Man Martin's Blog, page 172

Edward Gorey and I

When I was seven years old, in the children's section of the Ft Pierce, Florida public library, I discovered the most wonderful, the most delightful, the most delicious book I had ever seen up to that time.  It was as if the angels had placed it on the shelves especially for me.  It was The Wuggly Ump by Edward Gorey.  It was a nursery rhyme about three children who spend their lives in idyllic play and a monster, the Wuggly Ump, in a distant land, who lives on umbrellas and carpet tacks.  There's a periodic refrain with variations, "Sing tiraloo, sing tiralay, the Wuggly Ump lives faraway."  Throughout the story, the Wuggly Ump draws closer and closer until finally it is upon them: "How uninviting are its claws, how even more so are its jaws."  The last page shows the Wuggly Ump resting comfortably, a broad smile on its face, a cut-away drawing of the belly showing the three children floating inside with the final line, "Sing tiraloo, sing tiralump, from deep inside the Wuggly Ump."

I loved it.

That same year, my mother had introduced me to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and I loved that book too, but as far as I was concerned The Wuggly Ump had it beat all to heck.  Max gets in trouble and goes on an adventure where he overawes and rules over an island of monsters, but after all, he returns safe and sound, and the "wild rumpus," as far as I can make out, is really just a dance.  But the Wuggly Ump eats the kids!  That was way more subversive than anything Sendak created.

And there was something about the drawings, too, and the writing.  At seven years old, I didn't know the Victorian Era from buttermilk pancakes, but even I sensed that though the book was clearly recent, there was something antique in the costumes and the wording that gave an essential charm to Gorey's twisted nursery rhyme.

There's a Saki story when Clovis tells his niece and nephew about a "horribly good" little girl who is eaten by wolves because she can't keep all her medals for comportment and penmanship from clanking together.  At the end of the narrative, Clovis' nephew says it was the most beautiful story he's ever heard.  The niece says it's the only beautiful story she's ever heard.  That's how I felt about The Wuggly Ump.

I knew this was a book I'd want to read again, so not knowing the Dewy Decimal System, I memorized its location on the shelf before I checked it out.  I read that book until I had fairly worn the pages through.  I returned it one Saturday and came back the next Saturday to check it out again.  But it was gone.

Oh, the things that children lose.  Jars of pennies and plastic soldiers, favorite toys and socks.  But of all the things I'd lost in my short life, none dismayed me so much as losing track of that book.  I searched the shelf where I knew it was supposed to be, the shelf above, and the shelf below.  All the shelves in the children's section.  Maybe another kid had found it and checked it out, but even then, my angry heart suspected what must have been the truth.  I came week after week and looked.  It was gone for good.

I am sure now, as I was sure then, that some officious parent - I can picture her now, because surely she was somebody's mother, a flabby woman with moist hands but without gallbladder or irony, had seen the book and complained to the librarian.

And so, Edward Gorey passed out of my life.

Many years later, another decade, in another state - Georgia, this time, where my school-teacher mother moved us after walking off her job during Florida's teacher's strike - I began seeing some very odd drawings in The National Lampoon.  The National Lampoon was full of odd drawings, but these were odd in a different way - they didn't seem to belong in the same category as S Gross or Gahan Wilson; they were Victorian-seeming, with beautiful, hand-lettered text.  One was about a woman who becomes possessed by the devil and winds up in Hell, "The end had come, and this was it.  He threw her in the flaming pit."
I'd long since forgotten The Wuggly Ump and didn't recognize the author's name, but then I bought an anthology of Edward Gorey's work, Amphigorey, and there at the back was The Wuggly Ump!  The triumph, like finding the long-lost jar of pennies or the tin box of toys once secreted in a hollow tree, "It's the guy!"  I said.  "It's the guy!"

Gorey wrote over a hundred books designed the animation for PBS' Mystery and won a Tony for costume design in the Broadway version of Dracula.  Whenever I feel mopey for my lot - the struggle to gain recognition and readers - I think of Edward Gorey and take heart.  And I want to pass this along to my fellow writers and to everyone who toils without recognition in the vineyards of art.  Remember Gorey and take heart.

He didn't just march to the beat of his own drummer; it was the beat of a zither or a harpsichord or some unheard-of instrument no one has ever seen.  What a madman he must have been, to be born and live all his life in the US, leaving the country only once, but deciding to write and draw like an Edwardian Englishman, and to write such books and expect anyone to ever publish them - the painstaking delicate cross-hatching that fills the page with dark shapes, the odd nonsensical imagery!  But he went ahead, indifferent to what anyone else was doing.  He died in 2000 having spent a lifetime producing precisely the sort of art he chose.  He said, "If you're doing nonsense, it has to be rather awful, because otherwise there'd be no point...  Sunny funny nonsense for children.  How boring, boring, boring."

How true.  God bless you, Edward Gorey, God bless you.

Nancy Out of Town, Day FIve: The Post Mortem

Figure 1: House in reasonable orderNancy's flight comes in today.  I'll meet her at the airport, and we'll go to a restaurant we like for maybe some fried oysters and margaritas.  Frankly, the most difficult part of her absence was coming up with these darn blogs; not that I blame you, dear reader, but I mean, how many different things can you find to write about when it comes to straightening the house?  Nancy won't come home to a palace of gleaming floors and sparkling counter tops, but even with the two of us, the house is apt to deteriorate a smidge during the weekdays.  The truth is, housekeeping is not nearly so arcane or difficult as husbands sometimes like to make out.  My eighty year-old father-in-law swears he does not know how to operate a washing machine.  He will stand before a pair of dials clearly labeled things like "large load" "small load" and "wash" as perplexed as if before a helicopter cockpit.

Figure 2: Airplane Figure 3: Oysters and MargaritaThe thing foremost in my mind, right now, however, is Nancy.  Because I suddenly realize how much I'm looking forward to seeing her.  It's the strange thing about missing someone; when she's gone, I don't spend the silent hours gazing at her photograph with tear-filled eyes, but the thought that I'll see her in just a few hours makes my - oh, lord, this will sound so corny, so forgive me, but this is an actual, verifiable physiological fact - my heart beats just a little quicker.  Not a lot quicker, not like I've been running wind-sprints or something, but I can feel it right now.

So to recap.  House, not perfect but acceptable.  Tonight, oysters and margaritas.  Pulse, a little quicker.  Nancy, coming home.

Nancy Out of the House, Day Four: Pierogies

My buddy and coworker Mike Burr, having learned I'm a bachelor for the week, took me aside, and said, "One word: pierogies."  Yesterday he presented me with the most delicious pierogies hand-made by his wife, Molly, who is as gracious and lovely as she is brilliant and charming, and who - to boot - is a dynamite cook.  I will not unduly torment you with a description of a delicacy which you will not be allowed to taste, for like the Walrus in the poem, I've eaten them every one.  Suffice to say they were stuffed with mushrooms and served with delicate onions, cut into thin strips and sauteed just to the point that onions turn sweet.

Lordamighty, but they were good.  The saying you can't eat your cake and have it too applies with equal force to pierogies, and I wish I had one now as I write this.

The point I want to make, though, is that this is just one more illustration of why it's so much better being a man than a woman.  Sorry ladies, I hope you won't take offense, but that's just the way it is.  If Nancy's away for a week, friends press homemade pierogies on me, but if I'm gone for an extended period, I highly doubt anyone comes up to Nancy and says, "Man's out of town.  I'll bring you over some lasagna.  Or stuffed grape leaves.  Or shish-ka-bob.  Or whatever."  No, if a man's away from the house, everyone pretty much leaves the woman to fend for herself, assuming it's actually easier for her to get along without him than otherwise.  In fact, they would be hard-pressed to think of what service to offer to make up for my absence.  "Would you like to come over and sit my fat ass in front of the tv for awhile?"  "Want me to come in a track wheat straw covered and chicken crap on the carpet?"

All this points to the low expectations for the survival abilities of the typical American male and being a typical American male myself, I say, "Goody."  I return now to my thesis: it's better being a man than a woman.  From what I've witnessed, being a woman seems like more or less perpetual drudgery punctuated by occasional pregnancies.  Being a man is a piece of cake.  It's better than a piece of cake.  It's a pierogie.

Nancy Out of the House, Day Three: Right-Angles

I continue to hold down the fort in reasonable form halfway into the week.  The house is perhaps not the gleaming pristine showplace it is under Nancy's care.  From my station in a couch where I write this, I behold this or that out of place.  My light board, on which I draw the whimsical illustrations to adorn this blog, sits slightly askew on the table to my left.  An open bag of Sun-Maid Raisins sits behind it.  A basket of folded laundry sits on the sofa opposite me.  (The laundry is folded, note that.)  The accumulated junk mail and bills sit in a pile on the kitchen island behind me.

This stage of relative disrepair I count as complete victory; I am the Alexander the Great of housekeeping.

Really at this stage, all that is required is to set everything at right angles to some other thing.

Isn't that remarkable?  Take an unsightly pile of credit card offers and past-due bills stacked in a heap.  Ugly, isn't it?  Untidy?  Simply rearrange them so their corners touch and place them parallel to the edge of whatever surface you have them stacked upon, and voila!  Instant order.  Ditto for the random assemblage of stuff on the coffee table before me.  The light board and raisin-bag I have alluded to already, but there is also a box of tissues, an iPad, and a Bible.  I use the Bible in preparation for Sunday school class, and right now the light board is sitting on top of it.  In the region of Georgia I was raised in, setting anything on top of the Bible was a ticket straight to aitch-ee-double-hockey-sticks, but I'm more concerned now with the wrath of Nancy than the wrath of God.)

As an experiment, I paused in my blog-writing and put my theory into effect.  Now all the items on the coffee table are arranged in a straight line.  The light board, the Bible (on top of it is a book of Isaac Bashevis Singer stories I'd overlooked, sandwiched as they were between the Bible and light board) three remotes, the aforesaid bag of raisins, the iPod, and the Kleenex.  I have imposed an unmistakable order on the items; it is the order of a madman, true, an order that conforms to no logic but the inner voices of a schizophrenic, but it is clearly order.  Likewise, the pile of junk mail is a pile no longer; it is plainly a stack.  Everything sits squarely, arranged in size from catalogs on the bottom to postcards on top.

One thing I neglected to mention earlier was a jar of black plaka - a sort of watercolor.  I took this into the office.  There I saw in merry disarray, a book of Escher prints, another book by Heinrich Kley, the magnifier from my OED sitting on a drawing by Charles Bragg, and numerous loose papers with various renditions of a dragonfly with a motorcycle engine for an abdomen (don't ask).  I placed the plaka on the desk, turned off the light, and quietly closed the door behind me.

Even Alexander the Great got no farther than India.

Nancy Out of the House: Day Two. Making the Bed

As I said I would do in my previous blog, I went so far yesterday in my orgy of cleanliness, I even made the bed.

A word here about making beds in the Martin household.

Our bed has six pillows.  Nancy and I, except on rare occasions the dog is permitted to join us, as during a thunderstorm, are the only occupants.  We use one pillow apiece.  Zoe does not use a pillow at all.  The other four pillows are there purely for decoration.  When I asked Nancy why we are required to have three times as many pillows as we use, she responded that the headboard is a type that needs additional pillows.

The guestroom's headboard is also evidently of this sort because it also has six pillows.  Two of these could never be mistaken for actual pillows at all being diamond-shaped and upholstered with a shiny fabric, that while pretty, does not tempt one to rest one's weary head upon it.


Before retiring for the night, we must carefully lay the pillows on the floor, and then in the morning we must reassemble them on the bed.  These pillows, being multicolored must be placed just-so, to create what I confess is a not-displeasing layered look.

I suppose the idea is to create an image of sumptuous opulence like a sultan's palace where harem girls loll about all day eating grapes and being fanned by eunuchs.  The problem is, when you get in the bed, you discover all you want is the usual allotment of pillows, the angle from head to shoulder blade being sized to accommodate precisely one.

This extra-pillow syndrome seems related to the disease that compels some people to place out bowls of plastic fruit.  Doesn't it look delicious?  Don't you feel welcome, with this tantalizing bowl of fruit offering itself to you?  No one was ever taken in by one of those plastic apples, but the cluster of grapes was strangely realistic to touch as well as sight; does there live a soul who didn't squeeze one in the hope that real actual grapes had smuggled their way in among the fake ones?

Thank goodness in our house this infection is thus far confined to the bedroom.  What if couches were stacked with surplus cushions that had to be removed when sitting and carefully rearranged upon arising?  Guest towels, fancy embroidered monstrosities that even guests are afraid to use, thank heaven, are absent from the Martin abode, but imagine if the toilet "required" three rolls of toilet paper, two of which were unusable for the traditional purpose and had to be carefully set aside and then rearranged each time you went to the bathroom.

There is still much to be grateful for in this world.

Nancy Out of the House: Day One

Nancy is away on business this week.  This is always a perilous time for yours truly because the household tends to degenerate at a rather quickish pace without her around.  I will not go so far as to say wharf rats take up residence amid the flyblown piles of laundry, but then again, Nancy has never been gone more than a week at a time.

At the moment, I am proud to say, the house looks not half-bad.  After dropping Nancy at the airport, I made myself a wholesome dinner of baked chicken, green beans, and corn on the cob.  I ate dinner and watched reruns of The  Tudors and drew a bit.  (I'm working on an illustrated novella; my concept is that the illustrations will having nothing to do with the narrative.  What do you think of that idea?)  After supper I put my dishes in the dishwasher, the scraps in the compost bin, and the leftovers in the refrigerator.  I also made myself a nutritious lunch.

Reviewing my accomplishments, I am so seized with the fire of ambition, I may even make the bed this morning.

I deserve some recognition for this.  I deserve praise.  Maybe a medal.

"But," I hear the you nit-pickers out there picking nits, "Nancy does this all the time without any prompting or special acknowledgement whatsoever.  Nancy, in fact, does it far better, for if you inspect carefully, you will see the sinks are not as gleaming as they might be, and hither and yon a popcorn kernel's snowy head peeps out from beneath the furniture."

This may be true, but unlike Nancy, I labor under a terrible impediment that makes this accomplishment as remarkable as John Goodman running a marathon.

I'm me.

Missing the SuperBowl

I don't know what's wrong with me lately.  Yesterday was Groundhog Day.  Did you realize that?  I didn't send any Groundhog cards, put up the Groundhog wreath, or anything.  And now, I'm going to miss the SuperBowl.

Well, I can't really claim I'm going to miss it.  A more accurate description would be that I'm deliberately going to avoid watching it.  I would not even be remotely aware of it except the internet has been bombarding me with news features on all the interesting ads that are going to be on.  This literally seems to be a show where people will ask each other Monday morning, "Did you see the commercials?"  The advertisers have started advertising their advertisements.  And the ads that won't be showing receive just as much or more attention as the ads that will.  I honestly don't know who's playing today, but I do know Kate Upton has soap bubbles in one hand.  I believe she's advertising a car.  I'm pretty sure it's a car.  I don't think it's soap.

It's old news that the SuperBowl is the most valuable commercial time on the planet: nor is it some shocking new trend that advertisers conflate sex, sports, and whatever they're selling to move the product.  A nerd kissing a pretty girl has nothing to do with Go Daddy, but so what?  Go Daddy will make a joke of the very premise, but in the meantime, it will show you a picture of a nerd kissing a pretty girl.  The SuperBowl ad has become a major cultural event in the US.  As I say, none of this is any news.  And yet the news is full of it, and will be full of it all next week.

Oh, well.  I'll just have to be out of touch.  Again.

Next year, though, I'll do better.  I'm tired of being out of the loop.  Next year, Groundhog Day falls on Sunday, February 2.

I've already got my calendar marked.

Everyone Should Just Relax

So these NASA scientists come over, waking me up out of a nice nap, and what they all want to know is, "What are we going to do about this asteroid?"

Quick as a wink, my lightning-fast brain springs into action, and I come back with, "What the hell are you talking about?"

Turns out Asteroid-2012-D14 is going to swing by the earth the middle of the month.  And I said, "D14, did you say D14?  You mean D15, don't you?"

No, they said, it was definitely D14.  This put me in a pickle, I can tell you.  If you know anything about asteroids, you know we have nothing to worry about from Asteroid 2012-D15.  D15's just a big ol' teddy bear, as far as I'm concerned.  Now, it's not an actually teddy bear, you understand, it's still made of rock and ice just like any other asteroid, but it's a nice asteroid.  It wouldn't hurt a fly.

But D14.  Whoa, Nellie.

D14 is the kind of asteroid that if Darth Vaader, Godzilla, the Terminator, and that crab-faced dude from Predator saw it, they'd all be like, "Uh-oh."  To start with, it's the size of a football field.  That's the way it is with asteroids; if they're any decent size at all, it's always the size of a football field.  It's never the size of a badminton court or a bowling alley or a ping-pong table; no, it's always the size of a football field.  Second, it's headed straight for us.

Admittedly, the phrase "straight for us" is sort of misleading, because out in space, nothing really heads straight for anything. The straightest anything travels is about as straight as an eighty-year old with bad nerves piloting a soap-box derby car with a loose steering wheel.  Nevertheless, it's going to come within 17,000 miles of earth.  This does not sound like a big deal perhaps, but the moon is ten times farther away than that, and think of the enormous effect it has on earth, what with tides, menstrual cycles, werewolves, and what-not.

So this asteroid the size of a football field is coming closer than the satellite that tells your GPS the way to the Kwickie Mart.  And it's the size of a football field.  D14 is similar in size to the one that hit Tunguska, Siberia 50,000 years ago.

"But," you say, "Tunguska, Siberia doesn't exist."

Exactly.

So the scientists showed me their charts and after careful study and looking on Wikipedia, I calculated D14 will pass by on February 15.  At this point I shook my knuckly fist at the ceiling, "Curse you, Asteroid 2021-D14!" I said.  February 15 is the worst possible time. If it was February 14, I wouldn't have to worry about dinner reservations for Valentine's Day, but now there's no getting out of it.  Worse yet, knowing that the next day the cities of the earth will be razed and smoking ruins and that bands of lawless humans, reduced to crude barbarism, will roam the countryside looking for canned goods and easy victims will put a damper on the whole evening.  How can I enjoy my "Chocolate Volcano" dessert, knowing this may be my last night on earth?

Sighing in a manly way, I shook my head.  Here's what I told the scientists.  "Tell the news agencies and everyone they should just relax.  Asteroid 2012-D14 definitely will not hit the earth."  I shushed them before they could interrupt.  "I know, I know, it's a lie, but tell them anyway.  The asteroid will either hit the earth or else it won't."  This seemed to cover all options.  "If it doesn't hit the earth, fine.  Everything's ok, and no one's any the wiser.  If it does hit the earth, well BLOOEY.  In that case, it's game over, and you'd all be out of a job anyway, so it won't matter.  You'll be roaming nomads looking for canned goods and victims just like the rest of us."

"But here's the thing," I cautioned them.  "No one must breathe a word of the truth.  As far as everyone out there is concerned, Asteroid 2012-D14 represents no more threat than a dryer sheet."  We all pinky-swore: no news leaks, no Facebook posts, no telling.
...

Oops.

Stinkin' Rich

Ken Wilman was walking his dog along Morecambe beach when the canine became interested by what Wilman initially thought was a large, smelly rock.  Little did he know that the big, stinky lump might fetch him a small fortune. Wilman rushed back to the beach after a web search revealed the identity of his find.  The rare, waxy substance is believed to originate in the digestive tracts of sperm whales. Ambergris is highly valued by perfumers as a fixative and can fetch tidy sums.  Chris Hill, curator at the Aquarium of the Lakes in Cumbria,valued Wilman's ambergris at up to $180,000. - Andres Jauregui, The Huffington Post

Dear Potential Investor:As you are aware, there are 47 documented whales in captivity, and single block of whale vomit, known as ambergis, is worth over $150,000.The only challenge is getting whales to vomit on command, but each challenge is an obstacle in disguise.  Thus far we have attempted every conventional means of inducing vomit.  We have tickled their glottis with a broomstick, we have made them drink dishwater, we have fed them ice cream and cake and then spun them on giant merry-go-rounds, we have made them watch back-t0-back episodes of Parenthood.  None of this has worked.We know what you are thinking - did you try feeding them dishwater, ice cream, and cake, then spinning them on a merry-go-round and making them watch Parenthood while tickling their glottis with a broomstick all at the same time?  We tried that, too.  Nothing.
This is where you come in; with your seed money, we will fund the production of high-quality magazines, television shows, and movies, all geared at the Cetacean market.  These will prominently feature svelte, toned marine mammals with unbelievably narrow waists and slim thighs, or whatever you call the portion of a whale's anatomy where the thigh would be.  Naturally, images of "supermodel" whales will take massive amounts of air-brushing and computer enhancement to seem realistic.  From infancy onward, each generation of captive whales will be bombarded with these images, convincing them that the "right" way for a whale to look is represented by these ludicrously distorted images, and that the natural whale body is fat and unattractive.
We will introduce dieting and exercise schemes to "assist the whales" reach their weight goals, but of course, this will be deliberately designed to be not only arduous, but ineffective.  Each token weight loss of a few hundred pounds - we're talking about whales, here, remember - will be followed by a corresponding weight gain; meanwhile the tantalizing images of hyper-slim whales continue to goad them onward.  After their inevitable weight-loss set-backs, we will provide the whales ample access to cookie-dough ice-cream and chocolate brownies, foods that will not only provide a temporary sense of comfort, but will complete undo, and indeed reverse, any weight-loss.
Soon the whales will establish a frustrating cycle of weight loss and gain, at which point, we need only wait for them to take the inevitable next step.
Some people will laugh and say, "Who ever heard of a bulimic whale?"  There are those who see things as they are and ask "Why?" and others who see them as they might be and ask "Why not?"  To restate the statistics; a single chunk of ambergis is worth over $150,000.  There are forty-seven documented whales in captivity.  A typical human bulimic purges two times per week.  This represents a potential profit of $131,000,000 per week, or over $6,550,000,000 annually.
We await your check.
Sincerely,
Arthur "Ahab" HoffstaederCEO OrcaPuke, Inc

Figures of Speech - Where Do They Come From, and When Will They Leave?

Where did we get all these strange figures of speech we use nowadays?  Those things that everyone says but don't make any sense, like, "a penny saved is a penny earned," or "you can't tell a book by its cover."  What is meant by "earning" a penny, and for that matter, what is a "book"?  Well, a long time ago when people weren't as modern and up-to-date as we are now, but were planning to get there some day, they sat around together making up the language.  "If we're ever going to amount to anything," they said to each other,  "we're going to need us some handy sayings we can throw around to fill in the gaps of conversation."  This was especially important in an era before TV when there wasn't anything interesting to talk about.  So they made up all those funny little phrases we still use today even though now, thank goodness, our lives are so much more interesting we really don't need to say them any more or even, when you get right down to it, talk.

In case you're interested, here's a few of these "figures of speech" and their origins.  If you're not interested, there's a figure of speech involving the horse you rode in on you might want to look up.

The Whole Nine Yards

You might guess it has to do with football, but it doesn't.  A whole football field is a lot bigger than nine yards; it's twelve or thirteen yards, depending on whether you're playing American-style football, or South Carolina-style.  Actually, the original saying was "Hold My Nyards."  It doesn't make any more sense than the way we say it now, but that's where it came from.

Never Look a Gift-Horse in the Mouth.

In the Oklahoma territory, farmers left gunpowder on the ground and sometimes even whole sticks of dynamite which they used when they were going fishing.  Unsuspecting horses would graze and sometimes eat the explosives.  This made looking into the mouth of any horse, not just a gift horse, very dangerous because, well, BOOM!  This also made it dangerous looking a gift-horse in the butt-hole, but for some reason there wasn't a saying about that.

A Stitch in Time Saves Nine

There's a funny story associated with the origin of this saying involving Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and a Tory sympathizer named Jacob Mutts.  Unfortunately, I can't remember it.



A Watched Pot Never Boils

At first glance, this doesn't even make sense.  Of course a watched pot boils, just the same as any other pot, as anyone who's ever watched a boiling pot can attest.  The original saying is "A boiled watch never tocks,"  which is why people don't boil watches any more.