Blogorrhea Junior

Revenge of the Sloth

I'm being a complete and utter sloth today. Egret must be rubbing off on me, since I've declined to leave the house all weekend. You'd think I had agoraphobia or something. I don't. I just like being home, which is mostly what I don't like about working for someone else. Generally, when I'm working, I get so much more done at home than I do in the office. Too many distractions. Yesterday, however, this was not such a good thing, since I spent way too much time in my chair, which isn't good for my pathetic back. So at least I'm doing a little housework today. I might even finish painting the doors in my bedroom, or at least put a coat on them. I bought the metallic paint I'll need for the living room, and a couple others I might use on the beams, so we'll try that out, too. And in between, I'll write a little.

Toon Out

If you'd like to be a 'toon instead of a manga character, Tori Siegel can help you out. It's not free, but it's very cheap and her work is fun. You can also get print editions for a reasonable price, something you can't get from the icon program I've been using. It's also more personalized than the Chinese menu method of constructing your persona. I love toons of all kinds, so this really appeals to me. But I've grown very attached in the last week or so to my manga personas, as you can probably tell if you've been checking back here through the week, so I'm going to stick to these, at least for now.

Despite my fascination with 'toons and comics (comics especially), I've never been a huge collector and I've never gotten into manga, which is kind of shocking, really. I collected when I was a kid (Conan the Barbarian and, of course, all the original Star Wars comics), but the only one I've kept is the Star Wars collection, and I haven't gone full tilt boogie into getting the Dark Horse ones, either. I've got about a dozen I need to round out my old Marvel collection and may actually have to take a trip to a comics con to finish it up. This horrifies me. I would like to have a complete set but I'm not sure I can stand all the geekiness.

I should probably just give in to my Inner Geek and get over it, but there's this huge element of shame in it that's hard to overcome. Witness the Geek Flow Chart. And Paul Ford's F-Train essay on Geekiness, called "Gallivespians," a title you won't understand unless you're a fantasy fan. Part of this shame stems from pure snobbery: the artificial divisions between "high" and "low" art, between art and illustration or art and craft, between people who know and and people who don't. This is why I was glad to see Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics get such good reviews in the mainstream (or "mundane" as they're known to fangeeks) press, and why it's nice to "graphic novels" gaining legitimacy. As is true of any art form, there's always someone doing something to push the boundaries: George Herriman's Krazy Kat, Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, Walt Kelly's Pogo, Doonsbury, Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, The Boondocks. And of course, Art Spiegelman's Maus.

Science fiction and fantasy get lumped into the geek category and looked down on even more than romance novels or "chicklit" (of course, any writing that women do or like is obviously inferior to literature, which is just as obviously a masculine pursuit; see me rolling my eyes? But that's a whole different soap box.). SF&F is only now, in the guise of speculative fiction, getting any respect at all. It's true that's much of what's written and published in the genres is crap, but that's true of books in general. SF suffers from its prior association with the pulp genre and its formula of BEMs and BBBs (Bug-Eyed Monsters and Big-Breasted Bimbos), although even some of the early stories transcended that—early Ray Bradbury, for instance, not to mention H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell. Fantasy, likewise, from its association with fairy tales (too childish for adult reading; see below) and with the early Sword and Sorcery pulp of Robert E. Howard and the crossover SF sword and technology of Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars books. Even Tolkien wasn't very respectable for quite a long time.

The fear of the fantastic is something Tolkien himself addressed in his essay "Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics" which appears in an unredacted and extended version as Beowulf and the Critics and in "On Fairy Stories" in the same collection. Ursula K. LeGuin deals with it too in her book of criticism, The Language of the Night. Realism, apparently, is the only fit subject for adult minds to bother with. This strikes me as fearing that the monsters under the bed might actually become real if you continue to pay attention to them. There's also a sense that stories that don't deal with "real" life are somehow childish in and of themselves, rather than often extremely sophisticated, as Joseph Campbell and Burno Bettheim have pointed out.

Personally, what I love about this particular genre and its associate fringe and marginalized forms is the freedom it gives you to poke fun or reexamine at reality without necessarily being didactic about it. Some of the best science fiction, or spec fic, and fantasy is also some of the best social criticism: LeGuin's The Dispossessed, the first three volumes of Frank Herbert's Dune series, Sherri Tepper's Grass and The Gate to Women's Country, almost anything Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney have written. Some of the urban and dark fantasy coming out now is really presenting a somewhat distorted mirror of reality or pointing out the undercurrents of myth in it. I'm thinking especially of China Mieville, Iain Banks, Charles DeLint, and Emma Bull. They're like the darkest of the Grimm Fairy Tales. Not everything results in happily ever after, just like life.

Part of the shame of being a geek is based on the fact that so much of what geeks like appeals to disaffected, marginalized young people. Among them, there are two kinds of geeks: the doers and the fans. They often intersect and certainly cross-pollinate and definitely get lumped in together with each other. In the hierarchy, though, the geek fans are probably responsible for more bad press. It's one of those true cliches that a lot of geeks lack social skills, even after they reach adulthood, and that's what gives the rest of us a bad name. Bad hygiene is not helping the rest of us out, folks.

That said, there's an almost atavistic fear of being thought childish among adults. Being told to "Grow up!" is a major insult. I remember how horrified my mother was when I announced in junior high that I wanted to write for Marvel Comics. That wasn't an adult enough job. It's much cooler and more "adult" now to be an animator than it was in, say, the early days of Disney or Warner Bros. (Pinky! Pinky! Pinky!) because at least there's cool grown-up technology involved now. It's okay, too, if that geeky programmer kid in the garage turns out to be Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Enough money will buy your way, if not necessarily into the mainstream, then into its grudging respect. Bill and Steve will always be geeks, but they're freaking rich geeks, so that's okay.

Tied up with that is also the sense that jobs are not supposed to be fun. Work does not equal fun. Work is work. Fun is what you do on the weekend. And in that sense, I think part of the scorn for geeks is mixed up with a lot of envy. Geeks usually really like their jobs, computer geeks and animators and cartoonists especially. But the same is true of writers and artists. And in this country at least, you're not doing serious work, real work, adult work, unless you're (a) making a buttload of money and/or (b) hate your job. Even a menial service job is seen as more serious than being a comic book artist, although the money is not all that different. Why is flipping burgers "better" than tooning?

There's also the uncomfortable element of obsessiveness, which is somehow perfectly acceptable in someone who collects "art" but not in someone who collects comics. Even baseball cards are more acceptable because there's clearly so much money in them and baseball is a jock thing. And if you're obsessive about making comics or cartoons, or writing comics or cartoons rather than, for instance, designing new toasters, that's just weird. Artists are all a little obsessive anyway, but because their work is seen as less important, by and large, than manufacturing consumer goods, their obsessiveness is just self-indulgent rather than profitable.

At least that's what Manga Girl thinks.

Aging, Gracefully and Otherwise

Bought my new glasses today—my first pair of bifocals, only I got progressives so there won't be that little line in the middle of the lenses. $600. The new reading lenses for my old frames only cost me $37. I figure now that I've got some nice, cool new frames, I'll keep them for a while and just change the lenses, which will still be a few hundred, but not as bad as new frames and new lenses. At this price, I'll have to keep the frames for a while. They're cute though: frameless, with just a nosepiece bar and earpieces in metallic purple. They're really flexible, which is good for someone who's as hard on her glasses as I am, and special Varilux lenses that don't have a dead spot on the sides for the progressive prescription. Did all of this today after coming back from the chiropractor, where I've been going to take care of my wimpy back. As another woman and I said to each other in the eye glass place, it sucks getting old: back falling apart, eyeballs stretching, high blood pressure, knock wood everything else is still in pretty good shape. Then there was the little old lady with the cane who asked me for directions today on the way home: long time New Yorker's accent, climbing determinedly up out of the subway and toddling off to her appointment. This isn't a nice place to grow old, but I hope I've got that much gumption if I do wind up staying here that long. In the meanwile, I'm fighting off incipient senility with an ultracool pair of new glasses.

Unsubtle Hints

My friend and art-partner-in-crime, Marcia, has been sending me articles about writer's block for the last couple of days, with no explanation. This is like sending a musician an article about one-hit wonders. I mean, never mind that I can't get into the Author's Guild to get insurance because I haven't had a book published yet. Bad enough I'm angsting about that. Now she's got to remind me that there's always the danger of writer's block? When I've got four stories going at the same time and know exactly how to finish them, and yet can't force myself to do it because it's that workman part of the story, the getting from here to there conjunction part of the story that's not very exciting to write. Never mind that, thanks to this blog and my new job, I'm actually probably writing more than I have at any time since graduate school, maybe more than I ever have (and occasionally, it's actually pretty good). What up with that?

The idea of writer's block terrifies me, as I'm sure it terrifies every single writer anywhere. I won't call what I had during my first five years in New York writer's block; it was more like a mental and physical exhaustion brought on by a full-time job coupled with part-time graduate school. But I think I only wrote about a half-dozen poems and no fiction at all during that whole time. And when I was writing my novel, sitting down in front of the blank screen every morning was terrifying, even though I usually came away with 15 pages or so at the end of the day. Always, in the back of your head, you're wondering (or I am, anyway): have I run out of ideas?

This is one of the things that amazes me about Marcia: ideas just tumble out of her like a waterfall. Everything you say to her seems to spark something. Of course, the price she pays for that is a permanent relationship with Zoloft, so there's a downside to everything, I suppose. Still, I'd rather have that, I think, than to be completely dry. It's enough to drive one to drink.

Bartender!

The Lessons of Sodaplay

There's something just a little creepy about watching the animated forms on the Sodaplay site. (Watch me anthropomorphize shamelessly here.) One by one, they drop into the little oblong demo box and frantically try to make their way out of it, like bugs dropped into a jar. One long tubular form inches away like a caterpillar. A spoked wheel rolls smoothly off. A floppier cross between a Spanish Dancer nudibranch and a southern belle's enormous hat undulates awkwardly stage right. A well-designed four-footed walker marches off like some conquering machine from "War of the Worlds." A triangularly spiked wormy shape that reminds me of one of the fossils in the Burgess Shale in Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life creeps away in a strange rippling gait. A one-footed pyramid limps pathetically off. Worst of all is the oil-derrick shape that starts to dance madly, overbalances, thrashes desperately to stay upright, topples over and just lies there thrashing like a bug on its back. The whole thing seems like some cruel and weird evolutionary experiment in the shapes best suited to locomotion, run by some heartless bio-engineer.

Did I mention that if the animated shape fails to move quickly enough or "get away" in time, it's sucked out of the box, still struggling?

So, how was your day?

The Boho Zone

I was looking over some of my old essays today, and came across this one that I've rewritten periodically over the last twenty years. This version is essentially the fifth revision, though I didn't change much from the fourth one, written in '94. I wrote the first germ of it about 1984, when I was in grad school and dying to get out of East Lansing, as an idealized vision of what I thought I was missing, and then rewrote it to reflect the reality a little more closely over the years. It's been part of writing exercises for students, and a way to clarify my motives for moving here, and what I wanted out of life once I'd settled in. Though I've traded the tiny space in Brooklyn for a much more middle class existence since the last rewrite, I think it finally reflects a clearer sense of my priorities and reality than the original dream-vision ever did. But it was that dream that propelled me here, so I can't be too harsh with it, naive as it was. Ah, the foolishness of youth!

Images

These posters are going up in Los Angeles, appropriating Apple's iPOD campaign. I don't know if it's quite fair to pick on Apple instead of, say Halliburton, but it does give one that sense of bread and circuses: "Oh, just feed the masses a new toy and they won't care that their kids are coming home in body bags." The caption at the bottom, in case you can't read it, says 10,000 Iraqis killed. 773 US soldiers dead. The logo next to the iRaq "brand" is a grenade. (I've cleaned up the photos a bit to take out some of the glare.)

Here's the original photos, and an article about the posters.

Anime Moi

Egret turned me on to this little icon maker and I spent days weeping over my bloody computer (which has become infested with adware and spyware and been acting up ever since I downloaded all the Microshaft updates I've missed; go figure), trying to get Windows to let me actually get through the whole process so I could bring you the new and improved Anime Moi. Actually, it's more like Manga Moi (wow, that's almost an imperative verb phrase: manga me, baby!). I'd been using Pete Jelen's fabulous maple leaf Green Man mask as my stand-in, but masks are, well, masks, and personas are another thing, and not so unfamiliar to a writer. Masks hide who you are, even if they're made to the shape of your own face, as this was. Masks are also something artificial that you hide behind or put on to become something or someone else or conceal who you really are, while I always think of personas as aspects of myself brought out by the situation or the company: my writer's persona (which changes with what I'm writing), my work or professional persona, my Friday-night-out-with-the-mates persona, the general public-consumption persona, my professional publisher persona (which is so not the same as my work/professional persona though they share elements), my going-to-church persona (even though my place of worship isn't called a church), my classroom/teacher persona, my polite tourist persona (which has languished for lack of exercise), and in the last eighteen years, my NYC don't-even-pretend-to-think-about-mugging-me street persona, which actually started out as a mask and has turned into a persona. That is, it started out as a set of masking behaviors—don't look lost, watch where you're going, act like you belong here, walk confidently, don't flash your money, limit your eye contact—and turned into second nature as New York became home.

This is the first time that's ever happened to me, that a mask has become a persona. When Lizard, who'd never been here before, was up last weekend, we were talking about what it's like and what it takes to live here. It was interesting watching her observe and react to and digest and file away everything around her, much the same way I did when I first moved here. I think it has a lot to do with growing up or living in the country then finding yourself in the urban environment where you have to refocus your observations and retune your sense of danger. The factor that makes that shift from mask to persona is that the behavior changes you; it's not just something you fire up when you go out. When I first moved here, I remember thinking what a hard person I was becoming here, and that's true: I did become more aggressive, less polite, less willing to put up with bullshit. A lot of that hardness comes from fear of the new environment.

When that fear dissipates it can leave a hard shell, and that's a mask you hide behind, or the fear can leach into you and change you, and how it changes you depends on what you do with it and the composition of the places it's leaching into, like water filtering through the ground. You can end up with a deep, still aquifer of peace at your core because you've faced those fears down. It can seep into the little calcified places you didn't know were there and flush them out and leave something beautiful behind—say, patience, or compassion—like a geode. Or it can, instead, just hollow you out entirely, like an underground river. It can find the already hollow spaces in you and, drip by drip, build sharp stalactites and stalagmites that eventually meet and form a cage.

I think that New York persona I developed in my early days has gone one step farther now and become part of who I am. Most of my friends who knew me back in the day (you can take the girl outta the country . . . ) every now and then tell me how much I've changed. And though I used to think when I was little that people were immutable, I know this is true. I was fiercely independent and self-reliant when I got here, but that's changed now to a sense of interdependence with my circle of friends. The fear of being dependent and needy has been transformed by coming to a city of 8 million people where I knew only 2 of them and discovering how well I could survive. Now I know so many more people here (relatively speaking) and realize how much we all help each other out, whether we know each other or not.

That was a lesson I started to learn my first day here, when I was staying with Laurie on East 83rd Street. Not long after I got there, she gave me a map, explained how the city was laid out, and threw me out of her apartment to start learning my way around. Within blocks, I watched a woman dash across the street against the light and get hit by a taxi. The taxi stopped and half a dozen people ran to help her, while half a dozen more ran for payphones (this was before the now-ubiquitous cell phones, believe it or not). After hearing all my life what a cold, mean, heartless place New York City was, I found this very heartening. Of course, it also left me with an inordinate fear of taxis.

Turning 40 seemed to strip away extraneous masks as well, though I'm not sure why. Something my best friend Melanie said about looking forward to 40 (when we both were, instead of looking back at it now) because it means you could say whatever you wanted now and didn't have to care what anyone thought of you. For a couple of uptight WASPy Midwestern girls, that's a real liberation. It's a shame it takes so long to arrive. This is another thing living in New York has done for me: it's allowed me to try on new personas, probably sooner than I would have living elsewhere. Nothing too wild, but certainly different from who I'd be living in the Midwest. The internet is a bit like that, too: big and anonymous. If you're only a persona, that's all even Google can find, and you can be whoever you want. And people can project whatever they want onto that persona too, without doing any real damage.

This is where my writing/writer persona has really flourished. It's a cross between the core me I am in a private journal that no one reads (and thus doesn't care how shocking what she says is), and the public consumption persona who only rocks the boat when necessary. The important point is that everything here is a persona: aspects of me, but not the total, part fictional, part factual.

So my little anime/manga persona up there looks generally like me, but isn't an accurate representation, the way a picture (more or less) would be. She has the new glasses I want, the purple hair I'd wear if all I were doing is writing and making books, my usual single long earring, my dark lipstick (when I wear it), my short funky haircut (which needs another trim), and is standing on a street in what looks like Kyoto, where I hope I'll be next year. I wonder who I'll be there?

Brother Ray

Now there's a juxtaposition for you: amidst all the hoopla about Reagan's funeral, Brother Ray's passed away and stolen some of his thunder. Of the two, there's no question in my mind which is the greater loss, and which leaves a more positive legacy. One of the first songs I remember learning when I was little was "Hit the Road, Jack," which somehow got concatenated in my mind with "Open the Door, Richard," though I can't say why. "Georgia on my Mind" was probably my least favorite of his songs (though I love "Rainy Night in Georgia"), "Unchain my Heart" one of my favorites. Then we have "Am I Blue," "C.C. Rider," and "What'd I Say." A lot, if not most of the songs Brother Ray did were covers, or written by someone else, but there was always his spin on them that often made them the definitive version. I'm not even that big a Ray Charles fan (B.B. King is more my speed), but it's impossible to deny how much influence he had on so much of the music I love, and I'm sad to see him gone. He was 73. Why couldn't he have had the 20 more years that Reagan got? The world would have been a better place for twenty more years of Brother Ray. That's the man we should be giving a state funeral to.

Threads

It's been a weird kind of day with strange threads of synchronicity and deja vu running through it, rainy and cold for June, and slightly forboding and melancholy.

It's been an odd kind of weekend anyway, with Lizard up here. We don't know each other that well, but we clicked pretty instantly when we met through mutual friends a while back. Now, neither of us is speaking to the people who introduced us. Or the people who introduced us aren't speaking to us, actually. With someone you don't know that well, you're always "on," and there are none of those comfortable silences when you're both just sitting around drinking tea and reading the paper, so it's always a little exhausting. We had a great time, though, despite the fact that my back is acting up. It was fun, as always, showing someone around the New York City I love for the first time, and having long conversations with someone who's got an interesting mind, learning more about each other's background and history and baggage and beliefs. We covered the East Village, the Lower East Side and Chinatown on Friday, had sushi and beer, came home and sang with each other (Lizard's got a nice soprano to my alto; with some practice, we could do some nice harmonies) and played new music. I taught her to drink scotch, she taught me a little yoga. On Saturday, we stayed in and worked a bit, then had a chickflick night in, watching "Love, Actually" and "Rob Roy." We played a bit with the book and changed the design somewhat, and talked about where to launch her and how to present her, and what she wants to be represented as.

Among the new music I played her was Lucy Kaplansky's "The Red Thread." Sitting in TeaNY down on Rivington St. with Lizard, we'd seen a woman wearing a red thread on her wrist, which I'd mentioned to Lizard as a Kabbalah protection charm. For Kaplansky, it has to do with adopting her daughter from China: "They say the red thread that ties me to you ties her to me."

I saw her off at Penn Station around 1 today. We left here a bit after 11, and since the trains were weekend-screwy, needed the extra time to get her there so she could get some decent food for the trip home at Zaro's. On the way, we talked about the crazy people in our lives, especially the ones who fall in and out of it, and generally people-watched. Someone across from us was reading the Post, which is how I first discovered that Smarty Jones lost the Belmont and Ronald Reagan was dead. I'm always a little weirded out when someone around my parents' ages dies because, of course, it reminds me of their imminent mortality.

So I was primed for worry when my dad called me on my cell on my way out of the station, sounding a little worried himself. With Dad, it's hard to tell if everything is all right or not. He's getting less and less practical as the years go by, and he never did have much cool in emergencies. Now, he's just as likely to take your suggestion to wait for you to call him back as he is to do anything about what's wrong. But I was pretty sure it wasn't a crisis. So I bought a paper and walked across town to the uptown 6 instead of changing trains twice like we'd had to do to get to Penn Station (the E at 51st was closed, so we wound up taking the shuttle and then the 3).

When I called back, Mom answered the phone, sounding fairly chipper. Then she tells me she stayed home today instead of going to the Hall because she'd been dizzy and headachy last night and fell in the bathroom in the middle of the night. I had visions of her lying there in the tub until Dad got up to pee, but she said the shower curtain saved her. Obviously, she's had a little TIA, but she says she feels fine now and doesn't seem "off." I don't know what I can do about it from here anyway, except worry.

Then I read this terribly poignant Paul Ford essay in FTrain, about him going to Philadelphia to see his grandmother in the hospital after she's had a stroke. All I could think was "I suppose I'll be doing that someday in the not too distant future." Only it'll be one parent or the other. That's the undercurrent in my life now, worrying about my folks. Sometimes it's nearer the surface than other times, like it was this weekend.