January 5: Quite Illiterate, Good Reads, Linda Nemec Foster, "Talking Diamonds," New Cartoon

…I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot.  My favorite author is my brother D. B., and my next favorite is Ring Lardner.  My brother gave me a book by Ring Lardner for my birthday, just before I went to Pencey.  It had these very funny, crazy plays in it, and then it had this one story about a traffic cop that falls in love with this very cute girl that’s always speeding.  Only, he’s married, the cop, so he can’t marry her or anything.  Then this girl gets killed, because she’s always speeding.  That story just about killed me.  What I like best is a book that’s at least funny once in a while.  I read a lot of classical books, like The Return of the Native and all, and I like them, and I read a lot of war books and mysteries and all, but they don’t knock me out too much.  What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it…

Holden is literate, whether he admits it or not.  His brother is an author.  The only subject Holden doesn’t fail at school is English.  And Holden wants to be friends with writers like Ring Lardner and Isak Dinesen.  He loves writers who are funny and serious, who aren’t phonies, who touch upon deep truths about the human condition.

Today, I want to talk about a writer like that for Good Reads Saturday.  Her name is Linda Nemec Foster, and she is a poet.  Last summer, I did a poetry reading with Linda, and she embodies what Holden describes in the above passage about his favorite authors.  She is earthy and funny.  She doesn’t take herself too seriously.  But when she touches upon something real and true in her poems, you feel like you’ve just had a great conversation with a good friend.

Foster’s book, Talking Diamonds, is full of great conversationslike this.  One of my favorites is about the end of the world and the beginning; angels blowing trumpets and statues weeping salt tears; mothers planting gardens and daughters picking flowers:

The Third Secret of Fatima

She knows it has nothing to do with the end

of the world.  Angels blowing trumpets.  Plaster statues

of the Virgin weeping salt tears.  Whore of Babylon,

dressed in purple and scarlet, alone in the desert.

Nothing to do with the number of days left

to us:  as unreliable as the number of rooms

in heaven.  Or the color of their walls, or if

they have windows facing west.  She’s convinced

that the secret is ordinary.  Like something in her life

she’s forgotten.  The exact architecture of her face

as she fades into sleep.  Whether or not she is happy.

As she plants the garden, still no clue.  Only

dirt; a disconcerting sense of growth where she

least expects it.  At the edge of the garden,

her daughter appears almost unnoticed.  She

holds a fist of wildflowers.  She wears her mother’s face.

Linda Nemec Foster is a terrific poet; her work, full of mystery and honesty.  After reading her book, I feel as though I have just gotten off the phone with her, shared something personal and meaningful with a close friend.

Saint Marty doesn’t have Linda’s number, but he has the next best thing.  He has Talking Diamonds, a great love letter for the poet in every person.

Confessions of Saint Marty

November 24: Haunted, Good Reads, "The Dead and the Living," New Cartoon

"You will be haunted," resumed the Ghost, "by Three Spirits."

Scrooge is a haunted man.  He's haunted by his past.  He's haunted by his present.  He's haunted by his future.  He's haunted by his dead sister, Fan.  He's haunted by his lost love, Belle.  He's haunted by beggars and debtors, a whole army of the poor and destitute.  Scrooge has so many ghosts in his life that Marley and the Christmas Spirits are small potatoes, just four in a long line of specters.

The good read I'm going to tell you about today is my favorite collection of poems.  It's the book that made me decide to become a poet.  It's full of ghosts, from the poet's past, present, and future.  There are hosts of children and mothers, fathers and lovers.  There are ghosts of race riots and Marilyn Monroe.  It is one of the most haunted books I have ever read.

The book I'm talking about is Sharon Olds' The Dead and the Living, which won the 1984 National Book Critics' Circle Award for Poetry.  I first read this collection around 1990 or 1991, when I was a graduate student in college.  At the time, I was finishing my Master's in fiction writing, dreaming of being the next John Irving or Raymond Carver.  And then I took a class in Contemporary American Poetry, where I ran into this:

Photograph of the Girl

The girl sits on the hard ground,
the dry pan of Russia, in the drought
of 1921, stunned,
eyes closed, mouth open,
raw hot wind blowing
sand in her face.  Hunger and puberty are
taking her together.  She leans on a sack,
layers of clothes fluttering in the heat,
the new radius of her arm curved.
She cannot be not beautiful, but she is
starving.   Each day she grows thinner, and her bones
grow longer, porous.  The caption says
she is going to starve to death that winter
with millions of others.  Deep in her body
the ovaries let out her first eggs,
golden as drops of grain.

That is Sharon Olds.  She left me stunned, breathless.  I wanted to read more of her.  Each of her poems taught me something about myself and the kind of writer I wanted to be.  In a weird way, I wanted to be Sharon Olds, the way I wanted to be J. D. Salinger when I was a teenager.  Great writers do that to me.  The make me want to be better than I am.  I admired the raw honesty of Olds' poetry.  She didn't shy away from painful or private subjects.  She dissected them, in all their physical complexity.  The girl in the poem above is dying, and yet, within her body, is the golden promise of new life.  The juxtaposition of these two images is thrilling and heartbreaking.

About fifteen years after I first encountered Sharon Olds on the page, I had the privilege of attending a week-long writing workshop taught by her.  Every morning and afternoon, for two hours, I sat in a circle of poets and listened to Olds speak about the hard work of poetry.  She was the den mother to our group of Girl Scout poets.  It was one of the best writing experiences I have ever had.

I brought my copy of The Dead and the Living to that workshop with me.  At the end of our five days, I asked her to autograph it for me.  She didn't write anything special or earth-shattering in it.  It was a standard kind of autograph, "For Marty, with warm best wishes from Sharon, Big Sur, May 2005."  But it is proof that I met her, that she read my poetry and, for five days, knew who I was.

The Dead and the Living still haunts me.  Ghosts from my past and present haunt its pages.  I still want to be Sharon Olds.  I want her courage in choosing subject matter.  I want her gift of image and free association.  I want her ability to constantly surprise with each and every line of poetry she writes.

Saint Marty is going to let Sharon Olds have the last word tonight.

Blue Son

All day with my blue son,
sick again, the blue skin
under his eyes, blue tracing of his
veins over the bones of his chest
pronounced as the ribs of the dead, a green
vein in his groin, blue-green as the
numbers on an arm.  His eloquent face
grows thinner each hour, the germs use him
like a soap.  Exhaustion strips him, and under each
layer of sweetness a deeper layer of
sweetness is bared.  His white skin,
so fine it has no grain, goes blue-
grey, and the burning blue of his eye
dies down and goes out, it is the faded cobalt on the
side of a dead bird.  He seems to
withdraw to a great distance, as if he is
gone and looking back at me
without regret, patient, like an old
man who just dug his grave and
waits at the edge, in the evening light,
naked, blue with cold, in terrible
obedience.

Confessions of Saint Marty

November 17: Miners, The Bowels of the Earth, Good Reads, New Cartoon

"What place is this?" asked Scrooge.

"A place where Miners live, who labour in the bowels of the earth," returned the Spirit.  "But they know me.  See!"

I have used this passage from A Christmas Carol before.  The Ghost of Christmas Present has brought Scrooge to a mining village.  The Spirit's goal is to show Scrooge that even people who live in the most desperate of circumstances celebrate Christmas.  Yes, the Ghost is saying to Scrooge, even these poor schlubs enjoy this holy time.

For my Good Read today I have chosen a book near and dear to my own circumstances.  The book is titled In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, and it is written by a person who simply identifies himself as Professor X.  Professor X is an adjunct English instructor, and he performs the same job I perform at my university.  In his Introduction, he describes his duties:

We may look mild-mannered, we adjunct instructors, in our eyeglasses and our corduroy jackets, our bald heads and trimmed beards, our peasant skirts and Birkenstocks, but we are nothing less than academic hit men.  We are paid by the college to perform the dirty work that no one else wants to do, the wrenching, draining, sorrowful business of teaching and failing the unprepared.  We are not characters out of great academic novels such as Pain or Lord Jim.  We have more in common with Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men.

Adjuncts are the miners of higher education, working in the bowels of universities and colleges.  Professor X doesn't use his real name, doesn't name the academic institutions at which he teaches.  He says he maintains his anonymity to protect his school.  That may be true.  However, being a 17-year veteran of the adjunct wars, I also know that Professor X is protecting himself.  As "contract" teachers, adjuncts are hired semester-by-semester, depending upon enrollment.  We are hit men.  The analogy in the passage above is fairly accurate.  We teach classes that the full-time professors cannot or do not want to teach.  We adjuncts are always one disagreement with a department head away from unemployment.

Professor X captures the plight of this underclass of higher education fairly well.  Most adjuncts begin teaching as a way to supplement their incomes.  A bad mortgage or high credit card debt or sudden job loss forces a person with an advanced degree to join the ranks of these teachers at the bottom of the educational mineshaft.  If I remember correctly, Professor X's situation involves the purchase of an expensive new home.

Don't get me wrong.  Professor X also writes about the rewards of the adjunct business, which are abundant.  There's always the hope of improving students' lives.  That's one of the reason why I have been an adjunct for close to 20 years.  I believe I can make a difference in the world, every year, every semester, every class, every student.  That is the ultimate goal of my teaching career.  Professor X captures this hope pretty well in his final paragraph, where he describes meeting with his students in the basement of the ivory tower:

We are, all of us there gathered, trembling with fright, short of breath, sick at heart, but perhaps hopeful.  That our senses are so alive is thrilling.  The whiteboard markers give off a vaguely medicinal smell.  The edges of posters from semesters past curl away from the wall.  Motes of dust bob in the light from the overhead projector.  The old heating unit comes on with a shudder.  There seems a meaning in all this mundanity that lies just beyond our grasp.  Every new assignment, at least, starts us all thinking.

 Saint Marty is ever hopeful, ever thinking.

Confessions of Saint Marty





November 10: How Mild, Poor Tiny Tim, Good Reads, New Cartoon

"And I know," said Bob, "I know, my dears, that when we recollect how patient and how mild he was; although he was a little, little child; we shall not quarrel easily among ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it."

Bob has a strong bond with Tiny Tim.  In this passage, he speaks to his family about Tim, who has died.  It is a heart-wrenching scene, full or sorrow and loss.  It is also a scene of happy remembrance as each member of the Cratchit family pledges to keep the spirit of Tim alive.  Bob and Tim are Dickens' version of the Madonna and Christ Child in A Christmas Carol.  The Cratchits are the Holy Family of Dickens' tale.

It's time for another episode of Saint Marty's Good Reads, the day where I talk about books I love.  Today's book, no surprise, is about a father and a son.  It's a memoir by film critic David Gilmour titled The Film Club.  As the dust jacket of the book says, it's "[t]he true story of a father who let his son drop out of school--if he watched three movies a week."  Gilmour makes the unusual decision to let his son quit high school if his son agrees to watch three films of Gilmour's choosing every week.  Gilmour continues his son's education, through cinema.  The first paragraph of the book pretty much says it all:

I was stopped at a red light the other day when I saw my son coming out of a movie theater.  He was with his new girlfriend.  She was holding his coat sleeve at the very end with her fingertips, whispering something into his ear.  I didn't catch what film they'd just seen--the marquee was blocked by a tree in full flower--but I found myself remembering with a gust of almost painful nostalgia those three years that he and I spent, just the two of us, watching movies, talking on the porch, a magic time that a father doesn't usually get to have so late in a teenage boy's life.  I don't see him now as much as I used to (that's as it should be) but that was a gorgeous time.  A lucky break for both of us.

It's a hopeful memoir.  Gilmour's choice to finish his son's education with film is both moving and inspiring.  Gilmour's son, Jesse, struggles through the normal teenage landscape of drugs and alcohol and sex, and Gilmour provides his fatherly wisdom through films like American Graffiti and The Big Sleep and Plan 9 from Outer Space and True Romance.  It's a great read about a father and son connecting on a deep level, and it inspires me as the father of a four-year-old boy.

Gilmour shares his passion with his son.  He dispenses his advice through the lens of film, and it works.  Jesse experiences heartbreak and disappointment, but, in the end, he triumphs and learns how to survive in an adult world.  Gilmour's writing is beautiful, full of moments of connection and, at times, frustration.  At it's heart, The Film Club is about the love of a father for his son.  It is smart and moving.  The final paragraph breaks your heart and gives you hope for future of Gilmour's son.  And the future of all the Tiny Tims of the world.  All because of one father's love.

Saint Marty hopes he can be half the father Gilmour is for his son in The Film Club.

Confessions of Saint Marty

October 29: My Plans, Oprah, "Carol" Dip Monday

OK, so last week I wrote about reinventing Saint Marty.  This morning, when I logged on at 5 a.m., I only had 64 page views.  I need to do something about this situation.  I therefore have decided to impose some structure on my posts.  Each day, I will write about a generalized theme.  I have come up with a tentative schedule.  Think of it as the TV Guide for this blog.  Here goes:

Monday:  Carol Dip.  (This day will change once my year with A Christmas Carol is over.  Perhaps I'll do Bible dips instead.  We'll see.)

Tuesday:  Saint of the Week.  Yes, I am returning to the roots of this blog.  If you look at my earliest posts, they all concern various Catholic saints and how they relate to modern life.  I will be revisiting this feature on Tuesdays.

Wednesday:  Worry Wednesday.  Instead of writing about all my fears and worries all week long, I will pile them on this day.  It's the middle of the work week, so it seems like a good day to fret about things a little bit.

Thursday:  Blessing Thursday.  I will follow up my day of worry with a day of blessings.  I will discuss one thing in my life for which I'm grateful.  Just to balance things out.

Friday:  P.O.E.T.S. Day.  That stands for Piss On Everything Tommorow's Saturday.  On this day, I will unveil a new poem I've written.  I call myself a poet.  Therefore, I should be writing poetry.  This day will keep me writing and experiencing incredible guilt when I don't get something written.  That's for the Catholic boy in me.

Saturday:  Good Reads.  I will discuss books, short stories, authors, poets I like reading.  Think of it as Oprah's Book Club for this blog.

Sunday:  My Favorite Things.  Yes, I'm stealing another page from Oprah.  On Sundays, I will talk about something I love.  Anything goes on this day, from books to movies to foods to vacations to people.

There you have it.  That's what you can expect on this blog in the future.  Of course, this schedule is not Stonehenge.  Nothing is made out of stone here.  I will deviate for special occasions--holidays, birthdays, elections, when something pisses me off.  For example, I will be posting a Halloween special on Wednesday.  I've already got the graphics for it.  And, not to worry, I will still be fulfilling my promise of focusing on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol for an entire year.  I do not go back on my word.

We'll see how this new schedule works out.  I may be adjusting things.  Even the television networks cancel programs and bring in mid-season replacements.  For now, this is what you can look forward to.

Now for the Carol dip.  My question this morning is simple: 

Is my new blog schedule going to get me named a Blog of Note by the good people who run Blogger?

And the answer from the great Dickens is:

Scrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, "Bah!" again, and followed it up with "Humbug!"

Well, that's not the answer I was hoping for, but I'll take it.

Saint Marty isn't going to argue with Charles Dickens or Ebenezer Scrooge.

I won't be giving away any cars, folks!