While watching Netflix yesterday afternoon, a retirement activity that becomes the majority of my social life when the diabetes demons are eating me, I started doodling a fox. It was a pencil doodle at first. And I was not drawing from life. I was drawing the fox in my head. I suspect it was the fox from Antoine de Saint Exupery’s masterwork, The Little Prince.
Yes, that fox. The wise one that knows about taming little princes, and loving them, and being reminded of them in the color of wheat fields. I began to need that fox as my doodle pen uncovered him on the blank page. There he was. Surprised to see me. Either he was leaping towards me in the picture, or falling down on me from the sky above. I don’t know which. But I realized I had to tame him by drawing him and making him as real as ever an imaginary fox could ever be. You will notice he does not look like a real fox. I did not draw him from a photograph, but from the cartoon eye in my mind where all Paffoonies come from. And this was to be a profound Paffooney… a buffoony cartoony looney Paffooney. It simply had to be, because that is precisely what I always doodle-do.
And so he was a fox. He was my doodlefox. I had tamed him. And then I had to give him color. And, of course, the color had to be orange-red.
And so, there is my fox. Like the Little Prince’s fox he could tell me, “What is essential is invisible to the eye. It is only with the heart that we can see rightly.” And I put him in a post with lyrical and somewhat goofy words to give you a sense of what he means to me, in the same way one might explain what the thrill of the heart feels like when a butterfly’s wing brushes against the back of your hand. Yes, to share the unknowable knowledge and the unfeelable feeling of a doodlefox. A demonstration of precisely what a Paffooney is.
Nobody who wants to be a writer gets by with just writing and never reading anything by anybody else. It is too easy to devolve into some kind of human mushroom that way, thinking only thoughts a mushroom could think, all fungus-like and having no chlorophyll of their own. You never learn to decode other people and other people’s thinking if you don’t read other people’s thoughts crystallized in writing.
And not every other writer is Robert Frost. Or even Jack Frost who thinks he’s Gene Kelly. There has to be some interpretation, some digging for understanding. What did that writer mean when she said political correctness was like a tongue disease? And what does it mean when a commenting troll calls me a nekkid poofter? Is that how he spells “exceptional genius”? I think it is. Trolls are not smart.
I know people have to make an effort to understand me. When I write, I am writing under the delusion that I can produce literary quality off the top of my head. In fact, I can barely produce hair off the top of my head, and it is gray when I do it. See what I did there? It is the kind of joke a surrealist makes, pretending the idiomatic expression you use is to be taken literally when it doesn’t literally make sense. That kind of nonsense is what my readers have to put up with, and probably also the reason why most of them just look at the pictures. If you have to think too hard when you read, your brain could over-heat and your hair could catch fire. I like that kind of purple paisley prose that folds back in on itself and makes you think in curlicues. But most people don’t. Most people don’t have fire-proof hair like I do.
Of course, there is the opposite problem too. Some writers are not hard to understand at all. They only use simple sentences. They only use ideas that lots of other people have used before. You don’t have to think about what they write. You only need to react. They are the reasons that words like “trite”, “hackneyed”, “boring”, and “cliche” exist in English. But simple, boring writing isn’t written by stupid people. Hemingway is like that. Pared down to the basics. No frills. Yet able to yield complex thoughts, insights, and relationships.
Sometimes, it doesn’t even take a word to make the point. For instance, why, in the picture, is Fluttershy trying to drink out of the toilet in the dollhouse bathroom? For that matter, why does a doll house even need a bathroom? Applejack doesn’t even fit in that yellow bathtub. I know. I tried to stuff her in there for this picture. And, as you read this, doesn’t this paragraph tell you a lot about me that you probably didn’t even want to know?
When I am reading the writing of others, I am looking for a cornucopia of things. I want to not only understand their ideas, I want to detect the limping footprints across the murder scene of their paragraphs and come to know the deeper things about them as well. I spent years decoding and trying to understand the writing of preliterate kids in my middle school English classes in order to be able to teach them to write better. And I learned that no writer is a bad writer as long as they are using readable words. I also learned that very few writers are James Joyce or Marcel Proust. Thank God for that! And given enough time I can read anything by anybody and learn something from it. I read a lot. And it may not always make me a better writer to read it, but it always has value. It is always worth doing.
This post is a movie review for Thor : Ragnarok, though I don’t really plan on talking about the movie very much. It was an excellent comic book movie in the same tongue-in-cheek comedy tradition as Guardians of the Galaxy. It made me laugh and made me cheer. It was the best of that kind of movie. But it wasn’t the most important thing that happened that night.
You see, I spent the weekend in the hospital thinking I had suffered a heart attack during the Thanksgiving holiday. I thought I was facing surgery at the very least. I knew I might have had an appointment to play chess with the Grim Reaper. It is a lot to worry about and drain all the fun out of life.
Well, one of the things that happened that day, Tuesday, my first full day out of the hospital and, hopefully, out of the woods over heart attacks, was that I received my new replacement bank card because my old one had a worn out, malfunctioning chip in it. So, I took my three kids to the movie at the cheapest place we could find. I tried to run my bank card for the payment, and it was summarily declined. I had activated it previously during the day, and there was plenty of money in the account compared to the price, but it just wouldn’t take. So I had to call Wells Fargo to find out whatever the new reason was for them to hate me. It turned out that it had already been activated, but a glitch had caused it to decline the charge. While I was talking to the girl from the Wells Fargo help desk, the lady who had gotten her and her husband’s tickets right before us put four tickets to the movie in my hand.
The middle-aged black couple had lingered by the ticket stand before going in to their movie just long enough to see a sad-looking old man with raggedy author’s beard and long Gandalf hair get turned down by the cheap-cinema ticket-taking teenager because the old coot’s one and only bank card was declined. They were moved to take matters into their own hands and paid for our tickets themselves.
That, you see, was the gift from my title. Not so much that we got our movie tickets for free, but that the world still works that way. There are still good people with empathetic and golden hearts willing to step in and do things to make the world a little bit better place. The gift they gave me was the reassurance that, as bad and black as the world full of fascists that we have come to live in has become, it still has goodness and fellow feeling in it. People are still moved to pay things forward and make good on the promise to “love one another”. I did not have a chance to thank them properly. I was on the phone with Wells Fargo girl when it happened. The only thing that couple got out of their good deed was thank-yous from my children and the knowledge that they had done something wonderful. I plan to pay it forward as soon as I have the opportunity. Not out of guilt or obligation, but because I need to be able to feel that feeling too at some point.
I do have one further gift to offer the world.
After we got home from the movie, I opened an email that contained the cover proof for my novel, Magical Miss Morgan. Soon I will have that in print also if I can keep Page Publishing from messing it up at the last moments before printing. It is a novel about what a good teacher is and does. It is the second best thing I have ever written.
Sometimes the gifts that you most desperately need come in unexpected fashion.
(The graphic above should say “Empiricism,” not “Empirism.” Ir is a typo.
Yes, Sir Francis Bacon is at least as interesting and obscure as William Shakespeare. But let me assure you, I can confidently state, “Shakespeare is NOT Bacon!” He is not eggs either… or any other breakfast food. Sir Francis Bacon was the breakfast, the first meal in the great Elizabethan banquet of literature, poetry, and culture. And William Shakespeare is a more important main course, the royal dinner, as it were. But it has to be acknowledged that Bacon was essential to the very existence of William Shakespeare. Breakfast always comes before dinner.
In 1845 a female author by the name of Delia Bacon (nothing suspicious about that coincidence, by the way) put forward an idea that William Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by a group of men under the leadership of Sir Francis Bacon. She thought the group intended to inculcate into English culture an advanced system of politics and philosophy which they themselves could not take credit for publicly. She would later write a book in 1857 called The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded which advanced the notion that the plays were written for Baconian purposes beyond mere theatrical entertainment. Numerous people, including the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson supported her in her quest to find proof, sending her to England to research the crazy conspiracy theories she founded by noting ciphers in the plays, and in the essays of Bacon, that led her to believe all she had to do was dig up the gravestone of Shaksper in the chapel at Stratford to find written proof in Bacon’s own hand that he was, in fact, the author or primary motivator of the plays of William Shakespeare. She spent one cold and creepy night in the chapel, just her and her spade and her crow bar, along with the bones of the Stratford guy, trying to work up the courage to do a bit of grave-robbing… and failing. It is a good story, but very poor archaeology. She was denounced by the literary historians and establishment figures who supported the Stratford guy. They said her scholarship was sloppy, her cipher analysis goofy and unfounded, and her conclusions more questionable than a pig in theatrical make-up. (My words, not theirs. English critic George Henry Townsend was entirely too stuffy and boring to simply be quoted here.)
Now, I, of course, strongly disagree with the Bacon lady. As I said in the very title, “Shakespeare is NOT Bacon.” But I do think there was merit in sniffing out old Frankie’s scent and fingerprints on the whole Shakespeare/Shaksper thing. The Stratford guy was not Shakespeare either. When he died in 1616 there was no public outcry at the loss of England’s most popular poet and playwright. Even King James who was Shakespeare’s number one fan and constant audience member, didn’t mourn the passing of the actor/theater-owner/businessman from Stratford.
Francis Bacon, on the other hand, was a powerful intellect, educated in the ways of science, the law, and government in the Elizabethan age. Bacon gathered other men of powerful intellect and accomplishment at Gray’s Inn to hold debates about things philosophical and things scientifical. It is not unreasonable to imagine that the man who really wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare sat at that table and participated in those debates. And Sir Frankie had good reason to keep lots of this business a secret. There exists evidence that though he was apparently happily married to a fourteen-year-old girl, he did a little bit of swaying toward the other gender too, a thing not too popular with the average Anglican Englishman. He also dabbled a bit in the occult (think witches in Macbeth sort of thing). And his essays indicate a strong correlation to the philosophies and ideals of the German Rosicrucian Movement. In 1593 during a Roman Catholic plot against Queen Elizabeth, Frankie managed to take a position on the investigation that totally offended the old virgin queen. He was on the outs with Liz for the rest of her difficult and anger-management-challenged life. He did rise to prominence under her successor, James I, but never-the-less managed to die amidst total ruin and scandal. There is a lot in Frankie’s life to indicate that he had a direct influence on the content of Shakespeare’s plays. Some of the characters in the plays may actually be, at least in part, based on Frankie himself. But this guy never hung out with the Stratford guy that anyone knows of.
So, if Shakespeare is NOT Bacon, or eggs either… and the Stratford guy isn’t Shakespeare, then who is? Come on! You knew I had a lot more to say about this crazy conspiracy thing, right?
I am, unfortunately, a dedicated conspiracy theorist. No, not the braying, unintelligent kind like Alex Jones who has an unhinged and hidden agenda. More the Indiana Jones kind, seeking the truth no matter where it leads, but always relying on research, science, and creative methods of re-framing the facts in order to reveal truths that other people don’t see even when the answers are right in front of them.
An example of this is my firm belief that everything we think we know about the man known as William Shakespeare is based on an ages-old deception and is basically an unrevealed lie.
Of course, I am not the only literature-obsessed kook who has ever taken up this notion of someone else having written the great works of Shakespeare. I share the opinion with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Walt Whitman, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Dickens, Actor Derek Jacobi, and the great Mark Twain (also not the writer’s real name) .
It is very possible the standard details of the life of William Shakespeare have been fudged just a bit… or maybe quite a lot.
The biggest question that I can see when looking at the man we pretend is the actual author of the plays, is why doesn’t this man look like an author? As brought out in the video, the only example we have of the author’s own handwriting are six signatures from legal documents, three of which come from his last will and testament. And if the name is really William Shakespeare, then the Stratford man misspelled his own name. He wrote it as Shakspere or Shaksper. And the handwriting is atrocious, nothing like the carefully practice signature I sometimes put on my own handwritten work. How does that happen? I have seen signatures by many other authors, both famous and obscure, and nowhere do I see such careless script as what is allegedly the signature of the greatest and most acclaimed writer who ever lived.
The accepted life story of Shaksper doesn’t bear up under scrutiny either. In spite of being a wealthy businessman and mayor, his father can be seen to be provably illiterate, relying on associates and underlings to write the paperwork involved in his business and mayoral rule. There is no proof in the form of enrollment lists or written record of Shaksper having ever enrolled at or attended the school that supposedly taught Stratfordian youths to read and write. His wife and children and grandchildren were also provably illiterate. What other writer has such a lack of effect on his own family?
And Shaksper’s will details everything he owned and left to others at his death. Nowhere is there a mention of plays, manuscripts, poetry, or even books. The greatest author who ever lived owned no books at all? He was provably wealthy enough to buy books, and public libraries did not exist back then. How then did he demonstrate such knowledge of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, as well as the functioning of royal courts both in England and abroad? How did he get so many details right about places in Italy and Europe which he had never visited or seen with his own eyes? Something is definitely missing.
It is true that everything mentioned is merely circumstantial evidence. And yet, if all circumstantial evidence leans in only one direction, then isn’t the conclusion probably sound?
Do you not see the lines of the mask in this portrait?
But if Shaksper, the Stratford man, did not write the masterful literary works he has been given credit for, then who did? And why did he let the credit go to someone else?
Ah, I am betting you are beginning to smell a multi-part essay brewing. I mean to tell you who I think is under the mask, who it was I believe actually wrote under the pen name of William Shakespeare.
Despite my skepticism about the accepted wisdom in regard to the historical William Shakespeare, I do deeply love the body of work that is Shakespeare. My most favorite play is The Tempest, the final play in the canon. I also have read and loved As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Othello,and King Lear. I know that is not all of the plays, but that is probably more than most people have read. And of course, as an English major in college, and later as a teacher, I have actually analyzed, compared, studied, and taught some of these plays. So, the Shakespeare I know is the Shakespeare of the writer’s own mind, his communicated wit and wisdom, imagination and intellect.
And I do not have any disdain or disrespect to give the Stratford guy. To say that, in the Elizabethan world, the actor son of a tradesman with only a grammar school education could not have been the mind behind the literary masterworks is foolish. The Stratford guy owned and operated the Globe theater at a time when “the play was the thing”. All of London society, rich and poor, gloried in the theater, and Shakespeare did for Elizabethan plays what Babe Ruth did for baseball. He was a good enough business man to make himself a decent fortune. Although, apparently, this world-shaking author didn’t spend any of his money on owning books, which in my experience is extremely rare among writers. His life, bound up in an urban existence that never traveled outside of the country also somehow produced great works that were set in places in Europe, especially Italy, that described those settings in accurate detail. As a working actor, he also apparently had the time to study law and somehow learn the inner workings of the royal courts of more than one country. And the plots were not original. He took existing stories that already were a part of European literature and lore and wove them into rich tapestries of human striving, laughable foibles, and a deep understanding of basic human character. But I do have doubts that the businessman and actor from Stratford was the real writer of the plays.
I have already told you that I don’t believe Sir Francis Bacon was secretly Shakespeare. Christopher Marlowe wasn’t either. And I have unsuccessfully made a case against Shakspere, the Stratford guy. So who could possibly be the real William Shakespeare? Well, I am not going to be able to make a decent case for him in the 100 words that I have left to end this essay with. So there has to be more to come. (And stop screaming obscenities at the computer screen. I am going to reveal the name before the end of this essay. And I promise not to make my case for him in coming days too boring and horrible.) I have to show why I believe that the true heart of Shakespeare could only have beaten within the body of Edward deVere, the Earl of Oxford.
And what does this oil painting signify? It’s called “The Madonna of the Golden Door.” But the door is obviously made of brown wood, surrounded by all the gold paint the doofy artist could afford at the time.
And is this a painting of a naked young girl, or a shirtless boy with long hair? And how can there be an ocean in the background if the painting was done in Iowa, as far away from the ocean in every direction as you can get in North America?
And no explanation of this is worth the time it would take to explain.
Are they green because they are aliens? Or do they just eat too many leafy vegetables?
One of the models in this picture didn’t show up to pose for this picture… but his clothes did?
So, maybe this post is geared toward artworks that Mickey doesn’t reveal very often because they show some of his mistakes and tendency to bad judgments. Yeah,, that’ll do, unless he decides to tell us the real reasons at some later time.
Mike Murphy and Blueberry Bates have gone back in time to a year Jesus might’ve walked the Earth. It is a digital art practice using a colored pencil drawing, several photos of things like hair and sackcloth clothing, and a background that is really a train station but fuzzed up to look like a temple. I used digital tools to put it together rather than Photoshop.
I am certainly no expert on the Golden Age of Comics. I was, in fact, born the year that the Golden Age ended. I am a child of the Silver Age (1956 to the early 1970s) and those were the comics I grew up with. But I admit to a fascination with the initial creation of the characters I love, including Batman, Superman, the Flash, Captain America, the Phantom, Steve Canyon, Wonder Woman and numerous others who were first put on the comic book pages in the Golden Age. And being subject to comic book prices that zoomed upward from a dollar an issue, I was bedazzled by the ten cent price on old comics.
Comic books owe their creation to the popular newspaper comic strips from the Depression era and WWII wartime. Originally, comic strips were gathered and printed on cheap paper. Dick Tracy, Prince Valiant, Terry and the Pirates, Flash Gordon, and other adventure strips would lead to the war comics and hero-centered comics that would morph into superhero comics.
Some of the artwork in Golden Age comics leaves a lot to be desired. Especially original, straight to comic book publications that were produced fast and furiously by publishers who would open one week, produce three issues. and go out of business three weeks later. But in the mad scramble, some truly great artists formed the start of their illustrious careers, Will Eisner, Hal Foster, Milt Caniff, and Bill Elder learned to master their craft in the newspaper strips, and all later created comic books and graphic novels. True geniuses like Jack “King” Kirby and Bob Kane and Jack Davis grew directly from comic book studio madhouses into comic-book-artist immortality.
As with most things that have a Golden Age, the truth was that later comic book eras were superior in most ways. But this Golden Age was the foundational age for an American art-form that I truly love. So, flaws and warts are overlooked. And some of these old ten cent books on super-cheap paper are worth huge amounts of money if you still have a rare one in mint condition. Ah, there’s the rub for a manic old collector guy like me.
Most of the Golden Age comic book images used for this post were borrowed from the ComicsintheGoldenAge Twitter page @ComicsintheGA. If you love old comics like I do, you should definitely check it out.
The question before me now is, “What do you know, and how do you know it for certain?”
Well, I really don’t know anything. How do I know that I don’t know anything? Well, Socrates always told everyone who would listen that he didn’t know anything for certain, and he is obviously much smarter than I am. So, being super-stupid by comparison, I don’t even know as much as Socrates.
So, like Socrates, I need to ask questions. But who will I ask? I can look at the picture above for answers, and I can ask you, the reader, the questions.
The picture is one of the most favorite ones I have ever drawn. By that I mean it is one of the pictures I drew with colored pencils that I like the best. It is, therefore, basically a self portrait of things inside my silly head.
Do the soldiers look familiar to you? If they do, it is probably because, like me, you have seen the soldiers from Disney’s Babes in Toyland. Hopefully they are just generic enough that Disney wont sue me for modeling this fantasy on something I saw in their copyrighted movie. I didn’t intentionally copy anything, and I have never knowingly made a single dime off of this picture. So, they don’t need to sue me, right?
Okay, those weren’t Socratic questions. They were leading and focused questions. So, let’s start the Socratic stuff.
Do you see anything in the picture that is innocent and childlike? Could this be illustrating a childish fear of the darkness? Did you notice the darkness they are marching towards on the left of the picture? Could this also be showing a progression towards maturity? Are the children and the soldiers not approaching that darkness… whatever it might be? Are they not getting more prepared to face the darkness as they get closer to it? The weapon pointed straight at the darkness is the bugle. Does the bugle, being an instrument for announcing something in combat, not have some symbolic meaning here? Does the darkness they are approaching not represent something like death? Does the boy with the drum suggest how we might deal with the darkneness in our own too-near future?
Doing digital art is fascinating. Once you draw a face and head, you totally turn it, adjust it, add new details, change eye color; in fact, you can turn it into a completely different picture with the same face… or, almost the same.
Ariel’s New Fall BlanketAriel in the RainWaking Up and Looking at MeIntensity
Reading Other Writers
Nobody who wants to be a writer gets by with just writing and never reading anything by anybody else. It is too easy to devolve into some kind of human mushroom that way, thinking only thoughts a mushroom could think, all fungus-like and having no chlorophyll of their own. You never learn to decode other people and other people’s thinking if you don’t read other people’s thoughts crystallized in writing.
And not every other writer is Robert Frost. Or even Jack Frost who thinks he’s Gene Kelly. There has to be some interpretation, some digging for understanding. What did that writer mean when she said political correctness was like a tongue disease? And what does it mean when a commenting troll calls me a nekkid poofter? Is that how he spells “exceptional genius”? I think it is. Trolls are not smart.
I know people have to make an effort to understand me. When I write, I am writing under the delusion that I can produce literary quality off the top of my head. In fact, I can barely produce hair off the top of my head, and it is gray when I do it. See what I did there? It is the kind of joke a surrealist makes, pretending the idiomatic expression you use is to be taken literally when it doesn’t literally make sense. That kind of nonsense is what my readers have to put up with, and probably also the reason why most of them just look at the pictures. If you have to think too hard when you read, your brain could over-heat and your hair could catch fire. I like that kind of purple paisley prose that folds back in on itself and makes you think in curlicues. But most people don’t. Most people don’t have fire-proof hair like I do.
Sometimes, it doesn’t even take a word to make the point. For instance, why, in the picture, is Fluttershy trying to drink out of the toilet in the dollhouse bathroom? For that matter, why does a doll house even need a bathroom? Applejack doesn’t even fit in that yellow bathtub. I know. I tried to stuff her in there for this picture. And, as you read this, doesn’t this paragraph tell you a lot about me that you probably didn’t even want to know?
When I am reading the writing of others, I am looking for a cornucopia of things. I want to not only understand their ideas, I want to detect the limping footprints across the murder scene of their paragraphs and come to know the deeper things about them as well. I spent years decoding and trying to understand the writing of preliterate kids in my middle school English classes in order to be able to teach them to write better. And I learned that no writer is a bad writer as long as they are using readable words. I also learned that very few writers are James Joyce or Marcel Proust. Thank God for that! And given enough time I can read anything by anybody and learn something from it. I read a lot. And it may not always make me a better writer to read it, but it always has value. It is always worth doing.
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