The Alphabet May Be Subversive

Using a chainsaw Wild Mountain Man, a.k.a. Ray Murphy, carved the entire alphabet on an ordinary 2B pencil.

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I once wrote a sentence starting with a word beginning with A and then continuing letter by letter through the alphabet? Twenty-six words from A to Z. I tried to avoid a nonsense sentence that meandered beyond a sensible meaning, but clarity ebbed after the letter p. Words scattered about like down feathers?

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Suppose we ration words. Spend a word and the stockpile shrinks. You can’t buy words, but trading is permissible. Take the word forgive. I’ll give you one forgive if you give me back the book you borrowed, spilled coffee on, and wrote marginalia on page forty. You give me sorry.

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A my name is Alice and I come from Albania and I eat avocados. B my name is Bertha and I come from Byelorussia and I eat betel nuts. Bounce the ball and lift the right leg over the ball on every word beginning with an a, then on to b, and c. Keep going. Use a Spaldeen ball. Miss a word and your turn ends. Z my name is Zahava and I come from Zanzibar and I eat zucchini. According to those who collect the past and catalogue and alphabetize it, this is a city game. I grew up in the Bronx and I garnered my knowledge of vegetables by reading cans at the A & P Supermarket. When I played— Alice ate an apple. I studied the atlas and collected countries and cities. In time, a few countries discarded a name that fell out of fashion and fashioned a new name— leaving my atlas deficient, outdated, a relic. You can’t simply throw away a name. Someone remembers and insists on the old reading.

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Once, before computers eradicated the long cursive letter and the Postal Service charged a more modest sum for mailing a missive, I wrote to seventeen people. How to keep track? I alphabetized the list and noted when I received a letter and when I responded. Irene owned a bookstore and we wrote of books, Jean sang in a choir, Anna sent biblical passages and was a one-woman missionary, Bonnie wrote of Bighorns, Rocky Mountain Marmots and Alpine Meadows. I wrote her of smaller peaks and ocean surf. We wrote the letters out longhand, thinking about the words. Now email suffices—brevity is the word.

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''It often occurs to me that e-mail may render a certain kind of literary biography all but obsolete,'' Blake Bailey, the author of a biography of Richard Yates and a forthcoming one of John Cheever, said. The messages are ''too ephemeral: people write them in a rush without the sort of precision and feeling that went into the traditional (and now utterly defunct) letter.''

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“…when copies of 150 year old letters written in the Dakota language by Dakota prisoners at Fort McClellan in Davenport, Iowa, during the years 1862 to 1869, after the U.S.-Dakota Conflict”… surfaced they told the story from a different perspective.

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I went on a trip and packed an apron in my steamer trunk. I went on a trip and packed an apron and a balalaika in my steamer trunk. Now when I went on a trip I packed an apron, a balalaika and a cookbook in my steamer trunk. A simple suitcase wouldn’t hold all the items. My friend Ellen always used the same items until we changed the rules. If you used a zither on Monday it remained unavailable until the following week. Zipper appeared on Tuesdays, and then adjectives like zany made an appearance.

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A romance with the alphabet is a lifelong addiction. It starts with magnetic letters on the refrigerator, moves on to phonics and long and short sounds and the more confusing diphthongs, then phonemes added to other phonemes to make words and it continues unabated.

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It is summer and I’m smitten. I think I’ll read my way through the letters–author by author, first a mystery and then a non-fiction.( I read fiction two summers ago.) A, B, C, —Boris Akunin, Joseph Berger and James Church. A good choice to begin—Akunin’s setting is 19th century Russia, Berger writes about the neighborhoods of New York, and Church sets his mystery in North Korea. The Man Booker prize judges read a hundred novels in a hundred days. My pace is slower.

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On 26books.com like-minded people share their twenty-six books—with copious commentary and responses.

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