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now is the winter of our discotheque
me me me. today i am doing this instead of thesis. probably i will write that a lot, at least for the next month. (holyshitholyshit) yesterday i used a letter press for the first time and it was both exciting and scary. arches watercolor paper at a weight of 250, stacked four pieces thick requires a lot of force and makes amazing prints. the text letters press up and the second and third pages have blind prints (i.e. embossing without ink). my book-to-be is about sailors, whalers actually. it all started with scrimshaw. i have always had a bizarre fascination with sailing and whaling (ha). i grew up on the east coast and learned at an early age about widow's nests and nantucket scrimshaw traditions. the men carved into the teeth of the whale (these were predominantly sperm whales, and the east-coast whaling ships had to head south to find them..) the act of killing the whale. or portraits of their wives, or illustrations of whalers screwing prostitutes (these were rare - probably because no one considered then heirlooms). at any rate, this seems like some sort of screwed up attempt at showing reverence, appreciation and dedication to the whale (this idea is immediately scrapped when one learns that the only things that were used was the blubber and the head of the whale - the rest was left to be scavenged). perhaps that is just my own attempt at justifying something i find really beautiful - no! it 's not bad! look how cool! so cool! so back to the book. the research about scrimshaw turned into research about whaling, and the whaling experience in general. turns out those whalers were fucking obsessed with women (who isn't?). they loved them and they hated them. they hated the captain's wife, they loved their ladies back home, and they loved the ladies in foreign lands. they desperately needed to the busty woman on the bow of the ship, because her chest warded off the worst of storms (what power!). so here i am, thinking that maybe i should have been a history major, writing about whaling, about these men who endured so much stink just to come home to find the women they loved married to someone else (well, shit, when they're gone for a year and might be dead, what can they expect?). all these thoughts, while i am working on an art project, and also thinking about how i should have been an art major, dammit. college has made my indecisiveness, as well as my other psychological problems (insecurity, obsessive compulsion, etc) increase tenfold. the bastard. |
this is new for me.... so things may be rusty for a bit. i am hoping that this helps me to be better about journals.... one can find many diaries, journals, etc. of mine that last for at most a year and then i forget about them (i recently found one from when i was seven. there are three entries, including one about how i like my cat because he is sleek.).