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Rodman Edward Serling, or Remember the Twilight Zone Where…?

May 4, 2013
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A popular conversation-opener at Unit VI Elementary in the mid-60s was “Remember the Twilight Zone where…” The Twilight Zone was the gold standard of Cool TV Shows. How tragic that its creator, narrator, and author of the majority of its episodes, Rod Serling, died long before his hair turned completely gray. He would have been Serling Silver.

The sad fact is that Rod Serling was hopelessly addicted to cigarettes and work, work, work. He died in a hospital of a different kind of broken heart. But his family life, as described by his daughter, Anne Serling, was rich with love and high good humor. I’ve just read an advance copy of Anne’s memoir, AS I KNEW HIM: MY DAD, ROD SERLING, and good Heavens, I wish I had met and known him. Read the book, which is heartily endorsed by Carol Burnett, Robert Redford, and Betty White, and you too will wish my wish.

Appropriately for a page dedicated to the six-Emmy-award-winning creator of The Twilight Zone, I write this at 4:14 AM local time.

At the upper right is an ersatz Twilight Zone intro, which, if you’re a fan of the show, you will not be able to read without hearing Mr. Serling’s unforgettable narrative voice.

Here are the words to the acrostic:

Risky business, television–hey, ask a man who knows
O those censored teleplays–the jerks would predispose
Dimwits dumbing down unto a low denominator
Mangled messages with wounds so often proving fatal
Ah, but this man persevered with WORK fulfilling wishing–in
Noting his sad passing we must add that he’s gone fishing

Anaïs (Henry & June) Nin

January 22, 2013
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Two days ago, having just finished a journal page, I told my girlfriend I wanted to do a portrait page of someone I hadn’t “paged” before. She suggested Anaïs Nin, perhaps because I’d been affectionately calling her “Nin” (why? Long story) off and on for more than a year.

What a terrific, and challenging, subject for acrostic poetry! The biggest challenge would be to find a word that begins with an umlauted i, i.e. ï. A capital ï, i.e. Ï, never “occurs in nature” since the umlaut in ï is that peculiar species of umlaut known as a diaeresis, which is a diacritical mark that indicates a new syllable. Since the first letter of a word starts a new syllable by definition, the diaeresis isn’t needed and wouldn’t work. What to do? –Well, heck and gee-whiz, what if I treated those two pesky dots not as an umlaut, but as two-thirds of an ellipsis, i.e. .. ? Then I could put an extra line in that began with an ellipsis–problem solved. (One of the things I LOVE about acrostic poetry is the challenges it creates. Solving odd problems like these forces creative solutions.)

That wasn’t the first problem, though. The first problem was, before I got to the acrostic poetry, I had begun the illustration.  My illustration featured nudity in the form of a nude, reclining Henry Miller and June Mansfield. I drew, both with them and with Ms. Nin, not from a photo source, but from imagination; and my imagination used not real life but actresses and actor from the film Henry & June, which I’d seen only once, and that about twenty years ago. Consequently the full-faced Nin looked less like Anaïs Nin and more like Maria de Medeiros, though not much like either (I most definitely do NOT have a “photographic memory”). But the bigger problem was the nudity. Though it is not a violation of WordPress terms & conditions to include nudity, it is frowned upon on certain other sites where I might wish to post my page. I HATE censorship, but I solved this problem by self-censoring.

Before I did the portrait fix-ups and the clothing of the nudes, though, I scanned the work in progress. I leave you with that image:

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