Fall Tour: space-time coordinates

September 17th, 2006 | Uncategorized

space-time continuum
I’m leaving in a week for another book tour. I thought making a map of where I was going might help me to pre-emptively (god, that word is ruined forever) adjust to the psychic displacement entailed by serial air travel. In case you can’t decipher it, here’s the text version, too.

Fun Home Fall Tour

Austin, Texas
Sunday, September 24, 2006, 3:00 pm

BookPeople
603 N Lamar Blvd.
Austin TX 78703
(512) 472-4288

Atlanta, Georgia
Tuesday, September 26, 2006, 8:00 pm

Outwrite Bookstore
991 Piedmont Ave. NE
Alanta, GA 30309
404.607.0082

Miami, Florida
Thursday, September 28, 2006, 8:00 pm

Books & Books, Miami Beach
933 Lincoln Rd, Miami Beach FL
305-532-3222
Co-sponsored by Miami-Dade G&L Chamber of Commerce

Asheville, North Carolina
Friday, September 29, 2006, 7:00 pm

Malaprop’s Bookstore and Café,
55 Haywood St. Asheville, NC 28801
828-254-6734

St. Louis, Missouri
Saturday, 30 September, 2006, 7:00 pm

Left Bank Books
399 N Euclid Ave, St. Louis MO 63108
314-367-6731

Washington, D.C.
Monday, October 2, 2006, 8:00 pm

Politics and Prose
5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC 20008
202-363-7663

Cleveland, Ohio
Tuesday, October 3, 2006, 7:00 pm

Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Legacy Village
24519 Cedar Road, Lyndhurst OH 44124
216.912.1981

Oberlin College
Wednesday, October 4, 2006, 4:30 pm

I’ll be giving a lecture about Dykes to Watch Out For and Fun Home for the Comparative American Studies program. But anyone’s welcome to come. It’s in the Craig Lecture Hall, Science Center, 119 Woodland St., Oberlin, OH

University of Michigan
Tuesday, October 10, 2006, 7:00 pm

The School of Art & Design and the Office of LGBT Affairs is bringing me in. I’ll be speaking at the East Quad auditorium. This is a National Coming Out Day event.

Toronto, Ontario
Wednesday, October 11, 2006, 7:00 pm

Pages, ‘This is Not A Reading Series’
http://www.pagesbooks.ca/

I’ll be having a conversation with Ivan Coyote and Zoe Withall.

Gladstone Hotel Ballroom, 1214 Queen St W,, Toronto.
Wed, Oct 11, 7:30-10pm (doors 7pm), free

Coming up:
London and Paris at the end of October

NY ComicCon in February

27 Responses to “Fall Tour: space-time coordinates”

  1. shadocat says:

    That map is beautiful! I also makes my head hurt to look at it–you must be exhausted! Wish I could see you in St Louis-so near, and yet so far away…

  2. tallie says:

    hey…. good luck with the tour! get sleep! drink water!

    any plans on hitting the west coast in the (near) future?

  3. ObieAry says:

    I’m thrilled that you’ve got a stop at Oberlin – besides being a big DTWOF fan, I’m a student and it made me inconceivably that Peters and the womb chairs in Mudd Library made appearances in Fun Home.

    looking forward to the tour!

  4. Jaibe says:

    How cool to give a talk at your old university. Will you use the French book’s slides in Paris? 🙂 How do you decide where to talk — is there someone a university can bribe? (WRT “London”). Hey — get them to book you on the Eurostar between Paris & London — it is much better than flying (& no risk of crazy British airports putting your laptop in checked luggage). If you book ahead you can get first class quite cheap (about the same as regular) & then they feed you & you get a power outlet & the cars are relatively quiet etc. etc. I would totally do my flying in & out of Paris right now & do the train to get to the UK.

  5. Lauren Zito says:

    🙁 no stop in Pittsburg – flyin’ right over. Not that I blame you…

    I hate this town.

  6. Heidi says:

    Yea! See you in Austin next week!

  7. Deb says:

    Alison, yes, I totally agree. The word pre-emptively is totally ruined forever! Good luck with the tour and have a great time!

  8. Kommishonerjenny says:

    Alison, I’d just like to tell you that when I was a lonely queer living in rural Missouri a few years ago, I bought every DTWOF book at Left Bank in STL. The characters in DTWOF were the only queer community I had, and I am eternally grateful (and also eternally addicted). Those books are such a prized possession, and I treasured the visit to Left Bank once every couple months (it required a two-hour drive) to treat myself to the next book in the series. Enjoy your visit.

  9. Em says:

    Whoo-hoo! For once I’m glad to live in St. Louis!

  10. tania says:

    give my regards to the alma mater! will you get me a Peters keychain or OSCA mug or something?

  11. Deb says:

    Hey, bring me back a prize too! 🙂

  12. sillipitti says:

    Thanks for putting such a nice Vancouver Island on your map despite it’s being totally on the wrong side of the continent. The timing never seems to be good to catch you when you’re in Seattle, so I hope it won’t be too long before you get up to Vanouver. Perhaps IDKE 2007, as I can sense that there is a King lurking in that juicy psyche of yours.

  13. An Israeli says:

    what about Tel-Aviv ?!
    p-l-e-a-s-e

  14. Nicky UK says:

    hey, the UK in October huh? does that mean a little skirmish into York for the YLAF?
    come on, you enjoyed the last one, and all your friends will be up there and not in London.
    and I have my non UK edition of the book for you to sign….and nope, I cant work out how american my edition is compaired to a UK edition

  15. […] Alison Bechdel is coming to the Joseph-Beth in Cleveland, and Oberlin. * * * […]

  16. Farar says:

    While in St. Louis, you might check out the City Museum. Rather than a museum of the history of the town, it is a testament to one artist’s vision of weirdness, with galleries inside that have other artists’ visions of weirdness. Hard to describe, but fun to go to!

  17. Daisy Thompson says:

    Will your appearance at Politics and Prose be shown on CSPAN? I ask because I’m thinking of cancelling my cable this month, and I won’t if there’s a chance you’ll be on next month.

  18. Joe Code says:

    Don’t suppose I could convince you to make a stop at Bookends in Ridgewood, NJ on you way home from Toronto? (I couldn’t get to NYC when you were there.) 😉

  19. Pam Isherwood says:

    On UK vs US editions – the UK version is paperback only, published by Jonathan Cape/Random House. They must think all brits are too poor to prefer the real thing. How will the wrap-around cover work? And how will the paperback survive long enough to give it to my grandchildren?

  20. Duncan says:

    Pam — have it rebound. In leather. Rich Corinthian leather, perhaps. 😎

  21. brynn says:

    London and Paris?

    Could you add Dublin??? 😉

  22. Pam Isherwood says:

    I’m vegetarian. So I will have to keep illegally importing US copies.

  23. Shmuel says:

    Washington DC on Yom Kippur. Not quite as disturbing as the name of their football team, but close. Or maybe all the Yids will come and break their fast at the bookstore!

  24. jen says:

    Looking forward to the Austin stop. Heard that you’re also stopping at Bookwoman on Monday?

    And, re the map: How sad for those of us in the U.S. that instead of also laying claim to the title, “the country with health care,” we can merely confess to be living in another of those countries with an illegitimately elected president.

  25. LondonBoy says:

    I think describing Mexico as a country with an illegitimately elected president is wrong. The salient facts are exhaustively documented elsewhere (Wikipedia, say), and the election was certainly close. But… Calderon won a small but clear majority. It was clear from election night onwards that the election was extremely close. The full count began on 5 July, and as counting proceeded showed a small majority for Calderon. Note that Calderon’s vote share had been expected to increase as the count progressed, as his support came more from states to the north, where counting was slower for known geographical and administrative reasons, and there is no reason to suspect these results were fraudulent – indeed, they were extensively checked by observers from all parties. (An exactly similar phenomenon is found in, for example, UK elections, where the Conservative Party tends to carry more rural consituencies, which report later.) By 6 July it was clear that Calderon had won the election, though by less than 1%. This count was manual, and carefully monitored by representatives of all major parties and by independent observers (including the EU, which formally found the elections “free and fair” on 8 July). Various recounts over following weeks did not substantially impact this result, nor was any systemic bias found. There were, as in every democratic election, a number of small irregularities and frauds, but these were neither widespread nor provided any systemic bias to the results. On 5 September the TEPJF (Federal Electoral Tribunal) unanimously certified Calderon as winner of the election. Under the constitution of Mexico, and on any natural interpretation of the counting and validating process, Mexico has a legitimately elected president. Many of us may not agree with Calderon’s proposed policies, but his election is legitimate.

    A couple of further points should be clarified: (1) The TEPJF has been generally regarded as politically neutral, and its personnel have been generally well-respected, since its constitution in 1996; (2) Lopez Obrador has not always respected the outcomes of other democratic processes in the past: notably, his expropriation policies in downtown Mexico City and his failure to accept the IFAI transparency policy. Note that he left the PRI only after its decline became obvious to external observers, and that he joined the PRD for what might well be construed as opportunistic reasons. His overall approach to policy is not that of a left-winger – his record as Mayor clearly shows this – but that of a populist or caudillo. (This, and not his ostensible socialist party affiliation, is what un-nerved the financial markets. The markets can manage a socialist with defined and consistent policies, as many previous elections in e.g. France, the UK, Germany, Sweden, etc. have shown. What scares financial markets is erratic or economically nonsensical policies, e.g. Peru under Garcia (first term), Zimbabwe under Mugabe, Sudan under many regimes including the present one, Argentina under Peron, etc..)

    There’s a final point to make here. I’ve noticed a rather unfortunate tendency developing in many countries over the past few years: when a candidate with whom we disagree is elected, it is becoming increasingly acceptable to claim that the victor is not legitimate – to ignore or disavow the election results. This phenomenon is visible in Europe, both North and South Americas, and in some parts of Australasia. When an election is close it is of course right to check it and monitor it with great care, and to fight for every hanging chad. But once this process is over, we have to be prepared to draw a line under the election, and move on. If we don’t let go, the risk is that our disrespect for one individual or one election result will spill over into a more general disrespect for the electoral process and our system of government as a whole. This, I believe, would be a very dangerous outcome: democracy is to some extent a confidence trick – we all need to have confidence that the system works in a more or less unbiased way. (This, of course, is why we should be pleased that Mexico is now having contested election, rather than facing another PRI triumph: Mexico is one of the countries that have moved towards this outlook in recent years.) Crying “fraud” every time we don’t get the result we want, and suspecting nefarious forces of foul play, ignores the simple fact that sometimes we are in the minority: sometimes a majority, large or small, may disagree with us. Howling about this, beyond the point of careful monitoring and review of the democratic process, is not what makes democracies work.

    Sorry this post was so long, but I felt I should get it off my chest. Thanks, as always, for a great website and strip.

  26. kate kelly says:

    Good grief that was like a thesis or dissertation or something? 😉 Just like Jen said, the heading used for Mexico could probably be inserted for the country directly north as well; at least some people would say this.

    Damn it to hell Alison–am I ever going to get a signed copy of your book? I saw your drawings in the comics museum in SF but your book wasn’t in SF yet. Then I went on my travels and it’s like I arrived at some of the places you were ahead of you. Now that you’re closer in proximity (Austin), I’m about to leave for New York. Damn, damn, damn.

    Quite seriously contemplating taking off in my car now for Austin but I don’t think I can manage it–I’m behind on a book deadline and need the time to write. Now I’ve just looked at the plane schedule and would have to fly to Chicago or Memphis (weird, not the cities, the plane schedules) in order to get to Austin in time. What a dilemma!

    Maybe I should just do another NYC trip again in February? Will you please post info on the nyc trip as soon as you know? And will you be doing the same presentation there that you have been at the bookstores? I’ve heard it’s wonderful. Possibly any other bookstore dates in the US other than those listed? Maybe I’ll have to talk my university into bringing you here?

  27. Jana C.H. says:

    Nice map! But I like all your maps. Cartoonist/tographer is a favorite combination of mine.

    Jana “the Cartographer”
    Seattle