Man Martin's Blog, page 198

Another Reason I Never Made It as a Cartoonist

"I'm a little horse this morning."

So We Can Also Assume the Pope is Catholic

These commercials are very disturbing.  I cannot even tell you how disturbing they are.  After the adorable animation in which mamma bear brushes fecal matter off her cub's butt with a whisk broom, we get a demonstration leading us to infer that bears have dingleberry wads weighing up to one pound.

Thinking of Chris

Whenever we talk about our childhood, Chris recalls the various tortures she inflicted on me.  I do not deny these occurred, but they do not form as prominent a feature in my memory as they seem to in hers.  Perhaps part of the reason these incidents loom so is because my now-defunct comic strip, "Sibling Revelry," featured a brother and sister, not unlike ourselves, and I frequently drew from childhood experience.  Let's face it, bad stuff makes better entertainment than good stuff.
But sitting in the doctor's office waiting to have some fluid drawn from my knee (see previous blog) the classical radio station played an organ piece, and a scene from my childhood flashed back.  I do not know its name, but it was ponderous and turgid and you could almost see Lon Chaney's skeletal delight as he leaned back, elbows locked, pressing down the keys with heavily-veined hands.  It was a piece Chris and I used as intro music when we recorded vampire melodramas on a reel-to-reel tape recorder.  We'd start off with a good creepy blast of organ music, then ad lib an encounter in an old castle replete with plenty of squeaky doors and crashing thunder (the latter of which required a good mouthful of spit to do properly, not unlike machine-gun fire.)
Another thing we liked to do was put on little skits for my mother.  I can't think of why Mur tolerated this, but she'd sit there acting for all the world as if this were the best entertainment you could hope for, as Chris and I improvised goofy rambling scenes about desert islands or detectives or whatever.  Maybe part of the reason was because Mur set us up to perform for Meemaw and Great Aunt Bessie whenever we went down to visit.  We'd have to sing "Senor Don Gato" or "The Bold Fisherman," which at first we dreaded, but later secretly looked forward to.  Mur was an early contributer to our love of being in the spotlight.
We were both avidly interested in drawing, and once Chris challenged me to see who could draw a better hand.  Our maid was to be the judge.  I labored putting in the parenthetic wrinkles on the knuckles and the little white scallops at the base of the fingernails.  Chris drew four aces and a king.  Chris won.
Chris began drawing these gorgeously funky words in the shapes of what they were describing, so that "bird" for example, looked like a bird, where the letters were so puffy and interlocked, all the negative space closed up.  You've seen the sort of thing, I'm sure, but in Sandersville, Georgia, 1970, it was the coolest thing since Sesame Street.  I tried my hand at it, but wasn't much good, so instead Chris and I started drawing mazes.  We'd fill an entire sheet of notebook paper with narrow twisting corridors, no wider than a pencil shaft, and present them to each other to solve.  What generosity that was!  An hour toiling on a labyrinth of coils and serpentines, that would be ruined once the triumphant pencil stroke found its way from the little bubble of "start" to the pirate x of "end."
All this is pretty random, and if you've read this far, you're a better audience than I deserve.  But it's the sort of thing that goes through your mind when you hear a snatch of music you haven't heard in years.  What would childhood have been like without my sister?  I cannot imagine.  She is in every corner and nook of my past.

More Proof of God

If anyone out there is curious, I have yet more proof of the existence of God.
I just found out that I've been invited to be a Fellow at the Kenyon Writers Workshop this summer.  This is officially a big deal, and it makes you feel pretty darn swanky joining an elite group of writers who've shared this honor.  One has a tendency to blow on one's fingernails and brush them on one's lapel.  I don't know why one has this tendency, but it's definitely the tendency one has.  Then I was walking outside to put up the chickens for the night, and I saw a low-flying hawk.  Seeing hawks makes chicken owners nervous, and watching it, I missed a step and twisted my knee and ankle.  Just a sprain, but when I woke up this morning, I really couldn't walk.  I write this laid up on the couch, a bag of frozen peas on my knee.
We went to the doctor and he drew a syringe of liquid from my knee the color and apparent consistency of a raspberry smoothie.  This is how he determined I had probably "torn something."  Later this week, I'm scheduled for an MRI to find out exactly what.
Mind you, all this drama occurred because I stepped down funny.  This is not a sexy injury like playing soccer or rock climbing or something.  This is the equivalent of tripping over a penguin.
This is how I know there's a God; He's a big one for keeping you humble.
Thanks for the reminder, Lord.  Message received.

What Does Nabokov Look Like?

I've been reading a book on Nabokov, and I've noticed something: I have no idea what he looks like.  I wouldn't know him if I bumped into him on the street; not likely, I know, but imagine someone who admired Mark Twain, say, who if asked to describe him said, "Well, uh, I'm pretty sure he had a moustache."  Maybe it's just me, but look at these pictures and see if they don't all seem to be different people.  I mean, I know he's a bald white man, but is it really the same bald white man?  Hell, I'm a bald white man.  Maybe I'm Nabokov.

An Oldie but a Goodie: Caring About Characters

This morning, I'm reposting one of my old blogs on why we care about fictional characters.

I’m teaching my high school class The Great Gatsby. (In addition to being a world-famous and justly-beloved novelist, I teach high school. We all have little pet dreams, I suppose; mine has always been to be a high school English teacher; I just write novels to pay the bills until the teaching thing works out.) Anyway, you remember Gatsby, right? It was the book they assigned in high school only you just watched the movie and read the Cliff’s Notes. So we get to the part after Daisy, who is driving Gatsby’s car, runs down and kills Myrtle Wilson. Gatsby, who has been carrying a torch for Daisy for the last five years is naturally going to take the blame for the hit and run. And Daisy, that bitch – sorry, there’s no other word for it – is going to let him do it! She won’t tell a soul it was she, not he, behind the wheel, and she’s going to let him face, a legal expert tells me, five to twenty-five years hard time for a crime she committed.


The thing about it is, Daisy is nothing more than ink spots on a page, but when they’re arranged in certain configurations, it still outrages me.

This sort of thing happens all the time; we read about purely fictional creations – creations we know are fictional in a book with a big fat warning – “a novel” – and a disclaimer like, “Any resemblance between characters in this book and actual people living or dead is purely coincidental,” and in spite of all this, we still worry if Inspector Mudge will unmask the killer or Rodney and Darlene will find true love. That we care so much for people we know full-well aren’t real is like… Well, imagine a magician saying, “I’m going to reach through a hole in the top of this trick hat, through a hole in the top of this trick table where I have concealed a specially-trained rabbit which I will extract from the hat as if he had materialized from thin air.” And then the magician doing exactly that, and the rubes in the audience saying, “Gaw-lee…” as they rub their slackened jaws in stupefied amazement.

But stories get this sort of reaction all the time.

Have you ever shouted – or wanted to shout – a warning to a character in a movie. “Don’t hide under the bed! It’s the first place he’ll look!” Or been unable to sleep because you needed one more chapter to see if Bilbo was going to outsmart a dragon in a cave. News flash, Bubby. Movie characters can’t hear you. And in The Hobbit, there is no cave, and there is no dragon. There’s the word dragon. The word cave.

Humans have this weird, almost pathological, ability to empathize. We feel sad to hear a stranger has died in an earthquake, happy when some frumpy lump turns out to have the voice of an angel, concerned when a kid floats off in a runaway balloon. (Later we’re furious – but equally entertained – that the whole thing was a hoax.) At some point, we don’t even care if the people are real, so long as the events are interesting.

I think this surely must have started at the very dawn of man. Two cavemen – not Geico cavemen, the real thing – we’ll call them – oh, what’s a good caveman name? – Lamar and Loomis. They have been chasing this one mastodon across the tundra for the last week. Lamar got a good spear thrust in him, and he and Loomis left the rest of the tribe, trailing him, skirting the face of a retreating glacier. It has been a lean winter, and no opportunity for meat can be allowed to slip by.

Of course being cavemen, they have no concept of a “week,” they just know it’s been a long time since they’ve seen another human. They also know they lost sight of the mastodon two days ago, but they’ve been following its tracks. Loomis claims the footprints show signs that their prey is seriously wounded and weakening, but privately Lamar isn’t so sure. Loomis says you can tell a lot from an animal’s tracks, but Loomis says a lot of things.

To make matters worse, the spring rains come early and Lamar and Loomis take shelter under an outcropping. It is very cold, and they are wet. And it is dark of a darkness none of us in our light-polluted world can ever imagine. Shut yourself in a closet, put a bag over your head, and close your eyes. It’s darker than that.

The situation is desperate to say the least. So Loomis begins talking – just nonsense, anything to take their minds off themselves. Silly stuff, the first thing that pops in his head. There’s a guy named Raindrop, and he’s on his way down the side of someone’s face, and he runs into Flea. And Flea and Raindrop have a conversation, oh, about a far-off land neither has seen, called Big Toe, and the two of them decide to set off to find it.

And at first Lamar is just listening because you can’t help listening when it’s dark and raining and cold and you’re lost and your belly’s empty and you don’t know where your next mastodon is coming from, but little by little Loomis’ magic begins to take hold. Lamar begins to wonder, will they make it to Big Toe, and if they do, what will happen there? And Loomis – who, if you remember, is making the whole thing up – begins to wonder himself, and not that it makes their lives any better, not really, but in the cold, dark, lonely rain they find themselves wondering and caring about two products of their own imagination.

And that was how the whole thing started: the wonderment we have at a story.

Do Flea and Raindrop reach Big Toe? Do Lamar and Loomis get their mastodon?

A Few Random Tweets

Cardinal @redbird                                     1m
Whoit cheer, whoit cheer, cheer-cheer-cheer


Catbird @kittybrd1                                      1m
mew, mew, cack



Brown Thrasher @thsh101                      2m 
Smack, churr

Cardinal @redbird                                      2m
whoit cheer, cheer-cheer-cheer


Mourning Dove @sadbird                        2m
Coo-coo.  Coo-coo-coo-coo

Cuckoo @kookoo                                      2m@sadbird  Cuckoo?

Mourning Dove @sadbird                        2m
@kookoo Coo-coo.  Cooo.  Coo-coo-coo.


Ostrich @ausieos                                       2mMook.  Mook.  Moo.

Cardinal @redbird                                     2m
Whoit cheer, cheer-cheer

Turning 53

Something very strange is going on with mirrors.  I haven't mentioned it up to now, because at first it was only a slight change, and then when it began to become noticable, I hoped I was only imagining it, or that the phenomenon was only temporary.  Later, I hesitated saying anything because I feared people would doubt my sanity because what I have to say is so bizarre, I myself have difficulty believing it.  No matter the consequences, I must speak up; what's going on with mirrors suggests something is going radically wrong with the space-time-continuum, something inexplicable that may threaten the very universe.
First, let me describe myself. 
I am five-foot ten inches tall, with green eyes, brown hair, and a 32-inch waist.  I mention my waist size because this will illustrate the puzzling and dreadful change that has come over mirrors.  I am not muscular by any means, but I'm reasonably fit.
When I look in the mirror instead of myself, there's a strange man.  He offers no threat and seems good-natured enough.  When I raise my arm, he raises his just as if he were my actual reflection, but he is clearly not.  For one thing, he's bald.  I, as I have mentioned, have brown hair.  What hair he does have, has a little brownish to it, but it's mostly gray.  I have nothing against bald men; long ago I resolved that if in the fullness of time, I lost my hair I would accept it gracefully, but I decided I would never go bald with two side-walls of hair over each ear and a shiny dome with a few stray hairs clinging to the top, like Larry from the Three Stooges.  And this is precisely the way the man in the mirror is bald, so you can see, it is clearly not me.
Moreover, his face has an unearthly puffiness.  It's almost - not quite, but almost - like my own face, only filled out, as if I'd gained twenty or thirty pounds.  It is not a face that would cause people on the street to run in terror, but studying it closely, as I have had opportunity to do, reveals a multitude of little horrors.  At the corners of the mouth, for example, are these marks in the skin - not tatoos, but little trenches or grooves.  One might almost call them lines.  My actual face is very smooth, almost babyish in fact, so unless a maniacal surgeon has been at work on me while I slept, there is no accounting for this.  Then there is this strange lose tissue joining his jaw and neck.  I do not know what this is, but it looks scarcely human, and leads me to suspect mirrors may have become visual portals to another planet, if not a parallel universe in another dimension.
When I take off my shirt, the result is even more startling.  Again, I am no Adonis, but I am reasonably fit.  In Romeo and Juliet, the nurse describes the handsome Count Paris, as a "man of wax."  The man in the mirror, however, resembles Count Paris if he'd been left in a hot car for several hours on a July afternoon.  There is sort of a melted look around the chest and torso, whereas the middle is thickened, and somewhat jiggly as if a semi-liquid substance were stored there.
If this had only occurred in one mirror, perhaps I might treat it as a harmless, if mystifying novelty: but it is not.  It is all reflective surfaces.  Even digital cameras have been affected.  I come forward with this now, hoping that others who have noticed similar alarming phenomena will speak up.  I don't know what, if anything, can be done, but I do know that we can no longer remain silent.

Times Are Tough All Over

A recent study reported that those in the Arts - writers, dancers, musicians, and artists - have been hardest hit by the recession.

To: Bill Wordsworth
Poetry Dept

Mr. Wordsworth:

It is with deep regret we inform that your services in the poetry department will no longer be needed.  This decision was made on purely economic grounds and does not reflect the fine service you have done for our company, but revenue shortfalls have required us to reduce our staff.  Some on the board even questioned the necessity of having a poetry department at Haliburton in the first place.  Your service in writing verse to commemorate the joys, the sorrows, the transient glories of our little industry will always be appreciated.  One of your haikus in particular stands out for me, I hope reading it reprinted here brings you solace at this time:

First azure, then black.
Tar streaks on waves, rise and fall.
Dinosaur revenge.

Wishing you the best of luck in your future endeavors,

David Lesar
CEO

Honey Do

Nancy is in Orlando this week at a conference, and I must admit, I was looking forward to some time as a "bachelor," when I'd have a little extra time to write and read, have a chance to watch my DVD of Bubba Ho-Tep and my only responsibilities would be scraping the steak grease off the stovetop before she got home.
Before she left, she said, "Don't forget - take up the trash Monday and the recycling Tuesday."
"Check."
"And write the cleaners a check.  They'll be here Thursday."
"Got it."
"And could you clean out the pool?  I told the neighbors they could use it Monday, but I want it looking nice for them."
"Right."
"And could you see what's wrong with the sprinkler timer?  It doesn't seem to be working."
"Will do."
"You may have to go to Lowes for a new one."
"I will if I have to."
"While you're at Lowes maybe you could get some new rubber stoppers for the rain barrel.  The old ones fell out."
"Good idea."
"Are you going to remember all this?  Do you want me to write you a note."
"I'll remember."
"Which day does the trash go up?"
"Tuesday.  No.  Monday.  I'll take it up Sunday night just to be sure."
"I'll write you a note."
So now I have a nice handy note reminding me of the various things she'd mentioned plus one or two more she happened to think of. 
It's almost like having her here.