David Erik Nelson's Blog, page 6

Looking for some spooºOºoky Hallow-Reads?🎃📖👻

I’m callously taking advantage of the Reason for the Season to plug some of my free-to-read/hear horror stories:

This Place Is Best Shunned

“This Place Is Best Shunned“—Allie and Rooster are heading down to Asheville for Rooster’s new gig, a cushy stint as artist-in-residence at UNC. Rooster is more of a con artist than maker of art, but Allie doesn’t mind, because he’s good-looking, charming, and values what she is: a girl with a keen eye for abandoned places and a knack for getting into them. But when they stumble upon an old backcountry church—the perfect backdrop for Rooster’s latest project—they discover that some “abandoned” places have a knack for keeping themselves occupied.…

Whatever Comes After Calcutta

“Whatever Comes After Calcutta”—It was late in the day when Lyle Morimoto saw the hanged woman and almost crashed his Prius somewhere between Calcutta, Ohio, and whatever the hell came after Calcutta. For hours he’d been sipping warm Gatorade and cruising the crumbling two-lane blacktop that sliced up the scrubby farmland of southern Ohio. He understood that he was not thinking clearly, but that seemed OK, since it also meant not thinking about his ear, or his wife, or Detective Jason Good, or the gun in the pocket of his suit jacket.…

The Slender MenThere Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House

If you simply must purchase something, you might just as well purchase this (especially if you liked any of the above, because it’s all that and moooooore):

There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House—”Downtrodden architect Glenn Washington and his none-too-bright sidekick Lennie help a crooked real estate baron flip houses in downtrodden Detroit. A house comes up that is too good to gut for parts. Too good to be true. Waaaay too good. Thing is, nothing leads where it should — go through the front door, step out the door on the back porch. Best library ever. And why are the cops nosing around? Non-Euclidian architectural petty-crime adventure, and all that implies.”—Adrian Simmons, Black Gate magazine

Sketch of the Week: Flowers or Lil Arbus Boy? (October 11–13, 2024)

You get a two-fer this week:

My son voted for the upper sketch, noting “holy heck I love the shadows on the flowers.” The model for this was a little table near the entrance of the Unitarian church where my congregation held Kol Nidrei service on Oct 11. I’m on our Safety Committee, and so had a shift watching the front door. Thankfully, it was an extremely boring shift, hence the sketch.

The lower sketch is based on Diane Arbus’s “Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962.” The sketch maybe looks pretty odd if you aren’t familiar with the reference. (Otto noted, “He’s adorable but I confess the angle of the head is kinda confusing me.” Then, after seeing the original, added “Pfff okay he just looks like that” and “Is that a grenade!?”)

Here’s my photo of a reproduction of Arbus’s original photo (which, stated like that, begins to sorta feel like I’m making a cheap Duchamp joke):

Holy Moses! That snake fooled me, too!

I cannot get over how persuasive the movement is of this snake’s “faux-spider” tail lump-and-floofs is. Structurally, it looks practically nothing like a spider; it’s like a skin tag put on a feather boa. But the way the snake moves it is an amaaaaaaaazing piece of puppetry. I could watch this video all day.

If you want more danger noodles, here’s the excellent Ze Frank explaining how kangaroo rats put snakes in their place:

Sketch of the Week: Rabbi at the Bimah (October 3, 2024)

Just a quick, loose sketch I did of our rabbi at the bimah while she was leading Rosh Hashanah services. (Our particular rabbi trained as a cantor before being ordained, and happens to play harp; harp isn’t a standard part of Jewish services.)

My son voted this sketch of the week because “I really like the curves on the harp. All the geometry in that one is very beautiful.” (I spent most of last week working on faces, which I’m terrible at; weak as it is, this is the best sketch of the lot )

Sketch of the Week: Heading to the Faire (Sept 24, 2024)

My son voted for this sketch to share this week. He liked several, but “the fairies one is just too adorable”:

The reference is this photo of my wife and daughter dressed up to go to out local Renaissance Festival a couple weeks ago:

Apparently this hat made my wife look like “Sadie Adler” from Red Dead Redemption II, which I guess bodes poorly for me

Sketch of the Week: Barn Swallows (Sept 18, 2024)

My son nominated this sketch, noting: “That one in the back looks like it has strong opinions.” I can’t quite recall where I saw these little guys, just that it was in a Michigan State Park this past summer, as part of a canoe trip that went moderately off the rails (massive duckweed, inclement weather, thousands of dead fish blocking the river, etc.) This park was maybe our third choice, in terms of places we were supposed to be that night.

For the record, I was almost positive he was either gonna chose the Jubilant Sorceress or Captain Tenacity:

Mostly I like how the two images interact (they were in adjacent slots on the spread). The reference for the sorceress is my wife in a Halloween costume she got for cheap at a thrift shop a few years back, while the captain is me about 20 years ago. Serendipitously, the ratio between their sizes is roughly our real-life size difference.

Sketch of the Week: Young Dali (Sept 9, 2024)

My best sketch from Week #37-2024 is this one of a young Salvador Dali:

My reference for the sketch was this picture of Dali and Man Ray I stumbled across on the Library of Congress website:

Until I saw this photograph, it never dawned on me that Man Ray might be Jewish (which he was), nor that he was American-born (I thought he was French, because he was most famous for the work he did while living in France), nor that he thought of himself as a painter (I knew him for his photography).

For the record, the Young Dali sketch narrowly beat out this space captain from Friday, September 13. She is taking no shit, folks:

Sketch of the Week: self-portrait of a portrait of a tree (Sept 3, 2024)

My son suggested I share this one, which he characterizes as “handception” . The sketch I’m highlighting is the lower one, but it doesn’t make sense without the context of the larger page, so here you go:

Agustina Bazterrica’s TENDER IS THE FLESH: ★★★★★ would dine again!

(I do a fair bit of reading, which I track over on Goodreads. Trying to move some of that value over here, prior to the inevitable enshitification.)

This book is a little like heavy metal poisoning. Its impact is pernicious, deep, and likely permanent. You’ll be powerfully tempted to pigeon-hole this as an allegory (about world-wide overconsumption of meat, about climate change, about patriarchy, about the deadly tendency to humor wealthy idiots)—but, jeez, don’t. That’s just a defense mechanism, your brain’s white blood cells trying to contain and thus destroy an interloper. Don’t cop out like that. Just let the story fully in, let it blossom and consume you.

It’s really a helluva book. In many ways, this is the exact opposite of Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, in that it blessedly lets no one off the hook.

For those interested in other art Dave compares favorably to heavy-metal poisoning, consider Merhinge’s film Begotten.

I should not have read Jack Ketchum’s THE GIRL NEXT DOOR (a zero-stars review)

(I do a fair bit of reading, which I track over on Goodreads. Trying to move some of that value over here, prior to the inevitable enshitification.)

This book was notorious when I was a kid for being so extreme and gruesome. Straight talk: it’s not that gruesome. Yes, there are graphic depictions of torture and sexual violence that are basically in the ballpark of stuff happening in conflict zones right now. That this really happens to real people is gruesome and outrageous; that some guy typed it up in 1989 feels trite.

Anyway, what really is truly extreme and gruesome in this book is its absolute moral cowardice. Ketchum sets up an interesting premise–not the sex torture of the orphaned girl next door, but the narrator’s (David’s) complicity, how he lets awfulness roll forward despite liking this girl, despite being a “good guy” and “All-American Kid” (echoes of King’s “Apt Pupil” there).

That premise is interesting, because it matches the vast majority of us: we’re good people, and we let bad things happen all over the world all the time.

The problem is that Ketchum pulls the punch. Inexplicably, he attempts to transform David into a hero in the final act–despite the fact that there’s no set-up for it, and Ketchum seems entirely incapable of pulling it off. That might be fine; it could still be a solid three-star book if David tried to play the hero, then faceplanted (as he does in the novel, as he must, because the situation is so hopeless), and Megan (the victim of these outrages and everyone’s leer, readers included) had poured her fury and rage out on him.

Instead Ketchum paints this kid–this coward, this bystander, this rapist-by-proxy and torture fanboy–as the hero, and forces Meg to be his forgiving damsel.

And it just makes me want to fucking vomit. It’s a mediocre book that’s only shocking if you’ve never read a newspaper’s international headlines. It’s an advertisement for never holding anyone accountable for anything–save for the victims; “What was she doing alone with those boys? What did she expect, dressing like that” and so on and so forth ad nauseam, ad infinitum, world without end, amen