The Importance of the Fictitious

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

–The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

SECOND ACT

SCENE

Garden at the Manor House. A flight of grey stone steps leads up to the
house. The garden, an old-fashioned one, full of roses. Time of year,
July. Basket chairs, and a table covered with books, are set under a
large yew-tree.

Miss Prism. [Shaking her head.] I do not think that even I could
produce any effect on a character that according to his own brother’s
admission is irretrievably weak and vacillating. Indeed I am not sure
that I would desire to reclaim him. I am not in favour of this modern
mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment’s notice. As a
man sows so let him reap. You must put away your diary, Cecily. I
really don’t see why you should keep a diary at all.

Cecily. I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my
life. If I didn’t write them down, I should probably forget all about
them.

Miss Prism. Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about
with us.

Cecily. Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never
happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened. I believe that Memory is
responsible for nearly all the three-volume novels that Mudie sends us.

Miss Prism. Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily.
I wrote one myself in earlier days.

Cecily. Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I
hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They
depress me so much.

Miss Prism. The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what

Fiction means.

Cecily. I suppose so. But it seems very unfair. And was your novel
ever published?

Miss Prism. Alas! no. The manuscript unfortunately was abandoned.
[Cecily starts.] I use the word in the sense of lost or mislaid. To
your work, child, these speculations are profitless.

Midwest Shake

I woke up in the dark thinking there was an earthquake. Then, that seeming silly, I remembered that the weather guy had said that there would be a change and the wind would pick up, so that made sense in a sleep addled way–the wind is making the windows rattle. But–I was becoming interested and a bit more awake–that much wind would make the wind chime on the porch ring like a church bell. Instead, it was still. An explosion somewhere? I waited to hear sirens. There would have been sirens after any explosion big enough to leave the windows shaking half a minute after the fact.

It was an earthquake.  Around 4:30.  In Illinois. Something short of a couple hundred miles from here. They are saying on TV now that it was a 5.4. It seems to be out in farm land, some distance from most major cities. Vincennes Indiana is not too far from there.. There seems to be a little damage as far away as Louisville, the facade of a brick building.

It is part of the New Madrid system, but peripheral.

Ryder to ryder

“O where are you going?” said reader to rider,
“That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder’s the midden whose odours will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return.”

“O do you imagine,” said fearer to farer,
“That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?”

“O what was that bird,” said horror to hearer,
“Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.”

“Out of this house,” said rider to reader,
“Yours never will,” said farer to fearer,
“They’re looking for you,” said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.

– W. H. Auden

Transfers Using Liquid Sculpey

I took my first stab at this. The results were…interesting. Not great, but not all that bad.

Since I have an inkjet printer, I used a variation of the T shirt transfer paper method. I had a photocopy from a catalog, of a painting. Scaled it to fit the lid of a cheapie wooden box from Michael’s–about 9×7 inches. For a first effort, that was a bit large. By the time I managed to paint the entire image with the Liquid, the ink on the transfer paper was already beginning to go into solution. Learned that the hard way when I scraped a 1/2 inch long bit off the edge with the chopstick I was using to hold it in place. That was all right, since the over all effect was going to be on the rough side.

I skipped the heat gun and baked the whole thing in the oven, on a cheap cookie sheet. A little soaking, and the paper came right off.

Next time: I will make sure my Sculpy is thinner before I begin. I’ll brush it on instead of pouring it and then trying to smooth it out. And it would be better to work by sections. Leave a “handle” when cutting out the image. Maybe practice with a smaller image a couple of times before anything I want to look really nice.

	Heat Gun Method: Spread a thin, even coat of Translucent Liquid Sculpey on the surface of your toner transfer image. The uncured clay will appear milky white and shiny.
	Use your heat gun to carefully set the clay. Move the tip of the heat gun evenly over the surface of the clay so it does not burn in spots.
	The clay will become translucent and matte when it cures.
	With a clay blade or your fingernail, peel the clay away from the paper while the clay is still warm. You will now have a paper thin transfer.
	If you use the side of the clay that lifted the image off of the paper, your image will be reversed. It is a good idea to bake the transfer on a flat tray (if you are not applying it to clay that will be baked again) for 10 minutes to make sure the liquid clay is completely cured.
	Color Transfers with Fabric Transfer Paper Color images printed from your computer inkjet printer onto fabric transfer paper can be easily made into thin liquid clay transfers. Once you have printed the image onto the fabric transfer paper (used for transferring images onto t-shirts and fabric), just follow the directions for the heat gun transfer method. Once the Liquid Sculpey is cured, the clay will peel easily from the paper. This way, you can quickly turn your own digital color images into paper-thin clay transfers.