Tuesday, January 15, 2002
I bet you thought I was only joking . . .
The filing cabinet in my office is black. Atop it sits my fax machine and the office telephone. And, because it quickly got rather boring staring at a matte black filing cabinet all day, every day, I have decorated it with various magnets and postcards. They are as follows:
Drawer One (front):
1. Mucha's original "Salmagundi" painting on a magnet.
2. Two (count'em two) souvenir magnets from the 1998 World Horror convetion in Phoenix, AZ, which I somehow ended up with even though I didn't attend WHC '98.
3. Held up by one of the WHC '98 magnets, a postcard I bought at the James Joyce Museum in Martello Tower, Sandycove, Eire. It's a portrait of Joyce, painted by Jaques Emile Blanche.
4. A postcard I got with a Farscape fanzine (yes, I am a geek) of the endlessly delightful Chiana. It's held up by the other WHC magnet and a second magnet that's a famous (well, if you're into dinosaurs) painting by Charles R. Knight of the theropod dinosaur Allosaurus devouring an Apatosaurus ("Brontosaurus") carcass.
5. An Echo paperdoll (she of The Dreaming) drawn by a girl from abcrk, which originally appeared in an issue of my newsletter. Jennifer and Thyrn cut this one out, laminated it, and a magnet of it. Echo's wearing nothing but a bra, panties, and fishnets, which explains
6. two lines of magnets below her, pieced together from a Beavis and Butthead magnet set (I think that was a gift to Jennifer from Poppy, or maybe not). They read:
"Hot chick in her underwear" (line 1) and "Heh heh Heh heh heh heh" (line 2).
Drawer 2 (front):
1. A postcard of Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974) standing in front of the Spirit of St. Louis. I've always loved Lindbergh, partly because my first geology professor in college, Dr. Denny Bierce, looked exactly like him.
2. Mr. Lingbergh is held in place by a magnet nearing a reproduction of a painting by Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). While splendid, Rossetti isn't my favorite of the Pre-Raphaelites and I don't recall the name of this paiting and don't feel like looking it up. Maybe later.
3. A magnet with a plaster cast of a fossil of the Silurian trilobite Calymene attached. The original fossil came from Oklahoma.
4. A magnet with a plaster cast of a fossil of the Cretaceous ammonite Cheloniceras. The original fossil came from Boyaca, Columbia.
5. A Johnny, The Homicidal Maniac postcard. It's the cover to one of the issues, the one with him standing before a wall festooned with knives, but I don't recall the issue number.
6. A magnet of the movie poster for The Company of Wolves, one of my five hundred all times favorite films.
Drawer 3 (front):
1. A magnet showing part of Rudoplh Zallinger's Pulitzer Prize-winning mural, The Age of Reptiles from the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale Univ., New Haven, CT. This portion of the mural is a scene from the Jurassic Period.
2. Held up by Zallinger's mural, a postcard of Ernest Hemingway, trout fishing in Sun Valley, ID, in 1939. The photograph was taken by Lloyd R. Arnold. Hemingway is holding two large trout and looks very happy. The fish seem quite beyond caring, one way or another.
3. A Rocky Horror Picture Show magnet.
4. Held up by the latter is a postcard showing a very beautiful Oscar Wilde, as photographed by Napoleon Sarony in 1882. Wilde rocks my world, as one might say, in the parlance of our times.
I often wonder how Hemingway would feel being stuck on a filing cabinet next to Wilde. I expect Wilde would have something witty and perhaps somewhat off-color to say, and Hemingway would grumble, frown, and shake one of his trout at poor Oscar.
What? You want more you say. Oh, Caitlín, please continue. This is just so goddamn exciting you just wet your pants, you say?
Well, I would, and later I probably will, on another night when I've nothing better to do than catalog the decor of a filing cabinet. You'll just have to wait. Calm down. You'll live. Take a pill.
Meanwhile, tomorrow I will begin the final third of Bast: Eternity Game for Vertigo. Also, I had a significant breakthrough regarding Low Red Moon today, in that I realized, quite suddenly and without warning, that what I thought would be the epilogue should be more like the middle of the novel. Which means that this will be a somewhat more fastpaced book (though not a shorter one) than eith Silk or Threshold. And, as if that wasn't enough tittilation for four days, I also learned that Wal-Mart, spoiler of small town economies everywhere, is actually carrying both Threshold and Wrong Things.
Go figure.
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