Those of you who regularly read know that I occasionally watch movies in my obelisk (here’s how I do it).   Most of the movies I watch no longer exist.  They star Theda Bara, she for whom publicity agents invented the word “vamp”.  To be a vamp, as I understand it, an odalisque must possess magnetic powers of attraction coupled with:

1.  stagnant, voluptuous  repose: to immure a fascinated victim in slavish inertia, resulting in his eventual decay

2.  seductive evasion: to lure an obsessed victim into fruitless pursuit, resulting in his eventual collapse

An exceptionally gifted vamp might employ a combination of the two to completely destroy her man.

It is a lot of work to be a vamp, something they don’t teach you on screen.  Imagine yourself submersed in sultry repletion, an abysmal vortex into which all light, love and true happiness are absorbed.  Your insidious repose, your oppressive sensuality and its opiate effect on your victim,  inspire an image: an enchanted, dismal swamp.  You are quite smitten with this simile  (yourself as swamp) and are seized with the need to write it down.  Immediately.    You scramble across the bed for your notebook and your feather, scribble some words, pick up your scissors, pop open a new pot of glue, and before you know it hours have passed!  Hours have passed in happy absorption and you’ve made a brand-new scrapbook page!   You smile,  satisfied.  You look up from your creation, eager to share it with your fascinated victim, only to discover that he, in his boredom, wandered away.

It is hard to be an enchanting, dismal swamp every minute of every day.  It demands focus and self-sacrifice.

Your formerly-fascinated victim will never get to see your scrapbook page –which you were, after all, really excited to share with him–because he will sail off and smash to smithereens at the first sound of sirens.   If he survives the rocks, they’ll turn him into a mute, docile pet, fed on mangled sea-claws, vicious taunts, and the occasional nauseatingly arousing caress.

But I meant to tell you that I am making my first movie!  It will be epic, an odalisque crashes to shore and all, aLL ALL IS LOST.  Except…

It’s also low-budget: it was shot entirely on paper.   I hope it will make sense.

Because of this movie, I don’t have a scrapbook page to share.  But I do have a movie still.  In this shot I am not a swamp.   However, I am in something that looks like one:

Thank you for looking.  Thank you.

–The Odalisque