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plain and simple

Dear Reader
Billy Collins

Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.

Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.

But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,
no room or manicured garden to enclose us,
no Zeitgeist marching in the background,
no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak.

Instead, our meeting is so brief and accidental,
unnoticed by the monocled eye of History,
you could be the man I held the door for
this morning at the bank or post office
or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.
You could be someone I passed on the street
or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car.

The sunlight flashes off your windshield,
and when I look up into the small, posted mirror,
I watch you diminish—my echo, my twin—
and vanish around a curve in this whip
of a road we can’t help traveling together.

—

How?

The finished product:

And something else:

Warm.

Symbols of Time. January 2008. 18″x24″, colored pencil.

Click on the image for a larger version. Also, someone remind me never ever to do anything this large in colored pencil again!

Clock is referenced from the Prague astronomical clock, but not exactly copied. I just took the parts I liked and simplified the rest.

There are a lot of mistakes. Can you find the obvious (imo, at least) one?

Detail:

Previous posts: 1, 2

February’s Vogue Paris has an editorial featuring models Lara Stone and Travis, photographed by Steven Klein and entitled “Lara Fiction Noire.”

The one clever thing is that there are no guns anywhere in the editorial, this attempt at noir fiction:

In this sub-genre, the protagonist is usually not a detective, but instead either a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator. He is someone tied directly to the crime, not an outsider called to solve or fix the situation. Other common characteristics…are the emphasis on sexual relationships and the use of sex to advance the plot and the self-destructive qualities of the lead characters. This type of fiction also has the lean, direct writing style and the gritty realism commonly associated with hardboiled fiction.

The images (not work safe):

A woman handcuffed to a bed, nothing new – but the boy in a cage?

The police are here!

Is he forcing her mouth open? She’s still holding a cig anyway. This one’s ambiguous, so I’ll leave it.

Definitely tones of gang rape here. The boy is restrained (by three hands), underneath, submissive (eyes closed) with menacing people above him.

Uh oh, power reversal.

What’s she going to do with the car?

Oh, she’s going to crash the car, kill (yes? perhaps?) the dude and then smoke a cigarette. She still has tossed, perfect hair, un-smudged lipstick, and the blood on her neck doesn’t look like her own: murder is cool.

Other than glamorizing rape and violence, this editorial is also boring. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been done before. Blood, sex, allusions to The Dark Knight and Jane Birkin? A thousand and one pornos have already done it all, and Steven Klein has done a thousand and one photo shoots emulating porn. The Shock Factor is the cheapest way to get attention.

Images via fakingfashion @ lJ

What’s in the top left corner?

—

The Long Boat

Stanley Kunitz

When his boat snapped loose
from its mooring, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn’t matter
which way was home;
as if he didn’t know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.

Reference from mjranum-stock for page on the left

Excerpt from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman

52
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yaws over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Happy things:

1. No more standardized tests (for a couple years, at least)!
2. Thanksgiving break!

because not only did I have to rake leaves today, I just saw a flock of geese fly past my window.

—

All your life is such a shame, shame, shame.
All your love is just a dream, dream, dream.

Well, I dreamt I saw you walking up a hillside in the snow
Casting shadows on the winter sky as you stood there counting crows.
One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for girls and four for boys,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.