Look up! The Tiny Showcase Celestial Events Appreciation Society and Jez Burrows present An Illustrated Guide To Amazing Feats Of The Night Sky 2009.
Yes, I know that there is only two months left in 2009 and thus, you’ve already missed a handful of (inter)stellar amazing feats of the night sky BUT LOOK AT IT. For November, we’ll have a full moon on the 2nd and Leonids Meteor Shower on the 17th and 18th. I hope they make one for 2010!
See more shots below the fold!
Read more…
Yesterday I got a package in the mail from my pal Harvey. Inside, amongst other awesome surprises, was a set of limited-edition letterpress cards from Cloudy Collection. This set is Volume 1: Edition 3, called “The Scarlet Lettering.” And the dance that I did upon seeing it is called “The Dazzler.”
Holy cow. Thank you, Harvey!
The 7 highly touchable letterpress cards were created by Marian Bantjes, Kate Bingaman-Burt, Ray Fenwick, Ray Frenden, Linzie Hunter, David Huyck, and Nate Williams.
Madeleine can see the body floating there. Just beneath the velvety surface of the Seine, it floats. The shadows of the ancient buildings ink a temporary tattoo of early evening on the lapping waves of the river, on the stone walkway and its stairs that lead to the water’s edge. People are scrambling across the cobbled embankment. The body is floating in the current, an underwater hummingbird filled with artful stasis. The body is floating in the current and people are scrambling, flocking en masse. Madeleine is not. She is frozen. Madeleine is frozen, watching the body beneath the water. It is just inches beneath the water. People are now scrambling from the embankment to an elegantly carved stone bridge. People are scrambling; Madeleine cannot move. In the background, the sirens begin their high-low keening. The sirens swirl. The sirens rise and fall, a score for the wave of people who are scrambling to save the body. The sirens wail, a score for Madeleine, statuesque in the window of her mother’s French boutique.
Underwater, the body is weightless. It floats very near the slick moss of the concrete riverbank. It floats in the chilled slow moving river, and it doesn’t flow anywhere quickly. It simply drifts, drifts in its own kind of peace. It is entirely unaware of the commotion it causes, the commotion that roils the banks of the river. When the wind blows, when the branches of the riverside trees shift, waning light cuts through the mere inches of murky water that separate the body from air. The light sheds those gallons of water; the light displaces them. The light shows a leg one moment, shimmering and pale. The light displays pure, unblemished skin. The light reveals what is most definitely a girl, her slender pixie feet closest to the surface, her torso pointing down into the furtive depths. She’s floating and flowing and drifting, so slowly, gracefully, her torso pointing down.
“Dear God!” an American tourist, husky and balding, exclaims to his petite wife. The shutter of his camera clicks. The shutter clicks and clicks.
To be sure, there is a sense of urgency, a thick sense that a clock is being raced. Madeleine can feel the adrenaline running through the crush of people. It fills her, too. Madeleine feels that human emotion, the ache those people must feel. Madeleine can feel the shock of the men, their tailored navy blazers thrown to the ground, as they skitter along the water’s edge, following the body inch by inch. The sun is falling and it will take a sharp eye to keep the girl from disappearing into darkness. Yes, Madeleine knows a form of this feeling, the feeling of wanting so badly to save something, desperately, at all costs. And as soon as she recognizes the feeling as that which these strangers following the girl must feel, as soon as she puts her finger upon that feeling, it is replaced. That distinct feeling is replaced with an overwhelming sense of futility!
The girl has been under too long. The people that are fumbling down to the embankment, the people that are shouting to their friends, the people that are pointing—the tourists with their flashbulbs popping—they are not jumping into the water. And Madeleine thinks, with relief, that soon the people will have to realize the body is just a body. Madeleine hopes they will stop imagining it a sinking girl. She isn’t named Greta. They won’t call her Rebecca. She is an “it.” It is just a body form. Madeleine wants them to realize the girl, whoever she is to them, is no more. Beneath the waves is just this thing. Beneath the waves, this thing falling heels over head through the night, this thing twisting and somersaulting in the current, it is just a thing. Madeleine wants them to understand.
And yet they all keep following the girl down the Seine.
Madeleine wants to tell them all. She does. She wants to rip open the shop door and run down to the water’s edge. She wants to tear down to the water’s edge, screaming bloody awful. She is moments from doing it. She is moments from racing to the water, her long sapphire scarf flying behind her like the streamers of a kite. She would grab that gentleman, the one on his belly now, the one whose ankles his friends are supporting, the one who is on his belly with his arms outstretched, the one who is reaching, reaching for the arm of the dead thing. She would race to that man, her hair wild, her silk dress drenched with wind, and she would pull him back in. She wants to pull him back in, pull him back in and press her small finger to his lips. She would stop him screaming for help. She would silence him, and at that moment she would quiet those sirens, too. It would be still, then. Quiet as the riverbed bottom.
“It’s not a girl,” she would whisper in her best English. “It is not a girl. And none of this matters.”
That’s exactly what she would say. That’s exactly what Madeleine wants to say. But she is frozen. She cannot. And then, as sudden as a sneeze, she is laughing. With her hand at her slender side, she is laughing. The laugh comes crashing down. Oh, what has she done? She can’t ever tell them.
And so, below her, down the embankment in front of her mother’s dress shop, the people will continue their frenzied panic. The people will scream. The sirens will wail. The man, the one on his belly, the one anchored by the strong arms of several American friends, that man may reach the body; he may grab it and pull “the girl” to dry land, pull her to some sort of safety. But Madeleine decides she simply cannot tell them.
With a click of her high heels, Madeleine finds herself once more. She smoothes her dress down at her sides. She calms her alarmed expression, tucks it away. And she steps outside. She locks the shop up tight, noting the stiff orange placard hanging from the shop door, noting the plywood board beneath it that reads Cessons nos activités in cursive purple paint. Madeleine frowns at this particular sign. She frowns at the sign and further pushes the commotion from her mind. Her keys jingle. She places them in her purse. And off the stoop, she walks. She walks and her footsteps echo out into the narrow street. She walks away. She walks away and the dress shop, its window display eerily empty of its mannequin model, recedes as well, simply fading into black.
Inspired by “In My Sleep, Falling Through The Night,” an original Ian Dingman illustration.
Just purchased. WE ARE THE FRICTION, a collection of illustrated short fiction. Half of the stories are inspired by the illustrations. Half of the illustrations are inspired by the stories.
This is very much along the lines of the project I’ve been working on with Ian Dingman, and I’m so excited to see it done here so beautifully. My oh my, it looks so good I could to take a bite out of it. Well-the-fuck-done, Sing Statistics.
Jump on this, friends. There are only 1000 of them in the world. (I now retain #462.) Inside, writers like Ben Greenman, Tao Lin, and Dan Kennedy go head-to-head with the artistic forces of Ray Fenwick, Frank Chimero, and Lizzy Stewart. The result is a collection of 24 stories and 24 illustrations worthy of bookshelves (and walls!) everywhere.
See some of the artwork below the fold, and be sure to pick up your copy soon!
Read more…
Helen and Betty are not asleep in the attic. They are listening to the rain. They are listening to the rushing sound of water and it is keeping them up. They are two little girls, sisters—Helen is six and Betty is eight—and they cannot sleep because of the persistent rushing sound of so much water. It angrily punches the wooden beams, clawing for the insulation underneath. The drops want to shatter like bullets through the roof and shower over the girls’ heads. The water washes down the one window at the far end of the attic and reminds Betty of an advertisement for a front-loading washing machine that she once saw on television. The only thing that’s missing is a rainbow assortment of baseball jerseys to tumble, in simulation, over and over, past the window as well. Betty is eight years old and she doesn’t expect a rainbow assortment of baseball jerseys to go tumbling past the window in the attic, but maybe. The power is out. It is night and when the lightning flashes, Betty can see that it is just rainwater sloshing against the windowpane; there’s no laundry.
The small tattered AM/FM radio that the girls have beside their mattress came from the dusty space behind their mother’s shoeboxes at the top of the closet. It now sits on the floor keeping them company. Their favorite station, the one with all of the popular music, stopped broadcasting earlier in the day, but they’ve managed to bring up something else, the tinny voice of a woman softly singing. The girls don’t know what this faraway woman is singing, but they at least have something to listen to besides the rain. They are not used to sleeping in the attic.
Their mother is somewhere downstairs. Their father is somewhere out in the rain. He’s packing sandbags together, one on top of the other, building a wall of sandbags, one on top of the other, somewhere out in the rain.
A strong flash of lightning makes daylight appear in the attic. The light attacks the dark corner where the little girls lie. It exposes old cardboard boxes, a playpen covered in cobwebs, a bookshelf stocked with a cookbooks, old yellowing yellow National Geographic magazines, and a pink pair of rollerblades Betty hasn’t used in years. There is a stroller missing a wheel and a box that says MARTIN’S in faded red permanent marker. There is a ragged sheet covering a microwave and a weight bench without weights. The lightning exposes these things in a magical flare before bursting out like a blown light bulb.
“What if it never stops raining?” Helen, still small like a figurine, asks her older sister. The woman on the radio is not singing anymore. Her voice is suddenly lost somewhere in a dark waterfall of quiet static.
Betty thinks for a moment. In the blackness, on the mattress that her mother took from her bed and hauled, wrestling inch by inch, down the hall and up the retractable ladder to the attic, Betty lie thinking. And Betty doesn’t know the answer. She’s been wondering herself: What if it doesn’t stop raining? This has never happened before. What if it is like this forever?
“I think our house might float away, Helen,” Betty says, finally. “You’ve heard of houseboats haven’t you?”
Helen says yes, even though she has never heard of a houseboat. Helen says yes anyway. And then she pictures their house, two stories and tan as an almond, sailing on top of a lake. She pictures it cutting through the water and she imagines her mother, wearing a shiny emerald green one-piece bathing suit, on skis behind the house. She imagines her mother being pulled along behind the house, the water spraying, the water spraying in a mist and her mother laughing, holding onto a cord with one hand and waving with the other.
“Well, our house will be a houseboat if it keeps raining, Helen.”
Betty scoots along the mattress closer to her sister, pulling the nubby blanket up around their shoulders. The rain is flying sideways into the window at the end of the room. It sounds like impatient fingers on a desk or lots of gunshots from an old western movie.
Betty continues: “It could rain that much. Or, it might not. But if it does, one morning we might wake up for school and everything will be floating on the water. All the other houses will be boats too and so it wouldn’t be so bad, Helen.”
“But then why is Daddy piling all of those bags of sand? If we’re just gonna float up on a houseboat, why?”
Betty doesn’t know. She pictures the sandbags her father is out stacking. She envisions each one, imagines how heavy they are, like the lumpy sacks of potatoes that her mother buys from the market to make stew. She thinks of them underwater. What purpose could they serve?
“Um. Well, just think about it. If our house is a boat and we float around during the day, we’ll need to know where to park it again at night, right? That’s what those bags of sand are for. They’ll mark where our house belongs.” This makes sense to Helen. So, Betty continues: “But don’t worry about that anyways. What’s really neat is that I think we’ll look out the window and it’ll be like the pool next door to Grandma’s house. The whole town will be like a beautiful blue swimming pool and I bet Mom would let us dive off the roof and the roof will be like the diving board at the Y and Dad will build us a ladder so that we can climb up the side of the house and get back in.”
Betty isn’t exactly sure that it will be like a swimming pool. She is eight and she doesn’t know. But that sounds possible to her.
“I’m really excited about it,” she says. “How fun will it be to stand on the roof and look down and see our yard underneath the water? We can do races to the fire hydrant and we could swim down through the peach tree. It will be like seaweed.”
The lightning comes again. In the flash, Betty sees, through the fine strands of blond hair covering her sister’s face, that Helen’s eyes are closed. Helen is sleeping. Helen has fallen asleep and Betty decides to hush up. She puts her arm around her sister and snuggles in beside her tiny pajama-clad body. She closes her own eyes. She thinks about which bathing suit she would want to put on in the morning. She pictures herself in the purple and pink swimsuit, the one with the matching tank top, the one that her mother got her last year for the Fourth of July barbecue. Then Betty imagines herself in the purple and pink swimsuit, swimming in circles around the house, and doing cannonballs out of her upstairs bedroom window. Betty smiles and soon she too falls asleep, dreaming about a happy new world, a world underwater.
Inspired by “Above Flood Stage,” an original Ian Dingman illustration.
