Painting Elephants in Udaipur
“Come in Miss, come in! I show you to paint with a squirrel hair!”
A man stands in the doorway of a tiny art shop, grinning at me. It’s only just breaking light here in Udaipur, the city of lakes in India’s northwestern region of Rajasthan. The cobbled streets are almost deserted and there’s a slight fog, making the maze-like alleyways down near the ghats seem more magical than usual.
I hesitate. Stacked in frames against the front window of the shop are beautiful paintings, none bigger than a postcard. Each artwork is a detailed glimpse into the wonders of Rajasthani culture: palaces, forts, lakes, snarling tigers, and dancing serpents.
But after a month of travelling in India, I am more than a little cynical about grinning men. I start to walk on.
“No sell, I provide you art class!”
They say there’s a sucker born every minute, and when you’re travelling, you are re-born every day. So, I give in to India yet again and turn around, squeezing myself and my backpack through the narrow entrance and down some chipped white stairs.
Read the rest over at Trespass.
Who do you write like?
Possibly the most awesome procastination tool the internet has produced in a long time..
Check which famous writer you write like by entering in a couple of paragraphs of text.
Apparently, I write like Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian author of Lolita (which, incidentally, I’ve never read) and H. P. Lovecraft, who Google tells me was a “20th century master of weird fiction”, whatever that is.
So, I write like a Russian and someone who used initials, which can only mean that I must be good ;-)
Who do you write like?
Some sample pages from a zine that I made, it’s about a little purple faery who wants to be green.. I’ve just posted it to Bird in the Hand, Octapod and Milk Thieves…
Sa mort nous sépare.
Ma mort ne nous réunira pas.
C’est ainsi; il est déjà beau que nos vies aient pu si longtemps s’accorder.
Simone de Beauvoir, La Cérémonie des Adieux
Un petit peu nihiliste, peut-être, mais c’est vrai - à la fin, je ne suis rien si je n’ai aimé personne et si je n’ai pas essayé pour quelque chose.
Even the most solid of things, and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand-shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light.
Jeanette Winterson (Sexing the Cherry)
I am reading The Passion at the moment…
I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.
my new typewriter!!!
Reintroducing the Interrobang!
a fabulous new toy for punctuation nerds everywhere…
hmmm: Neil Gaiman on gendered literature
“Books have sexes; or to be more precise, books have genders. They do in my head, anyway. Or at least, the ones that I write do. And these are genders that have something, but not everything, to do with the gender of the main character of the story.”
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I love to write, and I love to take photographs. I make zines, copper jewellery, rushed sketches, and I am learning to play the guitar.
Sometimes I like to imagine that I live in a world where all that I need in life is a pair of red shoes and a cobblestone street in Paris...
You can find me elsewhere on the web at:
http://jessicacarter.wordpress.com/
http://redshoesandcobblestones.wordpress.com/
http://twitter.com/jkcsays
Thank you so much for visiting my little blog!
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