Tlönista

Via Ben:

I can’t believe I only got 66% on Dorky/Nerd/Awkward, considering that I said I would choose the Internet over sex.

Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.

James Nicoll

When I wake up it’s not quite raining. Misting.

My attempt to take a shower earlier so I don’t cut into one roommate’s shower time fails spectacularly when I cut into another roommate’s shower time. I meekly take the scolding and scurry back into my room.

At work, H. and J., who sit next to each other, whisper. I hate that; people did that a lot at my last workplace too. I get paranoid and imagine they’re whispering about how I’m going to be sacked, or about my outfit, or whatever. I know perfectly well they’re probably not talking about me at all, but it still makes me nervous. I vow to become a freelancer as soon as possible so I don’t have to work in an office.

It’s still rainy, so instead of feeding the ducks at lunch I sit in a sandwich shop and work on a comic.

L., girl-I-briefly-dated-before- she-decided-it-wasn’t-a-good-time-for -a-relationship-so-now-we’re-just-friends -even-though-I-still-kind-of-like- her-but-it’s-cool, texts me. We head out into Marylebone in the pouring rain and find a quiet corner in a pub to catch up. She’s anxious about a friend, and moving to a new city in the fall. I’m looking for a new place to live, having failed to fit in with my roommates during our initial trial period. (Their idea of fun: playing fratboy-style drinking games while blasting Britney Spears. My idea of fun: game night with the girls.) I can’t relax at work, I can’t relax at home, it’s just so pleasant to sit and eat chips and joke around with someone who gets me.

L. is signing as she talks in a cued-speech language, possibly Makaton. “…That one time I was in Liverpool — the sign for ‘Liverpool’ is the same as the sign for ‘lesbian’, did you know? I can’t think of a situation where they would be interchangeable…”

We ponder. “The Beatles were ‘from Liverpool’, if you know what I mean,” I suggest. L. laughs and pulls a face. “If you keep doing that it’ll stay that way,” I tease.

“It’s my beard-growing face,” L. says, and demonstrates. “All men make this face when they’re really trying to grow their beard out.”

“Really?”

“Really…”

She runs off to the toilets. I fiddle with my mobile. Two men, construction workers, a younger one and an older one, sit down at the next table over. They say hi, as you do with cute girls sitting alone in pubs, and we make small talk. I am struck by an idea. “Hey,” I say, “what face would you make, if you were concentrating on growing a beard?” They don’t get it. L. comes back just then, and tries to explain it, but gives up.

“So what are you two doing here?” the younger one asks.

“We’re visiting,” I say, “from Liverpool…” and L. cracks up and then gets the giggles and we laugh like crazy people for five minutes straight. The construction workers are bemused, down their pints, and head off.

Back home I lock myself in my room, not even going down for dinner. I curl up with my laptop to finally finish Peter Watts’s Blindsight, and over the next several hours it slowly quietly blows my fucking mind.

I fold up the laptop and put it away and lie in the dark, luminous with the sheer ecstasy of engaging with ideas halfway out of my ken, and coming out of the absorbed rapture I get into when I’m stuck in a book. I cry a little. I am frustrated with the confines of mental illness and general social ineptitude and my uninspiring job and the dreary dreary perpetual state of Not Fitting In. I don’t fit in. Furiously, irrationally, I think: I am brilliant. I should be more than this.

I’ve been sitting on this one a while, as you can tell. Broken up into parts for your convenience.

1 “Angoulême is old, old, old”
2 General overview of demographics, genres, comix culture and industry in France
3 A very short glossary
4 Playing the bass
5 Gatecrashing
6 Notes on the panels
7 Schtroumpfs noirs
8 Party in the alt comix tent
9 Readers on the lawn of the Hôtel de Ville
10 “Je tombe amoureuse”

Continue reading ‘Angoulême’

Jae, on Spore:

Spore = fuck you. I wanted to have a family procreate with a female. After this game comes out I’ll be on the news six months later dead after forgetting to eat and sleep.

Ben weighs in:

I’m in the “can’t fucking wait” camp

I’m also in the “willing to drink Will Wright’s pee” camp

I may have to get some new friends come September…

Against all odds, it seems I’ve acquired a social life.

Last Thursday I had a random rendezvous with a fellow girl geek and, it seems, did not scare her off. We end up chatting till late and I nearly miss the last train home. Friday morning is thus kind of unproductive. At lunch my co-workers and I go out for Vietnamese and I have proper pho for the first time in ages, and also Vietnamese iced coffee (ca phe).

There isn’t much to do that afternoon. I print out the Google Map for fellow Couchsurfer K. Z.’s birthday party in the evening. I’m looking forward to it, but an old nemesis of mine and Jennie’s is going to be in town, and I can’t miss that either. I text Jennie. “Let’s go torment D. J. later on.” We decide to meet up at Holborn, sevenish.

While sitting around in a coffeeshop waiting for Jennie, who’s stuck on a bus in a traffic jam, I doodle idly. The nemesis we’re going to surprise, by the way, belongs to CFI, a rather slick, corporatesque American secular organisation, which happens to be opening a new branch in London tonight. Their schtick about “culture war” and “separation of church and state” and what not sounded irrelevant enough in Canada; God knows what they hope to accomplish here, in Britain, where the official religion is nominally Church of England but is in practice nonchalant agnosticism. It’s so misguided it’s almost funny. With that in mind I hastily sketch out a mocking cartoon, whatever, finish it when I get there. Then I text a mate I met ages ago when gate-crashing a goon meet and arrange dim sum for the next morning.

Jennie and I get to Atheist HQ shortly before a scheduled talk by Simon Blackburn, a British philosopher and Humanist. A CFI bigwig is giving a speech. We scam some food and sit in the front row. Jennie scribbles copious notes and I draw whilst making snarky comments in a stage whisper. D. J. can’t help but notice us, especially since he’s next up to give the standard Go CFI! speech. Yessss.

Simon Blackburn doesn’t show, and doesn’t show. I figure he’s passed away quietly and I’ll read about it on Leiter Reports tomorrow morning. In the meanwhile, Richard Dawkins, who just happens to be in the audience, gets herded up to the mike for an impromptu Q & A. How random is that? He got questions from a surprising number of philosophy majors. I managed to get a stab in about reductionism. A couple women bring up the gendered rhetoric of New Atheism but unfortunately they ramble and nobody much cares. Eventually Dawkins escapes the inquisitive mob. And before we had a chance to show him the comic, too!

Jennie leaves the cartoon on the desk in front of the hall with the CFI brochures. I go off to the loo. When I come back, the cartoon’s gone. She tells me that some guy picked it up, read it, giggled, and ran back into the hall with it. We flee, burning bridges to Neo-Atheism behind us.

So I set off for K. Z.’s party, a couple hours later than I’d intended. Naturally, I have the map of the area but forgot to write down anything useful like his flat number or mobile. So I wander through the halls of this yuppie Tower Hamlets apartment building until I hear party noises. I stumble into a random party, grab myself a gin & tonic, mingle for a while and am beginning to wonder if perhaps it’s the right one when K. Z. appears and we yell respective greetings over the dj.

To my surprise, I’m actually the kind of person who can go to a party full of strangers and successfully mingle and — I enjoyed myself! Go figure.

A Typical Conversation Begins

Me: NICE PARTY EH
Random Partygoer: WHERE ARE YOU FROM?
Me: SOUTH-EAST LONDON. THE UNCOOL PART.
Random Partygoer: NO LIKE WHAT PART OF AMERICA
Me: TORONTO! CANADA!! BUSH IS NOT MY FAULT!
[Pause.]
Me: SO HOW DO YOU KNOW K. Z.?…

I remember to, y’know, check the time and once again manage to make it back before the last train. And the next morning — okay, midmorning — okay, lunchtime — it’s back into town to meet up with J. for dim sum like I promised. We stuff ourselves on shrimp dumplings and pork buns and deep fried things and wander out into the city, ending up at Borough Market. Oh. My. God. Spices and ciders and cheeses and breads and all manner of meat and produce and did I mention cheese and fresh fish and chutneys and sausages and I’m gonna have to go back. J. waxes eloquent on mackerel while I covet cheese wheels.

At that point the Tired hits. I excuse myself abruptly and head home, where I take the most epic nap ever. And that, kids, is my weekend.

Next weekend: Angoulême.

ENH ENH ENH

When I titled that Alan Moore post “Comics Will Break Your Heart”, I had entirely forgotten that it was the epigram of Dylan Horrocks’s comic book Hicksville. It must have crawled into my unconscious years back.

I first read Hicksville in the summer of 2006, about a year after getting into comics. Ben had it on his bookshelf because it was Chris Butcher’s favourite comic, so I eagerly figured it must be full of awesome.

I didn’t get it.

The story was nice, but I could only manage a superficial kind of appreciation and I knew it. Capital-C Comics was still this entirely alien medium – imagine being new to film in general, or music in general – and I was intimidated. It’s not a n00b comic.

Weekend before last I saw it on the top shelf in the Alternative Comics section of Gosh, almost out of my reach and wedged in too tightly to just tip out. But maybe if I could get a few more inches by just stepping on that ledge of the bottom shelf there –

bam! Piles of bagged and boarded back issues fly out on the floor like a catch of rainbowy fish as the shelf collapses. I want to melt into a puddle as a store clerk piles the comics to one side and puts the shelf right. “What book were you after?” he asks, and reaches it down for me.

I couldn’t very well not buy it after that, eh?

So I read it through again, and this time…I got it. Guys, Hicksville is wonderful.

The comic it reminds me most of is Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder: Talisman, which as Sleep is for the Weak’s NotHayama will tell you anytime, is what indie comics should be like.* I find it hard to explain exactly what McNeil did with Talisman that made it so powerful, but Horrocks does the same thing in Hicksville – a map that in the drawing creates the territory.

(Speaking of maps, I’m also very curious about what Ben thinks about the recurring cartography metaphor…)

Delightful jabs at Todd MacFarlane, Rob Liefeld, and the general awfulness of the comics industry, not just in the ’90’s but pretty much as long as it’s been around. But it’s anything but a snarkfest; it’s about what we do for the love of comics. Horrocks creates this utopic little town that’s populated by people who really, really get it, where this obscure maligned misunderstood medium is the air they breathe, and it’s the most heartwarming thing ever.

If you’re not accustomed to reading comics they can be a little hard to follow at first. My initiation was probably Flight.** It took a bit of effort to parse. But the feeling was simply magic, there’s no other way to describe it. (I’d better stop now before this becomes some soppy love letter…) Hicksville comes closest to re-awakening that sense, and let’s leave it at that.

__________
* As opposed to (as Dirk Deppey said), Joe Worrymope’s Real Life Is Stinky and I Can’t Get Laid for Shit.

** I can hear Lianne Sentar and NotHayama snickering at my cliché indie snobbery already. “She started with Flight! She reads seinen like PlanetES and Dragon Head!”

Alan Moore, arguably one of the greatest comic-book authors of all time, brings new depth and subtlety to every genre he works in, whether it’s historical fiction, horror, dystopia, superhero stories, or plain old porn. His bibliography reads like a list of Graphic Novels You Must Read Before You Die. He makes Xine use big words like “intertextuality” and “Baudrillardian” gratuitiously. So when I heard that he introduced a Golliwog character in the newest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I knew the odds that he’d pull it off with sensitivity and insightfulness were, oh…

…approximately HONKY TO ONE. Because there is no way for a white dude to appropriate such powerful racist imagery and *not* fuck it up somehow. Has ebogjonson’s blackface flowchart taught us nothing?

Pam Noles has written a very good series at And We Shall March in which she discusses the historical context of the Golliwog, and the treatment of race in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in great detail before describing the comic itself:

It’s an alien.

Its spaceship isn’t a cue ball, it’s more like a Golli eyeball. It’s powered by roses and its exhaust is moonbeam and starshine. Perhaps there’s a unicorn somewhere in mechanism, gently pissing rainbows to keep the gears oiled.

Peg and Sarah, the two Dutch dolls, speak Dutch throughout. From translations cobbled together via various free services on the internet(s), they refer to him as their brave hero, their proud champion of love and an admiral of pleasure. Once they get to the blazing world, other dolls from their world greet him as the fiery pirate of the heart, and say something about either dying of luck or dying of happiness.

Peg also says she volunteered for the Golliwogg’s crew because of his big dick.

So as of this outing, The Black Dossier removes the Golliwogg from its roots in racist ideology while still clinging to the ever so wearying fascination with black sexuality. To evade the difficult fact-based truth of where the Golliwogg comes from while simultaneously affirming the black male stereotype it represented (complete with lustful white women) is quite a trick. Talk about Olympian-level Denial Acrobatics.

And that’s where comics broke my heart.

I remember how I felt when I discovered Jose Saramago was an anti-Semite. You know the kind – the kind who say they’re merely anti-Zionist, but who somehow can’t manage to express their perfectly sensible and well-thought-out opposition to Zionism without sounding suspiciously like raging Jew-haters. I was in a daze.

And I remember when I was just a wee thing reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time. It’s in The Two Towers, I think, when we first encounter the armies from the east and south of Middle-Earth who are allied with Sauron. They are “swarthy” and “slant-eyed”. Generally, in LotR, anyone swarthier than an inbred Anglo-Saxon is morally suspect; I recall a “sallow” Southerner rousing our heroes’ suspicion in Bree, later being likened to a goblin. Now, because I take after the European side of the family, I generally identify as White; but reading that, I was keenly aware of my Asianness.

If it ain’t literature it’ll be sci-fi or fantasy or comics; they’ll get you every time.

I’m going to go pet the cat. There is nothing happier than a cat getting a good scratch under the chin.

Hypothetical Question

If, somehow, I found a way to get to the Angoulême International Comics Festival, who should I check out/cosplay as/learn more about/say hi to? I depend on your expert wisdom.

So far, I am leaning towards cosplaying as Seth. I will wear a fedora, round glasses, and an expression of profound, nostalgic melancholy.

The health-care assistant dips a piece of litmus paper into the vial of urine, draws it out, and compares the colours to a chart. Glancing up at me abruptly: “Do you have diabetes?”

“Er…no. I don’t think so.” Shouldn’t she be the one giving the answers?

“When did you last eat?”

“Two-ish, maybe?” It’s evening now.

She frowns at the bit of paper again. “Wash your hands.” When I’ve done so she pricks my finger and draws the little drop into a digital thingamabob. The number means nothing to me, but it puzzles her: “Well, blood sugar’s fine.” She tells me to make a doctor’s appointment.

The discrepancy is probably nothing, but alarming nevertheless. Yes, I know that diabetes has gone from an early death sentence to a common, serious but manageable medical condition. But it’s an annoyance. And I like my sweets, damn it all.

I’ll make an appointment tomorrow, before they need me too much at work.

P. S. I discovered, rather too late, that the Angoulême comics festival is coming up in only three weeks’ time. Getting travel and accommodation together in time is a bit of a gamble and I will probably end up just attending next year’s.

P. P. S. Must go, cat wants love.