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Give Take Hurt Heal

October 19, 2013
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Here is a work in progress. It is Stuck, has been for over a month, but it is a good Stuck. There’s a book by the brilliant physicist Freeman Dyson called Weapons and Hope, now dated in a way but still vital and worth reading, that spoke of Stuckness. He also wrote Disturbing the Universe, which rocks autobiographically.

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One hand Gives, the other Takes. What is Given is a blank check. It may represent indefinite wealth or unlimited potential. (To further digress, the awesome meteor-logical Stephanie Abrams, viewable in the wee hours, is often partnered with Al Roker. I wonder if she’s ever deconstructed the word POTENTIAL to POTENT-I-AL. She well could.)

A woman torques and cracks a bone in her foot. That Hurts. She then goes to an Urgent Care center and gets support-booted and caned in the nicest possible way. That Heals. (That’s based on the real event in the real life of my real girlfriend, who rocks every bit as much as does Freeman Dyson, inventor of the Dyson Sphere.)

This is catch-circling and confusing, so it perfectly fits what Cyndi Lauper sang, once upon a time after time:

Caught up in circles
Confusion is nothing new…

My thoughts have wanderlust. And wonderlove. I am unshaven, but even after I shave I’ll be a work in progress at least as long as I live.

Revealed: The Secret No One Cares About

August 20, 2013
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My last post invited readers to e-mail me if they wanted the words to the poem behind the eponymous Love Birds. I sat back and waited, eager to respond to the flood of requests. Alas, I got not a one, not even from–sob–my Girlfriend. [sad face]

Humbling experiences build character. I am perhaps too puffed up/showoffy, or too much, to use my daughter’s charming locution, the Attention Whore. But it drives my creativity, and creativity is just about all I have to offer to civilization and posterity.

So, folks, as you never requested, here is the cheat sheet on the strict-character acrostic poem I wrote as backdrop:

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This also reveals acrostic methodology. FIRST, decide on the acrostic; SECOND, decide on the rhyming (or near-rhyming, as in this case) words at the ends of the lines. THEN write one of the lines of poetry, and do a character grid that exactly maps that line. (It doesn’t have to be the first line, and truth is, it’s often easier to acrosticize if you don’t.) Then write the rest of the poem, and have your eraser handy.

Bonus (?) feature: here’s an example of my sign-making layout skills, with my workplace and the cause we evented de-identified:

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Unchain’d Mallardy

July 27, 2013
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scan0031This post’s title was to have been “Post #222,” for this is my 222nd post, and I have a thing for certain numbers. When I’m on a treadmill I call eleven minutes and eleven seconds “getting my ones;” 22:22 is “getting my twos;” and so on. I used to get my fives. Then I got old and deconditioned.

But the title is “Unchain’d Mallardy” for two reasons. Reason one: I consider this one of my worst puns of all time, and I take perverse pride in that. Reason two: the song “Unchained Melody,” which I love to hear and wish I could sing, came to be in about as random a way as this page did.

This morning the first thing I did to my blank page was to rub a pencil’s edge over it while it lay atop the drawing table I’ve owned and used for more than 40 years. Here is what I got:

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The scratches, gouges and dings from often-ill-advised use of my table gave an unevenness to the graphite rubbing, as I hoped it would. Straining to see something real in the randomness, I suddenly perceived a duck on the surface of a body of water.

Here is a progression of my drawing’s stages from that point on:

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The gorgeous and talented Salma H didn’t enter the equation till I’d written the poem. I had left room for her beforehand, though–I knew another element would demand existence.

Here are the words:

Umberto Eco’s lists give calm
Not too unlike the torsoed Salma
Cacophony does discord tell
Harmonious-webb’d feet compel
And to the brain by way of sclera
In waterfowl we’ve funhouse mirror
Nor do we need go R F D
‘D seem Ducks do Delivery

As in…From Evil? [Author smiles]

Naked, Eyed

December 29, 2012
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Way back in ’09, and early ’09 at that, I took a tangential look at nudity. The effort, with three epigrammatical quotations and two acrostics, looked like this:

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This week I dug it out and had a go at revamping it. I had learned a year ago, reading Art Spiegelman’s awe-inspiring MegaMaus, that his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Maus was thirteen years in the making, and that he’d painstakingly done draft after draft of comic-book pages, panel studies, and layouts. Now I would see what reflection and rework would do for one of my own.

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This study includes the epigrams but not the acrostics. I added a quotation, concentrated more on the calligraphy, experimented with more angled text presentations, and drew a different imagined nude cat lady. (I felt the original looked too YOUNG-old.) Then I did a text study of my acrostics:

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Note the lines “Magistrate or Auntie Em/A Joy, a Challenge, a Dilemma.” The scansion sort of jumps the rails to maintain acrostic integrity; were there no acrostic, the break would yield “Magistrate or Auntie Em a/Joy, a Challenge, a Dilemma.” I especially liked the flat-breaking plane of the NAKED NAKED NAKED triple acrostic. Now I was ready to integrate the studies into yet another study.

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This result took about three hours, and could have taken another three to unmuddy and finesse the image, had I the time. I do not, so I will save the FINAL final image for another time. But there’s a valuable creative-process lesson in reworking an original. I will be doing a lot more reworking, of this and many others, in 2013 and beyond.

Spoon Render Anthology

December 26, 2012
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Here is the evolution of a journal page, spoon-fed:

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But sometimes we go too far. In this case, the finished spoon, unadorned, seems to speak for itself.

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The title of this post is “Spoon Render Anthology.” It refers obliquely to the classic SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY by Edgar Lee Masters, which is a poem cycle of capsule biographies told by the permanent residents of a graveyard. It is, pardon the pun, haunting, to say the least, and brilliant; and if only one reader of these message-in-a-bottle words goes into the ethers and finds and reads it, this blog post will have succeeded beyond its dream of avarice…