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Writers Week at the New Zealand Festival

March 9th, 2014

We’ve been in New Zealand for two days now. It’s too beautiful to bother trying to put into words. My first event was a trip to the small seaside town of Paekakariki in a van with the hilarious mad professor Terry Castle. Here’s the scene outside the town hall where we spoke.

Terry’s book The Professor is a collection of her brilliant personal/critical essays plus a memoir about her early days in the trenches of academia and lesbiana. We had a fun conversation…

…then were feted by the lovely locals. This woman brought all her old DTWOF books to be signed.

This one brought her pink brassiere, which she deftly removed without dislodging her t-shirt.

At the ensuing community potluck, Terry and I were presented with this astonishing cake.

Here are Terry and Holly marveling at it.

Here’s the view from the house of our gracious hosts. How do people bear all this beauty?

Today there was more book festival activity. I did a conversation onstage with Moira Clunie, who is a friend of the great NZ cartoonist Dylan Horrocks. He has a new book out called Incomplete Works, and I will see a panel he’s on tomorrow morning. I love his work. It’s very smart and the quality of his line is deeply pleasing.

It’s very overwhelming being at events like this. So much going on, so many people. It’s exhausting but also energizing.

And people are so kind! We also had a great potluck dinner in Adelaide, hosted by our new pals Sal and Mary. Here is Sal, the kangaroo whisperer. She took us to a wildlife park where we saw kangaroos, emu, dingoes, koalas, and all manner of strange beasts.

Here’s I am feeding a kangaroo. A kangaroo for god’s sake!

Here’s a joey in its mother’s pouch as they both lounge on the grass.

Well this is all rather disjointed. But it’s the best I can do right now. Tomorrow New Zealand cartoonists and a trip to more botanical gardens. Oh. Here’s my new dorky hat that I got at the Melbourne botanical gardens.

And here are some other photos I didn’t manage to upload in Australia where the internet was so pricey. Me with the owners of the Hares and Hyenas bookstore.

And me in a photo these guys gave me that they took in 1997 at Book Expo America of Judith Katz, Nancy Bereano and me at the Firebrand Books booth. This is the pic where Hol says I look like an Amish preacher.

Melbourne

March 6th, 2014

Last night I did a talk for the Wheeler Center here in this fancy old theater, The Athenaeum.

I never know what to expect when I do these things. Maybe 75 people came to my talk at the Adelaide Writer’s Festival cartoonist day event on Tuesday. And I’ve gotten used to large-ish but captive and studious audiences at college events. But last night in Melbourne hundreds and hundreds of people came, many of them lesbians of all ages. It was really cool, like olden days, a very lively raucous crowd.

Afterward in the lobby Joan Nestle came up to me! She lives here now with her Australian partner—I knew that, but had forgotten. She looks fucking fabulous. “I’m 73!” she said. But she looks exactly like she did the last time I saw her, which was in 1997.

I also met the Australian cartoonists Judy Horacek and Kenton Miller.

It was an amazing night. Then this morning I bustled all around town doing 3 radio programs. And visiting the gay bookstore, Hares and Hyenas!

They’ve been around for 22 years. Here I am with the delightful owners.

They gave me this photo they’d taken in 1997 or so at Book Expo America of Judith Katz, Nancy Bereano of Firebrand Books, who pubished my work for many years. And me—Hol said I look like an Amish preacher in this pic.

(pic)

God, you know what? This post has been extraordinarily difficult to put together and it is bedtime and I’m exhausted. I can’t upload these photos. Megabytes are apparently like gold ingots here in Australia. Hotel internet costs $30 AUD, and even after forking that over, as soon as you use up 1000MB (by, for example, checking FaceBook) they cut you off the fast connection and slow you to an ignominious crawl unless you’re willing to pay even more! How does anyone get anything done?

For the life of me I cannot upload all these images. you’ll just have to picture them until I get to New Zealand tomorrow…where things might not be any better megabyte-wise.

So you will miss seeing me in the dorkoriffic hat I bought at the botanical gardens to protect me from the relentless sun.

Oz

March 3rd, 2014

I can’t believe I’m in Australia. I left frigid snowbound Vermont almost a week ago. Made a quick visit to Savannah GA, where I spoke at the annual Spring Break convention of Sigma Tau Delta, a college English honor society—English Majors Gone Wild.

Then Hol and I flew through Dallas to Brisbane, and from Brisbane to Adelaide. I’d been really dreading the long flight to Australia. I have actually been invited here a couple times before, and always declined because I couldn’t imagine being confined to an airplane seat for 16 or 18 hours. But it turned out to be pretty pleasant. Crossing the International Date Line was confusing, but after two days I’m finally starting to get oriented. It’s summer here, very hot, with a hard relentless sun. It’s strange and magical to be so far from home, on the other side of the planet.

Just now I saw the night sky for the first time. There’s a lot of light pollution so I couldn’t be sure, but I think I saw the Southern Cross. And then across the sky I saw a very familiar yet slightly odd looking bunch of stars…Orion, upside down!

I’ve been at the Adelaide Writer’s Festival where I’ve met a lot of wonderful people. Lovely Australian dykes and cartoonists. Today I did a talk with the puckish and super charming Rabih Alameddine, whose work I am ashamed to say I only recently discovered.

Tomorrow we’re going to go see koalas. Koalas?! As I say, I can’t believe it.

Then, Melbourne. And on to Wellington, for Writers Week at the New Zealand Festival.

If you missed the musical…

February 19th, 2014

…you can still experience a lot of its magic on this amazing cast album. Plus there are extensive liner notes with great photos, a synopsis by Lisa Kron, and of course her amazing lyrics.

You can order it online here from PS Classics, but it should also be available on Feb. 25th wherever people get CDs. iTunes too I think but of course then you won’t get the physical package with the liner notes.

Here are some photos I took at the recording studio on the day they made the album last December. They’re not great photos but whatever, I was trying to shoot through the glass of the booth. Here you can see Joel Perez who plays Roy, Beth Malone who plays Alison, and Noah Hinsdale who plays my little brother John.

Here I am with the formidable Michael Cerveris who plays my father.

This is a not great shot of the most brilliant and melodious Judy Kuhn, who plays my mother. Interestingly, her posture in this candid hand-wringing shot is not unlike my mother’s. And that’s Roberta Colindrez on the right, who plays my college girlfriend Joan. (And also Tako on GIRLS!)

And here is the Great Kron.

And the Great Tesori, consulting with Chris Fenwick, the music director.

Ring of Keys!

February 11th, 2014

Here’s a preview of the Fun Home cast album.

Beth Malone as Alison speaks at the beginning, then the amazing Sydney Lucas as Small Alison sings “Ring of Keys.” In the below pic from the recording session, Sydney is third from the right.

If you want the album you can pre-order it here. It’ll be released on February 25. You can also hear clips of other songs from the play if you click that link!

Leaving France

February 3rd, 2014

I’m leaving France and heading home. Not because of the massive anti-gay protests that happened here yesterday, just because it’s time to go. There have been these big demonstrations lately where people carry pink and baby blue banners and equate gay marriage with “familyphobia.” Their slogan is “Manif Pour Tous,” which I think is short for “manifesto for all.” (Though “all” seems a little disingenuous.) Libération’s headline about it today reads, “la grande manip,” which seems to be a pun, as in manipulation. It feels like a great triumph to understand a pun in French, though of course I could be mistaken about the whole thing.

The Angoulême comics festival was amazing. I spent many hours signing books and drawing pictures in them, and met lots of people. Here is a reader from Luxembourg who wanted to take this picture because we were dressed alike. Unfortunately I was not wearing my blue checked shirt that day.

And here is the amazing Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan, who I got to have dinner with one night. She won a big prize at the festival for her new book The Property, which I have not read yet but it looks really great.

Also I got to sign for a while next to the genial (in its original, genius-related sense, not in its meaningless “awesome” sense) Joost Swaarte. He drew astonishing things for people. And he wore two pairs of glasses-his regular ones over his reading glasses. Like Holly does! Okay. Gotta come home now.

My life has become un Train a Grand Vitesse

January 30th, 2014

(I.e., a very fast train.) I’ve been doing nonstop interviews and booksignings all week in Paris and this morning I just took the train to Angoulême, the big European comics festival.

My hotel in Paris was at 21 Rue Jacob…that address sounded familiar to me but I couldn’t remember why until Christine, one of the owners of Violette & Co., the women’s bookstore, said that Natalie Barney lived at 20 Rue Jacob. Here’s her house! It used to have a plaque but now it doesn’t. Djuna Barnes apparently used to stay across the street at my hotel.

Also across the street from Natalie’s place is a shop that sells autographs and letters and stuff, and they have a letter from Natalie Barney in the window. I did not inquire about the price.

On Monday I met with a journalist to do an interview at Shakespeare and Co., where this chat blanc watched the proceedings with complete disinterest.

Here I am with Christine at Violette & Co.

A lot of people came to my talk there, and were very patient as my French editor and sheep dog Jean-Luc translated for me. Here is a little gaggle of rowdy French women who wanted me to pose with them for a picture.

I visited the Musée D’Orsay, but sadly missed both these exhibits.

Masculine, L’Homme Nu was over, and the Gustave Doré one was still being installed. See the clock at the top of the building? You can look out through it. That was pretty genial. Which I think is French for “awesome.”

Wednesday night I spoke at a bookstore called Les Arpenteurs where a très charmante young woman named Melanie facilitated a conversation with the audience. I met Béatrice Faveur there, who published this French translation of one of my Dykes books many years ago.

Here’s Jean-Luc surrounded by lesbians.

The woman with her arms crossed is Anne Cremieux, an academic who has written some stuff about my work. And she also made this cool movie with Gretchen Phillips in it that I posted here a long time ago.

Okay. I have one half of a brain cell left. Bon nuit!

Off to France

January 26th, 2014

I’m going to Paris, then to the Angoulême Festival International de la Bande Desinée. If you’re in the neighborhood, please come to one of my events!

Tuesday/Mardi 28 Janvier, 19h, I will be at Violette and Co, the women’s bookstore in Paris.

Wednesday/Mercredi 29 Janvier, 19h, I will be at Les Arpenteurs, 9 Rue Choron, Paris.

Then I’m off on the very fast train to the Angoulême festival. I’ll be spending lots of time at the Éditions Denoël stall, signing books, or hoping to sign books.

On Friday at 19h, I’ll be in the Salle Bunuel to do some kind of presentation or interview or other.

My book Are You My Mother? or rather, C’est Toi Ma Maman? is one of the official selections of the festival, which is awesome, so there’s another event having to do with that on Saturday. And on Sunday I think I’m doing a joint interview with one of my favorite French cartoonists, the brilliant and brooding Fabrice Neaud.

I hope to see you at one of these things!

January 15

January 15th, 2014

I have to make a new post here because it’s been two months since the last one, and the comments shut off after two months, otherwise they just attract spam. But I have absolutely nothing to say at the moment. So it occurred to me to post an old datebook entry from a nice round number of years ago—thirty. Here is what I was doing on Sunday, January 15, 1984, when I was 23:

Woke at 10 and stayed abed until 11. Went out for a run [in Prospect Park]. Road slippery and unplowed. Great run. Only one lap, but much energy. Then I went out and skied for while. Went down some hills. Fun. Home. Ate. Went to sleep for a while. Played at my desk and listened to my digital Bach record. Was supposed to do drawing work but didn’t. [My roommate] cooked curried eggplant. Then we played Scrabble and quit. Then we made gross brownies. Played at my desk more. Read old journals from 1980 and got depressed. Tintin antidote. Sleep.

I was puzzled by the “digital Bach record.” This was before the era of CDs. At first I thought maybe I was referring to one of those Bach-on-synthesizer albums. But by backtracking a few days I see that I had recently purchased “a record of Bach Orchestral Suites. Digital!” I guess digital recording was a new exciting thing in 1984. Of course the funniest part of this old journal entry is my note that I had spent the evening reading old journal entries.

Hmmm. For a long time I’ve had this idea for a project where I examined what I was doing on a particular day of the year over a span of different years. To see what changes and what doesn’t. I guess I’ve always had a sort of philosophical interest in whether we remain the same person, the same “self” over time. In college I felt disturbed but also strangely excited by Hume’s idea that there is no unified, ongoing self, that we’re just bundles of perceptions which of course are constantly in flux. I often feel like my “self” is a problem, a source of pain, a thing I’m stuck in. As evidenced by all this obsessive diary-keeping, and the re-reading of diary entries, and my midlife career shift of reworking my old diary entries into memoirs. And now this recursive blog post.

I wonder if I will ever exorcise the need to keep such close tabs on myself? Rather than get to work right now (although I can make the argument that this is my work), I’m going to look up a few more January 15ths, and post them here as an experiment. Am I the same person I was on these earlier dates? I leave it to you.

Tuesday Jan. 15, 2002 (age 41)

(this one actually made its way into my memoir Are You My Mother?)

I’m on a plane, flying to Sacramento. I just wanted to note an interesting thing that happened yesterday. I went to the lumber yard to buy a board to make a ramp for Julia–she’s been limping, and I wanted to make the stairs easier. I was hoping to get an eight-foot board, which I could have just stuck in the car but they only had a twelve-foot one. So I had to strap it on the roof, and it hung way off the front and back. It was cold and I was struggling and my hands were getting numb and I was in a hurry because I wanted to get some skiing in at Bolton.

Finally, I got it on, and walked briskly around the car to the driver’s side–straight into the board. I got it right between the eyes. It was stunning. The top edge cut my forehead, and my nose is scraped and bruised. I was afraid I might get a black eye, but that has failed to materialize. Still, I look quite thuggish and disreputable.But since I’ve been reading Freud on the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, I can’t help but wonder if there might be something going on besides pure accident.

Monday Jan. 15, 1973 (age 12)
I got an 83 on my English test. So far my average is about 84. Bleah! Miami won the Superbowl. BooBooHooHoo (?) I was for Redskins. After school, we went downtown. I got a pair of jeans and a gigantic gym suit. I practiced [the piano]. We took down the Christmas tree. I got in a big box and handed out bags [the plastic bags we kept the tree ornaments in]. I washed my hair and my clothes.

Thursday 15 January, 1981 (age 20)
I don’t really want to write. I have been putting it off. Am at low ebb. Self-disgust stage of cycle. Mediocre mediocre mediocre.

1. Mediocre lover.
Things have palled with [X]…or do I just think so?
Pall: from appall 1. to become vapid, dull or insipid. 2. To become satiated or cloyed, as the stomach.
Cloy: to satisfy or fill to excess. To cause surfeit.
I don’t know. She’s in some kind of mood too, I guess. Kind of coming down after the high of December, I suppose. Both of us. Anyhow..no more of that awe, that incredible feeling of tenderness. Just mediocre. We hardly look at each other. Why does this happen? [long passage about bad sex that I will not try your patience with (any more than I am already trying it)]

2. Mediocre student.
UGH. C on Greek final. B+ on Hood’s slides. Just wrote an INSANE paper for Surrealism. Long, hyper-intellectual, pointless. A detailed logical argument in order to make a vague, debatable, artistic point. Ludicrous. I am DUMB. I am not even SMART.

3. Mediocre worker.
I almost got fired from the library for showing Tom how to input obscene words as books. Why did I do that? [My boss] thinks I’m a jerk now. I fucked off all semester there, didn’t do anything. What a jerk I am.

4. Mediocre artist.
My stuff has no impact. I have no motivation. Those text-sculpture pieces I did last semester…they are BORING! TRIVIAL! Over-processed! SHIT. And I have to materialize some sort of portfolio soon. Soon?! IMMEDIATELY. Goddamn shit fuck

Tuesday January 15, 1974 (age 13)
We had gym. We started volleyball. I finished my clay devil in art. Now I have to glaze and fire it. Hokay. Mr. Weaver talks too much. YA KNOW? I had my [piano] lesson. It was pretty good. When we drove into Woolrich, we saw [my friend/my piano teacher’s son] walking home from the bus, and he was wearing the jeans he got like mine. He went in the house and changed them! While I ate my orange out front. MAN! He gets everything I do. I’M ANGRY. Dad dropped me off and went to Williamsport. He was late and I had to eat with [my piano teacher’s family].

Saturday Jan. 15, 1972 (age 11)
We watched cartoons. The men came to put in the carpet. Chris got the (illegible). We went to (illegible) We tried to get (illegible) Snuffy’s bucket, but it broke. We had fondue. We watched T.V. The (illegible) was nice. Dad & I went to the store. It’s cold out.

Sunday Jan. 15, 1995 (age 34)
Hell night at [Y’s]! Really windy out, blowing musty attic/wall smell into [Y’s) room through gaps in the baseboards. Such a rickety house! Y goes to sleep downstairs. I manage to doze (badly) till 12:30. Then me & Y cooked a BIG BRUNCH. Banana-walnut pancakes, fake sausage, grapefruit….I left at 7pm and came home. Cooked and ate and fucked with computer. Stayed up really late answering letters and stuff, putting stuff together for some comics shows. Then I worked on planning my dinner party. To bed at 6am. Read Middlemarch and tried to sleep but kept getting my party plans confused with the characters in Middlemarch.

Friday Jan. 18, 1985 (age 24)
(okay, this is not the 15th. I didn’t make an entry on the 15th that year. But this one on the 18th is so apposite I must include it.)
Sitting trying to organize my affairs in the Northampton Public Library. From a book review about a new book on Virginia Woolf in Wednesday’s Times:

“What a disgraceful lapse,” Woolf once chided herself. “Nothing added to my disquisition, & life allowed to waste like a tap left running. Eleven days unrecorded.”

(this Woolf quote also made its way into my book Are You My Mother?)

Saturday 15 January, 2011 (age 50)
Had a long talk with [my agent], telling her about [a business conversation I’d had], then listening to her take on it.

[My theatrical agent] emailed, saying he thought [the conversation] had gone well. I feel extremely exhausted by all this. [My agent] called again later, while I was out skiing. I stood in the cold dark woods listening to her and trying to stiffen my spine for [yet another business conversation].

That will be happening at 1 today. Before then, I need to hammer out a script for what I will say. I was hoping to just get back to work on chapter 6 [of Are You My Mother?] and do this later, but now I’m doing it anyway. No. Don’t let this completely derail me. Do my own work first. Then prepare for the conversation.

Woke with a migraine. I’m stewing in my own juices, my own feedback loop…can’t get out, can’t move forward…stuck on this spread about mirroring, freud’s “narcissistic or anaclitic” desire model…Trying somehow to summarize my entire psychic/erotic development in two pages.

time space life death

November 15th, 2013

This is the vector of my life since January. I have been having a really crazy, intense, draining, grief-stricken, and surreal year. And in an attempt to orient myself again, I’ve been trying to figure out how to capture it all visually somehow. I’ve come up with this animated chart which was extraordinarily complicated to devise, involving Photoshop, iMovie, a graphic tablet, a screen casting app, and the stopwatch and Voice Memo apps on my phone. The resulting video has three layers. Time—the year elapses day by day. Space—the red line is me traveling hither and yon, mostly to Pennsylvania and back where first my mother dies, in May, and then, her partner Bob dies, in October. And in and around all of that awful, abysmal loss, I’m flying and driving all over the place for work stuff that I scheduled way before I knew anyone was going to die. The third layer of the video is my voice-over, trying to explain where I’m going and why.

The surreal element enters when Fun Home, the musical, opens at The Public Theater in October, to great acclaim. I’ve seen the play five times now. And I keep trying to come up with a way to describe the feeling of seeing this simulacrum of my book—and thus of my life—take shape on a stage, in song, embodied by supernaturally gifted actors. And I keep failing. But one metaphor that occurred to me today is that maybe it’s kind of like getting a glimpse into a parallel universe that’s just slightly out of synch with this one. Uh…and set to startlingly beautiful music.

The video ends with me here, today, in Vermont. “And now, it’s now.” To quote a line from Fun Home, the musical. (later note…the line from the play is, “And then, and then, it’s now.” Sorry I got that wrong.)