Nicholson Baker - The Size of Thoughts - Essays and Other Lumber

In one scene, the adolescent Edward waits outdoors for the evening star to come out and thinks over his phrase-hoard of nature poetry and “becomes a connoisseur of the last lonely gradings of blue into black”; and in doing so somehow leads us to the conviction that all the grunting, groping, and “stubbly frenching” that apparently goes on at dusk between men and boys in decrepit parks and overgrown commons, in ruined abbeys and hermitages and other handy arcadias, has always gone on and is good and worthwhile — is, indeed, the secret triumphant undertheme of all pastoral verse. Edward looks over the trees at that trope of tropes, Hesperus, star of the muse and of poetic attainment, the “folding-star” of Collins’s “Ode to Evening” or (as in Milton’s “Comus”) the “Star that bids the shepherd fold,” and it seems to become for him the winking lure and symbol of all things perseveringly evanescent, immortally short-lived, bravely tearful and impeccably campy. Edward never goes so far as to say that his private muse, his beloved vespertine twinkler, is actually puckered , forthrightly anal, but he is too visually on the ball not to want to allow us to infer that cinctured sense of “folding star,” as well — he refers to Luc (the name is a broken spangle from “Lucinda,” perhaps) as a “star” and as “starlit” and we concede the point. And it’s a star of mourning, too; the AIDSy sadness of so much recent loss, the disappearance of brilliant youths and the disappearance of one’s own youth’s brilliance, and the more general sadness of the unknowable generations of self-stifled and closeted poets that preceded our outspoken time, and then, too, the simple asexual unattainability of much of what we really want and the unretrievability of what we best remember, are some of the emotions toward which Hollinghurst shepherds us.

The Folding Star turns out to be one of the few satisfying books around that treat the relationship between art and life and the secrets they keep from each other. The thirteenth-century English exported wool to Bruges, where Flemish guild-members wove it into cloth and tapestry. Edward Manners here exports himself, his native language, his wool-gathered raw material of educated reading, his sexual appetite, to a Brugesed and battered city that goes to work on him and knots him as we read into a figure in its ancient hieratic carpet. The allegory in the book is thick and ambiguous and un-Jamesian: like a well-hung (shall we say) Flemish tapestry — like the Flemish tapestry, perhaps, that hangs in the childhood room where Dorian Gray secretly stores his horrifying portrait, or like the tapestries Edgard Orst paints behind his mysterious orange-haired models — it’s decorative and plush and fine, exuberantly pictorial but uninsistently in the background.

Given the man-boy theme, we may be forgiven for keeping half an eye out for gender-flipped Lolitanisms. There are at least two: a pointed passage about the pronunciation of “Lucasta” (“the darting buss with which it began, the upward and downward flicker of the tongue against the teeth”); and the Frenchified “dream palindrome” of “Luc” and “cul.” One could conceivably call these defects, but they aren’t — as a matter of fact, the play on “Luc” and “cul” helps dissolve another minuscule potential reproof, which is that there are a few too many uses of the vogue word “clueless.” For “clueless” is only a dream anagram of “Luc-less”—and the pain of Luc-lessness is what this clue-laden book, lucky for us, is all about.

(1994)

This 1may be the funniest and best-smelling work of profound lexicographical slang-scholarship ever published. Some may respect the hint of Elmer’s glue in recent printings of Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English ( 8th ed. ), or the faint traces of burlap and cocoa-bean that linger deep in The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang , or even the fume of indoor swimming-pool that clings to the paper-bound decolletage of Slang!: The Topic-By-Topic Dictionary of Contemporary American Lingoes . But a single deep draught of J. E. Lighter’s magnificent Historical Dictionary of American Slang (Volume I, A — G) is a higher order of experience: it smells like a high-ceilinged bare room freshly painted white — clean and sunlit, full of reverberative promise and proud of its mitered corners, although with a mildly intoxicating or hyperventilational “finish.” Since these one thousand and six pages embrace more concentrated filth, vilification, and depravity than any contiguously printed sequence is likely to contain until Lighter’s Volume II (H — R) appears in the spring of 1996, we may momentarily question the appropriateness of so guileless a fragrance. Yet reading onward (and Lighter really must be read, or at least deeply browsed, rather than consulted — the book belongs on every patriotic coffee table) we begin to acknowledge its aptness, for this work makes us see American slang — a dingy, stuffy, cramped apartment that we’ve lived in for so long now that it bores and irritates us — with sudden latex-based clarity and awe. What a spacious, cheery gallery we now have in which to tour our swear-words! How delightfully chronological and typographically tasteful it all is! How firmly principled, how unchaotic, how waltzable-in!

And mainly, how unexpectedly funny. To judge by his helpful introduction, Mr. Lighter, who has been laboring on this project for twenty-five years, is not himself a wildly comic person, but he is an exact and deliberate and historically minded person, and he has a rare ability for positioning formerly funny words and phrases in settings that allow them to become funny once more. He is slang’s great straight man. I never suspected that I would again laugh aloud at the phrase “broken-dick motherfucker,” having found it inert for some time — but no, reading (on the plane) one of the several citations under “ broke-dick adj . worthless. — usu. considered vulgar,” I was suddenly, mystifyingly, pounding the tray-table. So too with the entry for airhole :

airhole

n

. [partly euphem.] ASSHOLE, 1 & 2.

a

1925

in Fauset

Folklore from N.S

134: Mary had a little lamb,/Its face was black as charcoal,/Every time it shook its tail,/He showed his little airhole.

1985

Webster

(ABC-TV): I wear socks with black shoes. A lot of people think I’m an airhole.

And fern :

fern

n. Stu

the buttocks.

Joc

.

1965

N.Y.C. high-school student: How’s your fern [after a fall]?

1965

Adler

Vietnam Letters 99

: You know, the hardest part of all this is the feeling of sitting around on our ferns, doing nothing.

And even:

asshole

n

. [ME

arce-hoole

] Also (

Rare

in U.S.)

arsehole

.—usu. considered vulgar. [See note at ASS,

n

., which is usually considered to be less offensive. Additional phrases in which these words appear interchangeably may be found at ASS.]

1

the anus or rectum [….]

1987

D. Sherman

Main Force

183: when I tell you to do something, I expect to hear your asshole pop, do you understand me?

You enter, while studying this book, the west wing of verbal consciousness — the realm of slangfarbenmelodie , of alliterative near-similarity and drunken lateralism and chiming hostility purged of its face-to-face context and abstracted into music: you are in the presence, at times, of the only good things that a million anonymous bullies and sadistic drill-sergeants and cruel-minded, mean-spirited frat boys or sorority girls have bequeathed to the world: