My pig, Frank Sinatra, simply failed to show up for a meal. He was tired, he was angry, he was worried. Sinatra was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold. I spent several days and nights with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time.
The alarm spread rapidly. The classic outline of the tragedy was lost. I found myself cast suddenly in the role of pig's friend and physician - a farcical character with an enema bag for a prop. A pig with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the pigyard and beyond. Here he was, the pig himself, in the early hours of the evening, out of range. He tried, insofar as it has been possible, to be like everyone else, but it was clear Sinatra was very depressed.
That night dozens of pigs, some of them casual friends of Sinatra's, some mere acquaintances, some neither, appeared outside of my pigpen. They approached it like a shrine. They had come to pay respect. And as I watched this ritualistic scene, I got the impression that Frank Sinatra was dwelling simultaneously in two worlds that were not contemporary. On the one hand he is a sick pig; on the other, as when he is nodding and sucking in and blowing out water through his teeth, Frank Sinatra is both majestic and humble as he faces a ceremonial ending in smoked bacon and ham. Frank Sinatra survives as a phenomenon, one of the few products to withstand the test of time.
My pigpen is at the bottom of an old orchard below the house. The pigs I have raised have lived in a faded building which once was an icehouse. There is a pleasant yard to move about in, shaded by an apple tree which overhangs the low rail fence. A pig couldn't ask for anything better - or none has, at any rate. The sawdust in the icehouse makes a comfortable bottom in which to root, and a warm bed. This sawdust, however, came under suspicion when the pig took sick. One of my neighbors said he thought the pig would have done better on new ground - the same principle that applies in planting potatoes. He said there might be something unhealthy about that sawdust, that he never thought well of sawdust.
It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when I first noticed that there was something wrong with the pig. He failed to appear at the trough for his supper, and when a pig (or a child) refuses supper a chill wave of fear runs through any household. The two blonde pigs knew, as did Sinatra's four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force treatment upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this week of ailing.
I had seen something of this side of Sinatra last summer, which was the only other time I'd gotten a close view of him prior to this night in the pigyard.
The most distinguishing thing about my pig’s face are his eyes, clear blue and alert, eyes that within seconds can go cold with anger, or glow with affection, or, as when sick, reflect a vague detachment that keeps me silent and distant.
After examining my pig, who was stretched out in the sawdust inside the building, I went to the phone and cranked it four times. Mr. Henderson answered. "What's good for a sick pig?" I asked.
"Look, I donno, man, roll him over on his back and give him two ounces of castor oil."
The whole scene was becoming ridiculous, and it seemed that Sinatra was only half-serious, perhaps just reacting out of sheer boredom or inner despair.
When my son and I arrived at the pigyard, armed with a small bottle of castor oil and a length of clothesline, the pig had emerged from his house and was standing in the middle of his yard, listlessly. He gave us a slim greeting. I could see that he felt uncomfortable and uncertain. He seemed miles away in his private world, not even at first reacting when suddenly my son reached down, grabbed both front legs, upset him quickly, and when he opened his mouth to scream I turned the oil into his throat - a pink, corrugated area I had never seen before.
"Try not to upset yourself, Frank."
The screams, slightly muffled by oil, were pitched in the hysterically high range of pigsound, as though torture were being carried out, but they didn't last long: it was all over rather suddenly, and, his legs released, the pig righted himself.
"Well, good-night, Frank."
It was obvious from the way Sinatra looked at me that the pig was not going to live.
He came out of the house to die. At intervals during the last day I took cool fresh water down to him and at such times as he found the strength to get to his feet he would stand with head in the pail and snuffle his snout around. He drank a few sips but no more.
When I went down, before going to bed, he lay stretched in the yard a few feet from the door. I knelt, saw that he was dead, and left him there: his face had a mild look, expressive neither of deep peace nor of deep suffering, although I think he had suffered a good deal. His face was pale, his blue eyes seemed a bit watery. He had been unable to rid himself of the cold.
----
Perhaps what delights me most about the digital age is mash-ups. Anything that can be copied has become source material and with so much text online, mash-ups and repurposing of other people’s work seem inevitable. It’s so easy to copy and paste, to be inspired by something and then redesign it.
Everything is potentially connected, or connectable. Dead authors can live in totally new ways and become relevant to new audiences. Less popular or obscure works are more accessible as people upload them. Byliner, for instance, almost always suggests a text I never would have read and might not even have come across on my own. I may not be reading as many books as I used to, but I sure am reading a ton of unexpected stuff online.
Seeing mash-up projects and attempting them make me think about writing in ways I don't think I otherwise would. As I was working on this post, I was struck by how combining two true texts resulted in a fictional one (or maybe you could say a new truth, if we're playing loose with definitions. If I slapped a new title on this, "How I Read Two Classic Texts" does that make it a nonfictional essay?). The truth is a precarious thing.
Some other thoughts:
Mash-ups are really hard. You have to know the source materials well enough to find how they connect and the best mash-ups comes from unexpected pairings, I think. This particular attempt was pretty uninspired--both subjects were sick, what a connection!--but it was fun to sift through the two stories and find ways they could interact.
I worked from White's essay as a base and as I was putting the pieces together, I found that pieces of base story needed to be reshuffled, which was something I hadn't expected.
Every word in my mash-up comes from one of the texts or the other; I didn't add anything. I used my browser's find feature to search around the texts for the spots I wanted. Being able to do this makes me think about an author's language in a new way--"cold" pops up more times than I realized while reading, when looking for "I" I discovered just how much time Talese spends marking things Irish and Italian. Nothing earth-shattering in those discoveries, but it's stuff I wouldn't have caught otherwise and I think it says something about Talese's style in that words mentioned rather frequently didn't seem overused or distracting or dull.
It's fun, and perhaps a little cruel, to mess with the carefully crafted prose of EB White.
The possibility of mixing Sinatra into a scene with a pig enema was almost too tempting to resist. The gross factor won out, though.
The alarm spread rapidly. The classic outline of the tragedy was lost. I found myself cast suddenly in the role of pig's friend and physician - a farcical character with an enema bag for a prop. A pig with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the pigyard and beyond. Here he was, the pig himself, in the early hours of the evening, out of range. He tried, insofar as it has been possible, to be like everyone else, but it was clear Sinatra was very depressed.
That night dozens of pigs, some of them casual friends of Sinatra's, some mere acquaintances, some neither, appeared outside of my pigpen. They approached it like a shrine. They had come to pay respect. And as I watched this ritualistic scene, I got the impression that Frank Sinatra was dwelling simultaneously in two worlds that were not contemporary. On the one hand he is a sick pig; on the other, as when he is nodding and sucking in and blowing out water through his teeth, Frank Sinatra is both majestic and humble as he faces a ceremonial ending in smoked bacon and ham. Frank Sinatra survives as a phenomenon, one of the few products to withstand the test of time.
My pigpen is at the bottom of an old orchard below the house. The pigs I have raised have lived in a faded building which once was an icehouse. There is a pleasant yard to move about in, shaded by an apple tree which overhangs the low rail fence. A pig couldn't ask for anything better - or none has, at any rate. The sawdust in the icehouse makes a comfortable bottom in which to root, and a warm bed. This sawdust, however, came under suspicion when the pig took sick. One of my neighbors said he thought the pig would have done better on new ground - the same principle that applies in planting potatoes. He said there might be something unhealthy about that sawdust, that he never thought well of sawdust.
It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when I first noticed that there was something wrong with the pig. He failed to appear at the trough for his supper, and when a pig (or a child) refuses supper a chill wave of fear runs through any household. The two blonde pigs knew, as did Sinatra's four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force treatment upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this week of ailing.
I had seen something of this side of Sinatra last summer, which was the only other time I'd gotten a close view of him prior to this night in the pigyard.
The most distinguishing thing about my pig’s face are his eyes, clear blue and alert, eyes that within seconds can go cold with anger, or glow with affection, or, as when sick, reflect a vague detachment that keeps me silent and distant.
After examining my pig, who was stretched out in the sawdust inside the building, I went to the phone and cranked it four times. Mr. Henderson answered. "What's good for a sick pig?" I asked.
"Look, I donno, man, roll him over on his back and give him two ounces of castor oil."
The whole scene was becoming ridiculous, and it seemed that Sinatra was only half-serious, perhaps just reacting out of sheer boredom or inner despair.
When my son and I arrived at the pigyard, armed with a small bottle of castor oil and a length of clothesline, the pig had emerged from his house and was standing in the middle of his yard, listlessly. He gave us a slim greeting. I could see that he felt uncomfortable and uncertain. He seemed miles away in his private world, not even at first reacting when suddenly my son reached down, grabbed both front legs, upset him quickly, and when he opened his mouth to scream I turned the oil into his throat - a pink, corrugated area I had never seen before.
"Try not to upset yourself, Frank."
The screams, slightly muffled by oil, were pitched in the hysterically high range of pigsound, as though torture were being carried out, but they didn't last long: it was all over rather suddenly, and, his legs released, the pig righted himself.
"Well, good-night, Frank."
It was obvious from the way Sinatra looked at me that the pig was not going to live.
He came out of the house to die. At intervals during the last day I took cool fresh water down to him and at such times as he found the strength to get to his feet he would stand with head in the pail and snuffle his snout around. He drank a few sips but no more.
When I went down, before going to bed, he lay stretched in the yard a few feet from the door. I knelt, saw that he was dead, and left him there: his face had a mild look, expressive neither of deep peace nor of deep suffering, although I think he had suffered a good deal. His face was pale, his blue eyes seemed a bit watery. He had been unable to rid himself of the cold.
----
Perhaps what delights me most about the digital age is mash-ups. Anything that can be copied has become source material and with so much text online, mash-ups and repurposing of other people’s work seem inevitable. It’s so easy to copy and paste, to be inspired by something and then redesign it.
Everything is potentially connected, or connectable. Dead authors can live in totally new ways and become relevant to new audiences. Less popular or obscure works are more accessible as people upload them. Byliner, for instance, almost always suggests a text I never would have read and might not even have come across on my own. I may not be reading as many books as I used to, but I sure am reading a ton of unexpected stuff online.
Seeing mash-up projects and attempting them make me think about writing in ways I don't think I otherwise would. As I was working on this post, I was struck by how combining two true texts resulted in a fictional one (or maybe you could say a new truth, if we're playing loose with definitions. If I slapped a new title on this, "How I Read Two Classic Texts" does that make it a nonfictional essay?). The truth is a precarious thing.
Some other thoughts:
Mash-ups are really hard. You have to know the source materials well enough to find how they connect and the best mash-ups comes from unexpected pairings, I think. This particular attempt was pretty uninspired--both subjects were sick, what a connection!--but it was fun to sift through the two stories and find ways they could interact.
I worked from White's essay as a base and as I was putting the pieces together, I found that pieces of base story needed to be reshuffled, which was something I hadn't expected.
Every word in my mash-up comes from one of the texts or the other; I didn't add anything. I used my browser's find feature to search around the texts for the spots I wanted. Being able to do this makes me think about an author's language in a new way--"cold" pops up more times than I realized while reading, when looking for "I" I discovered just how much time Talese spends marking things Irish and Italian. Nothing earth-shattering in those discoveries, but it's stuff I wouldn't have caught otherwise and I think it says something about Talese's style in that words mentioned rather frequently didn't seem overused or distracting or dull.
It's fun, and perhaps a little cruel, to mess with the carefully crafted prose of EB White.
The possibility of mixing Sinatra into a scene with a pig enema was almost too tempting to resist. The gross factor won out, though.
Let me disagree with you right away: This WAS inspired! Absolutely inspired. As a writer you'll find a million ways—daily—to doubt yourself, to quit, to beat yourself up, but try giving yourself some credit from time to time, too. This was not only a clever and entertaining reimagining of the material but also aptly represents this moment in literary nonfiction. Readers have come to expect access, to denigrate what they perceive as corporate selfishness and to find a growing treasure trove of material that's instructive, explorable, malleable. "Everything is potentially connected, or connectable. Dead authors can live in totally new ways and become relevant to new audiences," you write. Yes—and we are here to make something of it. To "...connected, or connectable" I'd add "corruptible" because that, too, is a big part of the story.
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