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tiny time

September 20, 2022
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The challenge for today was to make a work of art on a rectangle of card stock measuring two and a half inches bt one and five-eights inches. Since it would be tiny, “tiny time” seemed an appropriate double acrostic. It didn’t take long to figure out end rhymes with an abab scheme, though “exempt” and “pro tem” are not quite true rhymes.

tiny time

thoughtfulness is tax-exempt
indolence is sans souci
none need senator pro tem
yin needs yang as thou needst me

The poem is a distant cousin to the lyrics of the song “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” The illustration is a sort of resonance with “thoughtfulness,” the first word of the poem, reducing a somilar concept “watchfulness” to the pocket-watch “watch,” the king’s jester “foole,” and the Prohibition-era G-Man Eliot Ness “ness.”

Readers, your time is precious, and there are thousands of demands on it. Thank you for spending this Tiny Time with me.

Retrograde

September 16, 2022
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2022 0916 retrograde

I did this one for certain of my poet friends who are under the influence of celestial signs and portents and are freaking out because astrologically speaking things have gone quite Retrograde. It is an occasion I am memorializing through acrosticizing. It’s the first time I’ve done backwards letters on part of the acrostic spine; it felt right and fun to do so.

Retrograde

Regard the Planets so entrancing
Ensorcelling as they are Dancing — for
Turns of Fortune oft dismayed a
Reaved, regretful Soul who’s strayed
Or reft a Forest of her glade

see who won

July 4, 2022
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2022 0704 see who won

There are two word games I play daily on the Internet. One is Words With Friends 2, a fancier version of the Scrabble-derived Words With Friends, and the other is Boggle. I play Words With Friends mostly with a handful of people I know in real life. Boggle I play in tournaments and with individuals, and I play anyone, which can be downright humbling when up against a player far better than I am. WWF2 and Boggle are made by the same game-maker, and one of the similarities is that at the end of a game a player is invited to “See who won!”

See Who Won turns out to be a perfect triple-acrostic spine, so I gave it a whirl. It’s really hard to read the acrostic poem in the image above, so here is a transcription, lightly edited for clarity.

see who won

sissy fuss is how we grow
enterprise and march and go
endocrines ahoy — c’est bon

For fifteen and a half words, there is a lot to unpack. “Sissy fuss” is a bad pun of Sisyphus, the poor guy of Greek myth who is condemned to eternally roll a burdensome stone up a hill. “Resistance training” found in many gyms and fitness centers is downright Sisyphean. You push and pull and climb and run a treadmill and never get anywhere. Even so, you gain muscle mass and you make more efficient use of oxygen. So going nowhere gets you somewhere, and if you’re blessed with good biomechanics and work ethic, you may find yourself in competitions. And some of the biggest Sissy Fusses ever made are at competitions.  One such just occurred at Wimbledon, and two players were fined.

It takes enterprise to succeed. Inherited wealth is not success.  Making the world a better place is, and it makes you a better person to boot. If you have life goals, it helps to march toward them resolutely.

As for endocrines, here’s a quotation for hopkinsmedicine dot org: “The endocrine system is a complex network of glands and organs. It uses hormones to control and coordinate your body’s metabolism, energy level, reproduction, growth and development, and response to injury, stress, and mood.” No one succeeds without a contribution from their endocrine system. “C’est bon” is French for “This is good.”

My drawing is meant to be a mysterious metaphor for winning and winners. I apologize for the murk–I both underworked and overworked my penciling. I imposed a deadline for myself of today, and got a little too ambitious with the implied planets and archetypical competitors and pseudo-calligraphy and such. But if you look carefully you’ll find a niftily drawn cat, and the clear message that felines are born winners.

I can’t think of a better way to be a winner than by practicing the wisdom imparted by George Carlin as Rufus in the Bill & Ted movies. “Be Excellent To Each Other,” Friends! 🙂

Life as a Series of Erasures

July 1, 2022
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2022 0701 life erasures
Here is an oddness: This is the final version of a drawing which by definition is unfinished. Titled “Life as a Series of Erasures,” the drawing itself has been extensively erased., redrawn, erased again. The roots of this approach may be thought by some to have been planted by Robert Rauschenberg, who erased a Willem de Kooning drawing to make a point about the Ephemeral (my guess as to what he was up to,  anyway), but centuries previous Rembrandt had taken an etching of his which had an extensively-drawn crowd scene, and taken his scraper to completely eliminate his hours and hours of drawing. Prints of both states still exist. Was Robert R riffing on Rembrandt? He’s not around to answer.

There are four acrostic poems-in-the-making in this drawing. They are all double acrostics, with spines/titles “Denude/Bemoan,: “Resist/Desist,” “Derail/Detain,” “Repeat/Defeat.” Note that on the drawing the third title appears to be “Detail/Detain.” “Derail” is better. ERasure and redrawing would be done, were this drawing not finished.

Derail/Detain

Deride the Women; Hand the Maid
Ensconce the sex in marmalade
Release the Kraken mon petit
And have another cup of sea
I wish for Love and get mere Sin–I
Lost my will to re-begi

This poem is a protest against the recent US Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. “Release the Kraken” was a command issued by Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, as part of the events surrounding the January 6, 2021 insurrection. There’s a tip of the hat to Margaret Atwood and her The Handmaid’s Tale. There’s also an implicit nod to now-deceased Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has been roundly betrayed by certain recently-appointed Supreme Court Justices, as well as by Justice Thomas, who is itching to turn back the clock further with more reversals. Two-thirds of the Supreme Court is politically hacking for the Repulican Party now. This is what we have come to.

On the positive side, outraged women across the country are protesting, and the pendulum may well swing again in my lifetime. I hope so. The little I can do to further that swing of the pendulum is right here, and you are reading and seeing it, Friends.

Life IS a series of erasures. At its best it erases Injustice and redraws Betterment. Let us strive to choose our erasures in the favor of honesty, decency, and lovingkindness.

Final note: under the word Defeat in the lower right-hand corner is a question mark, and underneath that, the answer “NO!!” NEVER give up, Friends. Ever. 🙂

bird n russ

March 14, 2022
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This morning at 7:44 AM Russ Kazmierczak the text equivalent of a Bat-Signal to me and Birdie Birdashaw:

“Good morning, you guys free to hang and draw at Sip’s this morning?”

We were. We did. And it was a fine morning to hang and draw. And when I got home I took a look at one of the pics I’d taken of Birdie and Russ, and then drew some more.

I’m grateful that these two fine gentleman include me in some of their sessions. They’re both quite a bit younger than I am, and they’re doing a lot more of what they should be doing, creation-wise, than I did when I was their age. They keep it up and they’ll go places. And then I’ll show them this page and I’ll remind them that I fully recognized their potential a bit before the World did. 🙂

bird & russ

buds abide & score a coup — or
iridesce & Gobsmack you
razzmatazz & comic sans
diving deep & clanging pans

Happy 100th Birthday, Jack Kerouac

March 12, 2022
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2022 0310 what the hell

Jack Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922. Today is his Centenary, just as March 12, 2072 will be his Sesquicentennial Year. We have fancy names for points on our number lines.

I am not too strapped for time, but I am leaving part of my page-image unfilled-in. Call it Compositional Whim, or call it Laziness, just don’t call it late for lunch. (Inside American joke there.)

But the poem will exist complete as soon as I codify it below:

Nick Nack Kerouac’s

New Waves of change, of Parry & Attack
Irreverence as tasty as Shad Roe
Concocting journey’s chapters of a slacker
Keelhauling preconceptions to & fro
Now we must fit the Bride to her Trousseau
And mark when Heads called Marijuana Tea
Concluding that this Beat who’d reached High C
Knew habits that are Bird’s as well as Bee’s

Here are some facts, fun and less so, about Jack Kerouac. Though he was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, he spoke nothing but French till he was 6 or so due to his immigrant parents, and it took him till 11 or so to lose his French-Canadian accent. (Tip of the hat to my French-Canadian friend Michel Lamontagne!!) His birth name was Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, which has an odd resonance with Hercule-Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac of legend. He wrote his famous novel-but-not On the Road on a single, enormously long sheet of uncut typing paper. A movie called Heart Beat loosely adapted from his reality was made in the early 80s, starring John Heard, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, and a manic Jeff Goldblum as the guy who was supposed to be Allen Ginsberg. Kurt Vonnegut wrote this about him: “I knew Kerouac only at the end of his life, which is to say there was no way for me to know him at all, since he had become a pinwheel. He had settled briefly on Cape Cod, and a mutual friend, the writer Robert Boles, brought him over to my house one night. I doubt that Kerouac knew anything about me or my work, or even where he was. He was crazy.”

I read On the Road in my early 20s, when I was still involved with my college sweetheart, and I still had romantic notions that made On the Road as enticing as catnip to a cat. It was a good, quick read, but I remember little except the reference to Fort Lowell near Tucson, and a description of steak and milk as a “protein feast.” I bought The Dharma Bums but do not remember a word of it besides the title. (How Time withers the Mind!!)

But the title did come in handy today. My poet friend Richard Davis Facebook-posted a Happy Birthday to Kerouac, and in minutes this pastiche came to me:

This old man
He was Beat
On the Road and on the street
With a trick knack
Kerouac
Was and now becomes
Saintly
To us
Dharma Bums.

Happy Birthday, Jack, however you are.

PS: The late Harry Dean Stanton would have been perfect for the role of Jack Kerouac, I think.

What [?] Thee [!] Hell[!!]

March 10, 2022
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2022 0310 what thee hell
Here is an image on a 3×5 card that sat on the table for weeks, faces vaguely sketched, no words. It was either throw it away or finish it. It is almost always better to finish it, and I did finish it, or at least bring it to a stage of completion, but  it may still be better off shredded or otherwise destroyed.

This one’s uniqueness of composition and the aptness of the drawing to the acrostic poem gets it  indefinite stay of execution. When I review my 2022 output in 2023, I’ll have fresher eyes and judgment. Meanwhile, it seems to be something done by the lovechild of Franz Kafka and Sally Bowles.

What [?] Thee [!] Hell [!!]

Whip’n out the sour mash
Hoist it high for dear Estelle
Aye a serpent of the lash’ll
Take grotesqueries unwell

first world driiink

February 24, 2022
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The conceptualization for this page occurred while I was walking home from a drug store/pharmacy called Walgreens, sipping and then gulping on the first-world drink I had purchased, a Naked Blue Machine. It tasted sweet. Research revealed that similar products ARE sweet, to the tune of about 13 teaspoons of sugar per unit; and the nutritionally-valuable fiber is been mostly removed in the juice-making process.

So this is a product that suckers people into drinking something that they think is good for them, and it’s priced for the upscale consumer. Anyone with fresh fruit and a blender can do much better for themselves with their own concoctions, which with experimental effort will ultimately result in a drink better, tastier, and FAR cheaper than this store-bought, blatantly First World product. (I refer now not to the product I had purchased, but to the satirical product depicted above.)

I tried to be funny when I did this,m but world events have deadened my funny bone. Please think of this page as a Caveat Emptor public service.

Technical note: The “iii” in “driiink” is pronounced “three.” So the phrase becomes “snort or three.” The acrostic construction process makes for strange bedfellows, in this case triplets.

first world driiink

find your bliss with wet, not weed
in the kick your totters teeter
riffing with your snort or iii
savoringly in between
tasty and the kitchen sink