Catch a Falling Star

January 16, 2023 · 4:38 am

Thinking Naked

I intend to write a book of essays about naturism and nudism, my attempts as a teacher to avoid becoming a practitioner while still teaching, and my eventual yielding to the urge to become what I avoided becoming for too long.

Now I know from my own family and my various communities over the years that nudists and naturists are generally considered to be a category of crazy people. That was especially a pointed observation in Iowa during the winter time when I was a boy in the 60s.

Of course, it was the 60s. And even though the hippies and other allegedly naked crazy people lived in far-away California and far-away New York, and closer, but still far-away Chicago, there were people we all gossiped about that would gad about their house in the all-together. Apparently, we knew because somebody, probably an old-lady gossip gatherer, had been looking through somebody else’s back windows. And some of those local crazy people turned out to be ordinary farmers, bankers, and even members of the Belle City town council. Really, the councilman and his wife are the reason I am calling the town by the fictionalized version of its name. Not because I am trying to protect the people’s identities, which you can figure out with very limited research, but because the old-lady gossip gatherer may have fictionalized what she allegedly saw through their back window and talked about at morning coffee in the Uptown Cafe.

But you see me here in a drawing of myself as a nude boy because from very early on in life, I felt the urge to give myself the freedom of costume… or lack thereof… as the councilman and his wife obviously gave to themselves in the privacy of their own home.

I was a big fan of skinny-dipping, and spending alone time nude in the woods south of town and the tree-lined pastures down by the creek to the west of town. I enjoyed being naked, although I dreaded the Devil finding out what I had already told Jesus in private, and then being condemned to Hell to burn for eternity… although, according to the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch in the Encyclopedia Britannica at school, I would still get to be naked.

This, then, will be a book both humorous and potentially sad about naked people and why naked can be good. I will include in this book works of art that I have made portraying people who are intentionally naked and happy about it. So, if your eyeballs will catch on fire for seeing naked people in artwork, your eyeballs should already be producing prodigious amounts of smoke, if not open flames. You better stop looking before you are blind. Some people’s Old Testament God is obviously much crankier than the God Jesus told me about when I talked to him in private.

I do intend to make fun of people who like to be nude in this book. But I will also make fun of myself for being one of those people. And I don’t intend to spare people who wear clothes all the time from a little bit of satire either. (Really, Mrs. Simms? You made Richard wear a swimsuit in the bathtub until he was twenty?)

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, nudes, Paffooney

Tagged as Essay on nudism

January 16, 2023 · 3:13 am

Reading Bag of Bones

This is not a book review. I did finish reading this book in a 3-hour-end-of-the-book reading orgy, spending an hour last night, and two more early in the morning before the rest of my family was awake.

This is certainly not a book review. But I did read a Stephen King book, 1998’s Bag of Bones, which I picked up from the dollar sale shelves at Half Price Books. And I did love the story.

………………………………………………………………………This is not a book review. Instead, I want to talk about what a novelist can learn and reflect on by meta-cogitating over what this book reveals about King’s work habits and style and author’s voice.

Mike Noonan, the protagonist, is a novelist who writes books that routinely land in the numbers 10 through 15 slots in the New York Times Bestseller List. Obviously, this first-person narrative is coming directly out of King’s own writing experience. But, remember, this is not a book review. I am discussing what I have learned about how King puts a story together.

King sets a back-story for this novel that digs deep into the geographica and historica of the city in Maine where the story is set. The literal bag of bones revealed in the book’s climax is almost a hundred years old. And he takes a compellingly realistic tour back in time to the turn of the Twentieth Century more than once to reveal who the undead characters are and why they do what they do. One thing that makes a writer, a novelist, truly solid is his ability to set the scene, to grow the story out of the background in the most organic and realistic way possible. But this is not a book review. I am saying that King always does this with his books. And if you wish to write at that level, you must do that too. I know I am sincerely trying.

At the end of the story, he clearly tells the reader that he learned from Thomas Hardy that “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones”. So, he is definitely aware that a character is a construct that has to be crafted from raw materials. It takes a master craftsman to build one with the right words to make it live and breathe on the page. He does it masterfully in this book with several characters. The protagonist, the beautiful young love interest, the love interest’s charming three-year-old daughter who is nearly slain in a horrific manner at the end of the book… The living villain is a well-crafted bag of bones, as is the ghost, the actual bag of bones in the story. But this is not a book review. Most of his books, at least the ones I have read, have the same sort of masterful characters.

There is so much more to be learned about novel writing from this book. He literally shows you how ideas are captured, how they are developed into stories, how you overcome “writer’s block”, and Noonan’s book he is writing within this book is even used as an example of how to poetically advance the plot. But this is not a book review. You should read this book. It is a very good and scary piece of work. But you should read it because it shows us how to write and do it like a master.

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Filed under horror writing, insight, inspiration, NOVEL WRITING, writing teacher

Tagged as Bag of Bones, Stephen King

January 15, 2023 · 3:49 am