writing – Page 3 – PretenseSoup

That Sick Feeling: From Hell Reviewed

Note: I read this book in October 2013, and worked on the review for almost six months, then forgot about it. I don’t know why this happened. The date in my Word doc is October 13th.

Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. From Hell. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions, 1999. 572 p. 095857834-6.

In Whitechapel, London, in the 1880s, humans live in powerless poverty and squalor. By the end of the decade, hundreds of the unemployed would be injured at the (1887) “Bloody Sunday” rally in Trafalgar Square, where they were protesting their lack of employment and the Irish Coercion Act, a crack-down that underscored how powerless the working class were. Beneath working class men, the “working girls” of Whitechapel were even less secure as they tried to make their way in the world. Often married very young, at the age of 12 or 13, they were condemned to poverty and prostitution when abandoned by their husbands (the ones who didn’t die in childbirth, anyway). By the end of the 19th century, wealthy women could inherit land, but womankind in general still could not vote. And worse, a monster was preying on the women of Whitechapel. In the fall of 1888, an unknown person or persons murdered at least five prostitutes in London’s East End, vivisecting four of them. “Jack the Ripper,” as the killer came to be known, was never caught, and the theories the case has spawned live on today, too many to enumerate.

Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s graphic novel From Hell takes as its starting point the theories of one Stephen Knight, who evidently heard the story in his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution from the illegitimate son of English painter Walter Sickert, Joseph “Hobo” Sickert. (Walter Sickert, incidentally, was somewhat obsessed with the murders and was fingered as Jack the Ripper by a number of theorists including Patricia Cornwell, based largely on the evidence that he drew moody paintings of murdered women in dark rooms and that he allegedly had a congenital deformity of the penis.) Joseph Sickert (also known as Joseph Gorman)’s story makes his father only an accomplice, but the whole thing is so rotten that’s hardly a consolation. Basically Knight/Sickert maintain that: Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward (“Eddy” to his friends), grandson of Queen Victoria, knocked up a working class girl, Annie Crook, and secretly married her. Of course Victoria finds out about the whole nasty business and sends the girl to her physician ordinary, Sir William Gull, who certifies her insane. The baby (a daughter), however, survives, and when a group of prostitutes led by Marie (or Mary) Kelly find out about her, they try to blackmail Walter Sickert and Victoria asks Gull to “take care” of them too.

As it happens, according to the way our boy Joseph tells the story, his mother was the daughter I just mentioned, so he is descended from legitimate but unacknowledged royalty. Decide for yourself how much doubt that casts on the story. The story also ignores the powerlessness of the prostitutes to actually carry through on any kind of threat–while it seems possible a gossip tabloid might have run the accusations (maybe), it seems unlikely that anyone would have believed them in the face of a denial from Victoria.

Running behind all of this is a hint of Freemasonry: Allegedly, both Prince Albert Edward (later Edward VII, Prince Eddy’s father) and Sir William were masons, hence Gull’s willingness to do something that would admittedly seem entirely insane to any reasonable person.

In the hands of Alan Moore, though, this story becomes slightly more elaborate. Gull is a mason, yes, and a patriot. He has also suffered a stroke-cum-theophany; it is not entirely clear that he is the same person after that event, although the implication is that he is, just with more outlandish theories. Gull is certainly bidden on to his task by Queen Victoria, but he also sees himself as striking a blow in a battle for supremacy between men and women that dates back to the stone age (see Robert Grave’s The White Goddess and other books about the idea of a mother goddess being supplanted by a father god for more of this idea). He is an unrepentant misogynist who worries that women will somehow gain back the upper hand and (re)subjugate men. Additionally, he sees himself as moving society forward, noting that some crimes can cause the public to agitate for certain things, as in the case of the Ratcliffe Highway Murders leading to the formation of a police force in 1811. What exactly he is leading society toward is unclear, but at a pivotal moment he tells his (semi-literate) driver and assistant, Netley, “I have given birth [to the twentieth century].”

Moore does a good job of allowing Gull enough time to explain his theories. In fact, he spends an entire chapter driving around London with Netley, talking about the architecture of Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor, the Dionysian architects, the solar and lunar symbols of the battle between men and women, prostitution through the ages, and how all these symbols, both pagan and Christian, get rolled up together into one big ball of conspiracy that makes sense if you don’t look at it too hard. Then Moore undercuts Gull brilliantly: at the beginning of the next chapter, we see the morning routines of Sir William contrasted against the woman who will be his first victim, Polly Nicholls. Gull wakes in a bed, is fed a good meal prepared by his cook, and is driven to work in a coach. Polly, on the other hand, is sleeping on a bench, sitting up against a wall with a clothesline strung across to stop her from falling over. This was in fact the cheapest form of accommodation available to Londoners of the era. To see the privilege on the one hand and the crushing poverty set against it is to realize how out of touch with reality Gull really is, and how unlikely his fear that women will somehow “win” is.

The story from there on out is roughly the one you are probably somewhat familiar with. Women die, the police continually foul up the investigation, and Gull grows increasingly out of touch with reality. The narrative begins to flip back and forth between Gull and Inspector Abberline, the hapless but clever detective assigned to the case.

It seems moot to discuss Sir William Gull and whether or not he was really the murderer. Nearly every man of any social standing who lived in London during that autumn has been theorized to be the Ripper, as well as most men of no social standing. Some of the information related here about Gull seems to be true: he did come from an impoverished background, he was a doctor, he was quite intelligent, and he did seem to have some disregard for what today we would consider to be medical ethics. His selection as the murderer makes as much sense—or lacks as much sense—as anyone. Personally, I think there were some who have been named, like Francis Tumblety, a known misogynist who boasted that he had a collection of female reproductive organs, who were probably more likely suspects. But in the context of From Hell, Gull’s character is built so that he makes sense as the killer, and that is what matters. It can help to remind oneself that this is fiction based on facts; as Eddie Campbell put it in a blog post, he’d “always liked to imagine that our William Gull is a fiction who just happens to share a name with a real one who existed once” (source).

In a certain sense, it doesn’t matter who the killer actually was because the killer was everyone. Several of the women Jack the Ripper offed would have been dead within a year or so anyway, since they were impoverished, living in insanitary conditions on the streets of Whitechapel, which as far as I can tell was quite a bit worse than what you might find in a major city today—for example, Londoners of this era had to deal with diseases like tuberculosis, attacks from packs of feral dogs, crime, diseases caused by the terrible pollution and inadequate nutrition, and poor housing . . . and of course, if they were lucky enough to have a job, they might have to face conditions in the factories . . . if not, there were workhouses. This is reinforced by the scene in which Campbell and Moore depict hundreds of people writing letters to the police posing as Jack—a disturbing but real event. To put on my Žižek hat for a moment, is this an outgrowth of Victorian anxiety about the poor? Or, alternatively, about women, women’s place in the world, sex, religion, colonialism and aliens in the metropol[1] . . . the list goes on. Moore presents a holistic view of the crime that, in some way, should clarify what happened but in actuality serves only to confound what has happened. It is a conceit of crime fiction that crimes can be picked apart and a definite killer and motive can be found. In reality, life is rarely cut-and-dried. Certainly, general motivations can be discerned, but what really causes a certain person to commit a specific crime?

The thing I keep coming back to is that Mary Kelly never really finds out what’s happening to her. The audience knows, sort of, both the reasons Victoria objected to her continuance and the reasons Gull gives. Mary Kelly at best has a small sliver of the picture; she is able to piece together that her friend Annie Crook got into trouble with royalty and that her friends are being murdered one by one. She can’t see the whole picture, and Gull doesn’t oblige her with a moustache-twiddling moment of revelation before he offs her.[2] I feel like because I do see the whole picture that this shouldn’t be an issue, but I keep circling around the lack of resolution (obviously, because I’ve been writing this review for six months—can you tell?). Perhaps this is reminiscent of the way the people of London felt, knowing something was walking among them that they could not understand. Mary Kelly, for her part, likely felt nothing at all for very long.

To bring this to a kind of conclusion: The collected version of the comics has not only a short epilogue, “Dance of the Gull Catchers,” that tackles some of the difficulties surrounding naming Gull as a suspect, but also Moore’s extensive annotations explaining the origins of his theories and various obscure pieces of Victoriana. The art is illustrative without being overly graphic. The writing is solid. Really, if you haven’t read this book yet . . . why not?

Notes

[1] The Victorians were, as far as I can tell, a very anxious people. Or at least a people whose anxieties have been highly researched.

[2] I should mention, for those unfamiliar with the Kelly murder, it was really gruesome. The real life killer really dissected her; the best that can be said is that the coroners at the time thought she had been killed relatively quickly and then mutilated. I don’t recommend looking up the photos unless you have a strong stomach.

Red: In which I review a play without discussing the acting

Note: This was written (originally as sort of a joke) for B’s younger brother, who is a theater person and has a a blog of his own filled with excellent play reviews. I realized when I got to the end that I’d not reviewed the acting so much as the play itself. (Or rather, I tried to avoid talking about the acting at all costs.) I guess this is what happens when you send a novelist to the theater.

Logan, John (author). Red. Directed by Laura Gordon, Forward Theater Company, Madison, WI. 2014.
Starring Jim DeVita as Mark Rothko; Nate Burger as Ken, his assistant.

Mark Rothko immigrated to the US from Latvia at a time when it was still part of the Russian Empire (1913) to avoid conscription into the Imperial Army (the same reason my ancestors left, at around the same time, actually). His parents settled in Portland, where he grew up one intellectual Jew in a big colony thereof. He attended Yale but dropped out. Nevertheless, he was extremely well-read. He was among the most important artists of the post-WWII era; along with such painters as Jackson Pollock and William De Kooning, he launched a movement termed abstract expressionism (by the critics, of course). In the later part of the 1950s, Rothko accepted a commission (to the tune of $35,000) to provide a series of murals for the (then under construction) Four Seasons restaurant in New York City. Drawing inspiration from a stairway designed by Michelangelo, Rothko said he was going to create a series of earth-toned paintings that would produce a claustrophobic effect and ruin the digestion of every son-of-a-bitch who dined at the restaurant. After completing some forty paintings, Rothko called the project off and returned the commission. Twelve years later, in 1970, he committed suicide.

Most of this I learned from Wikipedia,[1] but I also learned it from the play Red, which attempts to solve the riddle of why Rothko called off the Four Seasons project and returned the money. As is clear from the play (and from Wikipedia), Rothko knew when accepting the commission what the restaurant would look like, what its clientele would be like, and so forth. So why did he finally decide that it wasn’t the right spot for his works? That is Red‘s central mystery; although it attempts an inquiry into other things, such as how an artist’s life might influence his work, the commodification of art, the shifting of art movements, or what exactly abstract expressionism even really means (as a movement, to the viewer, etc.), the solution to the Four Seasons question is really its unique contribution to whatever myth may have sprung up around Rothko, if there is one.

Much of the dialogue, at least on Rothko’s part, seems to have been lifted directly from things he said, and from all of that he seems to have been an extremely intelligent, well-read and well-spoken individual. The parts that aren’t so lifted fall a bit short of profundity—it is a bit insipid, in the middle of a dialogue about color choice in abstract art, to have the characters fall into a shouting match wherein they both name things that are red. I know that roses are red—I have looked outside from time to time. Instead, tell me what it means. And, as an aside, lobster aren’t red. Cooked lobsters are red.

Rothko’s assistant Ken is a fictional character, although Rothko did have assistants, and it was one such assistant who found him dead when he killed himself—there is a scene in the play with red paint that nods and winks at this fact, but the play stops short of delving too deeply into Rothko’s emotional life. He says, “I do get depressed sometimes.” Everything else is intellectual discussion. Ken’s life we see a little bit more of, but the central story of his character—that he was born in Iowa, his parents were murdered when he was young, he went through several foster homes and wound up in New York because he wanted to be a painter—is not sufficiently used, except to give Rothko a few moments to play Freud. In addition, it feels like the background of a fictional character–something created to be dramatic.

This lack of emotional connection is frustrating, because the play really does begin to feel like watching two people talk about art for ninety minutes. One feels, looking at his biography, that Rothko’s wife Mell may have been a not insignificant part of his life; he dined at the Four Seasons with her right before deciding to give up the commission, and committed suicide not long after they separated. There is a lot of potential in the story right there, without the need to introduce a fictional assistant. But she, and indeed his marriage, children, and family, is never mentioned. That said, it is nice to have characters who are emotionally resilient and don’t take the slightest criticism as an excuse to dissolve into melodrama. Imagine if after one fight we were treated to how depressive and potentially suicidal Rothko could be—this would be terrible.

Jim DeVita plays Rothko. He’s quite thin and manic, which . . . DeVita seems to be thin and manic in most of his roles. But I think this was a good fit for him. He has shaved his head—an odd choice, since I don’t think Rothko did that, but in context it works, although in combination with his glasses it looks a little bit Breaking Bad for my taste. His Russian accent was so subtle that I wondered at times if I were imagining it. Ken, played by a guy from APT whose work I have somehow totally missed, is a good actor, but his costumes did not strike me as sufficiently period. In one scene, he wears a t-shirt that looks like it came from the Land’s End catalog last season, not from 1958, when the play is purportedly set. But whatever he’s wearing, Ken carries off his role fairly well, refraining from lapsing into mawkish sentimentality in the scene wherein he recounts his parents’ murders. (Although perhaps he doesn’t avoid it altogether—in my notes, I see the words “My parents are dead!,” suggesting I found something hilariously Batman-like about the scene in question.)

I can see why this play won awards.[2] It is trying very hard to be smart. Having cribbed much of its material from a very smart guy, it largely succeeds at that. Perhaps in the end, its intellectualizing of the artistic process is its downfall. Rothko’s stated reasons for turning down the commission are emotional; however, since we have no access to any of his interiority, and lack an emotional connection with him, it is hard to take his feelings about/toward the paintings as seriously as perhaps we should, and it is hard to really evaluate his reasons to determine if he’s even telling the truth.

Bottom line: As we were walking into the theater, we met a friend of Bryan’s who is a professor at UW. This fellow said something like, “Well, I’ve done my sixty, sixty-five hours this week; I’m ready to have a beer and go sleep through a play somewhere” (except picture this in a charming New Zealand accent). The play was involving enough that for a fledgling art nerd like myself, it was interesting, and for someone looking for a relaxing evening, it was probably not overly taxing.

—
[1] I don’t mention Wikipedia here to suggest that the play is superficial in its treatment of Rothko’s biography, or not exactly. Rothko’s Wikipedia page was clearly written by someone(s) who was/were very deeply interested in him as an artist, and consequently it has a lot of information. But somehow, I had hoped that the play might provide something more in-depth than what I could have learned from skimming the wiki on my phone right before the curtain went up. On the other hand, I do wonder that this may not be a totally valid criticism, because obviously there’s only so much that can be known about someone’s life.

[2] It won the Tony award for best play in 2010, and also five other Tonys, although a few of them were things like scene design and lighting design that impact the performance and are not as pertinent to the text of the play itself. It also won a 2010 Drama League Award and a Drama Desk Award.

And yet, I am left with the feeling that we are still doomed: Slavoj Žižek’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

Note: I started a new job last week, which has temporarily reduced my available time for drawing. Also I am doing battle with the wallpaper in our first floor bathroom, so that is taking up a lot of my time. I hope I’ll have a comic next week. In the meantime, please enjoy a few of the reviews I write.

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London and New York: Verso, 2009. 978-1-84467-428-2

So here are the things you need to know about Žižek: First, if you decide to write about him, his name is kind of a typographical clusterfuck for the English keyboard. Second, he’s a Marxist. Third, he’s essentially an intersectionalist[1], but because of point two, ultimately all the systems of discrimination are caused by capitalism. Fourth, he is extremely entertaining and charismatic, albeit in a weird way. He is often referred to as the rock star of modern philosophy.[2] He personally divides his books into the easy stuff (nothing books) and the deeper philosophical works (like The Parallax Effect). This book is one of the easy ones—it is a straight-up Marxist critique. Finally, he takes a psychoanalytic perspective toward his philosophy, with a particular focus on Lacan. This means the book is filled with terms like objet petit a and subject supposed to know. Don’t worry about it.

Ok, so the book: ostensibly, Žižek is comparing 9/11 and the 2008 financial collapse. But in reality, he’s mostly focused on the financial collapse and the implications for global capitalism. Basically, the story is that capitalism is inherently exploitive. Since 1968 we have this thing called cultural capitalism, which is where we pretend that capitalism is not totally bad because we can come up with these market-based solutions to our problems. Like Starbucks sells water and donates five cents per bottle to giving people water. Or fair trade coffee. Or organic (and nowadays, non-GMO) foods.[3] Essentially, there are these stories we tell ourselves about how we are not being terrible people because when we spend our money, we are affecting positive change as we simultaneously get ourselves a latte. But we are still lying to ourselves. When we buy bottled water, Starbucks is still taking the resource from somewhere and essentially screwing the people who live there out of their water, and they are exploiting the labor of the barista who is standing there making your triple-pump caramel macchiato heated to one hundred and eighty degrees. Organic foods have no real benefit other than costing more money but they make you feel like you’re doing something good for the environment. You are not really being an anti-consumerist rebel because you are still consuming things, but you can fool yourself into believing that you have done something good and anti-consumerist.

Ah, hell, go watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g. I’ll wait here.

There are a lot of things wrapped up in capitalism that are bad: It is inherently exploitative of workers. It is inherently greedy, and that greed is now so out of control that we are allowing the wholesale destruction of the planet to the point where we may render large chunks of it uninhabitable. Probably the 80/20 principle is the best example of this—the idea that twenty percent of the workers produce eighty percent of the profit. Because eighty percent of the profit actually amounts to more profit when you only have to pay twenty percent of your workforce with it, companies have (since the crash) taken up cutting down employees significantly, which is why we have so many damn unemployed people who can’t find a job, and meanwhile the stock market goes up when a company announces layoffs because even though the stupid fuckers who are buying the stocks are probably also workers and thus at risk of getting laid off if these trends continue, the having of more profits to share with stockholders is considered a net positive. We have poverty, disease, ever-increasing class divisions, anti-Semitism[5] and other forms of xenophobia, homophobia . . . more than that, we have a political system which is essentially built to make politicians more concerned about getting reelected than actually doing anything useful or effecting any real change in the world, and yet we continue to vote and pretend that we think that somehow, change is possible, that somehow this time it will be different.

The solution, of course, is communism, because these harms are not harms that can be rectified by the system—they are harms that are embedded in the system itself. (And also, I suppose, because if you’re giving a Marxist reading, you have a certain responsibility to follow him along.) The Ziz places the blame for the failures of early twentieth century communism squarely on the shoulders of Stalin (with Trotsky sharing a little bit of it for refusing to take over for Lenin and thus opening the door for Stalin and his followers). His argument seem to be less of “this time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything” and more “try again. Fail again. Fail better.” At least he’s realistic.

I am willing to accept communism as the solution to our current problems. Not without some reservations, but for the sake of argument let’s assume that the Ziz is right and communism is the answer. So now we come to another issue: changing is difficult. In fact, it is very, very difficult. To judge from the sheer number of commercials, it is incredibly difficult to even get someone to change their breakfast cereal,[6] so how do we convince approximately 314 million people to change their government? Spoiler: You can’t.

Or at least, according to Foucault, you can’t.[7] According to Foucault, the way the power structure is set up, you can’t ever really change things, because the system is essentially set up to be self-producing. For example, truly revolutionary politicians can’t get elected—if they do, it’s because they moved their views into line with what the majority of people in the electorate think. The Ziz is somewhat dismissive of Foucault, leaving him behind early on after an argument about Freudian analysis, but he even provides evidence of the system doing this himself. Key quote:

Those who hold power know very well the difference between a right and a permission. . . . A right in a strict sense of the term gives access to the exercise of a power, at the expense of another power. A permission doesn’t diminish the power of the one who gives it; it doesn’t augment the power of the one who gets it. It makes life easier, which is not nothing. (Quoting Jean Claude Milner, Žižek, First as Tragedy, 59)

After a lot of revolutionizing (i.e. the 1960s), we have what Žižek terms “the permissive society” that allows for “divorce, abortion, gay marriage, and so on” (ibid.) without actually giving anyone more power or rights. The system shifted enough to relax the protestors, thereby preserving the system without ever really changing in any meaningful way.[8] This tendency of the system is something the Ziz doesn’t really deal with, which is too bad. The problem of how to change a system that is willing to bend to acclimate revolutionaries without actually changing is a big problem when one wants to be a revolution. The closest that he comes to resolving this difficulty is in the aforementioned Beckett quote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” While it would be a stretch to suggest that each successive (Communist) revolution came closer to the workers’ utopia that Marx originally envisioned, it is possible that the sustained movement toward a goal (i.e. successive failed revolutions) might be a way to begin to improve the situation gradually. Maybe.

I personally, as I think I’ve said, find this convincing enough. I am certainly willing to give it a try, anyway. But where to begin? To paraphrase Žižek at the outset of this book, perhaps it is time to spend a moment in thought before blindly rushing off (c.f. p. 11). I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

Postscript: When I showed a draft of this essay to a friend, he asked if this was my attempt to make myself feel better about capitalism. It’s not; I don’t really “feel good” about capitalism. But when I wrote this, I didn’t have a job; now I have one again. So I feel a little better about the system, now that it’s working for me again.

—
[1] I just tried to read about Marxist-feminist theory and I had like a seizure or something because it was so boring. Whatever. I think this term is probably being used correctly here.
[2] Better him than Peter Singer, I guess.
[3] The single most hilarious joke of the twenty-first century is that someone has convinced a certain segment of the population that eating GMO food is bad for them. Organic foods are like the second most hilarious joke of our modern era.[4]
[4] There was a footnote here that I’ve decided to omit, but I don’t feel like renumbering the other notes.
[5] And/or anti-Islam sentiment, depending on how much you want to go with Said in defining anti-Semitism as being anti-all Semitic peoples or not. I just had an argument about this with one of my brothers.
[6] To be fair, breakfast cereal is an important decision.
[7] I think these arguments are in Discipline and Punish. But also in basically everything he wrote.
[8] The Ziz actually views social issues as a smokescreen that politicians (in particular conservatives) use to distract the people from what’s really important—this is essentially why low income voters so frequently vote against their own economic interests. I have mixed feelings on this point—of course he’s right, but social issues are also important (even if only in a tautological way).

Em oi! #389 and #390

In honor of defending my MA thesis (successfully), two comics about the final throes. I have discussions in the vein of #390 with those who copyedit my fiction as well. Hm. We’ll file these two under LB2385 L86 2013c and LB2385 L86 2013d for Theory and practice of education–Higher education–Academic degrees-M.A. You can also check out LB2385 L86 2013a and LB2385 L86 2013b. You know, for all that I seem somewhat frustrated with my advisor, he’s really been a good fellow to me, and given me a lot of space to make my own discoveries, which I’m kind of glad about. He said some really nice things about my thesis during my defense, and we shook hands. I guess that’s, finally, a détente.

I’ve recently seen a spike in traffic, probably all you crazy people who bought my book. What fun! But looking over the blog, I see that like 99% of the posts I’ve written since July have been about how terrible it is to be in graduate school. And…to some extent this post is not a change from that. Whoops. Sorry. Next week I will have comics that are not about being exhausted and stressed out. I promise. I already have them drawn, even!

Anyway, the big news can be seen in this photo:

No, not the copy of House of Leaves in the background. The postcards are here! If you want a signed one, send me your snail mail address to ehlupton+postcards(AT)gmail(dot)com [ehlupton plus sign postcards at sign gmail period com]. As you can see, I have a lot of postcards, and I believe thus far only three people have asked for them, so get your order in!

Publication Day

So in answer to all of my anxiety dreams last night, my novella has been published! Yay!

Now you’re asking, “Emily, where can I buy this marvelous thing?” Glad you asked. Check out these links:

Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Smashwords
Battered Suitcase Press (not up yet)

But that’s not all. I know some people like to get their books signed, and this is difficult with an e-book. So if you bought the book (and enjoyed it, I guess? Otherwise what’s the point?), send me an email to ehlupton+postcards(AT)gmail(DOT)com (yes, that is my name, ehlupton, the plus sign, the word “postcards,” and then gmail dot com). Include your name and snail mail address, and I will send you a postcard with the book’s gorgeous cover on it. I’ll write a message, if you want one, or draw a picture of a dog (probably of my dog), even sign it. If you’re extra obsessive, like me, let me know and I’ll mail it to you in an envelop so it doesn’t get cancelled or otherwise undergo the rigors of the postal service.

Please note on the postcards: I probably won’t get the order before the end of next week, so I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to get youthe postcard by mail before Christmas unless you live locally. If you buy the book, you will get it delivered electronically in less than five minutes, so that will have to fulfill your desires for instant gratification for the nonce.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it! I hope, if you really enjoyed it, that you will consider reviewing it, or recommending it to your friends. But even if you don’t do those things, I am glad that you took a little time to read it. Thank you.

Em oi! #388: The New Guy

Edgar came to live with us close to four weeks ago. I think it will be four weeks tomorrow, actually. It’s actually surprising how much about him has changed since we brought him home:

He will walk on a leash and not freak out.
He will go up and down stairs by himself, although he’s a bit clumsy.
Weighs 46 lbs rather than 42.
Is willing to walk past cars that are parked as well as cars that are turned on but not moving. Still terrified of moving cars though.
We are reasonably sure he is flat-coated retriever and Aussie rather than part Newfie.
I have decided on the best way to draw him. As you can see in the comic above, there was some experimentation.

At first Edgar was very shy and stayed in his crate most of the time, even though we left the door open so he could come and go as he wanted. I think he appreciated having the little cave to hang out in, because re-homing is incredibly stressful and confusing. And that’s for people; imagine how the dogs feel. Anyway, Edgar is a rescue dog and he had spent a lot of his life in to a shelter before entering the foster care system and then coming to us, so we knew that it would take him longer than it took Maya to warm up to us. After all, Maya was 12 weeks when we got her, versus Edgar at six or seven months–much more life to have traumatized him thus far. However, I am happy to report that he is thriving. I drew this follow-up comic to demonstrate Edgar hanging out in the atrium every morning while I eat breakfast:

I’ll file this comic under SF427 .L86 2013 for Animal Culture–Pets–Dogs–Culture and care. Sadly, there was no entry for “doggy personal ads.”

And here’s a photograph of him I took earlier this afternoon:

And a picture of Edgar and Maya playing in the snow:

So the reason we were able to get another dog is that we recently moved to a new house. I think I may have mentioned this before. But the thing is that we have been slowly going through a lot of stuff at the old condo that didn’t get moved, stuff that we should probably throw away so we can get the house on the market. Earlier this evening while doing this, I came across this piece of paper:

If you can’t read, it says, “ทำงานทุกวันและเล่นไม่ได้ทำให้คุณจากคนไม่สนใจ,” which translates as “Working everyday and not playing makes Jack an uninteresting person.” Nowadays I would spell “Jack” as “แจก” rather than “จาก” I guess. But. I wonder what was going on when I made those notes? It also seems to say “Liz Bernstein–another Jew in Asia,” “มหา [maha] Ghosanada,” “CompLit,” and “No one is soverign [sic] in love.”

…It’s probably a good thing I’m finishing my thesis and graduating soon.

I should mention that the novella is due out at the end of the week. It will be available as a PDF and on all major ebook platforms (i.e., Kindle and Nook). So, uh, prepare to spend money on it? It should be pretty awesome. Here, in case you haven’t seen it yet, is the cover.

Scott Walker and the Abortion Law

If you have read my comic for a while, you may have gotten the feeling that I am pro-choice. This is not something I have talked about much on the blog, because I think that it is a complex topic with many ethical gray areas that cannot really be well-discussed in a short amount of time. But recently, the republicans in the Wisconsin legislature began to push through some anti-abortion laws that made me very angry.[1]

I thought, when I was younger, that we lived in a pluralistic country founded on the principles of freedom of religion and separation of church and state. Increasingly, however, that seems to not be the case. But passing laws based on evangelical Christianity to govern a diverse country just isn’t cricket.

I only want to protest if there are sock puppets involved.

That isn’t to say that I feel like abortion is a straightforward question. There are certainly arguments to be made that there is a point in a fetus’s development where the ethicalness of an abortion (in most situations, but not all) tips to the “don’t do it” side. But I want this debate to be played out by bioethicists.

After all, there are things that doctors can legally do but they don’t, because it would be unethical (like the kinds of experiments Andrew Wakefield did). And there are other things that actually are unethical (like promising someone that they can be cured by homeopathic treatments) that are also legal. So why should abortion be singled out as the medical treatment that the government decides to legislate on? And why should legislators, who are not by and large doctors, nor are known for the depth of their scientific knowledge, be allowed to pass judgment on this?

I do understand why they’re doing it, sort of. In theory, evangelical Christians believe that abortion is murder (which I think is mostly wrong, but I’ll let the point stand for the sake of argument). If I thought that people were being routinely murdered in the US, I would be against it (and I am–against the death penalty, and against uncontrolled, unregulated gun ownership). But laws like this ultrasound law don’t actually speak to the sense that murder may be going on–it just says, “There are reasons for getting an abortion, some of which are OK and some of which are not, and we want to police women’s sexual and reproductive agency by being the ones who get to decide what constitutes a reason.” It turns out that I have a problem with old white men telling me what I should do. In reproduction. In art. In life.

The problem is that the governor has repeatedly showed that he is motivated only by money, and is unwilling to listen to dissent or debate. There were protests about these laws, but–no one cared. Somehow during the 1960s and early 70s, there were enough people protesting the Vietnam War that the government had to take them seriously. But protesters in the US have not held that kind of sway since. In addition, Walker has been so outrageous on so many topics–busting collective bargaining, trying to disenfranchise huge numbers of voters, opening Wisconsin to environmental piracy and more–that most people are pretty tired of being angry. We’re just resigned. So I decided to write a letter to him to vent spleen.

Dear Scott,

I hope you don’t like me calling you Scott. I know it is not the preferred address for someone in your position, but I assume that because you feel it is acceptable to legislate about my internal organs, we must be on a first name basis. I also hope to come across as mildly condescending, because I believe that the recent bill requiring women to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound prior to receiving an abortion is predicated on the assumption that women are stupid, an assumption with which I take issue.
The bill, nicknamed the “Woman’s Right to Know Her Unborn Child Act,” seems to rest on the belief that women who go for abortions don’t really know that they have a fetus in their uterus. “So let’s show them the fetus!” the reasoning goes. But in fact, women who seek abortions are quite aware that there is a fetus in their uterus—that is why they are seeking an abortion. If there was ever a chance of there being something different in there—a new car perhaps?—I would not be as opposed to this procedure as I am.[i]

But in fact, the truth is that this bill is not designed to induce women to have fewer abortions. If you wanted to make it easier for women to raise children, you would consider projects that could reduce poverty such as making sure women get paid the same as men,[ii] increasing funding for daycare, or improving welfare payments for women with children. You could even offer a guaranteed paid leave for women and their partners.[iii] If you wanted to decrease abortions on the other side, you could increase funding for comprehensive sex education, make birth control more readily available, and offer family planning clinics to help women make informed decisions about when to have children.

I don’t believe the rhetoric about “every fetus is a gift” either. If you really believed that, why not move condoms behind the counter in the drug store or institute mandatory waiting periods for men seeking vasectomies? You could even require they undergo a trans-anal ultrasound to check the health of their prostates.

This bill is designed to shame women; that is its sole purpose. That is made clear in the exceptions allowed for cases of rape and incest. The truth is, they only make sense when you consider the bill in this manner. Perhaps a case study will further prove my point. Consider: Two women require abortions. Sally was raped. Molly had sex with her husband, but his vasectomy failed, and they have determined they cannot afford to raise another child (they already have two). Sally filed a police report and is as such exempt from the ultrasound. Molly is not—but isn’t she equally blameless for her situation?

Scott, I am tired of the rhetoric in the Republican Party that suggests that women are second class citizens who deserve to be treated as little better than gestational carriers who are capable of making sandwiches. I will not stand for such a message, and I hope that I am not the only woman who is hearing it. The next election is coming, and we will remember what you have done. 2014 is coming, and the people of Wisconsin will no longer tolerate your placing the “needs” of your rich donors above the well-being of our state’s people and economy. So enjoy your political career now. It is my dearest hope that it will not continue much longer.

Sincerely,

[i] That’s a joke. I would still be opposed.
[ii] You don’t care about this, either—remember when you repealed the equal pay act? I do.
[iii] Did you know that the US is one of the only countries worldwide that doesn’t require some amount of paid parental leave?

Walker is, for some reason, occasionally referred to as an up-and-coming republican wunderkind of some sort, possibly because he is good at 1) taking money and 2) kissing asses. I don’t really get it–he’s not presidential material (he didn’t finish college; even George W. Bush had a graduate degree), and he looks like a version of Paul Ryan where he slept on his face and it stuck that way, so he doesn’t have Dan Quayle’s reported appeal to FEMALES either. (Although, I just looked up a picture of Dan Quayle and all I can think is, maybe he looked better standing next to George H.W. Bush? Eech.)

Personally, I’m hopeful that someone even a little bit charismatic will come out of the woodwork for the 2014 elections and beat SW. In fact, I’m hoping to volunteer for whoever’s campaign that winds up being.

My letter was cosigned by nine people.[2] I was very grateful for the support. The letter is even now winging its way to the capital (well, it’s in the mailbox). I don’t expect a response, but writing it made me feel better.

Now to make everyone happier, here’s a picture of my dog being cute. Next time I’ll write about kittens.

When you're made of pillow, who cares where you sleep? — When you’re made of pillow, who cares where you sleep?

[1] The article only talks about the ultrasound law. There was also one allowing religious organizations to opt out of covering birth control on their health insurance.

[2] I won’t list their names here, because I make it a rule to not mention people in Google-able ways unless they give explicit permission.

Em oi! #375: Another Terrible Thing Done in Nietzsche’s Name

The age of specialization is over. — Have you heard of a madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market place and cried incessantly, “I seek God! I seek God!”

Writing a thesis is simultaneously the best and most terrible thing I have ever done.

Anyway. Nietzsche! Has there ever been a philosopher with a cooler mustache? I think not. Other things Nietzsche had: Syphilis. But that’s not to say we should write him off. He grew up next door to a church–his father was a Lutheran pastor (who died when young Friedrich was four). That he later went on to propose some revolutionary ideas about man’s relationship to religion in the 19th and 20th centuries is not entirely surprising. He lived a quiet life in the mountains, because of health issues, and so he knew what he was talking about when he said that happiness comes from overcoming obstacles. That’s an older idea than him, actually; I believe it goes back to Aristotle. At any rate, Nietzsche is quite cagey and doesn’t say what he thinks the new morals he’s calling for should be like. He is pretty clear that he thinks hanging on to Christian morality is stupid and outdated. You can check out the famous passage on the death of God from The Gay Science here. (He talks about the death of God again in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.) He has a marvelous mode of writing, it’s very readable. What else? Philosophy Now magazine did a marvelous podcast about our fellow that you can listen to here. And philosopher Alain de Botton did a 24-minute episode of a longer series for the BBC about Nietzsche, and you can check that out here. It’s awesome both because the US would never air something like that (not enough desperate housewives) and because de Botton is very good at explaining the essence of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Is that enough links? Can you tell I’ve been doing some research? I’m having an affair with Nietzsche; don’t tell M. Foucault, I fear he would sulk.

I wrote an article on running for a local running blog called Technically Running. You can read it here if you’re interested. You can check out the last comic I did with Nietzsche in it here.

This comic will be filed under B3317.L86 2013, for Philosophy (General)—Modern (1450/1600- )—By region or country—Germany. Austria (German)—By period—Later 19th and 20th centuries—Individual philosophers—Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900—Criticism and interpretation.

Em learns to ski

A few weeks ago we were in Lake Tahoe. Last time we went on a ski trip, I tried to learn to snowboard. It was not a huge success, involving as it did a lot of falling down, crying, shouting, bruises, and eventually a migraine. This time I decided to learn to cross-country ski, something I’d not done in easily 20 years.

Like a graceful blue bird, Em descends the mountain.

At one point, I asked the guy who was renting out skis to give me a brief overview of the trails. He was kind enough to point out good routes. One of them he said, “This one is very flat.”

It turns out “flat” is a relative term on a mountain.

I picked out a route, about 12 km round-trip, that was uphill on the way out and downhill on the way back. This let me tackle the problems of how to ski uphill and downhill one at a time, and I eventually got the hang of it. I went on to ski almost 20 km that day and gave myself a wicked blister. Anyway, I’m in love with skiing. I made a friend of mine go skiing with me at Elver Park here in Madison yesterday, and it was awesome.

I like ski trips because I get to do stuff like eat fancy food, drink fancy drinks, look at poorly proofed artwork, and think about how terrible the airport in Reno, NV is.

precious artwork2 — Bryan was so impressed by the scare quotes on this sign he made me take a photo. I like a man who can get excited about inappropriate punctuation. That’s one of the reasons I married him.

Then we come home and I get to see dog again and feel more attached to reality instead of a jet-setting lifestyle.

For her part, dog is not overly attached to the ground.

My thesis proposal is done and handed in, so until I get some comments on it I’m in a bit of a lull. (Well, a lull that requires me to continue working all the time on various things.) I’m hoping to get caught up on some other projects–writing/drawing comics, blogging…My ankle and I have reached a détente, so I’m back to training. I managed eight miles on Friday, eleven on Saturday (plus skiing), then seven this morning, and I feel good. Tomorrow it’s back to the pool for a day off.

After a lot of thought, I’ve decided to take myself off Facebook for the nonce. Not totally–I’ll stick around to monitor the comments on comics and that sort of thing. But for a lot of reasons, I need to put some distance between me and FB for a while. Feel free to email me (ehlupton(AT)gmail(DOT)com) if you want to chat, or leave a comment here. I’d love to hear from you.

Em oi! #371: The Big Announcement

MAGNIFIQUE
This is absolutely true: Vagabondage Press will publish my novella as an ebook in May, 2013. I am very excited. This work was originally composed as my senior thesis for my English/Creative Writing degree in 2006. Since then, it has been through a number of rewrites (and will go through a few more before it is ready for prime time). More importantly, perhaps, I have begun to mature as a writer and I think I have been able to do the story justice.

This is a very brief summary of the story I wrote for my cover letter:

Mara Daniels is a physicist doing cutting-edge research into the nature of reality at the University of Chicago. She’s an astronomer. She’s an amateur student of Chinese philosophy. And she’s still recovering from last summer’s car crash that killed Benjamin Zhu, her fiancé. It’s a slow process; she can walk without a cane now but she still suffers from migraines, nightmares, and she’s seeing Zhou’s ghost everywhere she goes. The Joy of Fishes follows her through the day on which these threads begin to unravel.

To paraphrase Robert Persig, I will say that I am an expert on neither Daoism, nor astrophysics, nor neurology. However some of the bits about ghosts are pretty neat.

In honor of this being my first stand-alone publication, I’m going to file this comic under PS3612.U68 J69 2012, for American literature—Individual authors—2001-—L, subdivided on Table P-PZ40 under Separate works. By title.

To get you all thinking, I’ll add this: If you have a book club in the upper Midwest that would like to read the book and have me come and talk/answer questions, drop me a line and we can work something out.

(ถ้าคุณอ่านภาษาไทยในเรื่องนี้ ฉันต้องพูดขอโทษ เพราะฉันเขียนภาษาไทยไม่เก่งและไม่สวยด้วย)