Visual Diary #32

Wolf Man, Bird Woman, Hotpants, Press Here

Hi readers,

I hope the days are being sweet to you. This has been a week of lying low, sitting with the shift in the weather, sinking into my novel-in-progress. Things I might have drawn: in that hefty storm rain started coming into the kitchen through one of the ceiling ducted heating vents. I filmed it dripping into the blue bucket - a mesmerising short film!. It wasn’t a heap of water but luckily I was at home because in the first instance it was falling on my lp of Alfred Deller Shakespeare Songs & Lute Solos. Over the week I have transplanted all my green leafy plants into one area of the garden that seems to get a lot of wormage and later today I will plant parsley, garlic, rocket and some spring bulbs. Spring bulbs are always welcome when they pop up out of the cold winter’s ground. Today, at the parklands nearly all the leaves had fallen of the mulberry bushes. The air smelled like mud and the creek was flowing freely. In the heaps of refuse that had been washed onto the rocks I saw a condom, still in its square, it’s name (brand?) was simply ‘sex’. It made me laugh. On the way home I saw someone had put a green cabinet out on the street; on top, casually, a pair of tomato red 1970s stack heels with feathers. Very Liza Minelli. Earlier in the week I saw Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother. I fell right into it, four stories that you couldn’t even call capsules, open-ended, more like glimpses or short stories, linked by motifs - image, dialogue, object- a dream, or a reminder. Nothing hectic. Small things take up space, and the acting feels sometimes too mannered and sometimes too casual, but Jarmusch’s films are always like this, and I can’t remember any one I’ve seen that I didn’t love. What else? A sublime cinnamon roll. A rather good Gozleme. I’m reading Lily King’s Heart the Lover and it’s as great as everyone says it is. I’m right in the middle of it and don’t want it to end. I could have drawn any of these things but in the novel is where I spent the most time. I know it’s risky, to be publicly excited about a not-yet-work. I met a writer once who had so many superstitions about this - she used to wear a memory stick of her work-in-progress around her neck and would never breathe a word about it to anyone until it was done. I understand this impulse, but I think for me, drawing helps keep it alive. I suppose I don’t have to share them. It’s just, you have to keep it alive for so long without any encouragement from anyone. You have to encourage yourself. The pictures feel to me like the story’s dreamlife or shadowlife. By the end I will have two texts exploring the same territory. Or maybe drawing will feed the writing, and in this way the work will get done.

The first round of pictures is here:

And here now is the next:

This is from a vintage portrait of a Russian man with hypertrichosis.

This is Peruvian birdwoman or the macaw woman, from Peruvian mythology - you can read the myth here. If she looks sad it’s because she was forced to stay and become the wife of two brothers and have their babies - what happened to her sister, the one that got away? The myth doesn’t go into that.

This is Lula, from Wild at Heart, reclining in her hotpants in a hotel somewhere in N’awlins probably. “The world really is wild at heart and weird on top.”

This is the Palace of Toil - an acupressure point that eases anxiety and encourages clarity. See here.