“Don’t you actually mean nuts and bolts?” someone is surely going to say. Oh, yes, I misspelled that little item on purpose. This is another inane post about the writing process and trying to improve my “brand” with my blog. It is something I have no earthly idea how it works or how to go about it. So I often have to go back and think about the nuts and bolts of how you put this stuff together and try like heck to figure out what I am doing wrong.
Doofy Fuddbugg here is an example of what a “Nolt” is.
So, the problem is, while the blog as a whole has been gaining momentum, my blog traffic is down for this month. People are not viewing and reading my actual stuff and nonsense as much as they were in the other months besides February. So I have to look again at what works and why it works.
A lot of my work generates interest from the real world outside of my stupid little head because of the artwork. I am really probably better at drawing colored pencil Paffooneys than I am at the constant yadda-yadda-yadda of trying to write humor. Pictures like Mr. Fuddbugg here draw people in better than anything else I can post. Of course, the artwork I post from my favorite cartoonists and comic artists of the past, like Wally Wood and Rumiko Takahashi draw far more views than my own artwork does. This is due to the undeniable fact that they are better known and better at it than I am.
And both of those artists are well known for the “butts” that are in their works. Yes, nudes and naked pictures increase your blog traffic. Two of my top ten posts of the past two years are Be Naked More (https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2015/12/20/be-naked-more/) and Naked and Nude (https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2015/03/04/naked-and-nude/). (Sorry for the poor link quality, but my computer is still having brain farts and keeps shrinking stuff and blowing stuff up at random, so I cannot, for the moment, make proper links.) So, I can probably boost my blog traffic by posting another nude I have never posted before, even though it may make it impossible to share this on Facebook.
This picture is actually a very complicated thing to post. I have issues with things like sexuality and nudity because I was assaulted as a child. And some of my nude drawings involve real-life models whose privacy I don’t want to invade. (Yes, I had a real Gryphon pose nude for this picture.) But this picture is old, having been created during my wild days as a grad-school college nerd. Adding the “nude” tag to this post will undoubtedly draw in viewers. (There really do seem to be a lot of people out there who want to look at naked Gryphons.) And I am not ashamed at having drawn this pencil-piece. It brings back lots of grand and glorious memories, though probably not the ones you think I mean.
Finally, I may need to get more aggressively insulting. It seems to be the thing to do to create political humor with the impending Presidential Election coming up between the Wicked Witch of Wall Street and the Racist Orange King.
The Orange King is very, very HYUGE! but his hands are small.
But there are difficulties in pulling that one off. I mean, I spent a lifetime learning how to love the unlovable in the classroom because all students are able to learn and we owe them all, as teachers, the best education we can give them. (Believe me, you will have a better life because I spent my teaching career trying to iron out the stupid from the laundry basket of Texas education.) So I will have to settle for a more serene and gentle sort of political wit (if I may be allowed one last oxymoron). Because I agree with Neal Gaiman on the subject of Political Correctness.
There’s my two cents, such as it is. Four cents after inflation. I have had my say about the Butts and Nolts of this essay. And if that’s not enough to explain it, then feel free to call me names in the comments and look at some of my other recent posts that nobody is reading so you can see how terrible those are too. And thank you for actually reading the whole post.
Naked Innocence
To be clear, I will have to write a post called Naked Experience to go with this post. It is a William Blake style of thing. You know, that English Romantic Poet guy who was into drawing naked people even more than me? The writer of Songs of Innocence and Experience? You know, this stuff;
Well, maybe you don’t know. But Blake gave the world the metaphor of the innocent lamb and the tyger of experience (tyger is his spelling, not mine, and it didn’t blow up the spell checker, even though it made the thing unhappy with me again). There is a certain something I have learned about nakedness that I mean to innocently convey. I learned it from anatomy drawing class and spending time with nudists. Naked is not evil. Naked is not pornography. Nakedness, itself, is a very good thing.
At this point the avid clothing-wearers among you are probably saying to yourself, “This guy is nuts! If God had wanted us to be nude, then we wouldn’t have been born with clothes on.” And I must admit, I cannot argue with logic like that.
But on a more serious note, I believe nudity is a fundamentally essential part of the nature of art. After all, pictures of naked people are a central part of what people have been drawing since they first started etching them with charcoal on cavern walls. And all art, including this blog, is about the human experience. What it means to be human. What it feels like to be alive on this Earth and able to feel.
And there is nothing sinister and immoral in drawing nudes to portray that fact. I am trying to show metaphorically the music of existence, the pace, the symmetry, the musical score… It isn’t focused on the private bits, what some call the naughty parts, even when those things are present in the picture. “How dare that naughty Mickey show the naked back end of that butterfly! It ought to have pants on at least!” Yes, I am making a mockery of that outrage itself. I am not a pornographer. These pictures were not created to engender any prurient interests. These pictures are part of Blake’s lamb. They will not bite you. Though blue-nosed people who wish to control what others think may very well bite me for daring to say so.
I have posted a lot of writing and artwork on this blog that I held for the longest time to be completely private and personal. I hardly ever showed any of it to anybody before I posted it here. But I am old. I no longer have secrets. I am capable of telling you everything even though I have never met most of you in real life. And I have no shame. I have become comfortable with emotional and intellectual nudity. And when I am dead, the body I have kept hidden from the world for so long will be no more. It’s just a thought. It’s a naked thought. And it is completely innocent.
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Filed under artists I admire, artwork, commentary, humor, nudes, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as nudes, William Blake