Archive.org brings you Halloween Treats! 🍬🍭🎃👻🔪💉👶⚰️

"Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child's Book about Satanic Ritual Abuse" cover

I’ve spoken at length about the Satanic Panic in the past, especially Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse—which was a real book that was earnestly written and actually published in order to (traumatically) teach children and parents how to recognize the signs of something that was believed to be an epidemic when I was a kid, but in fact never ever ever happened to anyone (more details, with links to sources, at my original post).

"Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child's Book about Satanic Ritual Abuse" ritual

Sadly, I’d never come across a print copy of the complete book. Happily, that no longer matters because the good folks at Archive.org have digitized it and you can now read the whole thing online for free:

Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse on Archive.org

(As an added bonus, Archive.org also has this law enforcement training video on Satanic Cults from 1994! Again: real resources for taking real actions in the real world to address a made-up thing, often with disastrous consequences for people who did nothing wrong.)

The full text of Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy is worth a look. Seeing the whole book really does underscore that this was a well-intentioned project (and even decently trauma informed, for the period). But those good intentions were tragically misdirected, literally paving a road to hell for some folks who were accused of imagined atrocities.

I suppose there is a lesson there, America. I don’t imagine we’ll learn it.

Sketching glitches (Sketch of the Week for Week 42 of 2025)

No Sketch of the Week last week, because it was full week of failed attempts at capturing a specific promotional head shot of Boris Karloff. There’s nothing especially hard about sketching Boris Karloff, just that he has a human head and face, and I struggle at those in general. Probably a great place to start would be actually looking at folks’ faces when I spoke to them 🤷‍♀️

This week was Glitch Week, and I sorta liked how these two came out (yeah, the first one is another failed attempt at Boris Karloff. This time he came out looking like Jimmy Stewart! Last week, he was mostly the unwholesome splice of Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and HP Lovecraft as himself).

A "glitched" pencil sketch of an older man in a tie.

A "glitched" pencil sketch of an autumn tree.

I don’t know that these are good sketches, but I enjoyed working on them. Carefully reproducing a destructive analog video error in a pencil sketch sorta started as a joke, but quickly blossomed into a really good deep exercise in remembering and seeing what you see in your (fallible) memories.

The top one, of Glitch Karloff, gave me the oddest shudder working on it. Drawing it was upsetting but also fascinating in a way I can’t put my finger on.

You Are Beautiful. Watch this video…

Watch their faces. It’s fascinating how often you can see the cognitive dissonance, the battle of voices triggered in an average human’s head by being told they are beautiful. I don’t think this was the filmmaker’s point—in fact, I’m pretty sure it’s sort of the opposite—but it’s kind of heartbreaking. Why the hell should it be so hard to be told you are beautiful?

This video is ten years old. All of these kids are adults now (hopefully). Gott in Himmel how I wish there was a follow-up video of each of them being shown this video.

Tree and Bench [NOT PICTURED: all of humanity] (Sketch of the Week for Week 40 of 2025)

Week 40 was “Tree Week” in my journal, where I worked on capturing more different kinds of trees under different lighting conditions. It didn’t go superterrific, but my son liked this one because the overall composition communicated the scale nicely, and it captured something of the late-day autumn light in Michigan, which has an oddly specific angle and saturation.

A pencil sketch of a tree near a bench and pathway, caught in the deep slanting light of late-day Michigan autumn.

I’m sharing it not because it’s especially good, but just because it puts me in the mind of Edward Hopper, who I think captured the unique (and uniquely enduring) dimensions of American Loneliness better than any other artist who has yet lived.

My glass is neither half full nor half empty… (Sketch of the Week for Week 39 of 2025)

… because it isn’t a glass of water; it’s just a sketch. But I like how I began to capture the light here. I didn’t get it right, but I got closer than I think I’ve gotten on any sketch before, and I really do love light and shadow and refraction.

A pencil sketch of a glass of water, half full

That said, I did a terrible job of capturing “glass” in this glass. Here’s one of my father’s finished drawings on a similar theme (though no water; his glass was entirely empty. Let that be a lesson to you.)

A finished drawing of an empty drinking glass by David Robert Nelson (z"l)

I’ve always loved this drawing, how precise and controlled it is, how it makes a flat white page into a space one can occupy. I suppose there’s a lesson there, too: the hours upon hours spent making a small orderly corner of the world where every lines makes sense and can be justified and defended, and the whole thing can be secured in a frame unchanging, so you can keep looking back at it and knowing it is there exactly as it should be.

“Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”

Yesterday was Yom Kippur, which means there was a Yizkor service with my congregation, which means I spent much of the day thinking of my father (of blessed memory), who I loved a great deal, despite not necessarily liking him very much.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

by Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul   

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple   

As false dawn.

                     Outside the open window   

The morning air is all awash with angels.

    Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,   

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.   

Now they are rising together in calm swells   

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear   

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

    Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving   

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden   

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

                                             The soul shrinks

    From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

And cries,

               “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,   

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

    Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,   

The soul descends once more in bitter love   

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,   

    “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;   

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,   

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating   

Of dark habits,

                      keeping their difficult balance.”

Tiny Dancers (Sketches of the Week for Week 38 of 2025)

I mostly sketch from photographs, simply as a practical matter (I mostly work from home, and am mostly in a college town in mid-Michigan; nit a lot of horses and barbarian ladies sitting around my kitchen waiting to be models). But this gets me thinking a lot about how high-speed photography has changed drawing and painting, not by replacing them—the perennial anxiety about art and technology—but by giving the artist one more tool to see more clearly in ever smaller increments. At my most hopeful, I wonder about the ways genAI will offer creatives sharper scalpels and finer microscopes. (And at my least hopeful? There, I’m pretty hopeless.)

Anyway, last week was all “furious dancers,” a subject that is devilishly tricky to capture from life if you haven’t first had the benefit of capturing it from a snapshot.

A pencil sketch of Fred Astaire mid-leap

This lady in the flowing skirt was my son’s favorite from last week. He insists it’s legible, but I worry; her posture is so striking and strange. Either way, it is indeed a good sketch, in that it captured what I hoped to capture. I just wonder if I maybe chose the wrong subject to begin with.

A pencil sketch of a whirling flamenco dancer

I think this one was my favorite. Draped cloth is a fun challenge in restraint, and I think both the dynamism of her gesture and its dignity and grace all came through. 10 of 10, A++; would draw again.

A pencil sketcher of a lyric ballerina, her reach exceeding her grasp

L’Shana Tova, mofos! (Sketches of the Week for Week 37 of 2025)

Rosh Hashanah is fast approaching, so last week’s sketches were all High Holiday themed, as that’s what’s in my head right now.

My son felt strongly that this lil Jew rocking out on an apple was the best sketch of the week; he loved those groovy arms:

A tiny chasidic Jew rocking out in a big ole apple

I, on the other hand, preferred this lil Honikmensch, ready to rock you with a big ole honey-smack:

A tiny chasidic Jew wielding a big, loaded honey-jar dipper

Meanwhile, my daughter (who just her her her bat mitzvah this past summer) felt strongly that this mighty little fella was the sketch of the week:

Tiny little chasidic Jew about to throw a big ole apple at you, mofo!

One way or the other, may your coming year be good and sweet 🍏🍎🍯 (regardless of whether or not you observe; all you goyim deserve good years just as much as anyone else).