Check out this wild Dutch animator’s video! As someone who spends half my life drawing and half my life on the computer, I found it oddly, deeply satisfying. Here’s her website.
Marriage equality is up for grabs in Maine’s election on Tuesday. Anyone from anywhere can help make phone calls this weekend, if you have a couple free hours.
You can also donate here to No On 1: Protect Maine Equality, and see a short, sweet, moving tv ad of a Catholic mom talking about her gay son’s family.
My friend Lucy Jane Bledsoe is coming out with a new book in the spring. I love Lucy’s work, and have been following it over the years from her short story collection Sweat to the novels Working Parts, This Wild Silence, and Biting the Apple, to her recent collection of true adventure stories, The Ice Cave. I think Big Bang Symphony: a novel of Antarctica is her best yet.
Antarctica is like a vortex that draws you back, season after season. The place is so raw and pure, all seal hide and crystalline iceberg. The fishbowl communities at McMurdo Station, South Pole Station, and in the cold and remote field camps intensify relationships, jack all emotion up to a 10. The trick is to get what you need and then get out fast.
“Pound for pound, Bledsoe’s books are hard to beat….Bledsoe, who seems incapable of a false or unwieldy sentence or motion…takes us there to the end of the journey one unflinching page at a time.” — Kevin Killian
If any of you are reviewers and want an advance copy, email her at her website.
Thanks to the folks who pointed out that my last post made it sound like 47 million people had rushed to make donations to Maggie for her health care costs. I only wish that were the case. To donate, and to follow her progress, go to Maggie’s blog.
Thanks to Liza for her comment on the last post about our blog pal Maggie, who’s in the hospital after emergency surgery. Go to her blog for updates or to make a donation–like 47 million other people in this country, she has no health insurance.
This t-shirt has been kicking around on my desk for months. I kept thinking I’d have a contest or something, and give it as a prize. But I can’t think of one. Except this: the first person who emails me with their (continental u.s.) address, gets it. It’s an XL Hanes Beefy T, that I drew for a soccer team that played in the ’94 Gay Games.
Instead of making a new post, I’m going to cheat by linking to a post about my visit last week to the Center for Cartoon Studies.
A whole buncha cartoonists drew Mr. American Splendor for his birthday. Can you figure out which head is by me?
Chicago’s Women and Children First, one of the few remaining women’s bookstores in the country, celebrated their thirtieth anniversary with a gala last weekend. I was one of the guests, along with Dorothy Allison and Nicole Hollander. It was a really fun evening. Nicole and I had a public conversation, and later, as things got a little wilder, Dorothy spoke to the crowd about her personal history with women’s bookstores. I managed to take a few very low res photos, and record a little bit of her talk with my phone. From those audio and video snippets, I put together this brief glimpse of Dorothy conjuring up her first visit to Women and Children First years and years ago, when she was touring with Trash.