Blog

my friend Sarah’s blog

March 31st, 2012

My old pal Sarah Van Arsdale has a book coming out this month, Grand Isle, her third novel. Check out her funny, illustrated blog. Her latest post is a short tribute to Adrienne Rich which links to this great essay about Rich by Susan Stinson on Lambda Literary. Susan describes very eloquently the deep, encompassing way that Rich’s work shaped her own writing and thinking.

Adrienne Rich

March 29th, 2012

I just heard that Adrienne Rich died. The NY Times obituary ends with this:

What she and her sisters-in-arms were fighting to achieve, she said, was simply this: “the creation of a society without domination.”

Of course her work had a huge influence on me. In fact a chapter of my new book revolves around her. The excerpt above is from a lecture I heard her deliver when I was 23. I wrote down practically everything she said in a notebook.

I wish I had time to write more now but I have just begun my fellowship at the U of Chicago and am so busy I can’t breathe. But here’s another Rich reference. Back when I was still struggling with my book I wrote about a dream I had, and our blog friend Alex K realized that the image came from Rich’s poem Diving Into the Wreck.

dazed, confused, addled, and befuddled

February 12th, 2012

Thank you all for your kind congratulations on finishing my book. I’m starting to dig out my office out now. I’ve been working on this new memoir ever since Fun Home came out six years ago. So a lot of matter has accumulated. Not just related to the book itself, like this pile of drafts and sketches.

But all kinds of other detritus like a camcorder that died four years ago with a cassette still inside it. I couldn’t bring myself to throw a $500 object away, but fixing it would cost hundreds more. Plus I had to get the tape out. So today I took a screwdriver to it. It was not as satisfying an experience as I had hoped. Plus I cut my finger.

The disorganization has brought me to a standstill. To take any action I have to move something and there’s nowhere to put anything. I know it doesn’t look too bad in this photo, but it is.

But the most disorganizing thing is that my email is not working. I very wisely waited until I finished the book to upgrade my Mac to the new Lion OS, and switch from using their old synchronization service, MobileMe, to the new one—iCloud. Ever since I effected this “migration” on Friday morning, my new email is being sent to another galaxy, or into a black hole, or perhaps it has migrated to a parallel universe where it hasn’t been written yet, or has already become obsolete. Irksome as email can be, not having it is much worse. I feel completely unmoored. Even the Apple tech, with whom I spent three hours on the telephone, kept saying, “Weird.” He has now passed my problem along to “the engineers.”

I guess I’m coming online to tell you all this because I feel so offline.

done

February 5th, 2012

I finished my book last night!
I finished writing it months ago, and the Advanced Reading Copy went out weeks ago. But I still had a million things to do before it was actually finished. Hundreds of little drawing corrections, plus new art for the title page and endpapers and the case of the book. It was a long, hard, isolated slog. And now I’m done.

Here is my cat’s latest favorite spot. We bought this rotisserie thing to make chicken with because Holly loves rotisserie chicken but you can never get happy rotisserie chicken. We took it out of the box and immediately the cat got on the box and she hasn’t left. This is unfortunate because we discovered that the rotisserie thing is damaged and we need to return it but we can’t because the cat is on it.

a public service message

January 16th, 2012

It’s 12 below zero this morning. I was just trying to heat up my frigid basement office with the space heater I’ve been using since 1987. I’m always a little nervous about this aging appliance and feel like I should probably replace it, but it works fine and so I don’t. But this morning I left the room for a couple minutes and when I came back the thing was in FLAMES. Flames and black smoke. I unplugged it and put it outside in the snow. Back in my office, noxious fumes and a scattering of black ash over everything.

Now I have lugged my computer upstairs, and set up a little office in the living room. I already have a drawing station here.

I’m very glad I did not burn my house down.

buy this book

December 31st, 2011

I just heard Ellis Avery on NPR talking about her new book The Last Nude. It’s based on the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka, and the relationship she had with one of her models. I majored in art history and never heard of this woman for godsakes. But the novel sounds great—set in 1927 Paris, all very steamy and literary.

The book comes out next Thursday, January 5. Ellis is going on a tour—go hear her if she comes to your town! Also, buy or pre-order the book! The way books make the best-seller lists is if a lot of people buy them right when they come out. And then if they make the best-seller lists, even more people will buy them. There’s something slightly circular about that logic, but it seems to be the way things work.

return to the light

December 22nd, 2011

I seem to have finished penciling the last chapter of my book at the moment of the solstice.

paper or plastic

December 21st, 2011

June Thomas has a new nonfiction book podcast over at Slate. Her first episode is a chat with Steve Kleinedler, executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary. (See here for a post about my own fascinating visit with Steve a couple years ago.)

I’m on the Usage Panel of the AHD which means I get to weigh in on things like whether “their” as a gender neutral pronoun is okay. (I’m lobbying hard for a yes on that one.) It also means that I get a free dictionary when a new edition comes out. The Fifth arrived recently, resplendent as ever with its profuse photo illustrations. But this time it came with an app for my phone! And it’s a pretty cool app. It contains the full text of the dictionary, which is great, but the search function is…what do you call it…like how Google works now, where with each letter you input it’s finding new search results? Anyhow, the AHD app does that, with each letter you input, a list of words comes up. One of the amazing things about the hard copy dictionary, of course, is the serendipitous pleasure of finding other words on your way to looking up one particular word. And some of that analog experience is preserved by the app’s alphabetical list of possible answers to your search.

(SOmebody please tell me what that technology is called. My brain is so fried from drawing 16 hours a day I can’t even try to look it up.)

ANyhow, June’s talk with Steve is fascinating. One of the things they discuss is whether the Fifth Edition of the AHD could be the last printed dictionary.

my everlasting process

December 19th, 2011

The journal Critical Inquiry has posted this video of my friend and colleague Hillary Chute interviewing me while I was working on my book last summer. If I had talked less and drawn more, maybe I would be done by now.

Hillary Chute Interviews Alison Bechdel from Critical Inquiry on Vimeo.

stand-up shorts

December 12th, 2011

I’m working hard on finishing up the drawing for my new book. All day long I sketch and take pictures of myself in various poses, then sketch some more. I use different props and clothes for all these reference shots.

I have this ancient pair of Patagonia “Stand-Up” shorts from when I was twenty-five, so I wear them in some of these little tableaux to help me conjure up my younger self. They’re too small now–I can barely button them. So I take them off as soon as possible after the shutter releases. As I was rushing about today, I caught this glimpse of them living up to their name.

They also reminded me of that Dr. Seuss story about the empty pants in his book The Sneetches and Other Stories.

I saw a pair of pale green pants
with nobody inside them…