Eileen Maksym's Blog, page 12

Fiction starts with reality

I love Jane Long’s work.  You can find some here, and more here.  She takes existing antique photographs and turns them into whimsical, magical scenes.  What strikes me is how her works are imaginative yet (for the most part) logical extrapolations of the existing images.  Above are two children dressed in adult clothes, particularly the little boy in the military uniform.  Long’s recreation invites us to look into the future, where the two are grown up, yet reminds us that the future is uncertain, and only shows us their backs.

Fiction, when done well, does the same thing as Long’s art. It starts with a given, with something that exists, if only in general, then draws out the rich possibilities, taking imaginative, yet logical, narrative steps.  A writer sees two children, and imagines how they might grow up. And perhaps they only show us their backs, and allow the reader to fill in the blanks.

The Gentle Monster

I’m watching Elfman: Tim Burton Film Music on Live From Lincoln Center. When they got to Edward Scissorhands, I was struck anew by the simple purity and tragedy of that story. (And isn’t that so like Tim Burton? A simple, heartfelt tale dressed up in baroque fantastical imagery?)  The foundation of every good protagonist is frustrated desire.  What does he or she want? And why can’t they get it? Edward wants love.  He wants so deeply to be loved by everyone.  And why can’t he get it? Because he is a monster, an unfinished creature gentle by nature yet destructive through no fault of his own. I think we can all relate to that.  We want love, yet we are flawed.  We are unfinished.  We reach out to touch and hurt those we care about. And the sadness of the end is, I believe, something we all fear, that our loved ones will only be safe far away from us.

Of course, our lives aren’t fairytales.  They’re much more complex, and, in many ways, much more beautiful.  We can give and receive forgiveness and mercy to and from those we love, because we are all flawed. We all hurt each other and ourselves. And we all heal each other and ourselves.  We don’t need to be banished, because we are needed here, in the world, to give and receive love.

Hanging Together

Leandro Lima’s art (more here) is delightfully surreal.  I’m a big fan of surreal art, from Salvador Dali to David Lynch.  One of the things that strikes me about Lima’s work is how the imagery hangs together in a cohesive whole. I think that this is one of the most important aspects of surrealism.  It’s not merely coming up with random stuff and throwing it all together. The randomness needs to have a rhyme, a rhythm.  There needs to be order in all the chaos, parallels drawn in the most unexpected places, where two things that seem to have no connection actually have a connection deep down below the surface.  It’s hard to do well, which is one reason why I admire greatly those who can do it.

A writer’s nightmare

 

Photograph by Rene Benjowski. Click the image for more. (NSFW)

 

…just me?

 

Dealing with the devil

This article at Boing Boing talks about the fascinating hobby of collecting vintage magic posters.  What catches my eye in particular is the demonic imagery. From Eve to Faust, we have a certain fascination with people who make deals with the devil.  Sometimes we fear them, sometimes we admire them, and sometimes we think that maybe, just maybe, if we were tempted, offered that power by the devil, we would figure out how to win.  Maybe one reason magicians are alluring is that we think they made that deal, and it turned out in their favor.

The Central Park Zoo Escape

Happy April Fool’s Day!  Remember, today is a day to not trust anything you see on the internet. You know.  Like every other day ever.

But this you can trust.  Really.  I promise. If you don’t believe me, you can check out the original story on the awesome site of the Museum of Hoaxes.

On November 9th, 1874, the New York Herald ran a front page story that proclaimed in the most alarming terminology possible that the animals in the Central Park Zoo had busted out of their cages and were at that very moment rampaging through Manhattan.  The article recounted the carnage in gruesome detail (one of my favorite quotes: “The panther was crouched over Hyland’s body, gnawing horribly at his head”).  People freaked.  They called the police, armed themselves, and went to rescue their children from school.  According to the Museum of Hoaxes account, the editor of The New York Times “ran out of his home waving two pistols in the air, ready to shoot the first animal he encountered.”

It was, of course, all a hoax.  If you look at the illustrations from the story, at the end of the cartoonish carnage there is an image of a man wearing a dunce cap and reading the New York Herald.  The caption reads “The Moral.” And people would have known that this account was entirely fictitious had they only read to the end of the article, which closed with this statement:

“Of course the entire story given above is a pure fabrication. Not one word of it is true. Not a single act or incident described has taken place. It is a huge hoax, a wild romance, or whatever other epithet of utter untrustworthiness our readers may choose to apply to it.”

If Facebook had existed at the time, I have no doubt that this story would have been shared thousands of times to widespread outrage before anybody took the time to actually, you know, read the article they were spreading.  And that’s human nature.  We want to believe what we’re told, especially when it’s as awesome as zoo animals rampaging through New York City and leaving a bloody trail of corpses in their wake.

Have fun today. And don’t believe a thing you read.

Too much of a good thing?

Just a friendly reminder that too much of anything can kill you.  Even water.  And chocolate.  And pot. Although apparently it takes an absurd amount of pot to kill you.  Enjoy!

 

Weeping tears of wax

This candle and its holder are made by The Jacks.  You can find it and more here at their website.

The image of an inanimate object crying (or bleeding) is familiar in religious contexts.  For instance, there are plenty of tales of statues of the Virgin Mary weeping, sometimes with tears of chrism or blood.  This typically evokes feelings of reverence and awe.  However, there is a larger genre of inanimate objects acting in human ways that can evoke some other emotions as well.  There is the whimsical, exemplified by Pixar movies such as Toy Story and Cars.  And then there is the terrifying, as we can see in movies like Child’s Play and Christine. This skull crying tears of wax is amusing, and also in a way unsettling.  Maybe it’s because we secretly wish, and secretly fear, that inanimate objects are actually alive.

Artistic ephemera

The beautiful playing cards above are from the Ultimate Deck by Dan and Dave.  If I had $25 to spare, I would totally buy one.  If I had $50 to spare, I would totally buy two, and give the other to a magician friend of mine. If you have $25 to spare and you like what you see above (and who wouldn’t?) you can buy your very own here!

When I was a freshman at Yale I worked at the Beinecke Rare Book Library.  My tasks often brought me into the depths of the basement stacks where many of the collections resided.  (Those stacks, massive rooms packed with shelves, kept cool and dark, were eerie at best, terrifying at worst.  One of the unsettling things was that the materials on the shelves were good at absorbing sound, so you wouldn’t know there was someone else on the floor until they were almost upon you.) In addition to books, there were also ephemera, things that are not meant to endure, that are used and then discarded.  Magazines fit into this category, as do posters and, apropos of this post, playing cards.  I was privileged to take a close look at some centuries-old decks that were quite beautiful, if more simple than the cards in the Ultimate Deck above.  I can’t help but wonder how many of these decks were made so that this one survived.  Everyday play, particularly in a time without TV or internet, can wear a deck down, and using cards for other things, like magic, wears them down even faster.  When he’s performing card tricks, my magician friend  can go through three decks a week.  Thank goodness for mass produced playing cards!

That any of these things outlive their expected lifespan says interesting things about our desire to preserve what we find beautiful.  “Hoarding” might be an extreme case of this, but I think that all of us have things that we just can’t part with, even if they are old or broken or otherwise of no use to us.  I know that my own collection is full of ephemera: posters from plays I worked on in college, photocopied course packets from grad school, years and years worth of birthday cards.  All things essentially made to be used and then discarded.  But I can’t.  I may never, ever look at them again other than those times when I’m packing or unpacking on either sides of a move, but I just can’t bring myself to throw them away.

If I bought the deck above, I probably wouldn’t actually use them, or at least not as they were intended.  If I wanted to play poker, I’d pull out the good ol’ Bicycles.  But that says something too, doesn’t it?  When we so want to keep something pristine that we don’t even let it serve it’s intended purpose, its telos?  We can easily think of collectors, meticulously enshrouding comic books in plastic, never opening the packaging of some prized action figure.  But comics are meant to be read, and toys are meant to be played with.  When we wrap life in plastic, it suffocates.

So maybe I would play with those beautiful cards.

Just very, very carefully.

Days of future past

 

This digital painting is by Yuri Shwedoff.  Click on the image for more of his work! Hat tip Bleaq.com.

I find it interesting that so many science fiction stories contrast advanced technology with a low-tech society.  Like Star Wars, with spaceships and farm boys. Or The Hunger Games, contrasting the decadence of the Capitol with the desperation of the Districts.  Curious how the technology generally winds up with the powerful and “evil” people.  Or perhaps the power and evil winds up with the people with technology?  When it comes to the struggle between the high-tech evil and the low-tech good, we find ourselves cheering for the little fuzzy tribesbears against the state of the art AT-ATs.  Why?  Does this common dynamic rise from the same root of such things as anti-vaccination and anti-GMOs?  Do we naturally have a mistrust of technology?