A Mouse in a Milkcan

He's Damn Near Screwed the Whole Patch (Suttree p. 24-32)

2010-09-06T20:54:00.000-07:00

Suttree's moving around Knoxville after his visit from Uncle John.

His visit's to a sort of drinking house. This is where we start to meet some of his fellow unsavories. Suttree surrounds himself with all forms of ne'er do wells, first off we meet J-Bone and Jim. They discuss the possibility of caves forming some sort of maze under the city.

Aint that right Suttree? What's that? About there bein caves all in under the city. That's right. What all's down there in em? Blind slime. As above, so it is below (23).

Then they get drinkin.

Words I Didn't Know (p. 24-32)

"Lord God what is that? Early Times, Nig, cried J-bone. Early tombs is more like it. Lord honey I know they make that old splo in the bathtub but this here is made in the toilet."
16. splo (24) - Here we go again. Not in the OED. It is, however, in the Urban Dictionary. I figured it was moonshine, and it is. Corn whiskey. Former Tennesse policeman Bob Martin explains it in his memoir Both Sides of the Fence. "Basically as the etymology of the word goes, when you drank it, something exploded inside you, usually your head, hence, the abbreviated 'splo.'"

An old black man intercepts the bottle of Early Times and spins a tale.
"Come over there one Sunday mornin huntin a man and they was a bunch of tush hogs all standin around out there under a shed used to be there, you boys wouldnt remember it, drinkin whiskey and was friends of this old boy's, and Irish Long walked up to em and wanted to know where he's at."
17. tush hogs (25) - Well, the real dictionary says it's a hog with a tusk. That can't be. According to southern slang, it's a big old fat unwashed woman. It's also this really neat art exhibit.

A man named Hazelwood takes the bottle.
"The last time I drank some of that shit I like to died. I stunk from the inside out...I had to burn my clothes. I had the dry heaves, the drizzlin shits, the cold shakes and the jakeleg."
18. jakeleg (26) - Maybe my favourite new word so far. I have heard of the jimmy legs before (and am reminded of the Seinfeld bit that I can't find the video for. The Jimmy Legs, you can get that in your arms? Like you wouldn't BELIEVE), but the jakeleg has an interesting past. Jake is an alcoholic beverage made from Jamaican ginger. If you drank too much of it, you got the shakes.

There is a super-interesting post about here on a liquor history blog.

Suttree leaves, gets a grilled cheese and the scene switches.

Our next piece of action revolves around the deviant Harrogate. The first time I read this section of the book I had to go back several times to ensure I was actually interpreting things correctly. You'll see what I mean. It's a perverted, juvenile act - and McCarthy uses a lot of fancy type words here.

"He crossed the tracks of the railway and loped into the growth on the far side wiping his nose with his sleeve as he went and casting his eyes about, passing along a high revetment of honeysuckle and then through a patch of cane."

19. revetment (31) - Well, now I know another word for a retaining wall. I can't wait until it comes up in my next conversation. Check out that sweet revetment!

I think this next paragraph is beautiful prose.
"When the light of the sealedbeam cut over the field he was lying prone upon a watermelon with his overalls about his knees. The beam swept past, stopped, returned to fix upon his alabaster nates looming moonlike out of the dark. He rose vertically, pale, weightless, like some grim tellurian wraith, up over the violated fruit with arms horrible and off across the fields hauling wildly at the folds of old rank denim that hobbled him."

But yeah, it's about a dude humping watermelons. Harrogate is a melonfucker.

20. sealedbeam (32) - I thought this would be interesting, I was wrong. It's a headlight.

One where the light source, reflector and lens form a sealed, self-contained unit! Whee!

21. nates (32) - yer butt. From Latin! I will not put a picture of a butt here. I will assume you have one.

22. tellurian (32) - pertaining, or residing in the earth. So, Harrogate is being compared to a dirt monster.

This section also has some of the funniest dialogue in the entire book. Two farmers discuss Harrogate's activities.

"What do you aim to do?
Hell, I don't know. It's about too late to do anything. He's damn near screwed the whole patch. I don't see why he couldn't of stuck to just one. Or a few.
Well, I guess he takes himself for a lover. Sort of like a sailor in the whorehouse.
I reckon what it was he didnt take to the idea of gettin bit on the head of his pecker by one of them waspers. I suppose he showed good judgment there.
What was he, just a young feller?
I dont know about how young he was but he was as active a feller as I've seen in a good while" (33).

This farmer ends up shooting Harrogate in the nates. We start the next section with him being hauled off to the workhouse.

Hiatus

2010-08-24T11:48:00.000-07:00

There's been a delay here in posts. Two reasons for this.

1) I went to Vancouver to celebrate my nana's 90th birthday.

2) I am caught up in the next part of this blog, reading Blood Meridian - and reading about the possible film adaptations. The hope is to have both of those novel's words up here before that movie comes out, so people reading the book for the first time can use this blog as a bit of a companion.

I promise I'll get back to Sut tomorrow.

Don't tell me who I'm like (Suttree p. 13-22)

2010-08-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

There's a little bit of a pattern forming. McCarthy's chock full of words I don't know when he's describing something, usually something mundane. This nine page block is mainly dialogue, and it's the dialogue of the southern U.S. It's simple diction, and it's a stark contrast to the narrative; it makes the characters seem simple. We haven't really learned anything about Suttree until this scene. His uncle John visits and we learn some important facts. 1) He is distant (seems to be a self-imposed distance) from his father. 2) He spent time n the workhouse.

An American workhouse was initially a government run institution set up to help those who couldn't make ends meet. You worked there, you got room and board.

In 1834, the Poor Law was passed. The people behind the workhouses figured out a way to keep people from trying to get into them: make them awful. For all intents and purposes, it was a jail. There's a spot in Suttree's workhouse for solitary confinement. The diet's not good. There's fights and moonshine. He's careful to point out that it's not a jail, implying he chose to go there. We'll head to the workhouse in the next entry.

Words I Didn't Know (p. 13-22)

"A dextrocardiac, said the smiling doctor. Your heart's in the right place."
11. dextrocardiac (13) - I headed to the OED for this one. There's a multi-volume set at our public library. It's actually defined in the second sentence. Dextro - right, cardiac - heart. He means well.

These next two are Suttree daydreaming about a stillborn baby. Charming.

"The infant's ossature, the thin and brindled bones along whose sulcate facets clove old shreds of flesh and cerements of tattered swaddle."
12. sulcate (14) - this means marked with furrows, or grooves. It's often used to describe trees, think of a Western Red Cedar. Good old thuja plicata (what a wonderful phrase).

"Perhaps his skull held seawater. Born dead and witless both or a terratoma grisly in form."
13. terratoma (14) - A word that confirms to me that McCarthy is MAKING WORDS UP. This isn't in the OED, so you kind of have to sleuth it out. Terra, that's earth. Toma was a short-lived 70's cop show starring this hairy bastard.

Tony Musante aka David Toma. Baddest narcotics cop on the Jersey shore. In 1973. Actually, I found out -toma refers to a tumor, or swelling. Greek.

"Up these steep walkways cannelured for footpurchase, the free passage of roaches."
14. cannelured (21) - Grooved, fluted. Seems to be an architectural term, also a part of bullet culture. Check out this sweet cannelured ammo to your right.

Suttree's "footpurchasing" his way to a little hole in the wall bar he spends a lot of time at.

"The room was otherwise barren, a white marble fireplace masked with a sheet of tin, old varnished wainscotting and a high stamped rococo ceiling with parget scrolls and beaded drops of brazing about the gasjet where a lightbulb now burned."
15. parget (22) - this one's neat. It's plaster spread on a wall, made of lime mixed with cowdung, usually used to line chimney flues. Or (more likely) it's an ornamental plaster.

It's clear that McCarthy read a few books on architecture before writing this novel, and that he has more than just a passing interest in the stuff. Dude doesn't have a passing interest in anything. The WSJ asks him here, why don't you write shorter works?

CM: I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Get Ye A Tater (Suttree p. 7-11)

2010-07-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

So, you want some plot summary for these 7 pages following the incredibly dense prologue? OK - Suttree floats down a river, pulls up his fish lines, talks to some guys.

I hadn't dogeared any pages on my initial run-through of pages 5-50, but I went back and re-re-read them last evening. Turns out there were a couple dozen of new words in there.

Words I Didn't Know (p. 7-11)

"A hand trails over the gunwale and he lies athwart the skiff"
6. athwart (7)- obviously some sort of directional term. Yep, means across.

"Glancing up at these cathedraled vaultings with their fossil woodknots and pseudomorphic nailheads in gray concrete, drifting"
7. pseudomorphic (7)- Blogger.com tells me there are five words misspelled in this fragment of a sentence. I could parse together an idea of that this word meant. Pseudo - fake, morphic - form. Yeah, a fake form. It's also a geological term; a mineral that has the crystalline form of another mineral rather than the form normally characteristic of its own composition. That's probably more close to what he meant.

This is a pseudomorphic agate. Neat.

"...past warehouses of galvanized and corrugated tin set in flats gouged from the brickcolored earth where rhomboid and volute shapes of limestone jut..."
8. volute (9) - a shape, spiraled.
Looks like this to your left.

Suttree watches a body being pulled from the river. The man has apparently committed suicide.
"A pale incruent wound."
9. incruent (9) - a bloodless wound. Yeah, that happens when you're in the river a while I guess.

Suttree strikes up a conversation with 'Joe' (10).
J: Are you still fishin?
Yeah.
What made you take that up?
I dont know, Suttree said. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

A nice little summation of why Sut leads the life he does. He moves on to deliver a catfish to a fellow derelict. The man's cooking potatoes for dinner in a hubcap.

"Arched sumac fronds quivered in the noon warmth and pigeons squabbled and crooned in the bridge's ribbed spandrels."
10. spandrels

I'm guessing these are like trestles? Oh, not really. Close though. They're the spaces above arches.

Next up, a visit from Uncle John. Consequently, we learn a little about Suttree's past.

A Beginning/Words I didn't Know (Suttree p. 3-5)

2010-07-23T16:06:00.000-07:00

I shunned American literature in university, in favour of Canadian stuff. That's the way it works up here. We're taught to be proud we're not Americans, and to embrace our culture (musicians, novelists) above others. So, I never knew about this Cormac McCarthy fellow until the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men. I read that, then read everything else. This is America to me, this guy's words.

I'm not an expert, but I'm the kind of guy who knows a lot of words. Meaning, I do crossword puzzles, I passed a Jeopardy! audition, I read a lot.

What do I love about the man's books? I love the honesty, the bleak truth that he puts on every page. I love when I hit a paragraph where I don't know the meaning of a half dozen words.

So this project is something to keep me busy during a time of "under-employment" in my life (read: I don't have a job until I begin substitute teaching again in the fall). My plan is to pick out words I didn't know - tell you what they mean, and talk about the book. Groundbreaking.

I'll begin with the book I most recently read, Suttree. It's a rambling, deeply funny collection of transpirings set in Knoxville, Tennessee. The protagonist is a man who spurns his life of privilege to live on a houseboat and make a nominal living fishing for carp and catfish. The opening 2 1/2 pages of the book are enough to throw anyone for a loop. I will be using the Vintage Intl. 1992 Edition for all citations. Definitions will be a lumping together and translating thing.

Words I Didn't Know (p. 3-5)

"Out there under the blue lamplight the trolleytracks run on to darkness, curved like in the cockheels in the pinchbeck dust."

1. cockheels (3)
I should've known what this meant. It's cock feet. Still, not in my dictionary.
2. pinchbeck (3)
This is an alloy, some type of brass that looks like gold. He's also some dude that advocates the use of LSD and shrooms.

"Gray vines coiled leftward in this northern hemisphere, what winds them shapes the dogwhelk's shell."
3. dogwhelk (3)
I had an idea what this meant, a type of marine lifeform. This is a dogwhelk.

It doesn't survive long out of water. A parallel to Suttree.

"Old tins and jars and ruined household artifacts that rear from the fecal mire of the flats like landmarks in the trackless vales of dementia praecox."
4. dementia praecox (4)
I figured this was some form of mental illness (dementia, duh), and I was right. The 'praecox' part means the illness is in the early stages. Labyrinthine imagery (usually using 'junk') arises many times in the novel.

"...wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark's total restitution could appease."
5. abrogate (4)
Just means canceling something, annulling it.

This is the way reading this book goes for me. A few pages chock full of new vocabulary (I reckon there are going to be words in here I can't find the meaning for - McCarthy might be just making it up) and then 10 pages of hilarious dialogue and events. Pages 5-50 were clear sailing for me, but we'll discuss them a little and lay out the characters next time.