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You Dun Had Yer Fun (effaced)

July 3, 2020
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It might help to think of this blog post as a carnival ride. Take or leave all the backstory and poetry, if you wish. At heart it’s an improbable occurrence that may if let mess with your middle earbones a little bit, pleasurably I hope.

2020 0703 toucan

Many years ago I read Cool Hand Luke by Donn Pearce for the first time. It was about a man who found himself in Florida, in the Raiford prison chain gang. Every 4th of July the inmates got the closest thing to a holiday the prison offered, with free lemonade and some latitude, with the thought that a positive association with Independence Day, the springboard of the United States of America, would help instill in the convicts more love of country, and therefore of law and order. Ironically enough, though, in this scene from the book, some convicts were quietly sawing through the wood floor of the building, through which some would escape, thus declaring their independence. It’s a well-crafted scene, but the only reason I bring it up is that Carr the floorwalker at one point announces, “First bell. You done had your fun.”

The sentence “You done had your fun.” has been echoing in my head for over 50 years. I use it every time I need to tear myself away from self-indulgence and get back to chores, work, or other responsible activity. Many is the time “You done had your fun.” has compelled me to walk away from a gambling venue before I put my debit card in the ATM yet another time. (I am a recovering gambling addict, what Mario Puzo called in his too-neglected novel Fools Die a “degenerate gambler.”)

I’ve been in a creative slump of late, and the combination of self-quarantine due to COVID-19 and serial movie-watching and overindulgence in various tasty treats has undermined my creative output further. Finally I grabbed myself by the scruff of the neck, figuratively speaking, and said, “You done had your fun.”

Then I realized that with alternative spelling that would actually make the phrase more Southern-sounding, “You Dun Had Yer Fun” was a perfect quintuple acrostic. It would be a bear to write, but the challenge might well pull me out of my slump some. So here we are.

Since it is a quintuple acrostic, and I took on the further challenge of keeping the verbiage to a minimum, with as little sacrifice to rhyme and meter as possible, the logic of the poem’s content goes afield more than once. But that turned out to be serendipitous, because right at the last few words there came unbidden the perfect subject matter for the illustration: an Undressed Toucan. “What kind of clothes would a toucan wear??!” “Why, self-expressive HAWAIIAN SHIRT and HAWAIIAN SHORTS, of course!!”

Nobody else on Earth, except MAYBE the latest, bleeding-edge Artificial Intelligence Artist, could have created this page. Like Peter Pan, I gotta crow about that, though with the subtextual knowledge that no one else on Earth would WANT to.

****
You Dun Had Yer Fun

You’re riding high and then you eyeball stuff
You so doubt what you’re saying off the cuff

Of course your sense can intercede for you
One scene’s unclear and typeset in Urdu

Urbane and sleek, of dearth you’re not a fan
Unless until y’undress a mere toucan
****

About that powder-blue, fizzy effacement: It is sort of a way of marking my territory. When an intaglio plate, or lithographer’s slab, is deemed by the artist to be unworthy of reproduction, the plate or stone may be slashed with an appropriate tool, indicating that any further use of the plate or stone is unauthorized. About 38 years ago I had one of my intaglios professionally printed in a limited edition. The printer included with the prints and ancillary materials the declaration: “The plate has been effaced.” Remembering that, and wanting to jazz up the image a bit, I used photoediting software to efface this too-canny effort.

Maybe it was all for a Bad Pun. In the Arizona Wildcat, the school newspaper for the University of Arizona, reviewer Bryan Johnstone called the comments by my artwork in the solo show I had in the Hall of Fame gallery “self-effacing.”

Thank you, O Reader, for reading my Bad Pun of the Day. (Actually, there are two Bad Puns in this post. Can you spot the other one?)

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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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.