Oh lovelies,

Reading has been tough. My mind is currently focused on bringing up all the pain of the past 20+ years and parading it around, making focus difficult and spare time unpleasurable. Today is the third (is that possible?) anniversary of my father's death. He had terrible dyslexia; he was so proud that I enjoyed reading, even though it made us further apart. This year reading has not been the refuge I crave. What interests grief hasn't flattened, depression has steamrolled.

I'm still in The Crystal Eaters, still hoping the end supports everything I love about story developed so far. Shane Jones definitely has a razor insight into the thoughts and compulsions of children, especially traumatized children. It's so difficult to get that right. Place that precision in a book also dealing with complex family sadnesses, and dang, you've just created a book I am deeply into and can barely bear to read! He also captures what pain drugs can take away while also showing what pain they can give subtly and without moralizing.

I've been reading everything from my comics subscriptions (Ley Lines from Grindstone Comics/Czap Books, Kus, Retrofit/Big Planet and Frontier from Youth In Decline), but at a leisurely pace and without the calming effect of falling into a novel. CAB was fun and I'll dive in to my haul, mostly longer works, as soon as seems wise.

What have you been reading?

Your friend,
Carrie

Some people in comics [in the world] live under rocks and should stay there. However, it is important that their ways are brought to the harsh light. That way no one can say they didn't know, that that is the reason that they don't believe us.

Read MariNaomi's account of being harassed at a comics' convention by another panelist. Then read Rachel Edidin's examination of the pathetic apology by the perpetrator. 

Then never wonder why we are full of rage, but never surprise.

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I imagined my cool green cards appearing in the mailboxes of my friends and becoming a kind of signature. Whereas my old picture postcards were about the ephemeral land of dreams and potential, these new postcards were about the vulnerable space of now.

This love letter to postcards by Jamey Hatley is the perfect thing to read on a lonely day. She goes down so many trails in this short piece, that it left me wandering in the forest long after I finished it. The power of affordable art, the need for images of our idols, the desire for a connection: All these are combined in the simple postcard. I think about mail more than your average human, and wonder why I persist in the sometimes arduous task of making space for my friends in my mind, trying to tell a little story just for them, without the instant gratification of a response.

Checked my P.O. this week and found stuff in there from October. Then I had to wait in line for 20 minutes to find out that that they had sent some of my mail back. I spent so much time in that post office that I forgot how much I love mail. That place has an evil power!

VVVVVV

If you've been checking the sidebar at all you can see that I've been pouring books down my gullet like a starving sea bird. Almost all have been good, all have have fantastic elements. Reading still has that dislocating power for me--a fact that I become more grateful for as the tragedies pile up. Short stories work well for the subway, novels for the train and while in my parents' house, and comics for all the times in between.

What have been your security blanket books?

VVVVVV

Felt a strong connection to the Norwegian people after hearing this from Julia Grønnevet's recent essay in n+1, "Letters from Oslo:"

"Almost everyone owns a washing machine, but no one owns a dryer! Instead everyone dries their clothes on flimsy drying racks, and this takes so long that these racks are out on display all the time, even though they are constructed so that you can fold them away. it mystifies me why Norwegians, who tend to arrange their lives for maximum convenience, treat laundry as though it were a passing issue. It looks terrible..."

The essay is actually about a mass-murderer, and it is very disturbing. A reminder that life and laundry persist even as monsters exist.

"lazy shut-in"

If you, like me, love horror movies, then Final Girl Theory by A.C. Wise will unsettle you for several excellent reasons. It is a great, scary, story about obsession, entertainment and complicity. It is narrated by John Meagher over at Pseudopod, #287.
“The woman screams. The screen dissolves in a mass of spinning color, and the opening credits roll.
You know what the worst part is? The opening sequence has nothing to do with the rest of the film. It is what it is; it exists purely for its own sake.”

!000!

Let's talk about subscriptions. If you make minis regularly or have any other kind of regular publishing schedule, please make a subscription option available. It helps lazy shut-ins like me get your comics when they come out AND you make more money upfront--all the better to plan your lavish vacations and yacht purchases with. Kus does it, Retrofit does it and Oily Comics has been talking about it. Who else?

!000!

!000!

Dear comic book store guy,

When I come into your store, head straight for the mini comic section, pick out a few things and come to the register money in hand, do not tell me that you'd rather pay highX amount of dollars for the item that you have displayed on your counter, no matter how cool it is, than the regularX dollars for the comics I have chosen. I am standing at the register. I could still walk away. (I should have walked away).

You are not only drastically lowering my opinion of you, but you are insulting me, the work I am interested in, a genre that I love and your own store's selection. This does not make you seem cool or informed--it makes you seem like a preteen braggart all alone on the playground.

Best,
Carrie

Looking for a safe space to have a vagina

I listen to a lot of podcasts. I love to let my eyes leave the screen for a while and let my brain grapple with information in another way. It’s generally a very enjoyable way to spend time.

As I recently prepared my place for guests, I clicked on the science fiction cast StarShipSofa #240 to make the cleaning go faster. Everything was going great, as usual, until J.J. Campanella’s Science News. His intro to the first story began, as you may remember like this: “The first story of the night may make the male part of the audience a bit uncomfortable because it has to do with, well, female plumbing, so to speak. So if you have kids listening or are just uncomfortable about the topic you may want to skip ahead about five or six minutes to get beyond this particular story. So what is this anti-macho, squirm-inducing story?”

The answer to that is: a very technical story about the human microbiome, specifically that of the vagina.*

This embarrassing intro not only undercut the cool science of the story but it also made me feel incredibly angry and sad. Here’s why:  First it suggests that male audience members are so immature as to find a rather dry (though interesting) story about vaginas somehow unlistenable. StarshipSofa often includes stories where men and women fuck each other, most often, vaginally—including the story before this one. So imagining a vagina is cool if we’re talking sex, but if we are talking science, it’s gross? Way to reinforce negative stereotypes of science fiction fans, Dr. Campanella, while undercutting your own science reporting at the same time! At its most innocuous, this kind of intro panders to the immature and close-minded, more insidiously, it provides support to the idea that it is totally reasonable to think that women’s bodies are gross, that it's okay, if you are a man, to be ignorant of the non-sexual aspects of the vag.

And, worse than gross, apparently “the topic” is unsuitable for children. Considering half of those hypothetical kids have vaginas themselves, this idea is absurd at best. It is definitely a pretty terrifying statement about how many people conceive of reproductive organs, especially those of women, as shameful, embarrassing, and most importantly, a dirty secret. If you, as a parent, are not comfortable with your kids knowing about their own bodies, or them hearing the correct terms used for their parts, then you are failing in your job. Frankly, any parent listening to a podcast aimed at adults, full of violence and other adult situations, with their children better be prepared to answer much more challenging questions than “What’s a vagina?”

Even though the terms “anti-macho, squirm-inducing” are thrown out a with a little cheek, it is still incredibly disappointing to hear SSS’s science correspondent use those words to describe a story about a part of half of the population’s bodies. Why do I have to hear this shit on a podcast dedicated to the world of the fantastic, fiction or fact, where anything is supposedly possible?

* Here's the article: P. Gajer, R. M. Brotman, G. Bai, J. Sakamoto, U. M. Schütte, X. Zhong, S. S. Koenig, L. Fu, Z. (. Ma, X. Zhou, Z. Abdo, L. J. Forney, J. Ravel, Temporal Dynamics of the Human Vaginal Microbiota. Sci. Transl. Med. 4, 132ra52 (2012).

old, in internet years, but good

The best comic shops in Paris, a list by Mark Burrier. I've been to two of them--Album and Boulinier--and spent much more money than was wise. My one Burrier print is away at the framer. When it is done, it will go to B's windowless office to act as antidepressant decor.


#####
Here is a callback, I encountered Pinocchio by Winshluss at Album, right after it won the Angoulême International Comics Festival award. If I had known that it was about beetles in your brain, well then perhaps I would have picked it up. Depression (and other inaccessible brain things) is difficult to write about, and this review covers three comics that try. I want to give Bookslut review-writer Martyn Pedler a hug right now: "Why am I putting this in print? I don’t know. Maybe because the only way we’ll ever know what each others’ cockroaches look like is to try to explain our own, and pay close attention when others do the same."


#####
Some terrible things that bosses have said. My entry: "Well, [your brother] wouldn't have died if the car had had airbags." This was about two months after it happened. I left for the day right after that.


##### "Still, it is hard to look at people the same way when they are so clearly putting a blanket of hatred over me, even if they didn't know I was standing there."  I like a blog post that talks about Burger King, disappearing, a small room under the stairs and why Facebook is a pipeline to hate.

Let's stop talking about hair and maybe talk a little bit about homework. Not my homework, which is amorphous and mounting, but the homework that high school and college kids hope to finish by googling the title of a book and copy n pasting. This type of thing is one of the uggles one must put up with when putting writing on the internet, but still, when combing my stats, it still annoys me. Actually doing the reading is much more interesting, though I will admit that what qualifies as interesting for me may not correspond with the average teenager.

$$$


Tonight as I cycled home from school, using avenues with bike lanes, I had yet another confrontation with people who just can't bear to be on the sidewalks with all those other people. I believe this inability to view a biker's safety as a higher priority than walking faster than the sidewalk allows is a sort of egomania.

As I was tearing up Eight Avenue, after making my way through the laneless nightmare that is 40th-42nd Sts., I pulled over to the mushroom head emblazoned track and soon encountered a flock of douchebags, khakis pressed and ties flying, in a vee formation spread over my lane. I said to them, "Hey douchebags, nice walking in the bike lane." They waited for me to pass a ways and yelled a rousing, "Fuck you, dyke!"

Class incarnate, they were.

$$$

I got my first graded assignment of grad school back today, an analysis of LibraryThing's cataloging abilities.
I got an A.
Hooray!

The past weekend I was in unsunny California to help my aunt continue her months-long process of cleaning out my deceased grandmother’s house. What’s taking so long, you may ask? Well, my grandmother kept everything—like her deceased father’s pay stubs from his 52-year career on the Reading railroad and cruise brochures from the 70s—and had a house with many, many hiding places. She was doing a genealogy of our family, and had been doing so for over 50 years. That’s a lot of paper.

As cool as it was to find photos of my beloved and long-deceased grandfather looking spiffy in his Navy uniform or sexy on the beach, it was less fun to chance upon unexpected photos of my brother, or of the two of us together.

Shortly before I left, I was given a small pack of items that my grandmother had had from him, including a sweet note written to her in his baby-handwriting. It simply said, “ I love you Grammy.” It reminded me of his particular ability to love, and the huge, painful absence that he left behind when he died. Later, at the airport, running late and lacking sleep, I was overwhelmed with grief.

People will stare at people who are crying, but they won’t sit next to them, as if they fear that whatever caused your sadness is contagious. I remember the feeling of being shunned from my infrequent public forays shortly after my brother died. It was interesting to be in that situation again, but have the wherewithal to observe others’ behavior, but mostly it was lonely. Grief and sadness are, somehow, in this age of youtube ass (and assery) and religiosity-for-fun-and-profit, socially unacceptable.

Later, when my tears had dried and my heart settled more or less in its usual place, I was still getting looks, but mostly because I looked puffy and unwell-—perhaps a carrier of the piggish flu?

Essentially an entire day spent on the toilet means more reviews for you in exchange for the cross-country journey planned for today. It also means that no one else should ever use my computer without washing their hands afterwards.

At least staying inside today lessens my chances of getting swine flu!

ETA: A sudden, four-hour, sick nap kind of ruined my plans for a day of reviewing. Instead I had dreams about filling out forms.

for your ears

I spent the day feeling bad, shitting something with the smell and consistency of bong water and having daymares about my brother in between.

The only upside to this was that I spent much of the day listening to podcasts. Here are a few that swept me away from this inexplicable sick day:

The Something-Dreaming Game by Elizabeth Bear from EscapePod
Elites by Kristine Kathryn Rusch from EscapePod
Little Girl Lost from The Horror!
Indie Spinner Rack #146
Sperm from RadioLab
No Pussyfooting from 11/17/08
Inkstuds with Robert Goodin

RIP

Studs Terkel died today.

He was 96, but that doesn't make my heart hurt less. His autobiography Talking to Myself changed my life. Everything I know about listening I learned from him, the original rockstar with a tape recorder.

Here's a long obit.

Safe travels, friend.


(Tribune photo by Charles Osgood / May 16, 2007)

Exactly:

"Like the Magical Negro, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She's on hand to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness. In the late '60s and early '70s, MPDGs often took the comely form of spacey hippie chicks burdened with getting grim establishment types to kick back and smell the flowers."

I find that the older I get, the less I care to see relationships with wacky, supposedly artistic, yet so uninspiringly flat, ladies be the turning point for mopey male characters. Those guys are so tortured-- I should care about them because-- wait, why? Wouldn't it be better if all these guys started a flirtation with extreme sports or meth instead? That would be just as realistic, don't you think? It's not that these characters fall in love with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, they just use her to come to some kind of understanding of themselves. After all the sexin' and/or adventures stop, so does the relationship.

BARF!

Can movie makers please stop thinking the mopey-man-flowers is interesting at all? It is so insulting to any creative woman with a brain and a real life. Sadly female actors and audiences aren't the only ones stiffed by this lameitude, the guy characters in these films end up being merely a more charming bag of tics in the end.

The worst is how many men, especially ones who indulge in lots of media, think that the Magical Pixie Dream Girl exists, and if you are artsy, you could be her. If you don't do your job to shake that artsy boy loose, you'll find out just how disposable you are.

Worse than the MPDG is, of course, the Unbearably Sexy Crazy Lady. USCLs are darker and show more tit. Rather than just flitting away like the MPDG, USCLs get to succumb to drug addiction, suicide or mental illness. Sexy, no? Well, as long as she's out of the way so the protagonist can live his new life...

HATE!

ARGH!

(Who was the comic character that used to always say that? Was it Cathy? I hope not.)

This morning I was faced not only with the sad fact that my friend The Prog Lady is going home, but also that someone in my apartment building is a total asshole. Or, more likely, the incompetent asshole super of the building is just exhibiting his strongest traits. When I looked out the window this morning to assuage the rolling nausea of a new day, instead of a clear vista to the chain link there was a giant, broken trash bag filled plopped unceremoniously into my fern garden. Judging from the broken weed tree branches littering the ground, this bag of bricks, broken pottery and dirt was heaved from a great height.

Ferns are brittle.

I am angry.

Why do I suspect SuperJerk? Well, because he was asked to help clear the fire escape to amend a violation, is ignorant as hell, and doesn't tend to think things through. As helpfully pointed out by B, the bag was also obviously calculated to have a soft landing, as to not wake us up, exposing a shady side to the thrower that SJ definitely has. I wonder if it will still be there when I get home tonight. Judging by the bags of trash still sitting in the corner that he was supposed to help us with 2 years ago, I think yes.

Luckily, ferns are also frondalicious, so the damage should be covered in a few weeks.

A note on books not finished

Recently I have had a little run of bad novel reading. Two of those books I read almost all the way through-- one sort-of sci fi and the other a 90s noir (which was just as awkward as that sounds). Both suffered from wooden dialogue and too much time inside uninteresting characters' heads. Why do I waste my time on these things when I have a million other books at my disposal, some just steps away in my cluttered bookshelves or in one of the numerous piles on the floor?

I used to think I could only have an opinion on a book if I read it all the way through. In the imaginary cocktail party of my collegiate nightmares, not only am I naked, I am out-litted too. Now that I realize that most cocktail parties require only a black dress and good balance, it is still somehow hard for me to give up on a book, no matter how wretched it is.

These books certainly helped me continue to get over that ridiculousness.

Luckily, because of MoCCA, I have been reading incredibly great comics. I rarely write about single issues here. Should I?

On top of that, a trip to a small bookstore on Court St. in Brooklyn netted three books that should be good reads, all for under $10.

Posting May Be Sporadic...

Here in tryharderland, the computers are all in a kernel panic, the family is beckoning and the books are piling up.

I'll do what I can, considering, but now may be the time to work on your contest entry and enjoy my favorite computer based pick-me-up.

The lesser books of 2007.

Just to get the rest of the 2007 reviews rolling, I thought I would do a round up of the books that remained to be reviewed that I didn’t really enjoy.

The Mystery: Case Histories by Kate Atkinson- This book certainly worked ok as a mystery, but the detective’s back story was unwieldy and the coincidences that drive the plot became increasingly transparent as the book went on. Other than the description of the detective’s beautiful dead sister who wore perfect 1940s clothes to dress up her drab life, I don’t remember much.

The Steampunk, sans steam: The Iron Council by China Mieville- I enjoyed Perdido Street Station and this book is set in the same world, after PSS, I think. Hard to tell really, because it was so boring I couldn’t pay too close attention. Since this book involved golems, puppet shows and a giant train, you’d think I’d like it, purely in a fangirl way, but no. The numerous battle scenes lacked all tension and too many characters seemed to stretch Mieville’s ability to mete out distinctive characteristics that don’t seem false or overdone.

The Birthday Gift: Mortified edited by Dan Nadelburg- MattMo got this for me for my last birthday. It is a compilation of embarrassing stories from the authors’ past straight from middle school and high school diaries and notes with some commentary by the grown-up authors. I read through the entries quickly because they all blurred together into one exploitative clusterfuck. Why are my peers so obsessed with how dorky they were when they were kids. We were all like that in some way; middle schoolers are never cool. Though it may be great to share our misinformed views with our friends and loved ones (vulnerability makes us more loveable, doesn’t it?), I think it shows a lack of creative ability to simply reprint some marginally silly artifacts and then plead with the audience to reject (and then embrace) the ghosts of Starter jackets past. Then again, people need to pay the bills. It's too bad when it shows.

10 things about food poisoning/stomach flu:

1) You will learn new and exciting things about your body’s capacity to store partially digested food.

2) You may see a half-finished New York Times Sunday crossword in the trashcan, that, as you vomit on it, magically yields new answers so much more easily than when you worked on it three weeks ago.

3) Everyone you tell about your predicament will tell you to stay hydrated and you will want to punch them in the face.

4) All the time off of work will be useless, you will barely be able to focus, much less finish that book.

5) You will cry at least once, possibly in the shower, while vomiting.

6) When questioned about your profanities, you may have to tell the person you have sex with, “I didn’t make it.”

7) In between eruptions, you will barely be able to move and your restless sleep will be plagued with nightmares.

8) The second day seems much better, but only until hunger sets in.

9) You will want to die, but, sadly, you won’t.

10) You will never see Thanksgiving leftovers the same way again.

This week is Drowsy Driving Prevention Week.

I don't usually go in for Eat a Carrot month or whatever, but now is as good of a time as any to remind everyone that you are not invincible. Don't take it personally, it is just a fact. As awesome as I am, I wasn't able to deflect the pain and change inflicted upon me when my brother died, crushed under the weight of the car at whose wheel he fell asleep. I wasn't able to stop crying when I "needed" to, at work, during times that should have been romantic. Even with my shriveled black heart to protect me, I wasn't able to stop the implosion of my life at the reality of my brother's 19-year-old vulnerablility, his soft flesh and simply human bones. His ability to just vanish from my life.

So here's the deal:
I don't care if your fucking parents will kill you if you get home late, if your wife will be mad you missed the rodeo, if your cousin will smoke all the weed if you don't show up before Dancing with the Stars.

IF YOU ARE SLEEPY WHILE DRIVING, PULL OVER AND TAKE A NAP.

It doesn't get simpler than that.

back from SPX

I knew yesterday morning that something wasn't right. A few hours later, I knew something was definitely wrong. Despite my piles of comics and new prints, the company of my main man and a delightful baby, littlehp!, I felt grumpy, nauseated and like a monkey made of razors had taken up residence in my neck.

I am SICK. From my bed of crappitude I will attempt to do an SPX roundup sometime today.

The best part of returning was when B called me from the bathroom in a tentative voice to show me this:






So this morning I heard what I think was the plumber, though I expected more klongs and less bangs.

PS- until I get it together, go over to Topic and read the two newish stories. They are great.

BAD NEWS

a most excellent blog is going the way of all poor parent company decisions and to that I say triple F minus.

RIP Table of Malcontents.

image from ToC