I got mixed up in a drawing challenge and was commanded to do a portrait of either Theodora Keogh (novelist), Vera Nabokov (editor/translator), or Ingrid Pitt (actor best known for playing scantily clad vampires in Hammer B-movies). I couldn't find any photos of the first two on short notice, so now I have the good fortune to have learned a few things about the artist formerly known as Ingoushka Petrov (1937-): stage and screen actor, writer, horror nerd, commenter on current events, fan club doyenne and, as far as I can tell, general badass - though I still haven't seen any of her movies.
Started out drawing her as one of those heavily-made-up, big-haired, cleavagey vamps, but then I just made everything the opposite. Picture here.
So today I heard about these poor beagles that a lab in San Jose is getting rid of, can you find homes for them, etc. Sounded plausible till Becka finally showed me the E-mail. Oh no it's one of those damn chain letters.
The website Break the Chain will tell you about all these things in great detail, but it's pretty simple:
Chain E-mails about a real issue, unless they're originated by an idiot,
- will have some kind of source info & date, so you know it's not something that's been making the rounds for 10 years;
- will give you some way to check the story or find out more, other than sending an E-mail to some person you've never heard of.
Whoever put out this beagle story is either (a) a well-meaning idiot (but if it's a real story, I'm sure you'll be hearing about it from some non-idiot too), or (b) harvesting addresses for spam, or (c) pranking you, or (d) pranking the poor schmuck they're telling you to write to.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't keep sending these things around, or other things that look exactly like them with different stories. Read that website. There's a lot of bullshit out there, and no it's not "worth it just in case".
(dammit now we can't have a beagle. waa.)
Edited to add: Several people have sent links to a page that they think supports the beagle story. It doesn't; it's just another copy of the same forwarded E-mail saying it "hasn't been verified", plus another person's address with no clue as to how they're involved. And yes, there is a drug research facility being closed in Mountain View - it's all over the business news, it's a natural detail for someone to add to a hoax; most of these chain letters include something like that. Other times, it's something someone misheard, or something that happened somewhere else years ago.
So why does this kind of thing piss me off more than some other things? Because I don't like it when people take advantage of other people's good intentions for a laugh; and because it'd be good if we didn't get into habits that make it so easy to manipulate large groups of people. As long as everyone thinks "I'd better forward this just in case it might be true, think of the puppies, besides it's so easy to forward it"... well now we have a great tool for anyone who might want to make your life difficult, say, by getting 10,000 people to make your phone or E-mail unusable, with pretty much no effort at all.
It's not about being cynical, it's just using the same standards on the Internet that you'd use if someone dropped an anonymous flyer through your mail slot.
In the year 2007, San Francisco’s own Shaenon Garrity drew (or channeled) this:
“The Trouble with Tribbles”:
A Television Adaptation by Edward Gorey
Well, she did.
(* my favorite, on p. 85: Gollum is about eight feet tall.)
• Dr. Okay brought the Orb Swarm to life.
• The visiting art included those big green glowy jiggley artichoke things. Jiggling them is very satisfying.
• I got to say hi to my Costco soulmate for half a minute. Hi! Bye!
• Dancey thumpy dancey dance.
• The Shamanic Cheerleaders are awesome. They have just enough snarkiness about their affirmations (“You are a freak! —like everyone else! You are unique! —like everyone else!”) and their moves are actually pretty kick-ass, cheerleading-wise. And they got me to stop hating the Macarena by turning it into a song about the pelvic floor.
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
1951-1957
For years I had a vague feeling that I should read this, but really didn’t want to, because people I knew in college wrote so much terrible crap under his influence—and maybe because I associated it with macho cool, and thought it might make me feel wimpy and naive. Fortunately I got over it and this really is a great novel.
Kerouac and his friend Neal Cassady (a.k.a. Sal and Dean) travel around, lose each other off and on, settle down once in a while, meet people. Dean is a broken person, kind of sociopathic in a non-aggressive way, but he’s entertaining so he gets away with things; Sal is obsessed with trying to figure him out and describes him as a mythic figure, and Sal has some big ideas about himself too: writer, free spirit, representative of the new jazz bohemia, etc. But somehow even so, the book doesn’t really allow him or Dean to become larger than life; things keep happening around them and in spite of them, and Sal keeps losing sight of his navel and getting caught up in the stories of others. Kerouac describes a diverse assortment of people, landscapes, towns, jobs, and relationships, all with such affection that you can see why Sal wants to keep moving and see them all, but he (mostly) manages to avoid the sense that they’re all just about what they mean to the narrator—he values them for just existing, and Sal also understands at some level that Dean is whatever he is and has his own story.
It would be stupid to use this as a template for your own pursuit of happiness, and many of the characters behave very badly, but it’s a very humane book. The prose has a casual elegance and it’s also pretty funny. Read it for what’s in it, not for the mythology.
The Subterraneans
Jack Kerouac
1958
This one is a quick sketch of Kerouac’s crowd of cool kids in San Francisco, and a love affair gone bad due to the narrator being kind of an asshole (as are most of the cool kids). But at least he’s an asshole with some insight about himself and others, and a good eye and ear, so there’s a lot of dense, vivid description of places and people. There’s not a whole lot else: in between boy-meets-girl and boy-chases-girl-away they mostly hang out with the gang in various places, and some aimless unruliness happens; you could put those scenes in any order. On the Road has a very loose shape but it is a shape—the places he goes are distinct, and we see Moriarty go through different stages of distress—whereas this book, despite the charged-up free-associating prose, is pretty static. Whenever it gets back to Mardou (the girlfriend) and the narrator’s belated attempts to imagine what’s going on in her mind, it comes to life and makes you love them both, as sad and frustrating as that is.
Nick Mamatas
2006
“What if H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic demons showed up in a Jack Kerouac novel”: this could be a gimmicky lark like the Sherlock-Holmes-versus-Dracula kind of thing various people have done, or it could be the kind of dense historical fantasy that Tim Powers is good at, but Mamatas is on to something different. For one thing, he writes the whole thing as Kerouac, not just mimicking his style but with a real feeling for his character and for the things he cared about. But he’s also got a good reason for this particular mash-up, a very ambitious reason—and he lets you know this right off by breaking the first promise such stories normally make, which is to leave something unscathed. It’s not just our heroes in a secret skirmish with monsters in the sewer; no, Cthulhu has pretty much taken over the world, America is now a dreamlike hell and we are all screwed. Raise your hand if you sometimes feel like that.
Lovecraft wrote a lot about ultimate evil waiting to destroy our bodies and souls - and he wrote like someone who knew nothing about life except what he’d read in Victorian pulp or in Poe, but he still managed to express, in his verbose and nerdy way, the postwar feeling that the established order had cracked and revealed something rotten at the core. What exactly it would mean for it to crack all the way wasn’t something he cared to go into, but, thirty years and another world war later, the Beat writers were part of a shift in attention toward those fractures and what might come out of them. What’s destruction, what’s insanity, is it good or bad; what’s humanity, what’s freedom, what’s worth keeping?
So, following Kerouac’s own tendency to assign mythic roles to his friends, Mamatas uses the Beats for different responses to the question: “What do you do when the status quo seems very very wrong?” William Burroughs is the best equipped to deal with Cthulhian America: slimy appendages, half-human authority figures and gratuitous cruelty were how he already saw the world, and now he gets to shoot monsters. Allen Ginsberg laughs and retreats into private playtime. Jack can’t go either way—he’s too interested in people, and he’s trying to practice Buddhist compassionate detachment, a point of view that doesn’t grant any special status to the apocalypse. Mamatas writes very convincingly from that point of view, and it’s a startling effect, undercutting the nihilistic horror of Lovecraft and Burroughs with humane bemusement at the ways people fall into illusion and violence. The Cthulhu cultists aren’t the slavering savages Lovecraft was afraid of; they’re conformist citizens in a late-stage fascist delirium, dancing to entertain children that they forgot they killed. (The oddly warm-hearted tone, within the carnival of atrocities, also lets Mamatas be very funny. In one of several little travelogue scenes that would’ve fit perfectly in On the Road, a small-town waitress snickers at the pretensions of local demon-worshippers, who’ve “never seen a tentacle” because they’re landlocked in the Midwest.)
The plot, if it’s a plot, is provided by Jack’s unstable friend Neal Cassady, whose descent into even worse behavior gives Jack something to focus on. Neal thinks the breakdown of reality is long overdue, and he’s advanced from con-man to sorcerer without getting any smarter. Pursuing him into the ruins of New York allows Mamatas to bring the epic horror story back in touch with the personal one. It’s no surprise that Jack’s final effort to connect with this damaged guy is directly related to the last hope of the world, but the last scene is still a surprise. The ending, though it seems just right and is written with love, is hard to take for the same reasons that real life is hard to take.
(Note: Besides the paperback, Mamatas has released the book as a free download.)
Lewis Trondheim
2004 (U.S. version 2006)
Lewis Trondheim makes me feel like the laziest person on the planet, or on any planet: he’s been working for 16 or 17 years and made about a billion jillion comics, and they’re all good, and he keeps working with more people and trying new things. A.L.I.E.E.E.N. (original title A.L.I.E.E.N.; in French, two E’s are as funny as three) is like the result of some unwise bet by the devil: “Sure you’re versatile, you can do minimalist wordless slapstick strips, and you can do funny animals for grownups, and you can do fantasy parody comics full of sick humor for kids, but I bet you can’t do all three at once!” So this is a minimalist wordless slapstick funny animal fantasy gronwup comic for kids, and it’s like almost nothing else, and it is hilarious and sick, sick, sick, sick.
Allegedly it’s a kids’ comic from another planet, found discarded on Earth (so some of the pages look artfully weather-beaten), written in an unknown language, about a few dozen different kinds of brightly colored critters having a variety of serious problems. Some of the problems are pretty basic: one character accidentally pokes his eyes out on page two (Wertham was right!); another wants to give people presents, but they’re not appreciated; another has to figure out what to do with a pet/friend/colleague who literally can’t stop crapping, ever. Others are more complicated: why do cheerful Pokemon-looking people like to club little blue shrimpy people on the head?; why does the mad scientist(?) want to dissect a floating weeping ghost(?) that looks like the creature he just smooshed and fed to his plants(?)?; did the little birdie guy just die, or was that his clone that grew out of a clonifying eel type thing? Since you can’t read the words, part of the fun is trying to figure out what the rules are, and in some cases you realize that you just can’t. It doesn’t really matter, because the characters are so expressive - it’s like Trondheim is playing an instrument whose notes are Happy, Hopeful, Hungry, Perplexed, Greedy, Bored, Scared, etc.
The one thing it kind of resembles is Jim Woodring’s great Frank, which has a similar setting (mostly pastoral), things that turn into other things without warning, and no words. But where Frank is more haunting and esoteric—a chronicle of currents inside Woodring’s head—A.L.I.E.E.E.N. reads like a plain fun narrative that just happens to include some incomprehensible and/or highly disturbing events. The overall message seems to be: the laws of nature are harsh, and all physical beings commit outrages or endure grossness, and these things are funny.
The subject is whether it’s OK to pass an Employment Non-Discrimination Act that protects sexual orientation but not gender identity. Aravosis thinks that it most certainly is, and that anyone who doesn’t think so has been brainwashed by the all-powerful pro-transgender establishment, who are ruining everything with their pesky idealism. This isn’t just some random liberal blogger, he’s a Washington political consultant who gets quoted these days every time a reporter wants a credentialed Internet Liberal on a gay-rights story. And apparently what it means to be a liberal these days is: don’t bother me with this common-cause stuff, and don’t rock the boat.
Aravosis wants to know what a gay man could possibly have in common with a trans woman. He respects Those People and everything (to his credit, he doesn’t actually say “some of my best friends are...”), just please don’t look at him like he’s one of them! One variation on this that I’ve seen a lot of is “We shouldn’t talk about them together in the same law, because that’s what the bigots do—they think trannies are gay [or vice versa].”
May I say: duh, sir. Yes, that is what bigots do. They discriminate against various groups of people for similar bad reasons, which exist in their own heads and do not correspond to reality. They think “black” is a “race”, they think Sikhs are Muslims, etc. (they may even assume, as Aravosis at one point appears to, that trans women want to have genital surgery). The point of laws like the Civil Rights Act and ENDA is not to help them get their facts straight, but to stop them from imposing their peculiar standards on others. And since the name of this bill is the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the right question for Aravosis to ask is “what does discrimination against a gay man have in common with discrimination against a trans woman?” Easy: it’s based on highly personal matters that (a) conflict with some people’s sexual norms, (b) have historically been subject to blatant widespread discrimination including denial of livelihood and/or life, and (c) don’t have a damn thing to do with your job.
The other main premise of Aravosis’s piece, which is also more or less what I’m hearing from Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi, is that an unrealistic desire to achieve things the nation is Not Ready For will just scare people and sink the whole cause. Oddly, I wasn’t able to find any similar statements on his blog about why Martin Luther King should’ve toned it down to avoid causing a backlash from racists... or why we should shut up about same-sex marriage until Rosie O’Donnell is President.
Strangers with Candy
directed by Paul Dinello
written by Dinello, Amy Sedaris, Steven Colbert
2005 (seen 2006)
Amy Sedaris plays an all-around bad person who’s kind of innocent, and when she gets out of jail and tries to finish high school as an adult, there are problems. Three things make this a pretty good movie: Sedaris’s bizarre performance, and Steven Colbert as a closeted gay fundamentalist science teacher, and the general level of shameless incredible bad taste. There are a lot of little good things too. Sedaris’s character is one of those great naive sociopath clowns—like Anya Jenkins, or Tony Soprano—who don’t know any better than to say all their selfish childish reactions out loud, which you kick yourself for identifying with. The science contest that drives the main plot is a decent parody of every inspirational school movie ever made, and a horribly true picture of administrative smarm. I’m told the TV show was better but I haven’t seen it so that’s OK.
Notes on a Scandal
directed by Richard Eyre
written by Patrick Marber, from a novel by Zoe Heller
2006
Oh boy, I wanted to like this. I would go see Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench even if they were in Home Alone 6, and they’re well cast here: Dench is a bitter veteran teacher who needs a friend, Blanchett is a new one who doesn’t know what she needs. Blanchett starts sleeping with a teenage student; Dench tries to rescue her, then figures she’s owed big-time and things get mean. You could either play this as pure melodrama, or you could dig into their needs and rationalizations, but the movie tries to have it both ways and it doesn’t work.
A friend said something like “Why does an older lesbian always have to be a miserable evil predator?”, and I started to argue that that’s not a cliché because neither of us could actually think of any other movies/plays/novels with that premise. But the way Dench’s character is handled here, it feels like a cliché whether you’ve seen it before or not. She starts out as a voiceover narrator, and the tension between what she says and thinks is effective. But once she gets scarier, and you find out about ugly things in her past, the movie more or less drops her point of view so all you see is scary behavior; and the ending implies that she’s never really felt or learned anything, that she can do it all over a million times and bounce right back. You can tell a good story about someone who’s just empty (like The Stepfather, which is how I got a big crush on Terry O’Quinn way before Lost), but here we already know she isn’t, so there’s no reason for this distancing except that the filmmakers got coy or distracted.
Blanchett’s character doesn’t have this problem, because we never really get what she’s about anyway except in one long speech near the middle; otherwise she just doesn’t seem very smart, but you sympathize with her because there’s a scary monster chasing her. The men get pretty short shrift too: I like Bill Nighy as the husband, but he just goes from oblivious to furious; the teenage lover is a one-note idiot and also implausibly confident.
The VERY! LOUD! dramatic music that you hear all the time is by Philip Glass, or an alien pretending to be Philip Glass.
Y: The Last Man
Brian Vaughan and Pia Guerra
2002- (read 6 books so far, out of 9 or 10)
Everyone seems to love this, so I’m relieved that I like it pretty well. All the males in the world drop dead except this one schlub, Yorick; the world carries on, sort of; Yorick is on the run looking for his girlfriend; various people think they know what’s really going on; cultists and pirates and spies, oh my. It’s a lot of fun, I just wish it were better.
Vaughan is ambitious for sure. It seems like he’s been wanting for years to write science fiction and romance and sociology and secret agents and ninjas, and he picked a pretty good excuse to throw them all in. He keeps coming up with non-obvious corollaries to the removal of men (Israel now has the largest army; there are almost no Republicans in Congress; etc.), and he’s also got a big stash of interesting facts you should know, which some character happens to mention every so often - it’s clumsy, there might as well be a “Today’s Lesson” caption, but it all more or less fits. And keeping half a dozen subplots in the air at once lets him cut to somewhere else whenever things slow down.
That said - he writes really, really cheesy dialogue. Yorick spouts one-liners every ten seconds, like everyone under 40 does on TV; eventually Vaughan fills in a little background for why he seems so stupid, but still. The evil cult leader is so unconvincing that Vaughan had to make up a hilarious coincidence to explain how one of the main characters instantly fell under her spell. Nitpickers will find more to complain about—my main beef was that no “plague” would kill billions of people at the very same second, which Vaughan obviously knows (as of book 6, he’s still playing with the mystery of what the hell happened) but almost no one in the book figures out.
Pia Guerra’s art is OK, and has more attention to details of real-world things and places than in most adventure titles these days, but it’s kind of bland: there’s a generic Hollywood look to a lot of the people, and almost no use of shadow. It gets more interesting after the first few books.
Blade of the Immortal
Hiroaki Samura
1994- (read 2 books so far, out of like a zillion)
Well done, I guess, but really not my thing. The details of the cynical antihero’s curse of immortality are sort of novel (body parts made out of “blood worms”, and the requirement that he find and kill exactly one thousand bad guys) but the fight scenes fall into a predictable pattern: bad guy chops off hero’s arms/legs/liver, not realizing he’s immortal; bad guy chuckles and turns to go; hero gets up and kills him. Also, samurai intrigue for its own sake (renegades from Sword School X form Sword School Y to wipe out all the other sword schools, etc.) is possibly even sillier than superhero intrigue. The art is lovely, although the very gory violence is stylized in a way that just looks odd to me: for instance, people don’t just get stabbed or sliced by swords, they get sliced in half effortlessly like Jello.
David Chelsea
1992-93 (read 2007)
Or, “cranky young man wonders what the hell is wrong with everyone else.”
This odd little autobiographical book appeared during an odd little time in U.S. comics. The Art Spiegelman modernist gang was vying for respectability, and had good reviews and production values, but hadn’t yet crossbred with the last wave of undergrounds to form today’s small-press scene. Superhero publishers were coasting on the buzz from a few innovative books and timidly venturing into other genres. And then down in the weeds where no one looks but total geeks, there were a bunch of unconnected weirdos each with a black-and-white series in traditional flimsy comic format, each with a different idea of what alternative comics were. Many of these, even more than today, decided to write about themselves; Spiegelman’s Maus was part of the reason, but American Splendor was lurking in the weeds before that, and Justin Green pioneered the “incredibly embarrassing confessional” version even earlier. Anyway, you could take this kind of thing in all different directions, rude or neurotic or hard-boiled, it all seemed like fair game. Some stayed in for the long haul and became important artists, like Julie Doucet and Chester Brown; some produced a brief run of memorable work, like Dennis Eichhorn; some just did one interesting thing and then more or less stopped. This is one of those.
The book is about young David, aspiring illustrator in Manhattan from Portland in the ‘80s, pretentious and needy and horny, age 20 going on 45. (Autobio-review note: I first saw this book when I was 20 and in Manhattan, but after one look, I couldn’t stand to read it; I identified too much, except he knew how to get laid a lot.) The “love” in the title is pretty much sex and arguments, with a series of careless and/or damaged women - almost everyone David knows is as selfish as he is, though some of them have a better grasp of the world. He bounces around between cities and beds and is constantly surprised by betrayals the reader sees coming a mile away, including his own. Once he gets into something like a feasible relationship, the book slows down and then leaves off in a hurry, with a postscript to let you know he’s now wiser and married.
This is all nearly as awful as it sounds, except that it’s extremely well written and drawn, and funny - basically a compassionate-but-merciless satire of a particular floating world, a little like Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers and nearly as good, lacking only a plot. Chelsea has a great ear for dialogue, using it to sketch out the characters right away, and as obnoxious as they are, he gives you enough of their point of view to make it more than just “David vs. the Crazy Girls.” And even without a plot, there’s a good sense of time going by as other people in his crowd move on with their lives. It’s all well supported by the art, which looked unusual then and still does: realistic and precise with a great individuality to the faces and bodies and environments, and skillfully laid out, but just unpolished enough to make it look like something made in an obsessive spree by a young guy not sure of what tools to use.
In one funny scene that might or might not have been intended as self-satire, David tries to sell an early version of his comic to a magazine that’s clearly supposed to be Spiegelman’s Raw, and he can’t understand why those snotty elitists won’t publish his work. He doesn’t get that they’re just doing a totally different thing—his story would’ve looked ridiculously out of place in Raw. But there was a lot of that mistake going around then, the idea that “good comics” was just one big genre that would all fit together somehow. I’m glad it’s not like that, and if misfit critters may hop out of the weeds with just one story to tell, I say bring them on.
The Quitter
Harvey Pekar and Dean Haspiel
2006 (read 2007)
Or, “cranky old man wonders what the hell is wrong with him.”
Pekar has been writing about his life for so long that it’s hard to read a new piece of his on its own terms—if there’s a gap, you fill it in with what you already know. And he’s always used a lot of gaps, writing about little moments here and there; he’d talk at length often enough, but it was like a tour guide who might stop at any moment and let you just watch things go by for a while. His one long book, Our Cancer Year, had more or less the same rhythm, and it held together because of the intense experience it described (although Frank Stack’s art, scruffy and flowing like one big sketchbook, helped too). The Quitter is a long story that doesn’t hold together at all, partly because it tries so hard to be a seamless piece, but you can still pull it apart and enjoy some of the mess.
He rarely wrote about his pre-adult years in American Splendor; here he skips through them and pulls out episodes that fit his theme, with a frame of his present self saying more or less “This is my theme and here are some examples.” The theme is his pattern of freaking out and abandoning various challenges, which seems pathological in some cases and pretty normal in others. There are some vivid stories in there, including a brief successful career in beating up other kids and a humiliating panic attack in a Navy laundry room. There are some great depictions of defective internal drama, like not being sure whether someone hit you on purpose but deciding you’d better hit them back just in case. And there’s enough undramatic but particular stuff to give a feeling of organic life, all the seemingly random turns and false starts that somehow ended up at where you are now.
But the stories start and stop arbitrarily, dictated by the need to get on to the next example; the pacing within them is spotty too, dwelling for two pages on some trivial scene, then disposing of a major event in one panel or just in a sentence. The frame-narrator intrudes all the time to explain the transitions, so that when the subject occasionally changes without that segue, it seems like an editing error—and in some cases I think it might be, because there are a few captions that seem to assume you know about events he didn’t actually mention. This book was published by DC/Vertigo, so you have a writer who’s not used to working in a long form and an editor who’s not used to working with realistic fiction; this is probably very unfair of me, but I wonder if DC just figured that Pekar’s thing was rambling monologues and all they could see was that he was doing his thing.
I like Dean Haspiel’s art a lot (disclosure: he’s a pal) and he’s done some good American Splendor stories. His work in The Quitter is slick and he did his homework, but for once I didn’t feel the life; the muscular line is too mismatched with the aimless script, except when it’s too closely matched and just shows the exact same thing the caption is needlessly saying. (I love the cover unconditionally, though—it’s a good joke if you’ve ever read The Spirit.)
My favorite panel in the book is when, after explaining again how fear and impatience have deflated his efforts, Harvey just looks at you and says, “And there are lots of people like me.” At least on that one page, he knows the problem isn’t that he’s a mutant with magic failure powers in an epic tragedy; it’s that we’re all playing a game whose rules often result in pointless damage, and this damage makes us into obstacles for each other.
Gregory T. Everson and Hedy Weinberg
2006 (4th ed.)
I used to work as a hepatitis C nurse, counseling patients and monitoring their treatment, so I looked at this book both as a resource for self-education of people living with hep C, and as a summary of the current state of medicine for nurses and allied professionals. I recommend it strongly on both counts.
The writing is clear and engaging, uses patient testimonials nicely to get across the variety of experiences, and offers several levels of detail: most sections should be easy enough for any high-school graduate, but there are more technical descriptions of research findings for readers who want to dig deeper. (Really the only problem I have with the presentation is that those levels are closely mingled throughout, so someone who just wants the big picture will have to skip sections pretty often; it might be better to move things like clinical trial data into an appendix, since the writers’ paraphrases of the data are to my eye very clear and fair.) There’s a good balance between discussion of antiviral treatment options and practical measures for improving health without the treatment. They’re careful not to imply that we know more than we do, and this is a field with a lot of unknowns and some quickly-moving science—but I don’t think the 2006 edition has anything that’s out of date, except for clinical trials that were ongoing at that time, some of which have gone to the next phase or been stopped (good sources for the most recent developments are hcvadvocate.org and hivandhepatitisc.com).
Note, this is a book about the current consensus in (for lack of a better term) Western medicine; the authors acknowledge that they don’t know much about Chinese medicine or other alternatives, and neither do I.
The Hepatitis C Help Book
Misha Ruth Cohen, Robert Gish and Kalia Doner
2007
I read this book as a nurse working with hepatitis C patients, and as someone without any knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). I’m not sure who the book’s ideal reader would be, but I don’t think it’s me or my patients. It takes the unusual approach of alternating chapters or half-chapters between Dr. Gish, a GI/hepatology physician of some renown, and Dr. Cohen, a Chinese medicine practitioner at a clinic that sees some of the same patients. The two halves have virtually nothing in common: Gish’s side is more or less like other mainstream books on the subject, although not the best-written of them, while Cohen starts every section with something along the lines of “In TCM, [whatever organ, cell, or other concept Gish just explained] has nothing to do with this disease; it’s an imbalance between [nondescriptive name of some principle in TCM] and [another one of those]”... basically a lot of terms that, to anyone who hasn’t studied TCM, will just sound like gibberish and not really give any basis for understanding what the doctor thinks you should do. Now I know that that’s more or less how even the simplest “Western” medical teaching would sound to someone who’s never heard of any of its concepts, but the fact is that just about everyone here has heard of at least the very basic ones, so it’s possible to describe even something as complicated as the immune system in simple terms and, if necessary, explain how those concepts can be tested and applied. Gish sort of does that, but—at least for me, and I think for any reader without that training—Cohen doesn’t. I’m left with the impression that they have two totally contradictory approaches, and it’s not clear whether they really think there’s a way that they can both be accurate, or whether they’ve just decided not to argue. In any case, I’m not sure what a patient would take away from the book itself; it seems more useful as a guide to further reading, or an incentive to ask your doctor more about everything.
Josh is not only a solid cartoonist with a good eye for the day-to-day (which he sharpened in his solo travel comics, and as an illustrator for American Splendor), but a socially engaged dude to a degree that’s rare in the current alt-comics generation. After the hurricane, he spent three weeks doing relief work in Biloxi and wrote about it on LiveJournal, but the comic is a different thing: it’s a docudrama based on interviews with a half-dozen people who got through the disaster in various ways. The level of incidental detail, the sense of place and character, and the unobtrusive storytelling craft that pulls you into it—damn. If it were on TV it would have to be a big-budget extravaganza and it wouldn’t be as effective as this is.
Jill Thompson and Neil Gaiman (sort of)
2003
Why did this have to be done? Jill Thompson could have made perfectly fine goofy big-eyed imitation-manga about whatever, and the parts of this that she wrote from scratch are pretty good for morbid children (I like the slapstick bit about gruesome things happening to a ghost who never complains). But trying to remake Neil Gaiman’s Season of Mists from another character’s point of view, and dropping in big chunks of the original dialogue, doesn’t work at all. Not only is it a very weird style contrast, it literally makes no sense a lot of the time because of the way Thompson rushes through it to get to the jokes, and also because in the original book Gaiman was counting on people having already read the previous books. His prose was already a little clunky and flowery sometimes, but Thompson makes it worse by treating it like Shakespeare—in the kind of lousy Shakespeare production where they don’t know how to make the meaning clear through action, but they have to say all the words, so you get some goofy stage business over a soundtrack of classy-sounding gibberish. Sure I’m a snob, but I just don’t get how that’s supposed to be more fun for a kid than something that isn’t a cutesified adaptation. I keep meaning to check out Thompson’s Scary Godmother, which looks much cooler than this.
• Last month I quit my very worthwhile, intense, interesting and secure city clinic RN job. I haven’t had so many good nights of sleep in a row for... jeez, I don’t know, probably not since I started nursing school in 1996. I don’t think all those years were a total false start—I want to stay involved with public health somehow, whether it’s volunteer work or activism or just writing about it—but I’d rather not do that again for a while.
• There’s still a sweet pretty lady and a weird dog living in my apartment. This is good. My country is still in lousy shape, and some people I love are having a bad time. This is bad. To do: not take the good or the bad for granted, keep both trees & forest in the picture.
• I’m freelancing as a computer programmer; right now I’ve got a little very-part-time work through a friend, and we’ll see how it goes. The computer stuff is something I never really did on purpose, just kind of fell into as random opportunities came up. I like it better when it’s on purpose, and it’s nice to pick up and dust off some of these weird skills I didn’t have any more use for—they’re like little robots who were patiently waiting in storage.
• Of course if someone wanted to give me some money for art, that would be very nice. I’m not ready to go out hustling as an illustrator, I don’t know how the hell people do it, but I want to take every chance I get to collaborate with people and work on things more steadily. I had fun doing a lot of drawings for someone else’s humor thing that’s being shopped around now, and it that turns into a real book deal, that’ll be great and I’ll tell you all about it.
• Still thinking vaguely about art school, although probably not soon (could be a hassle trying to go back to school at the same time as my sweetie starts her grad studies, plus I’m still not sure what my job is). A friend pushed me to go to an open house event for MFA programs, and I got to talk to some (mostly*) friendly school people about what I’d need to do if I wanted to go that route: basically, get serious and start trying to do more & different kinds of things. That’s a good plan no matter what—I haven’t really gone near paint or other media for at least 15 years, once I found out what a kick it is to do drawings and have them appear in print. (* I did get a little bit of “silly comics are not art” attitude from some of the schools, but not much. The only really obnoxious remark was that I hadn’t found my “voice” yet because I drew different stories in different styles. Wha?)
• Not being so tired all the time, and not being depressed, has deprived me of my main excuse for acting like a wallflower. Now when I go to a party I’m awake enough to notice that I also just have a big social anxiety problem. To do: work on that.
• All these reviews I’m putting on the blog lately aren’t because I’m having a compulsive episode or something, it’s just that I’d been wanting to do that for a while & saved up a lot of notes.
I’m gonna go out in the back yard and try to plant some things.
Background: this summer Congress passed the Protect America Act, which was more or less Patriot Act III and gave up almost all oversight on wiretapping. The Democrats did their “oh no people will think we’re soft on terror” thing again and totally caved on this, with the excuse that they’d try to fix it later. The current bill, “RESTORE”, was supposed to be the fix, but under heavy lobbying from the telecoms (and presumably the White House) they snuck in this immunity deal. The Democrats are waffling again, and Feinstein (CA) and Schumer (NY) are two of the committee members who could block the bill, but they don’t have a good track record of doing the right thing without massive support. Sen. Dodd is promising to filibuster if it gets out of committee, but the party isn’t really backing him up (so that’s another thing to call your senator about, no matter where you are).
This is one of those things I point to when people say “Oh they’ve just always spied on everyone anyway, what’s the difference”: if this weren’t different, if the government didn’t think they could get in trouble for this stuff, they wouldn’t have bothered with all these legal maneuvers. This is worth pushing on.
p.s. I’ve called Feinstein’s office a few times on different things and it’s always kind of entertaining, in a sad way. Her staffers are all very nice and sound very young, they all sound a little apologetic (“Umm yes, we’ve been getting a lot of calls about that”) and they never seem to have any idea what her positions are on anything. But if they bother to count anything, it’s phone calls from constituents; E-mail definitely goes straight into the abyss.