Jimmy Buffett's Swine Not?

It has been a crazy semester, which has meant that I have not been as attentive to this blog as I would have liked. Now, at least, it's time for our much-needed spring break, and as we're headed to Key West for some of it, I figured I'd mention the forthcoming novel by Jimmy Buffett called Swine Not?, which tells yet another story of a pig in the city.

Buffett's novel, apparently based on a true story, concerns the adventures of Rumpy, a pot-bellied pig brought to a New York City residence hotel by his Tennessee family (more information here if you'd like it). Helen Bransford provides the illustrations for Buffett's story, including the image above of Rumpy with some of his pigeon friends. If you happen to be a Parrothead (I am not a Buffett fan, actually, though I've been to the Keys enough to kinda see the appeal) it might be worth picking up when it's released in May.

The more interesting question is why the urban pig seems so appealing (think of the Eloise books, Babe: Pig in the City, etc.). Today these texts play off the rural-urban and nature-culture dichotomies, but once upon a time pigs were ubiquitous in the streets of cities and there was nothing romantic about that at all. More on that later once I've found a way to scan some of the illustrations about the perils of pigs in the streets from an early nineteenth-century children's book I've found.