This week has been an entire month. I wanted to update earlier this week but then I would start looking for other things to put in the post and I would get distracted and so on and so forth and now it's Sunday and I feel like I have looked at twenty thousand things and yet looked at nothing. So let's dive in. Jinn have been on my mind! When trying to trace the origin of jinn being on my mind as of late (they have been on my mind for a while, I wrote a paper on jinn for Senior Sem), I have been using Twitter friend/writer/artist Kristina Kay Robinson as my jinn muse for a while: I have a hard time capturing her essence but I'm working on it. Jinn on the mind got me thinking about Middle Eastern horror, a genre that I am interested in but know nothing about. So I asked Twitter and wound up with some great recommendations! I have particularly enjoyed these short stories by Hadeer Elsbai: In Your Wake We Sin Your Damnation Will Be Infinite I was also recommended Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi, which I'm reading now and really enjoying, and The Queue, by Basma Abdel Aziz, which is on my wishlist. I finished my depressing zine from last week and did a test photocopy. It looks really good! Unfortunately I ran outta quarters. I have to go to a post office tomorrow that is not the post office at school because they won't let me mail an international package(???) But okay.
Recently, I had to do a database search exercise for class about which fields are searched by default, which took longer than it should have because then I would find articles that I wanted to read later and then started bookmarking them. (And because I did all that through a proxy, I just found out JSTOR didn't save anything that I saved, so that's great). Went out yesterday to the Peddler's Mall, which has so many packs of unopened trading cards and boxes of postcards that I had to walk away from them lest I get wild (I think a pack of trading cards would be a great little surprise to send in the mail, or even the individual cards, which would then give me the personal joy of opening the packet), but I did wind up with a treasure that I will write more about after I've read a bit more of it. Have a good week! Or don't. Is there any such thing anymore?
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There's been a lot of snow in Kentucky - I haven't lost power, but the internet was pretty slow for most of the week. I had to run errands twice this week, to stock up on groceries and to return something, and even when taking the bus there is a lot of trudging through snow/avoiding ice to contend with. Pittsburgh was also awful about clearing snow - Pittsburgh in general is an accessibility nightmare, though they'd love for you to think otherwise - and the only places I've lived where there were snowy winters and sidewalks were cleared regularly were New York City and Albany. Every now and then there's a parent taking their kid sledding, and it makes me think of sledding down the dell at Sweet Briar with a borrowed Prothro tray (no other sled will do). The world has been more Dire than usual and I am coping by making a zine (and glancing up from writing this to look out my window at two kids in snowsuits wobbling through the snow - I think their parent has on white earmuffs over an orangey scarf but I am choosing to believe that it is a mushroom hat). I don't have any recommendation for how to feel less dire about the state of things. I wish I knew, honestly. But here's what I've been getting into: ♡ One of my friends on Twitch recently streamed this beautiful game, GRIS. I couldn't watch it all when she was streaming it, but I got up the next day and watched the video. Gorgeous graphics, just a delight. ♡ I made paper yesterday for the first time since 2014. I think the first one is not great, but I found my notebook from Etching class and luckily I had the process written down: Reading:
♡ Women of Sufism: A Hidden Treasure, by Camille Helminski ♡ "The Role of the Kabbalah in the Afro-American Religious Complex", by James Houk (from Caribbean Quarterly, Sept-Dec 1993) (I saw a reference to a "Kabbalah banquet" in a different article and searching that phrase brought up this article) ♡ Twitter (which makes me lose my mind), and ♡ Iran: A Beginner's Guide, by Homa Katouzian Maybe next week will be...better? Idk. Seems sus. (from "Copy Sluts"; photography by Maggie Lee) I have been downplaying the need for a home printer all year, but having a home printer that also copies & scans would probably save me a lot of hassle. (Such as the hassle of toting a 32" tv box through an ice storm because my phone died while I was trying to get a return label from Best Buy...I still haven't gotten a return label.) At undergrad we had unlimited copies on the Art Barn Xerox machine which was honestly a dream. I would say that this mostly would have saved me the temporary embarrassment of photocopying my smut in public, but in the past I have had to hand people my smut so they could photocopy it for me, which is a bit higher on the temporary embarrassment scale, but still, as all things, temporary. It's been a rough week for the peddler of smut as first Larry Flynt and now S. Clay Wilson have passed away. (Me, when reading the obituary: "Is this the guy in Zap whose comics I always skip? Yes.") I'm sure there is a larger essay to be written here on gonzo pornography, but I well and truly don't have it in me. I'm on a nostalgia train where it's 1997 and I'm photocopying my one-page comics at Waas Drugstore for 5¢ a page (5¢! I sold them for 10¢), and also buying a cold Coca-Cola in a glass bottle. That sounds really good. This post has been interrupted by a loud knock on the door that announced the delivery of a large parcel. Apparently I can't open this until Sunday. I don't think I can hold out that long.
Everything I've been working on lately has been a gift, and therefore not suited for the blog, or show notes, which are similarly not suitable. I have made some artistic Decisions lately (working in miniature, pointillism) that are both things that Seem Like A Good Idear At The Time and then I get to the end of the day and wonder why I've gone blind.
Speaking of Twin Peaks, here's a fun tidbit I saw last week:
(Thanks Sean Scott. For once.)
My weekend was spent pretending I didn't know what a sport was. This year I was mostly blissfully unaware of sports goings-on, which I'm chalking up to not having to go to a workplace or a classroom and also being surrounded by (online) people who mostly do not know or care what a sport is. (This is all well and good until pro surfing starts again. When pro surfing is on, I have no friends.) I did watch the halftime show on Monday, though, because I love The Weeknd:
I was into it! It was what I'd expect from him. I liked the way they worked around giving the dancers masks. I've gone back to listening to After Hours...usually it's my mask making soundtrack, but today I did some comics and it was a motivational soundtrack. There's always a line between music that is good to work to and music that is distracting, or not distracting enough. After Hours is so good, though. I saw someone on Twitter describe The Weeknd as "haunted strip club music" and I approve of this categorization. (The whole album is solid, but I'm partial to 'Heartless' and 'Flashing Lights'.)
♡ Dr. Steph linked to this jewelry shop in her last newsletter...isn't it amazing?
♡ Bruja friend Melissa has some new fun at her substack, CEREMONIAL SEAS. ♡ Are my neighbors fucking? Are they watching a porn? Is it just a movie playing? Am I hearing things? Finally gone off the deep end, Royal ♡ Who doesn't need a Grenache with an R. Crumb label? What did I do all week? The vast majority of studio time has been working on Valentines, which are, of course, not done yet & I will have to mail them on Monday. Hopefully. I can't share any progress because then someone might see it, and then it wouldn't be a surprise. Also, the first real week of school started, and it's been a drag. Not school itself, just getting myself back into the routine of school after having a month off. I always tell myself to do everything in one day, and then I remind myself that all of these assignments and readings are not designed to be done in one day, and then it gets done at the last minute. So I have to re-assess the schedule. (In undergrad, we knew someone who did all her homework by Wednesday night so that she could party all weekend, and that's always the goal, but I rarely make it.) I watched The Vast of Night last night (it's on Amazon), and it was so good! The characters were magnetic, the dialogue was snappy, there was just the right amount of eerie suspense. It was a film version of having a friend tell you a spooky story. Not too scary. Just creepy! I loved it. ♡ Mysterious Mummy with Gold Tongue...bring it back, honestly.
♡ Did Frozen help solve the Dyatlov Pass Incident? (Best line: “When I told {my wife} that I was working on the Dyatlov mystery, for the first time she looked at me with real respect.”) ♡ And finally, some good news. |
AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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