My lovely pumpernickel loaves, this last semester of college has ended! I wrote a 103-page senior thesis (not counting front and back matter) called "The Arbiters of Childhood," about how American adults viewed children and childhood in the 1950s. It covered topics from the juvenile delinquency panic to Brown v. Board of Education, mostly focusing on what the experts said with occasional excursions into how that filtered down to the average American. In my last chapter, I spent a little time discussing how the dominant 1950s model of the child is still with us today. As difficult and stressful as the process occasionally became, I'm really glad I wrote this thesis--both as a historian and as a person. It's enabled me to do interesting scholarship in an area that fascinates me, to better understand my parents' and grandparents' generations, to think differently about childhood as a category, and to get hands-on experience of historical problems and processes. In some ways, I'm sad it's over, but I don't think my study of 1950s childhood, family life, and just life in general is done with. 1950s family history is a topic that, despite enjoying a great deal of fascinating scholarship already, still abounds with vast tracts of unexplored territory.

For now, though, I've done with my thesis and my classes (including piano lessons, which is kinda sad), and to my intense surprise they gave me a diploma. What were they thinking? NO ONE KNOWS. But I am apparently officially a Bachelor of Arts in History. This unexpected turn of events is so overwhelming that I need to take a week or two to recover from the shock. What I'm saying is, hiatus will continue for a little while longer, but I AM done with college and I DO plan to get back to blogging in the not-too-distant future!

Or, to put it another way:

Oh my loves my lo-ammi, oh tiger-children and witch-women, I am so full of words! They bunch together and get stuck in my eyes and my hands.

Timeo Danaos indeed, for are not most of the dead the dead the dead from Greece? Socrates is a sharp-clawed manticore, and Plato a gargantuan water-bear too far-sighted for spectacles. Odysseus is a jackal, Helen the butcher-bird, and Athena grey-eyed goddess has more blood in her chamber than Bluebeard. Those who love them become like them, and their teeth are admirably strong. What big, bright, white, wet, shining, solid, well-rooted cuspids and bicuspids and cusps of all kinds! They grow fat and flourishing.

Out here in the desert the winds blow through my eye-sockets. Out here the vulture and I discuss the words of the abbas in measured tones, with long pauses that the sunlight fills. Out here the bones in my hands hum but gently.

The prophet and the Marigold Woman hesitate still on the verge of the swamp. The elephants have one last chance to achieve their pirouettes. The morning-doves mutter amongst themselves, watching the king of jacks with suspicious eyes. The clouds sit low and weep occasional tears in an occasional eulogy.

Out here in the desert the sun tries to find a finger-hold in the shade of the cells. Out here I know two things, two things and a third. Out here the dust is warm.

Out here, I wait.

SCENE: The prophet and the Marigold Woman look at the trees with considering eyes. It is night, and they are alone. The moon is not quite--not quite--full. The clouds haze around it. The bottlefield spreads its twinkling fruit behind them.

Prophet: We can't stay there.

Marigold Woman: Why not?

Prophet: I don't know. They won't let us. The witch is still out there, and the bees, and the robots, and--oh!--a million and one things. The elephants--

Marigold Woman: The elephants are leaving.

Prophet: I guess. For now. I don't trust those elephants.

Marigold Woman: scowling I will never go back to the witch's kingdom.

Prophet: Oh, you will. You will. You'll do it every day. You've closed the doors nice and tight but you know what? I think you just wove yourself another cocoon.

Marigold Woman: What if I did? What's it to you?

Prophet: I wish I knew. I only wish I knew. removes cap, scratching head Got a light?

Marigold Woman: No.

3.3.3

SCENE: The elephants are here! The elephants continue to shuffle about in the moonlight, but they still have not got the beat. The Cheshire watches them from the spot where the garden gnome used to stand, in the tall grass.

Cheshire: Look, the king of jacks is in the window again. this to the boy with the angel face

Boy: Oh, let him stay.

Cheshire: looks at him sharply Oh?

Boy: Yeah, maybe--maybe I like him. Maybe we need him around here. I mean, where would I be if I wasn't needed? Maybe if he left--maybe I-- he half-raises his hands, a helpless expression making his eyebrows slip

Cheshire: You're afraid, my precious foxling.

Boy: N... nobody needs me any more. he shoves his hands in his pockets, glancing away from the dancing-lawn and down along the path, all edged with monarch butterflies and white wire, that leads to the pool. The sound of scorpions and blacksnakes drifts through the cool air.

Cheshire: What is it you think makes you so necessary, foxling?

Boy: kicks at the ground and frowns more deeply, but does not respond

Cheshire: Bless you.

Boy: I didn't sneeze.

Cheshire: Who said anything about sneezes?

The elephants continue to shuffle about.

My blood is made of yellow sunshine, it only dries red-brown homely.

Blessed ones, I strive to be whatever you need, an abba-of-every-shape that I may have words for each and every inexpressibly adored visitor. I hang in little ribbons some days, it is a relief to know that my job has been done well. But sometimes, on those days, a little voice comes in the dirty sunlight and he whispers to me. He suggests most subtly that I have not done right, I have not done enough, or perhaps I have done too much.

I would die for them, I tell him, is that not enough?

But what good are gifts given in folly?

That is the king of jacks, that one, he's a clever poker player and he plays the blues like nobody's business. But he stole the blues from the oldest bluesman that ever was, who hung himself with someone else's hands. That man knew how to die for 'em, all right. One he'd finished there was no point anyone having a go.

So why do I keep trying?

He was a tiger, and his children are tiger-cubs. So why does the king of jacks sit on my window-sill licking his chops and whispering wolf-words?

Mostly I don't know what to be, if the original bluesman, the original abba, the certified original tiger, got the last word in. What other key is there to play in? They only taught me the one, I can't jump to the next fifth on the circle.

Maybe if I knew that, maybe I wouldn't feel so kindly towards the king of jacks. Maybe I could finish up that dear john and change all the locks.

Who knows?

What if,

when the last trumpet sounds, on that day, we all come up skeletons? No skin, no cloak of muscle and sinew, no polite lies. Hard polished bones illuminated by the reflection off the sea of glass, every face wreathed with unchanging joy.

But skeletons are ugly; to you, maybe, but did you ask the Almighty? He crafted those knobbly scaffolds, carved the curve of the collarbone, turned the knobs of the knee, sanded down the edges of the sacrum. Is it a coincidence that he gave us that smile eternal, under the skin?

But how will we tell one another apart, skulls all look the same; to you, maybe, just like everyone from somewhere far away looks the same to you. We will have eternity to learn the intricacies of one another's new faces.

Maybe not. Maybe there will be pink cheeks and round eyeballs and sacral dimples. Same as always, the bones still hiding in the shade of the skin, business as usual, just heaven and earth touched up in spots. Nothing radical.

I'm not saying anything, or anything.

Prophet and Marigold Woman are at last on the move again, but slowly, brother, slowly, looking at Mt. Fuji with snail's eyes. The air bubbles with thick-tongued thoughts looking for heads to inhabit.

The dead the dead the dead, they whisper insistent hissing suspicions of every tradition that someone else preached. If you love truth too well they will catch your ankles in cold hands, warbling in their throats false promises of gnosis too delicious for words.

Avoid the graveyards, if you love truth too well, for your jealousy will open your ears to the dead the dead the dead, and rob you of your discernment. They will tempt you and shame you and slide their fingers through your skull, so that the cold air blows through and the night rot sets in.

If you love truth, beware the dead the dead the dead, their tongues are thick with winsome words.

It's true, they do not mean to destroy you. It's true, some of them mouth truths most healthful and nourishing. It's true, a thicker hide might let you walk among them unscathed.

But if you love truth, beware. Those who love truth too well are always most vulnerable to doubt.

3.3.3

I am floating high on the crest of pain, admiring the spots and speckles at arm's length. Nothing can touch me, nothing can touch me, up here where the sky is clear and the geese are outlined so crisp and the dead the dead the dead are silent.

How do I make you understand, it's like strong drink, it's like success.

How do I make you understand how easy it is

And how high I float, above everything, untouchable, not powerful not weak, not happy nor sad, not boy nor girl, not wanted nor unwanted, a yellow balloon above the rooftops. Sometimes I think about loneliness, but I can float above that, too.

3.3.3

when the world is so full of words, and your life is so short, how do you dare open your mouth?

3.3.3

that warm-weather devil jumps to life and tries to break out at the pores, reaching long fingers around teeth and staring through your eyes with his own.

They kept walking.

My inimitable pangolins! Here's the sitch: I have a thesis chapter due in six days. It's about half done, pagewise. So I have a bunch of writing to do. Because my feelings about this chapter are mixed (really excited about the ideas, having a hard time making them fall together nicely, getting frustrated and worried as a result), I have been all too prone to spending inordinate amounts of time online instead of working. It's a mixture of anxiety and the hope that if I let it percolate just a little bit longer it will work. Which hasn't happened, but I've run out of percolatin' time.

So.

What I am trying to say is that from now till Friday I am blocking all my usual web venues except Twitter (which I need for Accountability Tweets, although I'm hoping to limit my use outside that). After that... I'm not sure. I have a hunch that I need to cut out distractions and focus a lot harder on finishing my very last semester (fourteen weeks left! :O) strong and focused. I've taken school-driven web breaks before, and if ever a semester deserved it this is the one, because there will not be another one.

Thus, you might hear from me again Friday. Or you might not hear from me until May. Or some point in between. I'll still be on Twitter a bit, as I said. I'm always available via email, though it can take several days for me to reply (also, I do have notifications turned on for a lot of sites, though this is a less reliable way to get hold of me).

Catch you on the flipside. Stay discolicious, spacechums.

"It feels like magic when characters click like that, but in reality, that comes from a lot of work. I played those characters in my head for months, maybe years. I let them play through all kinds of scenes, sometimes replaying the same scene in different ways, to let them grow the way little kids grow. They succeed and fail and learn, and I learn with them."

--Camille LaGuire

This makes me feel about a million times better about my compulsive need to draw comics and half-comics and demi-comics and weird semi-illustrations and things-where-I-play-expressions-off-each-other-with-disembodied-faces. I have always secretly felt like this makes me a Bad Person who is Lazy and needs to Focus on Making Illustrations or Something Legitimate Like That.

Which, well, may still be the case to a certain degree. But for me, drawing those weird "lazy" things is an integral part of how I play and replay scenes in my head and grow characters. It's nice to know that someone else does this (albeit apparently without sketching), so it is actually a Thing and not just an Excuse to Justify My Unconscionable Laziness (my conscience likes capitalizing things, did you notice?). In fact, I suspect that the You Cannot Draw Because You Must Feel Guilty About Thesis* miasma that has been keeping my sketchbook stalled at the two-thirds point for a while is also why I feel like I can't get at my characters or their stories, either.

ANYWAY! I pass this on because maybe it will encourage someone else.

*You thought that was going to read "Work on Thesis," didn't you. Truth be known I have time and to spare to WORK on the thesis, but there is never enough time in the day for all the fretting.

Hello, everyone! I think it's about time for some art. Again!

I am settling into the semester, hammering out a few pages of thesis here and there. Also I've started my piano lessons and TURNS OUT playing the piano requires lower-back strength in order to support sitting with decent posture during practices. So I've also started exercising, which I undoubtedly should have been doing anyway. "I want to feel good" was always such a vague reason that it couldn't motivate me, whereas "I want to play the piano without pain" is sufficiently precise to, hopefully, keep me on track.

Other than that, you know, the usual semester stuff. I've been brooding on a few blog-related things in my spare time, which may or may not result in posts at some point. We'll see?

For now--Linus, clothing design, and crazy Coptic monks lie below the cut!

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MCA Hogarth's post about her new wiki got me thinking again about the story-related info I have scattered all over the place. I've attempted to collect some of it in my private wiki, but that's not exactly been a great success because, well, college. And I'm not very good at wiki design, especially not when it's just for myself and I can obsess over organizational hierarchies to the exclusion of adding new info. I've thought about getting back to the wiki when I graduate (you know, along with the five million other things I'm going to somehow find time for when I graduate).

But wiki thoughts raise for me the question of publicity, which ties to larger questions. Most of my info is for stories that are either unwritten, partially-written, or written but unreleased into the wild (and mostly no longer in fit shape for release, ahem). That, to me, is a major complicating factor. Would putting so much story info together in a public wiki diminish reader interest in the stories themselves? I have this same concern about my blog archives, actually, which is what makes it an urgent question at all. Periodically I feel the urge to purge, because the weight of all that info I blithely revealed in image descriptions troubles me. Partly because maybe I've given too much away, maybe no one is interested in the stories now (although then again, my experience has been that people are not very careful readers of my posts and tend not to remember all the plot stuff I blathered two years ago). Partly also I feel trapped by a lot of stuff I've committed to "in public" that has turned out not to work.

Or is this another iteration of my continual desire to wipe out my Internet traces in the unrealistic hope of somehow "starting fresh" and THIS time I'll know what I'm doing and do it right? This is all too likely. I've left a trail of deleted blogs and emptied archives in my wake over the years, and I am an ace at editing my past without any clear sense of what good the exercise actually does.

I don't know.

Maybe I need to get some (non-Marigold Woman*) stories into shape and get them out into the wild (a whole 'nother can of worms) before I'm ready to answer this question.

I'd appreciate your thoughts, readers and fellow writers and general peoples. In fact, that's precisely why I'm sharing these worries, because I don't know which end is up and I'd appreciate other perspectives.

Sweet Airedale fumbled gamely and mumbled mainly touching his toes diligently. Diligentibus, leaving open the question of heorshe, toforofby I am interested it concerns me specially.

O pulchrae! O pulchri!

O honey-Latin dulcet ones, Vergil tilts his head to one side, marveling at the Greek. In the wings his Italian acolyte waits impatient, to tour the dead the dead the dead.

No need, Alighieri, the dead the dead the dead whisper hiss susurrate their peculiar preoccupation with my failures continually. Take a tour of my skull, sir. I think there are popes here.

Mother Mary cradles her son, and what good is a thing done decently and in good order? Yet the bread is the same, the wine is the same, the air and fire reach down on lightning fingers though no one knows for sure what path they take. That flash frightens the dead the dead the dead for five seconds of perfect sky. Their bones rattle and fade.

Who can discern this?

The footfalls of the elephants, that sound, disrupts the silence. Their hides are painted with bees. They fill the lawn with the smell of their dusty backs, they knock over the gnome and dance solemnly amongst the tall grass. Everyone watches from the safety of the long portico. Where are the prophet and the Marigold Woman? Does anyone know? I'm sorry, sir, they're still out. Would you care to leave a message? Yes, I would. Withoureyesturnedinward howcanweseeGod? At the tone, sir.

This is the last dance, but the dead the dead the dead are intent on spoiling it. Their hissing disturbs the elephants. If someone--someone who is now sitting in the window-seat wrapped in a blanket--could walk onto the lawn and call halt, perhaps the elephants would discharge their duties and return to Carthage for the last time. But the window-seat and Carthage are both a million miles away, out with the stars but unable to sing with them, wheeling interminable cycles in the cold and the silence. Earth looks very small from here.

The elephants try to keep dancing, the bees on their sides wrinkle and ripple, the dead keep hissing, no one quite knows what to do.

Soon, someone must arrive. Perhaps it will be Mother Mary with a crowd of saints and abbas, and we will dance with them instead of the elephants. Until then, is there nothing to be done?

God only knows, sir.

Hey, everyone! I've had one class and a meeting with my advisor, and I'm getting the sense that this semester will be fairly doable as long as I keep my head and keep plugging away. It's only about eighteen weeks. That alternates between being reassuring and terrifying. Only eighteen weeks to get three thesis chapters, intro and conclusion done (plus revision)! Only eighteen weeks to get in my remaining two classes, write that extra essay, and learn to play the piano! Only eighteen weeks between me and all those post-graduation to-dos! Only eighteen weeks until this extended pursuit of a degree is complete!

So. Yes. That is the state of me, largely. Don't expect much brilliance or discussion-provoking posts for... another eighteen weeks.

I do, however, have art queued up for the next eighteen weeks! Including some silly cat drawings I did as a reward for finishing the request event.

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