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I have preserved my winning hand (the two rows of cards at the bottom) in The Entertaining and Instructive Game of Spodunk.
Ink, watercolour and gouache on Daler board, A1 size. Click to enlarge.

I came across this charred log. I broke off a piece and used it to draw a picture of that log.

A circular walk of 2 miles starting at Parliament Hill car park including a 200 metre swim in the Highgate pond. Water temperature 16C. 19 May 2011
Click to enlarge.

The hero returns.
Ink, watercolour, pencil. 35cm x 51cm. Click to enlarge.

I went to Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy with the redoubtable Terry Ryan. We found the fire escapes in the gallery to be more interesting than most of the works on show. My photo shows Terry creating an instant living sculpture entitled The Burning Man in Room 7. We did enjoy Damien Hirst's dead flies, but I think Terry's idea for a piece entitled Damien's Hearse needs to be built.

The final piece in the show is by one of our favourite artists, John Latham and features seriously mangled copies of the Quran and Bible. Luckily Latham is in no danger of reprisals because he's been dead for some time.

Hedgehog

The world is changing and so is my brain. When I was a teenager, I used to saturate myself in Dickens or Austen and go about narrating my life to myself in the voice of their novels. This evening I was struggling to light our apathetic fire and found myself narrating my life to myself in a Facebook status. Leila Rasheed Is: playing with fire. Language shrinkage. I’ve just finished the first draft of a novel, and I’m convinced that I’ve written it a hundred times more badly than I would have five or ten years ago. My brain has curled up like a hedgehog and no matter how much I poke it with sticks, it doesn’t want to move.
I think I can solve it. The first step is making space for a book, turning off the computer. Reading does for the brain what water does to those magic towels I coveted when I was a child; it causes it to expand and become far more interesting. There are microbes that lie around in a state of dehydration for years just waiting for the rain to bring them back to life. My brain can live again!
We need computers. We probably even need Facebook. But we need real books, too. This is why it is so sad that libraries are under threat. The internet scrunches language up small, it dehydrates it. Books, novels, well-written books of all kind, allow language to flourish. And language is thought.


Moiré

Spell checkers have their own happy logic. Sometimes when I am typing away, I’ll mis-hit a key, and the program will adjust what I typed to what it thinks I meant to type. So what I intended as more becomes moiré. Now I have never, to my knowledge, intentionally typed the word moiré until this blog post. How often does the average Microsoft user use the word moiré? How often does anyone use the word moiré? I imagine the computer, blind and deaf as it is, imagines itself used by an elegant lady with strings of pearls and a chignon (another word I have never to the best of my knowledge typed before). Such a lady would use the word moiré. Such a lady would have a less apathetic fire than mine, and a small dog to sit in front of it.

Log

Over in Italy, we buy firewood that fruit farmers have trimmed from their trees and we stack it outside to dry. It is proper wood, with knots and gnarls and bark and splinters. We also collect driftwood; big nubbly olive roots stripped of bark, bits of door, that kind of thing. When dried out this burns in witchy colours because of the salt. It usually leaves behind stubborn bits that won’t burn, and old nails and so forth.
Here in England we buy sacks of smokeless fuel shaped into perfect pebbles as light as pumice, and ‘Blaze’ logs, which are formed of sawdust into a regular cuboid with a perfect hole down the middle, packed neatly into plastic. They are the same brown all over. They burn entirely and leave vast amounts of fine, clean white ash.
On the one hand, a functional, Facebook sort of a language, perfectly cuboid, uniformly brown. On the other, a gnarly, splintery, waterlogged sort of a language that needs stacking in the head and leaving to dry for a while before it can burn, and burn, and burn.

Card No. 16 in the ongoing series of woodcuts.
Woodcut 30cm x 20cm. Click to enlarge.

• Having properly installed smoke alarms cut the chances of dying in a reported fire by half.  Install smoke alarms in every bedroom, outside every sleeping area and on every level of the home.  Consider purchasing one with an escape light built in as well.  Put a note on the calendar to test the smoke alarm on the first of every month.

• Be sure to place specially designed stickers from the fire department on the window of each child’s bedroom which will alert fire fighters that a child could be present in that room.

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The laundry room caught on fire (again) today. The smoke billowed up through the building and into our apartment, so I’m out on the balcony listening to the construction and the jackhammers. They’ve told us not to leave, but the firemen left, so I’m thinking of leaving as well. The last time this happened was October 1, 2008. I blogged about it then and that post could have been written today:

Post from October 1, 2008 on the old sruble blog

How’s life at the Inferno Apartment Complex on Incendiary Lane? Glad you asked. Earlier today, I smelled smoke. I tried to find the cause of said smoke, but couldn’t. A few minutes later, a thick heavy smoke smell filled the room (and I couldn’t breathe, which was very disconcerting). It also seemed a little hazy. I did the smoke check again and discovered that there was smoke wafting in from the hallway (I did NOT open the door, as I am not addle-brained).

While throwing on jeans (no need to go outside in my Halloween themed PJ pants I wear sometimes while being creative), I made a mental list of things I needed to do if there was a fire: encourage LeFurrball to get into his carrier without too much of a fight (ha ha), put on shoes, grab the Remus kitty, car keys, laptop, ID, money … FLEE! (Note: If there were flames or more smoke, I would have grabbed the cat and bolted.)

Before enacting my fire-fleeing list, I called down to the concierges to see if they could elaborate on the disaster that was surely happening, or not. He said that someone’s clothes caught on fire in the dryer!

Our apartment is nowhere near the first floor, where the laundry room is; the smoke came up through the elevator shafts and the vents in our apartment. Our apartment is not smoky anymore because the windows are open and the vents and bottom of the door are blocked off, but the hallways, elevators, lobby, and laundry room are evil smelling. I feel bad for the people with burned clothes.

The fact that someone’s clothing started a fire in the dryer didn’t surprise me. A few months ago, I noticed that clothing coming out of the dryer was so hot, that you would get burned if you touched it (fabric, not just metal zippers). We’ve been drying our clothes on medium or low since then. Dryer fires are scary and charred clothing is not fashionable.

I hope this isn’t a pattern, but just in case, remind me to look out for laundry fires again in 2012. I really wish I would have done laundry yesterday! Argh!

p.s. Unfortunately, I can’t find the pictures from last time. I haven’t been downstairs yet, but I’m guessing it looks similar. Imagine an industrial sized dryer with burn marks that looks a bit like a melted marshmallow, if you only held the marshmallow up to the campfire on one side.

Now Playing - King Kong Kitchee Kitchee Ki-Mi-Yo by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Life -  I just lit my toaster oven on fire. Apparently, leaving the foil you cooked some oiled up taters on the night before in the oven while pre-heating it is a poor idea. With an oily, stinky, foggy, nasty result. But I think my oven is still fine. Crappy cheap frozen taquitos from work for dinner, comin atcha! (

Another traditional English nursery rhyme that no one's heard of. However, Vivian de St. Vrain
has some interesting thoughts on the subject.
Pen and ink with watercolour. 17cm x 25cm. Click to enlarge.

Sketch for the cover of the latest album by The Flaming Baptists.
Watercolour with pen and ink 10cm x 15cm. Click to enlarge.

Two pages from yesterday. There's an idea in there somewhere, but can't quite get a grip on it as yet.
Pen and ink with brushpen wash. Each page 14cm x 14cm. Click to enlarge.

Carrick bend, Flemish eye, and Turk's head.
Pen and brushpen with watercolour. 21cm x 15cm. Click to enlarge.

It is the peak of immigration in New York City, at the dawn of the twentieth century. Shouts in dozens of languages whoop through the air and smells from every dish imaginable waft through the streets of the Lower East Side. Tenements, rickety but home, climb the sky, fire escapes snaking down. The streets are crowded with pushcarts and calls. Thus is the setting for The Uprising, by Margaret Peterson Haddix.

Bella is a young immigrant girl, fresh from Italy and weighted with the daunting task of providing for her family overseas. She is lucky to find a job, though the hours spent hunched over a sewing machine in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory are not quite what she expected.

Yetta has worked at Triangle for months. She lives with her equally rebellious elder sister, and, like Bella, sends most of her earnings home to her family in Russia. She is lively with life and pulsing with her want to change the world, to mean something, to matter. She wants women’s rights and safer conditions at work, shorter hours and higher wages. She is determined and fiery, willing to stand for months in the blistering heat and shivering cold, holding a picket sign and striking for union recognition in factories. Yetta is spirited and intense, gladly giving every bit of herself to her cause.

Jane, lastly, is a society girl with an intellectual spark. She is curious and compassionate, spending time with strikers and at rallies for no gain of her own, and finds herself swept up into this passionate world of striking and working and wanting and hoping. There is more to feel, she finds, outside of her ignorant, sheltered life. And these ardent factory girls so desperate for their cause accept her and love her—she finds a place with them that she cannot find at home.

Uprising is the story of these three girls. It is inspiring and adrenalizing (if that was not previously a word, I now deem it one), making me want to jump up and devote myself to a cause with all of my everything. On the other hand, the book does such a good job of enticing the readers into the world it creates, that it runs the risk of romanticizing poverty to some extent.

However, all in all, I love the way the book was crafted. The fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory looms ahead for the entire novel. Right from the first chapter, we learn that two of the three best friends will die in the fire, though we do not know which ones they will be. This sets up an interesting dynamic--as I would read and get to know each character better, I would start to root for her to survive, before realizing, dismayed, that the other two would have to perish. It gave the book momentum and a reason for me to keep reading at the few moments the plot lagged.

Furthermore, the author was very skilled at weaving fiction and fact together, creating a story that haunts and perplexes, makes you think about the world and what you can do to change it, but also makes you care deeply for the three main characters. She succeeded in bringing life to a tragedy that occurred almost a hundred years ago. In making us care not only for the girls who died, but for the factory owners and the workers who survived as well. In painting a horrifying picture of flame and sky and the impossible choice—to jump or to burn? In making readers understand that if we want change to we have to fight for it, as the shirtwaist girls did in their months-long strike. The author wrote the story to make us u

The Flaming Hand and the Milk Extinguisher. A sketch for Card 27 in the forthcoming Divination series.
Pen and ink with watercolour. 21cm x 14cm. Click to enlarge.

This trio turns everything into fire!!!
http://mariamacareu.blogspot.com/

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The winner for the "Fire" challenge is:

Doodlestreet!

Congratulations to Pam Jones (Doodlestreet). I chose Doodlestreet's "Fire Bug" as the winner for the Fire challenge. The form and design are perfect and the coloring and shading really invoke the theme. Great work, Pam!

Fantastic entries all! I particularly liked LittleMissMachete's "Fire in the Kitchen!" - expertly done, funny, and incredible as always. There were several others I was blown away by as well - thank you so much for your amazing work, artists! I complain about how hard it is to choose a winner because the artists here are so good - and that's the way it should be.

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I made this as an animated gif. Inspired by an idea that i had that Dali made paintings of birds on fire. I did an image search of his paintings but couldnt find any so perhaps i imagined it.

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