Vocabulary Lesson

I made the mistake of loudly smacking my lips and licking my fingers as I devoured Cormac McCarthy’s devastating novel The Road, last spring.
I’ve always told friends and family ‘you can’t afford what I want’, when they query me on my Christmas wish list. So last year they were able to take a kind of revenge, confidently gifting me with almost everything written by that Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.
I am only now beginning to dig myself out of this self-imposed prison of words.
Most recently I finished McCarthy’s 1979 opus, Suttree, the story of a debauched, usually drunken, mystical apologist for the South-that-never-was.
It is not an easy read. The novel begins with a kind of bio-sociological incantation, and ends with an amusing near-death experience. In between there are drownings, murders, the accidental death of children, police beatings, bewitchments, a great deal of sewerage, and characters who if not fully etched, are completely wretched.
If pressed I would have to say I was disappointed: it was not as satisfying a read as The Road, written twenty years after Suttree.
But on another level, it was magnificent. I have never read a book that had more words that I didn’t understand or couldn’t immediately suss out from the context. It was two books in one: the novel and the vocabulary lesson.

Gout, from the archaic ‘gutta’, meaning drops but in modern usage specifically crystals: crystals of uric acid in the blood that lead to painful swelling of the extremities, the knees, the elbows. We hear ‘gout’ and we think of wigged men in satin knickers mincing about to baroque music while, unbeknownst to them, their hostess with the hair piled high has ducked out for a rendezvous with Errol Flynn.
In Suttree though, it is apparently gout in that first, archaic sense, of a drop, or a droplet, of a spray of rain and blood and other biological fluids and even – on page 27, spiked clumps of sawdust bursting through the torn stitches in the belly of a stuffed lynx.
Sere. Where withered might have done admirably, perhaps substituted by McCarthy because of its homonymic association with seer - someone who prophesies, foreshadowing Suttree’s failed attempts to establish any kind of life. He is a failed fisherman, husband, father, son, friend, lover, pimp, Catholic, and auto enthusiast. He fails at everything.
At first I failed as well, to find a ‘sere’ in my Oxford Annotated. But then I looked under ‘sear’ – to burn into, and found the archaic spelling and secondary definition that McCarthy uses to describe bones, claws, flowers, foliage, hopes, and lives, all withering or dead on the vine.
Knacker: a slaughterer of spent or sickly animals. A writer might be said to be a kind of knacker: a re-processor of useless ideas, unusual words. The Knoxville that McCarthy depicts is certainly a slaughterhouse, and the characters that McCarthy invents create what lives they have, out of the waste. Most have built their homes from flotsam and jetsam. There, along the river, under the bridges, in the caves, they sleep in abandoned vehicles, in cast off rail cars, in boats made of old signage. They are the wretched refuse, washed upon the shore. Suttree is a knacker’s dream: literally crammed with the abandoned, the maimed, the mad, and the delusional. On page 457, in the last fits and fantasies of a typhoid coma, Suttree’s alter ego reads from an imagined indictment in which he accuses himself of consorting with..

“thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spallpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots, and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes and other associated felonious debauchees.”

Tellurian. You and I, as it turns out, are Tellurians, which simply means ‘of the earth’. There is though, a hint in its root, which suggests that McCarthy meant to imply someone not simply of this earth, but bounded by it, restricted to it, even imprisoned within it. For the root word is ‘telo’, meaning flat. Flat earth?
The list – kept in my everyday journal, went on and on: Concatenate, talus, warfarined (poisoned by a water soluble rat poison), dishabille, sacerdotal (the Jesuit schooled boy must have slept late that morning), cataphracted, crepuscular, spalls (just chips), purlieu, quoits, ‘breeks of kingscord’ (corduroy pants!), and triturations.
At first I just wrote down these mysterious words. Then, when the definition was not immediately available, or did nothing to help me understand usage, I began to write down the page number. Then I included the sentence in which the word was found. In most cases I had to have my Oxford annotated open on my lap, the novel in my hand, and my notebook at the ready, before I was satisfied I had a reasonable understanding of what the author intended.
Soricine. In the context in which I found this word - within a description of a wizened black Geechee witch preparing and administering a potion, I assumed it was a variation on sorcerer, or sorceress. But still unsure, I noted it in my journal. That evening I quickly found that soricine simply meant ‘shrew-like’. I thought back to the many instances in which McCarthy describes the reliance of those living in and along the river – the lower reaches of Knoxville, on the animals and fishes at the lower end of the chain. They ate roots, rabbits, rodents, bats, pigeons, turtles, shellfish, and often resembled the same.
Spelaean. I dug deep for this one and came up – if not empty handed, unsure of what I may have grasped in the darkness. I came up with ‘spae’, a wonderful Scottish word with Norse roots, which may be the root of our own word ‘spy’. A spae-wife is, in Scottish, a sorceress, or fortune teller, and I suppose I wanted this to be the correct inference. The reference itself in the book is to a ‘spelaen darkness’ which could – in the context of this novel, fit. But in the light of day I saw the root I was digging for was not ‘spae’, but rather spelae. So down I went again, and after a while uncovered ‘spalax’, which is the Latin term for a mole rat. As the chapter concerned a certain rat-like character spelunking beneath Knoxville, this seemed a quite plausible solution.
Perhaps ‘spelaen’ might also describe the process of reading: that is, a burrowing through the darkness and a grasping for meaning.
I can’t think of a better way to spend these last drab days of winter, than burrowing through this spelaean darkness. But then, that’s just me.

Fry Baby

Lipstick is up.
Chewing gum is through the roof!
Whittling is making a comeback, especially now that chances are good that your local hospital has someone on staff that can reattach a finger or two.
When we can’t afford to waste our money on the supposed finer things, we return – like the Prodigal Son, to those tried and true, simple, straightforward pleasures of life: corn on the cob, a long walk through the woods or, in my case, the French fry.
To be honest, I’ve always thought that a good French fry was one of the finer things, but was hesitant to admit it. After all, its basic components are on the list of politically incorrect ingredients: oil, potato, salt!
Yes, there are alleged French fries that are made without one or more of those ingredients, but what they actually are is really anybody’s guess.
And now I am going to admit a belief that may remove what last remnant of respect you had for me:
The greatest French fry in the world is the McDonald’s French Fry!
That said, I should note that not even McDonald’s can make a great French fry on a consistent basis.
I actually remember my first McDonald’s fry. We had just returned from Berlin – where my father was stationed, and like a kid on Christmas morning ‘the Colonel’ scooted us around metropolitan Washington D.C. eager to show us all of the innovations we had missed living overseas. There were Mustang convertibles, Boeing 747s rising up over the Potomac from National Airport, and – on the Baltimore-Washington Expressway just south of Beltsville, an odd, rectangular glass building with ‘Golden Arches’.
There were no drive-thrus then, but neither were there long lines, and with its limited menu fast food could also mean hot food- including those remarkable fries.
Timing is everything. In the last 20 years I would estimate that - out of 2000 visits, I have tasted properly cooked and served McDonald’s French Fries at most three or four times. You see, to wring the perfect flavor out of those emaciated strips of pale yellow tuber everything has to be perfect. They have to be cooked in the hot oil for exactly the right amount of time: no more, no less. They have to be immediately removed from the oil and, after a cursory rapping of the metal basket to remove excess grease, scattered in a thin layer over the serving area. And they have to be quickly and thoroughly doused with salt so that the tiny crystals adhere to the remaining patina of oil.
And then of course – perhaps most importantly, you have to place your order just in time to have those perfectly prepared fries scooped up and served to you – as the old saying goes, ‘piping hot’.
You eat these fries with your teeth – not your mouth, breaking each tiny shaft open with a kind of Irish step dance: quick jabs with the heels of your incisors, releasing the captured steam, crunching the salt, savoring their ephemeral vinegary tartness, and noting the remarkable balance of flavor that is possible in a simple recipe.
You need to eat these miniature two-by-fours quickly too. They should always be the first item out of the bag, beginning before you have even left the parking area, using your fingers like chopsticks to clutch a half dozen or so at a time and shoveling them quickly into your open mouth.
It’s like walking on hot coals: a potentially spiritual experience but, he who hesitates is lost. If these fries cool they are better used to build a miniature yellow picket fence round the houses on your train set in the basement. Once cooled these fries are like the trilobite uncovered by an archaeologist: fossilized fodder for the scientist to examine and file away. Not food at all.
But don’t get all exited. As I said, chances are that they – the fries themselves, will never have a chance to devolve from a perfect state.
Everything is working against you.
If you are in a long line, or the fries have languished under their tanning lights for more than a moment, or they have lain a few seconds too long in the hot oil or – and this happens very frequently, the salt has either been niggardly applied or not at all, then perfection will never pass through your lips.
There are probably hundreds of thousands of people who – though regular customers of Mickey D’s, have never tasted these fries at the peak of their potential.
When they are good they are emblematic of the majesty of simplicity – in all things.
And when they are not, they are like most of life: disappointing.
Yes, there are other fries, some with highly desirable qualities.
I remember fries from the base PX in Berlin. They served them fresh from the fryolator, dripping with grease, dropped them right into a plastic bag and – after I first pumped a good portion of vinegary catsup right into the bag, I would ride my bike home in the dark, one eye on the road, the other in the bag with my cheek and mouth.
I remember as well, Thrashers, in Ocean City, Maryland. On the boardwalk there they serve only one item: Large, roughly cut, always freshly cooked French-fries in several sizes, with salt and vinegar the only available condiments.
Trashers' fries were – as I remember them, like the big brother of the McDonald’s Fry, though far more consistently produced, far more substantial. I think they were great fries, but I have to admit that my memory of their flavor is hopelessly entangled in the smell of the ocean, the creak of boardwalk, and the hormones of youth.
Still, you can’t help but be impressed by Thrasher’s dedication to the fry: despite 80 years of success, they have never added additional items to their menu: they have never had to ask, ‘you want fries with that?’
I think that if McDonalds wants to expand – in recognition of the power of their small fry and, acknowledging the need for simple, less costly diversions in this economic environment, they’d devise little kiosks for the beach, or the boardwalk, or along the popular streets of picturesque tourist towns, where a single, apron-ed huckster would serve only French fries: fresh, hot, always overflowing their paper holster whatever the serving size.
Simplicity is clarity.
Simplicity is honesty.
Simplicity can help us survive the tough times ahead. That, and a belly full of hot, salty fries!