This was done by way of thanks to a friend who’d sent me a card featuring Levon in his bearded Salad Days. I have posted it on Facebook, and on the post I mentioned I might base a journal page on Levon some day. If I do, the double acrostic will be LEVON HELM’D.
Here’s a webcam “selfie” of me and the card:
This page is a mystery. The dots are connectible via Internet searches on the tags. Every mystery worth its salt has a good Red Herring and/or Maguffin, and thus an element is included that does not really fit…
Today’s post gets a little personal. My father’s mother, whose maiden name was either Cora or Marguerite Price, and whose Uncle Arthur co-founded the city of Chandler, Arizona, left this earth in the first part of January, 1979. It wasn’t till I started this page, based on a framed photograph of her probably taken in the early 1930s, that I discovered how dark the dark side of my memory of her could get. I suppose she did the best she could, and I owe her my life, my circumstance, and a lot of my DNA; but my poor Uncle Jim (birth name: Brian Aylesworth Bowers) and my poor father (he could have signed a contract with the Chicago Cubs, and would have if he’d followed his dreams)! There is a Latin phrase, “de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est,” that I am defying here. She ruled with an iron fist in a satin glove.
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:
Yesterday I attempted portraiture of Anne Hathaway and was not too successful, in my own estimation. As a portraitist I have my good days and not so muches. But “try, try again” I shall, just as I did with James Baldwin on two way back when occasions:
One with Clay, Image and Text 