I didn't realize this until I opened weebly to write, but I read the remaining five books in the Johnny Dixon series after the last post. I just finished the final book, The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost. I'm very very grateful for Irwin Terry's blog Goreyana, which is still active! Mr. Terry has posted all of these dustjackets for the John Bellairs books that were illustrated by Edward Gorey. (The new covers are so plain in comparison.) I've been reading these books on Hoopla, and they all have the new ebook covers: All right, let's see. - The Chessmen of Doom: Classic Bellairs in that there is some weird stuff happening that is never fully explained. Suspension of Disbelief Dept.: Prof. Childermass gives up on a $10 million dollar inheritance because he doesn't want to deal with the hassle of contesting his brother Peregrine's will. (Is tenure THAT good? Maybe it was.) Loved the witch at the end and the mention of Hecate. - The Secret of the Underground Room: Johnny, Fergie, and Professor Childermass have to rescue Father Higgins, which entails a trip to England. Johnny Dixon truly gets to go all over the place and Professor Childermass foots the bill. I'm sure the idea of Johnny and Fergie running around by themselves in a foreign land would scandalize parents these days, but this is the 1950s, so of course these thirteen year olds are on their own for most of the day while the Professor is in the library finding clues. I was going to finish writing about these other books, but Weebly just logged me out as I was writing this post and I lost about half of what I had just written. So I will do that another time because now I'm irritated.
Also, while I was writing this post I found that there is another book? I'm not sure how I feel about that, though. I actually haven't read the first book in the series! Maybe I will go back and read that one.
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I had to go see my family for Christmas. This may have been an error. I was there for far too long and I also was caught in the Southwest Airlines holiday fiasco, so I got back "home" two days later than I was originally supposed to. "You are at your mom's? You need to come up w/a new plan. Moms are alright for a little while," texted a friend from Kentucky. Well, here we are. It was kind of weird to be on the other side of Florida. They had a cute bookstore, though. I spent a lot of time and money in there. I picked up The Crossing Places because it was on the shelf of staff picks at Tombolo Books. I happened to flip it over and read the back cover, which is something that I don't always do. (The cover I posted here is not the cover that I saw in the store; this cover is much better.) This was a fun mystery. I did not figure it out (the red herring was kind of wild and large), the main character was a delight, and it made me wish that I'd had an actually good Archaeology professor in college (I withdrew from that class on the advice of an Archaeology graduate student - the professor was using a workbook from the 1980s for our class assignments and was clearly not reading our papers). It was a fun, quick read, and I'm actually looking forward to more books with this character.
I LOVED LOVED LOVED Sunless Solstice. I love a spooky Christmas story from the English countryside! This had a variety of fun ghostly stories that take place around Christmas - the British Library publishes these and there are three other books themed around Christmas-time. I have two of them on order. It was cold in Florida at the time I was reading these, and it made me just want to be next to a fireplace, drinking some mulled wine and eating fine cheeses. They're older tales, so it surprised me that one was directly about demonology - it seems more like a modern subject. When I was about halfway through Sunless Solstice I went back to the bookstore and bought Randalls Round. It was sort of Lovecraftian in that there were a lot of indescribable terrors. As one keeps reading Randalls Round, a pattern begins to emerge of the stories ending in a place where they feel distinctly unfinished. There was a very intriguing story called 'The Treasure of Abbot Thomas' that really ended leaving me with so many questions: Then what? Did the American sell the house? Did they try to find out what the treasure was? Are you just living in a house with a weird tentacle creature in your walls? If you like closure in a spooky story, this is not the book for you - I might go so far as to say that in some stories the story ends directly at the conflict. There are two stories included with Randalls Round that may or may not be the work of the same author, but those two stories have full conclusions so it seems unlikely. I have mixed feelings about it. I also picked up Tolkien's Letters from Father Christmas (it was the last one). This is the only thing by Tolkien I've ever read. It reminds me that Tolkien was into Santa Claus and C.S. Lewis thought Santa was dumb...I feel like I read that somewhere...if you don't have time for Santa Claus you're Feliz Navi-dead to me. This is a collection of the letters Tolkien wrote to his children. They are super delightful, they include characters and drawings and he would design stamps for the envelopes and all. I haven't finished this one yet, but I'm inspired to start writing my own. Hope you had a meaningful Chanuka! Hello! It has been a long time since I have updated, mostly because no one really reads this blog except for maybe three people. And I am one of those three people.
I have been reading a lot of comics lately, so let me tell you about what I've been getting into. ♡ My coworker loaned me a hardcover biography of Jack Kirby, which has been very inspirational but also kind of sad in terms of how much Jack Kirby got the fuzzy end of the lollipop. I started reading superhero comics in the '90s, but also bought vintage comic books from the antique store (mostly '70s era Wonder Woman and the third volume of Marvel's Red Sonja), so the Kirby influence was evident in what I was reading - I mean, I was renting the VHS tape of How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way from Blockbuster, and Marvel was reprinting the old Kirby comics around the late '90s as well. The art in the biography is terrific so I picked up a secondhand copy to use as a reference and I'm waiting for it to get here. Jack Kirby was wildly prolific and there were several projects that he was involved with in one way or another that I wasn't familiar with - one was a comic called Black Magic (or True Amazing Accounts of Black Magic) and another was The Strange World of Your Dreams. I love comics from the 1950s, and these two titles are okay, but they do not compare to another comic that I was reading pretty recently from the '50s whose title now escapes me. Many of the titles are very similar, so it's hard to remember if it was Strange or Weird or any number of synonyms combined with Tales or Stories or another similar synonym. ♡ Hoopla recommended Batman:Noel, which had very lovely art and opened up beautifully with a snowy Gotham city scene. The art was more realistic for a Batman book, which is something that I don't always care for, but it was very well done and I think that having a realistic style contributes to how horrifying Batman villains can be. Both the artist and the colorist deserve every accolade. It was an interesting take on A Christmas Carol. I liked that Batman was gradually coming down with walking pneumonia because he is, after all, a human being who gets sick. Not enough sick days in superhero comics in my opinion. ♡ After Batman:Noel, I read Catwoman: When In Rome, which was fine. I liked that the artists were inspired by fashion illustrator Rene Gruau when making this book - I really love Rene Gruau's illustrations, and it goes well with the mood of the character of Catwoman and her glamorous lifestyle. The book looks as though it was done either with watercolor or ink wash - there was a little feeling of not quite being comfortable with the drawing style, which is more of a vibe and difficult to explain. Because it's based on this illustrative work of Gruau, things are a little more stylized, but not as stylized as the art of, say, Darwyn Cooke. The storyline was all right, a little mob story, a little weirdness with the Riddler. I read that first and then went on to Batman:Hush. Batman:Hush was terrific. I was trying to piece together who did it and why the whole time and never got it until the end. It really involves all these different villains in amazing ways without feeling too forced (this was how I felt about Wonder Woman & Justice League Dark: The Witching Hour), is just a wonderful detective story, we have some very good spicy moments with Bat & Cat, it's a great story by Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee's art is fine. Jim Lee is someone I definitely looked up to in the 90s when he was super popular with the run on X-Men and then with his work at Image, but today I'm just like, Oh this is Jim Lee and everyone looks the same. The only way you can distinguish between Jim Lee characters is basically the coloring, everyone has the same body structure and facial features, especially the ladies. They are all babes, but they look exactly the same. Anyway, if you like Batman, this was a really good one. I don't even think you would need a firm grasp of continuity - things are pretty well explained if some of the context is unclear. ♡ Even though I have been reading all these fun Bat & Cat comics, I have also been doing some indie reading. Hoopla had the Madman collection and I started on that because I never had read Madman back in the '90s. I knew of it, but had never actually picked it up. It's very much a fun indie comic of its time, just a zany romp with competing mad scientists and Madman himself, who is a reanimated zombie in a superhero costume who uses weapons like lead-filled yo-yos and a slingshot. It's fun. You can't take it too seriously. ♡ I REALLY LOVED indie comic Hell Phone by Benji Nate. I can't wait for the next installment! I must know what happens. Cute art, engaging storyline, fun friends in adorable grave robbing outfits. It's a must. It had a blurb from Liz Suburbia, and it's in a similar vein to Suburbia's comic Sacred Heart, which I also really liked. I read Hell Phone on hoopla, but it is also available to read on WebToons. Good-bye, Camp Q, merry Camp Q. Good-bye, plain unwholesome food, good-bye Charlie boy. David Sedaris did a signing and my brother went because I lost my signed visual compendium in my last move. I am getting ready to move again, after a whole roller coaster of a week that ran me through the gamut of human emotion and also through the wringer. I'm headed home and I'm very pleased, because I was staring homelessness directly in the face for a hot second. Here's what I have been into lately. The Wojnarowicz documentary was absolutely amazing and part of the reason it is so wonderful is that David Wojnarowicz was so prolific in terms of the recording of his own life and times. We have his journals, tape journals, collages, paintings, videos; footage of the band he played in, his answering machine tapes. It's sad, it's lovely, magnificent. I'm so grateful that all of these tapes have been preserved so that he can narrate his own life even after his death. (The thirty-year anniversary of his death is approaching, on July 22nd.) I check out anything that looks interesting at work and Friday was one of those things. It's a very engaging story with mystery-solving teens, and I always love a good mystery-solving teen (key word here is good - there are plenty of mediocre mystery-solving teen tales). I like the 1970s style world they're in and the dynamic Teen Detective names. This one ends on a cliffhanger and I can't wait for the next one. Another comic I've really enjoyed lately is Harrow County. The picture I've used here is the first TPB, which caught my eye because I thought it was a reference to hag-riding. It's a really lovely comic that's done in ink and watercolor - the artist actually uses waterproof ink and watercolors OVER the ink, which I thought was absolutely unreal. There are a number of fun witches, monsters, curses, and magic that happens all in this little farmland setting. What I like about both Friday and Harrow County is that there are little sketches and thumbnails and things like that in the back - I love little behind the scenes glimpses at how artists work on composition and character creation. There's an arcade here in Lexington and it has a lot of old games I had not heard of (Gorf??), but my new favorite is Crystal Castles. I had never heard of Crystal Castles, because I didn't have an Atari growing up (and didn't know anyone who had one). I still don't really know what I'm doing or what's going on in this game. The trees chase me. The bees chase me. There's a witch. I pick up little dots. Are they tabs of LSD? Is that why trees are chasing me? I don't know, but it's a good time. I'm actually brainstorming out a piece for the first time in a while. It's strange, because in the past I've just sat down and let them come out and haven't fiddled with them too terribly much. This one, I think, might be a little different, but I don't want to over- or under-work it...I guess we'll see how it turns out.
I took a little bit of an extended break. Extended vacation. It's good. I have been trying to rest and relax. It has really paid off. For Christmas this year, Santa brought me an electric typewriter! He knows that I'm good for goodness' sake. I have been reading a lot and some of it has been good and some of it has been not so good, so we'll hit the highlights and leave the rest for another day. Wintering was a terrific read. I'd heard about it when everyone was raving about it during our first pandemic winter, and this winter was really the right time for it. It's very difficult to tell ourselves that we need to rest, or even to tell other people that we need to rest - especially now, when we all have pandemic exhaustion and are supposed to continue on with daily life as though it were normal for people to be dying in scores every day from a health crisis that could've been over by now. It's A Lot. I think people are trying to pretend it's Not A Lot, but it is, and that's okay. Take a break. The world will keep turning.
I'm going to segue directly from Wintering into Fierce Love because I think they pair well together. When we nurture ourselves in our times of difficulty, that's the only time we'll be able to nurture others in their difficult times. That is what living in community is about. We can't pour from an empty cup. I think that Fierce Love is my book of 2022; I got it from the library but I'm going to have to buy it. We have to start being more involved in the well-being of others, of our communities. I love this book and it's really been inspiring! Fun fiction: So, I checked out a lot of comic books to read and I happened to pick up this Warren Ellis Moon Knight TPB & what a joy, what a delight! I particularly enjoyed it because I didn't need to know a lot about anything that was happening - the character is well-enough explained for the new reader AND all the stories were standalones! I haven't read any kind of superhero comic for YEARS that has not been part of some larger arc and the individual comics stood alone. YEARS!! I didn't even realize it until I read these, and it was such a breath of fresh air honestly. Just fantastic, fun, witty, a great time. I am also working my way slowly through Krazy And Ignatz 1919-1921: A Kind, Benevolent And Amiable Brick (I snagged the next one, too, for when I finish this one). Krazy Kat is so good and it is a delight to read. I have never read anything like it and I love George Herriman's little puns and alliterations. I usually read a few of the strips before bed and they're like little treats at the end of the day. Hope y'all are staying warm and staying safe! Feliz ano novo! This week has been a delight in terms of reading. The Lonely City was wonderful - I may go back and re-read it tonight - I had to pull out a pencil and mark some passages, which is something I usually do not do in a physical book. There were some descriptions of paintings that I haven't seen, and I think it might be a fun exercise to have those to work on in the studio and then see how different they are. David Wojnarowicz is one of the people featured in The Lonely City, and I had his memoir on Kindle - I am always checking to see what drops to $3 and then snatching it up - and I had started it a couple of years ago, but had put it down and not come back. I think that it was not the right time then, but that after The Lonely City it was the right time for Close to the Knives. I made a lot of highlights. There were moments reading it that put me firmly within a time and place, and then moments that could've been written yesterday. The world is poorer after losing David Wojnarowicz. After Close to the Knives I have been reading We Are Everywhere, which is a treat and a delight and full of wonderful photographs and historical facts. We're lucky to have Matthew and Leighton (and their fiery social media presences on Twitter and Instagram). It's great to have a historical reference to the queer liberation movement that examines the movement but does not center only one experience. I'm moving into another book soon, and I'm glad I have all these available so I can keep the momentum from one and move to the next one! I have been in the studio a bit - not as much as I should have been this week - I did work on a piece last night and this morning, but it is Not Quite Done and I am trying to figure out what will bridge the gap to Done. (It involved some application of gold leaf, which was not as terrible as the last time I attempted to gold leaf something because the secret to a successful gold leaf operation is gloves. Wear some gloves.)
This piece is one I had actually laid out last summer in the sketchbook, but I'd forgotten about it and caught it as I was re-visiting the sketchbook. So when it's done, I'll post the sketch; it has changed a bit since I first envisioned it, and I'm happy with the changes, but it still needs some 'jeujeing' as Pharis would say. The best thing for 'jeujeing' something, in my opinion, is to have some tracing paper handy, so you can trace the change you are thinking of making onto the tracing paper so that you aren't making an irrevocable change without seeing what it looks like first. This is always my advice, but for some reason I never have tracing paper. For a little while, I've been using colored pencil or just graphite pencil, and this piece I'm almost finished with is in Posca with gold leaf and it's odd to be back in that stark world of flat color! I never thought I'd find it strange. I would estimate that much of my time in my life has been spent either gazing at or attempting to gaze at a woman's naked form. I'm not sure what my first drawings were - my parents never even told me the story of how they met, much less considered imparting any anecdotes about my life other than my father once tearfully asking whether I remembered when he would take me to the beach and I would eat sand. ("You'd think he would know," remarked my mother with disgust, "that if you were young enough to eat sand, you probably didn't remember it.") Though I could ramble on about this for the rest of time, constantly departing down rabbit holes of anecdotes that may well be false (remind me to tell you about the preacher and the Saran Wrap), I recently was talking to Katie about erotica, pornography, and the male gaze. Many aspects of erotica and porn are different now than when I was growing up - Katie and I are around ten years apart - and I came up in a time where feminine beauty and sexuality was centered around the male gaze. Additionally, the 1980's were a horny decade, the decade of the rock music video babe. There were babes everywhere you turned in the 1980's. And then came the 1990's, when I started reading superhero comics - and then suddenly, the Comics Code was out, self-publishing was in, and so were Bad Girls. (Let me tell you, I was living.) This is all to say that my personal understanding of what was sexually desirable came mainly from what was available to me as a child (Tex Avery cartoons, Jessica Rabbit), a teen (comic book ladies), and then as a young adult (the back room of the video rental place in the next town, the ability to buy Playboy and Penthouse). We didn't have a Gay-Straight Alliance in high school until years after I graduated (and even then, the creation of a GSA was so panic-inducing that it led the county school board to suspend all club activity in schools). There was very little in terms of queer teen companionship, of any kind of queer elder mentoring, of much community. So there was really no one to tell me how to be queer. I just continued in the way that I knew: looking at babes. Who doesn't want to look at babes, I would think, and I probably still do. Today I was reading The Lonely City and was so struck by this passage. It's an excerpt from Maggie Nelson's The Art of Cruelty: "This may explain, in part, why the meat-making of gay male porn doesn't produce the same species of anxiety as that of straight porn: since men - or white men, at any rate - don't have the same historical relation to objectification as do women, their meat-making doesn't immediately threaten to come off as cruel redundancy." Of course this seems obvious, but it brought with it so many avenues of thought. I have always been so struck by the joy and celebration that I see in the works of gay men, also in gay male porn: the appreciation of the visual, the exaggeration, the fun. Think about Tom of Finland and you'll understand what I'm getting at. Everyone is having a good time, except maybe the occasional woman who shows up in a comic.
One of my favorite stories in Sometimes She Lets Me was about a femme who just wanted anonymous sex, who just wanted to cruise. It was bemoaned that lesbians don't cruise, and I felt that. I also bemoan it, certainly. But it isn't safe. For many reasons. And this passage made me think about what it is to be a sex object, because there's power in that. But it's a fragile power, in a way, because it doesn't mean we can cruise, it doesn't mean we can walk alone at night - it's a different kind of objectification than the objectification of a white male body. Objectification with power, and then the powerless object. Finished a sketchbook this week! Another one is on the way, although I'm nervous about it because I haven't used this type before and it's not spiral-bound (I couldn't get another one of this same kind, which I really liked). I guess we'll see how it goes! I have omitted a couple of pieces here for various and sundry reasons. My astrologer sent along something that was inspirational, and I'm keeping it under wraps for the moment. Sunday is my social day of what amounts to about five hours of Zoom meetings. My Religion adviser from undergrad, Dr. Cath, hosts a Zoom meeting in which she shares her screen and we all go on a virtual gallery tour and look at art. Last week we were at the Uffizi for The Divine Comedy Illustrated by Federico Zuccari - we did Inferno then - and today we did Purgatorio and Paradiso. It's been inspirational in several ways, mainly the sparse use of color in Inferno, followed by the brown ink washes of Purgatorio and a return to color in Paradiso, with added color in the final illustration. We've also been interested in how Zuccari defines the action in the illustrations - rather than Dante and Virgil appearing in the middle of an action, Zuccari draws them at the foot of the mountain, ascending the mountain, and at the top, all in one drawing, and often this action is occurring from right to left. Also, Zuccari depicts Dante's dreams in a circle above the sleeping Dante. The Pugartorio and Paradiso segments also have text within the illustration, which also made us all think of comics. I had written down "Philip Roth" in my sketchbook while I was reading The Creative Habit, as he's mentioned in the final chapter, and then today I found American Pastoral in a Little Free Library. Another Little Free Library find: The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai. I also ordered The Lonely City, something that's been on my wish list for a while, after Austin Kleon featured it on his blog.
Luckily, this year seems to not be flowing at the breakneck pace of last year. At least, it seems slow for now. That may also be due to spending more time working or reading than refreshing the bird website. It's a good feeling. "I know there are artists who like music in the background while they work; they use the music to block out everything else. They're not listening to it; it's there as a form of companionship. I don't need a soundtrack to accompany my life. Music in the background nibbles away at your awareness. It's comforting, perhaps, but who said tapping into your awareness was supposed to be comfortable? And who knows how much of your brainpower and intuition the Muzak is draining?" - Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit I had been picking away at The Creative Habit for quite a while, but I finally re-read and finished it on Monday. I really enjoyed it and very much recommend it. Lately I have been thinking about this quote above, because I do listen to music quite a lot when cleaning or in the studio or just generally. This week, though, I have been working without it. It's an interesting change. I do feel a bit more focused, I don't feel the loss of background ambience, I have just been fully engrossed in what I've been working on. I actually finished a sketchbook yesterday! I think I'm going to do a weekly roundup of what I've worked on that I'll post on Sundays. Piggybacking from the last post, where I linked an interview with author George Saunders where he talks about social media, here's an interview with artist Tishan Hsu that also touches on how humans and technology interact: Even in the mountains, then, the artist felt watched: by the sites he visited, by the phone he took to bed. “They actually have cognitive psychologists helping them design this software so that they know what will pull you in,” Hsu said. “We need to stop and think about what it’s doing to us and our bodies. So in a way that’s what my work has been trying to grasp. I would say, whether people connect to my work — I think I’m really just trying to ask the question, ‘What is really happening?’” This is something we've discussed in classes: how easy it is for us to forget that there are always human beings behind everything that's programmed. Sometimes we long for this ideal of impartial computerized decision-making, but human beings themselves are not impartial, and have hidden or overt biases - these can all be reflected in a program that we might believe to be free from human error. More inspiration for the week:
♡ This Artists' Questionnaire on Caroline Kent, who uses cut paper instead of an initial sketch for her abstract paintings ♡ Social distancing, 432 years ago (I was just telling my cousins that I would love to have a six foot long pole that I could hit people with if they got too close to me in line) ♡ The work of artist Ellen M. Blalock. Amazing, beautiful, heart-rending. (I'd rather look at her quilts than look at Red Composition.) |
AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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