I'm sure you've heard of this, but JUST IN CASE.

Wode, the first art fragrance from Boudicca

As a nice little coda to all the cancer horseshit from months past, I give you this:

Wouldn't it be funny if Virginia Woolf, Ayn Rand, Willa Cather, Anaïs Nin and Anne Sexton were doing the Charleston together?


I THOUGHT SO TOO.

For Chels - He's an otherworldly Jewish vampire hunter with nothing left to lose. She's a man-hating, red-headed museum curator who don't take no shit from nobody. They fight crime!

For me - He's an oversexed ninja librarian -- She's a brilliant Bolivian widow trying to make a difference in a man's world. They fight crime!

For Alex - He's a witless Catholic barbarian who hides his scarred face behind a mask. She's a mentally unstable, antique-collecting bounty hunter with someone else's memories. They fight crime!



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Related: does anyone ELSE feel like the writers of Heroes just refreshed and refreshed and refreshed "They Fight Crime" until all 5 seasons wrote themselves?

According to my dream last night, my subconscious is primarily concerned with the following:

• The cleanliness of my socks, and what my friend Brett (who I have not seen in over three years) thinks of them


• "Cheaters" in Mario Kart


• The availability of piña colada Slurpees, and BottleCaps


• Passionate midnight rendezvous

And, when I woke up this morning, the absolute first words that popped into my head were "Nu, Pogodi," which after Googling, I found was a Russian cartoon that I have never even seen before, but I know I am aware of its name due to it showing up in the "related videos" pane of the Vinni Puh episodes, on YouTube.

So, it is pretty much business as usual around these parts.

For the first time, in a long time, I am proud of this country.

While reading Guy Trebay's latest over at the NYT, Backstage, It's Down to Bare Essentials, and while watching the season finale of Project Runway, I was reminded again of the very different way you come to see people After Art Classes™*.

Trebay writes,

What is strangest, perhaps, ... is that being around rooms filled with unclad women and men is anything but stimulating. At least this is true for people in the fashion business, who are either puritanically decorous about nudity or so involved with clothes that often they can barely see the naked limbs for all the glorious weeds. And it is true for me.

And me.

Living here in Utah, and having many friends that go to BYU, I cannot count the number of times I have had to field questions regarding the nude figure drawing classes held regularly at UVU or at the Springville Art Museum.

For those of you who aren't aware, it is still 1825 in my neck of the woods, and the sight of the milky mile above the knee is still cause for some alarm in certain circles. Cover your shame! Hue, and also cry.

Can we just get something straight? Figure drawing classes are the most un-erotic places on the whole earth. For all the nudity, the models' curvaceous forms and wiggly bits may as well be built out of legos. Because that is exactly what nude models are: building blocks. When you are looking at a nude, charcoal in hand, newsprint at the ready, all you are doing is trying to figure out how they are put together so you can reconstruct them on the page.

Figure drawing classes are like being at the doctor's office for a physical, and while the nurse might be hot, there is really nothing exciting about having a gloved finger jammed up your inguinal canal.

"Um... I felt like a table lamp."

So says my friend Amy who has modeled for the past two semesters. Her roommate, Megan, concurs. "You don't even feel like a person. You're like... a statue -- no, you're like a cow skull with an old tin pitcher. You're a still life -- except, after you're done you get to walk around and see the people who really botched it, or who really nailed your likeness, right down to your weird, saggy, left boob."

And can I just say, from the business side of the art-board, that your saggy left boob is really all we're looking at. And actually, less the boob, and more the sag. How will I draw your sag? How does it compare to your perk? How will I contrast the two? Chalk on tone? Or erase out the highlights? Scumble or Smudge? Your boob, real and spectacular as you may think, is hardly ever entering into the picture. And that goes for you, Mr. Prince-Albert-sans-can, too. Keep your pants on, for all I care, just show me your core shadows.


*I get the feeling that this could be a regular topic here. "After Art Classes: a look at the way art education forever warps your world view."

At the bottom of this list , there are some holidays I think you all could prolly get down with.

Man, what is with Amazon not having any copies of Graham Greene's Heart of the Matter? I swear this is one of his more popular titles. On Alibris there are like, hundreds of editions.

Last night I was watching the Platinum Edition of Sleeping Beauty (my favorite Disney), particularly for the special feature on Eyvind Earle*. And dude! That fool financed the beginning of his career by getting on his damn bicycle in Los Angeles, and then riding to Manhattan. In 42 days. Stopping everyday, to paint the landscapes around him. 42 paintings, in 42 days. Which he then submitted to a gallery in New York, got a show... and sold them all. Unbelievable.

Bassey Ikpi just sent me a message on Facebook telling me I had the freshest name.

That's a terrific way to start a day.

I keep mixing up Edith Wharton and Evelyn Waugh.

Speaking of Anne Fadiman, in Ex Libris she recounts her experiences reading Carl van Vechten's The Tiger in the House, while researching an article on cats:

"[Vechten's book's] subject was cats -- cats in literature, history, music, art and so on. I was writing an article on cats myself, and I'd read several recent compendia of cat lore that covered much of the same territory. The authors of those books made only one assumption about their readers: that they were interested in cats. Van Vechten, by contrast, assumed that his readers were on intimate terms with classical mythology and the Bible; that they could read music (he included part of the score from Domenico Scarlatti's "Cat's Fugue"): and that they were familiar with hundreds of writers, artists, and composers whom he referred by last name only, as if Sacchini and Teniers needed as little introduction as Bach and Rembrandt."

At the moment I am in the middle of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and thinking that Eco and Van Vechten would have been fast friends. We always joke about reading so-and-so with a dictionary at the ready, but I am opting for Wikipedia as not only does Eco expect me to be familiar with literally dozens of historical, scientific, and metaphysical references per page, I think he's operating on the notion that I also understand their individual significance, inner-workings, and complex interactions with... everything else in the whole world. Kabbalah, the Templars, Physics, the topographical layout of Paris, computer operating systems ca. 1988, etc.

Sometimes reading Eco is a bit like looking into the Total Perspective Vortex, but most of the time I am loving it, some of the time for the same reasons. the rest of time I feel like should be putting a list together for McSweeney's.

Goodness, heavy entries are just that, heavy, and I don't like the extra weight. So nevermind! Angry screed on Maher! I will just keep to my usual trite entries about books and bees and bicycles, et cetera.

Lately, I have been reading Nick Basbanes' Editions and Impressions: My Twenty Years on the Book Beat, a collection of his essays regarding his encounters in the book world and with its most interesting tenants. I am loving it, or rather, I thought I was loving it, until I turned the page and found that his next profile was on Anne Fadiman: then I knew I was loving it.

Who knew that when I picked up Ex Libris back in 2006 at a Borders in Kahala, that it would be the beginning of such a passionate crush? When I saw Fadiman's name at the top of that page in Editions..., it was like finding out that this book had a chapter on an old friend. It mentions a book she was reading at the time, Vilhjalmur Stefansson's The Friendly Arctic, and mentions her "Odd Shelf," and I thought 'of course! She loves books on arctic exploration! And I mean, anybody who has read her essays knows about her love for these books, and about her bookshelf dedicated to tomes on the topic; but I guess that's the magic of a book that connects with you: it feels like you own that bit of information, that it was a book written for you and no one else.

Or maybe thats just how it feels when you start to psychotically stalk someone you've never met. I know you're really writing to me, Anne! I've gotten all your hidden messages! Yikes.

Here's are two excerpts, a couple of my favorite parts from her second book of essays, At Large, and At Small, both from her essay "Collecting Nature."

"The spare bedroom, on the southwest corner of the second floor of our house in Los Angeles, to which we had moved when I was eight and Kim was ten, had a sign on the door that read:

The Serendipity Museum of Nature,
No Smoking, Please.

The sign was embossed in blue with a Dymo Label-maker, than which there was no more perfect gift, circa 1963, for a pair of children who were crazy about naming things. I am not quite sure why our parents turned over this room to us, nor why they let us hammer pieces of whale baleen into the striped tan wallpaper, nor why the permitted us to fill the bathroom with dirt in order to accommodate our pet California king snake. All I can say is that I am profoundly grateful that they did.

When I read that, I was just tickled, because it really struck a chord with me. I feel like Aimee and I were indulged in just the same way, although if you asked me why I couldn't possibly tell you. Had we kept a king snake of any variety in the bathroom, it would have been us -- and not whale baleen -- nailed to the wall. And, finally,

"Last week I was reminiscing about our museum with my brother. Kim said, "When you collect nature, there are two moments of discovery. The first comes when you find the thing. The second comes when you find the name."

So true.

Did you know you can change your default language on Facebook from English, to Pirate English? GENIUS.

Deal with this. The Most Incredible Personal Library Ever.

Look, I've never really read anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I know at one point I was supposed to, but I didn't and I don't really remember how I got out of it. This happened frequently in high school. Believe it or not, I managed to get through all four years of Honors English without ever reading one quarter of anything by: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Shelley, Aldous Huxley, Alexander Dumas, Victor Hugo, J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, George Orwell, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Alan Patton or John Steinbeck. And that's just the list off the top of my head. If I were to dig up some syllabi I could probably come up with a list of 50 or some-odd books that I started for class, never finished, guessed my way through the tests, and got high marks. Shamelessly.

For the most part, I have since devoured many of the authors that I've just listed, but still no Fitzgerald.

Which is curious, because I can almost recite from memory the opening lines to the second chapter of The Great Gatsby:

"This is a valley of ashes -- a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-gray men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air."

My mouth is dry just typing it out. Just Wonderful.

One of the things that I got teased for a lot as a kid was my know-it-all-ed-ness, having a ready answer for just about any question whether I was asked one or not. I butted in, piped up, spouted off just about whenever I could. I remember Ryan Lamb on more than one occasion teasing me with "What do you do? Like read the dictionary?" Laughter would ensue and he or Josh would do their best to impersonate me reading the dictionary in my leisure time.

Which taunt I think about often, because, secretly I did. And still do, although I am a bit less taciturn about it now. I find the dictionary incredibly interesting, both as a book and as a concept. Words are so tricky, and so deceptively simple, and I never grow tired of learning more about them. There are few days that go by that I do not consult the OED, The Brothers Grimm, or the online etymology dictionary, which as the name suggests, is a website that lets you look up word origins, histories, etc. Which may sound like a snooze to you, but where else would you go when you needed to know where the word haberdasher comes from?

Anyway, one of the most absorbing books I have ever read was The Meaning of Everything, which is the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, as told by Simon Winchester. To this day, when asked that tired "Who is one of your heroes?" question in get-to-know-you situations, my go-to answer is usually James Augustus Henry Murray, the tireless editor of the OED. If you really wanted to have me flip-out on Christmas morning, you would give me a subscription to the OED (only $295 annually! Takers?)

The book was eye opening. I guess when I think of a dictionary, I usually thing of a list of words in alphabetical order, with definitions for each. Which, should you ask anyone, is what a dictionary is. What I didn't realize however, is that the OED was conceived of as a history of the English language. So not only would every word have its definition, but its definitions: every shade of meaning that the word in question could have, with -- and this is the crucial element -- citations and reliable example of usage to back it up. Every word would have its first known usage listed, and then for every alternate meaning, the first time that word was used to mean that, also cited. This is why the OED's latest complete print edition is printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages.

The citations are another thing I think about, because every now and then someone will say something, use a unique turn of phrase, and it will catch my ear, not only because it is a unique turn of phrase, but because I can usually remember -- cite, if you will -- the first time I heard it.

I think this every time I hear someone say "mea culpa," or just the word culpable. First time I heard it? Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame soundtrack, "Hellfire," where a choir backing up Frollo's musical confessional trill "Mea Culpa! Mea Culpa! Mea Maxima Culpa!" Were you, back in 1996, following along with the music in the fold-out cassette tape liner, reading the lyrics as you sang along (like I was), you also would have seen those words with accompanying asterisked definition.


(Ahem: )


Other words I learned from that soundtrack: Janvier and dross. And that's really just the beginning.

Facetious and eptiome as printed words joined the spoken ones I already knew in Mr. Kemmer's English class, back in ninth grade.

Archipelago in fifth grade geography (a girl later got this wrong in our geography bee), and atoll from Waterworld. Simile was taught to me by Ms. Kirsten Knieff, my eighth grade English teacher, as "a comparison using like or as," which she illustrated using Pearl Jam, "Even flow, thoughts arrive like butterflies." (She demonstrated metaphor, which I already knew, with the Stone Temple Pilots, "Flies in the vaseline we are, sometimes it blows my mind...".)

Uncanny from the X-men 1993, Peloton last year from my mother in Sugarhouse park.

I don't know why some stick in there and some don't... I remember Anne Fadiman writes about something similar in Ex Libris, but I've mislaid my copy. Am I alone in this, are there any that you can remember off the top of your head?