Playing with their words
Some notes on a notorious style monkey's leisure reading:
I'm almost done reading Gardner's Year's Best SF from last year. Last night I read Michael Blumlein's "Know How, Can Do" (originally from F&SF), and though various aspects of the premise are kinda goofy, I was delighted by the language. It starts out:
Am Adam. At last can talk. Grand day!
Am happy, happy as a clam.
What's a clam? Happy as a panda, say, happy as a lark. And an aardvark. Happy and glad as all that.
And so on. It took me about that long, maybe a couple brief paragraphs more, to see what was going on, and I was totally tickled when I saw it. (I also laughed at some of the content, especially the line "Santa hasn't any fangs," which makes perfect sense in context.) In the next section of the story, the protagonist begins to refer to himself as "I," but it isn't until a couple sections later that O is added to the mix, with the others following a bit later. (I was a little disappointed when I noticed (on a second look) that the opening section does use Y as a vowel in addition to A; oh, well.)
It completely falls apart if taken literally, of course; an intelligence learning English doesn't add one vowel at a time, it begins with simple words and structures and works up to more complicated ones. But as a metaphor for the learning process, it works quite nicely (much the same effect as the changing language in Flowers for Algernon), and the sense of play is lovely.
And then tonight I was reading the April '03 issue of Asimov's, and came across Neal Barrett, Jr.'s "Hard Times," which also has a nicely off-kilter prose style and rhythm all its own:
Dawkit doesn't like Karl, doesn't care for him at all. Eyes like a halibut, nose like a frog. Teeth like a broken wood fence. Green stuff, brown stuff, all kinds of awful stuff sticking in between. Terrible stenches, horrible smells, sniffs, whiffs, unearthly odors that would make a hog shiver, make a dog shake.
The dialogue style owes a little to Elmore Leonard, but it works.
I've liked Barrett's stuff ever since I ran across "Stairs" in Asimov's lo these many years ago (or September '88 to be exact):
[Mary Louise said,] "I don't know who you are and besides your awful clothes are hurting my eyes. No one wears a clothes like that."
"Not here they don't," said Artist Dan. "And there are places I've been where they don't wear pitch and soot and dead-grub yellow. Lead and drab and shadow-black and slug-dung madder. Colors dull as belly button fuzz in the dark of night."
"Well if people dress like you somewhere," said Mary Louise, "I hope it's far away."
I'd never seen anything like it in all my twenty-and-a-bit years, and I wanted more. I'm glad he's still writing.