Blog

5 items

April 7th, 2010 | Other Projects

1.

I just emailed my colleague James Sturm to congratulate him on his new book, Market Day. I got an automatic response that read, “I will be off-line from March 19 through June 18. Any e-mail sent during this time will not be read. Apologies for any inconvenience.”

I get auto-responses all the time from people who are on vacation or something. But I’d never seen one that said YOUR EMAIL WILL NOT BE READ. What a thought! Don’t you DIE if you don’t read your email?

Apparently James is quitting the internet for four months, and documenting his experience at Slate.com. (And no, the irony of blogging about being online does not escape him.)

2.

A kind reader, Antje from Berlin, sent in this photo collage she took in a shop on a German island in the Baltic Sea. She calls it “Mo’s Paradise.”

3.

3. When I was in Chicago in February, I did an interview with a smart young woman from a blog called “Gender Across Borders.” See how hard I’m trying to look smart too?

4. You’ve probably all seen this by now, but Martina has breast cancer. Prognosis excellent. But she went four years without a mammogram! Don’t any of you be so lax, okay?

5.

Carey Maloney of the New York Public Library’s LGBT Committee just sent me this photo from the newly renovated St. Agnes branch of the NYPL, with Fun Home on display at the checkout desk with Catcher in the Rye.

Another Use for Bacon

March 29th, 2010 | Oddments, Other Projects, The Artistic Condition, Wild Kingdom

I ran out of suet for the woodpeckers recently, and they started hammering on the house. Holly, who is nothing if not resourceful, came up with the plan to make some out of our old bacon grease. I thought it would be a big mess, but it’s working out pretty well. (Hanging the laundry in the rain is not working out very well at all.)

Take a handful of semisolid hogfat. Mix in some of that banana granola that wasn’t very good. Stick it in the birdfeeder, and presto! Hours of fun for all concerned.

spring tonic

March 17th, 2010 | Other Projects

Holly had the bright idea to tap some of our maples. I know in theory of course that sap starts running in the spring, and that if you collect maple sap and boil it down, it makes syrup. I’ve visited sugar houses and seen the whole thing happening. But even so, when I saw sap dripping out of my own trees and bubbling into caramel on my own stove, it was the most staggering miracle.

Later today, after making this video, I went to my acupuncturist. He makes maple syrup every year and we’ve talked about how putting a tap in a tree is kind of like putting an acupuncture needle in someone.

freedom

March 10th, 2010 | Other Projects

I’m trying to get back to work after a week of travel. I was at Penn State last Thursday, and look! They have a giant Chas. Addams painting! It’s part of the Fred Waring Collection, which is part of the university library archives. Actually, the FWC was one of the many sponsors of my visit. I dimly recalled Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians as having played some kind of outmoded lawrence-welkish kind of music when I was a child Read the rest of this entry »

Snakesitting

February 25th, 2010 | Other Projects

Last night the power was out so Holly and I had to wade through two or three feet of snow to rescue our neighbors’ snake. They were away and the snake needed to be kept warm. Isn’t she sweet?

funnies

February 15th, 2010 | Other Projects

Here I am reading the big sprawling old fashioned color comics section from the latest issue of McSweeney’s. McSweeney’s is a literary journal whose physical form morphs peculiarly from issue to issue. One number resembled a stack of junk mail held together with a rubber band. This one takes the shape of a multi-sectioned Sunday newspaper, a vast 320 page broadsheet. Which includes the above funny pages with cartoons by a whole mess of cartoonists, including me.

Here’s the piece I did for it. It’s based on The Game of Life, which I played obsessively for a while as a child, often by myself. (the colors come out really garish here…sorry)

I think if you click on that, it’ll take you to Flickr, where you can see a larger version.

Anyhow, I just wanted to put that up. Now I’m off to give a talk at the University of Chicago. If you’re in the area, come by! I’ve also updated my events page. Maybe I’ll be in your neck of the woods sometime soon. Apparently I have nothing better to do than travel around talking about myself.

comics squared

February 6th, 2010 | Other Projects

Look! Tickets just went on sale for Kate Clinton and Lily Tomlin, performing together in New York in April. It should be a pretty amazing show.

Here’s Kate’s site for more info.

Here’s another item. I went out to get the mail yesterday, and there was my Oberlin Alumni magazine. I was idly glancing at the cover as I walked back inside, and something looked oddly familiar about it. It wasn’t just the drawing of the iconic Oberlin library womb chair, or the obstreperous Richardsonian silhouette of Peters Hall visible behind it through the window…no, it was something else.

“Oberlin Writes.” Hmm. Could it be? Indeed, it was. Cartoonist David Heatley drew the cover art for this issue, which includes this very sly allusion to an image from my memoir Fun Home.

I don’t know whether anyone else will notice, but I’m very flattered. The issue is about all the various writers who’ve come out of the college, and it notes the unusually high ratio of cartoonists among them, including Heatley, me, R.O Blechman, and Josh Neufeld. (Also, though not mentioned in the article, David Rees, Barry Deutsch, and Jason Little.)

facts vs. truth

February 3rd, 2010 | Other Projects

Today I spent hours creating a timeline of my life over the past ten years.

That was before I got to this passage in Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf, which I just started yesterday. Actually, I’ve been meaning to read this bio for a while but what prompted me to finally undertake it was Joan Schenkar’s biography of Patricia Highsmith, which I’m also reading. Schenkar begins her effort to describe Highsmith’s life by referencing Hermione Lee quoting Woolf on the impossibility of writing biography. Here’s Woolf:

” Facts have their importance—But that is where the biography comes to grief. The biographer cannot extract the atom. He gives us the husk. Therefore as things are, the best method would be to separate the two kinds of truth. Let the biographer print fully completely, accurately, the known facts without comment; Then let him write the life as fiction.”

I feel very dedicated to the project of writing my own biography as nonfiction. But she’s right. Trying to convey the facts AND the true story at the same time is not for the faint of heart.