The reason I was out walking yesterday was to meet my old pal June Thomas for lunch. She worked at off our backs eons ago. Now she works at Slate and wears a seersucker suit. When I first met her, she was convinced that I had based my character Mo on her. Here she is making a Mo face.
Yesterday I took a long city hike. God, I love walking in New York!
My favorite thing is how at the crosswalks, there are two walls of people who flow effortlessly through one another.
No one ever collides. Well, hardly ever. Imagine all the infinitesimal directional calibrations that entails.
It’s very different from walking in London, where every three feet you seem to get caught up in that little left-right dance with someone.
Saturday night I was at the Wild Rose in Seattle, and Sunday night I was at Cattyshack in Park Slope. Two lesbian bars in one weekend. I haven’t done that in, um… about forty years. Here I am with Aja and Brooke, the manager and owner of Cattyshack.
It’s a really nice place with an outside deck. I sat at a table and talked to people and signed books. This great new comics/graphic novel store Rocketship sold my books at the bar. Here I am with Mary and Alex, who own the store.
And here I am with one of my many doppelgangers, though Reina is a particularly good one. Don’t you think? Especially if I were wearing my other glasses, which look just like hers.
Friday night I read at the University Bookstore here. Another delightful audience who asked questions that ranged from the intimately emotional to the delightfully technical. (What does your family think? What kind of pen do you draw with?) But that’s the cool thing about graphic storytelling. You can’t avoid talking about the physical product as well as the content.
And last night Bailey-Coy, the LGBT bookstore here, set me up to read at the Wild Rose Bar. God, it was nice to be in a lesbian bar. And it’s so nice that this one is still here. I did a Dykes to Watch Out For slide show here in 1988!
Here’s Maggie, who had the most remarkable comics tattoos.
Driving back to the hotel at dusk, I got a heart-stopping glimpse of Mt. Rainier. Or rather a tiny slice of Mt. Rainier, between the clouds. God! It was all pink and ghostly and floating impossibly high up in the sky. You can’t possibly see it in this terrible photo I took from the car, but I’m posting it anyway.
I’m afraid things have been so crazy with the book tour that I wasn’t able to do new DTWOF episodes this month. I feel very bad about that, because it’s the second time in a year I’ve done this. But I’ll be back on track soon. Here’s an archive episode. Click the image to go to the bigger version (thank you, Nichael!) [Strip is now visible here without having to go to Flickr]
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Okay. You know that scene in Broadcast News where the William Hurt character says “What do you do when your real life exceeds your wildest fantasies?” And the Albert Brooks character says, “Keep it to yourself.” You know that scene? Right now I feel like a peculiar amalgam of both those characters. But I’m not going to keep this to myself: Fun Home just got an excellent, if not lavish review in the New York Times Book Review.
If the theoretical value of a picture is still holding steady at a thousand words, then Alison Bechdel’s slim yet Proustian graphic memoir, “Fun Home,” must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. It is a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions, with panels that combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own.
Well, the R. Crumb thing is a bit over the top. But I can’t tell you what a strange sensation it is to get all this establishment recognition after spending my whole career on the fringes of acceptability. I feel depressurized or something, like I’m getting the bends.
The Portland airport has free wi-fi. Such a civilized, community-spirited city. I’m posting this on my way to Seattle. The thing I’ve always hated about travel is the unfamiliarity of everything. But when you travel a lot, the unfamiliarity itself becomes familiar, if not routine. Here I am in the Kafkaesque security line just a few minutes ago.
Man! What a day. Up at 6 to fly from SF to Portland. A radio interview at KBOO. A pit stop at my hotel for a shower. A trip to In Other Words, the very pleasant women’s bookstore here. Then to the Powells.com warehouse building, where I had a really fun conversation with Craig Thompson, comix wunderkind, which will be published in the Powell’s newsletter at some point. Then off to Powell’s proper, the downtown bookstore, where there was a frickin’ HU-UUGE crowd to hear me read. What an audience! What a city! But whenever I say that to people from Portland they get all nervous and tell me not to move here because there’s already too many people.
That’s me in the middle of the room, running my powerpoint show. This was a good setup. Standing in the audience, or behind them, works better than standing up front. Because up front I have to look at my laptop. In the back, I’m looking at what the audience is looking at, which feels better.
Now it’s almost midnight. I just had my room service dinner. And I’m starting to crash.
New dates are up for Alison’s Fun Home tour in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Madison and Chicago. Also, you can catch an informative interview from The Forum on KQED San Francisco on Realplayer right here. (posted by Katie)
Now I’m in Portland, but I’m posting about last night’s reading at Cody’s in Berkeley.
We had to rig another impromptu screen, because they didn’t know I was going to be doing a visual presentation. But it worked out just fine. There was a large, very engaged audience.
They had questions not just about Fun Home but about the trajectory of my Dykes To Watch Out For career, and were coming up with all kinds of business strategies about how to make the strip more sustainable. It was a surprisingly un-Berkeley-ish sort of discussion.
Driving back to the city across the Bay Bridge, I took this picture of Mt. Tam. God, what a beautiful place.
