December 28: Top Secret, Water Pipes, Next Year's Book

World War Two had certainly made everybody very tough.  And I became a public relations man for General Electric in Schenectady, New York, and a volunteer fireman in the village of Alplaus, where I bought my first home.  My boss there was one of the toughest guys I ever hope to meet.  He had been a lieutenant colonel in public relations in Baltimore.  While I was in Schenectady he joined the Dutch Reformed Church, which is a very tough church, indeed.

He used to ask me sneeringly sometimes why I hadn't been an officer, as though I'd done something wrong.

My wife and I had lost our baby fat.  Those were our scrawny years.  We had a lot of scrawny veterans and their scrawny wives for friends.  The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought. 

I wrote the Air Force back then asking for details about the raid on Dresden, who ordered it, how many planes did it, why they did it, what desirable results there had been and so on.  I was answered by a man who, like myself, was in public relations.  He said that he was sorry, but that the information was top secret still.

I read the letter out loud to my wife, and I said, "Secret?  My God--from whom?"

Top secret.  For the last three days, I have been battling frozen water pipes.  I have e-mailed the city manager, gotten up in the middle of the night to flush my toilet and turn on faucets, and slept poorly.  Yesterday, I finally called a plumber.  The plumber was supposed to show up today, but postponed because of people with more urgent situations.  The plumber is supposed to show up between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. tomorrow.  The actual time, I guess, is top secret.

Another top secret--the book I will be focusing on next year.  That's right, the year of Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse Five is drawing to a close.  A new year will soon be upon us, and I have to choose a new novel, poetry collection, or work of nonfiction.  I can't say that I'm leaning toward any specific author.

I've been thinking about Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.  Or the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.  Another possibility--Herman Melville's Moby Dick.  Usually, I've already made up my mind by this time of the year.  Not so much this time.

Tonight, I plan to go home and peruse my bookshelves.  I'm hoping some title will jump out at me. or that a book will fall on my head.  I need some kind of inspiration.  This evening, however, after several almost sleepless nights, I'm not feeling the touch of any muse.

So, if you are out there, Constant Reader, send me some book suggestions.  I will seriously consider any work except The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump.

Lend tired Saint Marty a hand.

August 7: Rabies, Truth and Literature, "Mein Kampf"

Billy and Lazzaro and poor old Edgar Derby crossed the prison yard to the theater now.  Billy was carrying his little coat as though it were a lady's muff.  It was wrapped around and around his hands.  He was the central clown in an unconscious travesty of that famous oil painting "The Spirit of '76."

Edgar Derby was writing letters home in his head, telling his wife that he was alive and well, that she shouldn't worry, that the war was nearly over, that he would soon be home.

Lazzaro was talking to himself about people he was going to have killed after the war, and rackets he was going to work, and women he was going to make fuck him, whether they wanted to or not.  If he had been a dog in a city, a policeman would have shot him and sent his head to a laboratory, to see if he had rabies.  So it goes.

As they neared the theater, they came upon an Englishman who was hacking a groove in the Earth with the heel of his boot.  He was marking the boundary between the American and English sections of the compound.  Billy and Lazzaro and Derby didn't have to ask what the line meant.  It was a familiar symbol from childhood.

Okay, I wasn't going to be political in the post, but I just have to point out something:  Lazzaro sounds like Donald Trump.  Revenge.  Rackets.  Rape.  Pretty much describes everything that we know about the Trump dynasty.  Throw in some Russians and a couple numbskull sons, and we would have to call him President Lazzaro.

It always amazes me when literature seems to predict the future.  Of course, it's all hindsight.  We don't see how George Orwell's 1984 describes 2017 America until we are in the middle of the collapse of society.  We don't realize that Stephen King was describing Donald Trump in The Dead Zone until after Trump's finger is on the red button, ready to launch missiles at North Korea.  If more people read, perhaps the United States wouldn't be in its current predicament.

Thank God both of my children are readers.  My daughter read Cormac McCarthy's The Road in seventh grade.  By the time she was a freshman, she was arguing with teachers about "unacceptable" books she wanted to read, and she usually won the arguments.  When I see something about Jeff Sessions on the news and say, "Big Brother is watching," my daughter knows where I'm coming from.

Literature is about truth, and truth does not seem to be a valuable commodity at the moment in the White House.  Perhaps public schools will be forced to start teaching alternative literature to students soon.  Alternative novels.  Alternative poems.  Copies of Mein Kampf handed out to every student stepping onto a school bus.  The Art of the Deal required reading for all high school graduates.

I am joking here, for the most part.  But, as with all humor, there's always a kernel of truth in it.  Let's hope that kernel never gets popped.

Saint Marty is thankful this evening for every writer and poet he has ever read.