So while I was finishing this comic up and getting it posted, news of Antonin Scalia’s death broke. This has been a rough week for me–after traveling back from Montana, I’ve been dealing with some credit card fraud issues and with Kali’s health issues. So I don’t have really too much to say, funny or serious. I’m tired.
Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if yogurt has gotten sweeter overall (not just coffee yogurt) over the last few decades. I drew this comic while we were up in St. Paul two weeks ago. Daniel tried to get me some coffee yogurt at their local grocery, a brand not available in Madison, but then we went out to brunch instead of staying in so I never actually tried it.
I’ll file this comic under HD9283.7 A2 L86 2016, for Industries. Land use. Labor–Special industries and trades–Agricultural industries–Dairy products–Yogurt–General works. Does it make you happy to know there is a preexisting call number for general works on yogurt under which you can search for all your yogurt needs? I feel just a little safer, personally. LCC got my back.
If you don’t follow me on Instagram or other social media platforms, you might not be aware of my new hobby of posting mini comics over there. So here’s a roundup, plus a new one I somehow didn’t get scanned/posted before now.
These were all scanned using the CamScanner app, so if they look kind of cruddy, that is why. I ran them through Photoshop (okay, GIMP), but some of them, this was as good as I could get them. Or conversely, if you think they look awesome, that’s also why.
From Jan. 11, 2016:
Like a lot of people, I sometimes struggle with feeling like a total fraud. At this point, I’m pretty comfortable with my frauditude. I observed to someone a few years ago that it has been a long time since I went into a job confident that I could do all the parts of it flawlessly without issues. If you are reading this and also struggle with feeling like you are faking your way through life, I urge you to not worry about it. Nearly everyone feels like this. Just roll with it, you’ll be fine.
I went on my first business trip (to Long Island) since 2008 the week of January 11th. That previous trip happened to be in early February of a leap year too (to Houston, TX), and was chronicled in this comic:
It’s weird that eight years later, I’m back in healthcare IT after a long jaunt into different various fields. I no longer worry about feeling like a corporate stooge–for one thing, I work at a much less corporate place, and for another, I have come to the realization that art and making a living both have to have a place in my life. At least until the singularity.
From Jan. 14, 2016:
This actually happened on my way back from my trip–there was a fire alarm as I was coming through security. No one seemed concerned. Certainly not the TSA agents.
On the way out, I left the morning that David Bowie’s death hit the media. I actually woke up to an email from B telling me about it. On the way back, I was sitting in LGA waiting for my flight when the news that Alan Rickman had died broke. It was a weird week. At the gate, the agent was making announcements noting that it was not necessary to “slam” one’s bag into the bag sizer, and if we persisted in doing so, someone would get hurt.
From Jan. 28, 2016 (ish):
Deadlifting with Daniel during the St. Paul trip. I didn’t feel like inking it, and it looked better in pencil anyway.
Mixed grip means one hand palm up and one palm down. It is the best; I don’t care what you say.
From Feb. 3, 2016:
I sketched this out basically on the back of an envelope to amuse Daniel and Claire while we were in St. Paul for a wedding after I ran from their house down to the Mississippi River. Then I decided to go back and draw it out for everyone. It got three likes on Facebook. That is probably about what it deserved.
From Feb. 4, 2016:
I get anxious about travel.
From Feb. 6, 2016:
We went out to a company event in Montana for the weekend. After spending a few hours cross-country skiing (skate skiing, actually), I dashed out of the rental shop just to see the shuttle back to the lodge leaving the parking lot. Luckily, one of the women was heading back to pick up some trekkers, so I managed to get a ride and didn’t have to wait two hours for the next shuttle. We talked about wildlife on the way back.
From Feb. 7, 2016:
Another one from my skiing experiment, and one from the hotel. A bit behind the times, I guess, but no worse than the Joyce one, right? XKCD did the same thing a while back, except much better.
That’s all for now. I’m done traveling forever until April, but I may do a few more of these periodically. I enjoy the somewhat instantaneous feedback aspect (i.e., people clicking the little heart icon on Instagram), and it’s usually a lot faster for me to do these little ones than to think up a joke and draw 4+ panels. But we’ll see. I have another longer comic sketched and partially inked that I might be able to get up this week if I’m lucky.
As ever, if you’re having trouble reading, click to embiggen. I’ve had this comic sitting on my desk since before my trip to Long Island last week. I only just got around to scanning it. Oops. I was playing around with some different inks and Speedball pens. I have mixed feelings about how the art came out.
Recently, I was sitting around working while B was playing a game called Shadows of Mordor. It’s a surprisingly good game, and we found ourselves getting drawn back into the whole Tolkien thing. First, we watched The Hobbit (the Tolkien edit, not the full version–also, our copy was corrupted, so I missed the battle of the five armies).[1] Thereafter, I started re-reading The Lord of the Rings. At first I was only going to read FoTR . . . but I’m about to finish TT tonight. I’m surprised by how much my memory of the book has been overwritten by the film version, which I saw approximately 100 times (each section). I had forgotten, for example, that Faramir doesn’t try to drag Sam and Frodo back to Osgiliath(?) only to be attacked by a Nazgul. (Now I’m not even sure I’m recalling the film correctly.)
I’ve also become obsessed with the distances everyone is traveling in the book. In many sections it’s hard to tell, but in general I get the feeling that before the splintering of the fellowship, they are walking about twenty miles per day, more or less. That’s twenty miles in eight to twelve hours. At one point, when traveling with Glorfindel, this is referred to as a very long, difficult day’s march. The above comic was my immediate reaction. Of course, terrain counts for something, and they were frequently not on trails but just sort of out in the middle of the country, but still. (Maybe it was Bill the pony slowing them down?) Somewhat surprisingly, both groups (Legolas / Gimli / Aragorn and Sam / Frodo / Gollum) move much faster after the splintering than before it. But seriously, if I can run 31 miles in six hours, they should be able to go a little faster.
Another thing that interests me is that at least up to the point where Sam, Frodo, and Gollum enter Mordor, Sauron’s evil is very remote. The surroundings, even into Ithilien, are described as beautiful and the weather is quite fine. If one takes the tales of Sauron’s evil as provided by such luminaries as Gandalf, Elrond, etc. as tales (opinion rather than necessarily fact), it’s easy to begin to see Sauron as just a (hated) political leader. The orcs, for example, as seen during the scene of Merry / Pippin’s abduction, are quite like men in many ways with their conflicting loyalties and drive for glory. Sauron also employs regular men for his cause. In fact, when Faramir and his troops ambush a bunch of soldiers heading to Mordor, Tolkien offers us the following surprisingly sympathetic passage:
. . . Suddenly straight over the rim of their sheltering bank, a man fell, crashing through the slender trees, nearly on top of them. He came to rest in the fern a few feet away, face downward, green arrow-feathers sticking from his neck below a golden collar. . . .
It was Sam’s first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace… (646)
Tolkien was, of course, a veteran of the First World War. This paragraph speaks to me of perhaps a memory of his battlefield experiences and the trauma he may have experienced. But it also raises for me the question of Sauron–the ever-unseen Big Bad, who is noted to be fixing the roads outside Mordor, who is apparently able to convince a lot of people, including Sauramon, to join him–can he really be as bad as Gandalf et al tell us? But beyond that, even despite the themes of good and evil, Tolkien doesn’t necessarily view these battles as righteous or valiant, and he doesn’t necessarily lionize violence.
At this point, B looked over at me and said, “Are you arguing that Sauron is all right because he made the trains run on time?”
Well, maybe. Don’t look at me like that. My favorite characters from this rereading are Smeagol / Gollum[2] and Galadriel, so.
If you’re interested in this “LotR is a story told by the victors and Sauron was framed” idea, you may want to look into The Last Ringbearer, a Russian parallel novel exploring that side of things.
There is clearly a lot more to talk about in LotR (I mean, it’s over 900 pages long), including world building, the role of women, the peoples and the North / West versus South / East thing, the colonial(ish) myth of empty places for colonization, etc. But I’m not going to touch on those here–feel free to comment with your thoughts though. And tell me I’m not alone in liking Gollum and hating Sam.
We’ll file this comic under GV1065.17 T65 L86 2016, for Recreation. Leisure–Sports–Track and field athletics–Foot racing. Running–Distance running–Marathon running–Special topics, A-Z–Tolkien, works of.
Cited
Tolkien, JRR. The Lord of the Rings. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994.
[1] I still really want to see the Dol Guldor part. I love Galadriel and am a longtime fan of the actor who played Radagast.
[2] I actually feel like Gollum is rather hard done by. He certainly doesn’t deserve much of the shit he gets at the hands of Frodo and Sam. Sam is especially pretty cruel to him–there’s another paragraph where Gollum finds the two hobbits sleeping, and Tolkien writes that “could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, and old starved pitiable thing” (699). That passage very much made up my mind about him. And he is a much more interesting and complex character than a lot of them.
Blueshift, by Claire Wahmanholm. Not going to review, but I’ll say that if this doesn’t get picked up by a publisher, the world will be a sadder place.
That’s ten fiction books in various genres and five nonfiction. I also read
about 3,500 pages of books as an editor (one 300-ish page novel and twelve non-fiction books, several of which were highly academic). There may have been a few more that didn’t make it onto the list, plus let’s not even mention the various books that I picked up, read a chapter of, and put down again. (I am an annoyingly peripatetic reader; my tendency is to leave books here and there, never finishing more than a chapter at a go. Sometimes it can take me a long time to read things.)
I think my favorite of this group was Dune. That is a hard determination to make; many of these really spoke to me in deep ways, and as a writer I learned a lot from many of them. My love for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is very profound, I should add. It was a close race.
This was also the year that my book came out in paperback. So far, of the initial one hundred copies I purchased, I have twenty left. I didn’t get a website up yet, but soon. I know I’ve been saying that for several months now.
This is my preliminary reading list for 2016. Some of these are carry-overs from last year, and I have to look at them again and determine whether or not they’re still something I’m interested in. In a few days when I have solidified it, I’ll move it to the navigation bar above. If you have any books to recommend for me, feel free to let me know and maybe I’ll add them to the list.
The Southern Reach Trilogy: Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, by Jeff VanderMeer
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, by Eimer McBride
Viviane, by Julia Deck
The Way of Kings, by Branden Sanderson
Rock ‘n’ Roll, by Tom Stoppard
Being and Nothingness, by Jean-Paul Sartre
Dhalgren, by Samual R. Delaney (I did a little excited dance when this came in the mail)
Emma, by Jane Austen (How have I not read this before? I have read P&P, S&S, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey.)
The Parallax View, by Slavoj Zizek
The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson
The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The History of Human Sexuality, by Michel Foucault
“The Library of Babel,” by Jorge Luis Borges (yes okay, it is a short story)
I was surprised, but also not surprised when B told me about this conversation. After all, about a month and a half after we met, I went on vacation to Philly and sent him a postcard from the Eastern State Penitentiary, a panopticon prison based on Bentham’s ideas. And he decided not to dump me. Yay. I should have guessed that after all these years, my madness has rubbed off on him.
To be fair, that employer was kind of surveiller et punir. Click to embiggen.
It still kind of shocks me that the “elf on a shelf” thing has become, well, a thing that people do. I find it kind of creepy. But then I’ve always found Santa creepy too, even when I was a kid and desperate to have Xmas so that I wouldn’t be different from all the other kids in my class. I look forward to having children so I can forbid them from celebrating Christmas.
We’ll file this week’s comic under GT4991 L86 2015, for Manners and customs (General)–Customs related to public and social life–Festivals. Holidays–Special days and periods of time–Christmas–Special customs–Elf on a shelf. This isn’t explicitly listed, but it fits into the categorization right between “Pistol shooting” [GT4990] and “Santa Claus” [GT4992]. If you are about to say, “Em, what the hell is up with pistol shooting being listed under special Christmas customs?,” well, I want to commend you for asking the right (tough) questions.
Here are a few other Foucault comics for your reading pleasure. I would guess there are others, but I can’t lay hands on all of them right now.
This was drawn three days before we got married! My hair has changed a lot since then. Bryan’s hasn’t. He can bench press a lot more now though.I think this one is B’s favorite. It’s based more on The Birth of the Clinic.My favorite comic ever. Also more Birth of the Clinic.I don’t remember what happened here. Also, I drew this on notebook paper and tried to turn up the contrast to get rid of the lines. Good job, Em of eight years past.Philosophers love cake because they understand the true meaning of life.
This is the danger of encouraging people to read Shakespeare.
I have an excellent comic for Christmas coming up next week. Hopefully this offering, which I drew mostly freehand at a restaurant, will tide you over until then.
I was going to add a few notes about the Berbee Derby 5K, because it was a fun race, but I’m a bit late, so I’ll give the TL;DR version:
Did a 5.5 mile warm up because I was going to run with some slower friends; when we got to the race, they encouraged me to run at my own pace and then double back and meet them. Bryan had guessed I could finish in under 24 minutes, and I wound up doing it in 24:23, so I was pretty close. I finished just ahead of a fellow from my running group who is a 3:20 marathoner, and was initially elated to have beat him. Then I found out he’d actually just finished a 39-minute 10K and I felt less stoked. Doubled back and did the last half mile or so with my friends. Then home for nap before Thanksgiving.
Was that really TL;DR? Maybe a bit long. Lemme try again:
Ran a 24:23 5K after an absurdly long warm up and also while wearing my heavy sneakers.
Ah, there is proper conciseness. Concision? Something.
Let’s file this under PR2819 A3A L86 2015, for English literature–English renaissance (1500-1640)–The drama–Individual authors–Shakespeare, William–Separate works–King Lear–Texts–Selections. By editor.
Amongst authors, Shakespeare is kind of weird in LCC in that he has all the numbers PR2750-3112 devoted to him, while most authors are subarranged under one number by last name. So for example, the poet Claire Wahmanholm‘s number would probably be PS3624.A3[plus some other digits to put it in order with other stuff in the collection]; the author E. H. Lupton’s work might be filed under PS3612.U8[etc.]. (In a while, you’ll be able to see the actual call number here.) And you can see how those two numbers are only a few digits apart, because ALL post-2001 authors (authors’ surnames) beginning with L are fiiled under PS3612.A-Z, and all those beginning with W are filed under PS3624.A-Z. So I may have inadvertently messed up the number above slightly, because I don’t know if I have access to the correct sub-tables. But close enough is probably okay in this situation.
Click to embiggen. I had already written this script before the attack on Paris last Friday, so I decided to just go with it.
I actually have been reading Being and Nothingness[1], and contrary to my expectations (and it’s reputation, I guess), it’s not a depressing book. At least in the part I’ve read so far, Sartre is mostly concerned with setting out his view of ontology, refuting most of the philosophers who preceded him (everyone from Descartes to Kant, anyway). I’ve done this drawing illustrating the history of philosophy to show you what I mean:
I hope that clarifies things.
What I really love is the feeling that all the stuff I was dragged through as an undergrad–Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Spinoza, Kant, probably a few others I’m leaving out–seems to be summarized quite elegantly here and then rejected in favor of a philosophy that seems to better describe my intuitions about how my mind/reality work than, you know, Berkeley or anything. I am surprised courses on existentialism were not offered at my university. Or perhaps they were and I didn’t take any–in those days, my focus was more on epistemology (somewhat) and logic, so I read Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, among others. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus remains one of my favorite books I read during this period.[2] And of course, this was the time during which I discovered Foucault, but I came to him (and Derrida) through the English department rather than the philosophy department.
Here are a few other appearances of these philosophers:
We can file this comic under B2430.S34L86 2015, for Philosophy (General)–Modern (1450/1600-)–By region or country–France–By period–20th century–Individual philosophers, A-Z–Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1905-1980–Biography, autobiography, criticism, etc.–General works.
In other announcements, if you’re out and about, please consider buying a copy of The Joy of Fishes at A Room of One’s Own (not signed, but we can arrange it) or Mystery to Me (pre-signed). They have been very nice to take a few copies on consignment, so perhaps we can help them move them–you’d be helping not just an indie author, but a local indie bookstore as well. Huzzah.
[1] It’s not really a dreadmill book, so I’ve been reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle on the elliptical. I’m currently on book three. Each book is about 800 pages, and unfortunately they often seem to take about the first 100 to 150 to really get rolling. But if you’ve ever been interested in the enlightenment, it’s worth it. I don’t actually think he’s mis-characterizing enlightenment ideals or anything, for the most part. Maybe I’ll talk more about that when I do a review (in a million years when I actually finish it).
[1] I also did a lot of ancient philosophers, especially Plato. Modern philosophers included Philippa Foot, Robert Nozick, and Peter Singer.
To preface this story, let me say that two weeks ago I did a local Middleton race called the Haunted Hustle. It wasn’t an “A” race, and though it was fun there didn’t seem to be much point in writing it up other than my friend/running companion, Kristi, getting to see her name in “print” here. Since it’s marginally relevant, I’ll just give the tl;dr version here: Hilly course, cool day, lots of costumes to look at, ran a 1:55:55.
That was, at the time, my fastest half of the season, although to be fair my other half was a trail race, and I also did a 20K in 1:50:xx, which is only about 4 seconds/mile slower. Anyway, since I’d signed up for the Tyranena race only two weeks later, my plan was to use the Haunted Hustle as a hard training run and then really race Tyranena hard, with the goal of running a faster time.
The races were only two weeks apart, so my training was unremarkable. The HH was on a Sunday; I ran 54.19 miles over the next week (October 26 to November 1), with one day off for swimming. That week included one day of dreadmill intervals and a 15-mile long run in the rain. The following week, November 2–7, I lifted legs on Monday, then hobbled through 8-milers Tuesday through Thursday and was completely off except aikido on Friday, for a total of 24.4 miles before the race. No taper, that’s me.
This is getting dull; here’s a photo of where I went running in Philly a few weeks ago. Jealous?
Tyranena starts quite late—11:30. I got up early (well, okay, I got up at 7:30) to eat my pop tart, drink a small cup of coffee, and loiter around working on my novel until it was time to go pick up Kristi. Last year we hit real traffic on the beltline and it was very tense, so this year I actually left a bit early. And of course the beltline was empty. We arrived in Lake Mills, WI, about 40 minutes away, by 10:20 and picked up our packets, then stood around chatting for the next 40 minutes or so. At 11, I went out for a warm-up jog, just a mile out at a relaxed pace and then some telephone pole intervals on the way back. I got back with just enough time to find everyone, then jump in the line for the port-o-potties and lose them again. Oh well.
We took off at 11:30 and I fell pretty quickly into an 8:30 min/mi pace. Running with the crowd to break the wind, this definitely felt like a comfortable speed, and I decided to hold onto it as long as I could. A bit before the first mile marker, I bumped into Kristi again, but when she took off (aiming for a sub-1:50 race), I made the decision to let her go and try to stay with what I had. This proved to be a pretty good decision.
The hills on this course are all on the first half, with the biggest coming right around mile four. However, none of the hills is really too difficult; my Garmin clocked 248 ft of elevation gain, compared to 362 ft at the HH. Watching my watch on the uphills, my pace occasionally dipped as far as 8:45 or even 9:00 min/mi, but I always recovered on the downhill. At around mile 5.5, I took a gel, another big change from the HH when I didn’t have anything for the duration. I hit the 10k mark in 54:28, according to the chip, and the halfway point about two minutes later. Up through mile 8, everything went really well. Then I noticed the people I’d been pacing off were gradually moving away from me; I didn’t feel like I was slowing, but my watch was suddenly reading 9:00 for pace.
The Eastern State Penitentiary in Philly; I’m just including this because it’s cool.
At this point, I made a very conscious decision to push the pace, to leave everything I could behind and do my best to finish in under 1:50. I ran a few intervals using the trees along the path as markers, and gradually brought my pace back toward 8:30. Mile 8 seemed to last forever, but as I hit mile 9 at 1:17:xx, I did some mental math and realized that with 5K left to go, if I could just maintain my current pace I would finish under 1:50 comfortably.
Then, a few minutes later, I remembered that 9+3 is 12 and 9+4 is 13. So if I could run the next 4 miles at 8 minutes/mile, I would be done in 32 minutes. But what are the chances of that happening? Pretty much 0%. But if I ran strategically, it might be pretty close, so I decided to keep on it.
By mile 10, I was definitely beginning to feel the effects of a sustained 8:30 pace, especially in my right hip flexor. Every mile felt like I was making a bet with myself that I could sustain the pace I was running. If I had been smart, I would have brought another gel for this point in the race, but I didn’t really expect I would be doing as well as I was. Also, I didn’t have any other gels at home that morning. Tant pis.
I had a feeling that if I could hit a little better than an 8:30 pace for the actual last 5K, I would hit a sub-1:50. It was at this point that I fell back in with the group I’d been running with earlier and exchanged a few words with them, so I wasn’t looking at my watch and assumed later I just hadn’t been hitting the pace. But looking at my watch splits, I had this:
Mile
Pace
10
8:15
11
8:06
12
8:27
13
7:57
.1 (.26 on my watch)
7:30
I ran a 1:51:40 officially, which is about 100 seconds over a 1:49:59—meaning that even if I’d managed 8-minute miles for 10 to 12, I still wouldn’t have made it.
Last year, I ran a 1:53:13 on the same course, so I improved by about a minute and a half. I also managed my goal of beating my HH time. Part of this involved running strategically rather than stupidly, which is what I usually do. The biggest change was to find a pack or at least a tall guy to draft behind when running into the wind. Normally the decrease in perceived exertion in this position makes me speed up and puts me back in the wind; by biding my time, I was able to conserve some energy I really needed. I also didn’t take off with Kristi, which allowed me to save energy I would have spent very early trying to keep up with her (she’s fast). I took a gel at a good moment, about 5.5 miles into the race, with 7.5 miles on my legs. And I reengaged with my race mentally when I started to slow down and actually pushed myself. So I’ll call that a success, even if I didn’t hit my time goal.
I actually cannot tell if I named this comic “Impatient” or “Inpatient.” Both seem appropriate.
As you can see, I wrote this in early October, just a week or so after Bryan’s operation–this actually did sort of happen during the operation. But I got it uploaded only now because life kind of got away from me last month, a month during which I took care of Bryan, did one marathon and one half marathon, worked on my novel, and changed jobs, or rather job responsibilities, and went from working a kind of weird schedule that could vary from zero to eight hours or more per day depending on what work was available and needed doing to a more typical full-time work week.
Anyway, I’m hopeful that things will calm down a little more in November. Bryan is a lot more mobile and in less pain, my running schedule is calming down so I am less wiped out, and I am maybe getting the hang of some of my new responsibilities, so I am not lying in bed worrying that I will be retroactively fired or something most nights. I have a couple of scripts written that I am itching to get drawn. However, in order to get this stuff done, I may be a bit light on the various social media you typically see me on, so if you need me, drop me an email. (Note to relatives: Email means email, not voicemail. It is not impersonal to send an email. It is helpful.)
No other real news to report, other than since I last posted my novella came out in paperback and you should totally buy a copy. It i s currently held in the Yale library and in the Madison Public Library system and will shortly be available at several local bookstores such as A Room of One’s Own as soon as I can get my act together and drive them down there. Yiss. If you buy a copy and want it signed, or want a signed postcard, see the book tab above and follow the directions to send me an email.
I have a race report for the last two half marathons (I did one this past weekend as well), which I will try to upload tomorrow or Wednesday.
Let’s file this under P301 .L86 2015, for Philology. Linguistics–Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar–Style. Composition. Rhetoric. Usage–General works.
