My schedule has undergone a little upheaval since I have returned to the workforce. I am back to the graveyard shift and learning how to throw the truck (I was previously stocking the Christmas section of a big box store and only had to stock, but now they are short staffed, so I'm also helping throw). ('Throwing the truck' is jargon for unloading and sorting the contents of a semi truck trailer.) Everyone at work seems bravely casual about COVID-19. Some of them are not at all concerned about their distance from one another, which kind of makes sense due to our general proximity to one another, but I am trying to stay on the side of caution by keeping my distance and increasing my intake of vitamins. I treat going to work like I treat flying on a plane, although the option of Not Touching Anything doesn't apply at work. Our break room has a SNES mini, and I used to play that on my lunch breaks, but I'm not going to touch it (even though I think I'm the only one who plays it), so what better way to spend my breaks than by reading the sequel to the Sleeping Beauty trilogy by Anne Rice? Confession: I have had this book for a long time and just never got around to it. I saw it in the clearance bin at Barnes & Noble. I really enjoyed the original trilogy - I'd actually re-read it fairly recently, in the summer of 2018 - and I had no idea that Anne Rice had penned a fourth book. Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty trilogy is probably best described as BDSM fantasy that takes place in a fictional European kingdom that specializes in "pleasure slavery". Young princes and princesses are taken to serve as naked, well, pleasure slaves. They have a master or a mistress and they have to generally crawl around on their hands and knees and endure the sexual whims of any number of royal court members. Sometimes crawling around on one's hands and knees, being regularly bathed and oiled, and chasing golden balls across someone's floor was not challenging enough, so the pleasure slaves would "rebel" (not in a political way - this is a fantasy land - but more like an extremely bratty submissive), and be sent to The Village as "punishment" (this is very much depicted as a resort for princes and princesses who are Bored), and they are auctioned off to villagers to do things such as, say, being a magnificent Pony Boy Prince in someone's stables. The punishment of The Village comprises the second book, and the third book is a faux raid that often occurs between the European kingdom and another fictional, vaguely Middle Eastern kingdom, where they kidnap some pleasure slaves and have them be pleasure slaves in a more exotic locale. All of this is a very fun time, in my opinion. There are so many ways this could go horribly, horribly wrong, and it never does, because you're just in this enjoyable BDSM Fantasy Land where everyone is bisexual and no one is getting cut or branded. This fourth installment takes place in the future, where Beauty and her King, Laurent I think, have been asked to replace the old Queen and refresh the concept of Naked Pleasure Slavery for a new generation of...naked pleasure slaves. I'm not really certain of the time lapse between Anne Rice writing these books, but the new one has slightly more details, like the name of the kingdom (which I don't recall being named before, but I could be wrong), and little historical (?) tidbits like people chewing on apples to freshen their breath. I haven't gotten very far, but so far it's a pretty good, fun time. I suppose you could criticize it because everyone is hot and beautiful and they all have perky breasts or splendid organs, but honestly who cares. Have fun. Read some BDSM fantasy. Enjoy ponies. They don't look like that in real life. Trussssssst me daddy. I remember the first time I read the trilogy. I recommended it to one of the ladies who worked at the local bookstore (HOW and WHY the local bookstore had this BDSM fantasy for sale in our tiny Bible Belt town, I am not sure; I blame the guy working there full-time with quadruple Scorpio placements in his birth chart! But I digress...), and her review of it was: "I got bored, there's too much spanking." You can make of that what you will. Before I started working again, I asked people if they wanted a weird postcard that may or may not scandalize their mailperson. I had one taker: His wife reportedly said, "You got a really weird fuckin' postcard."
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As much as I'd like to use the global pandemic as an excuse for not updating this blog, I really can't, because I've had ample opportunity. The only thing that guilts me into updating is when I look at my Instagram metrics and see someone has visited. This is bad and I have to do better. I have not been doing very much, mostly because the world has kind of come to a screeching halt. The one thing I have done is make a one-page zine a day. Sometimes they are fun, and sometimes they are personal, but I do make one every day. I have been staying home, although that will change later tonight. Staying home has been ok fine. I think this is mainly because most of the people I know are also staying home, and so they are on Twitter all day. But also, I've been confused by people who are complaining about needing things to do. There are so many things I could do with this free time, but I am doing maybe 2% of those things, and the rest of my time is spent, like, cooking and reading. And I am okay with that! I am not bored! I actually don't remember the last time I was genuinely bored. I suppose I just got it drilled into me that if I was ever bored that my Mama would find something for me to clean. Sometimes I wind up ruminating on something that I don't mean to ruminate about, and it gets me a little agitated. This tends to happen while I am doing chores (usually washing dishes), and I think it's because when I wash dishes, I put on my little walkman radio and I wind up getting annoyed at the commercials. So now I have started listening to this YouTube streaming station instead:
I've also started putting it on as something to sleep to, and it is good for my mood. (I started by listening to the station that was "beats to study/chill to", but sometimes it would be too jazzy for me.)
Today was a low-key kind of day. My roommate and her boyfriend came over for a while, and we played some Beatles RockBand. I started a new book, titled Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. It is strange and unusual so far. I'm not yet sure what it is about, but I'm having fun. Other reads: - I started Gringos by Charles Portis, but I got about halfway through and there was no plot to speak of, and I didn't care for any of the characters, so I just returned it to the library. It was giving me the same feeling that I had when I was trying to read The Goldfinch. I do think it's interesting when books are plotless like that, though, because it's so similar to real life. I just wish novels that did this also had characters that weren't terrible. - Just finished Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis. This was really good, and I read it very quickly (and took notes). Despite having many prison pen pals when I was younger (see previous blog post), I have been really ignorant about the prison industrial complex and crime and punishment in general, so this was eye-opening and shocking. It's especially wild to read this and then see people on Twitter out here assuming that prisoners can "sign up" for what basically amounts to slave labor. But okay. - Recently read Black Hole by Charles Burns. Dire, but beautiful. Just gorgeous. I managed to pick this up before our library closed due to the pandemic, and I'm glad I'm stuck with it. Really wonderful black and white ink work. -Re-reading: Affinity by Sarah Waters. I'm honestly not prepared emotionally to re-read this. But I am doing it anyway. I haven't read it for a while, and I remember the very basics of the plot (including the devastating twist at the end). Re-reading this book is my emotional equivalent of a Hero's Journey. That's all for now. Unlike everyone else I know, I haven't taken this time to watch anything. That will probably not happen unless I get sick. Stay safe! Stay home! Some people can't do either. Around the time when I was in high school and high school adjacent, I was reading a lot more comics than I read now. Back then, though, comics were having a new Golden Age. Comics were a big deal, because I guess some people decided to hell with the Comics Code Authority, and they were gonna do whatever they wanted. I mean, Todd McFarlane was a damn millionaire, all on account of Spawn. I grew up in a really small town - an eight-mile island - but you could get your mainstream comics at the newsstand section of Wal-Mart or Publix. Marvel, DC, Image. I bought a lot of X-Men and Gen13. Specialty comics we had to drive to the comic book store for. My favorites were Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Strangers in Paradise. (They're both good.) For some reason, I manage to forget that Johnny the Homicidal Maniac was so influential to me. I reckon it's because I came upon it in high school (I used to get my anatomy and physiology teacher to call me Nny - my then-boyfriend and I would call each other Nny as well), and high school was not a good or fun time for me, and it is full of people and things I would rather forget (such as the aforementioned ex). I seriously only keep up with two people I went to high school with. I used to make a little comic called The Adventures of Mary that was my little copy of JTHM. It was about a homicidal child. Mainly I enjoyed doing the ink-splatter of blowing someone's face off. (Sam Kieth said he inked the Maxx's claws by dropping ink and blowing on it with a straw. I always tried this and found it very difficult. Maybe I should've been tilting the paper at an angle.) I would go and photocopy it at the drug store and sell them for 10¢ each. (Copies were 5¢ back then. I wish copies were 5¢ now...) I don't remember much about The Adventures of Mary, except someone was always getting horribly murdered by this small child. I think she had a friend, and the friend had footie pajamas. Or maybe Mary sometimes had footie pajamas. The most extensive comic of this I did was set to "O Fortuna", and I think I rolled the comic into my typewriter and typed the lyrics under the panels. Since I read a lot of comics as a teen, I also read a lot of Wizard magazine. I loved Wizard magazine. They had a section called "Pen Pals" that ran at the bottom of the letter column, and you could write in with your name and address and your three favorite comic books and someone would write you if you had interests in common. I know two of mine were JTHM and Strangers in Paradise, but I'm not sure what the third one was. Man, I was swimming in letters. I got at least a letter a day, sometimes more, for a month after that was published. I'd say that 85% of them were from prisoners. No joke. Not sure if it was because I was a) a woman, b) over 18, c) said I liked JTHM, or some combination of the three. I think I only had one woman write me, and the rest were men. Man, I had some pen pals! One of them would write me typed letters on a computer, with that old printer paper that you had to spool into the printer by the perforated holes on the side! I think all of his letters rhymed, too. I think I used to try to make mine rhyme back. I had another pen pal who would always draw some pencil drawing of a babe next to his letter. My pen pal Kim typed all her letters on one of those typewriters that typed in italics. She would send me Tori Amos tapes and photos. We became pretty good friends for a while, and we wound up going to see Tori Amos together on her Scarlet's Walk tour. I think I had two pen pals that I maintained from death row. One of them was like, "I killed someone, and I have learned my lesson, and here I am trying to be a good person." He was interesting to write to. Another pen pal I had that was on death row was someone I had actually heard of from a radio show I listened to, so he was like a mini-celebrity to me. He insisted that he did not commit murder, and sent me a photo of him and his young son. He wrote the WILD letters, yo. I wish I still had one so I could take a photo of it. He would start at one corner of the page, and kind of write in a triangle, and then kind of turn the paper and start in another direction, so you weren't really sure where to start reading the next section. Then he would finger paint over the whole thing. So I'd have this four-directioned diagonal letter in his erratic handwriting, and there would be a finger paint wash over the whole letter that just said "JIGGLY PUFF", or whatever the phrase of the moment was (Pokémon had just recently hit the US at this point). I had to stop writing him at one point due to some parental pressure, but he was super nice about it and said he understood, and sent me a card to say goodbye to our pen-pal-ship. Man, I wish I had some of those letters, but if I kept every letter I'd ever gotten in my life they'd fill a huge bin. Jhonen Vasquez did a mini-series comic called I Feel Sick, and I had read it when it came out (they wound up producing a squeaky Spooky, and I had one at one point): I wound up re-reading I Feel Sick at some point in 2009, I think. Possibly 2010. I hadn't been doing comics for a while, but something about I Feel Sick made me decide to draw again. I said to myself, You know, I'm just going to do this. I don't have to use a ruler. I don't have to do anything. I'll just do it. I had a regular Sharpie, a fine-tip Sharpie, and a grey marker, and I just sat there and drew in a big sketchbook every day. I think I did a page a day for a good while. And that's the best thing I've ever done, because I'm doing the same thing today. (Except for using Sharpie. Sharpie is not archival, so I had to cease and desist with the Sharpie when I was in college. They make archival Sharpie now, though!)
I like to credit all this to Jhonen Vasquez's wild angular panels. Some of them have hidden messages and I'm going to have to do that someday! This morning I finished the last book in the Pax Arcana series. I was going to go to sleep like a regular human being, but then I hit this passage: Molly Newman is a supporting character in the Pax Arcana series. She is a lesbian priest who loves Christmas - Christmas music relaxes her. Then I found out she is an alum of my college. I got so excited about this for no real reason. I guess I was excited to find a fictional character who also loves Christmas in any season. Also, Legend Has It (the fifth book) is almost non-stop action, so I was not getting tired at all just from reading. I think I finished it around 6 this morning. It had a lot of references to John Dee, which was an absolute delight. Now I'm bummed because there are no more books to read (although the author did write several Kindle singles that are in the same universe - I haven't read all of those yet), so I'm going to have to move on to the other things I picked up from the library. The collage is coming along: I had some issues with the Ouija board sun and moon at the top. I waited about thirty or so minutes to go in and erase my pencils, but the ink was still wet, so I wound up smudging my inks. I waited longer and even THEN they were wet (I have no idea why), so I didn't erase them until I woke up today, and then I had to go in with gouache and whiten the smudges. The color of the skies are Prismacolor pencils, which I am starting to think are more trouble than they're worth. Prismacolor colored pencils are so finicky to me. One has to use the Prismacolor pencil sharpener on them, or the leads just break. They break even with the special sharpener. This sucks, because one really has to bear down on the pencil in order to get that heavy color saturation. It has good color saturation, but that's really about it. I don't use them very often, though. This collage is going to be part of a series, but I haven't fully planned it out yet. I am also working on a Sad Night Crime painting that has been taxing in terms of waiting for gouache to dry and painting very tiny letters with a liner brush. This is usually something I live for, but now I just wish this painting was finished! Speaking of Sad Night Crimes: My friend Katie painted her own Sad Night Crime! I love and adore it. She's so wonderful - I love everything she does. Check out her work if you haven't already! We went to college together and I'm so glad we are friends.
It's been cold here, and I wish spring would hurry! I'm working on a new collage: It's still in the opening phases, where I'm shuffling things around. I need to add some hand-drawn elements, or maybe I don't. The thought of trying to hand-draw what I want right now is daunting. I reckon it's too late in the day. I had to go to the library to print most of this stuff out, and I picked up what was supposed to be a humorous look at etiquette while I was waiting for the person who ran the computer lab to come back from their break. It was not funny. I put it back and got Emily Post. (I've been thinking a lot about this article, which is much funnier than aforementioned book.) The printing trip was my second trip to the library today. Earlier in the day, I went to pick up my holds. These holds included the wonderful Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art, by Susan L. Aberth. I had the great pleasure of meeting Susan at the 2017 Occult Humanities Conference, where she gave a talk about Leonora Carrington. Some fun quote highlights: "Harold Carrington had no patience with his daughter's interest in art, thinking painting was 'horrible and idiotic' and that 'you didn't do art - if you did, you were either poor or homosexual, which were more or less the same sort of crime'. Speechless at this one: "Friends, mostly other artists, often interrupted [Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington's] romantic idyll in the country and these visits were full of fun and pranks. Carrington remembers playing culinary practical jokes on guests, such as serving them up an omelette full of their own hair, cut while they slept during the previous night. This book is really wonderful, and it's the first book about Leonora's life and work written in English. She had a really fantastic mind, a genius, in my opinion. I love her collected short stories - I am so wild about them that I bought three copies, one for myself and two to give to friends. I hope that one day my imagination can reach these heights.
The Occult Humanities Conference stays changing my life. I went to the third annual conference in 2017 with my friend Sharon. "This asshole has an MFA," I hissed to her during one particularly wild presentation. "Why don't we have our MFAs?" And now Sharon is in England, working on her MFA, and I am in a less glamorous place, applying for my MFA. I was unable to attend last year's conference, but I did attend the Occult Humanities Conference Afterparty, hosted by none other than the gracious and charming Cliff the Sorcerer. (I have been screaming about Cliff the Sorcerer for months and I will not stop now.) The aftereffects of Sorcery Party are still making themselves known. I met a lot of fun people at Sorcery Party - here's some links if you have an interest in the metaphysical: Shannon Taggart is a friend of my advisor, Dr. Cath, who graciously +1'd me into Sorcery Party. She is a photographer who gave what I'm sure was a stellar talk on 'Myth, Magic, and Michael Jackson' that I was sad to miss. She has a lovely coffee-table book on Spiritualism called SÉANCE, collecting her photographs on Spiritualist practices in the United States, England, and Europe. (Fourth-generation Spiritualist Dan Aykroyd provides the foreword.) Shannon is lovely and funny and I am a huge fan. She told us so many great stories during Sorcery Party and I just sat next to her and refilled her bourbon when it got low. Chaweon Koo was super friendly and fun to talk to as well. She does a YouTube series called Witches & Wine that is full of interviews with many different types of occult people! Her journey as an atheist witch has been super interesting for me to follow along with. I've really enjoyed her stories about launching sigils on roller coasters and working glamour magic. Of course, I met so many people at Sorcery Party! These are just some of them. I look forward to (hopefully) any and all Sorcery Parties that may occur in the future. Last October was really the time for parties! How's things? I have been spending my time making Taco Bell favorites in the comfort of my own home. Sometimes I need to put something on for background noise that I do not have to pay attention to. This is often a playthrough of a video game that has good music. This is kind of a misleading statement, as though I watched many playthroughs of many video games. I watch all of two video game playthroughs: Metroid for the NES, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. (Part Two of that video is here. I like this player because they don't slide Alucard everywhere - other players who put longplays up on YouTube will slide Alucard from place to place all the time, and the noise of it gets on my nerves.) I never played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night when it was out - I don't really have the patience for long games. A few years ago, there was a Castlevania: Symphony of the Night puzzle game available on the App Store, and it had the same concepts, enemies, and music, but with magic/spell elements thrown in. It was very difficult and time-consuming, and it's unfortunately no longer available, in case anyone was interested. The only Castlevania game I am any good at is Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, which 1) like most NES games, is not satisfying to beat, and 2) is so confusing that I need a walkthrough to play it every time. I do like playing it, but it gets frustrating. I have been reading Charming, the first book in the Pax Arcana series by Elliott James, a bit slowly. I think I will finish it tonight and move on to the second book. It's a great example of world-building, I find the concepts of both the Pax Arcana and the geas very clever. While the world of the Pax Arcana series has all kinds of mythical creatures (incredibly well-researched, and the reader can tell), Charming focuses on vampires. Pax Arcana vampires are a good blend of sexy vampires and scary vampires, which I appreciate; the vampires are definitely dead, but appear sexy to humans due to the glamour they project, and the main villain is recruiting humans who have money and want to be turned. It's a really great time, just a fun book that is also smart and clever in addition to being action-packed. This would make such a great television series if only they'd stick to the source material. Carmen Maria Machado has a new story up: "The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror". I think she is one of the best writers I've ever had the pleasure of reading. This short story reminded me of Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye, although I really didn't care much for Story of the Eye. I checked it out of the library after I saw it in an article about what Dita von Teese traveled with. "It's definitely not for the faint of heart," she remarks, which is not only the truth but also possibly an understatement. Here's a link roundup of resources, projects, work opportunities, and grants.
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AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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