Sneak peek: HARK Valley Publishing's new novel, 'The Immaculate Jagoffs of Pittsburgh'
Comic novel set in Pittsburgh, the last week of 1972
With the wild novel–picture, if you will, a head-on collision between Ulysses and Mad Magazine, written in "aggressive Pittsburghese"–coming soon, please enjoy an excerpt from the novel's Foreword, which sets the stage for the intense vernacular that is to follow. The Foreword is written by a linguist/diphthongologist who finds himself trapped by COVID in Pittsburgh ("a city absolutely notorious for its monophthongization, as evidenced by the morbid house/hahs and that double-murder downtown/dahntahn...").
The tone of the Foreword may be vaguely familiar to those who have seen horror movies that begin with an archeologist who stumbles upon a "forbidden text"...
If you would have told me two years ago I would be here–Pittsburgh!--doing this, or anything approximately close to it…you would have enjoyed the fragrance of onions, leeks, bacon and clams as I laughed my chowder in your face!
Indeed, though it seems as unlikely as a bizarre football play that has become legend, here I am, the foremost American diphthongologist of our generation (not my words–from a Linguistics Today review of my excellently-received autobiography, From Auld Boy to Yowling Zoospore: My Claustral, Zealous Life Stalking the Great Vowel Shift), putting my reputation at risk via my role in the book you have in your hands. Ut periculum damnetur!
These last eighteen months threatened to put an end to a life’s work I had so painfully crafted…A violent nightmare began shortly after leaving my offices in Boston for what I thought would be a three-week stay in Pittsburgh, where I was leading a series of seminars on Mobility, Indexicality, and the Enregisterment of “Pittsburghese.”
...
I did make it through the first seminar in the series, which took place in a small conference room of the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, on the University of Pittsburgh campus. I was just returning from a restroom break when I spotted a smallish, squat, middle-aged man in a too-small, faded black jacket with gold sleeves and the word “Steelers” on the back (costume de rigueur, I came to understand) placing a thick, stained eleven-by-fourteen envelope on my seat at the speakers’ table. My name was scribbled on it, but I had not the time to look at it; thus I simply scooped it into my briefcase and resumed my moderator’s role.
This was St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2020. It was a pleasant day, 65 degrees or so, with swirling, rainless clouds and a light breeze; I enjoyed the weather as I strolled from the urban campus to my temporary–so I thought–residence in Shadyside, at the lodgings Dr. Luna so graciously offered me. En route, I passed a dozen bars with green-clad revelers, hooting and hollering as they poured beer down their throats and on each other. One young woman rushed up to me, literally belched in my face and cried out, Kiss me–I’m Irish!--before leaping on me and stuffing her tongue in my mouth, which had opened in astonishment. A muscular young man I took to be her boyfriend dragged her away, and when I mumbled an apology, said with a laugh, “It’s groovy, man–you’re like the twentieth guy she’s done that to today.”
...
At the end of a third truly hellish day of alternately burning up and freezing, coughing and spewing mucus, throwing up and collapsing into feverish dreams, I crawled to my phone and dialed 911–and passed out.
When I came to, I was in a hospital room. “What happened?” I asked a powerfully-built nurse.
“COVID just punched you in the face,” she said.
I had been intubated for nine days!
A few days later, I was cleared for release, and took an Uber back to Luna mansion. After two weeks, I had enough strength and stability of mind to begin formulating a plan to escape from Pittsburgh and return home…just as the first, Allegheny County-wide lockdown went into effect.
Thus began a cycle that would discourage Sisyphus: A month later, the lockdown was partially lifted–and my symptoms returned.
...
Moaning in desperation, I ransacked the three-level house for anything meaningful–in a utilitarian way–to read, if only to distract my fiendish mind: a phone book, a tour guide, a comic book, pornography–something real.
Finding nothing but scholarly doubletalk, absolutely nothing, I collapsed at the dining table.
And there it was.
I glanced over the first page of All Yinz R Jagawffs–and immediately threw it down, as if it bit me...
I gleefully “cracked the code” of the vernacular and accents–though it probably took me a hundred times longer than my pre-COVID mind would have taken.
I am publishing this so that others may enjoy a game of literary checkers–though hardly chess. While those who feel they can “tackle this blind” are welcome to do so, for others I have included a glossary of “burgh words,” prominent (if bizarre) pronunciations, local curio, etc..
I also decided to improve the title–whether the author approves or not. The writer of this book, I’m afraid, will have to remain a mystery.
....
-Dr. B.E. Aggrandini, Shadyside, 1 Sept. 2022
For more on this novel's launch, follow the Immaculate Jagoffs' Facebook page.