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.

Pigs, Bacon & Aesop's Fables

A conjunction of several e-mails to yours truly, featuring another great pig-related tattoo, one that goes nicely with Lisa's recent submission of one of Aesop's fables:

The Pig and the Sheep

A pig found his way into a meadow where a flock of sheep were grazing. The shepherd caught him, and was proceeding to carry him off to the butcher's when he set up a loud squealing and struggled to get free. The sheep rebuked him for making such a to-do, and said to him, "The shepherd catches us regularly and drags us off just like that, and we don't make any fuss."

"Not, I dare say not," replied the pig, "but my case and yours are altogether different. He only wants you for wool, but he wants me for bacon."

Dick King-Smith's Recollections of Pig Farming

In his autobiography Chewing the Cud (2001), Dick King-Smith recalls his experiences as an "amateurish" pig farmer at his Woodlands Farm outside of Bristol, England from the late 1940s through the 1960s. As he writes, "The pigs suffered more than the other livestock from my love of trying to do things on the cheap" (82), such as converting an old barn into a piggery and using old chicken houses as farrowing units for his sows. King-Smith kept his pigs outside in a three-acre wooded area that he skillfully fenced with wire and coffin boards. After about five years of buying pigs from Mr. Hamper, a local breeder who was only "distinguishable from his larger pigs by virtue of wearing clothes and standing on his hind legs" (87), King-Smith started breeding his own pigs. He kept up to ten Saddleback sows, all serviced by a Large White boar named Monty who came to a tragic end in 1959 after gorging on dirt and mud. He also talks of the challenges of keeping newborn piglets alive, many of whom were squashed accidentally by their mothers. Interestingly, he notes that "the times when we never lost babies were when a sow farrowed completely naturally out in the Wood" (95). Most of the pigs were sold at market, although "once a year the butcher came and killed a bacon pig for our own needs" (98).

King-Smith really enjoyed his pigs and complains about how the pig is "linked always with gluttony, obesity, and squalor" (82). He is a big believer in porcine intelligence, something one can see by looking into a pig's eye. As he concludes, "The expression in the eye of a dog is trusting, of a cat supercilious, of a cow ruminative, of a sheep, vacuous. But the look in the eye of a pig is, quite simply, knowing. Other beasts think, This human is looking at me. The pig thinks, I am looking at this human. There is all the difference in the world" (82).

King-Smith got the idea for The Sheep-Pig (1983) while tending the Guess-the-Weight-of-the-Pig stall at the village fair. As he recalls it, "I must, I suppose, have thought as I stood upon the village green, recording people's guesses and taking their money, that it was a shame that such a lovely little pink pig should end up, once he was big enough, in the deep freeze. Suppose fate had something quite different in store for him? Suppose he should go and live on a farm, with a sheep-dog as his foster mother? Suppose he should want to do what she did? He couldn't be a sheep-dog. But he could be a sheep-pig" (6-7). King-Smith's book won the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction (he used the £250 prize to buy a new armchair) and later was adapted into the popular film Babe (1995) by director Chris Noonan.

The picture on the book jacket is of King-Smith with Monty, his "pig of pigs."

David Lee's The Porcine Canticles

"Loading a Boar"

We were loading a boar, a goddam mean big sonofabitch and he jumped out of the pickup four times and tore out my stockracks and rooted me in the stomach and I fell down and he bit John on the knee and he thought it was broken and so did I and the boar stood over in the far corner of the pen and watched us and John and I just sat there tired and Jan laughed and brought us a beer and I said, "John it ain't worth it, nothing's going right and I'm feeling half dead and haven't wrote a poem in ages and I'm ready to quit it all," and John said, "shit young feller, you ain't got started yet and the reason's cause you trying to do it outside yourself and ain't looking in and if you wanna by god write pomes you gotta write pomes about what you know and not about the rest and you can write about pigs and that boar and Jan and you and me and the rest and there ain't no way you're gonna quit," and we drank beer and smoked, all three of us, and finally loaded that mean bastard and drove home and unloaded him and he bit me again and I went in the house and got out my paper and pencils and started writing and found out John he was right.

Thus begins the wonderful The Porcine Canticles (1984) by Utah poet David Lee. It is a moving and funny collection of poems that I can't recommend highly enough. Pick up a copy from Copper Canyon Press now that it is back in print. You won't regret it.

Hawthorne on Pigs

I was taking a look at Hawthorne's Lost Notebook, 1835-1841 the other day, tracking down some of his comments on the circus, when I saw this meditation on pigs from his journal of June 15, 1835:

Returning by the almshouse, I stopt a good while to look at the pigs--a great herd--who seemed to be just finishing their suppers. They surely are types of unmitigated sensuality;--some standing in the trough, in the midst of their own and others victuals;--some thrusting their noses deep into the filth;--some rubbing their hinder-ends against a post;--some huddled together, between sleeping and waking, breathing hard;--all wallowing in each other's defilement;--a great boar swaggering about, with lewd actions;--a big-bellied sow, waddling along, with her swag-paunch. Notwithstanding the unspeakable filth with which these strange sensualists sauce all their food, they seem to have a quick and delicate sense of smell.--What strange and ridiculous looking animals! Swift himself could not have imagined anything nastier than they practise by the mere impulse of natural genius. Yet the Shakers keep their pigs very clean; and with good advantage.
N.B.--The legion of devils in the herd of swine--what a queer scene it must have been!

Hawthorne kept this notebook in Salem before his marriage to Sophia Peabody in 1842. It contains lots of notes and ideas for stories and articles and some journalistic observations about public events, such as the circus mentioned above, the public activities of the Fourth of July, 1838, and a show of wax figures. I knew that this notebook would be of use to my work on antebellum popular culture, but to find some comments about pigs, ones that reflect the general contemporary disdain for what was seen as a "dirty" animal, was a pleasant surprise.