Some Pensées on Michael Martone
On the evening of April 6, I saw Michael Martone read his work at the launch party for Booth 19—the literary magazine of Butler University’s MFA program—at Tube Factory artspace. I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. Martone is the author of one of my favorite short stories “Everybody Watching and the Time Passing Like That” which was published in his first collection of stories Alive and Dead in Indiana. The story, focusing in on the high school years of the short-lived actor James Dean, is written from the first person perspective of James Dean’s high school drama teacher Adeline Mart Nall. She was still alive when he wrote it, in the early 1980s, which meant that he had to get her permission to publish. She let him do so, even though he mixed fiction freely with fact when putting words in her mouth. This book launched a literary career in which the Fort Wayne native continued to mix fact and fiction in novel ways, perhaps most notably with his publication of The Blue Guide to Indiana. It’s a guidebook that has nothing to do with the eponymous series; it describes some dubious-sounding tourist sites, including a national monument in Goshen to those killed by tornados, in trailer parks. The book also contains an introductory letter from the lieutenant governor of Indiana, an endorsement of sorts. However, Martone neglects to specify which lieutenant governor wrote it. Not surprisingly, there’s a loud publisher’s disclaimer on the front of the book.
I was delighted to see Martone read excerpts from the equally offbeat Pensées: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle, a book that somehow was published without any kind of disclaimer. Quayle, you might recall, became vice-president under George Bush from in 1988—and helped Bush lose to Bill Clinton four years later. He comes across as more of an actual human being in Martone’s book than in much of the journalism written about him, in which he usually comes across as a potatoe-head, as it were. (His most famous gaffe was misspelling potato, an incident which became a shorthand for his supposed lack of intellectual capacity and gravitas.) Martone also read an excerpt from Martone by Martone a book consisting of 50 contributors’ notes. You read that right, contributor’s notes—that section in the back of the book, which gives a brief bio, usually in third person, of each contributor. But Martone expands each of these notes into the realm of short story and/or memoir with numerous digressions and fanciful narratives.
Martone finished his reading with pieces from his most recent work, titled Table Talk & Second Thoughts, where the digressions and narratives are bite-sized. This slim, square-sized volume was published by the Butler in conjunction with Booth 19. (In order to buy one, you have to buy the other.) Table Talk is a flash-memoir of sorts, with each recollection being paragraph-length, focusing on his encounters with writers and poets over his career. (His longest stint as a professor was at the University of Alabama, where he taught from 1996 until his retirement in 2020.) Two of the pieces are set in Indianapolis, “Toothbrush” and “Prozac,” both of which I republished (with Martone’s permission) in my blog. The other, “Gunkholing,” is a recollection of kayaking in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland with his friend and mentor John Barth, who died April 2, at the age of 93. Barth was a novelist, whose work is often described as postmodern, and a longtime professor in the Writing Seminars department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Table Talk is funny and topical. It contains some nice bits of literary gossip for those of you interested in such things. I was able to read the 133-page book in an afternoon without glancing at my cellphone. But it did make me look back at certain times in my life. At several points during my reading of it, I recalled my first coming across Martone’s Alive and Dead in Indiana in the Hutzler Reading Room at Gilman Hall at Johns Hopkins, where I was an undergraduate in the Writing Seminars in the late 1980s. I suppose my affection for that story is partly influenced by my memories of that place, where I spent a lot of time aimlessly browsing the bookshelves. Martone had been a graduate student in that department, and John Barth was teaching there at the time. Anyway, Martone’s book proved to me that captivating fiction could be set in a state I had been so eager to leave.
At the end of the reading, Martone reminded those in the audience that you don’t need necessarily to have an agent, or a big-league publisher to gain an audience for your work. The internet makes publication more accessible than ever before, he reminded us. I can attest to this fact by my experience self-publishing my own book Mindfucking Roundabouts of Carmel, Indiana: Poetry and Short Prose on LULU.com where I acted as my own editor, photographer, and graphic designer. It’s been a long hard process, but I’m starting to see it pay off. I decided on self-publication because the process of publishing books of poetry relies so heavily on contests, where you typically have to pay to play, where the contest administrators don’t always play fair. The frustration factor is such that I eventually said, “Fuck that,” and published Mindfucking on my own. After all, nobody’s going to publish a book with a title like that anyway. Except me.
So thanks a lot, Michael Martone! Thanks for challenging so many publishing conventions, thanks for being accessible to your audience, and thanks for being funny. (One of the funniest moments in your reading was when you babbled with the babbling baby in the front row.) Most of all, thank you for being an inspiration. I’m sure I’m not the only one in that audience who found you to be so.
