Framed!

Frames were what I forgot to get on my shopping excursion the other day. Fortunately on another errand with Tom and Debby, I was able to pick up a couple. I needed them for prints I received from Laurel Storey. Longtime readers might remember Laurel from LiveJournal, which is where I likely became acquainted with her through ‘Nathan and Dan (all in Canada, and I suspect their original connection might have been BookCrossing). Later, I followed Laurel on her blog Alphabet Salad, where I think she stopped writing around 2017, but by then, we’d connected via her Instagram, where we still interact. I like keeping up with all the adventures she and her husband enjoy (trips, music, art, restaurants, Lego® kits, photography, desserts, cats!).

I’m not sure when Laurel began pursuing her interest in Zentangle (quick explanation: the Zentangle Method allows an artist to create images using structured patterns, called tangles, by combining dots, lines, simple curves, S-curves, and orbs). Laurel is now a certified Zentangle teacher, who teaches and exhibits her art at the Walkerville Artists Collective Gallery in Windsor, Ontario.


No surprise that Vincent Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings, including this one from 1888, are among my favorites of his work, since I not only appreciate his art, I’m also a fan of sunflowers. I was delighted to see a Zentangle piece created by Laurel that was inspired by the Van Gogh painting, and I ordered a print.

 


(Sorry for the reflections you can see in the glass.)

When I received my order, she’d generously included another print that I also framed.

Here’s a bonus photo from Laurel’s Instagram of the crosswalk outside the gallery this past August to celebrate Pride. Pride Month comes again in June, but another significant date coming up on October 11 is National Coming Out Day, so it’s a good time to share this. I’m always happy to join other allies like Laurel in support of LGBTQ+ equality.

©Laurel Storey, 2023

Here are the two prints hanging over one of the windows in the office at Houndstooth Hall.

Thank you, Laurel!

Tiny Tuesday!

My newest action figure from FCTRY: ZELENSKY.

Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy is a Ukrainian politician and former comedian and actor who is the sixth and current president of Ukraine since 2019. Born to a Ukrainian Jewish family, Zelenskyy grew up as a native Russian speaker in Kryvyi Rih, a major city of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in central Ukraine.
Born: January 25, 1978 (age 45 years)

Source: Wikipedia

Backdrop photo: April 2022 ©Joseph O. Holmes of original sticker art on wall by brooklynbitchbakery.

Tiny Tuesday!


“She’s An American Girl”
acrylic and glitter on 4×6-inch panel canvas and 8×10-inch back-stapled canvas, 2013

Wishing you a safe and satisfying Independence Day. I’m thankful for all we have, hopeful for a better world ahead, and grateful to artists who remind of us of both. Here’s a favorite song/video, and a favorite interview.

Button Sunday


July 2 is National I Forgot Day. Seriously!

True story–I didn’t forget what I wanted to say, but it’s taken me some time to figure out how to phrase it.

I’m open to anyone who wants to financially back my proposition to transform a nonexistent “wrong” done to me into a lawsuit and take it through the court system all the way to our highly dysfunctional, partially corrupt and perjurious, capricious and contradictory, Supreme Court of the United States. If you’re an attorney with an outraged reaction to injustice, hit me up for details.

If you’re not an attorney, forget this post. It’s your lucky day!

ETA: This should have been read in /sarcasm/ font.

changing my mind

I wrote a long post about the Neverending Saga and then I reminded myself no one cares and I deleted it. What might you care about? A dog? One of them ate part of my leather purse. I need a new purse now. There’s no way to know which dog, so I’m not blaming this one. This is just a recent photo of Jack in which he seemed to be deep in thought. It was taken before the Incident of the Purse.

Here’s the playlist for what I’ve listened to during writing sessions on Thurs/Fri/today.

Sinéad O’Connor: “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” and “Am I Not Your Girl?”; The Paris Sisters, “I Love How You Love Me Plus 30 More Hits”; Pancho’s Lament: Self-Titled, “Leaving Town Alive,” and “3 Sides To Every Story.”

And if you look at the below meme-ish things and wonder why I’m putting them here, I’m wondering who’s benefitting from all the hate being stirred up toward certain groups of people.
Continue reading “changing my mind”

Coloring

Since I’ve written most of the day, and I’m exhausted and I should be in bed, and I forgot to play music so I have nothing to show you that I’ve been listening to, here’s a random post about coloring.

I ordered a coloring page from an artist referred to me by a social media friend. The artist, who I knew only by her social media name “Duchess of Lore,” provided this Artist’s Statement back in March of 2022.

I am joining in on the #makersforukraine initiative. This piece features a Ukrainian woman wearing a vinok – a traditional Ukrainian flower wreath. These flower crowns are an important symbol of Ukrainian culture. I was inspired by the beautiful work of @third_roosters. The piece also features 2 common nightingales, which are the national animal of Ukraine.

Working on this piece has helped me channel my profound grief over the war in Ukraine into something tangible. As the granddaughter of Estonian refugees who fled Soviet terror during WW2, the horrors the Ukrainian people are facing now hit close to home. My heart breaks for everyone who never asked for this monstrous injustice, including the people of colour experiencing extra barriers in fleeing Ukraine and finding refuge due to racial injustice, as well the Russian citizens who do not want this war and face imprisonment if they protest – which many continue to do despite the consequences.

This piece is available in my Etsy shop as both a digital download and a physical print. You can also purchase a version with just the line work, so you can colour it in yourself. The link to my shop is in my bio.

All proceeds will be donated to The Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal run by the Canada-Ukraine foundation @canadaukrainefoundation.

Only a couple of months after that, the artist had raised more than $1500 for the foundation from sales. I purchased a copy in the form of a coloring page in March of ’22. I didn’t start working on it until last month. I had to limit myself to short sessions because it’s very detailed, and I needed to be considerate of my eyes. I finished it today.


I absolutely stand with Ukraine.

I believe the artist is Elizabeth Lennox, and here is a copy of the original artwork as she created it.

Mood: Monday


Name that mood!

Ralph Fasanella, May Day, 1974
oil on canvas
Photo of screenprint © RoGallery

Reading Fasanella’s Wikipedia entry provides an interesting look at how an artist develops, is influenced, and how his reputation, recognition, and popularity can be swayed by shifts in politics.

Among other things, I was struck by this: In a press release regarding his death, John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, declared Fasanella to be “a true artist of the people in the tradition of Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie.”

I discovered so much about Paul Robeson doing research for the Neverending Saga, and Woodie Guthrie has always been an important cultural reference for me.

About this painting in particular: Fasanella’s art was highly improvisational. He never planned out works, and rarely revised them. He said of his 1948 painting May Day, it “just came out of my belly. I never planned it. I don’t know how I did it.”

I suspect many writers can understand this, as well as musicians.

The Scottish play and other things

…from Macbeth, spoken by Macbeth…

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

This… This is what I (and my class) memorized in English class my senior year, and I can still recite, with one caveat. I’d totally forgotten “To the last syllable of recorded time,” and have never missed it from my recitation. Ironic, since recording time is a vital part of a writer’s purpose.

They call it “the Scottish play” in the theater because saying “Macbeth” brings bad luck unless you’re rehearsing lines. There are stories a’plenty surrounding this superstition, and it’s definitely worth a fun Google. One of my favorite quotes from this passage includes the lines from which William Faulkner got the title for his novel The Sound and the Fury. I’ve disclosed before that I don’t read Faulkner novels. They give me headaches. But I love the synopses and the themes and everything I read about them, so as a college English major and English graduate student, I was saved so many times by Cliff’s Notes of Faulkner’s novels.

Here’s how I first learned about Cliff’s Notes. My sister was a senior in high school when she read Macbeth. Though, like me, she’s an avid reader, and we always read books beyond our “age group,” this was not a good experience for her. So she bought this.


Barnes & Noble “Book Notes,” friends, and that shows how long B&N has been important in some way in my life, because I was twelve going on thirteen when I picked this up and read it cover to cover, utterly mesmerized by the story.

Though I have TAUGHT Shakespeare, I’m going to admit freely that just as with Faulkner, I never hesitated to buy study notes for the plays. Guides aren’t meant to replace the text, but I’d rather see Shakespeare performed than read his plays. I perfectly understood my college freshmen who bought such guides. People spend their entire lives studying Shakespeare and writing literary criticism, and these were kids trying to navigate their first year of college, probably none of them English majors, who had four or more other classes loading them down, too. I just warned them to be careful not to count on the guides’ accuracy for writing papers, because they do contain errors.

Side bar: Teachers.

Though Debby doesn’t remember the class with any fondness, because as she told me, it also included The Canterbury Tales and Beowulf, (“Were they trying to kill you?” I asked), there is a bright spot among her memories.


Mrs. Lewis, 5th Period, once did her a great kindness which it’s not my place to share. But teachers can be far more understanding than you realize as a teenager. Teaching high school was supposed to be my vocation, but it didn’t work out that way. Ultimately I found different fields for my skills. Few regrets. I did get some teaching in, even in the corporate world, and no work I’ve ever done was as necessary to my happiness and mental health as being a writer.

I was curious about what notes I might have made in my textbook when I was taught Macbeth in high school by a gifted and brilliant teacher, Mrs. Bryan. I thought I’d kept both my junior and senior textbooks from the two classes I took with her.


This is how I found out I’m wrong. I have my eighth grade text book (a subject for a later post about teachers and school), the green one, and my eleventh grade textbook, the blue one. (I didn’t steal them. I asked the assistant principal at my junior high school for the 8th grade text, and the principal at my high school for the 11th grade text. Permission was given. School administrators can also extend great kindnesses.)

I was so distressed not to have that book from my senior English class that I immediately found one on eBay and ordered it. It won’t contain my class notes, but it will give me a view of the other material I read and the illustrations that I enjoyed.


I still have plenty of Shakespeare on the shelf, including the complete works (a gift from my college roommate Debbie). Inside it are some pressed flowers, though my memory of who they came from is gone. Also notice to the left all that Chaucer. I may as well speak of Beowulf (tiny and tucked in between Chaucer and Shakespeare), since Debby brought it up as being part of her senior class misery. I didn’t study Beowulf until my sophomore year in college, in a huge survey class I was required to take. It didn’t do anything for me one way or the other.

Years later, as a graduate student about to take my Masters comps, someone told me, “Brush up on your Beowulf. There’s always a Beowulf question you can use to write an essay.” I think it was spring semester, a year after my father’s death. I was trying so hard to study and prepare, but my bottled-up grief was getting in the way. I hadn’t written, other than for classes, for years, and I finally put everything else aside to compose a poem about my father. I worked for hours to write, edit, rewrite, polish, until I was satisfied with it. Then I reread Beowulf and it was so profoundly moving, so poignant, that I still remember lines from it. I never saw that coming! Sometimes you just need to be in a certain place emotionally, or mature enough, to appreciate a work of art that might not have affected you when you first encountered it.

Study guides like Cliff’s Notes can be a gateway to literature, though I doubt they can ever have the power of the work itself. But to immerse yourself in any story, to find agency and enlightenment and connection, is a gift well understood by those who would ban books. Those are three of the things they most fear as threats to their power: individual agency, enlightenment, and connection. They will go after schools and teachers, libraries and librarians, any institutions that defy them, and any groups they can target with all manner of lies to incite fear, even panic, to protect–not “the children”–but their love of power and lust for wealth.

Be mindful who you believe.

Saturday and not yet tax day


Usually when I use the journal Lynne gave me last May, I color a little, write a little, etc. It means that if I want to take a photo of it, I have to block out whatever I’ve written because that journal, at least, isn’t meant for public consumption. So this time I colored, photographed, then wrote.


If my coloring choices are too subtle or are unfamiliar, let me be clear. The top colors are from the transgender flag. I absolutely support transgendered people and am appalled at the hate, lies, and vitriol being directed their way by an ignorant, cruel public and by legislators and courts. Once again, a person’s right to privacy, particularly in medical matters, is being violated, but even worse, there is a blatant call to eliminate transgendered people. This is fascism. This is inhumanity. This is immoral.

The middle colors should surely be familiar after decades of LGBTQ+ activism and progress, which is also currently under attack in terms of privacy and equal rights. If you don’t know where I stand on this issue, you’re new here.

I chose those last colors for all the people over decades who attended Sunday school or Vacation Bible School and sang, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.” Some of y’all had a lot more sense as children.

Also, I’d like to make note of my belief that if you think a child is too ignorant to recognize when a person is in costume, then maybe you need to avoid or end: Santa Claus; the Easter Bunny; Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas pageants; Halloween and every costume from Super Heroes to witches, to cartoon or video game characters, to ghosts and zombies and skeletons and vampires; high school, college, and professional sports team mascots; Chuckie Cheese and other characters in costume used to push products (Ronald McDonald? Hamburglar? that Buc-ee’s beaver? Mr. Peanut? Tony the Tiger? the Michelin Man? the Jolly Green Giant? the Chick-fil-A cows?); all characters in costume at amusement parks (yes, even princesses); the musical Cats (is that too easy?); and military, royal (real or Game of Thrones), religious, angel, fairy, gnome, hobbit, magician, wizard, circus, bodybuilder, hunting, role playing, chef, police, firefighter, nurse, doctor, judge, race car driver–whatever costume aka “drag” of all types that will ensure that you’ve stripped the world of everything fun, whimsical, imaginary, and creative.

I only wrote all of that because it isn’t what I wrote in the journal with the coloring pages, and I needed to put it somewhere. You’re welcome.

Continue reading “Saturday and not yet tax day”