Memoirs of a Geisha

I finished reading Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden. I should have realized this was not a true story from the day I opened the book. I must have been in a daze when I read the information about the author? I probably just assumed this guy had recorded the information from a living person and put it in book form. Or something? When I finished it I was still hungry for more. How was this lady able to stay in New York City in an expensive apartment; and own a small tea house; and it was then that I realized this was a, "novel" and that I had convinced myself this was a true story. It is a "novel." I never read novels about a woman by a man or the other way around. It would be like reading a novel entitled, "My Life as a Pig" by Mrs. Cow.

So books like Autobiography of a Geisha and Geisha of Gion: The Memoir of Mineko Iwasaki is the real thing and not fiction. What was I thinking?

Which brings me to the point that I have been at parties and watched and listened to Geisha play the Shamisen and the music that comes from it. I was absolutely in awe of these ladies when I was just nineteen years old, 9,000 miles from home, sitting on a straw mat in a tiny room somewhere in the Ginza in Tokyo. I had assumed they were high-class prostitutes but was told nothing could be further from the truth. There are prostitutes that parade around as Geisha and, their Obi tells you, 'I am a prostitute' but I was not aware of these fine points of Japanese dress at that time.

© 2006 Abraham Lincoln - All rights reserved.

State Champs

Plastic hat, slightly crunched, featuring Arcanum High School colors, orange and black, and the year the basketball team went on to win the state championship. Saving this for Chris as he went to the game in Columbus with his grandpa Custer.

Thanksgiving

Audrey, Patty, Abe, Melinda, Noah, Melissa took picture at Thanksgiving a couple of years ago.

Wash Drawing

I guess this is one of the more difficult things to do—make a wash drawing using India ink and water and a small red sable brush. At the time I was making drawings for magazines and most were just black ink on white paper drawings because those are called, "Line Drawings" and a figure created with those tools (red sable brush, water, India ink, white paper) is the same as black and white printed text when it comes to making printing plates. The artwork above is the same as a photograph because it has lots of different shades of black—it is called a "halftone" like a photo. This was done back in the early 1970s when I did a lot of artwork for western magazines.

Raccoons

My favorite raccoon. She showed up one day and looked in the window and I snapped this photo of her.

She lived under my shop and had four baby raccoons there and raised them up until she weaned them and then she sent them up and over our board fence for the last time.

She was a wonderful wild animal and I often think of her and her babies.

The four of them are shown in this photo. The mother was on the ground behind them and was coaxing them to go on over.

It was a whole new world for the baby raccoons and they were not so eager to leave the only home they had known.

Gusty

The first time I saw this picture, somewhere, I copied and saved it. It reminds me of that photo of Marilyn Monroe's dress flying up when she walked across a grate in a sidewalk. I do think that a photographer should be looking for the unusual around him and hold off on just snapping the shutter at any and everything they come across. Try to capture the moment and don't create to photograph.

Mrs. Starr, my English teacher, listened to me reading a story that I wrote for class. She critiqued my story while I stood in front of my Sophomore English class, embarrassed and red-faced; I was our class president and was elected by popular student vote and I had used the word, "raised" instead of, "reared." My country-school education (we had to start there and go through the 8th Grade before we were promoted on to high school) had never prepared me for words like this. I would always say, "She raised me" and at that time didn't know words like "reared."