva prašia in dva oposuma.

  Pugh je sodeloval tudi pri metanju nebogljenih živali v neki restavraciji, vendar tega prekrška ni priznal in se bo moral zagovarjati pred sodnikom.

  Evidently the word for “possum” is similar in Romanian and Slovenian, but “pig” appears to be quite different in the two languages. Romanian for “lieutenant” is “Locotenentul,” which I like. I can’t tell whether the words for “redneck” or “silliest” are in there or not. I don’t see anything like “Mississippi,” so Romanians and Slovenians may not associate pig and possum throwing with the South particularly. They might even associate it with the West Point in New York where our elite army officers are educated. That would be unfair to the army, but a break for Mississippi.

  No Kevin Pugh is listed in the Cedar Bluff area, according to Information, so we may never know what motivated him in these acts.

  Or I should say, “in this act,” because we don’t know that he was the perpetrator of more than the one throwing. It is even possible that no possums were thrown, since you’ll notice that the story says only that possums were “involved.” Which is not to imply that the possums were the brains behind any of these incidents. I once asked Basil Clark, who organized the Possum Growers’ Benevolent Association in Clanton, Alabama, whether a possum was intelligent.