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Mangled Metaphors and Purple Paisley Prose
I have rather regularly been revising and editing old writing. One thing I have discovered is that I am capable of the most gawd-awful convoluted sentences filled with mangled metaphors and ideas that can only be followed while doing mental back-flips or managing miracles of interpretation. That last sentence is a perfect example of purple paisley prose. Paisley, in case you didn’t know this, is a printed pattern on clothing or other cloth that makes an intricate design out of the basic twisted teardrop shape borrowed from Persian art. The basic motif, the teardrop shape, is a leaf or vegetable design often referred to as the Persian pickle. I write like that. You can pick out the Persian pickles in this very paragraph. Alliterations, mangled metaphors, rhyming words, sound patterns, the occasional literary allusion, personification, bungles, jungles, and junk. “How can you actually write like that?” you ask. Easy. I think like that.
To make a point about mangled metaphors, let me visit a couple of recent scenes in novels I have been working on;
From The Bicycle Wheel Genius; page 189
Mike Murphy and Frosty Anderson sat at the kitchen table eating a batch of Orben’s pancakes, the twentieth try at pancakes, and nearly edible. Mike could eat anything with maple syrup on it… well, maybe not dog poop, but these were slightly better than dog poop.
From The Magical Miss Morgan; page 7
Blue looked at Mike and grinned. It was an impish and fully disarming grin. It made Mike do whatever Blue said, even being willing to eat a lump of dog poop if she asked him to, though she would never ask him to.
So, here’s the thing. Why is there a repetition of the dog-poop-eating metaphor? In one case it is Mike Murphy expressing in metaphorical terms his love of maple syrup. In the other, it is Mike Murphy expressing his love of Blueberry Bates’ dimpled grin. He is a somewhat unique character, but why would anybody associate love with eating dog poop? I don’t know. I just wrote the dang things.
I like to take a convoluted plot and complicate it with complex sentences and numerous running gags, with a seasoned-sauce of mangled metaphors poured on top like gravy. I will use sentences like this either to make you laugh, or give you a headache. I’m almost sure it is one of those. So if you have gotten this far in this post without a headache, then I guess it must be funny.
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Further Digital Art Practice
Drawn from a random model on Instagram.
I redrew this old drawing in pen and ink and colored pencil as a digital art piece.
Drawn from an old scrapbook picture of a catalog swimsuit model.
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Tess of the D’Urbervilles (by Thomas Hardy)
I decided I wanted to be a novelist because of Charles Dickens. I loved the way he told a story with vivid characters, rising and falling crises, and story arcs that arrive at a happily-ever-after, or a how-sad-but-sweet-the-world-is ultimate goal. Sometimes he reached both destinations with the same story, like in David Copperfield or The Old Curiosity Shop. I have wanted to write like that since I read The Old Curiosity Shop in 9th Grade.
Thomas Hardy has a lot in common with Chuck. I mean, more than just being old Victorian coots. Hardy knows the Wessex countryside, Blackmoor and Casterbridge with the depth and understanding that Dickens bestows on London. Hardy can delineate a character as clearly and as keenly as Dickens, as shown by Diggory Venn, the Reddleman in Return of the Native, or Tess Durbyfield in the novel I am reading at the moment. These characters present us with an archetypal image and weave a story around it that speaks to themes with soul-shaking depth. Whereas Dickens will amuse and make us laugh at the antics of the Artful Dodger or Mr. Dick or Jerry Cruncher from a Tale of Two Cities, Hardy makes us feel the ache and the sadness of love wrecked by conflict with the corrupt and selfish modern world. Today I read a gem of a scene with the three milkmaids, Izz, Retty, and Marian looking longingly out the window at the young gentleman Angel Clare. Each wants the young man to notice her and fall in love with her. Sad-faced Izz is a dark-haired and brooding personality. Round-faced Marian is more jolly and happy-go-lucky. Young Retty is entirely bound up by shyness and the uncertainty of youth. Yet each admits to her crush and secret hopes. Tess, meanwhile, overhears all of it, all the time knowing that Angel is falling in love with her. And worse yet, she has sworn to herself never to let another man fall in love with her because of the shameful way Alec D’Urberville took advantage of her, a quaint old phrase that in our time would mean date rape. There is such bittersweet nectar to be had in the characterizations and plots of these old Victorian novels. They are more than a hundred years old, and thus, not easy to read, but worth every grain of effort you sprinkle upon it. I am determined now to finish rereading Tess of the Durbervilles, and further determined to learn from it, even if it kills me.
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Lucid Dreaming
The PTSD I have experienced since the age of ten has in many ways altered my perceptions. I also was gifted with an abnormal body chemistry due to dioxin-based farm chemicals of the 1970s that have since all been banned. Being on edge and paranoid all the time because of what might happen if you wander into the shadows or go into a public bathroom alone where other, bigger people might be lurking… You know there are real monsters out there. And a hyperactive imagination can make you start seeing things that aren’t really there. You may also be plagued by night terrors and nightmares.
No child should ever have some of the dreams I have had.
Being stalked by a huge duck with human dentures in his monstrous mouth… Toys that play with their owner…
Walking skeletons that you saw for the first time in Ray Harryhausen’s movie Jason and the Argonauts, but chase you around the winter streets of Rowan, Iowa in early February, seeking to separate you from body parts… And you are naked in the snow…
Sentient pumpkins taking control of your relatives and attempting to make them judge you and send you to Hell…
But I learned from monster dreams early in childhood that all you need to do is realize that you are dreaming. If you know it is a dream, you can take control of everything in the dream. I learned to explode vampires and walking skeletons with finger guns that shot lasers, explosive bullets, or disintegration rays.
I not only saved myself by blowing up dream monsters, I learned to deal with those embarrassing school dreams. If I had to stand naked in front of Mr. Lyon’s seventh-grade Math Class, I could make everybody else in the room naked too. Starting with big old Kevin, the class bully. Dang! The girls too. Some of them screamed and tried to cover themselves. A lot of them, though, sat there like that and giggled at each other.
Examining yourself naked in the mirror of your dreams makes it possible to realize every advantage and vulnerability that you possess. I learned the depths and power of my imagination. I could weave dreams into stories where I was the creator of the plot. It was better than real life… even if it started out as a nightmare.
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The Road Home
This sofa-sized oil Paffooney is called the Road Home because it was painted from a photograph looking west on US Highway 3 towards Rowan, Iowa, the little town I grew up in. I painted it when I lived by myself in South Texas, believing that one day I would go back to Iowa to live out the rest of my life. Here’s where today’s post gets mortifyingly morbid. Yes, I know that last expression is repetitively repetitive, but that little bit of alliteration was necessary to lighten the load of this non-laughing part of my post. I am not going to make it. I am stuck in a North Dallas metroplex that I sincerely do not love. My kids are not done growing up there. I have family and roots there. I have them in Iowa, too, but like a Sioux warrior, I belong to my wife’s tribe once I married into it. I am old. I have six incurable diseases and I am a cancer survivor since 1983. Every day of life is a new miracle. but the miracles are running out. My COPD makes my chest hurt, and I have trouble breathing, especially at night. The house is rotting away around us, courtesy of the housing bubble we bought it in back in 2005. Doing what maintenance and repair that I can makes my arthritic body ache intolerably, more than Aleve can cure. I will not go back to drugs like Vioxx or Celebrex and let them kill me to enrich the pharmaceutical industry. My diabetes has made it almost impossible to eat without enduring a round of high blood sugar and nausea. I do not look forward to either insulin or the possibility of losing an arm or leg. So, if I get out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, it will probably be by curling up my toes and going bye-bye, followed by a cremation. I would like to have my ashes scattered in Iowa, but the family will probably find flush toilets much cheaper. Ah well… dark part done. Now for the part about going home.
The reason I feel uplifted, and crazily feel justified in calling this post “humor” is because I have already won my battle. I was a teacher for 31 years. I touched more than 2,500 lives, some of them profoundly. I have almost raised three wonderful, talented children. I have written and published three books, and if I can scratch out enough time, I have at least two more ready to be published. I have shared what little wisdom I have acquired along with a lot of really goofy artwork I have done in this blog, and, although I used to be the best author no one had ever read, people are actually reading and liking my books. In my stories, I have told about growing up in Iowa, about being a teacher, about being a friend, about being in love, about facing fear, and ultimately about being able to laugh about all of it. In my fiction, I have already gone home, repeatedly. When I get my cheapo flushing-funeral, that will not be me. I will be in the cornfields under the blue Iowa sky with a threat of thunderstorms in the distance. And while I may cry a little bit, because what is life worth without some of that? I will be mostly laughing and laughing and laughing. Because life may end in death, but nothing about it is sad if you don’t let it be. I like to delude myself into thinking the world is a little bit better now than when I got here, and I pretend that I have had something to do with that. The game is won. Everything else is just gravy! (Sorry about that. I do realize that gravy goes on mashed potatoes, not a game, but mangled metaphors are one of my specialties.)
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Doofy Dog Doings
I noted before that I have so far used an alarming number of dog-poop jokes in my creative writing projects. (All right, two instances may not really be alarming, but it does indicate that I am thinking about dog poop way too much.) I guess the reason for it is that I have a dog, and she is not a genius dog. She is smarter than I can cope with, but she only beats me at chess once out of every thirty games. She inspired today’s Paffooney, so let me show you the picture before I tell you everything that is wrong with my little dog.
Okay, my dog looks nothing like this. She is a Cardigan Corgi, a dog bred to chase and kill barn rats, or to protect the baby’s crib when the adults are not in the room. She is highly possessive, and she considers me her property. So, here’s where the dog poop comes in. I have to walk her twice a day, and I have to take a Walmart bag with me to pick up the poop in the park (even though it is obvious that no one else in our neighborhood does it despite the posted law). And it turns out that this is not enough to keep her from pooping in the house. The little poop factory can make as many as five times in one day. And even worse, she will poop in punishment if we commit the crime of leaving her alone to go somewhere. We get back from the dollar movie and she has pooped on the dining room carpet, or in front of my bedroom door, somewhere where she knows I will see it and get mad. She doesn’t care if she gets punished in return. She is satisfied if she made her point. So I am drowning in dog poop on a daily basis. It’s no wonder it’s on my mind and I end up writing about it. God help me, of all the things to have on your mind, I have dog poop on mine!
If you are wondering about the rat in the picture, there is a rat part to my doggy nightmare. We live near a city park where there are lots of storm drains and rain gutters for rats to inhabit. And there are throngs of rats. When we kept the dog in the yard on a chain, the rats would come by daily to laugh at her before coming into the house and gnawing rat holes into the walls and ceilings and eat the glues out of the spines of many of my books. So rats are a part of the reason she now gets to live in the house. My wife goes ballistic from seeing or hearing rats. But I think they still laugh at her as they come in anyway. It’s just that they stay quieter with her around and my wife doesn’t see or hear them. So, it would be problem solved if only the poop problem would go away.
Here’s her actual portrait. Sorry if it is too scary for children and the faint of heart.
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Maxfield Parrish Pictures
Much of what I draw is inspired by Maxfield Parrish, the commercial artist who created stunningly beautiful work for advertisers in the 1920’s and 30’s, and went on to paint murals and masterworks until the 1960’s. He is noted for his luminous colors, especially Parrish Blue, and can’t be categorized under any existing movement or style of art. No one is like Maxfield Parrish. And I don’t try to be either, but I do acknowledge the debt I owe to him. You should be able to see it in these posts, some of mine, and some of his.
Mine; (In the Land of Maxfield Parrish)
His; (Daybreak)
Mine; (Wings of Imagination)
His; (Egypt)
Believe me, I know who wins this contest. I am not ashamed to come in second. I will never be as great as he was. But I try, and that is worth something. It makes me happy, at any rate.
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Recent Acts of Evil Digital Art-Making
These are pictures I wasted time making first in colored pencil, or photographs of dolls, or coffee-shop backgrounds, and then taking my computer stylus and AI tools to them.
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Catch a Falling Star 