I'm not very good at keeping secrets.
as you can see there was alcohol involved.
This man appears to be wearing my disguise. Must be some undercover goverment op.
(found image from here.)
Published by Kunstmann Verlag, see the German website here. Get wrecking Germany!!!
book excerpt (not random)
If a person leads an "active" life, as Wiggs had, if a person has goals, ideals, a cause to fight for, then that person is distracted, temporarily, from paying a whole lot of attention to the heavy scimitar that hangs by a mouse hair just above his or her head. We, each of us, have a ticket to ride, and if the trip be interesting (if it's dull, we have only ourselves to blame), then we relish the landscape (how quickly it whizzes by!), interact with our fellow travelers, pay frequent visits to the washrooms and concession stands, and hardly ever hold up the ticket to the light where we can read its plainly stated destination: The Abyss.
Yet, ignore it though we might in our daily toss and tussle, the fact of our impending death is always there, just behind the draperies, or, more accurately, inside our sock, like a burr that we can never quite extract. If one has a religious life, one can rationalize one's slide into the abyss; if one has a sense of humor (and a sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised), one can minimalize it through irony and wit. Ah, but the specter is there, night and day, day in and day out, coloring with its chalk of gray almost everything we do. And a lot of what we do is done, subconsciously, indirectly, to avoid the thought of death, or to make ourselves so unexpendable through our accomplishments that death will hesitate to take us, or, when the scimitar finally falls, to insure that we "live on" in the memory of the lucky ones still kicking.
from Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins, Bantam 1984, page 249
(drawing by Tilden Smith Pitcher, february 2010)
I had a recent inquiry about the list below, which was a part of The Artist's Survival Kit. So I thought I would post it again here in case you didn't see it already. This piece has been more popular that I ever imagined. It seems to have own life now.
I love that this list has been somewhat controversial to some, it garners a slightly hostile response in a few people (who wrote me expressing upset with it's "negative" feel). You should probably know by now that I love any work that provokes a unique response from every reader. All of my work is based on this. When I wrote it I felt it was innately positive so the response is interesting to me.
by James R. Murphy aka Black Fox, 1990
To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precises scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.
--George Perec
thinking about
-starting a writing group with some friends.
-how I'm going to meet my book deadline when my husband was just called for jury duty
-what to make for dinner
-immortality (reading "Jitterbug Perfume" by Tom Robbins)