September 19: Kilgore Trout, Little Reflections, a Little Insane

Trout lost his argument with the boy who wanted to quit.  He told the boy about all the millionaires who had carried newspapers as boys, and the boy replied:  "Yeah--but I bet they quit after a week, it's such a royal screwing."

And the boy left his full newspaper bag at Trout's feet, with the customer book on top.  It was up to Trout to deliver these papers.  He didn't have a car.  He didn't have a bicycle, and he was scared to death of dogs.

Somewhere a big dog barked.

As Trout lugubriously slung the bag from his shoulder, Billy Pilgrim approached him.  "Mr. Trout--?"

"Yes?"

"Are--are you Kilgore Trout?"

"Yes."  Trout supposed that Billy had some complaint about the way his newspapers were being delivered.  He did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way.

"The--the writer?" said Billy.

"The what?"

Billy was certain that he had made a mistake.  "There's a writer named Kilgore Trout."

"There is?" Trout looked foolish and dazed.

"You never heard of him?"

Trout shook his head.  "Nobody--nobody ever did."

Most writers live in obscurity, like Kilgore Trout.  Not by choice.  If writers tell you they don't care if anybody reads their work, they're lying.  Every writer wants to be read.  Every writer wants to connect with people through words.

That's the reason I write poems and essays.  It's why I write these blog posts every night.  I like to believe that somehow I make a small difference in the world with these little reflections.  I may be wrong.  However, I can't stop.  If I didn't write, I think I'd probably go a little insane.

Writing is like breathing to me.  That may sound a little melodramatic, but I would bet that, if you ask any writer, he or she would say the same thing.  For me, putting words on paper is my way of making sense of the world in all its craziness. 

As Forrest Gump says, "That's about all I have to say about that."

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for words.

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.

September 13: Kilgore Trout, Books Make Good Friends, Sharon Olds

Nothing happened that night.  It was the next night that about one hundred and thirty thousand people in Dresden would die.  So it goes.  Billy dozed in the meat locker.  He found himself engaged again, word for word, gesture for gesture, in the argument with his daughter with which this tale began.  

"Father," she said.  "What are we going to do with you?"  And so on.  "You know who I could just kill?" she asked.

"Who could you kill?" said Billy.

"That Kilgore Trout."

Kilgore Trout was and is a science-fiction writer, of course.  Billy had not only read dozens of books by Trout--he has also become Trout's friend, to the extent that anyone can become a friend of Trout, who is a bitter man.

Billy read Trout's books when he was in the hospital after his nervous breakdown.  The guy in the bed next to him had almost everything written by Trout.  So, before he became actual friends with the author, Billy became friends with his books. 

I have become friends with an author through his/her books many times.  For instance, I'm really good friends with Charles Dickens.  I've read most of his novels, some of his letters, and a 1200-page biography about him.  I KNOW Charles Dickens.  I've done the same thing for Sharon Olds, Phil Levine, Stephen King (although it's hard to keep up with King's writing), and John Irving.  Books make good friends.

Out of that list, I've actually met only one of those writers:  Sharon Olds.  I was lucky enough to take a week-long writing workshop with her in Big Sur, California.  It was a sun-filled six days of journal scribbling and being in her presence, listening to her talk about poetry.  I was pretty damn lucky.

Of course, we have not kept up a correspondence.  Olds didn't come to my son's baptism, and I don't send her yearly Christmas cards.  Our friendship remains page-bound now, although I still have those sun-drenched memories of Big Sur .

Perhaps there is somebody reading this blog post right now who doesn't really know me and wants to be my friend.  If you are that person, I want to say that I'm pretty social.  As long as you compliment my writing or give me chocolate, I'm all yours.  I'm a pretty cheap date, as writers go.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for all the friends he has on his bookshelves. 

June 14: Only His Ideas Were Good, Saints, Abandoned

Billy's fiancee had finished her Three Musketeers Candy Bar.  Now she was eating a Milky Way.

"Forget books," said Rosewater, throwing that particular book under his bed.  "The hell with 'em."

"That sounded like an interesting one," said Valencia.

"Jesus--if Kilgore Trout could only write!" Rosewater exclaimed.  He had a point:  Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved.  His prose was frightful.  Only his ideas were good.

Only his ideas were good.  I can sympathize with Kilgore Trout.  I have great ideas all the time for things to write.  The problem is in the execution.  If my writing journals ever see the light of day, I will be incredibly embarrassed.  They are full of crap.  Starts and stops.  Fits and detours.  Ninety-five percent of what I scribble is absolute vomit.

The problem, it seems, for Kilgore Trout is that he publishes the vomit.  My problem is that I work on projects for so long--essays, poems, short stories--that it becomes difficult for me to decipher the good from the bad.  Everything looks like crap.

For example, I have been working on a project about Catholic saints off-and-on for many years.  It's an idea that simply won't leave me, so I will see it through to completion.  However, everything that I've written reads like Kilgore Trout--good idea, bad execution.  That frustrates me.  That's why I take long breaks from the project.

That is the life of a writer.  Laboring away in isolation on a piece of writing that might turn out to be absolute garbage.  Or it might turn out to be a Slaughterhouse Five.  Eventually, for me, it's a matter of simply letting go.  I think to myself, "I can't do this anymore," and I call it done.  Leonardo da Vinci once wrote, "Art is never finished, only abandoned."  I really believe that.

I am home with my wife for one more day.  I plan to clean the house and work on my saint book some more.  I'm not quite ready to abandon it yet.

Saint Marty is thankful for saints and writing today.

May 20: Kilgore Trout, Science Fiction, Hope

Night came to the garden of giraffes, and Billy Pilgrim slept without dreaming for a while, and then he traveled in time.  He woke up with his head under a blanket in a ward for nonviolent mental patients in a veterans' hospital near Lake Placid, New York.  It was springtime in 1948, three years after the end of the war.

Billy uncovered his head.  The windows of the the ward were open.  Birds were twittering outside.  "Poo-tee-weet?" one asked him.  The sun was high.  There were twenty-nine other patients assigned to the ward, but they were all outdoors now, enjoying the day.  They were free to come and go as they pleased, to go home, even, if they like--and so was Billy Pilgrim.  They had come here voluntarily, alarmed by the outside world.

Billy had committed himself in the middle of his final year at the Ilium School of Optometry.  Nobody suspected that he was going crazy.  Everybody else thought he looked fine and was acting fine.  Now he was in the hospital.  The doctors agreed.  He was going crazy.

They didn't think it had anything to do with the war.  They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A. swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon.

The man assigned to the bed next to Billy's was a former infantry captain named Eliot Rosewater.  Rosewater was sick and tired of being drunk all the time.

It was Rosewater who introduced Billy to science fiction, and in particular to the writings of Kilgore Trout.  Rosewater had a tremendous collection of science-fiction paperbacks under his bed.  He had brought them to the hospital in a steamer trunk.  Those beloved, frumpish books gave off a smell that permeated the ward--like flannel pajamas that hadn't been changed for a month, or like Irish stew.

Kilgore Trout became Billy's favorite living author, and science fiction became the only sort of tales he could read.

Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways.  They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war.  Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old foreman, mistaking him for a German soldier.  So it goes.  And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden.  So it goes.

So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe.  Science fiction was a big help.

Of course, science fiction is a huge part of Slaughterhouse.  Billy is unstuck in time through the entire novel.  He travels on a flying saucer, lives in a zoo on the planet of Tralfamadore.  Now, the question is whether the science fiction aspects of the book are just the results of Billy's unstable mind, or are they real?  Is Billy a time and flying saucer traveler?  Does Tralfamadore exist out in the far reaches of the universe, beyond stars and time, or in the inner reaches of Billy's brain?

I prefer to accept Vonnegut's science fiction as the truth of the novel.  I want to believe in the collapse of time and the presence of alien life on the planet Earth.  Of course, I grew up watching sci-fi movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet.  I loved sci-fi before Star Wars.  Grew up watching reruns of the original Star Trek.  I wanted a tribble for a pet.

I think my attraction to the genre is very much the same as Billy Pilgrim's.  I love the idea of reinventing myself and the universe.  Science fiction is all about possibility for something better.  Or something worse.  It all depends on what aliens have taken over the planet, and whether those aliens eat human beings, breed them as slaves, or find them "fascinating," to quote Spock.

I want to believe in a better future (hard to do in Trumpland right now).  I want to reinvent myself into a better me.  Richer.  Smarter.  Thinner.  More successful.  All I need to do is come up with a way to teleport myself across the universe or meet a kind Tralfamdorian who likes my jokes. 

Of course, Vonnegut uses science fiction as a way of dealing with, as he says above, "the greatest massacre in European history."  Reality is too painful, too horrific.  So, Vonnegut changes reality and time, gives himself an escape hatch on a flying saucer.  It's through this alternate reality that Vonnegut is able to come to terms with all that he witnessed in Dresden.  Kilgore Trout and the bird that sings "Poo-tee-weet?" fill in the gaps, ask the questions, provide the music in a world that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to Vonnegut.

That is what, I think, science fiction is all about, whether it be dystopian or pulp.  The Day of the Triffids or 2001:  A Space Odyssey.  It's about making sense out of senselessness, hope out of ashes.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for martians and Jedi knights.