Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

Happy Hump Day!

Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2004
6:56 p.m.
It was so nice to log in and see my buddy list all lit up, and to see that tcklyrpharsn hasn�t forgotten us while she�s on her big European adventure. I was thinking how she�s only been gone since Monday, but already I miss her, and there�s her entry from London. Woo hoo!

Somehow I made it through the day without losing my voice, which I thought was a sure thing by the end of Heather�s lesson. I taught my two young men this morning, lunched at the pub, went to my goddess class (wherein we viewed slides of cave paintings and two slide projectors bit the dust, one after another), taught the aforementioned Heather, went back to Patsy�s office (after having fetched the car from the upper parking lot) to pick up Suzie (more on that later), then ended up chatting with another middle-aged lady in the MacKinnon lot, whereupon Patsy joined us, so I gave her a ride home. The kids were feeding themselves cheese and crackers under the watchful eye of their father in preparation for their karate class at 6:00, to which their father drove them, and I made supper, juste pour nous, � deux. So now I actually have time at the iMac which I didn�t get yesterday because one or t�other of the kids was on it seemingly from the moment school was out until bedtime.

Writing group started up last night, much to my relief. I was suffering serious withdrawal. We have a number of new members: Deb from Edmonton, Leanne, Jim (a retired guy with an English accent) and Chris (a young guy who is either a Bishop�s or Champlain student). Very few regulars were there: Patsy, Bruce, and myself. This guy Chris is very, very funny. He had us in stitches when he was reading. His prose is really good too. I look forward to more of his stuff. Jim is just shy, but also good.

Now, you want to hear about Suzie. Many years ago I took Sculpture I. Jim (a different one) ran the course thusly:

Project No. 1: Fill a green garbage bag partway with plaster of paris, hold in arms until it solidifies, unwrap, and chisel away until you have a piece of art.
Project No. 2: Using clay, sculpt something, preferably not a duck, make a plaster cast, clean out the clay, and make a positive casting in a more permanent substance (i.e. ciment fondu or tuffstone).
Project No. 3: Using wire or some other �linear� medium, create a sculpture in three dimensions.
Project No. 4: Create a sculpture in a medium of your choice.

I made Suzie for my fourth project using the clay and plaster cast method. At first I was trying to reinterpret Cycladic art as I had seen it in Greece, and then I started thinking about the �Venus� figurines I have seen in books and museums, and then I started waxing autobiographical. I came up with a female form, about a foot high, with a Cycladic-inspired face (round head, brows but no eyes, the nose is too large and there is an attempt at lips), a beautiful neck and shoulders, no arms, enormous pendulous boobs, a huge gravid abdomen with an �outy�, a vulva slit (practically hidden by the enormous belly), a big ass, and thick thighs that are cut off so she can stand upright. She�s very solid, and very heavy. I cast her in tuffstone and coloured her with black shoe polish which I later removed. So she has a white and black-streaked marble effect happening on her surface. I quite like her, even after all these years.

Anyway, I brought this piece to class so that my fellow students could see that a pregnant female has an extruded navel, as opposed to the female figurines found in paleolithic sites, which all have �innies�. M-C and I are the only ones who have actually had children, and she was astounded by my sculpture. I left it with Patsy for the next class, and then I had to retrieve it before I left for the day. But first I had to get the car from the upper parking lot because there was no way I was carrying Suzie halfway across campus. She weighs (if not a ton, then it feels like) a ton.

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