Happy V-Day, friends. If you haven’t sent your loved one(s) a card yet, it’s not too late. www.someecards.com can hook you up.
I’m partial to these:
There are many more fun ones over at that site.
Tomorrow, assuming I have my act together, I will post pictures of the awesome Valentines that my sister made for the kids this year. To say they were a hit is an understatement.
Hope you’re having a good day.
While I have some free time today, I’ll post the progression of my latest oil painting. I did this one over the course of two 3-hour classes.
A fresh canvas.
The charcoal under-drawing.
First part of tone painting.
Close-up of same.
Refining…
Refining it with opaque paint.
More refinement.
And … I’m calling it done. I can see where further refinement would help, but I feel like I’m getting the hang of things a little more, so I’ll start a new one next week and incorporate what I’m learning about brush strokes and trusting what I “should” see vs. what I do see.
My parents were in Antarctica last week.
At first I thought Dad was reliving the ’60s while Mom waved hello, but then I realized they’re making the number 7, as in seven continents now visited. Check out the penguins behind them! The fuzzy ones are babies. Mom says the weather was sunny, with temperatures hitting the 30′s. It’s summer there.
I went outside this morning in Austin, Texas to this:
We have our own little arctic wonderland in my backyard.
It’s officially colder here than in Antarctica, at least the part above the 65th parallel. Dad says not to worry, though. The scientists they talked to assured them that not only are the glaciers not receding, but that the continent is well-insulated from climate change because of a) the Antarctic current that runs all the way around it, pushing away warmer water, and b) the fact that almost all of the ice has land mass underneath it (which makes it different from the Arctic, where the ice floats on ocean).
The Boy has had a blast today sledding down the driveway on cardboard and making Gatorade snowcones. The Girl is enjoying SpongeBob on the couch as she recuperates from flu. She has ventured outside once, but prefers to enjoy the scenery through the window. Her fever is down, so I’m relieved about that.
Hope every one of you is staying warm and well!
That last post went a completely different way than I had expected.
When I found the postcard from WWI, I started thinking about something amusing I had learned about people’s reactions in the U.S. to the war: anything German-sounding had its name changed. Hamburgers (Hamburg) became Liberty Sandwiches. Sauerkraut became Liberty Cabbage. I assume this is also when hot dogs became hot dogs instead of wieners or bratwurst or whatever they were called up until then.
So I was going to write about how that’s yet another example of history repeating itself, what with the whole Freedom Fries thing that got going a few years back. (And any time I think of that, my mind wanders to the crazy mom in Better Off Dead who serves what she thinks is French food to the foreign exchange student. “We have French bread, French fries, French dressing…”)
But then I went a whole ‘nother direction when I sat down to write.
I’ll take you back to three days ago. I was listening to a lecture on T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, a poem I find incomprehensible, even after listening to the lecture. Eliot referenced a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a line about “my fathers eyes were pearls,” which meant that his father had drowned, and then his body had been consumed by the sea and resurrected into something new.
So I poked around in my Riverside Shakespeare, laughed at what his buddies had to say about Shakespeare in the First Folio, and finally got around to reading part of the first act. Afterward, I retired to my room, where The Big M and I watched Winter Wipeout, a show that never ceases to be funny. (Thank you, Japanese TV, for bringing your crazy game shows to my country.) You would think watching someone collide into a giant bouncy ball and then fall into water would get old. But you’d be wrong.
Anyway, the next day I started reading The Tempest again, and I found the passage:
Full fadom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark now I hear them–ding-dong bell.
Isn’t that beautiful? What had captured my attention in the Eliot lecture was the “sea-change.” I remembered that Fitzgerald repeatedly used that phrase in The Great Gatsby, and it felt like there was some sort of theme related to it. So I wondered if maybe The Great Gatsby was The Tempest redone for a modern audience. It would be ironic (in an Alanis Morrissette way) if the Great American Novel turned out to be a ripoff of Shakespeare.
Yesterday I finished The Tempest, and the short answer is — no, it has no relation to The Great Gatsby, at least none that I see. (I really liked The Tempest, though. For one thing, the protagonist, Prospero, is very into books. I could identify with that. For another, it’s funny.)
But thinking about The Great Gatsby got me thinking about WWI again and the post-war disillusionment that Fitzgerald and Hemingway and so many other writers experienced and wrote about.
I was all set to write about Freedom fries when my neighbor’s band started up and the thump-thumping of bass penetrated my walls. To keep my focus, I turned some music on and ran a genius list based on “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers, an up-tempo (if depressing) song.
Before I knew it, Genius had picked Radiohead. As Thom Yorke’s melancholy vocals oozed over me, I started mulling on war and disillusionment, and you see the result.
Music is so weird in how it can influence your thinking, and even your memory.
This post’s title comes from Shakespeare’s First Folio. feuerall is what we now write, “several.”
Those are my several things for today.
I found this postcard among old family photos:
It is postmarked October 10, 1917. On that day, we were still 13 months away from the armistice that would end World War I. Oscar, my relative, wrote on the reverse that he was in Houston waiting to get on a train, presumably to head into basic training and then to the war in Europe. I know by looking at the card he picked out that Oscar believed in his cause.
Our Country — right or wrong
OUR COUNTRY
It was supposed to be the War to End All Wars, but of course it wasn’t. Some 12 years after the armistice the world plunged into a great depression, and Germans needed a wheelbarrow full of Deutschmarks to buy a loaf of bread. Through the chaos of insane inflation and joblessness and political disorder stepped a dynamic young man who would restore unity and stability and a patriotic pride to Germany. Unfortunately, he was Adolf Hitler, and he brought a new kind of chaos with him.
I wonder how Oscar felt when he saw newsreels chronicling the rising Third Reich. How must it have felt to have dedicated himself to his country, right or wrong, to have participated in mass destruction justified because it would end all war, only to see war starting in the same place all over again?
On October 10, 1917, the day Oscar sent this postcard to his father, Erich Maria Remarque was convalescing from a leg wound in a German army hospital. He had begun the war as a young man who believed in his cause.
Ten years later he wrote Im Westen Nichts Neues, a devastating novel published in 1929 in the United States as All Quiet on the Western Front. It was a best-seller in chaotic Germany. Five years after its publication the book was banned under Germany’s new order. After Goebbels declared him a traitor, Remarque escaped to Switzerland. His sister was not so lucky; she was executed in 1943. The German judge who sentenced her said, “Your brother has unfortunately escaped us. You, however, will not.”
How must it have felt for Erich to dedicate himself to his country, right or wrong, only to see that country disintegrate? And then to see it rise from the ashes not as the triumphant Phoenix, but as some monstrous perversion that would eat so many lives, so many dreams, so many hopes?
Two young men who lived across an ocean from each other shared a belief:
Our country, right or wrong. OUR COUNTRY.
The Great War and its aftermath stripped away illusions. We love our country, but we will support it only if it is right.
