query about an isogloss (pos. "anymore")

[Laurence Horn]

We've discussed the (apparently growing) range of positive "anymore"
on the list in the past, and it's clear that we're not just in Kansas
anymore, or even the midwest more generally.  (There is, for example,
the evidence of Joe Benigno, WFAN sports radio host and echt New
Yorker, that I've cited on the list.)  But one place I *don't*
associate it with is insular small towns in Maine, and I was thus
struck by a couple of occurrences of fronted (and hence non-polarity)
"anymore" in Richard Russo's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic novel
_Empire Falls_ set in the (fictional) town of that name.

Here are two examples, transcribed more or less accurately from the
audiotape of the book:

"She put the three cushions down on seats only a third of the way up
the bleachers because anymore her feet always hurt from standing all
day."

"Anymore, all he wanted to do was jack off to the porn he downloaded
off the internet"

I see that (according to his bio for his 2004 Colby College honorary
degree) while Russo grew up in upstate NY (also not what I think of
as true "anymore" country--at least Rochester certainly wasn't in the
1960s) he got his PhD at Arizona State and has taught at Penn State
and Southern Illinois (the last of which is definitely in the heart
of positive "anymore"-land, while the first two may be at least
partly in the zone) before coming to Colby (Waterville, Maine) in
1991.  Could it be that Russo absorbed the construction as a ruralism
somewhere along the way, possibly in Carbondale (but maybe earlier in
Tempe), and unconsciously put it in the mouths of characters who have
never been out of Maine?  (Actually, as the two passages make clear,
the "anymore"s in question are not actually *uttered* by the
characters in question but associated with them in style indirect
libre; at least in this novel, Russo--while not using a narrator as
such--presents most scenes from the point of view of a particular
character.)  Or am I wrong about Maine? I'm pretty sure not one of
Stephen King's Maine-bound locals, whatever their Down East
colloquialisms, have ever let a positive "anymore" past their lips,
or I'd have noticed.

Larry