Website alert: It's awfully hot here in the Northeast. If I go to a scheduled outdoor meeting this afternoon, I'll carry a fan. While digging one out, I remembered the presumed "secret language of fans," which may exist primarily in historical fiction rather than history but is fun nonetheless. Can't you imagine two characters inventing their own code during an intrigue?
Picturing a World
Gorey frogs
August 11, 2021
Many years ago, my husband and I saw an exhibition of beanbag frogs made by Edward Gorey with short mottoes embroidered on their chests—phrases like "Why not?" and "If Only." We've chuckled over them ever since. So imagine my delight in running across recently the froggy image shown here and then an article, Edward Gorey's Toys, in a recent The New Yorker. Maybe I should invent a character who was so inspired by them that he/she …, well, what?
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Faiyum face
August 5, 2021
Having finished a rough draft of my time-travel story, I've decided to press on with another idea in a genre new to me, set in a dystopian near future. At this stage, while I'm trying to bring my main characters into focus. Suddenly, in a blog post on a Gold necklace found in Roman baths in Bulgaria, up comes this face, a Faiyum portrait in the collection of the National Museum of Scotland.
Ardizzone’s Peter Pan
July 29, 2021
Blog post alert: When I ran across a reference to Edward Ardizzone's illustrations for J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan: the Story of the Play presented by Eleanor Graham, I was tickled. Ardizonne's illustrations for Eleanor Farjeon's Little Bookroom have been deep in my heart for a lifetime. I ordered a used copy of Pan. It arrived. Ardizonne's light-of-touch pictures were as pleasing as I had hoped. And they set me thinking: Who else besides Arthur Rackham had done interesting pictures for Peter Pan? No one came to mind, so I thought a blog post musing on which stories attract multiple illustrators and which ones don't might be interesting.
Ha! So it might—but not with Peter Pan at the forlorn center! See why at On J. M. Barrie and Peter Pan.
Bring-backs and takeaways
July 25, 2021
Okay, now I'm even closer to finishing a problematic short story than I was earlier this month when I wrote Out of the Woods. What has given me new energy to get to "The End" is a new question: What does the main character bring back?
Artists’ fans
July 21, 2021
Blog post alert: It's always fun to run into something that combines your interests—for me, in this case, Huguenot fan makers. For reasons of family history, I've been paying attention to Huguenots lately. Fans as part of fashion is a natural for a writer of historical fiction. Characters in Where the Light Falls carry fans, and artists' fans were part of the 1879 Impressionist show they visit. Here Gauguin follows his predecessors' lead. For more examples of artists' fans, see Fan Club: painted fans in European art 1 and Fan Club: painted fans in European art 2.
Pareidolia on Jupiter
July 18, 2021
Website alert: Does anybody else perceive a rider on the back of a horse in this detail from NASA's video animation of a flight past the planet Jupiter?!? And if so, is an elephant-headed rider looking over its shoulder or is that an elaborate hood? I'd love to see the photographs from which this segment of the video is projected. Meanwhile, whether you are as taken by this imaginary cosmic figure as I am, do check out Ride With Juno As It Flies Past the Solar System's Biggest Moon and Jupiter. It's mesmerizing
Out of the woods
July 15, 2021
First off, apologies to Su Blackwell: I've lost the citation for this piece, but it's just too emblematic not to use. I'm nearing the end of the first draft of a short story. I'll come out of the woods soon, but I'm not sure whether what I'm bringing with me will ever be truly satisfactory.
But is it art?
July 12, 2021
Rivers Have Wings, The Yellow Smoke That Rubs Its Muzzle On The Window-Panes (2021)
Blog post alert: Suppose you fed a phrase into a computer and it spit out a picture. Well, that's what happened when a computer-savvy artist used a program described in James Gurney's New Tools for Text-to-Image Generation. Perfect for producing jigsaw puzzles! But It also set me wondering about Text-to-text generation.. Yup, happening and been happening . So now I can't help wondering how a short story written by one program and illustrated by another would turn out. Hmmm, maybe an idea for a story written by a human being?
Elevated follow-up
July 9, 2021
And just for the fun of it, two more images to illustrate Rachael Robinson Elmer's milieu from an article on Japonisme from the Khan Academy. I hesitate to draw any analogy to the writing-school obsession with "point of view" that emerged at about the same time, but somebody else may already have done so— either seriously or in a lampoon.