I just finished The Grapes of Wrath, and now it seems I think in that blasted dialect…I keep mentally “hearing” things like, “Well Rosasharn…git them taters…they was a man oncet…yer supper’s a-gettin’ cold…never seen such skitters…we was a-huggin’ and a-dancin’…” etc.
It’s like reading Shakespeare (or even just seeing it performed); at first, I could not understand a word they were saying. Now it’s like it’s taken over my brain.
Ugggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Hep me! A-hep me!
I dare anyone who enjoys a drink to read Tortilla Flat.
Then get all saucy, and just try not to take on some of the logic of that group of drunken idiots. (Danny, Big Joe Portagee, The Pirate, Pablo, etc.)
“Surely my friend would not mind if I traded his only pair of pants for a jug of wine…”
OK, OK, so I’ve never actually traded pants for wine but it’s awfully fun to think about doing when you’re in a stupor.
That happens to me too. After reading Salinger’s Nine Stories I started thinking like the characters in the book spoke. For the life of me, I can’t remember any thing right now that I was thinking, but it was the usual Salinger 50’s style talk (“phony”, “bastard”, etc.)
Right now I’m reading A Clockwork Orange and I find myself thinking all bezoomny in a goloss like the droogs in that book. I’ll viddy something real horrorshow and can’t get it out of my gulliver, maybe I need a devotchka to give me a tolchock and then maybe it’ll come flowing out with the krovvy, O brothers!
I have the same problem when I read Jane Austen. Luckily, I can’t give any examples, cuz I haven’t read Austen in a few months.
Lynda Barry is queen of all brain-eating prose in the universe! Wow! My coworkers become concerned, but I know the true wonderful nature of it! Yes! She is truly viral!