Trash Day #2: Collages! Ack!

My big personal news this week is that I've decided to start sharing my collages over on Instagram via the @jkcollages account. I'll find a non-Instagram space to host the images at some point so they're on the web at-large, but I'll be most active over there for the time being.

I talked a bit about my emerging collage work in my last Trash Day installment. I am still on a barbarian kick but I'll talk about another series that I have been working on over the past few weeks called "Cathy in Crisis."

My wife and I have a little free art gallery in front of our house, and it's been a fun way to share our own work, see what our creative neighbors are up to, and showcase some really fun stuff by the neighborhood children. Every once in a while we get something in the space that doesn't quite align with the whole "art gallery" thing, and so I wasn't shocked when I came across this tiny collection of Cathy Guisewite comics shortly before Mother's Day.

I do want to note upfront that I am not a Cathy hater. I have a copy of I'd Scream Except I Look So Fabulous and I am on the lookout for more of the classic collections. I had an Aunt Kathy (with a K) who was inundated at times by Cathy (with a C) merch, but in a manner I have fond memories of in hindsight even if she does not (RIP Kathy). I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s so I have a particular fondness for the newspaper comic strips of those decades. If I listened to podcasts more I would be all over Jamie Loftus' Aack Cast already but I am sorry about preferring music to talking most days! The arrival of the Cathy collection was more an invitation to take on a more focused collage project with a nice tidy set of materials and vibes as a foundation.

Because my other collage materials these days skew a bit darker and weirder, "Cathy In Crisis" came together pretty quickly. I'm not sure how many I will end up doing in this series but you will find the first two collages below:

Any additional "Cathy In Crisis" installments will be up over on Instagram, in addition to lots of other stuff! I didn't expect to be talking this much about collages over here but it is one of my main preoccupations these days and I'm having a good time. Send me your collage account recs to follow!

I've spent most of this week reading Monsters In The Archives: My Year Of Fear With Stephen King. Like author Caroline Bicks, I am someone who grew up reading a lot of King and eventually worked my way towards academic work in literary studies. I was hoping for a bit more focus on the archives and was honestly expecting more in the way of academic research around stuff like cultural context, material culture, and reception history, but Bicks is primarily working in a kind of hybrid approach that is part memoir and part close readings of the differences in King's drafts. The book also focuses on a smaller segment of King books than I was expecting: Carrie, The Shining, 'Salem's Lot, Pet Sematery, and Night Shift. There's also an interesting detour into excerpts from "King's Garbage Truck," the author's college newspaper column in The Maine Campus during the late 1960s. So it's not the book I had in mind, but I do think the diehard King fans (especially those of us who write or dabble in writing) will enjoy some of the revision discussions at the very least.

"Close reading" is a methodology that I think can sometimes be overstated or made too prescriptive, so maybe I would say instead that Bicks has a particular attentiveness to King's word choices and editing decisions. There can at times be a bit of hyperbole and dramatics around some of the author's encounters with textual differences, but I am Irish Catholic so we are not prone to showing any emotion or feeling in any social circumstance, let alone the act of reading. I also appreciate King's aversion to reading too much into his edits and their motivations whenever he briefly appears in these pages. He tends to be more interested in the memories that the questions from his interlocutor open up around the life he drew from as he wrote these stories.

Bicks does find some cool things to laser in on via her archival research into these drafts. For example, I liked the attention paid in the Pet Sematary chapter to the description of the returning Gage and the work that went into the story of one of King's more memorable monsters. Bicks notes how the descriptions of Gage's movements and the motives ascribed to his (its) actions leave things a bit more open to the reader's nightmarish interpretations (and also seem to influence the revised three-section structure of the novel). I also appreciated the way that Bicks' Shakespearean training informs the discussion of the connections between Hamlet and The Shining. And I had no idea that King wrote a "Before the Play" prologue and used such overtly theatrical language in the initial conception of the story. I wonder if the experiences of almost blocking and imagining the performative elements of The Shining would go on to influence some of the negative feelings the author seemed to share about Stanley Kubrick's adaptation.

Given the franchising and IP farming of our current era, I was initially surprised that no one has attempted to stage The Shining as a stage play. But it turns out that major stage adaptations have been in the works here and there in recent years, with Ben Stiller at one point attached as a potential lead. Apparently it seemed bound for London most recently but nothing seems to have materialized as of yet.

There's also an opera of The Shining that premiered in 2016 and was re-staged as recently as this year in Tampa (with another staging scheduled for Columbus in 2027). The opera apparently takes its cues primarily from King's novel, though it is hard not to see the influence of Kubrick in some of the costuming and imagery I came across while learning about its existence.

Another set of stray thoughts and links to round out this installment!

• I made my way quickly through the available episodes of Widow's Bay on Apple TV and I'm excited to see where things go from here. I liked Matthew Rhys in The Americans but I absolutely love what he is going for in this show as the overwhelmed mayor of a New England island that was probably better left in its eternally dormant and overlooked state. Things could go off the rails from here (and almost did for me in the hotel episode, to be honest) but I am a big fan as of this writing.
• One of my favorite digital collage artists these days goes by the name of Moon Patrol. Their most recent series of comic page-inspired work is particular cool. I also recommend The Art of Moon Patrol in the Banzai edition series (that I am trying to resist but seem to be slowly buying in its entirety).
• Pretty quiet over on the Letterboxd front recently. I really enjoyed catching Hoagie on Night Flight Plus last week but it is hard for me to recommend that one if I want to begin said recommendation by saying something like "Have you seen Frankie Freako?" or "Do you wish Gremlins had more gore and was produced by Lloyd Kaufman instead of Steven Spielberg?"
• Asuka is allegedly in semi-retirement! Long May The Empress Of Tomorrow Reign in whatever she wants to do from here. Asuka is also in the Wrestling Hall of Fame as one of the greatest shitposters in the game.

Feel free to chat with me on Bluesky or email me: jimmcgrath[dot]us[at]gmail