Hey everybody. Are you doing your goodbye Rumsfeld dance? I am so looking forward to not having the same weird dreading-the-apocalypse feeling quite as bad on Sunday nights when the quiet catches up with me. It was bad this fall, after just reading the review of the new Cormac McCarthy, not to mention the elephants-going-crazy article. Monsters on Sundays worse than ever this fall. But now, I hope, better.
I had an amazing time at University Bookstore here in Seattle Tuesday night reading with Brangien Davis and Holiday Reinhorn--we had lots of fun. Thank you so much to everyone who came out. I showed Ariel Bordeaux's genius slideshow from the Grace Comics Showcase--Ariel's idea of viscerality being this key thing that women's comics do that men's comics don't so much really struck me. The slides she pulled together from various women comics artists really demonstrate that: hearts, guts, va-jay-jays, embarrassing painful truly vulnerable moments at summer camp and elsewhere, and also, the viscerality of a direct link to the natural world. Viscerality is missing from chick lit, for sure. It's also largely absent from work by women that fits easily into those male bastions of American letters that shall not be named. Seattle readers are so engaged and had lots of fun, smart questions--it really was a great night.
Two whispers from New York:
1) The Times reports that television is still a man's man's man's world (try not to die of shock)
2) Elsewhere, in breaking news of the visceral, complete with an anatomically correct diagram: Grand Army Plaza is a giant vagina (thanks Christine for the eyeopening link)
xoxoElizabeth