Man Martin's Blog, page 190

Power Napping for the Twenty-First Century

I think whoever came up with the concept of Power Napping was a marketing genius.  This way I'm a mover and shaker when I fall into a temporary coma in the middle of the afternoon, snoring like a dog on a...  Okay, I stepped out into the middle of that simile and it gave out on me, so suffice to say I was snoring really loud.  In any case, Power Napping has run its course, and we need some follow-up ideas.

Power Dripping:
Top news personalities know keeping your face photo-shop perfect 24/7 is just a recipe for ultimate failure, which is why once in a while you should just let go with a go old stream of nose honey.


Power Picking:
You can't hope to provide universal health care and rescue a teetering world economy if you got a big ol' itchy goober up there.  There's a time when even a good environmentalist supports exploratory drilling.






Power Farting:
OK, I don't really have a reason to believe Ryan is farting in this picture, but he looks like he might be farting, and it wouldn't be right to do a picture with Obama and not a Republican.

What "They Might Be Giants" Taught Me About Writing

So.  They Might Be Giants is about a delusional former lawyer (George C Scott) who believes he's Sherlock Holmes.  He follows clues in a manic fashion, like Batman in the old TV show, interpreting a thrown-away bag with the words "Back to School" on it as a sign that he needs to look for a school run by someone named "Bagg."  That sort of thing.  He can't seem to accept that the evil and cruelty peppering our lives is just random happenstance, but thinks it must be the result of an evil genius, a foe worthy of attack: ie, Moriarty.  You can't mistake that Moriarty is Satan, a principality terrible in both senses of the word, a being of pure malevolence, but not without a sort of grandeur.  And Holmes is a bit of a Christ figure - seemingly healing everything he touches, and asking at one point of self-doubt, "Who do you think I am?" a question Jesus put to disciples and Pharisees alike.
Holmes falls under the treatment of a psychiatrist named - wait for it - Dr. Watson - played by Joanne Woodward.  He draws her into his delusional world, and they set off on a series of escapades, silly but fraught with deeper meaning, blah blah blah.
It's the ending I want to talk about.

At the end, Holmes and Watson are staring into a black tunnel late at night, awaiting the appearance of Moriarty himself.  Holmes says he sees him, and stands, "Not on my knees," he says.  Watson (Woodward) is still kneeling, and cries that she can't see or hear anything.  The film cuts to the tunnel, still dark and empty as a skull's eye socket.  Holmes tells Watson to stand, which she does, still mourning that she sees nothing.  She wants to believe.  Then she says she can hear Moriarty.  We hear it too, hoof beats.  Back to the tunnel, as dark and empty as before.  Holmes points, can you see him?  Can you see him?  And Watson responds in fear, hope, and love that she can.  At this point they hold hands and the credits roll.  The audience has seen nothing but an empty tunnel and heard hoof beats that may be imaginary or may just be an ordinary person approaching on horseback.  (The location is a riding school, I forgot to mention.)
Why is this ending so important to me?
Let's start by noting that audiences, whether they be readers or viewers, are half-sold on fantasy already.  Coleridge called it the willing suspension of disbelief, but it's stronger than that.  It's a positive appetite for belief.  We know we're about to be lied to, we go in expecting to be lied to, wanting to be lied to, and are only disappointed if the lie isn't a good one.  We know Huck Finn and Humbert Humbert don't exist.  So convincing the audience of a lie isn't much of a trick, the audience arrives pre-convinced.
It gets just a little bit tricky when you wink at the audience and say maybe I'm lying, maybe I'm not.  Is there such a place as Oz, or is it only Dorothy's dream?  In literature, no one I know of plays this game better than Nabokov, but I'm going to stick with movies because that's what I started with.
Here's some movies that play a little bit of is-this-a-lie or is-it-not legerdemain: The Sting, The Wizard of Oz, The In-Laws, The Gods Must Be Crazy, and They Might Be Giants.  I have arranged them in ascending order of how well I judge they handle this delicate conjuring trick.
First of all, The Sting.  It is a fun movie, but the ending is a flat cheat.  We discover that the director has deliberately lied to us about what was going on, that in a movie about con-artists and patsies, the ultimate patsy was the audience itself.  We don't care, though, because we have been so thoroughly charmed by Newman and Redford; like any great confidence trick, afterwards we don't even blame the guys who rooked us.
The Wizard of Oz is another cheat; Dorothy has these wonderful adventures, wakes up and - it was all a dream. Again, the film is so delightful we don't mind, and besides, the dream is true for Dorothy, and there is something genuine gained.  (A lesser film maker would have included some incongruous bit of corroborative detail, a red sequin from the ruby slippers, say, to make us wonder if it were really a dream, but that would just be muddying the issue.)
Then we have The In-Laws, which is entertaining, neither as great as Oz or Gods, but has the upper hand in that it is a good, honest, straight-forward lie, instead of an outright flim-flam or a dream.  A lot of stories fall into this range, for example, The Sixth Sense or Rear Window.  Basically, it works like this - there's a character who says something that is palpable nonsense - I'm a CIA agent, there's a giant gelatinous blob eating the town, the next door neighbor is a killer.  And then, it turns out, a wonderful thing! the lie is true after all.  The liar turns out to be a truth-teller, the fool a wise man, and the lunatic sane.
With The Gods Must Be Crazy, we enter into the higher realms of epistemology and metaphysics.  In one of the interwoven stories Xi the bushman must find the end of the world to throw away a coke bottle.  The audience sitting in the air-conditioned theater eating greasy popcorn and iced soda, so totally disbelieves the world has an end it doesn't give it a second thought, but then - at the end of the movie - Xi arrives at the edge of the world!  We instantly reconcile ourselves that what Xi is standing at a cliff, so misty below that he can't see the other side, or whatever valley or sea is below, but to Xi, it is a the end of the world and he is satisfied and so are we, in a deliciously dissatisfied way.  For Xi, his lie is true, but we are left to see that our own truths are the lies we happen to believe, lies that may not be as beautiful or profound as Xi's.
Finally They Might Be Giants.  I ask you to refer back to the ending of the movie as already described.  The point is that the audience knows it is not Moriarty.  We are left in the position of Joanne Woodward before she rises to her feet - wanting to believe, hoping to believe, but still suffering disbelief, envious and wanting to join the lucky ones who do believe, and still hoping we will believe.
If you can bring your audience to that precise edge, where they hunger to believe the lie even as they still know it is a lie, not one step further nor one step back, you have done something rare indeed.  And something worth doing.

What George C Scott Taught Me About Writing

As Buck Turgidson in Dr StrangeloveThe other night, Nancy and I watched They Might Be Giants, with George C Scott and Joanne Woodward.  Actually, I watched it and Nancy went to bed two minutes before the ending.  I guess I have a soft spot for that movie because I watched it for the first time with my sister Nettie in Sandersville, Georgia.  I don't know if Nettie remembers that movie, but it blew us away at the time.  It occurred to me what an under-rated actor George C. Scott is.  Of course, his big film was Patton, and that is a great film, but lest we forget, he was also in Dr. Strangelove, and a couple of minor gems - The Flim-Flam Man and They Might Be Giants and a host of deservedly forgotten things like The Exorcist III.  He was also a director as well as a Broadway star, but the question I keep asking myself is why he wasn't bigger.  And part of the answer, I think, is because he was big.  He was big with a kind of John-Wayne bigness, with a nose that looked like he was no stranger to a fist-fight and a permanently arched eyebrow that looked like you weren't taking him in for a second.  He was so big, he couldn't fit into just a first and last name, but needed a middle initial.  It's unthinkable that you would have called him just George Scott.  During rehearsals for a play Scott was directing, Maureen Stapleton told a fellow actor, "I don't know what to do with him, I'm terrified of him," and the answer came back, "My dear, everyone's terrified of George C Scott."  So you have this big guy with a gravelly voice but who's also got this manic gleam in his eye, that he could never quite quench.  Put simply, he looked crazy, but not crazy in a charming Johnny Depp way, but dangerous crazy with muscles.  It made him perfect for Patton, or General Buck Turgidson, or Justin Playfair who imagines he's Sherlock Holmes, but he was never like James Stewart or Tom Hanks, who seem to be able to pour themselves into a role like water filling a glass, and be whatever the director wants.  Nor could he be the kind of matinee idol like Cary Grant or George Clooney who play themselves in film after film and are adored for it.  He had too many strange angles and protruding joists to fit into many roles, but the roles he fit, no one could do better.
That's what he taught me.
He never seemed to worry about who he was - and that sort of self-assurance is also terrifying to the rest of us poseurs - he just did the thing, the one thing, he was born to do, and did it in such a way there was no substitute.
God bless you, George C Scott.

Mortality and Knock-Out Roses

Nora Ephron died recently and NPR played clips from an interview with her.  She talked about aging and how when you're young you secretly imagine that somehow you will be the one person who won't need glasses, who won't turn gray, who won't grow old.  Then when you discover that you too are riding on Mother Nature's conveyor belt, you smack your head and wonder how you could have had so little imagination - that you never imagined yourself as old.
Right now I'm 53.  Not old, but on the cusp of old.  I can see old from where I stand.
My hair, what remains of it, is turning gray.  My body, once my obedient servant, is now revolting in a number of ways big and small.  (I know revolting has a double meaning; I intend it both ways.)  It dawns upon me - and dawn is such a strange choice of word here - that I really will - this is incredible! - share the fate of all mankind - of Plato and Plutarch, of Aristophanes and Nora Ephron.  I will die.  And once I'm dead, I'll be dead forever.

When this understanding breaks upon you, you have two choices.  You can either sink into yourself in fear and trembling, withdraw from the world, like a man made of glass in a planet of falling bricks - or realize the almost unendurable sweetness and beauty of life and almost pity the young who still imagine their time is infinite and so can be squandered.
Here's some pictures from our garden.  I have, I reckon, maybe twenty summers left.  Oh my lord, the world is so lovely.

An Open Letter to Mars

Dear Mars:
Some say you are a lifeless ball of rock and sand, too cold and dry to ever support life in any form.
I certainly hope so.
If you do have life up there, you're pretty much screwed.
I don't know if they have screwing where you are, or if you can understand how this might be an idiom for something really, really bad happening to you, but screwing is how we earthlings create new earthlings.  Earthlings find this process very pleasurable and do a lot of it, which is why right now there are over seven billion of us down here, which coming back to my main point, is a big part of the reason we are so screwed in the first place.
Landing on your planet was a major accomplishment for us.  After traveling 104 million miles, a device which cost us billions of dollars, had to slow down from 13,000 mph to 2 mph in seven minutes, then transform itself into a crane and lower the "rover" the last twenty-five feet to the surface.  The rover's name is "Curiosity."  Here on earth we have a saying about curiosity and cats, and while I'm absolutely certain you don't have cats up there, it's a very troubling saying vis-a-vis your getting screwed.  It should tell you something that we spent all this time, effort, and money to get off our own planet, even if it was only a robot. We deliberately landed in a crater, because we knew if there were any signs of microbial life at all, that's where they'd be.  So if you were thinking of hiding from us, forget it.
Meanwhile, what can I tell you about us?  Recently we had a world-wide contest in which our strongest, fastest, and most agile specimens showed how strong, fast, and agile they were.  One in particular is very beautiful by our standards and extremely young, and was able to throw her body around in the air and twirl and spin and land in ways that would take your breath away, assuming you can breathe.  She was criticized for her hair.
Also in the news, a young earthling, who seems to have been very gifted intellectually, went into a crowded building with semi-automatic weapons and shot at the people inside even though they'd done nothing to harm him and were only there in the first place to entertain themselves.  Their entertainment was watching professional actors pretend to shoot and pretend to be shot at with semi-automatic firearms as well as other weapons.  In an unrelated incident another man went into a another crowded building to shoot at people who had not harmed him.  One of our earthling law enforcement agencies is investigating this matter because the crime will be considered more serious if it turns out the shooter hated them.  The people in this second building were there to worship God which is part of the reason the shooter may have hated them.
Perhaps you don't worship God up there and don't know what I'm talking about; God is a being who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good.  Almost everyone here believes in God.  Everyone seems to agree God is Love, but we we still have many profound theological disagreements.   For example, some people say that God hates it when people of the same sex screw each other, perhaps because you can't make new earthlings that way which they say is why God may have invented screwing in the first place.  Other people say God hates it when people try to stop people from screwing regardless of whether this might create earthlings because they say God made them this way, and screwing is an act of love, and God is Love.  You see how complicated this is. Somehow all this means that I must either eat as many fried chicken sandwiches as possible or else I must not eat any fried chicken sandwiches at all.
If you are capable of reading at all, and if you do read this, by now you realize how deeply screwed you are that we have arrived on your planet, even if only in robotic form.  The best I can hope for you is that you have no life at all on your planet.  As for the other planets out there, and the other solar systems with planets, we on earth have an insatiable curiosity, and if there's any life elsewhere in the universe, we will not rest until we have found it.
Be warned.
Sincerely,
Man Martin

Provide, Provide!

The title of this post is a poem by Robert Frost. in which he sardonically advises to become as rich as possible so you don't face old age and death alone.  It reads in part:

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide! 

The other day Nancy and I visited her Uncle Morgan.  He's in an Extended Care Facility, the sort of place that used to be called a Nursing Home before they came up with a nicer euphemism.  He is not well.
We turned off the TV, which is always on, and Nancy read to him from the Bible, which he seemed to enjoy.  I have observed these things about dying:
It is usually painful and often confusing.  It is terribly lonely.
In addition to Frost's admonition to lay aside a fat nest egg, here's what I suggest:
This is the world's worst reason to have children, but have children.  Uncle Palmer has no children, which exacerbates the loneliness issue.  Also have as many friends as possible.  Be as good as possible to as many people as possible.  Do extraordinary acts of kindness for people.  Don't outlive them.
This is the world's worst reason to have a religion, but have a religion.  I wish I could show you how Uncle Palmer's face lit up as Nancy read from Paul's letters.  My own faith is about as strong as sodden tissue paper, but seeing his makes me wish it were stronger.
After visiting Uncle Palmer, we visited his wife, Nancy's Aunt Wilda, who's in Hospice.  Uncle Palmer does not know she's in hospice, nor does he know his own brother died recently.
Aunt Wilda is officially "unresponsive" but when Nancy read from the Book of Common Prayer, her eyelids fluttered, and then her eyes opened.  I think it mattered to her.
The morning after our visit or late that night, Aunt Wilda died.
Uncle Palmer does not know this either.
Provide!  Provide!

Shades of Other Novels

E L James' sadomasochistic erotic series Shades of Gray continues to be a major publishing phenomenon, with the predictable effects on literature.

Moby Dick
  "Call me Ishmael."
  "I'll call thee anything thou wishest, darlin," the captain said, a terrible unholy glitter in his eye, "but first I'll have thee climb aboard yon whaler with me.  I've got some...  implements I want to show thee there.  Something thou've never seen afore, I warrant.  Whaling implements, if thou take me drift.  Harpoons and velvet handcuffs and the like."  His face became dark at some private thought and then he was possessed by a terrible mad cackle of mirthless joy like all the demons in Hell and all the madmen in Bedlam all at once..  "Thou could be me first mate if thou take a shining to it.  This ivory leg of mine ain't just for walkin' ye know."

Huckleberry Finn
  About an hour after dinner everybody was dozing around, some in their chairs and some in their rooms, and it got to be pretty dull. Buck and a dog was stretched out on the grass in the sun sound asleep. I went up to our room, and judged I would take a nap myself. I found that sweet Miss Sophia standing in her door, which was next to ours, and she took me in her room and shut the door very soft, and asked me if I liked her, and I said I did; and she asked me if I would do something for her and not tell anybody, and I said I would. And then there commenced the doggedest set of calisthenics I ever laid hand to, all with rubbing ourselves with lard, and I had to put a bit in my mouth like a mule, and Miss Sophia took to whipping me with a riding crop, which hurt like blisters but was kind of pleasant, too, once you warmed up to it.  And later Miss Sophia said I mustn't never tell and I said I wouldn't but I haven't been able to see a pair of leather britches from that day to this without a little secret smile on my face.

Pride and Prejudice
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife, else wherefore have a secret underground chamber with shackles built into the walls, pincers, and a cabinet stocked with rhinoceros horn and oyster shell?

The House at Pooh Corner
One day when Pooh Bear had nothing else to do, he thought he would do something, so he went around to Piglet's house, taking his velvet restrains, satin blindfold, and mink-covered handcuffs...

FAQ: Just How Cool Are You, Anyways?

Just how cool are you, anyways?

Very.  On a scale of one-to-ten, I'm a forty on the Cool-o-Meter.

Where do you buy your wardrobe?


My wife shops for me, usually at WalMart unless Macy's has a sale.

What are you wearing right now?

Drawstring shorts and a t-shirt.  I think it's an old t-shirt from Pearl Barbecue in Micanopy, Florida.  I'm not sure what the stains are.

Socks?

White tube socks.  Comfortable, practical, and they go with everything.

Shoes?

Only when I'm outside.  I have a pair of knock-off crocs positioned at each entrance.

Eye-wear?

Recently I upgraded from reading glasses from the Dollar Store.  At WalMart you can get an entire set of five glasses on a card.  They are usually better quality.

Boxers or briefs?

Depends.  Ah-ha-ha, just kidding.  Today I'm wearing briefs, but sometimes I wear shorts with boxers to give myself that "layered look."

Where'd you get the Panama Jack hat?

Unless I'm mistaken, this is from Tampa, about two years ago.  Nancy put it in the washer to get out the sweat stains, with mixed results.

Are you really going out like that?

That's a question Nancy always asked.  My standard reply is to wait a few beats and ask, "Like what?"

Cool, very cool

Thank you.

Lesser Zombie Problems

By now everyone has their Zombie Escape Plan, and that's a good thing, but when you get down to it, how likely is a Zombie Apocalypse anyways?  You should also have plans for lesser, but more likely, Zombie Contingencies.

A zombie stumbles into your kitchen, knocking over the extra virgin olive oil and starting a grease fire: First, don't panic.  If you have a fire extinguisher, pull the pin located under the trigger and spray at the base of the flame using steady sweeping strokes from right to left.  If you don't have a fire extinguisher, or if it's not working, pour baking soda directly on the flame.  If you don't have baking soda, place a large pot upside-down over the fire to smother it.  On no account attempt to put out a grease or electrical fire with water.  Once the fire is out, turn off the smoke alarm and shoot the zombie in the brain.

You swerve to avoid a zombie stepping into the road, and your car goes into a skid.  Remember, don't panic.  Gently, press the brake with your foot and turn in the direction of the skid.  Once you have regained control of your car, park it, get out, and shoot the zombie in the brain.

You arrive at an elegant party and discover a zombie there is wearing the same dress as you.  Whatever you do, don't panic.  A few well-chosen accessories can completely change your look.  A chunky necklace, big hoop earrings, and bracelets distract from the dress.  Even different shoes or a modified hairstyle can make a huge difference.  Once you've updated your look, you'll feel fresh and confident.  Then shoot the zombie in the brain.

You're at another party, and this time a zombie backs you into a corner, wanting to talk about politics and how you feel about same-sex marriages, Barack Obama, PACs, Chic-fil-A, and Mitt Romney's finances.  Shoot him in the brain

Ovid's Metamorphoses

After many years I have finally finished Ovid's Metamorphoses.  I acquired this edition - Allen Mandelbaum's translation - while working on my Masters back at Kennesaw State.  Every once in a while, I'd make a foray into it, or either from fatigue or simply because I mislaid it, abandon it for something else.
The Metamorphoses is no slim volume, in fifteen books it comprises a virtual encyclopedia of mythology from creation to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar.  During this beach trip I was able to put in some marathon reading sessions, and yesterday, as I reached the final words, "I will live," and put the book aside, I felt as if I'd incompletely awoken from a long and vivid afternoon dream.  The title is apt because over and over Ovid returns to the story of some transformation or other - men changing into birds, women into trees.  Ovid keeps pulling variations on the same stunt: he loves to catch a character in the very midst of transformation: a young girl who tries to scream but realizes the tree bark that is now her skin has grown up over her throat, a man fleeing in terror who realizes he is no longer running but flying because he has turned into a bird, a woman piteously reaches for her husband while she still has arms to reach because her lower body has turned into a coiling snake.
This same device - what we might call the poetic use of transformation - appears in The Odyssey; in a few swift words, Homer accomplished the transformation of men into swine on Circe's Island.  We are reading about men at the beginning of a line, and the insertion of one tale-tell word "bristles" gives us a warning, and by the end of the line, the crew are men no longer, but pigs.
Towards the latter books, Ovid takes a break from miraculous changes to gore.  Perseus' rescue of Andromeda becomes remarkably bloody, and the battle of the Centaurs and the Lapiths goes into excruciating detail of just who hit whom with what and where, and how the eyeballs looked hanging in coagulated blood below the beard.  One poor centaur - this passage may be from another scene - is thrown from a cliff and falls into a tree so that his "guts adorn the branches;" I can just imagine someone's kidney impaled on a forked limb like a marshmallow.
In the final book we meet Pythagoras, a character who is at most semi-mythical, signalling a movement of the book from the mythical past to the historic.  And here there were parts that were so beautiful they made my ears pound.  Pythagoras was the philosopher of change.  To him, all things were in flux: babies change into youths and old men.  Corpses change into maggots and maggots into flies; caterpillars into butterflies; summer into fall; seeds into trees.  Coastlines change and empires and weather.  You see, all those disparate metamorphoses, different but always the same: people into flowers, into stone, into echoes - they all came rushing back with new significance.  The world is change.  And all those stories, as Ovid passed them from his hands into mine, had changed for me as well.
At the very end, after some shameless shameless sucking up to Augustus Caesar, Ovid is permitted to boast of the one thing that will not change.  His poem, he says, is immortal, and through it so is the poet, and his last words ring true.
"I will live."