Let’s Just Start with the MacGuffin:

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Surprising as it sounds and contrary to all expectations, it turns out she was the heroine in her own story.

graphite drawing

Sometimes the pivotal, crucial piece of information on which the plot hinges--the fantastical and showy part--doesn't wait for the denouement . . .

Whatever the exotic and thrilling final chapter of my life is going to be, nothing could fully prepare me, let alone anybody else, for it; I think, however, that I may have tromped through the facts of the event many times already without even recognizing where I was. Heck, I may exist in a universe parallel to the one I think I’m in as it is. It’s as though I’d backed through a door into my life and discovered I was somewhere well into the whole chain of events, been mystified by them (though everyone else is in on the joke, having started someplace more logical), and dashed back down the hall in hopes of a do-over. Pretty sure I showed up in my underwear onstage, come to think of it–everybody else seems to at some point.

Here I am, then, living a serio-comic mystery story, ending utterly unknown, and apparently it was written by a bunch of clowns more interested in spectacular pratfalls and occasional bouts of farcical action with absurd and incongruous outcomes than in logic or meaningful purpose. This is not, mind you, a complaint. Once it occurred to me that my calling in the grand scheme of existence was as comic relief, things got a lot simpler and less intimidating. There’s no grail for me to hunt, no world-saving invention for me to create, and certainly no audience expecting anything beyond my appearance in the olio portions of the program, say just after intermission and before the serious third act commences. Even in my own life I might end up playing a bit part, and that’s kind of comforting to me, as opposed to having some dreadfully high purpose to accomplish before curtain call even though nobody’s bothered to spell it out for me.

I make art that way most of the time.

Some drawings and stories start with a title that has no inherent plot or direction implied in its wording but is hoped to goose my brain in a fortuitous direction. I told you before about my [nonexistent] spy-mystery tale used (along with a few nonexistent chapters’ headings) as a springboard for illustrations. My sister donated another title for me that led to a couple of drawings that turned out to have no detectable connection with the title, “Penguins in Peril.” Much of the time, my mind takes such convoluted routes from Point A to Point B that I’ve exhausted the entire alphabet and gone into numbers before looping back to B, where I thought I was headed. If I ever really go there at all. “Penguins in Peril” is such a great title that I’ve tried, really tried, a couple of times to get it right but it just hasn’t happened yet. Ah, well, I like the drawings I got out of the attempts and I still have this fantastic title for future reference. A bonus!

There are other tales and pictorial ramblings that spring from the convoluted mental meandering itself, and these too can take their own tangents and drag me right along with them. If, as I’ve posited before, everything is research, then whatever I discard, carom off of, or don’t include in the current project is fair game for the next.

I figure that ought to apply in life as well as in art. What I didn’t succeed in becoming or discovering or doing this time around, maybe I am just saving up to do when I’m older and more, erm, mature (okay, that’s just not gonna happen). Maybe I’ll get lucky and either someone else will get it done, or karma will plunk me into a future person-place-or-thing better equipped and more highly motivated to get the job done.

And that’s what this is all really about, isn’t it. Motivation. I’m just hiding behind the actor’s persona and pestering the director to tell me “what’s my motivation?” when I know perfectly well that it’s I who am supposed to weasel that information out myself. Sigh. That’s why I prefer to keep goofing around on the edges of sanity purposefulness when making my various stabs at art, and just see where the jollity of the moment takes me. So much more fun, so much less, you know, <makes a face like a baby that just tasted a spoonful of pureed broccoli instead of the expected bananas> responsible. This way I’m also able to be just as surprised by the thrilling finish of the story as all of the innocent bystanders. Whatever it is, guys, I’ll see you there. Wear a Kevlar® jumpsuit, and perhaps also a water-squirting boutonnière, just in case.

graphite drawing

Writing good mystery stories is tough enough--solving the mysteries of one's own life, toughest of all . . .

I’m Not a Real Person, but I Play One on Television

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Maybe, Mr. President, but in the spirit of clarity and full disclosure, I think the other thing we really have to fear is ourselves . . .

. . . or as the ever-astute Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I’m speaking, of course, for all of us lily-livered, yellow-bellied, totally ordinary milquetoasts in the world who have ever awakened on a perfectly calm and sunny day filled with dread for no other reason than that we are over-anxious about anything–or nothing. By this, of course, I mean practically everybody. On a bad day. Those few of you magicians who have never once had this experience, I salute you with admiring astonishment. And I implore you to hustle out and patent your technique and figure out how to produce it in vegetarian-safe three-a-day capsules for the rest of the waiting world.

Meanwhile, back at the Reality Ranch, I can lay claim to having plenty of days free of the aforementioned bane, but certainly plenty of times too when it seemed it would be far simpler to raise a sunken battleship singlehandedly from the bottom of the Mariana Trench than to haul myself out of my cave and interact with the world as though I were a competent human. And I’m not talking about dealing with true clinical depression or anxiety disorder, both of which as you know by now I have entertained as unwelcome guests in my own head in times past (pre-treatment). I’m talking about that state most mortals enter occasionally, where we’re certain that our horrible inadequacy is a glaring banner of toilet tissue perpetually trailing from our waistbands, that we are so clearly impostors in our own lives that we’ll soon be successfully replaced not by another person but by a badly made mannequin and no one will notice or care.

Yesterday, I was reminded in conversation of a fine and sometimes very helpful method for dealing with this characteristic in myself. Don’t know why I’d forgotten the source for so many years, as it’s really rather handy. I was in the high school drama program–and lest you die of shock at this news, be assured that I got into it initially because (a) I liked reading and viewing plays and (b) I happened to know that there was a lot of off- and backstage stuff to be done. Somewhere along the line I drifted from stagehand duties and lighting design and being mistress of all things costume and prop and set-related to, you guessed it, acting. Clearly not because I was destined to grow up and take Broadway by storm. But there it is, weird as it sounds. I mentioned in a previous blog that I have won theatre awards, including in those years, Best Actress, but this was high school, and hardly a magnet school for the Arts, for Pete’s sake.

However, I think I did perhaps earn the award from among my peers, and obviously not because of my natural vivacity and gregariousness. What I had was a wonderfully tolerant and clever set of teachers that did their best to spot weaknesses and needs among their students and find ways for them to overcome themselves. Because of course that was precisely the problem in my case. How could an uptight introvert get up onstage and act? I could barely conceive of how to play ME in my own life at that point.

The answer was really rather simple to state, and not, it turns out, impossible even for an uptight introvert like me to execute when I put my also-natural stubborn will and desire to be better than I was behind it. “If you can’t imagine someone like you getting up on the stage and acting a part, then start with playing a good actor. Then let that actor play the part.” Convoluted? Of course it is. Silly? You bet. But somehow that one extra step of remove let me pretend it was somebody else doing what I knew I couldn’t do myself, and that was that. While I had forgotten the specific inception of that nugget of useful knowledge in my life until yesterday, I know that I have employed it to many and varied extremes over the intervening years, and can thank the idea (and Mr. C and co.) for thus having pulled me through many a dicey situation since.

So far I have played a college graduate, a construction worker, a landscape and interior designer, an artist, a teacher, a poet, an administrator, a blogger, and many other roles, not all perhaps to award-winning standards, but enough to help me survive them and sometimes even forget myself enough to truly enjoy them in the moment. And I think I’m continuing to get better at the role of Me, the one role that might actually matter the most come to think of it. I’ll keep you posted if any honors other than my self-appointed tiara should pop up.

digital photocollage

Never Fear, My Darlings, We're All in this Together . . .

Best-Laid Plans, Like Best-Laid Eggs, Gang Aft Agley

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Robert Burns evidently knew it as a long-established fact, so I think it’s safe to assume that the unexpectedness of the turnings in life’s wonderfully wiggly path long predates Bobby and me and pretty much anyone else I could look to for a quick peek in the crystal ball. The day will always just take me where it takes me, and I will consider myself to have done well even if I can only keep going with the flow of it and not just plain get knocked down and run over. Most of the time, the moment’s, day’s, or year’s destinations are far more interesting than those I thought I’d plotted out in the first place.

P&I drwgs x2

Even thoughts are often just fly-by evolutionary phases waiting to develop into something more meaningful . . .

Yesterday, for example, I thought I’d post my Wednesday-night drawing exercise, but I was startled by the arrival in my inbox of a lovely gift and task in the form of pay-it-forward blogger recognition into doing something entirely different than my first intention predicted. In the process, I discovered not only a renewed interest in visiting and catching up with various of my previous favorite bloggers‘ sites but a whole cadre of new blogs and bloggers with whom I will now be sharing this adventure. Much better than the stodgy post dedicated to yesterday’s-drawing.

On the other hand, what it brought to mind along the way was that there are few, if any, of us that understand any of ‘what happens behind the curtain’ in anyone else’s world. Non-musicians think that because almost all human beings can make sounds, most of them in some controlled form, that a singer is just someone who opens up and pretty sounds come out rather spontaneously, not that he or she would spend years learning how to breathe properly, read music, stand, sit, move and (when necessary) act in the ways demanded by the particular repertoire. That singers have, in fact, to learn a large amount of repertoire over the years, getting to know texts, languages (pronunciation and nuances of meaning), rhythms, techniques for singing faster passages or long-drawn-out notes well, and a million other aspects of musicianship that non-singers will never know.

I think it’s hilariously misguided how readily we assume that if something is done well by another person, it must come naturally or easily, and not that–as is far more often the case–it has been honed through the now-famous 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell posits in Outliers as requisite for gaining expertise in one’s field. Any one of us knows from experience that things being easy and “natural” from the start is rare almost to the point of nonexistence. From bronc riding to ballroom dancing, from puzzling out the intricacies of quartz crystal cutting to those of quantum physics, there’s no place that one becomes expert or even experienced at first try, or probably tenth.

So I think it’s only fair that we teach each other what we know of these behind-closed-doors mysterious labors. You see my writing in a somewhat raw form, granted, on a daily basis because I committed to posting daily and that means I can’t spend unrealistic amounts of my waking time fussing over rewrites and editorial doctoring or the house will fall into ruin around my ears and we’ll eat nothing but what comes in random order out of the fridge at every meal. Not to mention that I won’t fit in even my Wednesday evening drawing time, let alone go on photographic wanderings or any other creative tangents.

The drawing, though, you don’t see in process or very often in its developmental stages. I draw enough stuff that I don’t have to let you see my “underwear” like this, but as I say, being a fairly truthful person I think I owe it to you to show you that not everything gets finished to the same degree or as successfully. I wouldn’t claim any of my work at all as Perfect (and where would be the fun in that, anyhow?), but there are degrees of relative completion and appeal, even in my playtime stuff. So the sketches above give you some sense of process in my case. They are literally bits pulled from my carry-around sketchbooks, and show that while I’m in a particular mode I might be working out issues not only of technique and medium but also of style, mood, intended story content (if any) and so forth, until they might gel in a drawing of the sort I’m more often going to publish here or even want people to see when they peer over my shoulder at my work.

The result of recent noodling over bird stories (yes, birds are about as recurrent as the proverbial fish and pencils in my work) in my sketchbooks led to this Wednesday’s drawing session in which I imagined what would happen if a pair of birds found one of the Easter Bunny‘s plastic eggs and raised it as their own. I’m pretty sure this is the actual origin story of marshmallow Peeps.

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We are artistic birds and these are our peeps . . .

Given how generous, collaborative and creative the blogging world is, I expect that eventually there will be a bit of lessening of the information gap that lets us naively believe that anything we don’t understand but someone else is good at doing must just spontaneously spring into being for them. Much better to acknowledge and admire the immensity of learning and effort that devoted practitioners devote to their wide world of doings, and the great gift that having others so dedicated and skilled around us is to us all.

Just think: if some poor cave-dwellers hadn’t squatted nekkid around the cooking fire with a fat-spitting hunk roasting over it about ten thousand times too often, we would neither have the knowledge of how to have sputtery, juicy fun at the cooker, nor would we have the majestic modern beauty and wonder of aprons.

Friends Well Met in Cyberspace

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We have constant reminders of the dangers lurking around the dark corners of the webiverse, and indeed we would do well to heed all such warnings. But I have seen that the obverse of that coin is equally impressive and far more enlightening and cheering: cyberspace is full of fantastic people and inspirations, and I don’t have to go far to find them. The kindness of strangers is quickly transformed into wonderful streams of affinity and even deep friendships when we have the ability to find so much common ground despite the physical, cultural or temporal distances between us.

Case in point: ceciliag, author of the exquisitely artful and personal blog The Kitchens Garden. I saw, without surprise, that today she had received a much-deserved blogging award for her marvelous work, and was delighted, because in the short time I’ve followed her blog I have come to see her as an inspiration, a mentor and even a friend. That’s the beauty of this concentrated contact we can develop with wonderful people whose shared insights and arts move us to do more than merely hang about the fringes basking in their gifts, and actually get to work on our own, howsoever we can! What I saw with surprise, and gratitude, was that C had generously passed along the award to other bloggers, and included me. I will of course try to narrow the field of my admired cohorts enough to pay the gift forward, because others besides ceciliag have strengthened, entertained and inspired me as well. She must know that I would gladly have included her in my own list had she not been the one ‘tagging’ me!

award tag

The purpose of the award is clearly to reinforce the ties between us in this remarkably friendly and creative world of blogging, and also to introduce us to more new connexions that we haven’t yet known to enjoy. Along with the fine mandate to share with you some links to other blogs I know you’ll find delightful, I am tasked with telling you 7 things you don’t know about me. Finding 15 bloggers whose work I admire and think deserves recognition is easy (though keeping it to only 15 mightn’t be)–but since I’m so boldly non-secretive a person, I may have to fish around a little to think of any things everybody doesn’t already know about me. So first, a blogroll of other worthy persons whose blogging efforts I hope you’ll support and find as delightful, provocative, educational, witty, touching, and/or flat-out gorgeous as I do.

Ad Alta Voce

Cherry Tea Cakes

Claudia Finseth

Closet Cooking

Draw Stanley

In Search of My Moveable Feasts

Just a Smidgen

Little Brown Pen

My Little Norway

My Open Source Life

Plate Fodder

Roost: A Simple Life

Sustainable Garden

The Last Classic

Tinkerbelle

And now, as if my dear readers haven’t already heard enough blather about me, here are seven things you might not have known.

1  I consider ginger root the Universal Donor. I can think of hardly anything that can’t benefit from the addition of ginger in one of its many forms.

2   I have something a little like the earworms people get when a pop song (or, among people I know, a movement from some classical piece) gets stuck in their head for a day or week–but mine is a permanent repetitive tune. My personal theme song, I guess. At least it plays in variations sometimes, thank goodness, or I’d go batty. Or have I already?

3   Once, long ago, I got to make a commissioned artwork to be presented as a gift to the Bishop of El Salvador.

4   The shelves on my desk have a miniature found-science collection of bones, bugs, bird nests, rusted hardware and seed pods.

5   I have a horror of telephones. Yes, it has a good latin phobia name too. But what do we phobics do to get over it–call each other???

6   My ability to raise one (either) eyebrow sardonically once garnered me the nickname “GP” for reminding my teacher of Gregory Peck’s expressions. I don’t think she meant it as a compliment, ‘specially if she had any idea that my sense of irony was mostly aimed at what I thought was the absurdity of her teaching style. Mea culpa.

7  At various points in my life I thought I’d study to be a pastor (that was clearly before I started developing into such a heathen); a marine biologist (all that scientific knowledge started to get in my way); an architect (oh, yeah–a dyslexic who can barely do grade-school math). Turns out I wasn’t really cut out for any sort of well-defined path.

Which brings me right here! And I can definitely say I couldn’t be more pleased with having landed among you. It challenges more different aspects of my personality and self-image than pursuing any of the aforementioned would have done in my case. And it lets me keep up the hunt for my vocation, if I have one, with a dandy support community that often drives me down previously unknown and unexpected paths of fun-filled mystery. So thanks, and here’s to all of you, not just those on today’s list!

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Bouquets to all!

Maybe I DID Hear You the First Time

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mixed media drawing

Pardon my reverie . . . I was just mulling over my latest plans for ruling the world . . .

Oh, yes, in my youth I was very much that kid all of you teachers have found so frustrating in your classes. It wasn’t that I was at all obstreperous (a little chatty at times, but then who isn’t), and I certainly wasn’t intentionally disruptive or uncooperative. But since I mostly hated being noticed, thanks to my shyness and social anxiety, and naturally I didn’t want to get in the way of the kids that weren’t perhaps getting enough of the attention anyway, I often found myself wandering the byzantine byways of my brain with the undoubtedly frequent appearance of not caring about the highly significant stuff being generously shared from the pulpit of the teachers’ desks.

Did it really matter that while the doyenne of the desk was teaching the spelling lesson I was counting the holes in the ceiling tiles to see if one tile matched another or perhaps each was hand-punctured by specially trained elfin craftsmen with sterling silver toothpicks instead of fingers? Actually, as a sometime teacher myself, I can answer that query with a resounding Yessirree, but truthfully only because no matter how stealthy the “inattentive” student thinks she’s being, and no matter if she gets a Hundred on the spelling test every time, the other students are bound to take their cue from the least participatory and cooperative seeming student in the room. It doesn’t matter that she did in fact hear the spelling practice being held in the background of her own mental meanderings (or already knew how to spell whatever exceedingly counterintuitive new words were being practiced), what mattered was that she wasn’t supporting the standard of classroom decorum. I get that. Now. But as a kid, I found it rather trying that I had to do whatever everybody else was doing even when I was certain in my heart that I would get the required job done in my own way. I was the poster child for the triumph of Mind over What Matters.

Did I have Attention Deficit Disorder? (Do I?) Would that make any difference? Not really. Despite my demurrals and admissions of inner sloth and self-indulgence, I have always had the ability to be fairly disciplined when it mattered, I just know I have to make a very serious commitment to exercising that particular skill, because it’s simply not my automatic bent. So along the years I’ve tried to train myself up into a slightly more presentable appearance of compliance and conformity when it seems important or expedient to do so.

Yet my mind still flits hither and yon with equally purposeful purposelessness, all the same. I’m simply learning how to be better at a sort of out-of-body transcendence that allows me to look like I’m fully involved in the present action (and I almost am, really, Boss) while a hunk of my inward self can continue its peregrinations in whatever flights of fancy it requires in the moment.

digital photocollage

Sugar and spice, sure, but don't forget the snails and pails and whatnot . . .

See, there’s just too much loveliness in this universe (and potential in all of the other imaginable ones) not to be exploring it when-and-however I can. The found castoff wing of a dragonfly simply begs to be examined in person and in memory and at great length for its extravagant glassine iridescence. Every minute or magnificent object that comes into my view or my thoughts deserves some serious attention. Shells, shoes, barking madmen and barking dogs, whales and whiskers and whistling trains–if I don’t give them their due, and hopefully in the process also unveil their previously undiscovered secret histories, why then who will? That boy in row six thoughtfully picking his nose with his pencil eraser while staring out the window? Probably, because clearly he (a) has a similarly vagrant brain, the sort from which fabulous inventions and discoveries do spring, and (b) his nose ought to be clear enough by now that his brain will get more oxygen than all of the rest of Row Six put together, so his thoughts will have the added lustre of brilliance that fresh air brings.

In the meantime, I feel it incumbent upon me to keep up my part of cross-pollinating the scientific and romantic approaches toward whatever imaginative ends might finally appear. So please don’t be offended if my attention seems to have drifted just a little off to port or starboard when you’re regaling me with the wit and charm and incomparable genius that I should undoubtedly be diving into with the fullest focus possible. Because I probably only look like I’m off in la-la land when in fact it’s located in me and at one and the same time I’m perfectly awash with what you have shared, O my teachers. I promise I will absorb it, too, subliminally, cutaneously, osmotically and, if necessary, orthotically–right along with all of the goodness I’m already absorbing in my far-off inner world.

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The waters of mystery and adventure are just waiting there to be swum . . .

Foodie Tuesday: Everything You See I Owe to Omnivorousness

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". . . zee spites of life . . ."

Sophia Loren is on record as having attributed her, erm, attributes thus: “Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.” Following in her pulchritudinous footsteps, supermodel Laetitia Casta claimed “my breasts were made in Normandy from butter and creme fraiche.” I can tell you from experience that eating plenty of the aforementioned prescriptions doesn’t in any way guarantee one will become a siren–more likely, a zeppelin, if one applies the medicines too assiduously. I can even say that sometimes, as Pogo’s lady-skunk admirer Mam’selle Hepzibah referred to l’amour itself, food is “zee spites of life”–both the spice and the bane of existence. My love of food becomes at times something of an amour-propre, in which I am shaped by my love of food and in turn, my self-image is affected by my disaffection with my shape. But I can also tell you that I know this is not only an extremely common complaint but also one I am inclined to ignore and suppress, thanks to my adoration of food and the eating thereof.

I am an unregenerate omnivore of sorts; while there are a few (probably previously mentioned) foods I eschew to chew, they are generally in no way designated unwanted because of moral, ethical, logical, political, practical or physiological reasons. Yes, that’s changing a bit as my old carcase ages enough to begin objecting on its own to some things that weren’t previously non-grata on my plata. So as I said before, I am hunting up alternatives to wheat, for example, and finding that I lean toward some foods more as a way of leaning away from others I’d long eaten now that they don’t agree with my innards as well as they once did. The rest only gets avoided if I just plain don’t get its appeal, whether it’s a textural or flavor-based or conceptual thing. As for the objections others may have to a food for any of the above-named reasons or any others, for that matter, I am able to find plenty of things to like and overfill myself with in almost any setting, so if I need to lay off the red-in-tooth-and-nail eating while dining with my vegetarian companions, I can happily do so; if it’s time I got more kosher or halal because I’m at table with friends for whom that’s important, I can swing that way too.

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I can be semi-well-behaved when I really have to. I even learned to make wheat-free lemon shortbread to be kinder and gentler to the digestive attachments of my sweet tooth, but still . . .

But chances are pretty good that when left to my own devices, I’m going to eat a whole lot of whatever looks, smells and tastes good to me at the moment, and rare indeed are the moments when something or other doesn’t appeal. If the offerings in question should happen to be loaded with butter and eggs, taste rich and sweet and salty, have a juicy dash of ripe fruit and lavish lashings of cheese and avocado and chocolate and perhaps be sided with a rasher of excellent smoky bacon, look out! I’ve worked very steadily over the years to achieve my one form of womanly curvaceousness, that burgeoning bulge at my equator, and while it’s easy to maintain, I don’t recommend that you get between me and the buffet table at any inconvenient juncture or I can’t be held responsible for your safety. Just sayin’. Think I’ll go poach me an egg.

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At least edible perfection doesn't have to be complicated!

I’d Like to be Shakespeare, but It’s Too Much Responsibility

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white pencil on black paper

I'm much better at being the family curmudgeon than the curmudgeon that turns the family story into art . . .

Much as I always complained about it in my students as whiny entitlement, I too am consistently under the spell of that dream wherein one becomes Great without any sort of effort or even natural-born gift that should make it happen. I’d probably even be quite content with being a one-hit wonder, if for example it happened to be one of those comfortably money-producing sorts of a hit, because after all, it’s not the notoriety per se that appeals to me (as I still enjoy my dork-in-the-corner shy side’s privileges) but the benefits of the notoriety, i.e., exceedingly fat living supported by a steady stream of however-undeserved wealth. All the better if I can manage to convince anyone, at least myself, that it’s marginally deserved; hence, the one hit I’d gladly have.

Meanwhile, back in reality-land, I will go so far as to lay claim to having actually read work by a number of superior writers, studied art made by a talented-rogues’ gallery of artists, and paid some serious attention to what great thinkers and doers of all sorts in fact DO to make their hits just keep on coming. It’s fascinating to see who’s been prolific and who hasn’t, and perhaps more so to see who among those has produced higher or lower proportions within that of impressively high quality stuff. Not least of all, it’s intriguing, if sometimes only in a sort of sadly prurient way, to see who’s burned out our died young, and whether there appears to have been any connection between the productivity and its quality-quotient and that early “deadline” or not. It’s sometimes as though they were outfitted with a cosmic ending-detector that made them squeeze as much into and out of an unfairly short life span as they did.

My own plan is that, if that’s a requirement of greatness, I will be so unbelievably UN-productive and UN-talented and UN-dedicated as to live a Methuselah-like yet party-filled lifetime unnoticed by the gods of fame and fortune. Pretty sure I can do it.

But to be fair, lots of standouts have lived long, prosperous and even exceedingly happy lives, so my preference, my actual Plan A, is that I will get to have it all instead. There are footsteps worth following, and paths worth admiring but not wanting to touch with a ten-foot pole even when wearing full hazmat gear. Not that I wouldn’t look adorable in a hazmat suit, especially if I could find it in safety orange! With a fake fur collar!

But I digress.

If I am to succeed with Plan A, I am willing to concede that I might have to lift the proverbial bale and tote its concomitant barge. Sigh. So I do keep reading, writing, gazing, drawing, and otherwise studying and practicing whether I happen to be quite in the mood or not. It may be that my lucky stars will never get into the specific alignment required, the necessary coincidence never happen at just the right juncture, despite all of my best efforts–which would be a disappointment, given my inborn desire to enjoy all things in the least effortful possible manner and my determination to thwart that inclination in pursuit of productive betterment. But I do believe the only way to tip the odds toward, no, to actually make it possible for, any such confluence of desirable consummations, is to do the work. Pity, but there it is. So the old bum does get off her old bum. What else can I do but do?

This will not, I guarantee you, turn me into a Sure Thing. But it’ll pave the way, should any stars just get in the mood to align in my favor, and along the way, it’s kind of funny, but I find the more I work at the writing and art-making and, heck, even some other things at which I’ve been known to buckle down and work, the more often I find I can derive pleasure from the process itself. This is indeed a really fine thing; if I can’t guarantee that working hard will produce any tangible objects-o’greatness, at least I’ve figured out that I can guarantee it’ll produce some personal pleasure along the way. All else had better be considered bonuses.

Now, I am well aware that the whole idea of a one-hit wonder is fraught with a certain air of condescension among the cognoscenti. There’s more than a hint of disdain in the phrase, as though the wonder-maker were kind of a loser for not having followed up on the whole hitmaking process. I think that’s a horribly unmerciful judgement. Maybe even sour grapes. How many of us ever manage to produce a single notable achievement in our lifetimes? Talk about pressure! The response to a miracle of significant action or production, the thanks you get, is, “Cool–where’s the rest of it?”??

In spite of the danger, for as I’ve said I would be mighty impressed with myself if I could accomplish one really amazing thing in my lifetime of toiling as artist, writer–never mind as daughter, sister, friend, wife–I will keep on plugging along. Because I can’t, finally, figure out how to stop it. Because Twain and da Vinci and Shakespeare and Morisot are dead and so I don’t have to compete with them, only my yesterday’s-self. Because it’s worth doing even when only the process makes it worth doing. Just because.

mixed media portrait on paper

. . . because I Will do it . . .

If Strunk and White were Couturiers

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graphite fashion design drawings

Everything old is new again . . . again . . .

Fashion Week has just ended in New York. I tremble with the thrill of it right from the top of my Philip Treacy Toilet Seat Hat to the scarlet soles of my agonizingly tall Louboutins. Even the non-Twittering world is atwitter. Oh, okay–having confessed to you my dark past as a wearer of safety orange fake fur, I can assume you might recognize me as somewhat less than slavishly devoted to following the dictates of the clothing cognoscenti.

Despite being by nature shy and introverted (yeah, I can hear your gasps of astonishment over there, but it’s quite true), I’ve always gone my own way when it came to dressing myself. It may have begun as a bit of a defense mechanism against my self-consciousness on wearing plenty of hand-me-downs or an instinctive rebellion at recognizing my own mousiness. Whatever the cause, I started fairly early to accessorize with an eccentricity of sorts. Eccentricity is always easier to defend than failure to conform, even if the expression of each is wonderfully similar to the other. Uh-oh. Does that mean they’re a variant form of conformity?? What a disconcerting conundrum! Excuse me whilst I swoon on the divan for a moment, won’t you? There. <Fanning myself coquettishly.>

Now, I can look back on my youth and say that there was a time when I would have made an excellent Goth. Pillaging tendencies aside. Naturally as pale as an iceberg and mum as a mummy, I could’ve slipped into some painful-looking post-Victorian getup and been right at home, but the trend, had it existed, would’ve seemed far too participatory for such a wallflower. More logical that I wear my black veil inwardly and merely retreat into wearing rather sober but unostentatious girl-sized menswear; Dad taught me how to tie a proper Windsor knot and I got my grandfather’s beautiful classic fedora off the top shelf of the closet. I even snagged a great pair of period wingtips at my favorite thrift store and earned my one bit of style critique in them from a little child standing near me in a shop one day who tugged on her mother’s sleeve and said in a bemused stage whisper, “Mommy, that lady’s wearing men’s shoes!” If I felt more girly on any occasions, I might as likely have gone for something a bit librarian-ish as any frilly stuff. I was better suited to be prim and buttoned down, what with having a figure that always tended more toward Long Island Iced Tea than a Hurricane.

I might have enjoyed the Steampunk look, too, for its winking humor and skewed sense of history, but not only did it not exist as an entity yet, it would likely have competed too much with my general cloak of invisibility. I didn’t want to be noticed, but I also didn’t care to blend in with others so much as with the scenery–a much safer perspective to be a non-participatory observer and sometime critic, naturellement.

5 mixed media drawings

More clothing and costumes from thirty years ago . . .

The other day I read an entertaining article written by, an art critic assigned by his paper to cover the menswear shows of Fashion Week. Clearly, he felt himself in the role of anthropologist far more than that of design interpreter. That, of course, is precisely the issue with observing fashion nowadays. You’re likely to see either a parade of such haute-landishness as can be “worn” by (or somehow installed upon) the models nowhere but on a runway, or else garb so lacking in imagination and originality that you’re hard pressed to term it designed. The latter was evidently the case in the realm of menswear at this year’s shows as witnessed by the poor critic-reporter.

Everything new is old again. Perhaps it’s simply in response to the extremes of the couture fantasyland that we get such reactionary tameness and dependence upon stuff that’s most generously interpreted as retro when it simply lacks imagination. I am far from disliking the traditional or the historically referential (you did read the paragraphs just preceding this, no?) but it does seem just as slavishly conformist and uninventive to show mere color and cotton-content variations on the uniform of the day than to play with the range of possibility.

I always sort of felt that that old bible of American English usage, Strunk and White‘s venerable Elements of Style, ought more accurately to be named Elements of Structure, enumerating as it did the foundations and underpinnings of good form that make good writing a mode of communication no matter how artful the window-dressing of a writer’s style. In the same way, I’d love to see the mavens of fashion, if they really want to be both clothiers and designers, challenge themselves more often to do something truly original upon the foundations of those practical structures dividing the wearable from the merely showy. How far can they push those seemingly infinite possible variations when making new and different combinations, groupings and overlaps of color, texture, shape, drape, weight, trims et al.? The haute couture runway is grand entertainment and supremely good theatre at its best, but it’s so divorced from the world of wearable design it’s as though Messrs. Stunk and White had taken copies of the Canterbury Tales, Ulysses, Huckleberry Finn and Ginsberg’s Howl, and having imbibed a quantity of the aforementioned mixed drinks, looked at each other and said “By cracky, that’s some dandy use of the English language; we could all learn from it,” then jammed it all into the bookbinder’s equivalent of a Vitamix, bound it in gilt-edged leather, and pronounced it the perfect how-to for would-be wordsmiths.

mixed media costume parody

Mostly, if I get too involved in trying to be trendy and fashionable, I'm just the class clown. Not that there's anything wrong with that . . .

Now why is it that suddenly I’ve got this urge to write my blog in iambic pentameter while wearing Chanel and handmade cowboy boots?

Pass me that Iced Tea before I faint again.

Leading Me down the Primrose Path

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2 photos

Amid the fragile glories of a garden . . .

I am as gullible and easily ensnared as they come. When the weather is just perfect (however that may be defined by me on the day) and the blooms begin to go off like temperate fireworks and all of the insects are humming benignly in delight, I am easily convinced that the garden is the only place on earth to be.

It’s not that I’m quite in the league of those master gardeners and other addicts that find true solace in being elbow-deep in dirt, for everyone who’s not been nodding off like Rip Van Winkle knows I rarely get the urge to work that hard, and gardening can be truly heavy labor. But the smell of deep loam mixed with mouldering pine or fir needles and crisp fallen leaves, blended expertly by Ma Nature with top notes of any sort of sweet flora, and perhaps just a splash of wet pavement to finish–this is the perfume of a kind of happiness found nowhere but in a garden and in the heart of a garden-lover.

The lovely rustle of leaves, the metallic buzz of a sonorous cicada, perhaps the musical flow of water over stone, this is the soundtrack of contentment. Birds can sing to it with ease, and their choruses may interweave with a depth and beauty seldom heard in the most sophisticated counterpoint and polyphony devised by human composers. Even the neighborhood dogs and cats seem inclined to dance when passing by in these marvelous moments of song. A far distant lawnmower’s roar is softened by the miles to a point where it almost has the same romance as the sound of the passing train.

Every one of the gorgeous growing things is lovely in its own peculiar way as well. Grasses stretched to bristling brushy heights in wild bursts of growth may be just brown to those not tutored in a garden’s joys, but on a close inspection can reveal a magical array of brown and yellow, ruddy, rusty, tan and bronze, and silver and gold tones in every shade. Leaves and blooms in colors ignored by all but the most discerning eyes in a rainbow’s arc are suddenly broadcast with prodigality in all the craziness and grace a garden’s bed can possibly begin to hold. Somehow even the spots that might look bare at first hide secret gifts if one has patience just to take a closer look and see what moves among the bits of soil, the scattered rocks, to lean in far enough to find that velvet dust left by a butterfly, the drifted petals of a rose. I am enchanted, too, by the silky feel of a the bold tissue-paper blooms of a tree peony or the rough warmth of a sun-baked cedar trunk, by the taste of the honeyed air when I breathe in the sweet perfections of a summer afternoon.

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There is beauty enough for all the senses . . .

Here in Texas it has been a fairly brutal summer for such things to thrive. Only the profligate expenditure of water where there has been none could possibly allow for garden prettiness of such a delicate sort to live and grow. Other than trying to help our venerable oaks and full-sized Bradford pears survive with dignity intact, I’ve not been generous with water, knowing that there are more urgent uses for it at the moment than for personal pleasure’s sake. I have been working all the while to devise an appropriate native-planting-x-xeriscape new landscape plan with which to revise our yard for the long term–when we can afford to do it. I’m building a rather nice new scheme for it, I think!

Meanwhile, there came a little rain. In the last few days there’s been a little respite from the drought. It hasn’t ended the drought, of course, nor anywhere near undone the damage that’s been wrought. The dire dryness will likely continue for some time, and we know that droughts, historically, have shown the power to last for decades in a place, but for this little point in time it’s heavenly to get a sip.

So even though I know this hint of watering is likely only to lead me down some primrose path if I believe it means it’s garden time for real, I still give in. I’ll acquiesce to the false sense of springlike play this water brings and go, I’m sure, to the garden once again, only to be chased back by another wave of heat. But for this little time I cannot lie: the roses tentatively opening after a splash of rain make me want to believe in them, make me want to head out to the yard. There’s life in the old lady yet.

Correct Me If I’m Wrong (and I Never am . . . )

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spurs & windmill photos

EVERYTHING is research, no? Put on your spurs, head into the wind, and file this, baby!

I think of life as one big information-expedition. Whatever we do or sense or observe gets filed for future reference. Some things are instantly obvious candidates for the Circular File, yes, but everything else should potentially be of interest in one fashion or another. Call it ‘learning from experience’ or fodder for future tall tales to the great-grandkids or simply useful stuff to know, I can’t think of anything that doesn’t, shouldn’t or can’t inform the future self if stored and processed thoughtfully.

Anu Garg‘s wonderful resource website and newsletter A.Word.A.Day (http://wordsmith.org/awad/) is full of marvels: offering the etymology of a word (or more) each day, it seeks to broaden not only our vocabularies but our exposure to and, hopefully, understanding of the history, culture, politics, religions, biology, biography, and so forth–not only of our immediate surrounding population and geographic areas but all of the world’s intertwining ones as well. In addition, the site includes quoted wisdom, pathos and humor from great thinkers and writers. Today’s quotation was one that especially resonated in me:

A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. –Jorge Luis Borges, writer (1899-1986)

I’ve long felt that, whatever other good bad or indifferent qualities I impute to my life experiences, they shape not only how I think and act afterward but also what directions my creative life is bound to take. I have not even remotely achieved the Buddhist ideal of absolute presence in the moment or a fully and minutely examined life. In my case, though, I attempt most to apply that special rigor to the sensory experiences of my existence, since it is the use of the senses in interpreting and expressing my thoughts and ideas as art that gives me my best self-expression in its broader meaning.

Thankfully, my immediate circle is famously patient with such things. When my partner and I go for a walk, he is enjoying the movement and the tour through a place. I am spending some of the outing walking right along with him, but it’s usually interrupted from time to time by my stopping to investigate and/or photograph whatever intriguing distraction has caught my Miss Magpie eye. I call our walks ‘interval training’ on my part, because while my spouse has continued at his regular pace and I’ve been playing amateur researcher-inspector-scientist, the gap has widened from arm’s length and I must either speed up a little or hit a dead run to catch up for another bit of close-up strolling. Whether it’s now stored in my digital memory as a snapshot or not, whatever caught my attention is filed as quickly as possible–preferably while I catch up to my walking partner, since he may well have continued our conversation without noticing that I’d dropped behind and it would make for some disconcerting non-sequiturs indeed if I interjected with commentary on the beetle wing I just hurriedly stuffed in my pocket or the Art Deco cornice I paused to photograph.

Certainly I have found the digital mini-camera a boon when it comes to those fleeting moments of ideation and inspiration. More often than not, it’s long after the fact that I find the meaning and particular interests in whatever had diverted my attention, frequently because, upon seeing the photograph I’d hastily taken, I’m now noticing something new of interest. That’s usually when I spot similarities of appearance or type, or affinities that put this new tidbit into the context of some story I’d intended to tell or that make it a ‘good fit’ for grouping with other found treasures in my endless stream of visual-mental comparisons and meta-matches, these usually leading to yet another story or stream-of-consciousness ramble. Thus go the meanderings of the trackless mind.

The special appeal, for me, of such unplanned and serendipitous findings is that nothing goes to waste. There are no Wrong Answers in this class. Mistakes and griefs, misfires and tragedies, ugly things and scary things and unbelievably stupid things all have as much possibility for conversion into a good story or a fine piece of art as any happy or pretty thing can have. Even MY mistakes and griefs. With a bit of perspective, at least. So, whenever I can unfurl from the fetal position after having been hit by or created a disaster, I teach myself yet again to spring up with the cartoon-like enthusiasm of those eensy-weensy Olympians popping over the vaulting horse, throw my hands triumphantly in the air, and yell, “I meant to do that!” and then do my best to incorporate the most useful elements of what’s left of me after the experience into an even better me.

Or at the least, into a pretty cool piece of creative art.

aquarium photos + text

It takes some courage, to be sure . . .

And it’s particularly helpful to remind myself that, even if I’m not quite up to that task, maybe the Artist character that I play could do it . . .