Humorist Roy Blount Jr. to headline book fest

No one, but no one, cavorts with the English language more than Roy Blount Jr., for whom it is a personal playground.

And play he does, with cockeyed wit and fruitful invention. The author of 23 books, including "Alphabetter Juice" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), due to be released May 17, the popular humorist is beyond all else a merchant of words: words muscular and mysterious, seductive and strange.

"When I come to a word and think, 'There's an interesting one,' I look it up," says Blount, doing what your parents always told you to do. "What I put in a book is purely a matter of my choice and what I think I can write interestingly about. I love rooting around and wrestling with words."

Consider: Could you really live the good life without a clear understanding of the difference between "poop-noddy" and "noddypoop"? We thought not. It's in Blount's book.

Neither can those attending the 15th annual South Carolina Book Festival in Columbia, running Friday-next Sunday at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center. Blount is chief among the headliners.

A program of the Humanities Council S.C., this gathering of authors, poets, book enthusiasts and book dealers is offered free to the public Saturday and Sunday, with just a few Friday events requiring pre-registration. In addition to readings, panel discussions and book signings, more than 100 exhibitors will have booths.

Joining Blount will be keynote speakers Cokie and Steve Roberts, who will appear at 2 p.m. Sunday, along with such literary lights as Elise Blackwell, Celia Rivenbark, Ron Rash, Tatjana Soli, Kwame Dawes and Matt Matthews, whose May release, "Mercy Creek" (Hub City Press), captured this year's South Carolina First Novel Prize.

Having written about everyone from Robert E. Lee to the Pittsburgh Steelers (with sidetrips to ponder such things as what dogs are thinking), Blount, a panelist on NPR's "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me" and a regular columnist for Garden & Gun magazine, is former president of the Authors Guild and a member of the Fellowship of Southern Authors (never mind the fact that the lad who grew up in Decatur, Ga., now lives in western Massachusetts).

Once a Sports Illustrated staffer, Blount's articles, essays, stories, verses and drawings have appeared in 168 periodicals from The New Yorker and Rolling Stone to National Geographic and Smithsonian, as well as in 194 books.

"Alphabetter Juice" is a follow-up to his 2009 outing, "Alphabet Juice." Between them, he published "Hail, Hail Euphoria: Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup" (HarperCollins).

Thank his mother for everything. When Blount was a child, she taught him to read phonetically.

"That instilled in me an affection for the sound of words and their intrinsic qualities," says the author, who is drawn to the physicality of language. "Much of the intrinsic significance of words lies in how the words move through your mouth, the motion of speaking the words."

Blount coined the word "sonicky" to describe the quality he describes, and is making it his life's mission, among other things, to see that it resides in the popular lexicon.

The S.C. Book Festival is stop No. 3 on Blount's 21-city book tour, one which the ax of austerity has not lopped away, but he regards with the usual trepidation of someone who doesn't much like to fly. He's not insane about traveling, either, though it has its compensations.

"I do enjoy seeing friends around the country, and usually I don't mind talking about my books."

Besides, who else is going to defend the humble pun and its unfairly checkered reputation in the pantheon of wit?

"Even lame puns are fun," he says. "They get down to the level of sound."

Which is to say, sonicky.