Skinny Legs and All

A philosophical Can o' Beans and pork, shoes, Southern preachers, sexuality, art and Jerusalem are all entwined together in Tom Robbins' novel Skinny Legs and All. I love Robbins word choice and wacky poetry.

"John is a label. Nebuchadnezzar is a poem. A monument. A swarm of killer bees let loose in the halls of the alphabet (105)."

The images that evokes is so cool! "Killer bees in the halls of the alphabet"...I imagine big letters in a maze of halls of a huge house. The same halls that my imagination comes up for the house of Lord Craven in The Secret Garden. Another great line is this one: "He grew up in Alexandria, whose vowels rise like yeast on the tongue (133)." When one thinks about it, yeast on your tongue would probably taste disgusting.
This quote about Arabic made me think of my friends who are learning Arabic and how it's a complicated and beautiful language.

"Everywhere [Alexandria], the Arabic alphabet wiggled and popped, enlivening crumbling architecture with outbursts of linguistic jazz, notations from the DNA songbook, energetic markings as primal as grunts and as modern as abstract electricity of synthesizer feedback (133)."

It's such a... I was about to say neat but Can o' Beans would reprimand me for not using a more descriptive word, since the word neat used in that context falls into the crevasse of ambiguity. I like to think of language, written and spoken as music. Notations, marks and sounds that we use to express thoughts or movement. Music is all about movement--movement of emotion, key, thought. Language is about storytelling