Man Martin's Blog, page 123

Back to Work

Our Students.  I am so Proud.For the past week, I was the "good cop" co-teaching a novel-writing workshop at Kenyon College, alongside Nancy Zafris, author of The Home Jar, Metal Shredders, and Lucky Strike.  Last year there was a third teacher, Geeta Kothari, who couldn't be with us this time.

Nancy is beyond all doubt the most brilliant writing teacher I've ever known.  An anecdote to prove this: a student reads fresh work as she listens, either staring into her lap or with cocked head perched in the notch between thumb and forefinger .  Then, after a few seconds' pregnant silence, she will say, "Read me the fifth sentence again."

Who the hell is so attentive she listens sentence by sentence?  The reason for the confusing verb tense in the anecdote above, is that I have seen her pull this stunt on more than one occasion.

During this year's workshop, Nancy brought in paragraphs showing how authors shift smoothly from objective to subjective point of view.  (Everyone who's not a fiction writer is now audibly yawning, but to the rest of us, this kind of thing is fascinating.)  As Nancy revealed the structure of these paragraphs, my jaw literally dropped.  I am using "literally" correctly here, with close attention to its actual meaning.  There was a gap between my lower lip and upper.  Had there been a strong wind, it would have made a low whistle blowing across my gaping mouth.

We worked our students like sled dogs, but, by golly, they rose to the task.  There's not a one of them that didn't take a giant stride forward as a writer.  (Oh, and lest I forget, a returning alum announced she has received a publishing contract for a manuscript she worked on at Kenyon.)  I am home now, glad to be back with my wife, dog, and chickens.  The tomatoes are coming in and I have corn I need to husk.  Tomorrow - I'm going to wait one more day to let the radioactivity subside - I'm going to return to my own manuscript, my head a-buzz with insights gained from last week.  (I put some frogs in my story, and couldn't think how to use them, but now I think I see the solution.)

I am a lucky man.

Video Reviews with Kim Jong Un

Could Seth Rogen and James Franco trigger a conflict with North Korea? That's what Pyongyang says, calling the duo's upcoming film an "act of war."  In "The Interview," starring Franco as a TV host and Rogen as his producer, the two are sent to North Korea to assassinate supreme leader Kim Jong Un. "The act of making and screening such a movie that portrays the attack on our top leadership... is a most wanton act of terror and act of war, and is absolutely intolerable," a foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement cited by AFP. He also threatened a "resolute and merciless response" if the film is not banned by the U.S. government.  The statement was released via the official Korean Central News Agency, which last month called President Obama a "wicked black monkey." - Ed Mazza, The Huffington Post
Godfather III - After two great cinematic achievements, Director Copola, Screenwriter Mario Puzzo, and Star Al Pacino prove they are nothing better than wicked Italian lemurs who are well known for throwing feces at each other and for making inexcusably rotten movies like this one.  Everyone involved in this stinker shall face a lingering death.The Village - Frankly, I never really liked The Sixth Sense.  Everyone was like, "Jong Un, Jong Un, you've got to go see The Sixth Sense," but even though giving "spoilers" to a movie I haven't seen yet means certain death, I foresaw the ending almost from the opening scene.  I nearly started a nuclear war right then, but I watched the rest of the movie anyway and found it at least mildly entertaining.  But The Village!  What a stinker!  M Night Shyamalan - here we call him M Night Shamalama-ding-dong, ha-ha - is surely a notorious Indian orangutan for perpetrating this idiocy on the innocent public.  You don't know when, or where, Mr Shyamalan, but a massive can of whoop-ass retaliation is headed your way for this.The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, The Clone Wars, and The Star Wars Holiday Special - George Lucas used to be an sinister but ground-breaking little chimp.  Now he is just a sinister chimp who's become a billionaire pedaling this drek.  Enough said.  Your cities shall lie in ruins. 

What Was I Thinking?

Researchers, led by Martin Lotze of the University of Greifswald in Germany, observed a broad network of regions in the brain working together as people produced their stories. But there were notable differences between the two groups of subjects. The inner workings of the professionally trained writers in the bunch, the scientists argue, showed some similarities to people who are skilled at other complex actions, like music or sports.  - Carl Zimmer, The New York Times

Any of us in the field could've told Lotze writers have way complex brain activity and saved him the trouble and expense of all that research.  It's at least as complex as your typical outfielder.  I mean, watch an outfielder sometime; what is he thinking about?  Is he thinking at all?  Whereas, me, my brain is a beehive of activity.  (See?  I was thinking right there.  I briefly considered a "whirlwind of activity," and even more briefly, "a tilt-a-whirl," or possibly, "washer-dryer combo" of activity, but I went with the beehive which is the result of pure brain-work.)

Almost every area of my brain is activated while I write.  Some areas, of course, don't pull their weight, and I think they mostly just provide cushions for the workers.  Like the neo-cortex-quisquilae, which is responsible for reminding me to take down the garbage or wrap the cheese up to keep it from getting hard - that part of my brain seems to go completely dormant, if indeed it functions at all.  The temporal-campus-mutinium, which senses if I haven't pulled my zipper up, is another slacker.  I can't even tell you how much trouble the temporal-campus-mutinium has gotten me into.  But the rest of my brain is a regular tilt-a-whirl.  (See, that time I went with the tilt-a-whirl, the ol' brain was working again.)

Right now, there's the amygdyla-dorsi-digustibus, the part of the brain that thinks how good coffee tastes, and then there's the hippo-bottomus-clavicle, the part of the brain that's noticing my briefs are starting to ride up.  The prefrontal-latex will later activate telling me I could really go for a sandwich, and throughout the day my lower-celery-lobe will light up, helping me daydream about being interviewed by Charlie Rose or Terri Gross.

Right now, I'm experiencing difficulty with the lower-occipital-circumflex, which would provide a snappy ending for this blog.

Dang it, my briefs are riding up again. 

I Have Become a Lazy Dreamer

A Recent DreamI'm sorry to say that I've become a very lazy dreamer.  Some people dream in color, I barely even dream in black and white.  I've noticed that whenever possible the dream-projector in my head will turn off all the lights and save itself the trouble of coming up with scenery.  For example, last night I dreamt I was driving my car, and suddenly the windows fog up and I can't turn on the defroster, and it's night time on a street without lights, and needless to say, my headlights are off too.  In other words, total freaking dark.  This was not a dream where I wrecked the car - I felt perfectly safe, just slightly annoyed - but the main point was my dream-projector was saving batteries or whatever by coming up with a scenario where it didn't have to show me anything. It's the equivalent of a screenwriter saving himself effort by having two characters stare at each other in silence for an hour.  I wish this were something unusual, but it seems more and more common that my dreams take place in total blackness.  I used to look forward to dreams as a respite from my drab, colorless life, but no more.  While other people are dreaming of blue unicorns or yellow-spotted butterflies in top hats, I'm dreaming of dark closets or unlit basements.  I'm sure if I put my mind to it, I could have more visually interesting dreams, but that kind of spoils the point.  What's the point of sleeping if you have to work at it?

Don't Mess with Me, For I am a Bad-Ass

Don't mess with me, for I am a bad-ass.  Actually, a bad-ass probably would say, Don't mess with me because I'm a bad-ass, or better still, Don't mess with me; I'm a bad-ass, or even just, Don't mess with me.

Know why?

That's right.  I'm a bad-ass.

The other day, we were at a restaurant, and Nancy said, "Good Lord, what have you done to your napkin?  Look at your napkin, and look at my napkin."  I did.  Nancy's napkin still looked like a napkin.  Mine looked like it had been thrown into some sort of napkin-shredding-and-mutilating device.  That's what a bad-ass I am.  It's my little way of saying to the world, if you mess with me, I will mess you up, just like this napkin.

Then, later, that same day we were at another restaurant, and I was with Nancy and Spencer, and Spencer said, "Dad, what have you done to you napkin?"  We compared napkins, again, Nancy's and Spencer's still looked like napkins.  Mine looked like a napkin, too.  A napkin someone gave to a bad-ass.  I don't even care - one napkin or twenty-one, keep the napkins coming, is my motto, I'll ruin them all.  That's how you roll when you're a bad-ass like me.

And don't even get me started on rolls.  Nancy will eat her roll one bite at a time.  Not me.  I take my roll and tear it to pieces, just like it was a napkin.  My roll looks like some bad-ass stuck a tiny stick of dynamite in it and lit the fuse.  At the end of the meal, I've got crumbs not only on and around my plate and on the floor, but on the very seat I'd been sitting.  How it's possible to get crumbs under your butt even I don't know.  That's just how much of a bad-ass I am.

So don't mess with me.

Sisyphus Speaks of Rocks

So the first thousand years or so, phew, that was rough.  I really hated Monday.  And every day was a Monday.  "Monday, again?" is what I'd say.  "Same old rock, same old mountain, yeesh."  And then there's the tourists.  Everyone who comes down to Hades, is like, "Where's Sisyphus?" first thing, and they all come over to gawk.  Work's bad enough without having a bunch of people watch you do it.

The reason I got put here was I loved life too much, you know that?  Hades came to chain me up.  "Those are some nice chains you got there," is what I said.  "Mind showing me how they work?"  So he chained himself up to show me and I threw him in a trunk.  The gods are powerful, but they are DEE-YOU-EM, dumb.  The second time, I told my wife not to bury me.  "Just throw me in the public square," is what I said.  When I told Persephone how my corpse had been disrespected, she sent me back to give my wife a good scolding.  That little trick kept me from kicking the bucket a few more years.  But finally they got me, and here I am.  That's the thing about death.  You can put it off, and put it off, but you're going to die sooner or later, and once you die, you're dead forever.

So back to the rock.  That's kind of my motto, "Back to the rock."  Like I said, first thousand years or so, I was really pissed off.  I don't mind admitting I had a bad attitude in those days.  But little by little, I began to see things differently.  Did you know, for example, when you roll a rock uphill, there's a certain point it rolls all by itself?  I call that "the tipping point."  I started noticing I could get the rock to a certain point and it would just balance a second or two, before going over.  Of course, a lot depends on what part of the mountain it is.  It's a snap balancing a rock on the lower slopes where it's flatter, but near the peak, it takes real expertise.  But that's where it's really spectacular, this ginormous rock perched on tippy end like an egg on a mountainside that's almost sheer as a cliff.  I've gotten genuine gasps from the tourists with that one.

Then the other thing is rolling down hill.  Of course, once you let it go, the rock is out of your control, the trick is getting it in perfect position at the top.  I call this "teeing up."  What I like to do is tee it up so it goes in a zig-zag instead of just straight down.  Sometimes I can tee it up so it goes all the way around the mountain.  I call this the "loop-de-loo."  I've never gotten it to go around twice, but I've made it go around one and a half a few times.  

Then there's the rhythm.  I must've rolled the rock up two thousand, three thousand years before I began to appreciate the rhythm.  Your basic rhythm is BAM when the rock hits, that's the downbeat.  Then there's a silence just before the tipping point, and that's the upbeat, so you get a sort of BAM-de-BAM-de-BAM-de-BAM.  But you can mix it up by finding a low slope and making a BAM-diddy-BAM-diddy-BAM-diddy-BAM or on series of bumps it might just be BAM-BAM-diddy-BAM.  BAM-BAM-diddy-BAM.

Oh, goodness, listen to me yammer.  Don't get me started on rocks, I'll never shut up.  I get carried away, I guess.

If you love what you do, every day's a vacation.

Most People Believe What They Want to Believe

This is just the straight truth.  Say there's a man who makes a living upholstering electric chairs; well, he's got to be in favor of capital punishment, right?  I mean, that's his bread and butter, his livelihood; he can't very well go around saying the death penalty amounts to cruel and unusual punishment or the state has no more right to take a life than anyone else.  He'd be biting the hand that feeds him.  Or there's another guy, he puts those little red rings around the baloney slices, and you ask him what religion he thinks elephants are, and nine times out of ten, he'd say, "Hindu, I guess, I never thought about it," or else, "Get the hell away from me, are you crazy?"  But suppose his son was an elephant mohel, then he'd be like, "They're Jewish, of course.  Everybody knows that."  Suppose you ask a guy if parachutes made out of Bounty paper towels are practical.  Well, he's naturally going to say no, unless he's just been thrown out of a plane with nothing but a parachute made out of Bounty paper towels.  Then he's going to come back and say, "Why yes!  Paper towel parachutes are top-notch, and the very best brand is Bounty.  It's the quicker-picker-upper!"

So what you got to try to do is look around at all the stuff you believe.  Now anything that's inconvenient, like it'd be nice if it wasn't true but it is, like - "even if I flap my arms really hard and give myself a twenty-story head start, I won't be able to fly" - like that you know is a fact, because if it'd be a lot nicer to believe otherwise.  So things like, "I don't have the power of invisibility," or "it's a good idea to keep my mouth shut once in a while" - are almost certainly true because it's something you wouldn't want to believe unless you had to.  Where you get into trouble is the stuff that feels good to believe.  This is the stuff that maybe is just baloney if you thought about it seriously but you can't stop believing it because it feels so good to tell yourself it's true.  I won't give you any examples of what these things are, but they're exactly the things you like believing the most because maybe that's the reason you believe it in the first place.

And if you don't believe me... well, there you go.

Friday Morning Aruba

I got up at 6 AM to check emails and write this blog.  I had to move around pretty stealthily to avoid waking Nancy, but I managed to find my room key, computer, and clothes in the dark.  I can't get through a day - even a day in paradise - without checking my emails, etc.  (Even if I don't respond to them, I DO check them.)  Nancy and I even considered paying the usurious fee for access in the room, but we declined.  Nancy's been frustrated because her data plan means she can't access internet or post pictures to facebook from her smartphone.  Without that, her smartphone is basically just a phone.  And a camera.  It does take pictures, but what's the point of that if you can't post them to facebook?
When I got down to the lobby, I discovered the battery was low, so I had to scout for a place to plug my computer in.  I found an outlet poolside, and am sitting in a lounge typing this, straining my neck and back twisting to the side so the cord will reach.  It's somewhat uncomfortable, but there's nothing worse than having your screen go black in the middle of something.
The only other guy out here is at the far end, standing in the opposite corner, leaning over a rail and sneaking a smoke.  I guess it's something he needs to do regardless of how inconvenient.
Poor devil.
I'd hate to have a habit like that.

Common Core Nursery Stories

As states across the country implement broad changes in curriculum from kindergarten through high school, English teachers worry that they will have to replace the dog-eared novels they love with historical documents and nonfiction texts. The Common Core State Standards in English, which have been adopted in 46 states and the District, call for public schools to ramp up nonfiction so that by 12th grade students will be reading mostly “informational text” instead of fictional literature.  - Lyndsey Layton, Washington Post... and the Third Little Pig, who built his house of BRICKS, said, the TENSILE STRENGTH of STRAW, surprisingly high, at around 380, but the Izod Impact Test reveals a laughably low IMPACT STRENGTH, and that STRAW is especially prone to BUCKLING, FOULING, CREEPING, and FATIGUE.  TWIGS yield somewhat better results across the spectrum of strength tests, but they are uniquely prone to FRACTURE and STRESS-CORROSION CRACKING. Mortared BRICK has shown itself superior in all strength tests with the additional benefit of being flame-resistant, allowing me to have a fire place."... and Little Red Ridinghood opened the door and said, "You are not my grandmother at all, but a some manner of quadruped.  You are mammalian, but the similarity ends there.  For instance, my grandmother was - for I begin to guess that she is already dead - a female, whereas you, judging by the rudimentary development of your teats, are clearly male.  Your large sharp teeth - the better to tear meat with - indicate you are a carnivore, a surmise confirmed by the placement your forward-placing eyes - the better to see your prey.  Judging by these facts in conjunction with your large ears - the better to hear with - and your elongated muzzle, I see you are a wolf!"  And she ran out the door."... if you kiss me," the frog promised, "I will turn into a handsome prince and marry you."  "That seems hardly likely," the princess retorted.  "I am aware that frogs begin life as fish-like tadpoles, breathing through internal or external gills, and as they develop into mature frogs, acquire legs and lungs, and live partly on land.  But the process stops there, and in any case, no frog could turn into a mammal any more than a butterfly could become a parakeet."  "But I am no ordinary frog," the frog explained, "I'm an emblematic frog for the prepubescent aversion towards the exchange of bodily fluids, and a transitional device illustrating the interpersonal and societal rewards awaiting females who successfully overcome their initial revulsion."  "In that case, you are merely a metaphor," the princess exclaimed, "and a Freudian metaphor at that, and - as I well know - Freud has been thoroughly debunked by cognitive psychology."  And she smashed him with a heavy rock, not a metaphorical Freudian rock, but an actual rock made of actual granite, and that was the end of that.

Trendy Words

If there is one thing that stultifies a conversation, it is trendy words.  By trendy words I mean not only words that are in vogue with society at large, but words that are trending - as we say in googlespeak - in one's personal vocabulary.  Our friends and family say nothing about these verbal tics but await with creeping dread for us to trot out our personal favorites.

For my own part, I succumb not so much to trendy words as trendy phrases.  In the above paragraph, for example, the phrase "trot out."  I love saying that and trot it out whenever the opportunity presents itself.  The metaphor implies something is a kind of show pony, and no doubt has plaited ribbons in its mane.

Another phrase, and this is a jewel to me, is "I can't imagine what could possibly go wrong."  I use it right and left, whenever something is clearly about to go wrong - watching Nancy stick a fork into a toaster to retrieve a bagel for example.  This phrase never fails to get a chuckle.  From me.

A Reader's Digest kind of approach to improving one's conversation is to make a conscious effort to employ a new word at least three times in one's conversation.  This is invidious advice.  You might as well equip a sales manager with a post-hole digger.  The effort to use it is sure to result in its being misused.  Trotting out an unusual word is a crime of opportunity - there's another pet phrase of mine, "crime of opportunity," used in conjunction with "trotting out" for added topspin.  (Topspin, damn it, that's another one!)

The point I'm endeavoring to establish is that rather than the well-intentioned but misguided effort to use new words, we would be better off to avoid using old ones, or at least ones whose primary appeal was novelty and whose novelty has worn thin.  To demonstrate my seriousness about this, I hereby vow not to use the following phrases - "trot out" "I don't know what could possibly go wrong" "crime of opportunity" and "topspin."  It won't be easy, but that's the point.  Since I won't be able to fall back on my old tropes, I'll have to come up with new ones.  I'm working on one right now involving mastodons and ax-heads.

I'll let you know how it goes.