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.

Dear “Mark”:

Look, it’s like this: I don’t know what the problem is here, and I don’t really particularly care. But despite you’re having been quite active lately, it’s the holiday season, and I’m in jolly mood, so let’s proceed in that way.

First, I don’t know if your primary goal here is to annoy (or irritate or lecture) the regular readers of this blog. But the simple fact is that I’m reasonably good at what I do so and, as a result, virtually none of the readers here even see any of your “messages”.

On the other hand, if your goal is to annoy (or irritate or lecture) Alison Bechdel herself, then as you may have noticed she’s been pretty busy lately, and so far as I can tell she has not even been aware of any of the last couple dozen or so of your “messages”.

So that leaves just me as the only person who even sees your “messages”. And, to be clear, I don’t see the “message” long enough for any of the above to apply, i.e. only long enough to ensure that it is from you before I hit the delete link.

(In this last case you’ve actually made the work quite easy. As pointed out previously: 1) despite plenty of chances to the contrary you’re earned the unique honor of having *any* “message” banned from this site without further ado, something in all fairness I might point out that you’ve also managed to do on several other sites, as a quick Google search will demonstrate. And 2) on the chance that you ever do decide to seriously enter into the discussion here, it’s fully up to you to demonstrate that you’re capable of doing so in a remotely reasonable way. But a quick clue: The way to go about this is not to leave your messes around for someone, e.g. me, to clean up after.)

So my first seasonal gift here is to point out the obvious: “Mark”, whatever you’re trying to accomplish it’s just not working.

Second, so nearly as I can make out you seem to be working under the “notion” (again, both here and on other sites) that the only issue is with the content of your “messages”. That you are simply making reasonable points that, for some reason, the readers here “just don’t want to hear”.

Is it really possible that you don’t understand that the real issue is the name-calling, the obcenity, the insults, in short the ridiculous (for want of a better name) “tone” of your “messages?

So, my second seasonal gift here is to give you the benefit of the doubt; because I simply can’t believe that anyone can be that dense.

So in closing, I’ve really said all that can be said here. You’ll never hear from me again. But just look at things this way: Do you really have nothing better to do with your time?

However, if you really feel you must write these “messages”, here’s a bit of friendly advice: Go ahead and write it, but when you’ve finished just hit “Delete”. You’ll save everyone, including yourself, some work; and the final result will be the same.

Your pal,
Mentor

[We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog. --Mentor]

Time to talk about The Little Stranger. My pal, the Queer Theory Professor, is going to help me get the ball rolling.

QTP: The first thing I notice is what the book lacks: queer romance of any sort; the kind of narrative tricks that Waters has employed very effectively in Fingersmith and The Night Watch, among others; and then, of course, the lack of a conventional resolution to the ghost story in which we find out what’s haunting Hundreds Hall and why. So my process as a reader was to go back and stop seeing it as lack, and start seeing it as a different kind of substance.

AB: (The QTP wants me to mention that she is not treating this as a serious writing assignment because she’s feeling quite sick right now, but I have to tell you, she reeled off that whole sentence out loud, just like that, to me, semicolons and all.) You mean you actually went back and started re-reading at the point you noticed these missing elements?

QTP: No, I just rethought. I have a lot of questions. In what ways does the doctor’s arrival precipitate the supernatural occurrences, and why. And, two kinds of things are happening to the house. It’s physically deteriorating, and it’s haunted. Are we supposed to see those as manifestations of the same thing, even though they seem so different, one natural, one supernatural?

AB: Obviously the supernatural activity picked up after the doctor started coming to the house, but there was something going on even before, right? Betty the housemaid was talking about something scary before the doctor even got there. Maybe that could just have been because she was new at the house, and young, so she was scared in general. But of course I kept growing increasingly suspicious of the doctor as the book progressed. I couldn’t trust him as a narrator, but in the end it turns out he was more or less trustworthy.

QTP: He wasn’t radically untrustworthy, as in a Poe story.

AB: When we first talked about the book, you were disappointed by it, and I was trying to explain why I wasn”t.

QTP: I’m not sorry I read it. I think Sarah Waters is so brilliant, and so when she writes this novel that appears to be unfinished, somewhere hidden within it must be the key that makes everything fall into place. But I never figured out what that might be. I had a theory about time. Betty near the end seems to be a year off from the age she’s supposed to be. Was that supposed to tip us off to some kind of temporal aberration in the novel, or the doctor’s unreliability?

AB: Maybe it’s more accurate to say that I derived satisfaction from my dissatisfaction. As I read, my expectations were constantly being foiled or turned back on me, with nothing resolved in any kind of conventional way. Kind of what I imagine a week-long tantric orgy might be like. No orgasm, perhaps, but such intense pleasure and such a deeply altered consciousness that orgasm starts to look pretty paltry in comparison.

And in the end, what more can you ask of a novel than that you lose a couple nights of sleep to it? I was completely immersed in the world of Hundreds Hall, even when I put the book down and did other things. I guess reading any good book is sort of like being haunted, whether it’s a ghost story or not. And to me, The Little Stranger was a book about reading.

This is a scene of a Pride march in NYC that I attended in the early eighties. It’s been odd working on it this weekend since of course today is Pride day. (Or at least we used to call it that. Do we still?) And tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of Stonewall. I didn’t plan that, but it’s added an interesting resonance to the work. I think this particular march that I’m drawing was the 13th anniversary of Stonewall. It’s very peculiar to think that more than twice that length of time has elapsed since then.

Also on a visual note, did you see these lost photos of the Stonewall rebellion that the NY Times recently published?

And here’s a little selection of thoughts about Stonewall by a bunch of guys–the veteran radical gay activist Peter Tatchell on our lost radicalism. A younger gay man responding to Peter, saying thanks for what you did, but now please stop being so self-righteous. Our ally Frank Rich about how he never even heard of Stonewall until years after the fact, and how annoyed he is with Obama’s current foot-dragging on LGBT issues. Oh, and historian Eric Marcus has a nice piece in the New York Post today, busting some of the myths about the Stonewall riots.

Coming later today…I’ll make a post on Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, so we can begin our scheduled discussion.

This is a big problem of mine–I always feel like it’s my role to sit tight and not rock the boat because I think my needs aren’t as pressing as other peoples’ needs. Ideally, I suppose, no one would sit tight—and either each person’s motion would be counteracted by another’s, or else the whole damn canoe would flip over, and perhaps it would be all for the best.

Here’s a good article in HuffPo about what’s going on in Iran, where the canoe seems to have been lost altogether. It’s by Sarah Dehghan, an Iranian American who broadcasts a weekly literature program for VOA Persian. She’s doing a show this Saturday directed at the protesters in Iran, and she’s collecting messages of hope and solidarity from anyone who cares to post one as a comment at the end of her article. (Thanks to Jane Vandenburgh for telling me about this.)

P.S. The Rick Warren fiasco at the inauguration now looks like a tidy foreshadowing of DOMA and DADT, doesn’t it? And just as we were thrown a little bone with gay bishop Gene Robinson, now we get another one with this extension of job benefits to partners of gay federal employees.

Chastity Bono’s transitioning.

Here’s a press release from GLAAD. (The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation)

GLAAD Statement Regarding Chaz Bono’s Decision to Come Out as Transgender

June 11, 2009, New York, NY – “Chaz Bono’s decision to live his life
authentically represents an important step forward, both for him
personally and for all who are committed to advancing discussions about
fairness and equality for transgender people,” said Neil G. Giuliano,
president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).
“Coming out as transgender is an extremely personal decision and one that
is never made lightly. We look forward to hearing Chaz’s story in his own
words in the future.”

“GLAAD encourages media outlets to cover this story accurately, and to
avoid speculation about the details of Chaz’ story before he is ready to
tell it in his own words.”

The GLAAD Media Reference Guide urges media to use the name and pronoun
preferred by the transgender person – in this case, referring to him as
Chaz and using male pronouns. For additional information, including
related guidelines from the Associated Press Stylebook, please visit the
GLAAD Media Reference Guide at

I’m sorry I don’t have anything more interesting to report. There was a red breasted grosbeak outside my window the other day.

And I spotted this trillium while hiking last Sunday.

Oh yeah, and here’s a movie of my cat watching that talking cat on the computer. She’s not particularly interested.

Also, I just got a phone call from my friend Ruth. She was at the gym this morning, watching CNN. They were showing footage from a Christian Broadcast Network report on the gay marriages happening in Iowa today. For a second, she saw me and my ex Amy Rubin on the screen, getting married on the steps of City Hall in San Francisco five years ago. The Christian Broadcast Network? What were they doing at my wedding? It reminded me of this panel from a cartoon I once did about lesbian-specific phobias.

Since the chipmunk incident, I have put a collar with three bells on the cat. So far this has stemmed the tide of wildlife that had been flowing into the house.

Ariel Schrag has just released Likewise, the final volume of her epic graphic memoir about her high school years. Here’s a review in Time Out New York.

And Eric Orner, creator of The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green, is posting a cartoon diary of time he recently spent living in Jerusalem. Here’s the first installment. It’s really funny.

As evidenced also by these fresh honkin’ moose tracks I found behind the house this morning.

See how close it was to the house? My glove is next to the hoofprint.

And look! The book review I’ve been telling you about has finally been published. I reviewed Jane Vandenburgh’s memoir A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century for the New York Times Book Review this week. It’s a graphic review of a regular, non-graphic book–it was a fun exercise, and I was very pleased to be invited to try it.