American Soma

Dug Up in the Basement...

2012-01-30T21:50:00.000-05:00

So, while cleaning up some things in the basement, I found: 1) my master's thesis and 2) the illustrations for The Famous and The Anonymous. So much excitement. I'm in the process of listing them in my art shop. Here is a sampling of what I uncovered, but keep checkin' the shop....there will be more:

Illustration for "Movie Star" (2004) pen and ink, from The Famous & The Anonymous

Illustration for "A Sandless, Shapely Hourglass" (2004)
from The Famous& The Anonymous

Illustration for Pushcart-prize nominated story, "Essential Wreckage" (2004)
featured in The Famous & The Anonymous

Illustration for "In the Big House"(2004), featured in The Famous & The Anonymous

Illustration for "S&M: The Call That Started It All" (2004), featured in The Famous & The Anonymous

Check the shop for more!

Oh, I've been a busy girl...

2012-01-26T15:22:00.000-05:00

Now in my Etsy store are three new ink and watercolor illustrations....

"Jelly Beans!", 2012, ink and watercolor on Strathmore 400 series paper

"Roxy", 2012, ink and watercolor on strathmore 400 series watercolor paper

"Ralph, the Diva", 2012, ink on cardstock

Calla Lily Box...in progress

2012-01-17T18:23:00.001-05:00

Coming out of the studio next...a box covered in Calla
Lilies. Here's today's progress....

to be continued...

From the studio this week....the finished Poppy Box

2012-01-15T20:27:00.000-05:00

The "Poppy Box" was finished this week and is now in my Etsy Shop!

This is the first of a painted furniture series. More to come....

"Poppy Box" (acrylic on wood, with glitter and metallic acrylics, non-yellowing varnish).

And the RedBubble T-Shirt arrives....

2012-01-11T07:15:00.000-05:00

"Magical Jasper" on newly arrived RedBubble T-Shirt

    So, I'm excited about the quality of the T-Shirt bearing my drawing "Magical Jasper". The print is crisp, fairly detailed, and the decal is heavy, if slightly tacky to the touch. I don't know if sticky is good or bad. I won't wash it before I wear it, though, because I've found my "Earnestly Hemming Away" T-shirt by artist Landis Smith (it's a caricature of Papa Hemmingway sewing the hem of something frilly) is earnestly flaking away with each wash. That I'm not very happy about, and I fear what will happen to the T-shirt above after three or four washings. Michael's hybrid Mystery Machine/Star Wars mechanized thingy seems to be doing fine after an equal number of washings as my Hemmingway T-Shirt, so hopefully the flaking action is just an anomoly. We shall see.
     The "Poppybox" noted in my previous blog post will be done and ready for photographs by tomorrow. I finished the flowers, added purple glitter acrylic to the night sky, red glitter acrylic to the interior, re-attached the lefthand door, and applied a seal coat (no, not a fuzzy one; a varnish coat to 'seal' the design). Today's task, after I finish my daily quota of book reviews for my column, is to steel wool the sealing coat and then top coat it. And then, my friends, she will be ready for a photoshoot.
    What's next, you ask? So many things. I feel a table mermaid coming on, for one. I'll explain more later....

In the Studio Today: Poppy Box

2012-01-06T12:41:00.000-05:00

This year for my part of my brother-in-law Glenn's Christmas gift, I painted a shelf with bees and poppies (since he, Michael, and I are beekeepers). I made it a manly dark blue, and it eventually became a night scene with stars and a moon (although I know that bees stick around their hive at night). Anyway, I liked the effect of the red against the indigo so much that I began working on another piece for the Etsy store. Eh, voila! "Poppy Box" (Now, the box does have two doors; I just have one off temporarily. Also, it's not done just yet--this is a progress picture...the center of each flower needs to completed).

Front, "Poppy Box" (in progress, without one door)

Back, "Poppy Box" (in progress)

The Big Bad Wolf

2012-01-04T22:00:00.001-05:00

Angry lad, this one. He's for sale on T-Shirts and Hoodies in my RedBubble store. The original drawing is available in my Etsy art store.

Savannah Schroll Guz, "The Big Bad Wolf" (2012)
ball point pen on cardstock

Something awesome near York Central Market....

2011-12-31T11:22:00.002-05:00

Sunrise Soap Company near York Central Market.
On the left: the kitchen, where soap is made
On the right: the shop owner, pouring soap into a mold.
Visit the Sunrise Soap website!

Over Christmas, when Michael and I were visiting my parents, we went to York Central Market. Back in the 1980s--when I was in grade school and there was a local economic boom--York Central Market and its adjacent Cherry Lane stores were the place to be, especially on Saturdays. And now they are again, with some wonderful stores opening up in the area in and around the 19th century-constructed market itself. We happened upon Sunrise Soap, which has a beautiful facade, enhanced by outdoor art--even a gorgeous painting in the transom over the door. Inside, not only was there soap (see the owner's awesome soap-making kitchen above!), there were also handmade items like lampwork glass bead earrings; wind chimes made of silver utensils; and original paintings that looked every bit like the work of Thomas Eakins. I'm so excited that Cherry Lane is making a comeback and that creative entrepreneurs are helping to make York a pretty fantastic place again. Visit the York Central Market website here and see all the amazing stores inside!

The beautiful York Central Market

On Red Bubble, my Drawings on T-Shirts and hoodies....

2011-12-20T10:15:00.000-05:00

This morning, I opened a store on RedBubble, a site that caters to artists who seek to sell their work on T-Shirts, hoodies, and as stickers and iPhone covers. I know their T-shirts are very high quality, since I just bought T-shirts by two other artists for Michael and myself. The printed decal of each drawing is high resolution and substantially thick, so it will not fade with washings. Additionally, the T-Shirt is of equally excellent quality. Farbic tags, offering details about Red Bubble's mission and the artist, come clipped to the shirt tag by a tiny wooden clothes pin. How ingenious is that?

As I continue to complete drawings (which will happen more quickly as I complete Christmas gifts here) my store offerings will continue to grow. The image originals are available in my Etsy art store.

I'm walkin' here! I'm walkin' here!

2011-12-15T12:51:00.002-05:00

No apologies either. It ends up being a highly philosophical take on life, no?

Let the record show I foretold this if....

2011-12-12T20:06:00.000-05:00

Tonight, Michael brought home the Post-Gazette, whose front page bears the following headline (above the fold, no less): "Constitutional convention call gains traction". What's this mean? They're seeking to incite a movement to alter the Constitution. Let the record show that, if this actually begins to pick up speed and it is not handled with care, I foretold this development with this story, "Conceived in the New Liberty".

So, to all the journal editors who have rejected it, one of whom responded: "this doesn't resonate with us," I welcome you to think more deeply about what you feel is relevant and what should resonate with you. Contemporary literature is becoming too insulated, too inward looking, too sexually obsessed. Wake up! We can express ourselves freely only because we still have a Constitution that permits it. Start messing with it, and censorship might be the new American way. It can happen insidiously slowly, in ways we might not even realize until it's too late. Believe it, kids. I feel like I've been yelling at the top of my literary lungs over the past few years, and no one listens, no one cares, no one wants to hear it. And because I can't say it any better than my boy, social satirist George Grosz, I'll refer to his criticism of the socially detached avant-garde in the 1925 essay "Art is in Danger". Grosz, who collaborated on the manifesto with Wieland Herzfelde, wrote:
           Today's artist, if he does not want to...become an antiquated dud, has the choice
           between technology and class warfare propaganda. In both cases, he must give up “pure art.”
          Either he enrolls as an architect, engineer, or advertising artist in the army (unfortunately very
          feudalistically organized) which develops industrial powers and exploits the world; or, as a
         reporter and critic reflecting the face of our times, a propagandist and defender of the
         revolutionary idea and its partisans, he finds a place in the army of the suppressed who fight
         for their just share of the world, for a significant social organization of life. ("Art in Danger")

Shouldn't we writers be at the barricades and use our voices to advance a message that matters?

Duluth Trading Company Wonder-Ads

2011-12-07T21:56:00.002-05:00

And my absolute favorite:

Who's responsible for this fun? Planet Propaganda. Excellent work.

Jane Priser and Magical Jasper...

2011-12-06T15:03:00.003-05:00

Jane Priser, "Alien Face, Tricolor"

Etsy continues to be an amazing place for me, a hub of like-minded people doing inspiring things. Since I started creating artwork in earnest for the Literary Outlaw store earlier this year, I've 'met' and discovered atists doing some genuinely stunning work. Colorado-based artist Jane Priser is one of those people. Her polymer clay masks, with the haunting, often color-saturated eyes are, at least to my mind, somewhat like reading an A.S. Byatt novel....remember the description of the seance-conjured angel in the two-novella work, Angels and Insects? Or the description of Maud Bailey's flat in Possession? Well, like that. I am completely smitten by Priser's otherwordly beings, which seem to have depth and intelligence in those unblinking gazes.

For my part, I've been doing assemblages in cigar boxes. I've also been making illustrations, like "Magical Jasper", which is supposed to be a hybrid of our dog, of course named Jasper...only with a scaly backbone and fly-away hair (heh, like the hair doesn't fly away on its own in our house...I get out the vacuum one each day precisely because of that). Now, there is something about drawing with a ball point pen that is not unlike meditation for me. It's almost like automatic writing, and somewhat more restful that painting, although I enjoy that, too. Except, except...painting involves a certain level of anxiety. See, painting can sometimes get away from me, and I have to steer it back to a workable format, an aesthetically pleasing product, which sometimes involves reverting to safe imagery. What does that mean? It means, imagery that I've succeeded with before. With ballpoint pen (a good smooth flowing ballpoint), I'm pretty much free to do as I like, and I'm glad for that. I enjoy, too, making and developing the arabesque, nuturing the wisp into three-dimensional believability with the fantastic power of cross-hatched shaing....and then there are the eyes. The muscles of the iris, the diameter of the pupil, all totally absorbing to articulate in ink. Am I an art geek? Well, yes, I'm afraid so.

Savannah Schroll Guz, "Magical Jasper" (2011), ink on paper

On art, on memoir...

2011-11-29T08:15:00.000-05:00

"Loretta", 2011, polymer clay/acrylic/varnish sealer

So much to tell....primarily because it's been several weeks since I posted. This is due in part to my "day job", something I'll go into later, the holidays, and the general feeling that I had nothing new to really say. Strange, Weird, and Wonderful Magazine, for whom I have written several horror stories since 2008, has decided to cease publication with the fall issue. I wrote an apocalypse story back in May at the editor's request from a prompt he provided. After that, and a slew of other similar disappointments, I decided that writing has begun to be a somewhat hopeless enterprise. I've begun posting on Fictionaut and, of course, at Literary Outlaw, which I know I need to update. And more frequently, I have begun to clutch my coffee mug and head down to my basement studio and make things. I've been doing this since February or March. And now I'm beginning to sell a few items. I am so happy to see my work go to wonderful homes. I've sent "Loretta" (left), a pin depicting the 'den mother' to the made-up Lesser Known Girl Gang, to a new home. I'm very grateful to Loretta's new owner, Lindsey, for her wonderful note about about much she likes her. This definitely keeps me returning to the studio to create.

In other news, I've gotten some really good feedback on a memoir piece I wrote last year (or was it earlier this year?....I'm not sure....time has gone so fast, I can barely keep track anymore.) Originally, I wrote it for a hypertext project curated by Dan Waber (a project Chris Bowen of Burning River told me about--thank you, Chris!). I titled the work, Italy, 1990, because I went on a business trip to said country with my parents that year. Actually, I went on more than one business trip--all told, there was one to Atlanta, one to Chicago, and one to Europe--but Italy kept me out of school the longest and left the greatest impact on me. My experience with the machinery salesmen and the technicians helped to define who I have become. Had it not been for these experiences, I might not have attempted a foreign language with as much zeal. I might also have felt less comfortable running around Europe later, when I was on my own, trying to figure out train time tables, scuffing my shoes on the cobblestones outside monuments and grand mansions. But more on all this later.....I realize now that that day job I was talking about above is calling. Time to get into the car, turn up the radio, and zone for an hour until I get to campus. *sigh* Two weeks, kids, two weeks.

Why I Prefer Middle-Aged Characters

2011-11-09T08:33:00.003-05:00

On Sunday night, Masterpiece Contemporary aired Page Eight, which I found every bit as riveting as, apparently, the critics do. It defied many of the tiresome approaches to thriller narratives that involve the rogue agent--ranging from his late thirties to mid-forties—who smokes or has smoked, drinks to excess, and is disturbed by social interactions, yet is still perceived by both sexes as cool and alluring. To me, this formulaic kind of character gives rise to indigestion because it’s a type. This type was developed in the 1970s when (thanks to the help of film noir) the squeaky clean, heroic character—usually a socially-didactic cipher--of the 1940s and 1950s was re-cast as a more three-dimensional human, with serious shortcomings and a dark-side (perhaps more than one). For example, there’s the recovering alcoholic or, say, the reformed pill popper who has been kicked off the force and instead becomes a private detective or perhaps a consultant to the police. At the man’s core, he is understood to be good, but life and its frequently traumatic events have complicated his identity, precipitated a descent into substance abuse. And then there are characters like Kurt Wallander—whom I find absorbing, despite the fact that he conforms to a character type. He is gifted in figuring out cases but cannot negotiate familial relationships and seems vulnerable and deeply damaged in a way that still causes me to hope for his redemption through some deeper relationship.

Bill Nighy as MI5 Intelligence Analyst Johnny Worricker
in BBC Two's Page Eight.

Page Eight has very little of the traditional narrative nonsense I find so often in contemporary movies and mini-series. The main character, Johnny Worricker, an MI5 Intelligence Analyst, is gray haired, lined with age, and generally reticent with what appears to be a calm evaluation of facts. He is unflappable and strategic: the very qualities necessary to being reliable Intelligence Analyst. A viewer can see how he got and maintained the position for so long in a politically volatile environment. He’s been married several times—I remember the number five being batted around during the movie—and this alone suggests some undetermined failing, whether it be an inability to connect or an inability to commit or something else entirely. But his character is broadened by the fact that he does not live in a spare apartment, where housekeeping appears a foreign concept. He has lovely furniture, antiques, and apartment walls painted a bright green, a little bluer and more whimsical than the shade of kelly. Deocrating these walls is a shockly white trimwork and small to medium-sized Modernist paintings hung close together in salon-style. This is a somewhat surprising revelation of character, suggesting a deeper and richer internal life than Worricker projects in everyday circumstances, where he appears aloof or discomfitted, a demeanor that is brought on by his daughter's own paintings of torture victims. Clearly, too, he has collected art for many years. Our intelligence analyst has not just a appetite for acquisition (surely that argument might be made, given the number of paintings on the wall and his number of marriages, if the two collecting habits can somehow be equated), he also has the capacity for aesthetic appreciation. Not only that, he is a shrewd collector, cashing in an especially valuable painting with his (female) dealer—a relationship the director suggests was, through glance and dialogue, at least previously romantic—purchases from him for many banded stacks of cash. This, we find he carries around in a plastic shopping bag, which we see in the final scene as he is headed off to self-imposed exile in South America.

When I wrote “The Corpus Lupi Experiment”, I also chose a fifty-something man, Liam, for my main character. (I suspect Johnny Worricker, though, to be closer to his middle-sixties) I realized now that I choose these older figures (In “A Thousand Incarnations, A Thousand Deaths” I chose a middle-aged female, who worked as a lone secretary in a dentist’s office) for two reasons: (1) the popular media usually develops and focuses on teenage or twenty-something characters, or on characters perceived to be in their prime, which I consider to be in the mid-thirties to early forties and (2) middle-aged characters are more realistic (even when I’m writing about unrealistic things, like vampires and werewolves).

Let me explain. We are given to understand, although this perception is slowly changing, that the love-lives of those who have crossed the threshold of 45 are no longer worth inspecting. Whatever fantastic illusions that might easily be sustained in teen and twenty-something relationships, the ripeness and complexity of thirty-something relationships, is no longer worth examining after 45 and certainly never past 50. Good Heavens, no. The media tells us this in unspoken ways: sex after 45 is dirty. There are wrinkles, maybe physiological complications. No one wants to see an older woman attempt to woo a younger man, and we certainly don’t want to see a younger woman being “preyed upon” by an older man. When we do see this, there is eventually some reckoning or a return to social mores becomes part of the narrative. Certainly, a middle-aged character with another middle-aged character has also traditionally been deemed unpalatable to audiences (again, I acknowledge there are exceptions to this rule--like, ugh, The Bridges of Madison County--and I recognize that this attitude is changing).

But I believe that these middle-aged characters and middle-aged relationships are much more absorbing precisely because of their complication, because of the characters’ histories….because much of life is spent feeling like you’re off balance, not like you’re on top of the world. And middle-aged characters embrace this insecurity or have at least come to terms with it in a way that younger characters do not. Middle-aged characters carry regret and sometimes denial. They are filled with historical surprises that younger characters simply do not have. Often, the middle-aged characters are not heroic but instead remain riddled with crippling uncertainty. And this is precisely what makes them so intriguing. Perhaps it’s because I am moving away from the ability to identify with the preoccupations of twenty-somethings, and I can identify with the buffeting by life that middle-age characters undergo. To me, teen and twenty-something heroes are unrealistic, cheap, a dime-a-dozen. Give me a middle-aged survivor of life’s challenges any day of the week. Grizzled and wrinkled they may be, but they’re just far more interesting.

Artist James Ward (a.k.a. Jimbo Art)

2011-10-28T09:03:00.001-04:00

James Ward, "Bird of Paradise" (Serving Plate)
See the Etsy Listing here

Etsy, I have found, consistently showcases some fantastic artists. For example, I've been following the shop of British artist James Ward for at least a year. While he does works on paper, like the watercolor-drawing below, a bulk of his production for Etsy involves hand-drawn ceramics featuring anthropomorphic animals. In his profile statement, he indicates that he likes to create narratives within his images, although he admits they are ambiguous and, I would add, elliptical.You can't necessarily determine what has happened before the 'captured' image or what might happen afterwards.Still, the viewer knows there is some humorous or deeper interaction happening, and this is the heart of Ward'swit.

The artist's attention to detail is similarly stunning. Take, for instance, his hand-drawn wolf serving plate. The fur has texture and volume; the eyes hold depth and expression.

And of course, there is Ward's attention to brief verbal narratives, which often accompany his listings. I quote the description that accompanies "Goat Puppet":

James Ward, "Goat Puppet"
Viewthe Etsy listing here

"Ralph began his puppetry career in the late ‘80s following a brief sojourn in burlesque dancing. He regularly performs a range of puppetry and mime in underground clubs. His work, often taking a political bent, is heavily inspired by Dadaist theories. He dreams of taking his act to London’s West End and to Broadway." -- James Ward

Brilliant, no? I think so.

And in the studio....

2011-10-26T13:05:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, very happily, I sold the pin just above
in one of my Etsy shops. It's a lime slice made of baked
polymer clay, painted with acrylics,
and protected with varnish.
The rind says: "Destined for...gin!"

Since it's getting close to the Christmas shopping season, I made
these three handpainted pendants this morning.
I'm letting the protective top coat and epoxy resin dry.
Next, I'll fit them with ribbons and clasps and they'll be ready to go
into the shop.

And here they are with bubble chains. Swankness.

And of particular interest this moment...

2011-10-18T13:37:00.001-04:00

Martha Holmes for Life Magazine
"Painter Jackson Pollock with his
wife Lee Krasner"

While recuperating from what feels like a mild case of the flu today, I've been thinking. Dangerous? Indeed. I'm listening to the lawn mowers outside, and thinking about the harvesting we've still been doing. Our pepper plants, both the sweets and the hots, are so weighted with colorful specimens, they're lying sideways. I got two Budweiser cardboard boxes full of brightly colored wonder this weekend. I also started thinging about making jam again. Every year, since Michael and I have had a garden, we've grown hot peppers and made hot pepper jelly. One year, just before our September wedding, we made a huge batch (probably our third that summer), and we called it 'pre-marital hot stuff'. We slapped a post-it note label on it and gave it away to relatives. Freaky with the name, no? Okay, maybe a little.

Okay, get ready for it--a non-sequitur! I'm good at these. Back in graduate school, I remember reading an article by feminist art historian Griselda Pollock about the painter Lee Krasner for my Methodology & Issues Class. This particular article was long, involved, and discussed the concept of persona, and how we merely knew Krasner's persona rather than who she really was. It was my first semester of graduate school, and I'll admit, I was freaking out, reading until my eyes crossed. I had to discuss this particular article, determine if the argument presented had any weaknesses, and provide a rationale for why I felt the point used was ineffective. (Or at least, that's how I remember the assignment). Most things that have freaked me out academically usually end up having a long influence on the way I view things. For example, in college, I took an archeology and human pre-history course, where we talked about the Australopithecines. I remember being absolutely terrified by the tests in the class, although I remember none of them. I must have done fine because the class did not bring down my GPA, and I recall graudally gaining a kind of confidence in the course. However, the first test I studied so hard for--I had a complicated relationship at the time with an older slacker student (long story), and this created additional stress because when he wanted to party, I wanted to study--I actually made myself sick. I literally dreamt of monkeys swinging from tree to tree the whole night before the exam. I woke up ill, but I went and took the test anyway because I had little other choice. I have not forgotten what I learned in that class, and it appears again and again in my stories. Some freaking long impact that night of swinging monkeys had on me, right?

Anyway, back to Krasner...I gave the presentation, written in essay format, and I suggested that there was one specific passage of language that blunted Griselda Pollock's message. This was met with stunned silence--not because I was right, but because I had focused on just a few words in an essay that went on for some thirty pages. People looked at each other around the seminar table. I felt like an ass, and for the next two hours, questioned whether I belonged in graduate school, or whether my time might be better spent slinging hash at the 'O' up the street. I don't remember what my particular argument was or the passage I focused on, but I will never forget Griselda's concept of projected persona and the projections accepted by the subject, in this case, Krasner.

Lee Krasner, late 1940s/early 1950s

Later, when I lived in D.C., the movie Pollock came out, and I went to see it with someone who had a stylistic affinity for Abstract Expressionism in his own paintings. I had known him since that painful moment around the seminar table, although he was not present to see what I felt was the debacle. Now, of course, things seemed more glamorous in the movie than they probably were--most likely. In the movie, Pollock never tinkled in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace, as he had done in real life. And the walk-up that Krasner and Pollock originally shacked up in--the one with the bathtub in the kitchen--was probably much rougher than the symbolic representation of penury depicted in the movie. What I did feel acutely was Peggy Guggenheim's nasty dismissal of Krasner's paintings when she made a 'studio visit' to Pollock and Kraser's walk-up: "What's L.K.? I didn't come to see an L.K.!" Guggenheim passes out of the room Krasner uses for her studio, "I came to see Pollock. Where are the Pollocks?"

Ouch. Yet here is part and parcel of Griselda Pollock's thesis. Krasner accepted this dismissal, and subjugated her own work to elevate Pollock's career. We know not the real artist that Krasner was--at least until later. Instead, we know the Krasner who was Pollock's wife and artistic sounding board. We know a persona, not the genuine Lee Krasner. See that photo above? Notice the title? There's no mention of Krasner being a painter herself, only that she is Jackson Pollock's wife--Pollock, the painter. Interesting, too, is that for the picture, she is what appears to be a half-step behind him. Interesting, no? Is this posing by the photographer or her accepted position?

Another thing I remember from reading about the couple was that, when they moved to upstate New York, they made jam. They gardened. They bartered for goods and services with their paintings. There is a marvelous picture of Lee in the kitchen, as part of the Life Magazine spread. She is wearing a dark dress, a light plaid apron tied at the waist. And she is doing something at the sink, although it doesn't appear to be washing, while Pollock smokes and appears to wipe a plate with a towel. Behind her is the beautiful kitchen--not beautiful in the contemporary sense. There is no granite, obviously. There are few applicances. Perhaps some would say it's inadequate, certainly by today's standards. And yet, to my eye, it is entirely beautiful and complete, which is likely the aura the photographer intended. There are glass cannisters filled with unidentifiable cooking ingredients on a shelf near Krasner's head. In the background, an ostensibly enamel stove holds a huge tea kettle. There is domesticity here, the image says, not the depravity and poverty so popularly associated with artists' lives. (Say what? Like actors from Shakespeare's era, artists not engaged in craftsmen style labor were considered slackers, devoid of approprate moral compass. Peggy Guggenheim, on associating with and supporting artists--even marrying Max Ernst so he would not be deported--was purposefully slumming it. Sure, it ended up being cool, but at the time, it was a strategically daring act.)

Gail Levin has written an excellent biography of Krasner, getting to the heart of who she was. And in the process, Krasner's formidable strength as both promoter of Pollock and later, of her own artistic production (although she destroyed a conserable amount of her work, leaving only about 599 pieces, according to one estimate) is finally brought forward.

Lee Krasner barefoot in her studio.

And the final two ads

2011-10-12T13:53:00.005-04:00

So the ad campaign I ran last week went well. At left, there are two more images, as I switched the ad content out every 24 hours. Ultimately, I had over 100 click-throughs to the Literary Outlaw website, which means there must have been something compelling enough in either the text or the image to make someone click to read more. And that is somewhat gratifying.

"Conceived in the New Liberty" was, as I suspected, rejected by the group that invited me to submit my work. While an invitation sounds hopeful, it was merely a pro-forma note sent to previous contributors. They said "Conceived..." "did not resonate with them." I find this a funny sort of reaction, since some of what is currently happening in Washington, D.C. and New York City is fairly similar to what appears in the story, which is actually set in Washington, D.C. and has a band of proselytizing anarchists (a group I read is also attending the real life demonstrations). Of course, the Occupy Wall Street protesters are not burning facscimiles of The Constitution. The reason I included this in the story and made it such a narrative cornerstone is not because I condone it or seek to incite this kind of behavior. I included it because I can see it actually happening. Let me explain.

Yesterday, in a class I teach--a college-level course--I asked the students if they had heard of Ernest Hemingway. I received blank stares from my mid-day class. To have graduated from high school and not heard of Ernest Hemingway indicates to me that something is wrong with our educational system. Of course, there is a far stretch between knowing about Ernest Hemingway and understanding our nation's founding doctrines. I'll admit that. However, I'll bet if you asked many high school graduates what the 6th Amendment guarantees, they wouldn't be able to tell you. This is frightening. Why? Because if its existence and function are not understood, how easily can we be persuaded that they are no longer relevant? With the triumph of uninformed opinion over fact in many so-called news programs, with the rise of uncivil discourse, with the proliferation of media by which untruths can be propagated and history rewritten, will students fight the removal of these rights? Maybe. But not until it's too late, until these rights are already rescinded. So this is what I was getting at with the story.

I see what's coming out of high schools, out of GED programs, and I'll admit, I'm afraid. We've got an entire generation lured by technology, entirely without curiosity, unwilling to learn, bored to death by a lecture on critical thinking, logical fallacies, and propaganda. Often, they collect their Pell Grant money and disappear, never to be seen again after the first four weeks of classes. There are exceptions to this behavior, but they are few. So, how easily will they be persuaded to undo the foundation of our nation, to walk apathetically or with misplaced anger into a new era of martial law before realizing they've made a terrible mistake? And maybe they will never realize it.

I've decided that submitting to journals is like spitting into the wind. My words come back to me, usually with a curt or snarky response. And so the last of my works, submitted at the beginning of the year and up until July, have finally returned, all of them rejected. I am a writer without a traditional audience. And I say traditional because I know, based on the ad campaign, that I gained at least a few readers, even if this contact was fleeting. The fact that my words have met with someone else's eyes is a very good thing.

Last week, I found this fantastic quote by George Orwell. It comes from a preface to Animal Farm, and discusses his difficulties in getting the text published. The preface is apparently rare in reprints of the book, but it is reproduced in its entirety here: "The Freedom of the Press". The quote that I find especially powerful opens paragraph five: "Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban."

I would go so far as to say that even in the independent writing world, which by its early definition championed the bold idea and served as the author's Salon des Refuses, has its own insular system in place, whereby only certain styles, certain ideas, and certain writers are elevated, while others are marginalized, ignored, and devalued. How can a writer combat this? It's pretty thorny problem, and one with no easy resolution, other than to go off on your own to trumpet your message yourself. At least there is that potential. It's quite a comfort.

Three Ads from the Seven-Day Campaign....

2011-10-05T11:29:00.001-04:00

"These men were in desert camouflage, and both
carried M-4s, which were, to the president,
a somewhat stunning exhibition."
-- The Balance of Power

"He saw men scaling the low terrace walls. Their anger was
unmistakable. It was in every set jaw, in every horizontal
brow that squinted under the white sky..."
- Buses from Bridgeport

"...the rats that stood before me now were lean and
squint-eyed, looking sideways at me and sizing me
up in terms of shank, brisket, flank, tip, and sirloin."
--Revolutionaries, a Fable

Watch Your Hatchet, Carrie....

2011-10-02T21:43:00.002-04:00

I'm watching Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's film...

In the Spirit of Healthy Dissent

2011-09-30T13:59:00.003-04:00

Michael in front of the House of Burgesses,
Williamsburg, VA, mid-September 2011.

A few weeks ago, when Michael and I were in Williamsburg, I picked up a few pamphlets, one of which was printed on the Foundation's colonial-era, moveable-type printing presses. One of the hand-stitched booklets I purchased was Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Another was Poor Richard's Pamphlet No. 11: An Anonymous Account of the Boston Massacre. And finally, I also bought the slender, Williamsburg-printed Summary View of the Rights of British America Set Forth in Some Resolutions Intended for the Inspection of the Present Delegates of the People of Virginia Now in Convention, written by a "native member of the House of Burgesses". What's the House of Burgesses, you ask? It was Williamsburg's (and by extension, Virginia's, governing body, where elected officials presided for a greater part of each year). It is bicameral, with two parliamentary chambers, one dealing with British colonial concerns and the other with Virginia's localized conerns). I include a picture of Michael, standing in front of one side of the House of Burgesses. The circular window indicates that it was a governmental building.

Revolutionary pamphlets with hand-sewn quires, no bindings

I find a great deal of inspiration in these old printing processes and incendiary pamphlets, compositions that fuelled the Revolution. It's also compelling evidence that language is truly an agent of change. Yet now, things have altered so radically within the last fifteen years, that it seems print is completely obsolete. How do you distribute revolutinary material now? Of course, via the internet. Not only do you have a greater broadcasting capacity, but the cost is minimal. And yet, yet...there are so many people distributing "revolutionary" (the air quotes appear around revolutionary on purpose) material that it's difficult to be heard at all. The sheer number of voices undercuts almost every message but those voiced by the loudest or most popular figures. Of course, the internet promotes democratic expression of ideas, and this is wonderful. At the same time, however, voices that have genuinely compelling and thoughtful messages are often lost in a cacophony of pseudo-intellectual noise and other totally opinionated garbage.

Inside the printer's shop, Williamsburg, VA
mid-September 2011.

A few years ago, for ZMagazine, I wrote a review of Signs of Change, an exhibition charting the modern history of international revolutionary paraphenalia. You can read the review here. I started the essay with a quote by George Grosz, a quote that I pulled from his 1925 essay "Art is in Danger". Grosz wrote, "...come out of your seclusion, let the ideas of the working people take hold of you and help them fight this rotten society." Here, Grosz was telling the intellectuals to come down from their ivory towers and get involved in a progressive movement to effect positive social change. He wrote this shortly after the rampant inflation that crippled much of Germany. Perhaps more significant is that he wrote it after he had been to Russia, saw the impact of Communism on the people, and had begun to stray from its ideology.

I still find Grosz's quote to be significant, particularly as a writer. Do I believe in art for art's sake? Without question. But I feel that at least some artists and writers have a responsibility to engage in a kind of political warning system...that is, extrapolate from the data we have--in this case, particular elements of the status quo--and determine where these current variables might lead us should they persist. For example, (these are, of course, very specific and narrow variables) if students continue not to care about their studies, if they continue to collect their Pell grants and government funds without investing the time necessary to earning degrees, if they are never taught (or never absorb and understand) the fundaments of our political system, if they continue to cling to restrictive labels that facilitate their movement through the education system without truly working for what they receive, what will happen to us as a nation? How easily can we be conquered by savvy (even not so savvy) manipulators, who tell us what we want to hear? Is this what the men writing revolutionary pamphlets--including The Declaration of Independence--had in mind? Did they expect that we would be come a nation of slackers, surly and opinionated but unable to produce any factual details to substantiate them, even though they are often expressed with both middle fingers raised?

Moveable type printing press, Williamsburg, VA
mid-September 2011.

It's this realization that makes me want to write. I imagine where these variables, if unchanged, will lead us. As I mentioned in the previous post, this is why I wrote "Conceived in the New Liberty", where people actually burn copies of The Constitution because they are manipulated into believing it no longer works for the nation (and because burning the facscimiles gets the attention of television crews, who offer a kind of fleeting celebrity). This becomes the point at which the country descends into martial law. I myself see this descent coming, and in some ways, it's already here. Other writers have seen this potential, too. Take Vonnegut's Player Piano for example, or better yet, Orwell's Animal Farm. I wonder, are students even required to read this book anymore? And if they are, would they understand its implications or would they simply accept it at face value, as a story about talking animals in a farm yard? I truly wonder about this, given my own experiences in the classroom.

In the spirit of revolutionary pamphlets and dispersing views that counter popular notions, I've just purchased some ad space for Literary Outlaw on both Scholars and Rogues and Liberty News Forum. I've done this before, specifically for American Soma, which helped me sell two copies (one of which went to England) and landed me an interview with Jeff Farias on his radio show. At the time, I advertised on Truthdig, but their rates have gone up exponentially. What had, in 2009, cost $50, now costs $400. So I opted for something more economically viable for my piggy bank. We'll see if these two blogs accept the ad, first of all (for ads must be approved before running), and what traffic it might generate. We shall see....

Launching Literary Outlaw

2011-09-23T17:44:00.000-04:00

So, I've launched something I've been talking about for quite awhile: Literary Outlaw. It will become the place that I publish my fiction, particularly my political and speculative fiction. The so-called 'Featured Story', titled "Conceived in the New Liberty" appears there. I've sent it out to one publication, but I have little hope that it will be published. I say this not because I don't have confidence in the story, but because it's not something that literary journals would readily publish. I explain this statement a little more below. But first, some philosophizing, brought to you by: My Mid-life Crisis, available in regular or economy size. I know. It's a little early for that, isn't it? Indeed. But 40 is just three years away, so I'm rehearsing. Plus, I had one when I turned 30, too, so let's call it a relapse.

Lately, I've been asking myself: what is it that I want to accomplish in life? Well, I'd like to be a writer. Check! Cool. Got that one down. I'll recap...I published my first book, The Famous & The Anonymous, in 2004 when I was nearing 30. The designer and publisher was the wonderful Steven Coy of Better Non Sequitur. Through Steven, I made the online acquaintance of James Stegall, who ran So New Publishing. After he published my work in two short, DIY-style anthologies, he then went on to publish a theme-based anthology that I edited, titled Consumed: Women on Excess. Three years later, in 2009, he published American Soma, although its distribution and publicity didn't go as I'd hoped. (The design, by David Barringer, is awesome, and I'm really grateful to him for his astute marriage of visuals and concept). The rest of my experience with American Soma was less than stellar. I leave it at that for professional reasons. I'm very grateful to author Jen Michalski, Iconoclast Magazine, and horror writer D.L. Russell for their reviews of the book. That helped take the sting out of some of the things that happened with So New. American Soma was the last book James published under the So New imprint. He now is distilling whiskey, I believe. There's more to that story, of course, but it's all water under the bridge. And water moves on. Not even rocks can keep it back. Indeed, rocks, over time, are worn away by moving water. So, let's move on.

American Soma was a mixture of different genres, all of them related to either the actual or metaphorical drugs people take (or are given) to mediate (or influence) their experiences in the world. And I'm very interested in this: in human psychology and the things people cling to in order to mitigate pain or navigate through the harrowing landscape that is life. I'm also interested in politics. As a college instructor, I see how little information students leave high school with, whether through conscious refusal to pay attention to anything that doesn't involve music, consumption, or good times, or through poor high school curricula. I suspect it's a bit of both. But many kids can't even tell me how many amendments there are to The Constitution, or what any amendment is after the second one. They really have no idea. So, I wondered: how easy would it be to convince them that something better is needed, that The Constitution itself is obsolete, that we could come up with something better? Pretty damn easy, I would wager. And therein lies the danger that I see, and that's what I've written about in "Conceived in the New Liberty". This is not something that is going to find easy publication. I'll be the first to ackowledge that.

Back in my elementary school days, I was a handful. I talked back to the teachers, and only through my Mother's intervention did I avoid getting corporal punishment. Oh, they wanted to paddle my behind pretty badly because I was not a docile subject. I was not a bad kid, mind you. I just didn't like people telling me what to do and when to do it. So, I stood in the corner a lot. I often spent recess indoors, so I could think about the ramifications of my inappropriate behavior. This causes me to chuckle now. Anyway, I've taken some of this childhood 'FU' and decided that I would start cranking out my work in a venue I felt comfortable in. Of course, I know that self-publishing, which is in essence what I'm doing, is denigrated. I will not be easily reviewed, but I return to my other experiences in publishing and ask myself, "When has it ever been easy?" The answer to that is "Never." But at least it's out there. Like water, I will keep moving, hewing a path through the obdurate field that hasn't truly welcomed what I offer. Here, folks, is Literary Outlaw.

Home again, home again...

2011-09-13T08:10:00.000-04:00

...with more to come on where I've been and what we've been doing this past week. In the meantime, some pictures. Just a teeny, tiny sampling until I can tell you more. I've got a 10 o'clock class an hour down the Ohio River.

Michael at Chownings Tavern, Williamsburg, VA

A rainbow (actually, it had been a double rainbow) seen
on Route 15 coming from Maryland to Pennsylvania.

Michael waiting inside a colonial store.

Me, in a tree, Williamsburg, VA

On Michel Houellebecq...

2011-08-26T16:50:00.000-04:00

At one time, I was a great fan of Michel Houellebecq. Perhaps 'great fan' is too robust a phrase. Maybe 'had a peculiar fascination with' would be a better expression of my feeling for his work. See, the dude is dark. But once upon a time, 'dark' (as in psychologically messed up) appealed to my sensibilities. The first Houellebecq novel I picked up was The Elementary Particles from one of the bookstores I trudged to after work when I lived in D.C. I read about protagonist Bruno's plight--specifically, the horrible experiences he had in private school (experiences with which I could identify, having been in private school for several years). And there, I began to see a deep and abiding truth to Houellebecq's characters, to his view of the world and the emotional physics of its inhabitants. I will admit that it depressed me deeply. Things in Houellebecq's world are bleak, pornographic, and nihilistic. But along with all this is keen insight into human character.

I should also say that I read Houellebecq after 9/11, when the city changed, when it temporarily fell under martial law...when military police directed traffic at every stop light downtown...around the time I walked home to MacArthur Boulevard from K Street because a woman on my bus announced to us all that she heard on her Walkman the news that Bush had been attacked in the White House. I immediately pulled the cord, got off the bus at the next stop, and began walking home according to my internal compass, partially following the bus line. I knew the lady was nuts, and I wanted to get as far away from her as possible. But I digress...I read Houellebecq at a time when things looked particularly bad, at a time when I felt especially isolated. This colored my view of his work and caused it to resonate with me in ways that it probably wouldn't now. And yet, yet...I titled a story that was nominated for a Pushcart Prize three years later "Essential Wreckage" as a secret homage to The Elementary Particles because that's what The Elementary Particles is really about: human wreckage and human suffering. The collateral damage caused by living. The unintended (or sometimes intended) hurt we cause ourselves or others by moving through life in ways either mild or violent.

And really, you have to dig a writer who has such a superlative array of high quality shots, like the one below. It doesn't look like the man above, does it?. Who, I say, who has been at the gin today? Michel, the liquid level's well below the top of the label. And buddy, you might want to tip that ash away, too.

Like, where have you been, Savannah?

2011-08-20T08:52:00.004-04:00

Where have I been, you ask? I'll tell you: the deli. To make extra money for a project described below, I've started working part time at a deli, where I am cutting cheese in a way that no one would object to. I'm also learning how to make rotisserie chicken (in three flavors), fried chicken tenders, and salad that comes in individually wrapped components I throw into large mix bags along with mayo squeezed from a huge packet. And who the h3ll knew there were so many kinds of ham and turkey? The learning curve, kids, has been steep, I'll tell you. Me? I trained to be a museum curator or a gallery director. To me, cheese and luncheon meat was something I put on a tray next to dip and pre-sliced vegetables. So all this business about honey-roasted, mesquite-smoked, buffalo-coated what-not is new.

Ofcourse, I'm teaching, too, starting next week. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have a class in Wheeling in the morning, a mid-day class on the Weirton campus, and a class back down in Wheeling in the evening. It's a lot of driving (50 minutes to the Wheeling campus and 50 minutes back, if traffic is good), but then, that's why we got Frieda.

And then...I'm still doing my freelance writing work, too. Of course, this is what I really should be doing right now because I've got a deadline for a four-page article next week. And yet...and yet, I felt I ought to offer some explanation for my lengthy absence from blog-land.

Now, the way in which my working life could get especially interesting is the fact that the grocery store in which my deli is located is a union shop. And right now, the union is in rather heated negotiations with the store owners, who feel their investors are not getting the desired returns. They have proposed a 3-year wage freeze and an increase in out-of-pocket healthcare expenses required of workers. Already, the union, of which I am not yet a part until I am there for a full 30 days, has threatened a strike until better terms are put forward by the company. The company has replied, and I'll paraphrase them in rough (if not entirely fair) terms: "Your store is a depressed area; you're not likely to find another job, so we're going to do it and you're going to like it. We could potentially close the store, too, if you all aren't careful." As you can probably imagine, this statement has was not received with delight by any of my co-workers. It inflamed many of them, since the employees are the ones that make the sun rise and set for customers (and, in many cases, serve them hand and foot...believe me, I've already had some customers I've had to take my figurative patience pills in order to deal with). The date for settling contracts is August 28th, so we'll see what happens.

I finished copy-editing In the Aftermath, a collection of short stories, several of which are previously unpublished. When I've completed my article and finished my lecture prep for next week, I will purchase an ISBN, format the document using the Kindle interface, and get it out there for Kindle users. This may take a month or so for me to complete, since Michael and I will be in Williamsburg for vacation soon. Of course, once In the Aftermath is out there, I suspect no one will purchase it. Yet, it will be out there, and I will feel somewhat heartened that I'm producing something for public consumption. Someday maybe someone will read my work, likely only after I am long gone, and say, "why was she ignored?" (This, kids, is the fantasy that keeps me going.) I've found it almost impossible to get anyone to accept any piece of fiction I write. So, I'll publish myself, rather than sit back and continue to wait for someone to deem my message worthy. In order to have income for such a venture, I play with meat in the deli. Now, see, we've come full circle. But let's have another slice (look at me, I can't stop with the deli puns) of "Conceived in the New Liberty"-which is almost, almost done!)

"Appearing endlessly on the news were images of Richardson’s mug shot, where his glasses were off and his eyes were as wide as a startled doe. Occasionally, online, simulations of a red rubber stamp appeared above his head: Public Enemy#1. “But he’s a boy,” Richardson’s mother said, when the Today Show finally interviewed her. “He’s just a boy. He’s not responsible for this.” She wiped away a tear dark with eyeliner. “He was in the city feeding people that day. He was trying to do some good. He wasn’t in any of those museums. I don’t understand why he’s even in jail.” She was husky-voiced, a smoker, who was heavily wrinkled and heavily made up for the show. Even though her tears were obviously genuine, she did not inspire empathy from viewers. No one felt her pain. Instead, they forgot her when they were again presented with the grainy video feed from the G-20 protests and the image of a confused looking Richardson coming up the steps of the National Archives." -- from "Conceived in the New Liberty"

Farewell, Fair Truckerella. Hello, Frieda: A Pictorial

2011-08-09T10:22:00.007-04:00

Truckerella, my Mountaineer, saw me through my late-20s to my mid-30s.

I got Truckerella in late 2003, when my Dad felt I needed a more reliable vehicle for going back and forth to Harrisburg, where I then had a boyfriend (a man, who, funnily enough, sold used BMWs). At the time, I was driving my Mom's 1998 Mountaineer--hunter green--whose check engine light persistently flickered on while I drove up and down the white-knuckle highway known as Route 83. And so, Truckerella, as I came to call her, came into my life, thanks to the fantastic generosity of my parents (to whom I am very grateful). I drove Truckerella everywhere, and over the years, several men have sat in the passenger seat, including: a male cheerleader (yes, yes, I know...giggle away if you like); a former Calvin Klein model-turned banker from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Later, an astrophysicist from Baltimore, Maryland. Still later, a Redbone Coonhound breeder, with whom I went out once and who inspired this letter-story appearing at Yankee Pot Roast in 2005. Yes, the guy pulled it out in the passenger seat of my truck, to my utter shock. Note to boys everywhere: this is really not an advisable first date move. This memorable and slightly horrifying moment is the only reason I include the guy in the list. I don't even remember his name, just the absolute horror of realizing what he had in mind for me that evening. He made an impression in all the wrong ways.

And then, I came back to Pittsburgh and met Michael a day after I arrived. Michael took and kept that passenger seat. So, Truckerella has a great deal of sentimental value. She was with me through the last vestiges of my twenties and through my early thirties. I wanted to drive her for ten years, but she kept falling apart. We've sat along the road twice: once in searing heat and once in freezing cold, along Route 22 in the dead of winter. After three towing bills, and numerous repair bills, I began to feel Truckerella was letting me down. And when the window broke last Friday, I had to let a good girl go.

On Saturday, at a Kia dealship in Robinson Township, outside Pittsburgh, Michael and I found Frieda. It was the first car we saw. It was the only car we drove (if you don't count the Jetta wagon we test drove last year, around this time). Now a new life chapter begins. Pictures follow:

Michael makes sure Truckerella's 'chastity consol'
doesn't still have any CDs. We're saying goodbye to her.

Our salesman Tom Cole at #1 Cochran holds Frieda's
driver's side door open for me.

At Michael's mom's house, Michael claims the
passenger seat again for all time. I'd already reserved
it for him. :-)

At home, nightfall. Of course, we've been cruising. The speakers light
up and change color inside. We had to experience that after dark.

And on Thursday....

2011-08-04T12:33:00.003-04:00

I've got my courses for fall. There are three, two Writing Skills and a Comp I. My Tuesdays and Thursdays will be slightly crazy, since I will be traveling down to the Wheeling campus, back up to the Weirton campus, and back down to the Wheeling campus at night, but it will give me time to think in the truck. And thinking leads to new stories. Also, I'll get to see my old friend, the electric plant near Brilliant, Ohio, lit up at night like a post-apocalyptic fortress. And then there's the gorgeous red flame that shoots eight feet into the sky from the coke plant stacks across the river in Follansbee, and this is always what I see just as I'm making my way into Steubenville. It's then I know I'm finally close to home, where Michael's waiting on the sofa for me. Also, on Monday, I have an interview for another part-time job, which will give us some much-needed extra scratch for our upcoming projects. Both of us are in dire need of new cars (although I don't say this in the presence of my truck, in order not to make her feel inadequate...no, I'm kidding. That sounds a pale shade of insane, doesn't it?). This month, I'm working on several freelance projects, too, so things are moving along.

I mentioned before that I'm working on a Kindle edition of a new short story collection. I've got 40 more pages to proofread, and I'll be ready to create the cover and prepare to upload the entire package. I also re-reserved the domain name http://www.literaryoutlaw.com/, which will become my own imprint.

Over the last few days, I haven't spent quite as much time on it because so many other demands have snagged my attention, but I'm nearly done with "Conceived in the New Liberty". The story deals with the complete dismantling of the America's political foundation. Here's another tiny excerpt:

"As pro-Constitution activists grew in numbers and began sparring with members of The New Liberty Movement, riots broke out. When 18 people were sent to the hospital, police were dispatched in their riot gear to restore order. On K Street--less than a mile away from the National Mall, where police formed a charcoal-colored wall with their raised shields and FlexForce Crowd Control suits--the wide windows of lobbyists’ offices were smashed with crowbars. The Molotov cocktails that sailed from the street onto desks, leather sofas, and upholstered cube walls caused an inferno that occupied fire companies from both the District and Northern Virginia for several hours. And while fire hoses doused the blackened buildings, from which searing flames continually shot, a popular coffee shop on Connecticut Avenue was being held up. Around the same time, a bar was broken into on 18^th street. A light-colored SUV drove onto the sidewalk and figures in plastic George W. Bush masks rapidly loaded into the back five full liquor boxes, a small floor safe, and—to their great surprise—a Thompson M1A1 from the manager’s office closet. No one stopped them."

Now, to a completely different topic: I have to admit that I'm not easily impressed. Things affect me deeply, and I sometimes cry in response to other people's pain. Also, music can make me emotional. But rarely do I get goosebumps from something. I realize that I've had a long obsession with what follows here, and I suspect I've probably written about it here before. I've only seen segments of the movie, and eventually I would like to see the whole thing. It is, from the parts I've seen, totally amazing, totally haunting, and exquisitely produced. The synthesis of story (which I understand is based on the director's own experience), the animation (which is incredibly good, particularly in the metaphorical interplay of light and dark), and the music (I mean, it has Max Richter as part of the soundtrack, and he is on a nose-bleed-high level in my mind) make this something I feel would leave an imprint both on the imagination and collective historical memory. Here is the trailer.

"The Unnatural History of Brown's Island" at Fiction365

2011-08-01T13:21:00.002-04:00

The Service Bridge to Brown's Island

On Saturday, July 30th, "The Unnatural History of Brown's Island" was the featured story at Fiction365.com. I am grateful for the exposure. Thanks very much to Benjamin, Fiction365's editor, for accepting it. While the story is fiction, it is based largely on fact, as well as local folklore. My husband's uncle actually died in the Brown's Island explosion of 1972.
Right now I'm in the thick of job hunting, looking for something that will provide a more steady stream of income than freelancing and adjuncting, which can vary from project to project, semester to semester. With our many farm-related aspirations and the small (but not serious, thankfully) emergencies we've had over the past two months, a steady source of income will be welcome and provide me with a more dependable schedule. Actually, as I write this at 1 p.m. EST, our shepherd-collie is having a $1K tooth extraction. Yes, I meant to write 'one thousand dollars'. I choked on that number myself when we went for the consultation on Saturday, but it is genuinely needed, and so he is getting fixed up. Michael started talking about getting insurance for the boyz now. He said it's actually available through Thermo, where he works. When I first heard about pet insurance, I thought it was a little silly. Now, if you'd ask me, I would say 'sign me up please.'

Right now, I'm working on proofreading a collection of 16 stories, which I plan to release as Kindle Edition under the Literary Outlaw imprint. Stay tuned for the details.....

If you wonder what else is going on in our world, check out our homestead blog, the link to which is below. We've been canning beans most of the weekend. We're ants instead of grasshoppers, right? Right. This evening, we'll be making watermelon jelly. For pictures of our gardening and culinary activity, just visit guzfarm.blogspot.com.

More to come shortly....

And for humorous purposes....

2011-07-27T20:34:00.000-04:00

"Bastards won't give me tenure."

These delightful animatronic figures are for sale this week at an auction located near Steubenville, Ohio. Michael found them on Auctionzip.com. These darlings were once part of moving window displays erected in commercial venues. Really, I'll say no more, and allow them to speak for themselves. They have so much to say.

Celebrity Rehab: The Sesame Street Edition

General Doings...

2011-07-21T13:13:00.000-04:00

It's Thursday and incredibly hot, a fact we have been unfailingly alerted to and reminded of by the news for the past week. I can look out our living room window, from where I'm writing this post and see trees and haze. The ciccadas are screaming, so that (according to popular lore) means there are only six more weeks of this hard-to-breathe, quick-to-sweat searing thickness. We hope. To heal my broiled (and now perspiration-drenched) spirit, I envision approaching surf and cooling breezes. Happy place, yes.

Kate Zambreno's
first novel, O Fallen
Angel.

Kate Zambreno's wonderful blog (like this post or this one) always reconnects me with what it means to be a writer. She is a thinking writer, an intellectual, very analytical, but also forceful in her emotion, and sometimes her uncertainty. At her blog are the best three parts of humanity: head, heart, soul. More on her new book Green Girl very soon...

What I worked on from 7:33 A.M. until about 11:30 today is "Conceived in the New Liberty", a fictional commentary on how easily we might allow our rights be dismantled. I'm happy that it's flowing pretty steadily. During my daily hour of penance on the exercise machines in the basement, I flip between HLN, CNN, and Fox (all three are on consecutive stations on our cable box) to get a feel for the tenor and language used to deal with contemporary issues. My perceptions are, in part, what spurred my Two Minutes Hate post on Tuesday.

Lapith fighting a Centaur
Metope from The Parthenon

I may have mentioned this before, but I finished the Lord Elgin story, which I retitled "The Metope Prophecy." A 'metope' is a decorative architectural element, a carved spacer in a freize that usually appears between fluted trigylphs. On the Parthenon, there are 92 metopes. Many of these are what Elgin brought back to England to sell to the British Museum.

If you remember this post and the excerpt it contains (all the way at the posts' bottom), here is the paragraph that follows it:

"The image haunted him the following morning, even though he’d had other, less vividly remembered dreams afterward. He knew he could not save Phidias’ immense Athena. She was already lost. The military leader, Lachares, had used the gold plates that comprised the goddess’ drapery to mint coins to pay his troops in the third century before Christ. Resplendent then in copper and ivory, she survived two fires before disappearing with the rise of the Ottoman Empire. So, as he sipped at the dark brew that passed for coffee while his wife moved sulkily in her chair down the long table, he began to think of the statue’s plea in metaphorical terms. It is a message, he thought, staring at a triangle of buttered toast. I’m supposed to rescue what is still there." -- from "The Metope Prophecy"

Two Minutes Hate

2011-07-19T15:54:00.002-04:00

A still from the movie based on George Orwell's dystopic novel,

1984. Depicted here is the daily two minutes, during which citizens

of Oceania rail against images representing enemies of the state.

George Orwell's concept of Two Minutes Hate is an effective propaganda tool, with ingenious psychological effect. On the surface it reinforces recognition of ackowledged state threats. Yet, it is an opportunity for Party members to exorcise their fear and anger in a way that reinforces the state's purpose. In fact, it is the only accepted period throughout the day, when emotion of any kind can be expressed. Here, the frustrations borne of personal privation and grim existence are diverted away from the state, which determines these bitter realities, and onto figures who are not responsible but still pose a threat--even in theory--to the state's power. After Party members have exhausted themselves hurling their pent up emotion at the screen, an image of Big Brother appears, intended to instill a reassuring calm to their weary spirits. Someone capable is in control, even if (we, the readers, suspect) he is actually a political concoction by the party rather than a figure truly at the helm.

During one of the Two Minute Hate rituals, the character Julia, with whom protagonist Winston Smith eventually becomes involved, even goes so far as to attack the screen onto which the state enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein (whom critics believe to be modeled on Leon Trotsky), is projected. And apparently, as Orwell indicates, this type of attack is not uncommon. Yet it is here that Orwell's plot device points up the ways in which our culture is prone (or perhaps we will one day learn, our political system has facilitated) the creation of public villians, against which citizens--feeling similarly burdened by unemployment, their own inauspicious life choices, and narrowing personal options--can vent their frustrations.

Consider this: why offer 24-hour coverage and perpetual analysis of the Casey Anthony trial, other than to divert attention away from people's individual woes? What value does repeatedly showing Anthony's picture, or focusing on her impasssive face during the trial, have other than to inspire a deep-seated hatred that leads away from constructive activity or focus on one's own concerns? She becomes a flashpoint, an object of derision that channels disgust away from personal circumstances created by troubled economic and political issues.

24 Hours Hate: the impassive face of Casey Anthony on trial.

Another example is Ruppert Murdoch. Regardless of my feelings about what he may or may not have done, I realize the constant media coverage has made him into an enemy of the state, and not just one state, multiple states. In the image below, taken during the parliamentary probe in the UK today, he was assaulted with a shaving cream pie by an angry protester, later determined to be a comedian. Here, the Two Minute Hate had its inevitable consequences: attacking the reviled figure. Yet it was the 80 year-old man, not the telescreen, the symbol, or the intangible idea that was attacked.

Ruppert Murdoch, assaulted with a pie by a protester,
during a parliamentary probe.

Certainly, we want to know what's going on in the world. But vilification and doom appear everywhere in the media. Hasn't then the news actually become the outlet for setting up the political pariahs, against whom we citizens can vent our disgust with our social and economic circumstances? Of course, I've compared the media to Rome's bread and circuses (all circus, no bread, of course) before. But is the way topics are covered actually designed to divert attention from real isseus or, alternately, ignite public outrage against figures, whom various governments no longer find politically expedient? What does this remind us of? And shouldn't we be incredibly scared of the consequences of these patterns of thinking?

Germany's Dolchstoßlegende, circa 1919

Sad but True....two movies

2011-07-18T08:27:00.001-04:00

Conceived in the New Liberty

2011-07-15T09:47:00.001-04:00

The Bill of Rights, 1st US Congress, New York, 1789
Thank you, James Madison.

Oh, how this girl enjoys satire. I'm working on a new story called, "Conceived in Liberty." I include an image of The Bill of Rights, at right, because I don't think we see enough of it. I am certain that everyone born after 1980 likely hasn't seen enough of it. And so I am writing a story about it, along the lines of James Clavell's The Children's Story. I read this novella long before I ever read Animal Farm or 1984. Clavell wrote it after he realized his daughter did not understand what the Pledge of Allegiance really meant. She could recite it, but the meaning had never been explained to her.

I find that the young students I teach have large, somewhat surprising gaps in their education. It is patently obvious in English, and, I suspect, they also have an inadequate understanding of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. It may not be covered as thoroughly as it should be in primary and secondary schools, and since segments of it are so often bandied about carelessly by pundits, they may misunderstand its original intent. Their usual source of news and information is the web and television. And so, I am working on this:

"It began as a quiet rumbling at first, a question posted on Twitter by a fifteen year-old user named Boyz2DaHo, “So what good are trials by jury if criminals go free?” It was retweeted by five hundred of his followers, and by the end of the week, the question, which had percolated up Twitter feeds and across the Smartphone Screens of teens and twenty-somethings, became something people discussed over their cube walls, across tables in the nail salon, in lines for movie tickets. It got so much attention that, within a week and a half, the question was actually posed on the evening news. But instead of a history lesson on the Founding Fathers’ intentions, the news presented various viewer opinions, posted on Youtube and submitted via email."

Things I understand with age

2011-07-13T22:15:00.005-04:00

George Grosz at work

During my year in Germany, when I studied in an antiquated building whose most memorable feature was its herringbone parquet floors, I spent a lot of time in the Art History Department's library. I pulled out tomes, translated chapters, and made copies enough to fill several three-ring binders, which I eventually shipped home via the now defunct "Seepost". All of this activity got me closer to learning who George Grosz really was.

Of course, I knew who he was. His drawing, "Fit for Active Service", had been in my mother's college text, H.H. Arnason's History of Modern Art, along with a color plate of the painting, "Pillars of Society." (Arnason's book became something close to a sacred volume for me. I look at it constantly. I once knew the order of the page imagery by heart.) And yet, I did not understand what made Grosz, the man, tick. I felt this was necessary, since I had chosen him as the subject of my thesis. During my first few months at LMU, I made an appointment with a professor in Art History Department and indicated, in my then uncertain German that I wanted to study Max Beckmann. She said, "You will find it difficult to do any original research on Beckman. So many people have already written about him. Why don't you do your paper on someone like...oh, say, George Grosz?"

Why not, indeed. The previous year, I had deferred my Master's Degree at Pitt in order to come to Germany, and I had already met with my future thesis advisor. She was a George Grosz scholar, perhaps one of the most prominent Grosz scholars. I had no misgivings about entering her turf, although some fellow graduate students later questioned my sanity. When I returned home, she and I carved up Grosz' life like it was steak. She got the 19-teens, 20s and early 30s; I got his emigree legacy. And ultimately, I tied Grosz's legacy to another artist, Romare Bearden, Grosz's student at the Arts Students League. But that's another story for another time.

So, the first Grosz I got to know was the Grosz of Second Reich and Weimar-era Germany--the Grosz whose manifestos I read in my apartment at Moosacherstrasse 81. Here was the Grosz of Dada, of Neue Sachlickeit, the Grosz who spent time with John Heartfield and wrote disgustingly boastful journal entries about his sexual exploits with girlfriend (and later, wife) Eva. Also, I got to know the slightly older Grosz who had a sincere commitment to Communism until he saw its realities in Russia. And then there was the Grosz of the blasphemy trials.

Here, as an aside, I should probably mention that before the story collection American Soma took the name of the principal story (a decision James made, and I don't disgree with), the collection was called Behold! Mankind. Why? Because it is the rough translation of George Grosz's portfolio satirizing mankind's immorality. (I intended no allusion to either Pilate or Nietzsche, only Grosz.) Ecce Homo, published by Malik Verlag in 1923, was what landed Grosz in trouble with the authorities and, eventually, in court. Because American Soma offered small portraits of man's weaknesses, I felt there was a parallel in spirit and message. (Also, if you read the story "Movie Star" in my first book, The Famous and The Anonymous, George Grosz appears as a character. I try to fit him into each fiction compilation because Grosz is my literary version of 'Nina'.)

George Grosz, "The Retreat" 1946

Back when I was in Munich, I was young (22 and then 23), determined, not easily daunted. I drank alot, and I saw in Grosz the nihilst, the rabble-rouser, the person who stirred dissent because he was young and prone to rebellion. I recognized a little of myself.

When I got back to America, I began to discover a different Grosz, a disillusioned man, whose attempts to get away from his highly politicized past were met with criticism. Malcolm Cowley, who reviewed an exhibition of Grosz's American paintings for The Nation in the 1940s, castigated the artist for his decidedly apolitical tenor, for his tepid Cape Cod sand dunes, his comparatively academic nudes. Where, Cowley wanted to know, was the satirist? He was needed now more than ever. Apart from a few images representing the "haves" and the "have nots", Grosz abandoned social issues.

I couldn't see it when I was 23 and 24, but I understand at 37 that Grosz was a haunted man, a broken man, as evinced by paintings like "The Retreat" of 1946. And knowing about the prescient dream he had in late 1932 that caused him to pack up his home and family and flee Germany before Hitler ascended to the position of Reichschancelor in 1933, it's easy to understand his pessimism. He had already seen that, ultimately, Stalin was little different than Hitler, something he revealed in a drawing appearing in the 1936 portfolio Interregnum. Ultimately, he resigned himself to the realization that man was so bogged down by weakness, desire, and corruption that he could never hope to achieve an equitable social or political system.

Malcolm Cowley, who castigated Grosz for
the artist's apoliticism in America

Why Cowley could not appreciate this, I'm not sure. Perhaps he was himself still an idealist. Perhaps he felt a man could not, or should not change. Grosz's attention to aesthetics over content was a conscious turn away from that which he knew could not be fixed. No amount of propaganda or artistic dissent would change the fundamental, corruptible nature of man. Ecce Homo indeed. Here, it seems, is the disappointing truth about man. Grosz knew this, and it is, I would wager, what contributed to his heavy drinking and, ultimately, his drink-related death.

Neue Sachlichkeit und andere Geschichte

2011-07-09T00:33:00.001-04:00

Weimar's New Woman:
short-haired, smoking, thin, intellectual.
August Sander photograph of Sonia Schad, wife of
Neue Sachlichkeit painter Christian Schad
(photo credit)

Darlings, let's have a flashback. Look there. Yes, just there, through the glass of the closed-door private study room on the second floor of the Juniata College Library. That's me, head bowed near the desk lamp, which creates a deceptive halo of light in my short blonde hair. I'm in a blue hooded sweatshirt and a pair of black jeans I've worn since eighth grade (so ripped in places that it is necessary for me to wear red or mustard colored tights underneath to remain socially acceptable).

Yes, okay. Sure, I'll admit it. I have added to the graffiti on the wooden desk inside this closed carrel. I come back each evening and find there is more to the animated graffiti conversation I'm having with some sports-obsessed wanker. Anyway, I'm done studying for the night, or maybe I'm taking a break. I have left the carrel for a moment, gone to the stacks, and pulled out a book on Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). This is the way I reward myself after I have to study something especially tedious, like biology.

On the cover of one of these books is a painting by Otto Dix of the German Journalist and Poet Sylvia "Sy" von Harden. I find the image vaguely revolting but also entirely fascinating. It is this regular visual communing with paintings, like the ones below, that marks the beginning of my obsession with what I consider (at the time) to be German Expressionism, although this was not Expressionism. It is the antedote to the emotion associated with Expressionism. It was a new kind of perspective, a perspective gained on the back side of the Treaty of Versailles, on the back side of starvation and horrible inflation. Gone are colorful representations of idyllic Primitivism. In their place is a representation of humanity's terrible imperfections, rendered with technical virtuosity and Duerer-like precision.

Otto Dix, Portrait of Sylvia "Sy" von Harden
This painting was recreated in an opening scene of
the film Cabaret.

And then, there are allegories, visual allegories on the perils and outcomes of war, like Rudolf Schlichter's "Blind Power" (below). Other paintings depict the almost syphilitic post-war excesses (and privations) of the politically precarious Weimar Republic. In November 2002, I wrote an article on this for the European Journal of Cultural Studies. The article considered three books dealing with three vastly different facets of Weimar. They were universally scholarly subject references, but ones which discussed vital period themes: 1) The New Woman and how she was shaped by popular literature, 2) The Culture of Spectacle, 3) the reciprocal relationship between the faltering economy and the culture it supported (and sometimes failed to fully support...the black market was wild in 1920s Germany).

I'll admit that I'm still entirely blown down by this period in history. And I'm blown down specifically by Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, not as much by America and its era of Prohibition and speakeasy culture. Our media outlets talk about the dire circumstances of contemporary society. But think was it must have been like for those who came home from inhuman (and inhumane) front experience, their feet likely rotting from weeks of immersion in water. Some were maimed, while many others were yet in a constant state of alert and fear that would never truly abate. And then they come home to what? Brown shirts, violent power struggles, a worthless currency. And almost complete chaos and degradation, thanks to the Versailles Treaty, a punitive tool that only made things much worse.

But I realize, yes, I'm rambling. I know. Over the past week, I've been working on a series of different things. I finished the Elgin story and have submitted it to Weird Tales. I've got another venue lined up once it's rejected, which it surely will be. This is the way of all literary things for me, it seems. It doesn't mean that I'll stop trying. Tonight, in Barnes and Noble, Michael pointed out to me the book A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. I laughed a little when I saw this because I remember what happened to Toole, or more accurately what Toole did to himself in the face of such universal rejection. It's definitely not that I find it funny; I find it sad beyond words. I sympathize with him more that I care to go into here. We're all yelling into the wind, while the world blows crap in our faces. I feel that every time I sit down to write something. Sure, A Confederacy finally made it into print, but only after Toole's suicide and through the dogged determination of his mother, Thelma, and to Loyola University Professor Walker Percy. And then, low and behold, it won a Pulitzer. Now, why, publishers, was that so freaking difficult to accept? No, seriously.

Anyway, since it really might never see the light of day, here's a teeny tiny slice of Elgin:

"When it became necessary for the frieze to come down in smaller segments, Elgin suffered a blinding headache that lasted three days. Hunt came to his temporary quarters, where Elgin had asked for thick fabric to be drawn over the windows to block out the light. Hunt related the details in solemn whispers. “I suppose,” said Elgin, his thin palm over his damp forehead, “if it must be done to get them out, then it must be done. Try not to disfigure them any more than is necessary. Save them as best you can.”
Athena did not appear in Elgin’s dreams again. As he lay still in the swelter of his small Athens apartment, waiting for the sun to set, the heat to abate, for his the headache to lift, he experienced ocular fireworks, the flashing of strange geometric shapes, and a disturbing delusion that there were snakes around the base of his bed. But there was no ivory-skinned goddess. He longed for her approval. At one point, in the cool clamminess of night, he woke to shouting, but realized, on fully waking, that it was his own voice he heard. The words still filtered through his consciousness: Have I done right by you? Have I done right?" -- from "The Metope Prophecy"

Savannah does Pete Townsend pinwheels....

2011-06-29T13:17:00.005-04:00

So, kids, it's been a busy week. You see, it's just before July 4th and there's much to do for the big bash on Monday. Most of the Guz clan is at the Outer Banks this week, which leaves the Bunster and me to get things ready for the holiday. This evening, I may get a crash course in the Kubota, so I can mow tomorrow. Okay, yeah, maybe 'crash course' was not the best word to use. I hope to crash into nothing. Michael is confident in letting me handle the fields, but not around the houses. Yeah, not so much. I make him nervous when I drive, so with a mower attached to the bottom, I represent an even greater danger. And I probably shouldn't admit that, yes, I can see that.

Meet my supervisors: Jasper, on the sofa;
Fred, on the floor. This was their most
recent office visit. Apparently, my effort is
"ruff". Is this good or bad...anyone know?

Last night, we went up to visit the bees. I was wearing a tank top. This was a mistake. One especially zealous guard bee, who perhaps forgot that we're the ones who bring her hive sugar syrup, chased me all the way down the hill (all the way), while both my arms apparently did Pete Townsend-style windmills. According to Michael and Cousin Linda, who could see us from her backyard, I was quite the humorous sight. I did get stung--in the middle of my upper back, where I couldn't reach it to get the venom pumper out. So, my yelling was warranted. Michael said, when he got down to me to flick the stinger out (and after he stopped laughing), "Damn. You can really run fast in those flip-flops." There will be no more visiting the hill without my bee suit. Period. No, on second thought, make that an exclamation point.

So, I'm working on Charlotte, as mentioned in my previous post. I'm lengthening and adding scenes, correcting factual inaccuracies, and doing research. As I find scenes in the historical literature, I work on chapters. Yesterday, I found a fascinating article, written for the Block Museum of Art at Northerwestern, titled "Last Expression: Art from Auschwitz" by Guido Fackler. It details the use of music for purposes of psychological degradation in the camps. However, some of the women, in apparently rare cases, would actually use music as a form of resistance. There is documentation of the women singing La Marseillaise on returning from work details, when they were undoubtedly exhausted and sometimes (or perhaps often) forced to carry their dead comrades back to barracks with them. It's this spirit of resistance in the face of apathy and terror that I am most interested in.

Meanwhile, I'm also working on other speculative fiction. I've got a story going this morning about Thomas Bruce, 7th Lord Elgin. You know him. He's the man who has been blamed for theiving away much of the Parthenon freize and pediment sculptures when he was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1799 and 1803 and when the Turks had little appreciation (and probably a whole lot of disdain) for the work of Phidias. Elgin, who hoped to save these treaures--which eventually inspired sculptors like Canova--suffered a great deal of life misfortune and has been pretty harshly judged by history. So, he's inspired a story...here's part of it.

That night, while composing letters at his writing table, he fell asleep. He dreamed he was back in the darkened sanctuary near the Amazon whose skin had the pale faultlessness of unglazed porcelain. Her gold gown radiated its own warmth, which made him drowsy. He was a youth again, no older than fourteen or fifteen, and lay on his hip beside the reflecting pool, the cool marble against his cheek. In his right hand was a tiny wooden boat, a toy he recognized from his childhood. Languidly, without significantly shifting his position, he set the boat on the surface of the water. When it merely floated calmly on the surface, he pushed it gently with his finger towards the dais opposite him. He vaguely registered that the giantess above him was alive. Her eyes followed him even as her towering body remained entirely still, her face motionless. The boy looked away from boat, which moved steadily towards her. He cast his gaze up to her face, and when his brown eyes met the lapis colored stones representing hers, she leaned forward from her exalted position and whispered to him, “Save me.”

Now, back to work....but before I go, have a video moment. I know, pardon me. I'm again late coming to this party, since, apparently, this has been everywhere. But I have a tendency to get stuck on weird stuff and then put them on repeat play for months on end. Anyway, I just discovered Brandi Carlisle, and HOLY CRAP, the girl has some freaking powerful voice. http://youtu.be/o8pQLtHTPaI

Charlotte's Nexus

2011-06-23T17:01:00.000-04:00

It's been quiet, I know. So what am I working on, you ask? I'll tell you. (she lays her cards out on the table in a perfect fan shape...look, a full house)

Let's go back in time. It's the late summer of 2007. I'm waiting for the now apparently defunct So New to publish my book, which will eventually become American Soma. It is a long wait, and the book's publication is still two years away, although I don't know this yet. But, darling, that's another story.

Picture me holding a plastic shopping bag, kneeling in a large patch of Blue Lake Bush Beans. I'm picking pods to preserve while Michael replaces pads on my truck in a garage several meters away. That year, we can 75 Ball Jars of Blue Lake Beans, an amazing amount. Picking beans is a Zen activity, requiring little mental effort because the plants are yellow and the beans are thick and green, easy to spot. In this bean patch, I get an idea, which grows from an idea I carried with me on a disc from Pennsylvania...an idea that eventually grows into this.

This new idea hits me in that bean patch so hard it makes me cry. I wonder, for a few moments, about my sanity.

By then, I have started teaching, and during my long drives down Route 7 to Wheeling, I put together the images that comprise the following six flash works, some of which I read at the 5:10 Reading Series in Baltimore a year later:
"Charlotte, Ionized"
"Charlotte, the Apparition"
"Charlotte's Nexus"
"Arrival at the Camp"
"The Doctor Dreams"
"Fugitive Doctor"

After American Soma is finally released (and I beat my head against the wall with the publisher for months afterwards), I stop working on Charlotte's story. Other things eclipse her. I fail to hear her whispering in my ear for a long while.

Charlotte is back. And this time, I will finish her story.

"He himself was smooth-shaven, close-pored, every nail crescent scrubbed white. He brought the smell of clean laundry with him, too. And there was music, beautiful trills and noise her mind tried to record so she could hear it later, at night, when the lights over the wooden bunks were out. She would catch a remembered resonance and hang on to it. Where could it take her? Back into the office, back over the bones and teeth that scattered over the man’s desk? Back to the wash line where her mother stood pinning clothes and dish rags to the white cord that ran between houses? To the man at the dinner table, an uncle, who speared meat with a three-pronged fork and winked at her as he did it?

Did he, this doctor, look very much like my father? She couldn’t remember. She just couldn’t remember. No image came, only a swelling in her throat."

Who is Alan F. Reiland?

2011-06-16T12:34:00.002-04:00

Recently, I went in to Shaw Galleries, downtown, to see the photography exhibition "Forgotten Witness: The Long Lost Photographs of Pittsburgh Press Photographer Alan F. Rieland". If the arts & entertainment editor at CP can work it out, my article on the show will appear next week. Still waiting for confirmation. In truth, it's not really a review, although I do offer a little qualitative discussion on the power of the photos. Nevertheless, the article talks more about the mystery behind the photographs.

"Complaint Department (Self-Portrait)"
by Alan F. Reiland

image courtesy Kurt Shaw, Shaw Galleries

Who, exactly, is the Pittsburgh Press photographer Alan F. Reiland? He seems to have come from nowhere, left few historical traces, and died in obscurity.

But, wait. Let's back up and talk about how he was 're-discovered' at all. Reiland's 24 or so gelatin silver prints were first found on the floor of the Pittsburgh Press Building, where they had been for decades. They were almost thrown away during the merge with the Post-Gazette in 1992. But some astute soul rescued them, kept them for a decade and then sold them to someone else. This unknown someone-else had an estate sale in 2006. At this very estate sale, Shaw Gallery Owner Kurt Shaw saw them for the first time and purchased them (Please go see the show! It's up until June 30th!).

What appears in the exhibition are the prints (certainly, there are no negatives known to exist) still in their original cream-colored mats. These mats bear shoe prints and broad smudges of dirt. Remember, they were lying on the floor of the press building since the 1960s, so essentially, part of their physical history is also on display.

Shaw told me that in anticipation of the exhition, he'd done some research, attempting to track down Reiland over the previous five years. Based on Shaw's (and now my own) search of Social Security records, we know he was born in 1927 and died in Munhall, a borough adjacent to Homestead, on August 30, 1996. But when Shaw contacted neighbors in Munhall and a local upholstery company that goes by the name of Reiland, no one knew the man or even remembered him. Apparently, he had no surviving relatives.

I like a good mystery. And I'll admit that I've developed a fascination with Reiland over the past days, since I spoke with Kurt Shaw and saw the photographs. How can a man appear and disappear, just like that? Certainly there have to be census records, payroll records. Did the man bud, fully formed, from someone's head or perhaps land from the sky? Well, I finally signed up for Ancestry.com, and I got more information: his social security number, his old phone number, and two separate residence addresses. But that's about it. There's no evidence of co-habitation with anyone, no evidence of children, no evidence that he ever had a father or mother. In fact, before 1983, there seems to be no mention of him at all, unless he changed his name from Alaric, which I suppose is entirely possible. Yet Alan's birth date is firm, while Alaric's carries the dubious 'about' designation and is a year later than Alan's. So, the mystery continues.

Next week, I plan to do some more investigating at the Carnegie Library's Pennsylvania Room, where I'll scan a specific part of the microfilm collection. In the meantime, I've included a picture above, a staged picture that he took. It is intended as a self-portrait and suggests his sense of humor. Its title, of course, is "Complaints Department".

Me, milking a cow....

2011-06-14T09:39:00.002-04:00

First, wanna see something funny? Here it is....

Yep, that's me milking a fake cow. Details below.

That's me, milking a fake cow. Believe it or not, there was actually liquid of some sort in that... well, is udder actually the appropriate word when something is made of rubber? (Note the Purell hand sanitizer dispenser to my right, like they're real...well, udders. I did, however, dutifully use it). So, where exactly am I performing this (possibly inappropriate) act? Well, the York Agricultural and Industrial Museum.

Michael and I visited my folks this past weekend back in York, which is in south-central Pennsylvania, close to the Maryland line (I grew up 40 minutes from Gettysburg, and less than an hour from Baltimore...I say less than an hour because I used to speed down to Towson in record time for about two months in the summer of 2005, for reasons I now happily consider 'water under the bridge'). We had a wonderful time with my folks this weekend, visiting the Historical Society Museum, the Bonham House, and the Ag & Industry Museum, which--even though I was a high school docent at the Gates House and Plough Tavern back in the early 1990s--has changed so much I barely recogize it. I can still recite the beginning of my own tour spiel, though: "In 1741, when Thomas Cookson founded the town of York, Martin Eichelberger bought the plot of land on which he built the Plough Tavern...."

I could go on. I won't.

However, I do want to give a shout out to the ever awesome Left Bank Restaurant, where Mom and Dad treated us to dinner. Their food is amazing. The restaurant has been around for years now, and it never disappoints. I actually got there before my folks did back in my 'dating days' in the three years following my move back from D.C. in 2002. Still, the food and atmosphere has gotten even better than I ever remember it being.

So you're thinking...

2011-06-06T10:48:00.000-04:00

What the heck have you been doing, girl? No posts for days and then these little piddling things...

Well, I've been spending some additional time over here. I've also been working around our homestead a whole lot. There's gardening work to do every evening. You can also see the bee-related work we've been doing at the blog connected to the words 'over here' in the first sentence of this paragraph. And of course, I've been cooking. I cook a lot, and that also means I do a lot of dishes. Time at the sink is time away from the 'puter, you know?

Anyway, I do have some very good news on the writing front. My story, "The Balance of Power" has just been accepted into a Silverthought anthology, edited by Becci Noblit Goodall. Silverthought is an independent press specializing in speculative fiction, of which I seem to be writing more and more. But then again, doesn't the world seem to be getting increasingly surreal? What seems sci-fi-worthy is, lately, becoming increasingly believable.

There are other things in the works, and I'll keep you updated as things develop!

A Haunting Picture

2011-06-01T16:10:00.001-04:00

Michael and I went to auction on Friday night, and we won a small book of post cards, many of them from the turn of the last century and the early 1900s.

There are approximately five photograph post cards in the larger collection. Included among these are several humorous images of children and one of a doughboy in front of a painted screen intended to simulate a garden setting.

However, it was this one, the one above that leaves me a little speechless when I look at it. I'll be using a scanned enlargement of the couple in an assemblage like this one.

This one breathes history and has this amazing atompshere about it that I can't yet put into words. There are stories in those faces, in the ticking of the man's military coat, in the stiffness of the fabric in the woman's dress, in the wedding ring on the man's thin finger, in the glasses the woman holds nearly out of sight. Her eyes are so dark they seem to hold off questions. There's a whole world of clues, including who he is. See, it's all on the back.

But I wonder....is this woman his mother or his wife? It's hard for me to tell. The letter is addressed to his mother....he uses 'I', not 'we' to indicate a wife. Still, there's a proprietary nature about the way he sits, hugging the woman on the chair arm, his chin down, his head tipped towards her. And yet, there's a kind of maternal pride in the woman's posture, a "this is my son" gravity. Funny, too, is that it's addressed hastily, but not stamped. Perhaps it was in an envelope with another letter? Or maybe it was never sent at all. What is the real story? Would I be disappointed if I found out?

Book-rific Scrumptiousness

2011-05-27T14:37:00.001-04:00

I've talked about this collection before. But it's beautiful enough to mention again, this time with a proper picture.

Where are we here? In the bedroom. Who needs a nightstand for books, when you can sneak in a whole shelf?

We got this particular collection at auction, after fighting a fairly heated bidding war with a fairly hard-bitten antiques dealer. I knew she wouldn't treasure them like I would (and likely only saw them in terms of their resale value), so I kept at it. From my seat, I saw the Zola, the Dostoevsky, the Pepys and Harte.

After a quick volley of bids, she finally conceded, and I carried the many boxes home.

This is just one collection. There are a few others in the living room--one is a fantastic little collection of blue-bound Harvard Classics--but I'll provide a glimpse of them another day.......

A Foreigner Among Foreigners

2011-05-23T15:23:00.001-04:00

In 1998, I lived in Munich, huddled within the textured white walls of a tiny efficiency apartment charitably doled out to university students by the city’s Studentenwerk. There, my small room perched several stories above a first floor inhabited, on one side, by an Italian restaurant and, on the other, a police station, whose cars blared their panic-inducing two-tone sirens by night and by day. Down the street, the BMW plant began cutting sheet metal at 7 a.m., even on Saturdays.

From my apartment, I could see the architectural magnificence of the Olydorf, the 1972 Olympic Village, where some people took great pride in their apartments. Their stepped terraces, decorated with flowerboxes and spilling over with vining plants looked beautiful from my large square window. I felt bad for the reciprocal view offered by my sad gray-green building, which was casually shedding small bits of stucco onto the sidewalk below and occasionally onto Moosacherstrasse, which thrummed with the regular movement of cars like blood through arteries.

On Sunday mornings, when I usually suffered from a hangover that robbed me of my peripheral vision, I would force myself to get out and roam the streets, which I did even at night. I had no fears there. Almost no one bothered me. And I say almost because, once, a man did. But that's another story, for another time.

I had an admirer in those days, a dark haired man who worked in the restaurant kitchen, a man who seemed to know my schedule. He would stand outside smoking a cigarette and staring at the cinderblock walls surrounding the dumpsters. He always turned as I left through the glass door, my shoe heels clicking against the broken asphalt. “Ciao, Bella! ” he’d shout loudly at me before tossing his cigarette away and going back inside to--I assumed, based on the rubber gloves in his back pocket--wash dishes.
I usually rode the subway from the Olympia Zentrum stop, where drunks stood by the Imbisse near the heavily populated bicycle lock-up and drank Apfelkorn or the horrible, enamel-dissolving Obstler from tiny bottles they lined up like soldiers on the high, chairless tables. I nodded to the few World War II veterans I had come to recognize, one of whom told me he was kept as a POW by the British. I doubted some of his story because he was forever incandescent with alcohol, pinkish eyes tearing, nose leaking, mucous running like a frightened woman towards his upper lip. If someone had ever struck a match near him, I feared he would explode in one giant conflagration. So, I moved quickly past him, having faltered near him once and having been forced, thanks to my lack of a hard heart, to listen to his story. Not that it was uninteresting, just slightly incoherent, even accusatory. He thought I was British and was quietly giving me the business about his suffering and privations.

Munich's Theatinerkirche, a sight that makes me
teary-eyed. I never thought it would take me so long
to get back.

Often, I traveled to the wide and regal Odeonsplatz, which was the city’s hub. I emerged from the dark earth somewhat recovered and near the base of the towering, ochre-colored Theatinerkirche, with its giant Baroque dome and twin clock towers. Feldherrnhalle stood before me, a massive neoclassical memorial to fallen military leaders and behind it, the shadowy Dodger’s Alley, once travelled by those who wished not to salute another Putsch-related memorial plaque Hitler riveted to the side of the monument that faced the Hofgarten.

And then, the delicious walk to Marienplatz: past the modest Residenztheater and the opulent state opera, whose interior walls were either mirrored with beveled glass or painted an icy blue and accented with silvered acanthus leaf moldings. Beyond this, the shops: furriers; tobacconists, whose scents wafted onto the street with each movement of their shop doors; music stores in whose windows sheet music fanned and gorgeous violins suspended over burgundy velvet. There were ‘antiquariats,’ where I looked for prints and carefully flipped through gently yellowing first editions of Mann’s Buddenbrooks under the disdainful gaze of the storekeeper, who knew I was an impecunious student, but understood by my accent that I was a foreigner with at least one of the currencies then enjoying a high rate of exchange. Still, I often tried to hide my foreignness, and the longer I lived there, the better I became at it, until no one knew I was not one of them--a Bavarian who spoke the same broad vowels and deep-formed consonants authentically.

This was how I spent my days when I was not at the museum, where I catalogued the Wittelsbacher collection, harvested lavender from the roof garden by climbing through the window above my desk, translating correspondence into first halting, then lilting English. I, a foreigner among foreigners, with a disparity soon entirely undetectable.

This was originally written, in slightly different form, for Dan Waber's hypertext project, "That Reminds Me". Soon, there will be more....

My Review of Helene Aylon's show at Forward Magazine's Blog

2011-05-20T17:44:00.001-04:00

I'm excited to report that one of my reviews of Helène Aylon's show The Liberation of G-d and The Unmentionable, currently on view at The Warhol Museum, is now live at The Jewish Daily Forward's blog, The Arty Semite. You can read the whole review here. In the meantime, an excerpt:

Helène Aylon, The Digital
Liberation of G-D, 2004
(Photo Credit)

"The highlighting also reveals scornful attitudes towards the feminine. For example, Leviticus 15: 19-30 broaches the subject of female menstruation. Within these 11 lines, the word “unclean” appears 15 times. The repetition, when pointed out, is startling and calls to mind an earlier cataloging of unhygienic animals."

Pittsburgh City Paper (CP) will also run my review of the same show. However, this second review approaches the subject from a different angle, in order to offer other insights and ideas than those already presented. This should appear in next week's issue of CP. So, more to come on this next Thursday.

Other writing project are in the works, including a review for Sculpture Magazine. Details on these to come....

What's New in my Zoo

2011-05-17T08:52:00.001-04:00

I know, I know...it's been almost a week since I've posted. But I've been working on a variety of projects, about which I'm pretty excited. Let's work backwards in time, shall we? Let's, indeed.

Yesterday, I finished a proposal for City Sages: Pittsburgh. All in the preliminary stages, mind you, but I put together a list of significant historical and contemporary writers, who have helped to define or are currently working to shape Pittsburgh's literary identity. It will be part of a series, published by Baltimore's City Lit Project, an organization headed by Gregg Wilhelm. Jen Michalski edited the first volume, devoted to Baltimore, and initially suggested the project's potential for Pittsburgh, which has a surprisingly rich and diverse literary legacy, even as a mosquito-infested frontier town. And while there are so many Pittsburgh poets I admire, who are making the city a literary hub, the focus will likely be on prose writers this time because of the shape of the series' inaugural volume. However, an entire volume about Pittsburgh poets is truly needed.

Now, backwards towards Friday. I finished my monthly 8-reference title LJ Review Column (<--if you click, you must scroll to the bottom to see my stuff). And on Thurday night, I completed a review of Helene Aylon's examination of the Torah, now on view at the Warhol Museum, for The Arty Semite. I undertook a fairly intense education in order to interpret the details because, when I did go to church as a child, it was to my Grandparents' Lutheran congregation (and later, in college, I attended several Episocpalian services with a boy I was dating...yet, a great deal of what i know about the Bible has come not from a pastor, but from Renaissance and Baroque art history courses. Perhaps this is something to be ashamed of, but I have a slightly different view of religion that likely aligns more with Emily Dickinson's conception than any traditional perscription. But this is another matter, somewhat private and much more complex. Not blog material, really.)

Anyway, I've got some other writing projects brewing, but we'll get to that soon. Very soon. In the meantime, check out a fascinating interview Helene Aylon conducted with legendary gallerist and champion of Abstract Expressionism, Betty Parsons, in 1977.

In City Paper, a Review of Sung Rok Choi's "Call of Duty: Operation 100"

2011-05-12T08:11:00.000-04:00

Running this week in Pittsburgh City Paper is my review of the artist Sung Rok Choi's exhibition, Call of Duty: Operation 100, currently on display at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

Sung Rok Choi, "Call of Duty: Seaweed" (2011)
Photo credit: sungrokchoi.com

Here's a small excerpt:

"The Brechtian quality of these naïve depictions points up our conditioned expectations: Where is the impersonal, unfailingly heroic aura assigned to soldiers in recruitment and propaganda videos? There, physical prowess and valor eclipse any sense of individual experience. Here, Choi offers a view of the disillusioned individual. Considering South Korea's compulsory two-year conscriptions, this is likely closer to many men's understanding of 'duty.'"

Read the whole review here:
"A Korean artist's riff on Call of Duty asks us to reflect on warfare"

In Pittsburgh City Paper, my interview with Gary Shteyngart

2011-05-10T08:48:00.001-04:00

My interview with author Gary Shteyngart appeared in Pittsburgh City Paper last Wednesday. Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story (2010), Absurdistan (2006) and The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2003), will be reading at Pittsburgh's City of Asylum Series, which takes place at Mattress Factory tonight. The Warhol's Interim Executive Director and Milton Curator of Fine Art Eric Shiner will introduce Shteyngart.

I've reposted part of the conversation with Shteyngart here, just below. To read the interview in its entirety, click here.

"LOVE & RUINS" (from Pittsburgh City Paper)
Savannah Schroll Guz

Gary Shteyngart's novels are both satirical and prescient. And while his books deal with individual experience, his characters offer broader, incisive commentary on the grim nature of the human condition and global society's ever-shifting tectonics.
Born in Leningrad, in 1972, Shteyngart was brought to America at the age of 7 and grew up in an austere Russian household. His first two novels incorporate the tension of his own dueling cultural identities. The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2003) and Absurdistan (2006) -- named one of the year's 10 best books by The New York Times Book Review -- thrum with the angst of second-generation immigrants seeking to establish themselves under the weight of crippling, often parentally imposed, expectations.

This subject takes a back seat in his third novel, last year's Super Sad True Love Story (Random House), whose focus is a seemingly improbable relationship that develops amid a chillingly familiar social and political landscape. In the face of economic and political collapse, a hopelessly backward-looking man in his late 30s teaches an initially insensitive twenty-something female that the most redemptive kind of hope is not found in popularity or politics, but in love. The book, along with his previous work, earned Shteyngart a spot in The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list of literary stars.

Shteyngart reads at City Of Asylum on Tue., May 10. City Paper interviewed him via email at his home in New York City.

SSG: Since The Russian Debutante's Handbook, you've moved from protagonists in their late teens/early twenties to the late-thirties Lenny Abramov of Super Sad True Love Story. How much do you identify with your main characters?

GS: I like to write about people my age. As I grow older and older I encounter a whole new set of fears and anxieties to add to my list of golden oldies. You should see my cholesterol levels. Vladimir [from Debutante] reminds me of my insecure college years in your neighbor Ohio (that's when I started writing the book); Misha [Absurdistan] is too large and in charge to be autobiographical; and this new nebbish of mine, Lenny, has a very different bald spot from the one I have.
SSG: In an interview with The New York Times, you mention the influence of writers like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. In light of your more recent exploration of American-based dystopia, do you look to any other influences?

GS: Well, I've always been a huge fan of dystopia. I grew up in the Soviet Union and went to Hebrew school in Queens. Enough said. I loved 1984 and Brave New World as a kid. I think 1984 sticks out in my mind because it's a love story set against a horrifying society. Julia and Winston love each other and that's what I remember so well about that book. It was an inspiration when I started writing Super Sad True Love Story....

To read the interview in its entirety, click here.

* * * *

Hysterical Machines at Wood Street Galleries

2011-05-04T14:31:00.001-04:00

Bill Vorn's "Red Light" (2005)
currently on view at Wood Street Galleries

For a review I'm working on for Sculpture Magazine, I went to see Wood Street Galleries' recently opened, full-gallery installations, collectively titled Hysterical Machines. These robotic installations were created by Bill Vorn. I'll have to go back....while the lights show and sounds were pretty spectacular on the third floor, the hydraulic machines seen hanging in the picture at left were not moving, and the second-floor gallery was not accessible via the elevator.

Earlier this morning, at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, I also got a chance to see Sung Rok Choi's series, Call of Duty: Opeartion 100, which I'll be writing a review of for next week's CP.

Also, while this week's CP is not yet online, it is out in print, and I picked up a copy outside the elevator entrance to Wood Street. My interview with Absurdistan author Gary Shteyngart is advertised on the front, which is exciting. I'll include a link in tomorrow's post, when the whole enchillada goes live on the CP site.

More from "Exodus"

2011-04-29T08:10:00.001-04:00

Image from Extraordinary Intelligence

I've been working pretty steadily on the new sci-fi story, since my deadline is Sunday night....been consumed by that, so some more substantial postings will appear here as soon as I am done. In the meantime, an excerpt from the developing story...just a shorty for now, since I don't want to steal the thunder of what will eventually appear in the magazine:

"A strange red light seemed to rise over the rubble, and at first, the trio thought the Leviathans had found them. They all ran for cover, even Walter, who had previously wanted to die. Inside the spider-webbed glass front of a boutique, they stumbled over toppled shoe boxes and scattered boots and heels. They did not sit on the cushioned bench once intended for customers, but hunkered down on either side of the entrance, in case they had to move again. Once they caught their breath, Walter said, “I haven’t seen a living soul for the last four days. I was afraid I was the last one.” He paused when his voice cracked. “I tried to ...you know…kill myself, but I…I just didn’t have the guts.” He pulled back his sweater sleeve to show four or five light parallel cuts he’d made across his pale wrist.

Tina, crouched beside Rayray in a way that indicated she still looked to him for physical protection, said nothing. She glanced at the wrist and then shifted her eyes to the black and white floor tiles, where the sun’s light waned. The group could hear thunder, distant at first and then suddenly louder, until it seemed as if it were right overhead. Tina began to shake. Rayray looked through the windows, calmly, as if he already knew what was coming. The old Rayray would have gotten up, kicked the boxes around, raged against whatever was overhead, vainly challenging it. Now, however, he was composed. As the building shook with the percussive impact of the thunder, Rayray said, loud enough for them to still hear, “Behold, the Lord is riding on a swift cloud and comes to Egypt; and the idols of Egypt will tremble at his presence, and the heart of the Egyptians will melt within them.”

Within moments, a heavy burst of yellow-colored rain fell from the sky, striking the ground with the force of tiny hammers. Walter, kept his place in the doorway, holding the lapels of his cardigan closed. He rolled his eyes around and wrinkled his nose, exposing his teeth, while he tried to see the sky beyond the boundaries of the doorway. The smell of sulfur suddenly rose from the pavement, along with a thick steam." -- from "Exodus"

The Beginning of Exodus

2011-04-25T13:59:00.003-04:00

I'm working on a new story for the Winter '11 issue of the online sci-fi and fantasy magazine Strange Weird and Wonderful. Here are the first three paragraphs of a story with the working title, "Exodus":

The sun came up red and angry. It glowered through the gauzy fog, washing with a frail pink light the collapsing bridges and broken, graying asphalt that lay in chunks where highways had once been. While three of the small travel party still slept, protected from immediate sight by an overpass, Tina was awake, and so was Bible. She watched him sitting on the ledge some twenty yards away, looking east and staring with calm concentration into the sun. His braids, grown fuzzy at the roots, filtered the light around his skull so that it looked like a nimbus. Tina shuddered and turned over on her side, looking away from Bible.

Tina had known Bible before the apocalypse. That’s what they all called the invasion. It had come at the end of a very grim economic time. Even the Americans, who were fighting an endless war with sand colored tanks and ground harrowing missiles, were unable to muster the resources necessary to produce suitable weapons. But it did not matter, American science was not yet a match for the baffling nuclear arsenal the invaders had arrived with. Nearly everything around them had been either heavily irradiated or vaporized. In fact, at least two of the people lying near Tina snored quietly in front of human-shaped shadows burned into the concrete.

Tina again turned to look at Bible’s thin back. The sun had shifted. The red halo had disappeared. She could see his vertebrae, his humanity. Her nausea passed, and she remembered the man she had known. His birth name had been Leonard, and once, she and his other girls called him ‘Rayray’. As Rayray, he sat deep in his Cadillac Fleetwood, like it was a velveteen throne, and slowly wet his thumb and forefinger while he counted out twenties, fifties, hundreds. His girls took turns visiting him, went with their money to the Fleetwood at different times. Tina remembered how she drank in the air conditioning while she sat there and he counted, the motor humming beneath them. Most of his girls hadn’t survived the apocalypse. When the invaders landed, incinerating most of the inhabitants of buildings that burned and fell, the population in the Metro area fell by three-quarters. The survivors, before dying of radiation sickness or other equally fatal wounds, moved like cockroaches in the darkness, finding shelter for the daytime. Now, most of the city lay in quiet ruins that gently phosphoresced by night. -- from "Exodus" (in progress)

On La Cigale by Chekov

2011-04-20T17:22:00.004-04:00

Some time ago, Michael and I got into a bidding war with an antiques dealer for a set of 1920s classics, published by Black's Readers Service. We got them for $30, which, in my opinion, is a fairly low price for nearly 60 beautifully preserved books.
I suspect they were part of a subscription series, much like the Literary Guild books my mother got at regular intervals when I was a child. They are published in a variety of different years within the 1920s. And each is a beautiful fabric-bound red with spines sun-bleached pink and covered in lovely goldtone caligraphic swirls, now slightly worn from use and age. I can tell that the previous owner liked the Shakespeare volume the best because the spine is well worn, as if it had been pulled off the shelf many times. I even found a partial grocery list in nearly incomprehensible script marking a spot in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Slowly, I've been working my way through each volume (sadly, there is no Proust), but I've read through Zola and Flaubert, stalled somewhere deep in Wilde, but consumed almost all of The World's Greatest Detective Stories (well, 'world's greatest' up to the mid-1920s, of course). Right now, I'm reading through Chekov, having finished "The Kiss," which is a wonderful character study of a antisocial military man, a virtual ascetic who has a high opinion of himself, but very little engagement with the real world. I then moved through "The Chorus Girl" and am just past "La Cigale," (spelled, "La Giglae" in this 1929 edition).

Writer and Actress Ada Clare
(looking like my conception of Olga Ivanova)
photo credit

According to Babelfish, "La Cigale" means cicada, which is a perfect appelation for the main character, Olga Ivanova, who essentially descends on her husband's life like a plague and destroys it. The story begins with a defining statement: "To Olga Ivanova's wedding came all her friends and aquaintances. 'Look at him! Isn't it true that there is something in him?' She said to them, nodding to her husband, as if to justify her marriage to this simple, commonplace, in no way remarkable man."

She, who circulates within circles of small-time artistic, literary and musical celebrities, fancies herself to have great potential, a potential she never really builds on. She marginalizes her husband's work, feeling that he is somehow a flunky (echoing the way Anna thinks of her own husband in Chekov's Lady with a Pet Dog.) Olga goes about feeling she and her friends are far superior to her husband, who works at a hospital during the morning and moves to dissecting bodies in the afternoon. She has no genuine understanding of his work, and because the third-person narrator follows her line of thinking so closely, we also do not have a concrete understanding of the husband, only of Olga and her motivations. She does not seem to appreciate the fact that he keeps her very comfortable until later, when she's gone off 'on holiday' (again like Anna) without him and begins an affair with one of her artist friends.

All along, she racks up little debts, which her husband, Dymov, sends her money to settle, along with a monthly allowance she runs through very quickly. Each time he sends money, he begs her to come home, but she ignores his requests. Yet, it's interesting that, when the shine goes off her relationship with the artist, faced as they both are with the bohemian squalor of their domestic circumstances during this hot summer in the provinces (read: Olga gets tired of slumming it), she fantasizes about her life with her husband: how clean it is, how he dotes on her, how she will visit her dressmaker, and attend evening concerts. Her life with Dymov becomes the dream.

Yet, when she and her lover quarrel and she finally returns home, she falls into old patterns. Eventually, she takes up with her artist friend again. He belittles her, takes up with another woman, and causes Olga to become consumed with the fractured relationship. She threatens to drink poison more than once. Finally, her husband, Dymov, begins to suspect that she is having an affair, and he can no longer look her in the eyes. He merely tolerates her escapades, demanding nothing of her. She boasts to others of his "magnanimity." Finally, when he himself makes a great achievement, a professorship, she does not appreciate its significance to him. Instead, she is more concerned about the delay his news has caused her in getting to the theatre. Her indifference crushes him.

When he becomes ill with diptheria, and finally dies, only then does she learn through his friends what a great loss he was to the scientific world, how her demands for money shackled him to jobs that hampered his ground-breaking research. In the end, she was the one with little talent, and he, modest, unassuming, and supportive of her whims as he was, had the superior ability. Perhaps even more crushing to learn is that he infected himself with diptheria by siphoning a sample of the pestulance out of a patient's throat by using his own mouth, something he would have known not to do. In effect, Dymov commits suicide in a horrible way.

I wonder why this story is so overshadowed by "Lady with a Pet Dog". Perhaps it is because "Lady with a Pet Dog" has a hopeful ending: there may be a chance that Dmitri and Anna have a future together (although I wager it is unlikely because what kind of person is Anna really? Her life always seems to be one giant ending, while Dmitri has generally regarded life as an adventure of beginnings, new chapters. His obsession with Anna is based on a short period of time spent with her amid ideal circumstances, rather than the daily challenges of everyday living) Of course, Dymov's death in "La Cigale," extinguishes any sense of hope.

Olga, too, seems made from a template used again and again, a symbol of the problematic woman, the human shackle impeding a man's progress. She is much like Zola's Nana and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, or like T.H. White's Guinevere, who is called a "ruiner of good knights." But the story is so much more than this: it is a parable and an effective character study. Here is a lesson on egoism, its dangers, the outcome of an inability to look beyond one's own ambition and thwarted desires. Olga, darling, it is not all about you.

And so, I wonder, why has this story--so didactic in its reminders to humanity--been more or less buried among Chekov's oeuvre? Why has this not been a story elevated to the level of "Lady with the Pet Dog" or "The Bishop"? Many people could learn a great deal from this, particularly now, in the age of obsession with fame.

Enter James Frey through the High Art Door

2011-04-18T13:21:00.003-04:00

James Frey (Photo Credit)

I learned today that James Frey is coming out with a new novel, which Gagosian Gallery will publish in a limited run of 11,000 copies (A purposefully small run. Let's create demand, kids! But you know, on the other hand, just in case it doesn't sell, we aren't out so awful much.)

And while I call it a new novel, it had been part of the two-book deal (later abandoned by Riverhead Books) that followed publication of A Million Little Pieces. Perhaps not surprisingly, the book, titled Final Testament, has a central character who is reputed to be a contemporary messiah with a multitude of issues, including regular epileptic seizures. Here again, Frey revels in controversy...perhaps the ultimate controversy: religion. This only seems natural since it might be tough to trump his previous performance. The title alone, which indicates (1) the work's elevation to the level of holy text, (2) that it is the 'final' word on the subject, and (3) alludes to a person's enduring legacy, is in itself highly polemic. According to Art in America, the novel has already garnered the author threats in the UK. You can read a chapter segment, called "Matthew" here. (Also, kids, note the name of Frey's website: "Big Jim Industries"....has this always been his goal? The writing was not an end in itself, but instead he would like to turn creative production, even the creative production of others into an industrial-sized, money-making enterprise?)

What am I afraid of here? That James is writing about himself. Let me explain: Frey's main character, Ben, is "flattened by a piece of plate glass" that falls on him at a construction site early in the story. He survives and wakes from a coma to find that he has become a miracle worker. Could the plate glass be a metaphor for the anvil of wrath that fell on him after A Million Little Pieces was exposed as largely fictional? Apparently, he was so hounded by photographers and class-action lawsuits following his harrowing dress-down by Oprah that he was forced to take refuge in France. Now, let's look at his 'post-crucifixion' experience: he's still part of the literary world because people still write articles about his production. I would say his status as literary outcast (a title that frequently preceeds his name) is--if not always, then frequently--in air quotes. Sure, it's used as often for him as Mr. or Ms. is for others, but it's what perpetuates his bad-boy caché. Didn't he previously color himself as an outcast--a recovered outlaw, who saw the light and cleaned himself up?

Remember, the man refers to himself as Big Jim. Yes, yes, this may be an attempt to heal the wounded soul and to project an image of vital importance, but still....outcast? I'm skeptical. In 2007, Harper Collins published Bright Shiny Morning. In 2010, he co-produced (again, involving controversy over the exploitation of MFA candidates seeking publication) the movie I Am Number Four.

Well, let's take a look at Frey's description of Final Testament. Specifically, try out this explanatory line from Frey's site:

"[Ben] proceeds to roam the city and surrounding areas, reuniting with estranged family members, shooting buckets of miracle cum into the orifices of a wide variety of women and men who afterward will be happy forever, denounces the Bible and other organized religion, speaks to the entity humans understand to be God and tells them that He isn’t going to save them, warns that the end is nigh, generally has a good time doing whatever he fancies, and advises others to do so as long as nobody gets hurt." (Frey)

Really, the scary thing is--even if this is a veiled self-portrait of Frey and his virtual resurrection in the literary world (by entering through the high art door propped open for him at Gagosian)--it also points to the tacit message that devalues the notion of the future. Even though it's been positively reviewed by The Financial Times, the book's message seems filled with overwrought millenial angst and appears entirely devoid of hope. It's a message all too familiar, too overplayed in the popular media, which can be every bit as scurrilous and venal as Frey himself has been accused of. So then--what more can we really learn from this book that hasn't already been communicated by other means? Is there something to the book's theme and aura besides controversy?

It brings me right back to a question I often ask myself: what is the role of the writer in society? Do books like Final Testament contribute to constructive dialogue, or is it just another product on the conveyor belts at Big Jim Industries?

Sandow Birk's American Qur'an at City Paper

2011-04-15T13:01:00.002-04:00

"Sura 67: The Kingdom" from Sandow Birk's American Qur'an,
now on view at The Warhol Museum

A review of Sandow Birk's American Qu'ran, currently on view at The Warhol Museum, appears in the 4/13/11 edition of Pittsburgh City Paper.
Here's a small excerpt:
"Could it be that here he is using the Koran not as way to promote understanding, but as a tool for sociopolitical commentary? While this activity certainly has its value and place, operating under the guise of interfaith understanding would make it just as guilty of exploitation as the nation it criticizes." Read the review here.

I noticed the Warhol hasn't linked the review to their site, as they did with Kurt Shaw's article. This is very likely because I question the artist's goal, especially as it relates to the Warhol's mission with its larger series, Word of God. This series, which will feature at least two other theme-relevant shows, is supposed to foster interfaith understanding. Still, what the series' inaugural exhibition does do is foster discussion and constructive debate, and if this is its chief outcome, then I consider it a success, even though I read more dire and limiting implications into Birk's illustrations of the Muslim Holy Book. Overall, I am excited by the fact that The Warhol is organizing symposia. This is a vital part of engaging the community by making connections both personal and educational. This makes the works more than just framed illustrations on the wall. It makes them live and breathe meaning.

Because of the Saturday literature class I teach, I can't make it to this symposium (titled "Dis[locating] Culture") that's supposed to take place tomorrow, beginning at 1 p.m.. Resa Aslan of The Daily Beast is supposed to be the keynote speaker. There's actually another related panel on contemporary Islamic art that is scheduled for tonight at the Michael Berger Gallery. All this is very promising. It means that art is out there doing what it does when it's at its best conceptual potential (and I say 'conceptual' because I don't mean aesthetic, which often has a different impact).

But definitely check out the symposium description in the meantime.

Sold, Baby and Other Good Stuff

2011-04-13T09:01:00.002-04:00

"The Sassy Carrot" (2011)
from the Naughty Veggie Series
sold in yesterday's BnR. w00t!

Okay, I know, I know....I should be finishing my book review column. I've got two more books (The Historical Dictionary of Polynesia and a book about comet classification). The large, snarling dogs employed by my Type A personality are nipping at my ankles. Back, boys. I'll be getting back to that work in a moment. Really.

Ow! Cool it.

Some good things have been happening. I shall enumerate:

1) I'll be interviewing Absurdistan author Gary Shteyngart for City Paper. Shteyngart is coming to Pittsburgh to read at a City of Asylum event, so we're helping to spread the word. More details on this to come!

2) My review of Sandow Birk's American Qur'an, now on view at The Warhol, appears in this week's City Paper. It will be released in print today and will appear online tomorrow. Link to come...link to come! There will be a symposium related to the exhibition held at the Warhol on April 16th from 1p.m. to 4 p.m., with a reception to follow. Read more details on the event here. I'm grateful to have been able to weigh in on this exhibition, which has tremendous potential for opening discussion and inspiring debate.

3) I posted a story, "Zurich, 1989"--which originally appearing at LitSnack in shorter form--on Fictionaut. I'm very grateful for the good feedback from everyone. (Believe me, I need that.) The story is semi-autobiographical, as the date in the title probably reveals. In 1989, I was indeed 14 and truly did pass through Zurich from first Milan and then Rappallo, Italy with my Mom and Dad and a bunch of hardware salesman....these trips we took when I was young helped to shape my world view in ways I never imagined at the time.

4) Yesterday, I sold my "Sassy Carrot" art pin (pictured above) to a wonderful shop owner in Florida. Our lady of root vegetable sassification is packed in bubble wrap and ready for the post office this morning.

More to come tomorrow....

Bad Words, BnR Beauty, some Etsy love, and Small Press Librarian!

2011-04-08T09:12:00.000-04:00

So, I've gotten involved in something new: BnRs. Yeah, I had to look up what that meant, too. Just in case.... you know?

See, in junior high, I was going around saying a rather nasty expression that sounded funny in phonic terms, but whose definition I did not know. When I happened to use it to punctuate a sentence, as I was standing within earshot of my Dad's office manager, he said: "Savannah, do you know what that word means?" I admitted I didn't, and asked him for an explanation. He turned bright red and declined to tell me, suggesting I go ask my father.

Um, yeah. I stopped saying that word immediately around polite company. I won't tell you what that word is now, only because this a family friendly blog. (Really, it is!) Let's just say it's not a word that sounds anything like what it is intended to allude to. So....long story short, I had to Google what "BnR" meant....'cause little Savannah is not taking any more chances, especially now that I'm nearly 37, and gaffes like the one from junior high are no longer cute or endearing. Right! Perhaps they never were. Anyway....

BnR stands for "Buy and Replace," and while I initially thought it sounded suspiciously like a pyramid scheme, I've found that it's actually pretty excellent. The concept is this: you buy something from an open Etsy BnR Treasury, list the transaction number among the comments, add your shop to the list of purchases, and you're automatically in the next Treasury. Of course, one must operate with caution. There is no guarantee of a sale for your own shop, and as yet, I haven't made one in my art store, although I'm in two BnR Treasuries (both pictured here as screen shots). Still, with revenue I made from my Suite 101 articles, I bought into two more.

Now, really, I'm not in it for the sales, necessarily. There are other perks. As of this morning, one Treasury is on the first page of Etsy's Treasury listings, since it's gotten so many clicks and comments. And precisely because my painting "Rocket Bees" is one of the first four items in the Treasury itself, its little avatar appears on that first Treasury page. I call that some awesome exposure. Maybe even more importantly, I've met some really excellent people, who have amazing shops. In this sense, Etsy is a fantastic online community and resource. Lately, I spend much more time there than I do on Facebook because it's become a great place to connect with other craftspeople.

Thanks, Etsy founders, for democratizing the art and craft world. No gallery is necessary now for an artist to promote his or her own work. No bricks and mortar shops, rents, untilities or staffing costs are necessary to put work out into the wider world. And while there are certainly factors beyond the artist's control that impact how often a person's shop surfaces in search results, it is much easier now than ever to turn one's creative inclinations into profit...profit which Etsy and Paypal only take a little of--unlike galleries that take a large percentage. I hope Etsy stays as cool and accessible as it is now, although I know success might encourage the eventual change of fee structures. But, we'll see. Things are in a good place now. I plan to enjoy it. :-)

In other excellent news, Poet and Typewriter Girls Founder Margaret Bashaar currently has a review of Stefanie Wielkopolan's poetry collection, Border Theory, live at Writer Karen Lillis' blog, Small Press Librarian. Margaret makes some incisive observations on the book, and it's a really interesting read. Check it out here!

I'm headed into the city today to lunch with Karen at Red Oak Cafe, where we'll be planning a Seasonal Shorts reading for the summer (very likely July). Stay tuned for details! Over and out....for now. Happy Friday, all!

It's Wednesday, Kids

2011-04-06T12:17:00.002-04:00

My studio mess with a shaved Jasper

So, I'm in the studio this morning, although earlier, I was working on my review column for Library Journal. Very happily, I have a new story to write for Strange, Weird, and Wonderful as well. And while I'm moving the brush around the canvas you see on my easel, I've been developing scene images, which is always a good thing--a sign of mental progress as the ideas percolate through my brain.

I've sent an entirely different story, "Buses from Bridgeport" out to many journals, and I've gotten very positive feedback. One editor even told me that she could sympathize so much with the main character (a straight-laced employee, who works for a crooked company and gets killed by a mob of people at the end). Yet, consistently, the journals say "it's not for them", although I really don't know what that might mean. The story deals with contemporary issues, so I guess maybe it's not a politically correct thing to publish...but I can't interpret the true definition of "not for us". There seems to be something beyond its face-value meaning. I realized yesterday that it's been "in progress" at the Nashville Review for months now, and I expect a rejection any old day now, especially since they just released a new issue. It's out at a few other places as well. Go ahead, folks, just reject it. I'm used to it now. No need to deliberate for so long. I'd withdraw it, but there's always the slender chance that a 7K-word story whose sole focus isn't violent sex or dysfunctional relationships might actually get published somewhere. No, I know. I won't get my hopes up.
Ooooo...girl is bitter, isn't she? Yes I have been, about the writing world anyway. There are two nice companies that call me once a month (yes, call), trying to publish my book. I have a short story collection that's ready to go and a novel that needs editing. I should be hopping up and down with excitement, yes? I thought so, too, until I found out they want $4K to produce the book and market it (and that's the basic package). Now, understand, I operate under no illusions. When someone actually contacted me to see if they could publish my book, I was skeptical immediately. I did not see only the pretty feathers of the fly. I knew there had to be a lip-piercing hook somewhere, too.

The usual macabre: this time, necklaces

Now, folks, 4K is just under the price of a new roof, which we badly need on our little abode. Therefore, I believe I will be handing over my cash to the roofer this year, and to the bathroom remodelor next year even though these publishing companies look entirely reputable and my contacts there are very personable. I wonder, though, how it is that the writing world has gotten to be this way: how, exactly, has the writer become a consumer of his own printed words and not the producer of words that others buy.

I think the intermediary step has been that we've long provided free content. You can't support a family on writing anymore as John Updike once did. It is expected that you won't receive a dime for your literary labor. (Now, horror, sci-fi, and erotica are another matter. They pay! And thank goodness for them.) But someone saw this free digital content and said: Writers want books, don't they? Let them pay! There's a demand there, people! Let's take advantage of that.

And so it goes.

In progress: "Aunt Ann Does the Dishes"

It's much like the vanity galleries I encountered in NYC in the mid-1990s. One gallerist called me at Juniata (in my dorm room!), having seen slides of the dresser's dummy sculptures I had submited in response to an ad at the back of Art Forum. She wanted to put them in her gallery. I was totally over the moon, until I got the contract, which said I would be paying $100 per square foot along with the cost of marketing and catering the opening reception. Say what?!

Get this: she also took 60% of any sales, and I got 40%. Wait, wait, did I accidently include in the slide package my purple neon sign that says "I'M A RUBE!"?

Obviously, as a college student with meagre funds--and as a reasonably intelligent human being--I didn't go for it. Perhaps it was my loss. I still don't think so.

Anyway, I've more or less come to terms with the way the literary world is right now, and I'll just chug along, continuing to create stories without expecting too much in return. Frankly, this is why I went back to painting. When I hit a wall with one, I can spend a delightful afternoon with the other. And so it goes.

Hive Work, New Writing, and Painted Furniture

2011-04-04T09:26:00.001-04:00

My new foray into furniture painting.

I've been a busy girl these past few days, hence the delay in posting. Yesterday, Glenn, Michael, and I cleaned up the area around which we plan to place the top bar hive, so no branches fall on our little pollinators. The hive itself is painted and ready to go. We just have to wait on the package of bees to arrive at the post office. Now, that should make for an interesting drive home the day they arrive.

My article "Carnegie and Craft: The Next Chapter" appears in American Craft this month. You can read the article by clicking on the link, which will take you right to the magazine's blogpost page.

Soon, soon, I should be getting edits back from City Paper for the review I did of Sandow Birk's American Qu'ran, which I turned in on March 22.

Also, excitingly, I'll be contributing something to the winter issue of Strange, Weird, and Wonderful. I'm so glad to see that the magazine is back! The magazine's excellent editor, D.L. Russell, sent me three writing prompts to choose from this morning, so I'll soon be working on what I really enjoy: fiction.

What's in the picture above? My 'new-ish' foray into painted furniture. What, the daughter of a cabinetmaker has never before painted furniture? Oh yes, I definitely have. In fact, in our 2003 York Builder's Show booth, there was a black credenza with cherry blosom branches painted across the raised panel doors (to go with our 19th-century, Asian-themed kitchen display). However, I've never taken auction furniture and started to spray paint it. I guess, though, it's not totally unfamiliar work: anyone who drives past our house has seen our yellow garden gate with the blue and purple butterfly stencils and the marshmallow peep shapes stenciled on our brown garden shed. Now, I'm just taking old furniture and stenciling the willies out of it.
(Yes, furniture has willies you can stencil right out. I whacked two in the yard as they tried to run away.)

Cigar Box Assemblages

2011-04-01T11:00:00.008-04:00

I'm working on something new, while I stretch and gesso some canvases for paintings. This new work will be completed in cigar boxes Michael got for me at a smoke shop, where he buys lottery tickets. Inside the boxes will be scenes somewhat like those Joseph Cornell made, but they'll be much more like narrative tableaux. Below are pictures of the first one, which is still in progress.

Work in Progress: "Aunt Anne Does the Dishes"

Who's the lady with the gun, you ask? My husband's aunt, a twin whom we all called "Aunt Anne" passed away in February. She is very much missed because she was a warm spirit, always willing to help people. While her niece and twin were keeping vigil at her bedside in the hospital, my husband went to visit. They pulled out pictures of Anne in her thirties. One of the pictures showed her shooting a target with a handgun. This was a side of Aunt Anne I had never before seen. To me, she had always been reserved, artistic (she made beautiful quilts), and spiritual.

After seeing the picture, I absolutely had to do something with it, and so I scanned it, enlarged it, printed it, and begun using it as the principal part of this work. I'll follow with additional pictures as it progresses. The other photos below are of the collaged images on the outside of the box (the source of which are stacks of 20s, 30s, and 40s sheet music I got at auction). Eventually, I'll epoxy .22 bullet casings around the box sides, like rays of light.

In the patch of the Guz land, where Michael and I hill and harvest 50lbs of potatoes every year, we regularly find broken pottery shards, flow blue, oxidized glass, sometimes broken milk glass canning lids (once, we even found a rusty iron stove door, likely from the late 19th century). Our potato patch happens to be in a 19th-century homesteader's garbage pile--the homesteaders who owned the land before Dziadek (pronounced: Juh-jie, Polish for grandfather) and Babcia (pronounced, at least in the Guz family: Bub-she, for grandmother) purchased the land in the late 19-teens/early 1920s . I plan to use these pottery shards, too. Using the shards was Michael's excellent idea. Pics to come...pics to come....

"Aunt Anne Does the Dishes" (outside front)

Last night, Michael and I met with a very dear friend of mine from high school, Sheldon Yeager, who has begun his own business, working with Brooklyn artists (but in the summers, he also manages Skipper Dipper with his husband Dave, who edits the show "Say yes to the Dress." Sheldon's Christmas letter was really inspiring, since it described his new adventures after leaving MTV, where he managed the big MTV screen that appears in Times Square. He's had a really exciting life, and it's getting even more so with his new ventures. It's fantastic hearing his stories, which, as a bonus, boosts my creative energy, too. I also got to meet his wonderful friend Julie Simon, who works in New York City's urban planning department. She and Sheldon are taking a roadtrip through the 'Rustbelt' to look at the cities and take in some of the local art scene. More to come on Sheldon's new project, Municipal Print Company, when his new site goes live!

Bee Magic

2011-03-29T13:50:00.005-04:00

Ooooo, yes. Two postings today, and to what do we owe the honor? Creativity, kids. It's all going down in the Guz basement today. The painting below should appear in the art shop tonight. (Couldn't wait to share, though.) A swanky flatbed scan is necessary before she's listed, and that requires she dry completely.

For some accompanying bee-related music, see the video below. Zee Avi is my new discovery, thanks to artist Dana Perea-Bloede's excellent music selection. Check out her beautiful blog here. Her tune selections are my new soundtrack.
(And! This just in:) Writer Chris Bowen, of Burning River, just turned me on to The National. Bloodbuzz Ohio appears just below Avi's video. The man has an amazing voice. He also looks exactly like my Pittsburgh neighbor, painter Phil Rostek. Really, no jokin'. The two could be twins. Or, well...father and son.

Savannah Schroll Guz, Rocket Bees (2011)

Yellow Wallpaper (redux) and Some New Treasuries

2011-03-29T09:14:00.003-04:00

Photo Credit

It's that time again, kids. Time to teach Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." I get excited about teaching this story not because of the its inherently morbid quality, but because of its potential for bringing the circumstances of the Victorian woman to light. We ladies have absolutely no idea what it was to wear a corset. And I'm not talking about these lovelies, which I might actually consider putting on for fun. No, no, I'm talking corsets that made women like children, since they could not dress themselves without help. (Remember Scarlet O'Hara getting help from her maid while dressing?) I'm talking corsets that changed the shape of the body permanently, from repeated use, much like Chinese foot-binding practices. Miscarraiges were common because of the compression of the fetus (believe it or not, they still wore corsets during pregnancy....isn't it a wonder that we as a species continued into the 20th century at all?).

Scarlet's inability to dress herself was due in large part to the corset,
which laced in the back and had to be pulled tight.
Corsets were not only a health hazard, they robbed women
of their independence.

Edwardian-era Corset, c. 1900 (Photo Credit)

And because the lungs were similarly compressed, fainting was common. It was considered exquisitely feminine to be so pale and frail, to faint at distressing news. A tightly laced corset, darlings, does that to a girl. Those staight-backed, fainting couches were not simply part of fussy Victoriana. They served a purpose: first, it promoted good posture already reinforced by the corset. (Whalebone stays prevent slouching.) Moreoever, a girl needed somehwere to be lie until she recovered herself.

We think our era has unrealistic expectations of women. Indeed it does, in many ways. But, we don't have anything over the Victorian era's chief caging device. Want to keep a good girl down? Make her wear one of these and call it fashionable. No, make it a social requirement. Why, every good girl wears one. (In truth, mostly all of the bad ones, too). It thins and smooths, giving you an elegant contour. How can you not want to wear yours, darling?

In other exciting news, I've been a busy, busy girl. There's been a great deal of studio work, and new creations will be posted in my art shop soon. In the meantime, I've created a few treasuries of beautiful items. Two of these treasuries appear just below. Enjoy!

New 'Beautiful Blue' Treasury and Full Moon Art Jewelry

2011-03-25T21:51:00.003-04:00

See the treasury, in its natural beauty, here.

Full Moon Choker!

The full moon choker on!

Next time, kids, a much more substantial post. For now, sleepy time. I have a literature class to teach at 8:00 tomorrow morning. Zzzzzzz.....

Late Coming to the Party....

2011-03-24T09:20:00.001-04:00

So, I don't know why it's taken me so long to find them (since I realize now they've been everywhere--even scoring the movie Tron), but, by chance, while listening to Royksopp--as I always do when I'm working--I clicked on this video by Daft Punk, on a whim. Wow...what beautiful weirdness, and a gorgeous repetitive tune. The song elicits in me this strange ache for all the personal European history I have stashed away in my memory banks.

And then there's the following...do I see elements of Poltergeist and the horror doll Chuckie in this? Certainly, these boys are my age, according to the Wikipedia article. These influences wouldn't be out of their culture reservoir, although they are French rather than American.

Wayne Thiebaud Tribute Cake Slice

2011-03-23T09:02:00.003-04:00

Savannah Schroll Guz, "Wayne Thiebaud
Tribute Cake Slice", 2011 (art pin)

Yesterday, I finished a polymer clay piece that I'd been working on for a few days in between other projects and lecture prep. The work is a tribute to the painter Wayne Thiebaud, whose stunning images of cakes, pies, and candy have become such an essential part of mid-century Modernism.

My studio arts professor, Sandy (again, short for Alexander), used to talk about Thiebaud's work during lectures, and may--although I am not 100% sure of this--have known him. I am uncertain of this only because, even though my mind vaguely (and perhaps incorrectly) remembers a conversation in which Sandy mentioned meeting him, the two artists were on opposite coasts. Moreover, Sandy is now my father's age (late 60s/early 70s) while Mr. Thiebaud is 90, so it may be unlikely they had any significant contact. Still, Thiebaud's paintings came up in both Sandy's classes and in my art history classes.

Even when I was young--long before college...even long before high school--I used to sit on our brown plaid couch with my Mom's college text, H.H. Arnasons' History of Modern Art (which has been edited three or four times by various curators and art historians, one of them Marla Prather, for whom I worked as an intern when I was at the National Gallery in 1996). While paging through it, I used to stop and wonder over the plates of Thiebaud paintings. The application of paint made them appear as if they were actually edible. Forget about their three-dimensional quality, they looked positively confectionery. Look at their gorgeousness...and there's more of their amazingness here. They also recall department store lunch counters and the cases in bakeries, both of which have a great deal of nostalgia now that they are largely extinct in American culture (there are a few exceptions, of course...here's one I know well. Still, in terms of lunch counters, I rely on stories from my mother's childhood to remind me of what it was like to go shopping and be able to eat lunch all in the same place.

Yesterday evening, after I'd listed the cake slice in my art shop, someone very closely associated with Mr. Thiebaud purchased it. As you might imagine, I am totally over the moon about it! I'll be packing it up this morning, so it can be on its way to its new home. It's so fantastic to have one of my little works be enjoyed by someone so closely associated with an artist I've revered for such a long time. It was a very good day indeed.

You, too, can have ears for earrings!

2011-03-21T22:15:00.001-04:00

New art jewelry: painted, polymer clay ears
with translucent beads

What they look like when worn.
Ah, strange, surreal, exciting!
Yes, sometimes it's necessary to humor me.

And the little darlings from the back. Cupped like ears are.

And because they keep swinging to and fro,
I found it necessary to hold them for the pic.
Smile for the camera, kiddies!

New Review and Studio Good Stuff

2011-03-18T11:23:00.002-04:00

Let's take a short sojourn away from nostalgia-land for a moment (Nostalgia-what? Just me looking back and being six kinds of sentimental in the previous two posts). We'll get back to that. But right now, I've got new stuff to chat about.

First, my review of Peter Calaboyias: A Retrospective appears in this week's City Paper. You can read it here. In the meantime, a wee excerpt:
"But these works are only a fraction of Calaboyias' oeuvre, which also includes paintings. All 29 pieces featured in his 50-year retrospective, at Shadyside's GalleriE Chiz, are pregnant with memory, and reference the artist's dueling cultural identities: Calaboyias grew up in a steadfastly Greek household in post-war America. Many of these works draw equally from both worlds, uniting Greek mythology with American mid-century minimalism."

I know, I know. French words so early in the day? This kind of thing should be confined to cocktail hour, shouldn't it? Right. I'll make a mental note to use words like 'oeuvre' only after 5:30 p.m. and in the presence of a large gin martini, up with olives, please. Sure, well-gin is fine.

In other news, there's productivity in the studio area. I present the following for consideration. The top image may not look familiar at all. However, it is actually built from something you might have seen here before. (<--To see what lies under those bees, click on the link, which takes you to a February 19th blog post). Like I said, no more dead stuff. So, out with the skeletal foot. In with the bees. (Our real live bee packages arrive around April 1st, incidently. We're stocking 3 hives this year: one for me, one for Michael, and one for my brother-in-law Glenn). So the bee dance here is inspired in part by our hive studies.

In progress: "Bee Dance"

Also, I'm working on finishing some much smaller canvases that I started in D.C. over a decade ago. They've been lying around this house for several years now. On a side note, dig my excellent studio mess. Ahhhh....what comfort. I feel like I'm home again. Oh wait, technically I am. Still, I was speaking figuratively, though.

Three small un-photogenic canvases currently in progress.
Man, they look so much better in person.
Ooo..ooo! See the studio mess. Ain't it purty?

Life with Renger

2011-03-17T10:28:00.002-04:00

Carla (hand on the X-Ray), Olivia, Andreas, and Ilse (far right)
all consider an X-Ray of Rubens' "Massacre of the Innocents"
(I can't remember the woman in orange).

I call this post "Life with Renger" because for a great part of my time in Munich, I worked as an assitant to Konrad Renger, who was both curator of 17th Century Flemish paintings at the Alte Pinakothek and a noted Rubens scholar. During the period I was at the Pinakothek (my office was in the Neue, but we made frequent trips across to the Alte, which was being restored and updated), there were so many of us in the Renger retinue--sometimes as many as five--that when people saw us coming, they called us "FC Renger," meaning "Football Club" Renger. We apparently looked like a soccer team, trailing behind a coach.

In the picture you see above, a group of us are regarding an X-Ray of Rubens' painting "Massacre of the Innocents". I've written about this specific experience before. To get all the juicy details, you can take a look at this earlier blog posting, titled "I've seen this painting naked". I'm not in the pic, since I'm taking it, and sadly, time has erased from my mind the name of the woman in orange, who was only with us a few times. However, the rest of the folks in the picture I saw every day, and they all became my friends. On the left is the fantastic Carla, who could speak four languages, and became an intern a month after I began in February of 1998. She is Spanish, but admitted she could speak French better because she'd spent years in a French school. Her father was an architect, and she often got invited to events like champagne dress rehearsals at the opera. Next to her is an art restorer named Olivia (with the pencil in her bun). She is half-French and always very chic. She and Carla eventually planned my surprise going-away party--in my presence!--entirely by speaking French to each other. And making gestures is a research fellow named Andreas, about whom I have funny stories I will later share when we get to additional pictures of him. He was a very serious character, with whom I liked to have fun and sometimes affectionately torment. Last but definitely not least, is the sweet Ilse, who also had a wonderful going-away dinner for me before I left to come back to the US in July.

Claudia Denk and Konrad Renger working on this book.

Several times, we met Renger at his country home. These were pretty idyllic times. While he worked on a book about Flemish painting in the Alte Pinakothek with scholar Claudia Denk, Carla and I picked berries, read books, or made meals. In the picture at right, we were playing hooky from work, although they are clearly working. I took this photo through Renger's kitchen window into his side yard, where the two were working at what would eventually become our lunch table. You can see the beginnings of lunch in the final pic.

More pictures of all this to come in the next post.

Carla, Dr. Renger, and me (ay! 40 pounds heavier than I am now and with a terrible haircut)
The conversation looks awfully serious, doesn't it?
Gracious, he's holding a knife, too.
Not sure what we were all talking about anymore. It wasn't that serious.

Some pictures from my days in Munich (Part 1)

2011-03-15T08:32:00.002-04:00

My apartment at Moosacherstrasse 81, Munich, 1998
You can see apartment buildings
from the Olympic Village outside the window.

So, in a recent rush of nostalgia, I went looking for pictures of my time in Munich. I'll be posting the best of them over the next few weeks, grouping them by subject (work, parties, etc.) I have very few of the university, since I spent so little time there. Instead, I spent most of my days at the museum, where I was an intern (and, later, a correspondence translator).

To the left and just below, at right, are pictures of my apartment, which stood along a busy traffic artery, Moosacherstrasse, several blocks from the Olydorf (Olympic Village) and down the street from the BMW plant. It's funny that, a little over a year before I moved to Munich, I received as a gift a series of three 1972 Olympic posters from one of my professors, Klaus Kipphan. Over 12 months later, and somewhat unexpectedly, I would find a Studentenwerk apartment near the repurposed Olympic Village. A great number of my American friends (also Fulbrighters or DAAD recipients) lived in these tiny quarters with the balconies protected from pigeons by soccer nets. I went to more than one party in rooms not much larger than a closet. We were each glad to have our own spaces, though. What a change from the American dorm life so many of us had come from.

The entrance to my Munich apartment.
There's that two-burner stove I talk
about in my "Domestic Goddess" post.
Q: Is that a bottle of Jim Beam near the stove?
A: Why, yes it is.

So, this was the apartment I painted in (in fact, in the image at right, you can see one of my paintings--a small one, on top of the ancient-looking fuse box, from which a white apron also hangs. It's a partial work that I intended to finish by way of other smaller canvases. The painting is a dragon head breathing fire under a full moon. I'm not sure where that work is anymore. It did make it back to the States via slow-freighter mail, but I think I gave it to an old boyfriend when I was in graduate school, so it's probably somewhere in Pittsburgh, if he didn't destroy it or lose it along his own professional journey up to New Haven and back). Sadly, I don't have a picture of my painting corner, which was at the foot of my bed and lit by a desk lamp. Instead, I have a pic the opposite wall (above). There, I was apparently working on a giant charcoal drawing, one that never made it back to the states. I think I ended up tossing it when I was packing up to come home. Anyway, there was something funky about the nose I could never fix.

The last photo, below, is a picture of my desk at the Neue Pinakothek. I used to be able to crawl onto my desk and out the window, where there were beds of lavender. Really, this was part of the building's roof, but it was fully accessible, if you could fit through that metal and glass portal to the outer world. The particular room, in addition to having the long desk, was also the completely temperature-unmodulated "archive room", meaning that the room was populated by large Formica cabinets with doors that locked but were not temperature controlled. Inside these cabinets were catalogues dating back to the 1700s, filled with languorous script that was practically illegible to the contemporary eye. I was in these cabinets often, tracing the ever-changing numbers assigned to paintings in the Wittelsbacher collection, which became the foundation for the Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlungen (Bavarian State Painting Collection). In the next post, I'll share pics taken while several of us are looking at an X-ray of Ruben's "Massacre of the Innocents" within the Doerner Institute, the Pinakothek's restoration department. Also, there will be pictures of parties with the restoration deparment staff, too. Some very good memories.

My desk in the archive room
Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Spring 1998

The Lesser Known Girl Gang and other tales

2011-03-12T12:51:00.000-05:00

Tales of the Lesser Known Girl Gang have begun... I've started a series of polymer clay jewelry loosely (very loosely) based on Foxfire by Joyce Carol Oates, a book I loved when I read it (and still think about sometimes). This has actually inspired a whole host of characters that I've started painting in between bouts of review writing, lecture prep and paper grading. (Um, right. I made that sound like a case of Montezuma's Revenge, which was not intentional, but funny nonetheless). The rest of the pics here are two of the characters from an ever-growing cast (more each week).

Eva, the Enforcer
See her on Etsy here.

My review of Peter Calaboyias' retrospective, currently on view at GalleriE Chiz in Pittsburgh's Shadyside neighborhood, will run in Pittsburgh City Paper next week. And right now, I'm also working on a review of this show, currently at the Warhol Museum: Sandow Birk's American Qur'an. It is not what I first believed it to be from the publicity statement alone. But more on this later, once the review runs. I don't want to show my cards just yet, you know?

Eva on my "lapel". She's kinda tiny.
Believe it or not, I was very much like Eva as a kid.
Dad didn't call me "Rip and Tear" for nothin'.

Loretta, Eva's mother and girl gang "house mother".
You can see her on Etsy here!

Also, check this out: an interview with the artist Alex Kuno, whose work I talk about in the previous post. There are more examples of his art to complement the text. Excellent, excellent stuff--these other worlds and the characters he populates them with are simply amazing.

Finally, before I go a-review-writing, let's enjoy a delightfully freaky moment with our friend Sebastien Tellier, shall we?

Alex Kuno's Tiny Miscreants

2011-03-09T10:18:00.004-05:00

Alex Kuno
The Savagery of the Red Cat (Or: The End of Summer)
Featured on the Minnesota Artists website.

I'm totally smitten by the work of Alex Kuno, whose paintings I recently found on Etsy. See his shop here. According to his profile on the Minnesota Artists website, his work is similar to Beatrix Potter, Egon Schiele, Otto Dix, Edward Gorey, and Maurice Sendak. I can see that he is the best distillation of all five combined. But I would also say there is some Pieter Breughel, the Elder and Hieronymous Bosch in there as well. (Would Kuno consider doing his own version of the "Seven Deadly Sins", I wonder? Perhaps he already has, and I have not yet found it.) I would also add that there appears to be at least an influential dash of some other Northern Renaissance painters, like Jan Van Eyck, flavoring his work. Dig this Kuno painting detail, for example. Also, check out the gorgeous, watery lustre of the character's eyes here. Now that, kids, is virtuosity.

You can check out Kuno's blog, "Miscreants of Tiny Town" and see more of his works in progress here: http://alexkuno.blogspot.com/

Savannah Schroll Guz
"You Get a Gold Star!" (Art Pin)

In other art-related news, three of the aforementioned art pins (the ones I began yesterday) are complete and in the shop. To the right is "You Get a Gold Star!". But you can see all three in my shop, by clicking here.

Something new for the Literaryoutlaw shop--Art Pins!

2011-03-08T15:57:00.005-05:00

"Broccoli Man" and "Silver Lining"

"You get a gold star!"

Last night, Michael and I played with polymer clay, and by 9:45, I had our shapes baking in the oven. Each of the seven shapes--that's all that fit in the glass pie pan designated for the task--got an initial coating of gold or pewter acrylic this morning, and I started developing "personalities" on three of the seven this afternoon. They're pictured here....they'll be continued later tonight.....I hope to have them listed in my art shop by the end of the week!

On Picasso's Other Scary Legacy

2011-03-07T13:40:00.003-05:00

Pablo Picasso: Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust (1932)
Photo Credit

The painting at left, a portrait of Picasso's mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, has been in a private collection since 1951 and exhibited only once, on the occasion of Picasso's 80th birthday in 1961. It recently sold at auction for a whopping $106.5 million. In this economy, that's pretty astounding. Apparently, it's the highest auction price ever recorded for a painting.

But back to the painting's subject: Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso's submissive mistress. (He actually refers to her as such, and paints her ever in submissive, swooning, and dreaming positions.) I first read about her in Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington's biography Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, which portrayed Picasso as a sadistic megalomaniac. The only resilient female figure in his life seemed to be Francois Gilot, mother to Paloma and Claude and an artist in her own right. She managed to escape Picasso's manipulation and reclaim her life, as well as secure the Ruiz-Picasso name for her children--despite Picasso's attempts to prevent her from using it. (Q: Ruiz-what? A: "Ruiz" was Picasso's real surname; "Picasso" was his mother's maiden name.) Important to note is that Gilot was the only woman to leave Picasso. He liked being abandoned no more than the women to whom he'd done the same thing. Later, when Gilot attempted to publish her book Life with Picasso, the artist worked to halt publication. His efforts were frustrated and the book was released soon afterward.

Gilot was one of the lucky ones. The lovely French-born Croatian (and, of course, Surrealist photographer and poet) Dora Maar, who supplanted Marie-Thérèse, was eventually supplanted by Gilot, and it appeared to devastate Maar mentally for a long time. She herself had wrestled the fragile Marie-Thérèse in front of the unfinished Guernica canvas, when the two women accidentally met in Picasso's studio and demanded he choose between them. Picasso's answer: you fight it out. And so they did. Picasso apparently considered it one of the finest moments of his life. Not a particularly sensitive or upright critter, eh?

Devestation followed in Picasso's wake. Pablito, Picasso's grandson (to work this all out for you...because I had to untangle it myself: Pablito's father was Paulo, who was Picasso's son to first wife Olga, a Russian ballerina), suffered from severe depression and killed himself by drinking bleach following Picasso's death in 1973, when the family was barred from Picasso's funeral by his widow Jacqueline. Marie-Thérèse hanged herself in 1977. And the aforementioned Jacqueline--the lover who followed Francois' departure and became Picasso's second wife and, eventually, widow--shot herself in 1986, although her specific motivations for this act are unclear. So along with his many artworks, Picasso, it seems, has offered another, much scarier legacy: a little trail of suicide follows his own death. Coincidence? Perhaps. Frightening? You bet.

But now, onward and upward, let's switch gears: in other excellent news, the peacock painting is finished and listed on Etsy. This morning, the wonderful shop PuffinsonLemons included it in her "Avian Leaders of the Revolution" treasury. Check out the treasury here.

New Treasuries at Etsy and Upcoming Reviews

2011-03-05T20:20:00.006-05:00

"Plague Doctor's Mask"
by TomBanfield

I've made some new treasuries on Etsy. One celebrates masks, since it's time for Mardi Gras celebrations. The second treasury celebrates Icarus and his many artistic incarnations currently available for sale.

Icarus in Iron
by Photoamo

Last night, Michael and I attended an opening for sculptor Peter Calaboyias, whose retrospective at Shadyside's Gallerie Chiz I'll be reviewing for City Paper. More to come on this shortly.....I'll also be heading to the Warhol Museum next week to review The Word of God: Sandow Birk's American Qur'an . I'm excited to see this, since Birk's work brings together graffiti tagging techniques and Islamic calligraphy to amazing aesthetic effect.

In lieu of a more substantial posting....

2011-03-04T11:12:00.002-05:00

In lieu of a more substantial post (which I promise is coming this weekend...meaning, a post on something besides my own paintings), I present a me-at-work video. Riveting, I know. Also, I've been working on my Etsy store, and new drawings, functional artwork, and paintings will be posted there soon. However, in the meantime, take a peek at what's there right now.

Now, this is just not as exciting as Bob Ross and his squirrel, obviously, but it's still a happy little portrait of process (and progress).

From Flannery's Flock...more progress

2011-03-02T22:37:00.000-05:00

Savannah Schroll Guz, "From Flannery's Flock"
(still under production)

After some distractions (mostly work, which I suppose doesn't truly qualify as a distraction), I've gotten back to working on the peacock painting. Remember when it was just two long-necked golden blobs and sky? And then later, when I was "Building Up Color"? Tonight, after my 5:30- 6:45 class, I came home and finished the poppies. Tomorrow, I'll move onto the tail feathers, which will take some significant concentration and patience.

Funny is that I'm using the same colors that have been hiding in a plastic milk crate since I lived in D.C. ten years ago. Apart from a staple gun, I haven't had to really buy anything extra, and I'm glad for that. I even have a giant roll of canvas and stretcher pieces I dug out of the basement at the Pittsburgh duplex (buried since approximately 1999). I'll be making new canvases shortly.

Pat Antonick and Heliotrope Studio

2011-03-01T09:28:00.000-05:00

Last September, Michael and I went to Dayton, Ohio. While there, I came down with a terrible cold, and for a good part of the trip, I was hopped up on antihistamines and Dayquil. In our quest to find a drugstore--since I had come entirely unprepared for a cold--I saw a sign that said "Heliotrope Studio," although I couldn't see, from my vantage point, what the sign belonged to. But the word "studio" alone was magic. We made the necessary stop at Walgreen's and then wheeled around so we could investigate.

It turned out to be one of those great examples of spontaneous serendipity.

In one long building, surrounded by pretty garden furniture and potted plants, we found Pat Antonick, who came out, along with her sweet canine sidekick Mr. Marbles, to see who had pulled in to visit. Her studio is tripartite. On one end is a ceramic studio, complete with kiln. In the middle is a bead gallery, where jewelry-makers can find the most gorgeous bead selection I've ever seen in one place. (The beads, often translucent and arranged by color, hang in looped strands against the white walls, making them look like crystallized drops of light or liquid.) The final portion of the building is divided equally between a space for acrylic painting and space for fiber art, primarily art quilts.

Pat Antonick, ceramic art/mixed media, n.d.

Pat showed us around her spaces, revealed how she makes some of her clay impressions, using improvised stamps from vintage items. She indicated that she often rescues architectural elements from condemned buildings, before the wrecking ball hits, and then incorporates their shapes (sometimes even the objects themselves) into her ceramic works.

At the end of the tour, she showed us her most recent work. She was then making a new foray into fiber. A series of quilts were piled onto a long, make-shift table at the corner of her fiber studio. The colorful bias tape edges peeked out from beneath a protective cloth. Beside the pile was a pair of binoculars. These were used to actually view the quilts, although you don't look through the binoculars the conventional way. Instead, you look through them backwards, so that you actually have a compressed image of the quilt, as if it were much further away. This serves to make the swatches of color come together to create a coherent, often detailed picture. The effect is similar to stepping back from Seurat's pointillist paintings or viewing a Chuck Close color-block portrait from afar. It's a brilliant concept. Just below, you can see one of her award-winning works, "Glasses", which we had the privilege to view while we were there.

Pat Antonick's "Glasses" (2009) won
Ohio Designer Craftmen's Best of 2009
(Hint: look at the work the wrong way through binoculars.
You'll see a Kewpie doll. Brilliant, no? Very Chuck Close, too.)

Helotrope Studios does have a Facebook page, where you can view more examples of Pat's work and see images of the studios. It's an amazing place, where the creative energy is truly contagious. I hope to get back soon, and I also hope that perhaps some of her works will eventually be for sale online.

Old Friends and the influence of Cronos

2011-02-25T11:12:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, I visited my parents, who came out to Pittsburgh from the Susquehanna Valley, where I was born and raised. With foam sheets, brown paper, and white packing twine, my father had carefully wrapped the three paintings you see below.

There is a fourth painting, which belongs to the first image you see below, but it's not appropriate for all audiences...if you know what I mean. This, folks, is a family-friendly blog. *snort* Well, it is!

Savannah Schroll Guz, "Wounded" from the Cadaver Series (2002)
acrylic, paper, book pages, turquoise glitter

Where does this blue-veined nakedness come from you ask? Back in college, I saw a Mexican horror film called Cronos (1993). I didn't realize it until recently, but it was done by Guillermo del Toros. (To see a New Yorker-produced video exploring more of his monsters, click on his name). In Cronos, once the scarab watch inserts its hidden and scorpion-style brass stinger into the elderly man's body, he begins to change physiologically. He grows perceptibly younger, becomes incredibly pale. His blue veins show beneath his skin. He develops a taste for blood. So, in effect, he becomes a vampire. The vampire part, I'm not so enraptured by, but the physical changes were fascinating to me. I still remember them to this day. And in 2002, this continued to show up in my art.

Savannah Schroll Guz, "Hangman II (Pierrot)" (2002)
acrylic, paper, black glitter

(detail) "Hangman II (Pierrot)"

I was so excited to see that the background of "Hangman" actually contains a web of gorgeous black glitter, which apparently wasn't part of the first image of the painting I posted here on the blog. It looks beautiful in ambient light in the evenings...well, the black glitter does. The drooling dude with the orange head covering, well, not so much.

Savannah Schroll Guz, "Hangman"
from the Cadaver Series (2002)
acrylic, paper, black glitter