This is posted in haste on a borrowed laptop. It shows a woman warrior grappling with Death. The woman is derived from Cordwainer Smith’s D’Joan from his amazing story “The Dead Lady of Clown Town.” Smith derived D’Joan from Jeanne d’Arc, better known to people like me as Joan of Arc.
I may come back and add a transcription and/or annotation, but I felt a need to post NOW, but I have to leave for work in TWO MINUTES OR SO. Hope this pleases…
Here is a remake in pencil of a page I did more than six years ago using an ultrafine Sharpie and Faber-Castell colored pens. You will see when comparing to the below original page that I changed a few of the words, and that I distilled the design elements to the essential and magic-realismed the girl into self-illumination.
I THINK the remake is a significant improvement, but since I finished it less than an hour ago I might be too close to it to be objective enough to judge. I KNOW I can do better, and would have had I more time. Can’t wait to retire! [smiles]
Here as promised is a better spoon than the spoon I posted and promised to do a better one than. As for the double word acrostic, I decided on single-word lines for simplicity’s sake and then went shopping in the enormous dictionary near the front desk where I work at work. I’d never encountered the word “supposititious” before, and was delighted to find it could mean either Fraudulent or Hypothetical. Once I had Supposititious, I knew I wanted more words that were spooky-special. The last, Necronomicon, is a tip of the hat to H.P. Lovecraft and his disciples.
“Onomatopoetical” yields a squiggly red line when typed, but “Onomatopoetic” does not. Chalk it up to poetical license, and another hat-tip to a literary gent, this one Charles Dickens, who wrote “The Poetical Young Gentleman.”
“Obbligato” according to the dictionary is that part of a musical performance that is absolutely essential and must not be omitted.
“Phenomena” is the plural of Phenomenon. It is amazing how many newscasters think “phenomena” is singular. –Actually, it IS singular in the sense of Uniqueness; that it can be both Singular and Plural heterodynes its singularity.
These, then, are five of the most numinous words I could find. As for “Numinous,” it means “having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity.”
My image is silly but I hope fun. My real intention is to wish a Happy Birthday to three creatures the Universe has graced us with.
My superb friend Karen and her superb boyfriend Ed capture sea life on camera when they scuba-dive. Karen took the photo from which my drawing was derived. I have her gracious permission to use it; and it will get further use below in its reproduction to illustrate the difference between Art and Life:
Ansel Adams once said that were he confined to his house for the rest of his life, he’d still find rich and endless subject matter for his photography. Your humble narrator says that were he confined to the subject matter Spoon, Water, Glass, he’d find endless ways to beat a dead horse to the ground and beyond with those three elements alone. Luckily, this need never be put to the test, and shall not; and this day’s Evocation of the Three has a special guest with the reflectivity of glass, the fluidity of water and the wieldiness of a spoon.
Words, which may make more and more sense on successive rereadings:
Sipping’s an S-WORD that ends with a G
Parsing BANANAs divests them of peel
Ousting a despot brings more from the sea
Owning that Ownership has its rewards
Note that our s-words may morph into swords
When you look in the mirror, do you see a lazy person, or do you see a person who hates laziness? Do you see both?
These two “digitally remastered” Blasts from the Past address the yin and yang of laziness. The design for “Laziness Deplored” was put on a T-Shirt and light-use worn for four years–it went well with a Hawaiian shirt. I also made a transfer of “Laziness Defended” but, fittingly, found myself too lazy to do the ironing. When I get around to it–2014 probably–I’ll wear that T-shirt to the ground, and maybe beneath it, if they bury me in it. But I hope to be too lazy to die.
On the other hand, I hope to be too unlazy to cease doing these pages, into which, to be melodramatic, I am putting my very soul. Please note that with “Laziness Deplored” I took the effort to make the double acrostic exact as to line length, meeting that criterion of a “true” acrostic. To find out how unlazy you have to be to do that, I cheerfully invite you to try it sometime..
Here are some more self-rejected pages of mine. Ironically, there are yet more pages that I am yet again self-rejecting. The ones that don’t make the cut either are not visually engaging enough or are repetitive of themes or motifs previously presented.
Once upon a time the Phoenix Art Museum had a show of some of the stuff Claude Monet did at Giverny that was still unfinished at the time he died. Of the dozen-and-a-half canvases presented, there was only one that was worth looking at as a painting and not as a clue of Monet’s creative process; and “sketch and then fill in” about summed up his creative process on individual canvases. It was thin soup indeed, and if it hadn’t been Monet doing it the museum would never have shown it. Consequently, in the (I hope) far future when I start to get a glimmer of that Tunnel with the Bright Light, I hope I will have tagged those sketch-musings of mine that are not worthy of a viewer’s attention, that they may be consigned to the flames. (See Harlan Ellison’s ALL THE LIES THAT ARE MY LIFE for a more extensive discussion of this philosophy.)
Onward:
Popefullness
Must’ve done this around the time the latest Francis tried on his funny hat.
Struggle/Pinnacle/Afterwar
Comic book writer Steve Gerber, whose Howard the Duck made a great comic book but a horribly Uncanny Valley movie that misused Lea Thompson and Jeffrey Jones, once said something like “You know what there is at the top of the ladder? Another ladder.” And that’s where you Kick It Up A Notch or more aptly Take It To The Next Level. More irony: I wasn’t able to do that with this one; I realized it would take about five times the effort a ‘normal’ page requires.
Involvements
Here’s one that would be easy to finish. I vote it Most Likely To See Completion amongst these Salon entries.
Skeleton/Key
Gee, I just love bone configurations, especially if they hang together…
Logarithm
Logarithm, I got music. I got Readers; who could ask for anything more? (See also Algorithm…)
Collide O Hadrons
I’m sure this was done around the time scientists confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, the misnamed “God Particle.” I guess “Make-the-Universe-Possible Particle” is too much of a mouthful.
There you have them, for now. There may be a Part Three, but I’ll do a few posts prior even if there is one.
Ayn Rand must be turning over in her grave. A long time ago, she proclaimed that A equals A. Now people everywhere are saying “It is what it is,” and not giving Ayn any credit. (Nor, to my knowledge, did John Prine tip his hat to Rand when he put “You are what you are, and you ain’t what you ain’t” in his lyrics to “Dear Abby.”)
“It is what it is” is a semantically empty phrase that usually (in this neck of the woods, anyway) connotes that something not-great but unchangeable exists. As Robert Heinlein was wont to say, “You can’t argue with the weather.”
So why use it for an acrostic? Well, ten years from now it will remind me of the way people were talking ten years ago. (Fifty years ago, kids my age were calling Cool stuff Boss. Cool survived; Boss died.) Also, the end-letters work out fairly well for acrosticization, and enabled a reference to Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, heroic mongoose of the Kipling oeuvre, as well as the Robert Mondavi vineyards, which I was privileged to visit in the mid-80s, enjoying their five-course meal accompanied by five different wines.
Here are the words to the triple acrostic:
It pays a Cobra to BEWARE of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
The savage Truth would humble the most cock-eyed optimist
It’s like an alcoholic at a vineyard of Mondavi
So many vampires want to taste the blood of whom they kiss
Two things make this unlike a day like any other. One is that month, day and year in the mm-dd-yy format are in numerical sequence for the second-to-last time this century; the other is this is the 300th time I’ve punched “New Post” at WordPress and deemed the result publishable. Since I’m forever enumerating and otherwise manipulating numbers, the two phenomena are a good fit for “A very SPECIAL episode of ‘One with Clay, Image and Text.'”
Opus #300
Of course the Cosmos has my #
Pale penumbra; 1-2-3
Undercut the Grand Vizier-0
Seek ye Wisdom NOT from her-0
(Some ambiguity is built-in, and some is added. The Pound sign is now employed in referral, and it and a given phrase then referred to as a ‘hash tag;’ it also means both Pounds and Number. FYI: it means “number” in the acrostic. The zeroes are pronounced “Oh,” and, oh, by the way, they do not mean “zero” in the acrostic; they are a syllable dependent on their surroundings. “Her-0” should be pronounced “Hero.” As for the stuff in brackets, Googlers of “Lord William Not-from-here” will get a very SPECIAL lowdown on an intriguing character in the Instrumentality of Mankind mythos according to Cordwainer Smith.)
Eleven Twelve 2013
Endearing 2-some says À Bientôt
Leave 2lips in the sun to bloom & glow
Elopement’s zer0 hour makes them pale
Vivacious c0uple shakes but does not bail
Enlisting Space 13 for their RV
Now Wedded Bliss yields 13 forms of Glee
What better thing to do on this special numerical day than to get married? Truth is, a couple got married on today’s Today Show.
As for the illustration, attempts to deconstruct it may well prove it indeconstructionable. [proud-kid smile]
One with Clay, Image and Text 