David V. Matthews

More Collegiate Sketchbooking

R.I.P. John Holmes, March 13, 1988

Photo Boy, circa March 1988

Will She Wake Up?, December 29, 1987

Duck, December 29, 1987

Hunter, December 29, 1987

Untitled 12/29/87, December 29, 1987

Running across this page two days ago from the January 14, 2019, National Enquirer while Net-fishing for Pynchon articles in Lake Google (as I occasionally do during my downtime—yes, having downtime makes me an adult), I thought I’d encountered what the Leader of the Free World has termed “fake news.” First, why hasn’t any other media outlet covered this? And second, why would the celebrity-besotted Enquirer care about that eighty-one-year-old “acclaimed National Book Award winner”, and why would it think its readers do? Then I realized such a reclusive author—“photographed just four times in his 50-plus year career!”—would prove a challenge to a voyeuristic tabloid that exposes everyone famous (except for the abovementioned Leader, though that situation may have changed).

The Enquirer managed to snap at least two pics of Pynchon after he’d apparently “emerge[d] to vote” last November 6 in New York City. He’s definitely aged since his bucktoothed youth and walks with a cane, but he does have a full head of hair. Perhaps the paper’s readers will develop or have already developed an interest in non-mainstream, National Book Award-winning literature, if such an interest will keep them from going bald. And perhaps the other media outlets will get over their jealousy and start acknowledging the Enquirer’s existence; in this privacy-free world, winners snoop first and snoop the most, giving vicarious pleasure to the winners’ promoters and followers, though I assume some Enquirer fans worry about their status as corporate, social-network, and government surveillance targets, since paying attention to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie does not necessarily preclude one from also paying attention to civil liberties.

Addendum, 2/22/2019: Some Enquirer readers do worry about privacy, or at least the paper has tried convincing them they should; an article headlined “Facebook Is Selling Your Life Secrets!” appeared in the same issue as the Pynchon pics. Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg’s partial support for Democrats has rankled Trump’s (former?) pal, the Enquirer publisher David Pecker. (Zillionaires such as Z-Man tend to contribute to both major parties, to cover all bases, to the displeasure of right-wingers such as Pecker who probably hate baseball metaphors.)

Flash Fiction (a Hundred Words or Fewer) #51: Grandpa Bought a Rubber

Either my Internet skills have deteriorated, or I’ve hallucinated the past. After minutes of intense Googling, I can’t find proof Steve Martin ever sang a song called “Grandpa Bought a Rubber.” I could swear I’d heard this song during my childhood—well, not the actual song, but my classmates singing it at school; my parents forbade me from owning Steve Martin albums or any other adult cultural products, searching my bedroom regularly for contraband and beating me if they found any. However, decades later, my mother died from colon cancer, and my father died from liver failure, so, yay, revenge.

Flash Fiction (a Hundred Words or Fewer) #50: Your Insouciance Reaffirmed Mine

Nursing the flattest lager I’ve ever bought, sitting in a cacophonous bar and grill at a dreary Midwestern airport, my return flight delayed another two hours due to a ferocious snowstorm, some bald-spotted crewcut in the next booth pontificating to someone that the weather undoubtedly proves climate change does not exist despite what the liberally-biased scientific community wants us to believe, I suddenly realize your insouciance reaffirmed mine during our most recent tête-à-tête (yes, I know you consider English speakers who use French terms pretentious—sorry), thus proving we share an adamantine spiritual bond. Do you agree? If not, why?