A quick one to say I’ve been thinking a lot about the different subtitles they’ve slapped on Lewis Hyde’s The Gift through the years, mostly because it was only this year I learned that the original 1983 edition looked like this:
I LOVE IT. WHY DID THEY CHANGE IT. WHAT GIVES.
The whole thing is a far cry from 2019’s:
As well as the copy I first encountered (published in 2007), which features a third option:
Which is…fine? It’s fine.
BUT WHO BURIED THE LEDE ON THE EROTIC LIFE OF PROPERTY?!
Audre Lorde originally presented “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” as a paper in 1978, but it wasn’t published in Sister Outsider until 1984—just one year after the first edition of The Gift came out.
(There’s a nice write-up of this design on Fonts in Use, if you’re into that sort of thing, *cough*ROBIN*cough*)
I wonder about this post-70s literary landscape, everything still reverberating with the energy of the 60s, the explosive visibility of sexuality in American youth culture, the rising tide of queer voices—but also the broader definition of eroticism.
I just re-read Katherine Angel’s Unmastered: a Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell, which I picked up after Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again. Her exploration of eroticism veers more towards the question of what to do with desire that resists being codified, named, and negotiated in explicit terms. How do we reckon with consent culture alongside the lure of the unknown? What of discovery? What of the secret third thing?
Kate Wagner coming in at the right moment here with this essay:
A situational eroticism is what is needed now, in our literalist times. […] Arousal is a matter of the self, which takes place within the body, a space no one can see into. It is often a mystery, a surprise, a discovery. It can happen at a small scale, say, the frisson of two sets of fingers in one’s hair at once. It is beautiful, unplanned and does not judge itself because it is an inert sensation, unimbued with premeditated meaning. This should liberate rather than frighten us. Maybe what it means doesn’t matter. Maybe we don’t have to justify it even to ourselves.
This draft has been languishing because I don’t have a neat bow to slap on the end of this. If there’s anything I’m thinking of, though, it’s that Hyde (or his publisher) wasn’t wrong to foreground eroticism in that first edition of the book. Eroticism is creativity, and neither are as much work as they are play.
Instantly delighted by the premise and format of Genderswap.fm, a classy little database made by Eva Decker that catalogues covers and original tracks sung by artists of different genders. (Particularly love getting to filter by tags like “more danceable” or “less acoustic”.)
A number of fantastic ducks lined up in the month of June and I want to talk about all of them, but there isn’t time to do it in one giant post. One duck, however, took the form of appearing at the 14th International Melville Society Conference to speak about my time aboard the Charles W. Morgan eleven years ago. (You can read the comic about that trip here.)
I read Moby-Dick for the first time a handful of years ago and loved it, but I wouldn’t call myself a Melville scholar. However, attending this conference felt like a great chance to scratch the academic itch without, say, going to grad school.
I ended up spending the whole week taking visual notes, which allowed me to drop into a type of weightless, fixated attention that I’ve really missed in my caregiving life. It also helped give me something to do during panels where I felt a little, uh, out of my depth.
When I’m drawing, words just wash over me. I can pluck the ones that resonate in the moment, then step back at the end of the hour and get a picture of what I took away from the talk. I particularly loved the freedom to just wander into panels where I had no idea what the speakers were talking about, only to come away newly-enthused about some niche avenue into Melville’s work.
Time and time again the attendees emphasized how unique this conference is in its warmth and intellectual diversity. I met scientists and art historians and medievalists and printmakers and disability scholars and tall ship sailors and filmmakers and many, many professors. It was a dreamy, albeit intense, four days.
Here are the notes from every talk I attended, all drawn straight to ink during the speakers’ presentations (usually about 20 minutes per person).
The biggest takeaway was that we need embedded cartoonists at all sorts of academic conferences—and the demand is there! People were so thrilled to see this kind of work coming out of the event, and there are lots of journals hungry to publish unusual creative content alongside academic papers.
Something to pursue…eventually. Got a couple things* to wrap up first.
“It is maybe not functionally possible to design social networked technology geared towards listening. I don’t know, I’m not that smart. But the fact that the internet doesn’t have a mechanism for listening means that we’ve invented these kludgy quantification mechanisms to try and detect attention, and it is easy, so incredibly easy there are multiple books written about this, to confuse the thing you’re measuring for the metric itself.
I want to know who is visiting my site and whether they’re returning visitors and what pages they clicked through and for how long because it gives me the illusion of knowledge and control. Maybe I’ll know my project is connecting with people if I just hit some arbitrary threshold of pageviews, subscribers, conversion rate.
But none of that will tell me the thing I actually want to know, which is: am I making a difference?”
Hey I loved this. It also reminded me to go check up on the phone line and see if there were any messages that needed witnessing. I keep them close to the chest because that’s part of the project, but I will say that there were and they moved me to tears. Maybe that’s what it’s all about.
“I feel the answer to your question will always exist outside the world as it presents itself, beyond the matters of the day, distinct from the temporal. It will be found within the mysterious, the unsettled, and the sacred, that faraway and intangible place where truth and music and your father reside.”
Cat’s been out of the bag for a while: I’d rather be operating a switchboard than a megaphone these days.
To that end: I’ve been hosting more Zoom calls for my Patreon crew to hang out together, build community, and talk about their creative and adventurous projects on the regular. It turns out it’s extremely nice to do!
This month we’ve got a real treat: Patron Josh Horton will be giving a presentation about his journey around Cape Horn aboard the Dutch tall ship Oosterschelde. Josh joined up as part of Darwin200, an audacious voyage that’s been tracing the original path of HMS Beagle since 2023. They’re doing amazing work, and I’m really looking forward to getting a peek aboard.
The call happens Monday, May 12th at 11am Pacific Time. You can find the Zoom link and everything here. Can’t wait!
A quick event notification: I’ve got a free talk coming up Wednesday, April 9th! I’ve spent the last few months doing a deep dive on KELP FARMING for the folks at Blue Robotics, and now I’m giving a presentation on what it takes to translate the world of aquaculture into words and pictures.
While working on this project I’ve gotten an in-person tour of Ocean Rainforest’s pilot farm here in Southern California and read more than I can say about different farming methods and kelp life cycle stages in order to craft a big informational poster about the history of humans and kelp. Building on these experiences, plus some work I’ve done in the past for the Schmidt Ocean Institute and Mystic Seaport, I’ll be hosting an hour-long presentation on how cartoonists can help translate and transform everything from kelp farming to ocean conservation to maritime history. This talk is geared toward aspiring or practicing science communicators, industry nerds looking to widen their reach, and anyone curious about the world of kelp farming.
Hope to see you Wednesday, April 9th at 9am Pacific/12pm Eastern. Register for free here.
A nice thing: attended my first Journal Club last week to hear Ezra give a talk about credit card points and airline travel (MORE FUN THAN IT SOUNDS). Journal Club launched in 2011 when a group of Cambridge-based grad students wanted a place to come together and discuss their research. They’ve now been running bi-weekly events for 14(!) years and expanded their purview to include talks like:
The Politics of the Hat
Inca Bureaucracy
The Jack-O’-Lantern: History, Culture, Practice
PCR Tests
Vexillology and YOU!
Sea Chanteys: work songs of sailors, dockworkers, and fishers
Consider the Owl
Horse Theft
Using Shadow Puppetry in Environmental Education
And, of course:
spoooooooooooky nature
Where have these people been all my life?
In the half-hour before Ezra started his talk we had a bit of a meet and greet, and I mentioned something about making books and one of the organizers got excited about having that talk on the roster. I can do a self-publishing talk in my sleep at this point, but I still felt a bit of the old rush. I do love to get up in front of a crowd and wave my hands.
As I listened to Ezra wax rhapsodic about aviation history, however, I started to think of something else.
In 2017 I attended PWL Camp at the Kickstarter offices in Brooklyn. It was an un-conference, which is basically a roll-your-own event where folks propose panels and workshops throughout the weekend and mash together a schedule in real time. I learned about people’s favorite kitchen implements (THE FISH SPATULA), third culture kids (giving me language I’d never had before to discuss my upbringing), and fine press printing, but the talk I’ve never forgotten was “Are you worried about your parents? Me too” by Libby Brittain.
Libby was 25 when she started caring for her mom, who had early-onset Alzheimer’s and was too feisty to stay in a memory care facility. I had never met another person in their 20s who was so open about the experience of caring for a parent. PWL took place a few months before the fateful Thomas Fire Evacuation Debacle, which triggered my dad’s official dementia diagnosis, but I’d already been worrying about him for years.
I accepted my role as a caregiver in fits and starts, but I know that talk was a turning point. The room was packed. It was the first time I’d really grappled with the idea that everyone will face these questions sooner or later. Even if you don’t have biological parents in your life, you’ll have elders. If you don’t have elders, you’ll have your own aging and mortality to contend with. In disability justice the term temporarily able-bodied or TAB encompasses this truth.1
I remember less about the contents of Libby’s talk than I do the feeling of being in the room. It turns out she went on to run a newsletter during the early pandemic called Our Parents, Ourselves, which I can’t believe I missed at the time.2 I’m trying to pace myself going through the archives today, but wow there’s gold in there. (This review of a book on dementia I’d never heard of about erasure and darkness and rewriting the narrative of memory loss as loss of self? GIVE IT TO ME.)
All these threads came to the surface during Ezra’s talk and I realized that what I really want to get into in public these days is care work and grief and coping with a universal human experience that people want to talk about, but often can’t. (I scratched a similar itch talking about money in 2016 and imposter syndrome in 2018. Turns out I’m always trying to illuminate the thing that feels big but unspoken at any given moment in my life.)
This led to a poll on Patreon (you can vote in it! I hope you do!) about what elements of caregiving people might most want to explore. For all my jawboning about the ubiquity of this experience, I’ll admit I was still startled by the number of comments. People are always already doing this work in their own lives—that’s what makes this such an electric thread of curiosity.
Anyway: Journal Club was fun. The next one’s about rockets. And I’m betting sooner or later you’ll see me on the roster getting ready to talk about the ins and outs of care work. As I read this morning in my friend Kat’s newsletter (quoting Douglas Rushkoff, via a tipoff from Rosie Spinks):
When you can’t be an agent of change, aim to be an agent of care.
A good elaboration/complication of the phrase via Laurie Toby Edison’s blog. ↩︎
For someone writing a newsletter from the current trenches, Roger Mckeever’s is a great choice. ↩︎
The mushy middle can be too welcoming to the right, but the puritanical part of the left has a perpetual unwelcoming committee for people who are not in perfect agreement or all up on the terminology and stuff. If organizing consists of building movements through finding common ground and motivating people with a sense of confidence and possibility, this is pretty much a tactic of disorganizing, of coalition prevention and driving people away by making them fearful of getting anything even slightly wrong. It can be a conscious technique of sabotage, but I believe it’s most often an unconscious technique by people who think the assignment is to be perfect rather than to be powerful. By powerful I mean achieving your goals, realizing your hopes, and that’s most often done incrementally, imperfectly, and by working with people who don’t agree with you about everything. Maybe getting them to agree with you through an exercise of skill and even compassion.
Rebecca Solnit bringing the perfect coda to yesterday’s post via her newsletter, Meditations in an Emergency. Makes me think of Mariame Kaba talking about “the Lefts” during that For the People call I attended back in December. It was such a small shift in language but it did so much to embody the kind of thinking Solnit calls for here.
You don’t have to join people but maybe you have to be ready to welcome them when they’re ready to join you.
Every day when I sign out of our company slack, I post a moon emoji to signal ‘goodnight’. I’m careful to choose the actual correct moon emoji for the time: 🌑 🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘, as is appropriate to the day. I don’t know why, except I like the idea of incepting my coworkers with some kind of moon-sense. But for my site, I wanted something more specific to my spot in the world – and the moon is a global phenomenon.
I have never loved anything more. (Also his reading blog? Swoon.)
Next hop, all in: I’m a big fan of the moon.
I’ve been running a space via Patreon for the past year and change called Nü Mün Creative Club, which helps folks carve out two hours of dedicated monthly time to attend to what truly matters to them. Wherever you fall on lunar wooga wooga stuff, the fact remains: new moon time is DARK. It’s secret and quiet and a good time to focus on things I care about that need to be just for me. But doing that together? It rules. We get to have our secrets in concert.
Funny, then, that it felt so much harder to launch a similar Community Hour (also via Patreon, but free) for people to gather on Zoom at the other end of the lunar cycle. Launching something full moon-adjacent is scarier because it’s light. You gotta be visible.
I’m trying to illuminate the people who spend time in this online space I’ve created—to rest a little more weight on the ties that hold us to each other. It’s important work, but the kind of thing that’s taken a back seat during a season when I need people who are close enough to hang out with my dad of an evening so he doesn’t fall over.
Sideways hop on a tenuous single foot: Matt’s post also introduced me to Low-tech Magazine‘s SOLAR-POWERED WEBSITE.
Because our load (the server) has a rather constant power use, during the day our battery meter reflects the local solar conditions. If the panel receives full sun, the voltage will raise above 13V, coloring the whole website in yellow. However, if it gets cloudy, the battery meter will decrease and the blue background is revealed. During the night, the battery meter reflects the storage capacity of the battery accurately.
When the voltage of the battery drops below 12V, and the whole page is coloured in blue, the solar charge controller shuts down the system and the website goes offline. It will come back when the panel receives full sun again.
I’ve been on the hunt for something as clear and useful as their explainer on building small solar power systems for ages. Instant bookmark.
A further hop-skip in this direction: I totally forgot that I wrote an essay for the inaugural issue of The Disconnect, a magazine you have to turn your wi-fi off in order to read.
Returning to the main business with both feet on the next square: I’m feeling the tension Matt names between global and local phenomena in my online habits these days. Ojai and its surrounding unincorporated areas are home to a little over 10,000 people. That’s about the number of folks who follow me on Instagram or (RIP) Twitter, and realistically a very small percentage of those people live anywhere nearby.
But I care a lot about what happens here! I wish I could bring all my cool internet pals down to my studio for a drawing night, or meet up at the newly-reopened Ojai Playhouse for a free screening, or have a community picnic at the park. This is something living in Portland was pretty good for—I could throw a wide invite net onto social media and reliably have a crew gather for An Event.
I’m working on building that network here, and it’s coming along, but it’s different. It’s always different everywhere you go.
(Maybe come get your portrait drawn for free next month at Night Bart’s?)
A one-footed leap to the next tenuous link in this thought cloud: I’ve seen a handful of links to Elise Granata‘s newsletter in the past week and finally clicked through this morning and oh wow, what a crush-worthy human. This one about “7 ideas to jumpstart community practice” is riffing on the local web-weaving theme. I’m grinning and nodding along to bulletin boards and email lists and all the ways beyond social media we can find out what’s going on around us. (I have yet, however, to find a good substitute for Pete‘s rainfall gauge reportage on Instagram.)
For the purpose of this piece, I’m thinking about agency on the (seemingly) smallest scale. I experience agency when I sew a button back onto my sweater that has been dangling for months. When I tidy up my clothes chair that I have been meaning to tidy for months. When I mail a friend a letter…that I have been meaning to mail for months. (There is a theme and the theme is “for months”.)
It is desiring something and acting on that desire so that it leaves your consciousness and now exists alongside you in the real world.
Agency occurs when: the gap between the idea and the realization of the idea is as small as possible.
^ That’s the mock-up and realization of my studio window display, which has only grown more elaborate as time’s gone by.
I get halfway through before I realize these things are the sign I need to make the thing I want to make for my neighbors—a little zine introducing myself and trying to build out my map of who lives where in my immediate surroundings. Our street has no sidewalks. Traffic is fast, and most places are set back from the road. Hence: no trick-or-treating when I was a kid, no cul-de-sac games of basketball in the road. But I’ve met a couple people while dog-sitting (a dog walk is the perfect opportunity to strike up a conversation with a neighbor) and I’m curious. I want to know who else calls this road home.
The questions that kept stopping me were things like “What if nobody writes back?” “How can I be sure I’m reaching out to people who are aligned with me?” “Should I use a burner number?” “Do I need to make an online component?” “What if I just end up reinventing NextDoor with all the NIMBY racism that entails?”
Mailing a zine doesn’t require answers to any of those things. Not really. It’s an excuse to do something that might spark surprise and delight in the people around me. It’s laying groundwork for something to come. I want to trust that the right people will find each other; will find me.
Last square, both feet: My new friend asks “So…what are your dreams?” as we sit under the awning at Rainbow Bridge with a tumultuous downpour flooding the streets.
