Blog

The Fun Home tour: Book Soup, LA

June 9th, 2006

I spoke to a small but delightful audience at Book Soup last night. (Maybe everyone was at the Bottoms Up! anal sex workshop that Babeland was having at the same time.)

It was a really nice bookstore. I wish I’d had time to hang out and browse. My buddy Phranc and her girlfriend Lisa showed up, and afterward took me out for the best matzoh ball soup I ever had in my life. At Canter’s Delicatessen. Here’s a pic of Phranc and me.

hometown signing

June 8th, 2006

I had a really nice reading and signing for Fun Home last night at my local Bunns & Noodle, in Burlington VT. (Photo courtesy of my friend Samuel Lurie.) But it was weird reading this very intimate material to an audience filled with people I know. Somehow it’s easier reading to complete strangers.

I got up at 5 this morning to fly to Los Angeles. I’m posting this from O’Hare. You can often find yourself a nice little nook with an outlet under one of these three-pole supports that line the concourses.

I was feeling pretty cool until I almost trashed my charger by yanking it out of the wall as I was posing for the photo.

fifteen minutes

June 5th, 2006

Man. My little burst of fame reached a new level this morning. The FedEx guy brought a package and instead of just handing it to me, gave me a knowing smile and said “nice piece in Entertainment Weekly.”

That was pretty cool. But I’m starting to feel overwhelmed. I’m happy for all the attention, but it’s rather jarring after my long years of relative obscurity.

I won’t keep making posts about every Fun Home review that comes out, but there’s a really great one on Salon today, by Douglas Wolk.

“Fun Home” is a beautiful, assured piece of work, by far the best thing Bechdel has done in over two decades as a cartoonist. Her language and drawings are impressively sensitive to the details of her physical experience and to the trickier folds of her own self-consciousness; she dives over and over into the cloudy waters of her past, swimming deeper every time.

Okay. I gotta get back to work.

While Alison is on the Run

June 5th, 2006

Hi DTWOF Fans!

I’m interrupting your regularly-scheduled DTWOF and Fun Home programming to introduce myself!  As Alison’s new assistant, I will be attempting to fill Cathy Resmer’s capable and organized shoes to help with website updates, email, and other communications with the outside world.

Katie Sullivan

Launched

June 4th, 2006

I had a party last night to officially launch Fun Home. Liza Cowan hosted it at her great new gallery in Burlington, VT, Pine Street Art Works. There was a funeral theme to the evening: funereal attire optional, organ music, smelling salts. Lookit this amazing wreath Liza ordered–the flowers match the colors of the book cover. If you care to see a little slideshow of unfortunately blurred pictures, click here and you’ll go to Flickr. Or here are some shots Liza posted on the gallery’s site.

Life Drawing

June 3rd, 2006

More Fun Home news. Margot Harrison wrote a really excellent profile about me and my memoir for my local alt weekly Seven Days this week. I don’t think I’ve ever read an article about myself that didn’t make me cringe at least once until now. It’s exceptionally accurate.

There’s also an article about Fun Home in People magazine, the one just on the newsstands, though I haven’t seen it yet.  I spent three hours posing in a cold cemetery for the photo last week. Holding a shovel.

The shovel was my idea, because writing Fun Home felt at times like I was digging my father up. In fact, for a while I wanted to use one of my favorite silly Edward Gorey poems as an epigraph for the book. Why am I writing about Edward Gorey all the time lately? Sorry. But let me just quote the poem, which is from one of his abecedarian volumes, The Fatal Lozenge. (N.B.: A ‘resurrectionist’ is a grave-robber, or someone who digs up bodies in order to sell them for dissection.)

The resurrectionist goes plying
without ado his simple trade;
Material is always dying.
And got with nothing but a spade.

Apologies to everyone having trouble reading the split posts

June 3rd, 2006

Thanks to Andrew Burday and Nichael Cramer for identifying the coding problem. My web guy is going to fix it soon. In the meantime, you can try switching browsers. Netscape works, Explorer doesn’t. And Firefox is best of all.

Oh, and some people have been concerned about why I ask for your email address when you make a comment. You don’t have to put anything there, just leave the forms blank and you’ll come through as ‘anonymous.’ I think the way the comments form is set up now is just a default thing. I’ll try and make it more friendly and explanatory at some point.

My Tucson trip

June 1st, 2006

I’m posting from LaGuardia airport, while I wait for my third flight of the day to take me back to VT. I have 15 minutes before boarding. I just wanted to say that I had a really great time in Tucson. It was totally worth all the travel hassles. First of all, I got there in time to swim in the pool. I haven’t been swimming in I don’t know how many years.

And then an astonishingly large and enthusiastic crowd came to my talk at the library. I was braced for a similar showing to the one I got at the Dallas Public Library last October. Ten people came to that, and seven of them were librarians. But there was a whole mess of people last night in Tucson. I did a two part presentation–first I talked about Dykes to Watch Out For, then I read from Fun Home. It was the first time I’ve done a public reading from Fun Home, and I was surprised by its somber tone. But people really seemed to like it. Here I am signing books after.

Episode 489

June 1st, 2006

I think if you click on the image, you’ll get taken to the larger version on Flickr. Sorry, we’ll get this sorted out soon so it’s easy for everyone to see. [Situation is sorted out now] Read the rest of this entry »

The Loneliness of the Long-distance Blogger

May 30th, 2006

Here I am at some nameless airport motel on the outskirts of Atlanta. I’m supposed to be flying to Tucson right now. Tomorrow night I’m speaking at the public library there, a Pride kickoff event. But my flight leaving VT was two frickin’ hours late. Even so, when we got to Atlanta it looked like I might still possibly make my connecting flight. I did one of those decathlons through the airport, running full tilt as I Read the rest of this entry »