I did some writing a some years ago for a webzine called Film and Fishnets which appears to be defunct. Navigating to the url of my articles returns a "website expired" message, so that's that, I guess. I keep everything I write, though, so I'm going to be recreating those pieces here over the course of this month. These are some of my favorite pieces among my own writing and I'm happy to share them on my own site. I hope everyone else who wrote or created art for the venue has kept their work, too. It was an interesting experiment.
1.
Bear with me for a bit here.
One of the odder personalities in the history of art is the Swiss artist, Henry Fuseli (born Johann Heinrich Füssli before he anglicized his name after moving to England). His most famous painting is The Nightmare, which has been haunting the gothic imagination since its debut in 1781, especially since it was rediscovered, along with all of Fuseli’s other work by the symbolists and the surrealists in the early 20th century. Ken Russell once themed an entire movie around it. It suited Russell’s aesthetic. It doesn’t take a deep dive into Fuseli’s reams of drawings to discover that he was kind of a pervert, one with a deeply fixed fear of being unmanned by women, either figuratively or literally. Take, for instance, this early drawing of a man being forced to submit to his mistress.
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