September 14: Kilgore Trout, Celebrity, Selena Gomez

Trout lives in a rented basement in Ilium, about two miles from Billy's nice white home.  He himself has no idea how many novels he has written--possibly seventy-five of the things.  Not one of them has made money.  So Trout keeps body and soul together as a circulation man for the Ilium Gazette, manages newspaper delivery boys, bullies and flatters and cheats little kids.

Billy met him for the first time in 1964.  Billy drove his Cadillac down a back alley in Ilium, and he found his way blocked by dozens of boys and their bicycles.  A meeting was in progress.  The boys were harangued by a man in a full beard.  He was cowardly and dangerous, and obviously very good at his job.  Trout was sixty-two years old back then.  He was telling the kids to get off their dead butts and get their daily customers to subscribe to the fucking Sunday edition, too.  He said that whoever sold the most Sunday subscriptions during the next two months would get a free trip for himself and his parents to Martha's fucking Vineyard for a week, all expenses paid.

And so on.

One of the newspaper boys was actually a newspaper girl.  She was electrified.

Trout's paranoid face was terribly familiar to Billy, who had seen it on the jackets of so many books.  But, coming upon that face suddenly in a home-town alley, Billy cold not guess why the face was familiar.  Billy thought maybe he had known this cracked messiah in Dresden somewhere.  Trout certainly looked like a prisoner of war.

And then the newspaper girl held up her hand.  "Mr. Trout--" she said, "if I win, can I take my sister, too?"

"Hell, now," said Kilgore Trout.  "You think money grows on trees?"

Kilgore Trout is a disappointment for Billy.  Trout comes off as some modern-day Fagin, yelling at his newspaper orphans.  He certainly doesn't inspire admiration, except in the gullible children who crave what he promises--a free vacation to Martha's fucking Vineyard.  Trout is all about the money.

Sometimes, famous or semi-famous people can be disappointing in person.  I've met or seen my fair share of celebrities.  I shook Kurt Vonnegut's hand once.  Sat in the same room with Sharon Olds and talked with her about poetry.  Touched Vincent Price's back.  Saw John Cleese eating a hamburger with his wife in Big Sur.  Listened to Spike Lee give a speech about racism in the movie business.

My encounters with fame have varied from incredible (Sharon Olds) to pathetic (Bob Seger strolling through a shopping mall in Detroit).  Fame is not necessarily a gauge for a person's worth.  Some of the most famous people in the world are horrible human beings.  (Can I get a "Donald Trump!" on that one?)  Yet, our culture thrives on celebrity.  There are thousands of Syrians still starving in refugee camps, and yet one of the big news items today is "Selena Gomez Recovering After Kidney Transplant."  (Don't get me wrong.  I hope Selena does well with her new organ, but there are more important global issues that should be concerning us.  Can I get a "global warming!" or "neo-Nazis!" on that one?)

Kilgore Trout really isn't a celebrity.  His books are terrible.  Billy Pilgrim is probably one of the only members of the Kilgore Trout fan club.  Yet, certainly Kilgore Trout (if he really existed and did write 75 science fiction novels) would have his own booth at Comic-Con and a line of people waiting for his autograph.  That's the nature of celebrity.  It doesn't matter whether a person is a serial killer or a Nobel Prize-winning poet, fame will attract fans.

Of course, the best celebrities are those who use that fame for good things.  George Clooney and UNICEF.  Bono and his war on hunger and poverty.  River Phoenix and his work for animal rights.  Celebrity itself is not a bad thing.  It's what people do with that celebrity that makes the difference.

When Saint Marty wins the Nobel Prize in Literature this October, he promises to donate a few dollars toward a brain transplant for the current President of the United States.

February 3: Woman and the Pony, Origin of Pornography, Alternative Fact Checking

The woman and the pony were posed before velvet draperies which were fringed with deedlee-balls.  They were flanked by Doric columns.  In front of one column was a potted palm.  The picture that Weary had was a print of the first dirty photograph in history.  The word photography was first used in 1839, and it was in that year, too, that Louis J. M. Daguerre revealed to the French Academy that an image formed on a silvered metal plate covered with a thin film of silver iodide could be developed in the presence of mercury vapor.

In 1841, only two years later, an assistant to Daguerre, Andre Le Fevre, was arrested in the Tuileries Gardens for attempting to sell a gentleman a picture of the woman and the pony.  That was where Weary bought his picture, too--in the Tuileries.  Le Fevre argued that the picture was fine art, and that his intention was to make Greek mythology come alive.  He said the columns and the potted palm proved that.

When asked which myth he meant to represent, Le Fevre replied that there were thousands of myths like that, with the woman a mortal and the pony a god.

He was sentenced to six months in prison.  He died there of pneumonia.  So it goes.

A little history lesson on the origin of pornography from Kurt Vonnegut on a Friday night.

Nowadays, people can turn to the Internet to satisfy their urges for mythological weirdness.  It's one of the curses of the world of mass media.  It caters to the very best of humanity (readers of The New York Times and this blog), and the very worst (pedophiles and President Trump).  I have now made it a rule to fact check anything I read on Facebook.  I must have confirmation from at least three independent news sources.  (Sad thing, most of the news reports that I've questioned and investigated have turned out to be true.  So it goes.)

I enjoy alternative facts.  As I've pointed out in previous posts, in my universe of alternative facts, Tom Hanks is President of the United States.  Chocolate chip cookies contain zero calories.  And I am a graduate of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.  Go ahead.  Contact Professor Dumbledore if you don't believe me.

It's the weekend.  I encourage all of my disciples to embrace their own alternative facts.  Fritos and cheese dip are health foods.  This Sunday, there isn't going to be a football game--just four hours of really good commercials.  Adele is going to show up at your house tomorrow night with Barbra Streisand to sing lullabies.  You look good in spandex.

See, it's easy.  A willing suspension of disbelief.  I'm willing to look like George Clooney and paint like Picasso while sawing away at a cello like Yo-Yo Ma.  Not to mention that fact that Pope Francis just canonized me while I'm still alive.

Saint Marty is grateful for truth and all its alternatives.

Janauary 25: Iron Maiden, Alternative Facts, Chocolate Chip Cookies

It was a patter.  It was a crazy, sexy, murderous relationship Weary entered into with people he eventually beat up.  He told them about his father's collection of guns and swords and torture instruments and leg irons and so on.  Weary's father, who was a plumber, actually did collect such things, and his collection was insured for four thousand dollars.  He wasn't alone.  He belonged to a big club composed of people who collected things like that.

Weary's father once gave Weary's mother a Spanish thumbscrew in working condition--for a kitchen paperweight.  Another time he gave her a table lamp whose base was a model one foot high of the famous "Iron Maiden of Nuremberg."  The real Iron Maiden was a medieval torture instrument, a sort of boiler which was shaped like a woman on the outside--and lined with spikes.  The front of the woman was composed of two hinged doors.  The idea was to put a criminal inside and then close the doors slowly.  There were two special spikes where his eyes would be.  There was a drain in the bottom to let out all the blood.  

So it goes.

Medieval torture devices.  Thumbscrews and leg irons.  Iron Maidens.  I am not going to take this opportunity to point out that, in less than a week, Donald Trump has turned into the Dictator in Chief.  I am trying not to dwell on the dismal news reports.  I will say that Roland Weary's father and the President of the United States seem to have a lot in common.

I am trying to remain positive, to maintain a small sense of hope.  It's difficult with Kellyanne Conway talking on Meet the Press about "alternative facts," as if facts are something mutable or debatable.  Although I have been enjoying the idea of alternative facts, picking and choosing truth.

Here are some of my alternative facts:

• I am often mistaken for George Clooney.
• I won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry last year.
• Bob Dylan gave his Nobel Prize money to me.
• Hillary Clinton won the popular vote last November.  (Oh, wait, that one is true.)
• Barack Obama was unanimously voted President of the United States for life.
• I have six-pack abs.
• Chocolate chip cookies have zero calories.

That was fun.

Saint Marty is grateful tonight that he is not an immigrant from Syria or Mexico.

January 24: At the End of a Long Day

I'm trying to find something inspiring to say.  I'm at that point in the day where my brain is ready to go on vacation.  My son is in bed, and I'm trying to get ready for teaching tomorrow.  It doesn't help matters that my blood sugar is a little low, and I haven't had my daily dose of caffeine.


And the nominee is...handsome, rich, talented, and generous

The Oscar nominations were announced this morning.  I watched it live on the Today show.  Looks like George Clooney is going to have a good year.  (Does George Clooney ever have a bad year, really?)  He's nominated for best actor and best adapted screenplay.  I love this guy.  He's good looking.  Smart.  Talented.  And a Democrat.  I couldn't ask for anything more in a celebrity.

Meryl Streep was also nominated, and she may actually have a chance this year.  I mean, she's already won the Golden Globe.  Perhaps her luck will hold out.

My fortune is changing, as well.  My coworker, the one who transferred to a full-time position in another department, has decided to transfer back to her old job in our office.  That means I can actually take days off, go on vacation, and maybe accept morning teaching assignments from the university.  My life will be drastically improved.  My coworker discovered that working full-time sort of interferes a great deal with raising small children.  Plus, she's pregnant, due in September.  Frankly, I think that's the detail that tipped the scales.

So perhaps 2012 is going to be Saint Marty's year.  And George Clooney's.  And maybe Meryl Streep's.

January 11: Truman Capote, Paperwork, In My Element

Come on!  I can do better than Truman!

I had a coworker today tell me that I look like Truman Capote in my new glasses.  I was a little offended.  I replied, "I was going for George Clooney."  I'm wearing Ralph Lauren frames, for God's sake.  At the very least, I should be able to summon up a senior-citizen-age Cary Grant.

I spent most of the day, again, catching up on paperwork.  I'm almost done with one project, and then I have about 300 other projects to take its place.  With my job in the medical office, there is always some sort of project to complete, especially now, when I'm a business staff of one.

Later in the afternoon, another one of my coworkers commented on my computer bag for my laptop and George (my iPad).  "Oooh, look at the big-time professor," my coworker said. 

My bag is from the university and has the words "ADJUNCT FACULTY" embossed on it.  I told my coworker, "You know, when I'm on campus, I really feel like I'm in my element, like I'm in the right body for a change."

"I can tell," she said.  "You have a huge smile on your face."

And I was grinning like an idiot.  Unconsciously.  My whole body was relaxed for probably the first time in the day.  It was a really good feeling.

Of course, I quickly dived right back into my paperwork, and my shoulders became tighter than Ryan Gosling's abs.  However, for a few brief, shining moments, I had a vision:

Saint Marty, in his Ralph Lauren glasses, walking across campus, carrying a computer embossed with the words, "PROFESSOR SAINT MARTY."

September 9: Saint Peter Claver

I've always found saints comforting.  Sitting in church as a child, I stared at the votives flickering before statues, licking the stone robes, hands, and faces of the saints with light.  The walls reached up and up into vaulted darkness, that high, secret place where prayers gathered and swirled with incense and candle smoke.  I pictured the Hail Marys and Our Fathers trapped like carbon monoxide in the dark beams of the ceiling, circulated by copper fans onto babushkas, through rosary beads, across holy water in fonts, until everything was permeated with grief and hope.

In the pews around me, men and women knelt and prayed, lifted their broken lives to the saints.  Cancer eating pink lung.  Wife fucking strange men.  Son shooting heroin.  Husband coughing blood.  All this pain brought in whispers and candle tongue to the saints, who took it the way children take cherry Popsicles in July, with smiles, joy even, because they know relief from summer misery is simple.  Red.  Sweet.  Saint Sebastian, riddled with arrows, stared upward, as if watching fireworks on July 4, popcorn and hot dogs in his smile.  Lucy, holding a platter on which her gouged eyes sat, glowed like Grace Kelly in Rear Window, beautiful and serene.  Francis of Assisi, stigmata hands bandaged and weeping, surrounded by Disney animals, Thumper and Flower and placid blue jays.  Peter Claver, cradling a black-skinned infant with ribs like hungry teeth, blessed the child's face, tenderly as Michael Landon on Little House.

In the presence of such need, such agonizing want, the saints always looked like they had some secret, knew something the rest of us didn't.  None of the statues or paintings looked starved, filled with desperate hunger.  They all looked as if they had just consumed Thanksgiving dinner, overdosed on some kind of tryptophan-esque satisfaction.  Regardless of which of their body parts was being lopped off, stabbed, or cooked, the saints always seemed confident.  George Clooney confident.  They knew things were always going to work out for them, and, therefore, fear and worry didn't crease their features, didn't turn them into Holocaust refugees, haunted and hollow.

Two years ago, when I first started walking with the saints, I was plagued with doubts and hurts.  My wife was a struggling sex addict.  I was at war with members of my family.  I wasn't sure if my marriage was going to hold together or fly apart like some unstable, radioactive element.  I was happy and unhappy.  Full and hungry.  I thought that, if I could somehow figure out the secret locked behind the blissful smiles and stares of the saints, I would be able to be George Clooney, facing Nazis or mobsters or Joseph McCarthy, anything that came my way, with a crooked grin and a tuxedo.

My wife is still a struggling sex addict.  I'm still at war with members of my family.  I'm still working to hold my marriage and family together.  And I'm still not George Clooney.

I'm one of those old, Italian women I used to watch in church, clutching my rosary, muttering my prayers, beating my breast, flinging my needs heavenward, hoping somebody will catch them, polish them, turn them into something precious.  Love-filled.  Holy.