Nonsense Verse

Virtuosity

In the two weeks I was in Europe I carried around one book: Rabbit Angstrom, the Everyman's Library edition of John Updike's great tetralogy. I'm currently in the middle of the third novel, and I'm trying to get through it as quickly as I can, before the fall school semester starts. But I had to interrupt my reading to share just one passage. There are many instances of virtuosity to be found throughout these books — which has made reading quickly even harder going, since so often I find myself wanting to go back and read again — but this may be the first sentence I read where I had to put the book down, step away from it, throw up my hands and just marvel: How did he do that?

First, back up a tad: sentence. Now look below — this indented bit looks awfully long, does it not? In fact, it's more than 200 words long, long enough to require numerous breaths, and mental pauses, to absorb all that's happening and how it links up so seamlessly with what has come before, not only within this single sentence but within the past 843 pages. I'm not often a fan of never-ending sentences; so few authors can pull them off gracefully, and even when they do, the reader is often left wondering, All right, that was lovely, but — was it necessary? Here, though, at this major turning point in the characters' lives, it works. Updike wraps us in the moment and reminds us of the inside jokes and the many years of joy and pain and bitterness, and shows us the beauty and tragedy of the passage of time, just as his overwhelmed protagonist must have experienced it. (For those who haven’t read the Rabbit books, a little primer: Harry, aka Rabbit, is our antihero; Nellie is Nelson, his son, whom we first met when he was a toddler; and Mim, Harry's sister, we've also watched age through Rabbit's eyes, from 19-year-old ingénue to — well, you'll get the picture. Read it slowly:

And outside, when it is done, the ring given, the vows taken in the shaky young voices under the towering Easter-colored window of Christ's space shot and the Lord's Prayer mumbled through and the pale couple turned from the requisite kiss (poor Nellie, couldn't he be just another inch taller?) to face as now legally and mystically one the little throng of their blood, their tribe, outside in the sickly afternoon, clouds having come with the breeze that flows toward evening, the ridiculous tears dried in long stains on Harry's face, then Mim comes into his arms again, a sisterly embrace, all sorts of family grief since the days he held her little hand implied, the future has come upon them darkly, his sole seed married, marriage that daily doom which she may never know; lean and crinkly in his arms she is getting to be a spinster, even a hooker can be a spinster, think of all she's had to swallow all these years, his baby sister, crying in imitation of his own tears, out here where the air quickly dries them, and the after-church smiles of the others flicker about them like butterflies born to live a day.

When in Rome...

Rome, originally uploaded by jenwahhh!.

...you might see something like this. More commentary and ruminations to come, post-jet-lag.

UPDATE: Check out what my pal Dan did to this photo. It's like a painting! Ah, Photoshop...

Uh…

I had to call the credit card company today to take care of some business, and at the beginning of the call I got the "Please enter your 16-digit card number, then press pound" instruction. But then, right after the automatic girly said that, she went, "It's the button below the number nine."

Seriously?

I don't know about you, but in my opinion, anyone who needs to be told where the # button is on the telephone is not someone who should have a credit card. Oy.

Rated PG-13 for crude language

I was flipping through the dictionary yesterday to look up the word "shoehorn," to determine whether it was one word or hyphenated when used as a verb (one word, according to Webster's New World College, Fourth Edition). And as my eyes skimmed the pages — set/settle, shaman/shard, shellfire/shield — one set of guidewords stopped my progress:

shinny/shitkicker

Of course Bad Words are in the dictionary (that's right, kids — go nuts!). But two little things surprised me. One was that the dictionary editors didn't mind "shitkicker" appearing in bold type atop the page. But I guess that makes sense when you assume the dictionary's point is not to dictate any kind of vocab-morality. (Having to police the "wraps" in a volume of 1,716 tissue-thin pages might also get tedious pretty darn fast, although then again, by nature, dictionary editors are probably more up to that task than most mortals.)

The second surprising thing popped out when I decided to take a detour from my "shoehorn" quest to learn a little bit about the roots of "shitkicker" — getting lost in a maze of etymological tangents being one of my more favorite pastimes. What I discovered was that while "shit" is labeled downright "vulgar," its partner "shitkicker" — a term of American origin meaning "a poor, rural person, especially one from the South or Southwest; rural or rustic; of or having to do with country music" (!) — gets a mere notation of "slang" (with "somewhat vulgar" tacked to the end of the definition, after the jump).

Fascinating. So does "shit" lose its power when attached to any kind of suffix? In the eyes of the dictionary, apparently so: "shitfaced," "shit list," "shitload" and "shit-eating grin" are all deemed "somewhat vulgar" as opposed to outright "vulgar," the warning to that effect appearing at the end, rather than at the conspicuous beginning, of each definition. Does the dictionary explain itself? Sort of. Here's what it says about the labels in the "Guide to the Dictionary" section at the front:

Slang: The word or meaning is not generally considered standard usage but is used, even by the best speakers and writers, in very informal situations or for creating special effects. People belonging to a certain group, such as teenagers or jazz musicians, often use a particular group of slang terms. [NV aside: There's so much to say about the examples chosen for that second sentence, I don't even know where to start.]

Vulgar: The word or meaning is regarded by many people as being too crude, coarse, or unrefined to be suitable for use in many social situations.

So, to recap: "shit," not acceptable in mixed company; "shitkicker," not standard, but hey, some of the best speakers and writers may beg to differ!

I don't know. If I were tossing back a few with a bunch of country music fans at Joe's Bar and said "shit"  (vulgar) because I fell off my barstool while getting a little too rambunctious over Willie Nelson singing "Crazy," my pals probably wouldn't be offended. But if I then reeled around and said, "Hey, stop teasing me you bunch o' worthless shitkickers!" (slang), I could see winding up with a pool cue to the head.

The moral of the story: As ever, it all depends on context.

And speaking of context, all this "shit" talk reminds me of a childhood tale:

One day, a little girl — she was 4 at the time, or maybe she was 7 — walked up to her mother with an important question. This little girl was very inquisitive about words, and she'd recently heard one that her friends had refused to define. And so she went to her mother, because that was always the best way to get to the bottom of such things.
"Mommy?" she said.
"Yes, dear," the mother replied.
"I have a question," the little girl said.
"O.K., go ahead."
"What does 'shit' mean?"
And the mother turned bright red and grabbed the little girl by the arm and said, "Who told you that word? Don't you ever use that word again!"
"O.K., Mommy," the girl said. She promised never to use the word, except that there was one problem — she still didn't know what it meant. And so, she solved the problem the second-best way she knew how: She went to the dictionary.

Epilogue: Her promise to cease using the word stuck for quite a few years. She slipped and used it only occasionally, usually in the context of tripping and falling down (and it's quite remarkable that she didn't use the term more often, come to think of it, because her tripping and falling was not exactly an unusual occurrence). Then, alas, she became involved in journalism — and the promise was rendered, as the dictionary might put it, Obs. And so, dear readers, we come full circle, to the post you just read today. The End.