Plus Here Are Some Other Items:

•I just opened the latest New Yorker to find a piece by Ariel Levy on the Van Dykes, a roving band of separatists in the seventies. Why are august and hidebound publications suddenly having this spasm of nostalgia for lesbian separatism? I haven’t had a chance to read the story yet, but at first glance it looks good.

•Another LGBT bookstore bites the dust. Not just Oscar Wilde, but now A Different Light in West Hollywood is closing.

•Hot Librarian Action: Ann Seidl’s wonderful documentary The Hollywood Librarian is now out on DVD. If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s your chance.

•Also, Ann’s sister Amy, who lives just across the river from me, has a book out, Early Spring.

In Early Spring, ecologist and mother Amy Seidl examines climate change at a personal level through her own family’s walks in the woods, work in their garden, and observations of local wildlife in the quintessential America of small-town New England, deep in the Green Mountains of Vermont.

•Attention Octavia Butler fans: Beacon Press wants to publish a graphic adaptation of Butler’s novel “Kindred.” They’re currently “inviting proposals from cartoonists who appreciate Octavia Butler’s legacy, and reflect her commitment to social justice in their own work. Those interested in
discussing a proposal should email the editor of the Graphic Books list, Allison Trzop, at atrzop@beacon.org.” The deadline is March 16!

I’m home in Vermont after a three-day jaunt to the midwest, and look what happened while I was gone! The woods are aflame.

I carted State By State on my trip with me, which added a strange new dimension to the always strange experience of being hyperlinked across the country from airport to airport. I read Dave Eggers’ essay on Illinois en route to Chicago. And Susan Choi’s on Indiana as I flew over the soybean grid to Indianapolis. Tony Horwitz’s grisly Virginia as I hopped back north to Cleveland, and then Andrea Lee’s haunting Pennsylvania as I flew into the dusk on a gentle parabola back to Vermont over Lakes Erie, Ontario, and Champlain.

All of the essays I’ve read so far are wildly different–some intimate and personal (Indiana, Pennsylvania), some sprawling and historical (Alabama, California, Virginia), some microsopically particular (Arkansas), some grandiloquently general (Illinois), but similar themes are touched on in almost all the pieces: the loss of the natural landscape to sprawl, the decimation of the native people who lived here, the forces of conservatism and provincialism, and the author’s own unsentimental yet slightly mystical love for each particular place.

It’s a good book to be reading right now when I’m in such a pitch of despair over the future of the republic—an excellent antidote to Palin-dronian cynicism.

Look, here are a couple oddities from my trip. This is the front porch of the Women’s Center at De Pauw University. Jeanette Johnson-Licon, the director, hand-lettered the whole deck in silver Sharpie in an allusion to a scene in my memoir Fun Home.

And check this out! Did you know they have segregated drinking fountains at the Indianapolis airport?

Being a paper fetishist, I’ve often admired these giant paper airplanes in the escalator-well of the Cleveland airport, but I never have my camera handy. They’re made from sheet metal painted to look like newspaper, lined notebook paper, and a page from a yellow legal pad.

I have to say, appalling and terrifying as this country can be, and suspicious as I am of that slippery slope between patriotism and nationalism, at the moment I’m feeling a strange tenderness for these united states.

PS. Hey, bookmark this! My buddy Phranc’s starting her own daily variety show, Phranc Talk! Here’s the first episode, on YouTube. Or you can also get to it via her Facebook page.

I’m sorry I haven’t followed up on the Daily Distress project. I haven’t heard anything from the Houghton Mifflin marketing department since I turned all the material over to them. I’ll try and get an update this week. I think they might have the piece all done–but I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything.

I just got back from a visit to Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where I did a presentation about my memoir Fun Home and hung out with graduate students and got a tour of the Human Sexuality Archive at the library.

This archive is apparently even more extensive than the Tretter Collection I saw at the University of Minnesota last month. It houses the papers of Firebrand Books, my first publisher. So the archivist dug out some crates of those and I got to see old typewritten letters I’d written to Nancy Bereano, the founder of Firebrand, in the ‘eighties.

But the most amazing thing I saw there was this.

It’s a page from a lesbian photo album from the 1930′s. It starts out with these rather demure shots.

Then on page three, there’s this.

Isn’t that the hottest thing you ever saw? I don’t know why I find this so stunning. The thought of anyone–lesbians in particular, but anyone really–having sex in the past is so strangely shocking. And in this case, hot. In case I haven’t mentioned it.

Oh, Firebrand Books used to be located in Ithaca, where Nancy Bereano lives. Here she is, with the aureole of white hair, next to her partner Elisabeth Nonas, at my presentation last Thursday. It was really nice to see her again–she discovered me and published my first book when I was a punk kid, so I feel a very deep connection with her. She also urged me to write a graphic novel long before the current craze, and that was the beginning of Fun Home.

Another cool thing I did at Cornell was to go birdwatching at the famous Lab of Ornithology. Susan Barnett, a blog reader, and her husband Greg took me and my girlfriend Holly on a walk through Sapsucker Woods. I forgot to take my camera. But here’s a photo Holly took earlier of a cedar waxwing on campus, getting drunk on some fermented berries.

And here, to get a tad meta, is me taking a picture of the cedar waxwing to send to my friend Phranc who had just called me on the phone.

And here’s a picture I took of Holly taking a picture of the Ithaca Farmer’s Market. We went there on Saturday. It was the most vital, throbbing farmer’s market I’ve ever seen, and it’s only April.

Okay, and the last thing is, here’s a video of me talking about Fun Home when I was at Rutgers last month. The Writers House videographer put together an extraordinarily coherent 5 minute piece from probably two hours of footage of me yammering on and on.

Here’s a link to Holly’s post about the same trip to Ithaca. We didn’t look at each other’s posts first, and ended up using some of the same photos.

Doesn’t this look like the Hall of Prophecies in Harry Potter? It’s the University of Minnesota archives, a network of earthquake-proof vaults 125 feet below the surface of the earth. Also flood proof because they’re below the water table.

Part of my visit to the University of Minnesota last week consisted of a tour of the Tretter Collection, the GLBT archives that are stored here.
Jean Tretter is a guy who started collecting gay and lesbian cultural artifacts back in the seventies. Now his stuff has expanded into this official archive that he maintains at the University. So Jean gave me and a bunch of students a tour of the archives.

Here he is holding a charred book that was rescued from the rubble of the Hirschfeld library after the Nazis burned it down in 1933. Magnus Hirschfeld was an early gay rights advocate and sexologist, and he had this huge library of books about sexuality. This was a biography of the Marquis de Sade, in French.

Next Jean took out a box and started unwrapping something…he told me to put on a pair of white cotton gloves, then at the last minutes thought to ask if I minded “male things.” I assured him that no, I didn’t. Look. It’s a 4,000 year old pre-ptolemaic scribe, writing away on a tablet that’s perched on his gigantic schlong. It’s kinda blurry but I think you can get the gist.

And look, here’s all the extant editions of “Lesbian Nuns,” that Naiad book from the early eighties. Including an advance fake copy with blank pages that was used to show on tv when the Sally Jessy Raphael show did an interview with the editors.

Aren’t you glad someone’s keeping track of all this stuff? I am.

My talk at Rutgers last night was attended by a huh-uuuge crazy crowd of 400 people. They were all really amped up, and it was nice, but a little overwhelming.

It was a strangely ardent audience, and I was signing books till the cows came home.

I think it had something to do with Hillary Chute, a Rutgers Ph.D. who had taught my book to a bunch of classes last year, and returned to introduce me. In a corduroy suit. (vide)

Someone pointed out the mellifluous rhyme, “Hilary Chute’s corduroy suit.” Speaking of which, the Seussian rhymes about episode 523 were most delightful. I should point out that all those white on black passages were actual Dr. Seuss quotes…maybe it wasn’t clear. Hope I don’t get sued…it seemed like fair use.

No, I didn’t misnumber the last episode 524 on purpose! I’ve fixed it now. It’s so funny how you guys attribute so much more intentionality to little things I do, like giving Mo and Clarice different kinds of phones. And numbering things incorrectly. Or like the students I just met at Dickinson College the other day who were reading all kinds of raunchy sexual subtexts into the panels of Fun Home. (Well, one of those was intentional, one wasn’t.)

A bunch of people said something about the accuracy of JR’s sleeping positions in #523. I have YouTube to thank for that–found this cool time lapse video of an actual five year old, actually sleeping. (the things people put online! God!) Anyhow, YouTube has had a profound impact on my drawing process–now I can get motion instead of the still pix on Google Image Search.

Oh! And thanks for the link to the Garfield Minus Garfield thing! A bunch of people have sent me that, and someone linked to it on the blog. It’s kind of stunning.

Um, random other stuff before I fly to Minneapolis…oh, if you’re in the Twin Cities and want to hear me talk/read tonight, here’s the info: University of Minnesota. 7 p.m. Cowles Auditorium at the Humphrey Institute, 301 19th Ave. S., Minneapolis.

Oh, and one of the million things I did yesterday was get interviewed by some Rutgers students. Here’s a brief fragment of our conversation.

Here I am having dinner with Chris Ware and Lynda Barry after our PEN/Faulkner panel on Friday. The guy with the camera is Dan Raeburn, who moderated the discussion. You can’t tell from this picture that my brain is exploding in a spasm of profound cartoon transcendence.

Someone asked in the last post what Lynda Barry is like. She’s like what you’d expect, to the power of ten, and divided by zero. Which is to say, she’s a crazy mindblowing bodhisattva. In her reading, she asked the question—koan, rather—“what is an image?” And then answered it for us with her cartoons, like a zen archer hitting bullseye after bullseye.

Chris showed us how he created his series of four New Yorker covers for last year’s Thanksgiving issue. I had no idea there had even been four alternate covers—my copy arrived with this one, which was brilliant enough. But there was also a one-panel cover, a four-panel cover, and a 16 panel cover, which exploded the story of this family through time and space in an exponential progression of narrative detail that culminates in a 256-panel online strip.

How long did this take him, I asked, imagining it must have been the better part of a year. A month, he said. Well, maybe five weeks, he admitted when my jaw hit the table.

Not only are Lynda and Chris comics geniuses, they’re comic geniuses too. Onstage Chris reeled off dry, throwaway one-liners, and everything spontaneous thing that came out of Lynda’s mouth was funnier than the most polished of stand-up routines. Though perhaps her most ludic brilliance manifested backstage before the panel, as she tried to distract the three of us from our nervousness by doing obscene yoga poses and giving herself a wedgie.

Now I’m at home, slowly recovering and trying to assimilate all of this sensory input. One thing I learned this weekend: I need to draw more.

My cat is displaying some drawing promise.

I’m getting ready to go to DC later this week to be on a panel with Chris Ware and Lynda Barry.

That’s about all I have to report. Oh. Except last night I had a dream that Hillary Clinton asked me to be her press secretary. I didn’t feel very prepared, but she sent me out to handle a press conference anyway and I pretty much flubbed it. I think this is about my anxiety about the thing with Ware & Barry. Or…? What do you think?

I flew from Burlington to Columbus, Ohio last evening for the Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State University. I glanced out the plane window at sunset, and look! The Finger Lakes! I love how it’s patently obvious that they’re the Finger Lakes, nobody needs to tell you so–a phenomenon which in a way demonstrates the theme of this year’s festival, Visual Storytelling.

The festival is also honoring Milton Caniff, the guy who drew Steve Canyon and Terry and the Pirates. I never really knew his work, but he’s a hugely influential cartoonist and I’m sure I osmosed all sorts of graphic conventions indirectly from him without knowing it.

They have an exhibit up here at OSU of his work–here’s a close-up of a tidy paste-up job.

Here I am with my cartoonist pals Paige Braddock (Jane’s World) and Hilary Price, (Rhymes With Orange)

We went out to dinner and drew this cartoon together. Paige came up with the concept–she’d draw her character Jane in bed, and I’d add one of my characters, then Hilary would add an animal. So here you go.

Then–don’t ask me how–we got on the topic of drawing breasts. Oh, it might have been because of all the giant Milt Caniff breasts in the exhibit, or the fact that there are a lot of old school men cartoonists at this event, including Mort Walker of Miss Buxley fame. I confessed that I’ve sort of been in reaction to that sort of exaggerated representation for my whole career. Paige said that she’s recently been, um, embracing breasts. Hilary reported that an old man once told her her comic strip would be more popular if she made her women characters’ breasts bigger. So we all demonstrated how we draw breasts.

P.S. I’ve been a little crazed lately, and haven’t had time to follow the comments on the blog. I hope everything’s okay.

Evidence of my big Eisner Awards kiss with Ellen Forney has finally surfaced. Velvet Park Magazine just posted an extravagantly lengthy and comprehensive video interview with me that they shot at the San Diego Comic Con. It’s like 15 minutes long. The interview, sadly, not the kiss. But should you grow impatient, the action starts about half an inch from the end of the scrollbar. Ellen told me not to worry, she’d just grab my head and take care of everything. All I had to do was think of England.

If you’re a Neil Gaiman fan, (thanks, Kate McKinnon for mentioning his blog a while back–it is indeed excellent) keep watching after the kiss and you can see him presenting me with the Eisner award for best Reality-Based Work. Later in the ceremony, Jonathan Ross copied Ellen’s idea and gave Neil a big kiss, though Neil doesn’t look very happy about it. (thanks again to Dr. Empirical for that link.)