May 3, Houston: The big one -- the Inprint reading -- occurs at the Alley Theatre on Monday, May 3. Do not miss it or you'll be sorry. I'm not kidding -- I'm going to say the craziest, most intellectual yet hilarious stuff I can think of, and I'll be sharing the stage with the ultra sexy Oscar Casares, too.
June 24, Houston: I'm one of the peeps scheduled to read at Poison Pen, at Houston's famous Poison Girl bar. Besides me, everyone there will be ultra, *super* sexy. Come see me and drink!
June 26, Washington, DC: I'll be reading at the American Library Association conference. Come on down.
My other blog: Go read my the Houston Chronicle parenting blog (or my ChronMomBlog, as I like to call it) and make sure my kids won't resent me more than other kids resent their own parents.
Buy my new novel, Lone Star Legend. Already did? Well, buy a few more for your friends, then. :)
Friday, July 20, 2007
There's this really weird book. You should totally check it out.The other day my friend Ashley and I went to Texas Art Supply, which is one of the most awesome stores in Houston, partially because it contains all the Dover coloring books and copyright-free image books.
Whenever I go there, I have to look at every single new coloring book so that I can purchase at least one of them, then take it home and put it in a drawer in my vanity, next to my unused box of Prismacolors. That is my habit. That is my way. Right now, I have the following Dover coloring books in that drawer:
Old-Time Children's Fashions Coloring Book
Gods of Ancient Egypt
Chinese Fashions
Japanese Fashions
Classic Cars of the Fifties
I'm very picky about them. I can't just buy any coloring book and then take it home and never color in it. The ones I pick must have particular characteristics as far as facial expressions, line thickness, and color variety potential are concerned.
So, like I said, I was very carefully going through the new coloring books, trying to decide between medieval fashions and fairies, and Ashley was keeping me company. She'd found a book of illustrations of scenes from the Bible and was entertaining me greatly by commenting on it aloud.
"I love the Old Testament," she said. I don't love it, myself, particularly, but I appreciated her enthusiasm.
"Oh, God," she said. "Look what they did to Jacob. This is horrible." I think Jacob was the name of the guy who had to wrestle the angel. It was, as Ashley pointed out, a very lackluster illustration. Jacob looked tired and more like he was hanging on the angel, begging for lenience, than wrestling him. Ashley said this was an injustice, since Jacob (or whoever) had actually put up a pretty good fight until the very end.
At that point, I noticed a man walk near us. On the back of his calf, he had a tattoo of a red, winged devil woman. She was nude and had large, red, devil breasts. I whispered for Ashley to look at the tattoo. She said it was awesome. We went back to the Bible.
"This one's my favorite," said Ashley. She showed me a picture of Lot, his wife, and his daughters fleeing Sodom. "Did you know that, after they left and Lot's wife looked back and turned to salt, Lot and his daughters went to a cave, and his daughters got him drunk and..."
"Had sex with him?" I said. "So they'd get pregnant?"
"Yes!" said Ashley. "Isn't that awesome, that out of the four people in Sodom who weren't sinners, three of them ended up performing incest?" We looked for a picture of the incest, but there wasn't one.
The guy with the devil woman tattoo had a wife. Or a girlfriend. She was pushing a stroller, and the child in it let out a cry. The guy went to join them. He and his woman talked inaudibly, into each other's ear.
I had a thought. "Find the one," I told Ashley, "where the guy has sex with his handmaid, while the wife watches."
"Ooh. Is that... Abraham?" She found Abraham and Rebecca, and then a grown-up Ishmael, but no actual illustrations of handmaid-impregnating menages a troix.
"Did you know," I said, "that people think Cho Seung-Hui identified with Ishmael, and that's why he wrote Ismail Ax on his arm? And, like, in Muslim culture, the story's opposite -- Ishmael's the one who inherited, and Isaac didn't?"
The tattooed guy and his family were still within earshot, I noticed. They seemed to be moving in a semi-circle around us, close enough to hear us but not close enough for me to hear their whispering. They looked annoyed. I saw the woman roll her eyes.
"I think those people want to look at the coloring books," I said. They're waiting for us to get out of the way."
"Screw them," said Ashley.
"I know," I said. "Why don't they just come up and look at them? It's not like there isn't room."
"Okay, who the hell is this?" Ashley exclaimed, showing me a picture of the Garden of Eden. It contained Adam and Eve, obviously, but also a giant, forlorn man who looked like Rodin's Thinker or maybe the Jolly Green Giant. "Who is this guy?"
"I don't know. The giant guy that David fought? The devil?"
"No... I think it's supposed to be Gabriel," said Ashley, pointing to the winged Gabriel on the previous page. "And he took on the form of man... but why does he look so ridiculous?"
"Maybe he smelled the apple and morphed into the Jolly Green Giant. Because... you know... vegetables." Really, I know the New Testament way better than I know the Old one, because they never read the Old Testament at church when I was singing in the choir. How did Ashley know so much about it, I suddenly wondered. Had she actually read the Bible? Knowing her crazy ways, she probably did. She's artsy like that. She only works part time, then does art and/or reads obscure texts all the rest of the day. Or photographs her friends partially clothed near the bayou. Or takes the bus to Whole Foods and buys herself a coconut. She's a bohemian. That's why she fascinates me, I think. I would never, ever be a bohemian (because I grew up poor), but it's fun sometimes to watch her be one.
By now, the tattooed guy and his lady were openly sneering at us. Was it because they wanted unfettered access to the coloring books? Was it because we were speaking of the Biblical art in a less-than-respectful tone? Was it because we were ignorant of Gabriel's giant phase and too obviously dense for them to explain it to us? I wondered if maybe I should read the Old Testament. But then I decided that, no, I'm probably too delicate for it.
I ended up getting the coloring book with fairy tales scenes that related to flowers. And fairies. There was a gothic alphabet coloring book, and it turned out that Ashley knew the author. But I didn't get that one because I didn't like its lines. Sorry, Heather.
I also got a pencil sharpener, so I can sharpen my Prismacolors, now that Ashley's shown me how to properly open their box. Who knows -- I might actually color a fairy this week.
Labels: books, pop culture, stories
6:13 AM #Comments:
OH MY GOD!I do this too; yesterday I splurged on an anatomy coloring book that cost $20, so this time I was REALLY going to do some coloring. But when I got home I couldn't find my Prismacolors. At. All. I spent three hours looking for them after my son went to bed, to the point of scanning his room with a covered flashlight just to make sure he hadn't stowed them somewhere. I gave up and went to bed, and was still halfheartedly looking for them when I took a break to read your post. I was jealous of your Prismacolors, all in their known location, but thought "This is a sign of some kind," and looked to the right. And there they were--on the bookshelf next to me under my passport application. My throat hurts now from how hard I inhaled just now. Anyway, thanks Gwen. I'm off to color. Screw the bills and vaccuuming.
# posted by
Nik : 11:47 AM
Maybe they were sneering at you for having any kind of Bible literacy in the first place. I've met people like that -- mention anything at all having to do with Christianity and the sneering begins.
# posted by
Lisa : 2:45 PM
Hey, I think the picture that looked like Adam and Eve with the giant might have not been Adam and Eve. Soon after they disobeyed God, and before the flood took place, some of the angels came down and took the form of men and had sex with the women. When the women gave birth, their children were huge, being part angel and part human. Then the giant men terrorized the people on earth and God had Noah build the ark....So the picture could've been a huge fallen angel/human.
Also, Abraham married Sarah and they had Isaac together. He did sleep with the maidservant and had Ishmael before that. But he didn't sleep with her while Sarah watched. Maybe there is a different story like that....you never know.
The bible is full of stuff, not all things that God approved of, by the way. Like the book of Judges. In that book the people are doing terrible things and they think it's good and for God. But it isn't. Throughout the book it says the people did what was good in their OWN eyes. Not in God's eyes and yet it's in the bible to teach us not to be that way. And still, looking at christians you can see that's exactly how many of them are.
The bible is pretty interesting once you start to see more clearly what was up with the people and why God allowed evil, like today. This probably doesn't make much sense. Sorry.
# posted by
Rebekah : 4:54 AM
Nik: Did you color? I hope you did. (I didn't, but I totally put my pencil sharpener right next to my Prismas, so I'll be ready when the time comes.) Also, your name made me think of Nik from America's Next Top Model. Are you her? It's okay if you aren't.
Lisa: Oh, good point. Maybe.
You know, we studied Genesis and the Job story in one of my lit classes at UT. Even if you don't want to believe the Bible, you can't deny that its stories are part of our culture. I'm a heathen, but I won't deny.
Rebekah: Oh, thanks. I'll pass that on to Ashley.
Abraham, Sarah, and the maidservant: I think I got the idea that the wife watched from Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. Have you ever read that? It's about a dystopia in which old, rich, white men use Abraham's story as an excuse to sleep with younger women, with their wives' approval. I thought they quoted the Old Testament pretty extensively to back up the three-way aspect, but maybe I'm misremembering. Wouldn't be the first time. (See recent aborted post material on Corky, Down Syndrome, and the Love Boat. :) )
# posted by
Gwen : 10:25 AM
Hullo. I'm going to be a bit creepy for a moment, bear with me.
I stumbled across your blog a couple weeks ago - I think I clicked it because it said "Gwen", which is my name too. And it's been very entertaining, so I've been sitting here reading it and not saying anything. Lurking is the word, I believe.
I just had to say something on this one because I buy coloring books too. Some of them I color in, some of them I don't, but... I've been working on Dover's "Trolls, Elves, and Fairies" lately. Good stuff. :)
Also, part of what made The Handmaid's Tale so scary is that the government consistently misquoted the Bible for their own ends. One of the most striking examples, for me, was how they taught the handmaids to be quiet and obedient using the line "Blessed are the meek." End of sentence. Scary and symbolic, as the full line is "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth"... so yes, it's entirely possible that the government in it (Gilead?) made up or exaggerated the story. Makes a lot of sense, now that I think of it.
Anyway, Hi. :)
# posted by
: 7:28 AM
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