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Once again, it is time to head back to the wild forest cwms of my ancestral homeland. I will feed LG some corn, walk the golden fields and green forests, and visit my mother’s kinfolks who dwell on the other side of some truly hospitable mountains. It is going to be lovely. Brooklyn’s urban lifestyle is nonpareil, but sometimes one must escape Flatbush for a bit.
Of course abandoning the old blogstead is not without peril! As soon as Ferrebeekeeper announced these travel plans, economic indicators started blinking red and the market began screaming in protest. Evidently, without Ferrebeekeeper’s weekly posts, the yield curve inverts and the world economy comes undone.
Therefore, I am once again turning over the reins of Ferrebeekeeper to the experienced hands of Daniel Claymore, the great speculative fiction visionary whose now available sci-fi epic stares unblinkingly at the wonders and horrors of our AI future. Perhaps he will elaborate on these dark prognostications in some of his posts, or maybe he will take you back to the fish markets of Tokyo, or to the sketchbook of Japan’s greatest movie director, or to places yet unknown.
At any rate, I am sure he will take you on a soaring journey…of the mind. Also, he will have to bear sole responsible for the world economy for a week. So please give a hearty welcome to Daniel Claymore! Make sure to comment a lot (oh, and please let him know if you have deep connections to the world of science fiction publishing). I will see you in a week!
I am back from the bosky hills and verdant dells of West Virginia and SE Ohio and I have a lot of new ideas and stories to share. Thanks Mom and Dad for the lovely visit and all of your kindness. Also, I want to thank Dan Claymore who did a superb job in my absence. Dan understood the purpose of Ferrebeekeeper and matched the tone beautifully (although that Japanese fishmarket made me anxious for the oceans and our flatfish friends). Because of his excellent work, I realize I should take more vacations. Dan also confided in me that he found the project intimidating because of the perspicacity of the polymath readers…so, as always, thank YOU!
When I travel, I carry a little book and a tin of pens and colored pencils (my tin is shaped like a sarcophagus and is interesting in its own right, but more about that later). I like to quickly draw little colored sketches of what pops into my head or what is in front of me. Sometimes there are realistic. Sometimes they are utterly fanciful. They are sometimes silly and occasionally sad. I have dozens of volumes of New York drawings, but I figured I should share all the little sketches I made on my trip (unfortunately nobody posed for me–so there are no portraits). Keep in mind that these are sketches–so they are quick and imperfect. For example, I drew the one at the top in the car as my family and I went to a wedding in the central mountains of West Virginia, and half way through I realized I didn’t have a dark gray pencil. Roads are hard for me too (as are straight lines in the moving car). Maybe this says something about the unnatural yet astonishing nature of our highway infrastructure.
In the car, I also drew this humorous drawing of a gnome kingdom. My mother was describing a nuclear weapons facility somewhere which she visited during her Pentagon career, and I apparently misheard the name. This delightful misunderstanding engendered a whole didactic gnome world. Fribble Fribble!
This drawing is the corner of the yard at home with autumn cornfields beyond. Vinnie the barncat is sneaking onto the right corner, catty-corner from the old Amish farmstead. I wish I could have captured Vinnie better, but Rory the obstreperous adolescent poodle chased him off, before I could catch a better likeness.
No Ferrebeekeeper sketch collection would be complete without a magical flounder. This one apparently has a direct connection to the underworld. More about that in later posts.
Speaking of the underworld, here is a little drawing of the world beneath the topsoil. There is a lungfish, a brumating turtle, a mole, a mummy, and an ant colony, but beneath these ordinary items is a whole gnome kingdom. Don’t worry! I don’t believe in gnomes. Their tireless tiny civilization really represents bacteria to me…oh and humans civilization too (artistic allegory is more of an art than a science). This macro/micro dichotomy is captured by the shoes of a full sized (albeit anachronistic) human at the top left.
This is a quick impression of a sunset which was SO beautiful. If only I could truly have captured more of its sublime luminescent color….
This is my parents’ pond, which I love more than I can tell you. Unfortunately a big drip came out of my dip pen and made the ducks look monstrous. There is a hint of autumn orange in the trees. This is another one that frustrates me, because reality was so pretty.
I watched the second half of a documentary about the circus on PBS. It seems like the circus was more important and central to our nation than I knew (although I should have guessed based on current politics). I represented the performers as abstract shapes, but the overall composition bears a debt to Cimabue and his Byzantine predecessors.
Finally here is a picture from the tarmac of John Glenn airport in Columbus. Naturally the plane moved away as soon as things began to get good. By the way I really enjoyed my flight and I am always surprised that people are so angry about flying. For the price of a moderately fancy dinner, we can rocket across the continent above the clouds at hundred miles an hour. We travel like the gods of Greek mythology except people serve us coffee and ginger cookies and, best of all we can truly see the earth from a towering perspective–which is the subject of my last picture which I scrawled as we looped back across Long island west to LaGuardia (I’m glad I am not an air traffic controller). Sadly this picture did not capture the beauty and complexity of Long Island Sound, and Queens (nor even the lovely billowing cumulus clouds) but at least it made me stare raptly out the window at the ineffable but disturbing beauty of the strange concrete ecosystem we are building.
Let me know what you think of my little sketches and, now that summer vacation is out of the way, get ready for some October horror and Halloween fun! Oh! Also get ready for Dan Claymore’s book about a human gumshoe in the dark robot future. It will be out before you know it, and it is going to be amazing!
Ok! I’m headed off to the countryside to enjoy some apple cider, autumn foliage, and family time, but you are all going to be in great hands with the famous/infamous swashbuckler of speculative fiction, Dan Claymore! Be sure to ply him with comments. I will see you back in a week or so and don’t forget to check out my Instagram page. Any questions not addressed here should be brought immediately to the attention of the Great Flounder.
Sayonara!
I have been feeling a bit burned out by blogging lately, not because my subjects are exhausted (there are always so many more fascinating stories to tell, plus I am truly looking forward to weaving all of these strands together) but because I am exhausted. I have been working a full time job as some sort of crummy small-time insurance clerk during the day and creating a splendid world of astonishing allegorical fish art at night and then blogging on top of that. Obviously I should be more resilient and work harder and plan better, but still it takes a lot of effort. Worst of all I sometimes wonder if any of this is worthwhile. Based on what’s around us, it seems like people want reality TV, plastic junk, Kardashians, and Donald Trump. They care little for elaborate flounder artwork and daily articles about golden moles (although obviously, you, dear reader, are a person of much deeper discernment).
Anyway, the best way to avoid burnout is to take a vacation, and so next week I am heading back to the harvest-time fields and autumn oak forests of the family farm to see my family (and the family geese). This time though, I am not leaving you in the lurch. I am handing the Ferrebeekeeper reigns over to a burgeoning writing superstar, the science fiction author, Daniel Claymore (that is his sword sigil up there at top, in case you were curious about the medieval weaponry in a vacation post…although I am going to West Virginia). Maybe he will share some speculative tales of a dark future that might someday come to be. Or perhaps he will take you on an odyssey deep into the seething heart of modern humankind, or, then again, maybe he will rant about incompetent political leadership or write delicious cupcake recipes. Who knows? I am not an overbearing editor and I am giving him cart-blanche. But I know it will be supremely entertaining. make sure to comment a lot when he is writing: I have been bad about responding, but I know Daniel will give your precious insights the full consideration they deserve.
I’ll post another artwork or something tomorrow and then Daniel will be taking over next week. It is going to be really great to have a guest author so prepare yourselves as Ferrebeekeeper goes to unimagined new places (and Ferrebee goes home to collect acorns and feed corn to pet geese).
I hope you will accept my apologies for last week’s thin posts. I am on holiday for a fortnight. This week I am at my parents’ farm in the Ohio Valley, and, although it is exceedingly lovely out here, internet is exiguous, at best. I don’t want you to think I have abandoned you though, and so I am going to post some pictures from the farmstead throughout the week. The first is me with Rory, my parents’ new standard poodle puppy. Poodles may have a fancy reputation, but he has been jumping in the pond, running in the forest, and doing all sorts of farm dog things (although he is also super sweet). In fact, he is probably up to mischief RIGHT NOW…so I am going to go play with him some more. I’ll post some more from the fields and bosky dells tomorrow!
Soybean Field (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)
I’m sorry I didn’t write a post last Thursday or Friday: I was away from Brooklyn on a whirlwind family trip to see the farmstead and visit my parents and grandparents. Now I love Brooklyn with all of my heart, but it was a great relief to be away from it for a little while. It was lovely to feed the thousand gentle farm creatures, to assess the growth of the plums, apples & nut trees in the orchard, and to walk back through the soybean fields into the true forest.
Parkersburg (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)
Unfortunately there wasn’t much in the way of writing time (and there isn’t much internet access in West Virginia and southeastern Ohio anyway). However I have a few little drawings which I doodled while I was home. My favorite is at the top of the page—it is a view of the soybean fields as the viewer emerges from the forest and is struck by the dazzling deep green of the plants. Soybeans are a critical crop in numerous ways, but I never really noticed them as a child–perhaps because I didn’t yet love edamame, or maybe because I hadn’t become used to living in a world of asphalt and bricks. Anyway, I will write a post about soybeans, but I wanted to share a quick impression of their overwhelming glowing greenness. The second picture is a drawing from the road of Parkersburg, West Virginia. The town is actually both much prettier and much uglier than the sketch—there are numerous picturesque Romanesque and “Jacobethan” churches and buildings, but there also some truly dispiriting strip malls along the outskirts (which I represented with a Kia dealership). Still the town has been improving incrementally for decades—perhaps thanks to my parents’ lovely yarn shop and quilting shop (which you should totally visit if you are ever in the Midwest/Appalachian region).
Paisley (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)
Speaking of quilting, I also drew a purely abstract picture of paisleys after I became fascinated by the printed patterns of the bolts of quilting cloth. Ever since the age of the Mughals, paisley has regularly come into fashion and then fallen out of it. Yet the concept seems to be much more ancient than the Scottish textile makers of the early industrial revolution or the Mughals. Paisley is another subject I need to blog about—because I think it is tremendously beautiful.
Goose Pond (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)
Finally there is a little drawing of the goose pond. I sketched it quickly (and from a distance) just before we drove off to the airport, but you can still see a few little pilgrim geese swimming about on it. My parents’ flock of these creatures has succeeded beyond all measure and now it is like their farm is infested with miniature dinosaurs. Everywhere you look there are geese busily gnawing on grass, biting each other’s tails, or jumping sadly (with expectant open beaks) beneath tantalizing green apples. I am sorry I didn’t do a sketch that really does justice to the lovable avine miscreants, however I am afraid that if I had stood among them long enough to draw them, they would have begun to nibble on me like a big ear of corn (which is their affectionate way of gently reminding visitors that geese get hungry for corn and lovely for attention). Thanks for looking at my drawings—now that I am back from my trip and my mind is refreshed I will try to blog about some of these new subjects!
A ramshackle Russian dacha
This week the G8 shrank down to the G7. The other powerful nations threw Russia out of the club due to its extremely naughty behavior. This was a good choice: you would never see, say, Canada behaving in such a fashion. In fact, if Canada found Crimea just lying around–on a park bench or in a bathroom lavatory or something—Canada would probably take the wayward peninsula to lost and found (I won’t speak about France, Great Britain, or the United States: we can have sticky fingers sometimes). Anyway, now that Russia is no longer in the club, I have been reminiscing about all the Russian things which we will miss: ineffable literature, banyas, the unsafe (but vibrant) space program, and Russian architecture—particularly dachas, which are among the prettiest of all the world’s cottages.
An ornate dacha
A dacha is a country vacation house. They are usually located in the exurbs just outside of towns and major cities on tiny 600 square meter [0.15 acre] land plots, where the Russian middle class plants little gardens and enjoys playing at country simplicity. Originally dachas were gifts from the tsars to loyal or interesting Russian subjects. In fact the word dacha (да́ча) meant “something given”. These tsarist-era dachas were country estates which could be princely chalets or manor houses. After the civil war, the era of landed country estates was over and having a dacha could get a person sent to Siberia or killed (although, of course party luminaries had magnificent dachas, like Stalin’s great green hall). During the later Soviet era, however, dachas made a comeback among urban professionals. The concept was changed though: the little vacation houses could only have a tiny amount of living space and plot sizes were similarly regulated by central authority. This meant that clever dacha-owners had to push the boundaries with mansard roofs, architectural flourishes, and elegance (as opposed to sheer size).
Stalin’s Dacha at Kuntsevo (by Gordon Abben)
After the fall of communism, the rules all went in the scrap bin. Oligarchs began to build huge whimsical monstrosities (below is a contemporary dacha with one of the oligarch’s toys parked beside it).
Dachas have actually come to New York with the recent wave of Russian immigration. A number of Russian-born Brooklynites have pretty Russian-style dachas in the forests and mountains upstate. Although I am not Russian, I love ornate little cottages in the forest and I have been enviously looking over these fretwork masterpieces. Unfortunately I do not currently have a Soviet level of personal prosperity, so my project to build a dacha back in my native mountains may have to be put on hold until I learn to manipulate the system and ruthlessly crush my enemies.
In the mean time here is a gallery of lovely dachas for you to enjoy. Maybe it will inspire you to put some onion domes and scrollwork on your own vacation cottage. It has been a long rough winter and we could use some fru-fru ornamentation, some bright colors, and some time out of the city…
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