“I feel the answer to your question will always exist outside the world as it presents itself, beyond the matters of the day, distinct from the temporal. It will be found within the mysterious, the unsettled, and the sacred, that faraway and intangible place where truth and music and your father reside.”
A number of fantastic ducks lined up in the month of June and I want to talk about all of them, but there isn’t time to do it in one giant post. One duck, however, took the form of appearing at the 14th International Melville Society Conference to speak about my time aboard the Charles W. Morgan eleven years ago. (You can read the comic about that trip here.)
I read Moby-Dick for the first time a handful of years ago and loved it, but I wouldn’t call myself a Melville scholar. However, attending this conference felt like a great chance to scratch the academic itch without, say, going to grad school.
I ended up spending the whole week taking visual notes, which allowed me to drop into a type of weightless, fixated attention that I’ve really missed in my caregiving life. It also helped give me something to do during panels where I felt a little, uh, out of my depth.
When I’m drawing, words just wash over me. I can pluck the ones that resonate in the moment, then step back at the end of the hour and get a picture of what I took away from the talk. I particularly loved the freedom to just wander into panels where I had no idea what the speakers were talking about, only to come away newly-enthused about some niche avenue into Melville’s work.
Time and time again the attendees emphasized how unique this conference is in its warmth and intellectual diversity. I met scientists and art historians and medievalists and printmakers and disability scholars and tall ship sailors and filmmakers and many, many professors. It was a dreamy, albeit intense, four days.
Here are the notes from every talk I attended, all drawn straight to ink during the speakers’ presentations (usually about 20 minutes per person).
The biggest takeaway was that we need embedded cartoonists at all sorts of academic conferences—and the demand is there! People were so thrilled to see this kind of work coming out of the event, and there are lots of journals hungry to publish unusual creative content alongside academic papers.
Something to pursue…eventually. Got a couple things* to wrap up first.
*unfathomably vast creative projects
Cat’s been out of the bag for a while: I’d rather be operating a switchboard than a megaphone these days.
To that end: I’ve been hosting more Zoom calls for my Patreon crew to hang out together, build community, and talk about their creative and adventurous projects on the regular. It turns out it’s extremely nice to do!
This month we’ve got a real treat: Patron Josh Horton will be giving a presentation about his journey around Cape Horn aboard the Dutch tall ship Oosterschelde. Josh joined up as part of Darwin200, an audacious voyage that’s been tracing the original path of HMS Beagle since 2023. They’re doing amazing work, and I’m really looking forward to getting a peek aboard.
The call happens Monday, May 12th at 11am Pacific Time. You can find the Zoom link and everything here. Can’t wait!
A quick one to say I’ve been thinking a lot about the different subtitles they’ve slapped on Lewis Hyde’s The Gift through the years, mostly because it was only this year I learned that the original 1983 edition looked like this:
I LOVE IT. WHY DID THEY CHANGE IT. WHAT GIVES.
The whole thing is a far cry from 2019’s:
As well as the copy I first encountered (published in 2007), which features a third option:
Which is…fine? It’s fine.
BUT WHO BURIED THE LEDE ON THE EROTIC LIFE OF PROPERTY?!
Audre Lorde originally presented “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” as a paper in 1978, but it wasn’t published in Sister Outsider until 1984—just one year after the first edition of The Gift came out.
I wonder about this post-70s literary landscape, everything still reverberating with the energy of the 60s, the explosive visibility of sexuality in American youth culture, the rising tide of queer voices—but also the broader definition of eroticism.
I just re-read Katherine Angel’s Unmastered: a Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell, which I picked up after Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again. Her exploration of eroticism veers more towards the question of what to do with desire that resists being codified, named, and negotiated in explicit terms. How do we reckon with consent culture alongside the lure of the unknown? What of discovery? What of the secret third thing?
Kate Wagner coming in at the right moment here with this essay:
A situational eroticism is what is needed now, in our literalist times. […] Arousal is a matter of the self, which takes place within the body, a space no one can see into. It is often a mystery, a surprise, a discovery. It can happen at a small scale, say, the frisson of two sets of fingers in one’s hair at once. It is beautiful, unplanned and does not judge itself because it is an inert sensation, unimbued with premeditated meaning. This should liberate rather than frighten us. Maybe what it means doesn’t matter. Maybe we don’t have to justify it even to ourselves.
This draft has been languishing because I don’t have a neat bow to slap on the end of this. If there’s anything I’m thinking of, though, it’s that Hyde (or his publisher) wasn’t wrong to foreground eroticism in that first edition of the book. Eroticism is creativity, and neither are as much work as they are play.
Turns out I’m two years behind on these so I’m getting ’em up! No commentary because I gotta run out the door to ink more pages of Seacritters, but hopefully I’ll come back to this down the line.
(Previously: 2023 in Reading, 2022 in Reading, 2021 in Reading, 2020 in Reading)
| Legend | Rough Guide to Ratings |
|---|---|
| 🎭 – Plays 📝 – Poetry 📖 – Books (Fiction) 📓 – Books (Nonfiction) 💬 – Graphic Novels 🔄 – Reread 🎙️ – Audiobook | ❤︎ = Yes ❤︎❤︎ = Oh Yes ❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Oh Hell Yes ❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Obviously this one hit at the right place and the right time |
Hello friends. I hope you’ve been keeping warm. It’s been a crazy cold winter and we’re not even in February yet.
I want to start bringing in some natural elements soon but today I want to show you this super easy magnifying glass decorative item I made using Dollar Tree items.
This one was so easy to make and it think it looks so great!
I used a magnifying glass, a candle holder, some hot glue and crazy glue.
I heated a knife over the stove and used it to cut through the plastic. You can also use a small hand saw.
I then filled the candlestick with some hot glue, inserted the magnifying glass and added some more crazy glue in order to secure it further.
I then painted the top of the candle holder with some buff and rub and voila!
Such and easy craft but sooo cool. I love how it turned out.
Thank you for stopping by.
Much love,
Lucy
Instantly delighted by the premise and format of Genderswap.fm, a classy little database made by Eva Decker that catalogues covers and original tracks sung by artists of different genders. (Particularly love getting to filter by tags like “more danceable” or “less acoustic”.)
Another annual reading list I’m putting up without much commentary, but there were some bangers in 2025. “The point seems to be this,” Kate Briggs writes, “left to its own devices, the path of reading is very rarely chronologically ordered, thematically coherent, limited by language or respectful of borders. Books open out onto, they cross with and follow haphazardly on from one another. Left to its own devices, the path of reading strays all over the place.”
(Previously: 2024 in Reading, 2023 in Reading, 2022 in Reading, 2021 in Reading, 2020 in Reading)
| Legend | Rough Guide to Ratings |
|---|---|
| 🎭 – Plays 📝 – Poetry 📖 – Books (Fiction) 📓 – Books (Nonfiction) 💬 – Graphic Novels 🔄 – Reread 🎙️ – Audiobook | ❤︎ = Yes ❤︎❤︎ = Oh Yes ❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Oh Hell Yes |
Hello again friends. It’s been snowing and Spring does not seem to be anywhere near, but I’m taking matters into my own hands.
I made this pretty living spring wreath using pansies and some moss.
The day I made it, the sun was shining and I actually sat outside to make this wreath. But alas, it was just a little tease from Mother Nature.
I started by taking the pansies out of their pot…
Soaked some moss in water ….
And wrapped the pansies with the moss…
I used black thread to hold it together….
I then just used the same string to wrap the pansy ‘moss balls’ to the wreath…
So easy and I love how beautiful it looks. To water it, I spray it everyday and because pansies are so hardy, it’s going to last a long time.
I love it.
I took a lot of photos because it was so nice outside and I was enjoying the little break of winter weather. Sadly, it’s been snowing
and cold so I brought the wreath inside. I can’t wait to display it outside and for Spring to finally show up.
Thank you so much for stopping by.
much love,
Lucy
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Hello friends. I hope you’ve been well. We had a few days of warmer weather but we’re back to very cold days. During the warmer days I was inspired to create a few Spring crafts. Starting with this sweet ‘ceramic’ butterfly specimen display.
You won’t believe how easy it was to make. Let me show you.
You’re going to need a 3D butterfly; used for scrapping booking. I found several sizes at the Dollar Store.
Paper napkin with a nice pattern. I love THIS one because it has various patterns and it looks like Chinoiserie.
-I spray painted the butterfly with white spray paint. You can also use acrylic paint.
You will allow it to dry completely.
-Take some Modpodge or Glue and spread it over the entire butterfly.
-Take the napkin and remove the bottom layer and discard. Place the napkin on top the glue and gently rub napkin until it
adheres onto the butterfly. Allow to dry.
Once it’s completely dry, spread layer of UV resin. I used THIS ONE. I’ve used it in another project you can see it HERE.
Once dry, I used some gold paint to paint the edges and the body of the butterfly.
I then used a little bit of double sided tape and placed it onto the frame. You can of course place it inside the frame but I needed to place it over the glass for better photos.
I love how this turned out and I can’t wait to make more specimens.
The resin make the butterflies look like ceramic and I just love them.
Look how pretty they look displayed on this arrangement.
What do you think? Would you try this?
Thank you so much for stopping by today.
much love,
Lucy
Hello friends. I hope you’ve been keeping well. It’s been a little while since I posted. I’m not even sure if anyone is reading this blog anymore but regardless, here is a pretty Spring Mantel I put together a couple of weeks ago.
I used blue hydrangeas and these beautiful ferns. I bought these to make wreaths for our front doors and will still be using them…
But I just started to play with them on the mantel and thing led to the other and here we are.
It’s fun to play with decor and just see what turns out.
As usual, I took a lot of photos. I just enjoy taking photos and editing them.
I remember the good old days when photos and pretty pictures brought me so much joy. Nowadays, it seems like fast video is the thing,
Don’t get me wrong, I also enjoy creating videos but I miss the old blogging days so much.
Anyway, I hope you’re keeping well and hope to see you again soon.
much love,
Lucy
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