Blog

left to my own devices

December 4th, 2010

I arrived home last night from my trip to Rochester to find that the power had been out for 48 hours. It hadn’t come back on by this morning. After cooking breakfast on the woodstove and fetching in water from the brook to flush the toilet, I couldn’t quite relax into the silent and technology-free day that stretched ahead of me. Instead of reading or drawing, I became completely obsessed with figuring out how to harness our handy emergency crankable flashlight/radio (available at Holly’s store! excellent holiday gift for the apocalyptically inclined!) to the bicycle trainer which was already set up in the living room.

In Rochester on Thursday, Holly and I went to the High Falls Visitor Center and saw this cool exhibit of old machines—triphammers and lathes and flour mills—that were powered by the 90 foot waterfalls on the Genesee River.

Surely there was some way similar way that I could transmit the power of my bike. I found a dowel, and drilled a hole in it—using a hand-powered auger intended for tapping maple trees. Then I put a long nail through that, and stuck it through a convenient slot in the bottom of the pedal. The nail could rotate freely in the hole I’d made in the dowel. Then I wired the dowel to the crank handle. The tricky part was to make the dowel the exact same length as the pedal crank, and then to make sure the centers of each crank were at the same height.

I hadn’t allowed quite enough room for my bike shoe, though, so when I actually put my foot on the pedal, the whole thing kinda fell apart. Fortunately the electricity came back on at that point, or I would probably still be fussing with it. With a few refinements, I think it could actually work!

Rochester Institute of Technology

December 1st, 2010

If you’re in the area, come hear me talk Thursday 12/2 at 8 pm at the Ingle Auditorium in the Student Alumni Union.

Here are a few more details.

Engineers! I can’t wait.

I drew a cartoon!

November 17th, 2010

Remember when I used to draw a cartoon every two weeks? I miss those days. Well, no, I don’t miss the constant deadline pressure. But I do miss the regular sense of having achieved something.

I’ve been working on a new graphic memoir for years now without much visible evidence to show for it. Unless you count the reams of undrawn drafts I seem to have generated—that is, written-and-laid-out drafts that don’t have any real drawings yet. I just coined that term, “undrawn draft.” It sums up the paradoxical feeling I have from working hard but having no tangible product yet.

Anyhow, all that is to say, I did a cartoon this week for the Thanksgiving issue of my local alternative weekly paper, Seven Days, and it was really great to actually put pen to paper again.

three items

November 10th, 2010

I just got voted into the Friends of Lulu Hall of Fame. FoL is a national organization whose main purpose is to promote and encourage female readership and participation in the comic book industry.

If you don’t know Nicole Georges’ work, check it out. She’s a cartoonist who also does pet portraits and every year she does this great animal calendar.

I don’t normally plug stuff to buy but this new LGBT site revel and riot is pretty cool. I love that someone has found a way to not just reclaim but make a buck off the “god hates fags” folks.

Vote!

November 1st, 2010

Vote today for Nancy Goldstein in the WaPo’s America’s Next Great Pundit contest! UPDATE! Voting extended till noon on Tuesday 11/2.

And vote tomorrow, for god’s sake, to stave off the Teahadis. If you live in Vermont, while you’re casting your ballot for Shumlin, also vote for Philip Baruth for state senate. We badly need more novelists in government. And look. He made very clever use today of the annoying post-it type ads that always obscure the headlines on our local newspaper–you can peel it off and wear it like a campaign button.

Oh! Also, check out the latest issue of the online feminist journal TRIVIA, whose theme is “Are Lesbians Going Extinct?” It includes coverage of the recent Lesbian Lives in the 1970s conference that was held at CLAGS.

WaPo pundit contest

October 24th, 2010

Just got back from a trip to NYC. Here’s Holly and my Mom in the mezzanine at the intermission of Mrs. Warren’s Profession starring the illustrious Cherry Jones. As I was snapping this pic, an usher shouted across the room, “Camera guy! Stop taking pictures!”

And check it! My pal Nancy Goldstein has made it to the final round of the Washington Post America’s Next Great Pundit contest. The next step is the crucial popular-vote stage. Check out some of her work here. I’m particularly fond of her take on Virginia Thomas’s recent manic episode.

Now she goes head to head with 3 other finalists (out of an initial field of 1400) in the Q&A round, which takes the form of a live discussion with WaPo readers this Monday (10/25) at noon…

I’ll try to update with details on how to vote Monday. The grand prize is a 3-month opinion columnist contract with the Post.

test

October 6th, 2010

I just sent this photo to my friend the Queer Theory Professor with the subject line, “which of these things is not like the others?”

She responded, “the second pumpkin from the right?” As a child watching Sesame Street, she would amuse herself during the little ditty (which apparently you can now download as a ringtone) by trying to come up with a reason why each of the things could be “not like the others.”

what’s going on?

September 30th, 2010

Thanks to the folks on here who have already linked to Dan Savage’s YouTube channel “It Gets Better.” Dan started this a week or two ago, in response to news of a gay teenager who hanged himself in Indiana earlier this month. Dan says in this recent Savage Love column, “I wish I could’ve talked to this kid for five minutes.” Then he realized that there is a way for LGBT adults to talk to the kids whose lives are being made miserable by the people at their schools. YouTube. He’s inviting people to send in videos telling LGBT kids who are being harrassed that life gets better, so they should stick around for it.

I know this stuff goes on all the time, but it seems unusually bad lately, with today’s news about the Rutgers student who killed himself. There’s also this story about bullies breaking a boy’s arm, and this story about a man telling a 14 year old girl with a rainbow flag to move to a country where they will hang people like her.

Anyhow, the videos people are sending in are very moving. I hope kids are watching. It seems to me like an unusually brilliant use of the web.

24 hour comics day draws nigh

September 26th, 2010

Have you heard about this event? Where people produce a comic book in 24 straight hours? It sounds really fun, but not quite so fun that I plan on doing it myself, although it would probably be good for me.

Anyhow, it starts this Saturday, October 2. I know there are a couple places near me in Vermont where it’ll be happening. The Trees and Hills Comics Group is organizing an event at the public library in Montpelier, and Artists Mediums is hosting it in Williston.

I suppose you can also do it at home alone.

Lesbian Nation, R.I.P

September 20th, 2010

Just heard that Jill Johnston died two days ago. There’s a very respectful piece on the HuffPo.

I recently organized my whole library. Fiction was easy, just putting stuff in alphabetical order. But when I got to my huge stash of books on gay and lesbian topics, I was confused about how to arrange them. Finally it became clear that the only meaningful order was chronological. So I put them all on the shelf by publication date. And quite accidentally the first one was Lesbian Nation, and eight feet further down the shelf was my latest acquisition, When Gay People Get Married. A fitting summation, I felt, of the past 40 years.

RIP, Jill Johnston.