Up to Something #2
Up to Something is an occasional segment of my newsletter through which I let you all know what I’m reading, watching, listening to, and thinking about.
Hi there, and happy weekend! Welcome to the second edition of Up to Something. You can find the first edition (#1, posted on Tuesday, April 18) here, at this link.
Something fascinating I learned about this past week: Epaulette Sharks live in the waters off the coasts of Australia and New Guinea, and they frequent shallow coral reefs and tidal pools in search of food. These wriggling beings can survive out of water for over an hour, and—get this—they can WALK out of water, too. Literally…They WALK on their fins! Here’s a two-minute YouTube clip from the BBC (narrated by Sir David Attenborough) featuring an adorable little Epaulette pal demonstrating this evolutionary astonishment.
I got a book of paintings by Joan Mitchell, (1925-1992) an American abstract expressionist artist known for her brightly colored, (massive!) gestural oil paintings and drawings on paper. Here is my one of my favorite paintings by Mitchell from her later years, titled “La ligne de la rupture” (1970). This is the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s online catalog of her artwork. Should you choose to peruse the site, I’d recommend sorting the works chronologically and then sorting them in the reverse order. Joan Mitchell’s style changed significantly over the decades!
Speaking of books: I just started listening to M Train (2015) by singer-songwriter/visual artist/writer and “punk poet laureate” Patti Smith. The audiobook, narrated by the author, earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Spoken Word Album. I listened to Smith’s first memoir, Just Kids (2010) last fall, and I was so captivated by the story’s atmosphere of late sixties and early seventies New York City as well as Smith’s dedicated affection for her dear friend and fellow artist, Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989).
As I mentioned in my previous edition of Up to Something, (Linked again here in case you missed it) I do not consider myself much of a “gamer” save my obsession with GameBoy Tetris, at which I am fairly skilled. However, in the past week, I’ve developed an interest in solo/single player role playing games, also known as “solo RPGs” for short. (For the unfamiliar, the classic example of a group fantasy tabletop role playing game would be the iconic Dungeons & Dragons, first published in 1974.) D&D is less interesting to me, though, than many of the smaller, indie-developed games for individual players, like those found on the itch.io web store. I came across Wanderhome and acquired a copy to begin playing. It’s a relatively new, award-winning “pastoral fantasy” RPG about a group of animal creatures going on a journey together through the fictional world of Haeth, and the artwork alone is quite heartwarming.
The Wanderhome playbooks provide several lists of physical and personality traits in addition to options for what kind of journey your character is on for each player to choose from. It’s all very cute. For my first Wanderhome adventure, I’ve decided to play as a Toad named “Rorbert Reynolds,” who is a character I designed with the help of the aforementioned option lists. I have decided that Rorbert is writing a thesis about “the small and forgotten gods” of their homeland…and also dragon bones. They have a (somewhat impractical) dedication to writing down absolutely anything that might turn out to be relevant to their thesis, and they have memorized a literary quote for every occasion. Below is a picture of Rorbert, courtesy of the Wanderhome paperback.
Another highlight from my own creative life: The recent idyllic weather prompted a session of glorious “art outside” time. Before class on Wednesday, I decided to get to campus an hour early and scribble under the shade of some trees. Results:
I think that’s all for now! Sometime in the next few days, I’ll repost a guest blog article I wrote for a disability rights nonprofit last year to this feed for the sake of actually keeping my more recent longer-form writing in one space. See you soon!