Latin Quotations

As I mentioned before, I ended up doing a lot of research into Latin and famous Latin quotations in working on writing and editing my novel(s).

Here are some of my favorite quotations that I came across in that research (some of which made it into my novel(s) and many which probably won't):

Cedit item retro, de terra quod fuit ante, in terras - What once sprung from the earth sinks back into the earth. (Lucretius)

Collige virgo rosas dum flos novas et nova pubes - Pick the flowers, girl, while they are still fresh and youth is new. (Ausonius, Epigrammata Rosae 2:49)

Expedit esse deos, et, ut expedit, esse putemus - It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe that there are. (Ovid)

Homo sum humani nil a me alienum puto - I am human; I consider nothing human alien to me. (Terence, Heauton Timorumenos, I.1)

Homo unius libri timeo - I fear a man of one book. (Thomas Aquinas)

Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset - Because they didn't know better, they called it "civilization," when it was part of their slavery. (Tacitus)

Inter urinas et faeces nascimur - We are born between urine and feces. (St. Augustine)

Intret amicitiae nomine tectus amor - Let love steal in disguised as friendship. (Ovid)

Ita res accedent lumina rebus - Truths kindle light for truths. (Lucretius)

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur - The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived. (Petronius)

Nec alii obest aut prodest alterius religio - One man's religion neither harms nor helps another man. (Tertullian)

Necessitas etiam timidos fortes facit - Necessity makes even the timid brave. (Sallust)

Nemo enim est tam senex qui se annum non putet posse vivere - No one is so old as to think that he cannot live one more year. (Cicero)

Nequam illud verbum'st, bene vult, nisi qui bene facit - That expression 'He means well' is useless unless he does well. (Plautus, Trinummus, II.4)

Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum - To be ignorant of the past to be forever a child. (Cicero)

Nihil tam absurde dici potest, quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum - There is nothing so ridiculous that some philosopher has not already said it. (Cicero)

Non aetate, verum ingenio apiscitur sapientiai - Not by age but by capacity is wisdom acquired. (Plautus, Trinummus, II.2)

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Please note that my posting these quotes is not necessarily an endorsement of the words. There are a few of these I find interesting enough to momentarily consider, but don't/can't ultimately agree with.

Ovid's argument for believing in god(s), for instance, is interesting but ultimately unsatisfying. I don't believe in things because it is convenient to do so; I believe in things (or don't) because I actually believe in them (or don't). It is in fact often inconvenient to believe the things I believe. I've found myself more than once thinking that it would have been so much easier/more convenient if I had continued believing in God - but that convenience alone is not enough to pursue me back to Christianity.

Similarly, Tertullian's assertion that "One man's religion neither harms nor helps another man" is ideal, but complete bullshit in practice. One man's religion shouldn't harm another, and yet - so often - they do.

L'Art Erotique - Broadcasting Schedule

As I've mentioned before, last May I was flown to Denver to interview with Eureka Productions, a company based in Montreal, Canada, for their upcoming TV series "Erotic Art," which will show on ARTV. They talked to me about my thesis paintings, which feature flowers that were restrained, pierced, and mutilated as metaphors for female sexual oppression, assault, and female genitalia and sexuality in general. (Search the "thesis" tag on this blog to read more about my thesis specifically, or read the thesis online for free at: http://commons.emich.edu/honors/238/)

Well, now is the time for the TV show to air! I'm not sure which episode my specific interview will be a part of, but here is the list of episodes that will be airing, for those who may live in the Montreal area and are interested in checking it out. The first episode airs tonight (January 6th).

If I find out where my interview is online, I will post that here as well, but for now watching live on ARTV is the only option. Here is a description of the episodes, as sent to me by Eureka Productions in an email: (French first, with English to follow.)

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Encore un grand merci pour votre participation et votre implication dans notre projet de série documentaire intitulé l'Art érotique.

Grâce à votre généreuse collaboration, nous avons réussi à rassembler des artistes inspirants issus de disciplines variées, autour d’un même sujet : l’érotisme et la sensualité dans l’art.  L’équipe d’Eurêka! Productions est heureuse de vous présenter le résultat de ses rencontres à travers le monde, dès le mois de janvier 2016.

Voici les horaires de la télédiffusion sur la chaine canadienne ICI ARTV :

 1/ Ode à la beauté, mercredi 6 janvier 2016 à 21h - Les modulations du corps dans l'art : réinvention des perceptions de l'érotisme

 2/ Éros et Thanatos, mercredi 13 janvier 2016 à 21h - L'érotisme entre vie et mort, le corps dans une frontière trouble.

 3/ Jeux Jouissifs, mercredi 20 janvier 2016 à 21h - L'érotisme quand il n'est pas pris au sérieux, place au plaisir.

 4/ Éros au futur, mercredi 27 janvier 2016 à 21h - Entre machines et robots, voyage de l'érotisme et des corps à travers le temps 

 5/ Désirs secrets, mercredi 3 février 2016 à 21h - Pèlerinage dans les confins du désir et de l'interdit, l'érotisme caché sous la symbolique.

Suite à la diffusion télé de l’épisode dans lequel vous apparaissez, Eurêka Productions vous fera parvenir un DVD de celui-ci. Au plaisir de vous revoir à travers vos nouvelles œuvres !

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Thank you once again for being part of the documentary series and its web project "l'Art érotique" ("The Erotic Art"). Your collaboration made it possible for us to be proud of the good quality work we did.

Now, the time has come to present you the good result of Eurêka! Productions’s work.  By going on ICI ARTV, Canadian Channel, on January 2016, you'll be able to watch the collaboration of our work in the five episode of the series.

Here is the TV broadcasting schedule on ICI ARTV :

 1/  Ode to Beauty, Wednesday January 6^th 2016 at 9 p.m. - The body's curve, eroticism and sexuality as creative sparks.

 2/ Eros and Thanatos, Wednesday January 13^th 2016 at 9 p.m - The dangerous line between death and living: erotic tension between two bodies.

 3/ Game and Pleasure, Wednesday January 20^th 2016 at 9 p.m - This episode will explore the playful side of erotic art.

 4/ Eros and the Future, Wednesday January 27^th 2016 at 9 p.m - Eroticism through machines and robots.

 5/ Secret Desires, Wednesday February 3^rd 2016 at 9 p.m - A journey through the hidden erotic uses of everyday objects.

Following the television broadcast of the episode in which you appear, Eurêka! Productions will send you a DVD of it. Hope to see you through your new works!

Fortuna & Faye: 5x7 Watercolors

Patterns Fortuna & Faye have a happy spring/summer-like red-orange-yellow color scheme perfect to get you through a dreary January! They're both available for purchase at my Etsy shop.

Pattern Fortuna (for sale here):

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Pattern Faye (for sale here):

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Here are some "in progress" shots of creating these watercolors:

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These are ORIGINAL watercolors, not prints! All of my 5"x7" watercolors come with a 8"x10" white Crescent mat suitable for framing, and are available for purchase through my Etsy shop.

The fronts are unsigned so that they can be hung horizontally or vertically, in any orientation.

These two paintings would look great displayed as a pair, or mixed and matched with other patterned watercolors. Here they are shown with Pattern Flora and Pattern January:

Flora & January: 5x7 Watercolors

Here are two more of my patterned 5x7 watercolor paintings, available for purchase at my Etsy store.

Pattern Flora (for sale here):

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Pattern January (for sale here):

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Here are some "in progress" photos of these paintings:

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All of my 5"x7" watercolor paintings come with a 8"x10" Crescent white mat suitable for framing. These are all ORIGINAL watercolors, not prints!

These two paintings would look great as a pair together, or mixed and matched with other patterned watercolors at my Etsy store. Below they are shown pictured with Pattern Fortuna and Pattern Faye.

And here they are with Pattern Orchistrina and Pattern Virginia (before matted):

Be sure to check out my Etsy shop for more patterned watercolors!

L'eau de Parfum Watercolor

In my Etsy store, I have a listing for a 15"x22" watercolor titled "L'eau de Parfum." I gave this a French name because I've always loved the sound and look of French - so much so that I studied the language for five years in middle school and high school. I particularly associate French with all things beautiful, decorative, and stylish, and thought that this pairing of abstracted flowers with one of my Adobe Illustrator designed patterns would make a very "French" composition.

L'eau de parfum is the name that the French give to perfumes, to describe a strong concentration of fragrance. L'eau de toilette is perfume with a weaker concentration of fragrance. The word l'eau in these phrases means "water" - another reason I was drawn to this phrase for this painting, given the watery blue color palette I used.

"L'eau de Parfum" is available for purchase through my Etsy store.

Here are some details of the painting:

As you can see in some of the detail shots, though this painting is mostly watercolor, there are also some places where I used colored pencils to add highlights and shadows, particularly around the yellow centers of the pink flowers, and on the pink petals.

I also "splattered" some pink and purple pigment onto the blue background to add to the "watery" texture of the painting.

This painting is more abstract than many of my works of art. The flowers blend into each other in translucent layers in an almost unfinished way, and are not completely defined or rendered with great dimensionality. The colored pencil details only manage to flatten the flowers further, so that the petals look more like pieces of tissue paper collaged together than actual flowers. This, coupled with their disembodied nature (they are not on stems, but merely "floating" in the abstract patterned blue background) gives them a kind of "fake" or ephemeral quality.

Like perfumes meant to imitate the smell of flowers, this painting is only a screen, a 2D image, of what a true bouquet or garden might produce with its three dimensions of vivid color and fragrance.

"L'eau de Parfum" is available for purchase through my Etsy store.

Novel Update

I spent a lot of the end of last year working on editing the first book of the series of novels I've been writing. It's not always easy self-editing your own stuff, but I think I did a decent job, considering.

One thing I noticed as I was going through and doing this editing were several themes that started popping up. Some of them I sort of intended (or at least, noticed early on and played up a little), but others I did not notice until this recent bout of editing (though, again, I played those up a little as I went through and edited, since I did like them and wanted them to be more obvious). It's always nice to go back and read something you've written and realize there are interesting and profound nuggets of thought that crept in that you weren't totally conscious of at the time. To be honest, it makes me feel pretty damn proud of myself - like I'm doing something right and supposed to be a writer.

Other than editing the parts I do have written, I also have been working on some new sections to incorporate into the novel - sections that are basically straight up non-fiction, or at least non-fiction memoir essays (except that they are written as if my fictional main character wrote them). My manuscript already consisted of a contemporary story line, a dystopian future story (a novel that my main character is "writing" that sort of parallels her own life), and short sections of descriptions from the main character's dream journal - and now I'm also adding in sections of essays. I'm not trying to overly complicate things - I really do think it'll work, and add to the story. What these sections are are parts of the honors thesis the main character supposedly wrote at the end of her undergraduate program, and they give a lot of insight into how she interprets the world and what she's learned. Before, I had the character just sort of thinking about her thesis intermittently, as asides. Now I'm including parts of the "actual" thesis instead.

But to do that, I had to write the whole damn thesis - not just the parts the main character would consider for this first book. Because I had to know how the thesis would be organized so that I would know how the parts of her thesis relate to each other. And also, I'll use the thesis for all seven books that I have planned for this series, so I thought I might as well write the whole thing now so that I already have it ready to reference in the future.

The thesis is basically a list of philosophical conclusions/interpretations that the main character has written about some of her favorite Latin quotations. She looks mainly at ancient Romans, but also Catholicism, and even some Enlightenment-era philosophers (those who were still writing in Latin). But of course, I knew basically nothing about ancient Rome, or Latin - though I have been doing research into those topics for this story all along, since I know my main character would know all about Rome and Latin, and I'm trying to get her head to embody her beliefs and her voice. So I had to up my research and do a bunch more - all so I could write a "fake" thesis for my main character to reference.

It was a lot of extra work. I like to make extra work for myself. I do this kind of shit often. "Yeah, my story is good... but it would be EVEN BETTER if I added in this whole other idea/layer and made it more complicated! Or changed the point of view and entirely rewrote it!" "What if this is the only set of novels I write ever? I better make sure I put EVERY IDEA I'VE EVER HAD in it. Leave no philosophical stone unturned!" I don't know if that's just a me thing or a writer thing, but I do all this research and put all this thought into it and combine all these ideas - and then I get to the editing of said writing, and end up paring a lot of it down or not even using whole ideas, or scraping entire weeks of research. Writing, it turns out, is a lot more than just writing. There's a lot of behind the scenes stuff that no one else ever even sees. (At least, how I do it there is.)

So anyway. Now that I've finally (more or less) finished the fake thesis, I'm back to editing the book by adding the sections into it that need to be and giving it another read-through. I am hoping that soon I will be at a place where I am comfortable sending it out to literary agents again. Because I would really, really like to find an agent. I have all these ideas and outlines and drafts and plans, but I don't really know how to go about turning my plans into a reality.

My goal would be to have the entire series published as a series of seven books. Very J.K. Rowling of me. And then, when the series has TAKEN THE WORLD BY STORM and is beloved by everyone and I am rich, maybe also publishing some of all this supplemental stuff I've gathered, like the fake thesis I've written/am writing. (I'm sure I'll come back to it later and add in more stuff. Things are never quite "done" with me.)

I don't really expect that to happen, but it certainly would be nice if it did. ;)

Happy New Year!

The end of a year is always very reflective for me. It is for a lot of people, I know - looking back at 2015 and making Best Of and Worst Of lists, looking forward to 2016 and making resolutions. The holidays don't help matters - when you see family and friends you haven't seen in awhile (maybe not since last holiday season), they want to know what you've been up to. We all have to share updates on our last year, and to do so we first have to reflect back and see what actually happened. But for those of us (like me, like my husband) who also have birthdays toward the end of December, we have yet another reason to consider the past twelve months.

I recently turned 27 (on December 20), and it's starting to feel like I'm getting into "scary territory" - nearing that big 3-0 mark where, if I haven't already started acting like an adult, I really have no choice anymore to put it off. My opportunities for youthful indiscretions are dwindling. Not that I do many (or any) youthful indiscretions - but maybe that's precisely why it's disconcerting. I feel like I haven't taken advantage of my twenties much, and now I don't have much of my twenties left.

Of course, that's kind of a glass-is-half-empty view. I still have three years of my twenties left, and three years is a long time. There's plenty of opportunity left. Furthermore, focusing on what I haven't done isn't very helpful. So here's to focusing on my accomplishments instead.

I've spent the last few posts recapping what television, movies, and books I enjoyed in 2015, and today (on the first day of 2016) I want to look at what I enjoyed about myself in 2015.

I took care of my health. When I felt sick, I actually went to the doctor instead of trying to "get through it" on my own. When my doctor recommended I see an endocrinologist about a high fasting blood sugar, I followed through. When the endocrinologist told me to start watching my carb intake and get more exercise to build up muscle, I tried to do those things. Yeah, I feel short often (my sweet tooth is so hard to curb!) but I did try, and plan to continue trying. I also tried to take care of my mental health by seeing a therapist and working on positive thinking. I did my "annual" gynecology visit for the first time in probably three or four years. And I started seeing a chiropractor - not because I was in enormous neck/back pain, but because I knew I had TMJ issues with my jaw that had persisted for years and would probably only continue to get worse if I didn't start following the "ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure" mentality. I even got a flu shot this year. These aren't things I often or normally do, but I prioritized taking care of my health this year, and I did them.

I recognized when I needed to leave something behind, and I did. I don't always know what to do to be happy, but I can recognize when something is actively making me not happy. This year, it was substitute teaching. I don't know what it was exactly about subbing that stressed me out, but I felt myself physically getting sick this spring, and thought substitute teaching was probably to blame. So I stopped taking jobs and started taking some of the above steps to feel physically better. I'm still trying to figure out what I should do instead of substitute teaching to make money, but at least I was able to leave that stress behind while I figure it out.

I worked on the projects I want to work on. I devoted more time to my art and writing my novel(s). Yeah, I did it with the hope that I might make some money at it, but I knew money wasn't a guarantee and I poured myself into these projects anyway - because I wanted to. And though progress is often slow, I feel like I am seeing some progress. My novel was a lot better at the end of December that it was at the beginning of last January. I feel myself turning into a better artist, a better writer - but only when I work at doing those things.

I took care of a puppy. I've never before been solely responsible (or jointly responsible, but with someone else who knows as little about caring for a puppy as I do) for something so dependent. Since I'm home with her most of the day while my husband is at work, I wind up doing the bulk of the puppy-care. I don't always know what Ginny needs, but my husband and I have done our best. And Ginny clearly loves us and feels comfortable around us, so I guess we're doing something right. :)

Honestly, it's that first accomplishment that I'm most proud of for 2015, and the one I intend to focus on as 2016 marches on. I've recognized when I needed to leave something behind before, and done it. I'm always working on projects I want to work on - I just don't always have the time to do so, like I made sure I did in 2015. And though I hadn't been responsible for a puppy (or anything comparable) before last year, I always expected I'd be able to when the time came - just like I kind of assume I'll be a (relatively) good mother when that time comes. I understand motherhood is a hard job, but it's something I've always wanted, and I know that I'm capable of accomplishing things that I want to accomplish and work hard to accomplish. I know that I'm capable of recognizing when I don't know something, and I know how to go about finding answers. (The times I've Googled "is it okay that my puppy just ____?" in 2015...) So yes, I'm proud that Ginny is doing so well and I had a part in getting her to that point.

But I am even more proud of myself for making my health a priority this past year. Not that I actively rejected it before 2015, but I didn't prioritize it either, and it wasn't really something I thought I ever would prioritize. I like helping others, and in the process of doing so, often neglect myself. I'm trying to retrain myself into understanding that neglecting myself like that is not a virtue, proof of selflessness and womanhood and kindness. It's actually just a really stupid idea. It's not like we have to do one or the other - I can take care of myself and take care of others. (I think prioritizing my health and adopting and taking care of a puppy this year kind of proves that.) So why wouldn't I try to do both? Especially when my ability to help others is so dependent on how well I've taken care of myself first.