Season's Greetings from a Mixed Marriage

So, Coco and I have a mixed marriage: I celebrate Apple Day and she celebrates Rudolph Christmas.

Let me explain.

I was brought up in the traditional mid-century American Catholic Christmas tradition, one comprising equal parts conspicuous devotion and unbridled greed. At some point, I disengaged from both elements of that tradition, the religious and the commercial. Gone were nativity scenes, advent calendars, and midnight mass, along with the gift lists, mountains of wrapping paper, and shopping stress.

For some years, the holiday passed completely unmarked; when I worked in law enforcement and campus security, I was frequently working on December 25 anyway, so it was relatively easy. But generally it was hard to competely ignore the celebratory nature of the season, so I looked for another holiday to make my own. Celebrating Hanukkah or Kwanzaa didn't seem right and Solstice was too woo-woo for me. I briefly considered Yuletide and Saturnalia, but didn't have the energy to get beyond superficial appropriation.

Then I lit upon Isaac Newton's Birthday.

You may find Newton's birthday listed as January 4, 1643, but at the actual time of his birth that date was December 25, 1642. You see, although Pope Gregory introduced his new calendar in 1582, Great Britain didn't adopt it until after 1700, so when Newton was born, days were still reckoned under the Julian calendar. Despite the post-facto alignment to the Gregorian calendar, Newton was born on Christmas.

What better figure to use to co-opt the season to a secular humanist celebration than the father of calculus, gravitation, optics, and so much more ?

Thus was born the holiday of Isaac Newton's Birthday, called Apple Day for short, and abbreviated INB. New traditions arose: the hanging of prisms and rainbows, and the gifting of apples -- and the eating of apple pancakes! Reason became the reason for the season.

Then came Coco.

Now, Coco's upbringing was far different from mine. While her family was nominally Lutheran, they were not churchly folk, and Coco's grasp of Christian tradition was tenuous at best. (This became glaringly apparent when she became for a short time the Parish Administrator of an Episcopalian parish, but that's another story.) As a result, her practice of the holiday season has never involved much religious worship. She was raised doing gifts, yes, but with less greed and more art than a lot of families; she seems to have avoided ever getting too caught up in the overblown commercialism of the season (further proof, if any were needed, that she is a much Better Person than I).

Mostly Coco connects the season with snow (she loves snow), festive lights, decorations, animated Christmas stories, gathering with family, and sharing love. There's a lot of fairly traditional iconography in her holiday celebration, but generally from the generic end of the scale: lights and pine boughs and snowflakes and stars, mostly. She has been calling it Rudolph Christmas, a sort of wintry wish for goodwill.

And I can get behind that; it reflects the spirit of what I have called TV-Movie Christmas. You know the movies I mean: through a little snowy melodrama in a small town or old neighborhood, a cranky guy rediscovers joy, some lonely people find friends, a mean character becomes kind, and a diverse group of people create community. Dickens's A Christmas Carol in modern dress.

 But frankly, right now couldn't we use even the hokiest reminders that kindness and caring are important and that we should all demonstrate a little compassion and generosity in our personal, professional, and public lives?

So whatever you celebrate at this time of year, from whatever source your goodwill springs, I wish you peace and joy, and I ask you to spread love and hope wherever you can.

And may Sir Isaac Newton Bless us, every one.

Murray Tacoma

So, I once saw a slide like this one while watching Johnny Carson, and I thought if I ever wrote a story about a talk-show host on the run, he would use Murray Tacoma as an alias... y'know, because if you pronounce "More To Come" kinda funny, it sort of sounds like... ah, never mind.

I never wrote that story anyway, and it's not the only thing that has gone unwritten, especially lately.  O tempora! O mores! indeed, and I'm not sure which has a greater inhibiting effect, the tempora or the mores.

Eight posts and ten months ago, I talked about how hard it was to write these little posts with the very real threat of an authoritarian kleptocracy in the nation's capital. We've had precious few victories in the first eleven months of 45's term, and setback after setback to human rights, economic equity, scientific inquiry, rule of law, and productive politics.  It seems like we all should just be blogging about the current state of affairs, all the time, but I am not sure it is in me to do that, partially because I am not sure anyone cares. A rather sorry state of affairs.

And I wonder whether blogging per se is the way to communicate anything I want to say. The numbers on my consolidated blogs are minuscule; I could probably get as many readers by printing a 'zine and leaving it on laundromat benches. But I am loathe to abandon the relative independence of the blog for a corporatized commons. And in that indecision lies paralysis.

But there's a new year coming, and a chance for renewal and rebirth, or at least rejuvenation. Let's see how that turns out, shall we.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with this: Martin Luther King is often quoted as having said "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." It's really hard to see that curvature right now, and it is indeed dispiriting to see what appears to be a trends in the opposite directions. But Dr. King was paraphrasing Transcendentalist Theodore Parker, and the original quotations goes like this:

 "I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."

So maybe we just have to hang in there, and move along the curve until our sight catches up with its arc.

Let's hope so.

An embarassment of riches

So, if I complained, one of my complaints might be that I often don't have (or perhaps make) enough time for reading. I don't think I can say that right now, as my shelf is overflowing with just-reads and need-to-reads, thanks to a concatenation of circumstances: used bookstore visits, a new comic shop in the neighborhoods, a birthday, and some miscellaneous acquisitions.

Here's the rundown:

Grinding on:

At the beginning of this year, I told the story of finding this lost treasure in my paean to Henderson's Books, and I started reviewing the individual short stories on He is a Thark shortly thereafter. That project stalled, and I am sure that part of the reason was the gap between my memory of the stories and their actuality. Maybe the jaded, tired eyes of a middle-aged man can't see as clearly as teenager, or maybe the stories really aren't that good. I may take up this task again, but it might be more in nostalgia than joy.

In progress (one for a while, one for a bit):
 

The Sellout is a prizewinning satire of American culture and race relations; I found it exhausting to read, akin to what I imagine listening to a recitation of Howl in its entirety might be. It was lent to me by someone, so I guess I should finish it and /or give it back. Citizen is a book of poetic prose or prosey poetry with pictures, lent to me by Coco, that explores a lot of the same themes. I think this one will come back to the top of the stack; I enjoyed it but just got distracted away.

Done for a ducat, word book division:

One some visit to Henderson's when we were killing time, I fell down the rabbit hole and came back out with four books that I whipped through in short order.  

Journey to Fusang was an alternate history novel by William Sanders that I had never read. On the recent occasion of his death, I thought it would behoove me to do so. It was fantastic - the man had real genius.  In both characters and settings, this is a memorable work.

Near this novel on the shelf happened to be another alternate history - The Aquiliad, by Thai author Somtow Sucharitkul. Since I can't say no to the Roman Legion meets Native Americans sub-genre, I had to pick it up. Sucharitkul is... interesting. The book, a collection of longish short stories, is worth reading and enjoyable, but with an odd feel to it. Like a tasty drink that leaves a strange aftertaste.

Bottomlands contained one alternate worlds story I had read already (but enjoyed re-reading); its sequel, which I had not read (and enjoyed just as much); and another stand-alone alternate world tale that was a nice, tight yarn that would make a great movie (in the best sense of that compliment - I felt the same way about Arthur Clarke's Fall of Moondust).

Harry Turtledove's Supervolcano: Eruption, on the other hand, would need to be an HBO multi-season series - like every story Turtledove tells these days, this one is going to require three or four novels to conclude. I don't know why I keep reading Turtledove. I remember Gore Vidal saying something about authors having only a certain number of characters that they keep writing over and over - he put Shakespeare at something like twenty, and himself at ten or twelve. Turtledove is in the group that have three or four, and they just keep showing up in his endless, epic sagas, recycled into different professions and settings. I guess it's just his mastery of creating plausible alternate worlds that keeps me coming back - although Eruption is more in the vein of Lucifer's Hammer and The Stand in terms of post-cataclysm-world-building.

Done for a ducat, graphic book division:

I had heard all the buzz about DC's Young Animal imprint and even seen some previews and excerpts online, so I "waited for the trade" and picked up Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye and Doom Patrol. If I were still in Seattle I'd consider "waiting for the library to get a copy" - that would have saved me a nice piece of change on these two TPBs. It wasn't that they were awful; it's just that they were a little too self-consciously edgy to be authentically good. Or maybe my expectations were just too high.

High expectations were likely the case for the other trade I waited for, Future Quest, DC's epic crossover of the Saturday morning cartoon characters from my youth. The conceit had me from the beginning: seeing all the characters from my personal Golden Age* - Jonny Quest, Space Ghost, The Herculoids, and more - share the stage and adventure together. And that part was cool - even the updating and modifying of the various characters, filling in some backstory to make sense of it all, worked well. It's just that the story itself seemed desultory. I was put in mind of nothing else beside Total Eclipse, the 1988 project that shoehorned every character published by the Eclipse company into one pedestrian story. Still, I'll probably get volume two, just for the nostalgia value. I wonder what younger readers will make of this - or have they been exposed to the characters through cable TV and the web enough for them to resonate?

On deck, word book division:

Trumpet of Conscience and Utopia for Realists are both birthday gifts that were on my get-list. I need to experience Dr. King's words in the entirety, rather than in sound bites and pull-quotes, and Bregman's book strives to get to the solution of a great underlying problem in today's world, wealth and income inequality. The Nordic Theory of Everything was a staff recommendation at out local Village Books, and Coco and I bit on this look at social change. All three of these might help make sense of the current situation.

Coco has been getting me with Houghton-Mifflin's Best American Comics collection on my birthday every year since 2006 (see below). This year she decided to add their Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy collection to that tradition, and she gave herself a running start by reaching back to grab 2015 and 2016 as well. Hoo-boy, I have my work cut out.

This book might be easier - I think I have read most of Howard Waldrop's oeuvre already, so this collection of short stories will likely be a revisit. But Waldrop is well worth revisiting, and besides, who could resist that cover? Not me, apparently.

On deck, graphic book division:

I have only dipped a toe into the world of Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo but have long wanted to dive in. Finding these phonebooks at a cool comic book store in Vancouver seemed a great way to get a whole great load of the rabbit ronin. First looks shows that each panel seems every bit as complex and gorgeous as the bits I have experienced before. Looking forward to these.

Who knew that DC's adaption of a Hanna Barbera property would become the premier source of social commentary and biting satire in the comics world? Not me - but The Flintstones seems to be just that, at least from the previews and excerpts I have read. This might be at the top of the graphic book pile.

And last but not least: Best American Comics 2017 (see above). This time around, it's edited by Ben Katchor, and I am really interested in seeing what his sensibility is like. The volume editor really does make a different - Scott McCloud's choices and style in 2014 spoke to me most clearly. We'll see how this one is.

That's the lot. I had better get to it. Who knows, I might even blog about some of these.

* "The golden age of science fiction is twelve."

~ Peter Graham

Diamond Jubilee

So, I recently passed a milestone. (Better than a gallstone, amirite? I'm here all week.) My birthday this past week saw me hitting the big round 60.

I marked the last of my fifties with a day; for this landmark is sort of spent a whole week celebrating.

It started on Saturday last week with Geek Girl Con, the celebration of popular culture, art, and science for the female half of the population. I have attended all but one of these events since they started - I missed last year. Well, I re-upped this year, joined by perennial con pal Margaret (who cosplayed Mac, the doctor from Miss Fishers Murder Mysteries).

 Margaret, worn out and resting in Introvert Alley

Last visit I mentioned that GGC might be starting to show its age a bit; this visit I noticed that the con seemed smaller, both less-attended, with fewer vendors/exhibitors, and not as many Big Names. There was some internal staff kerfuffle earlier in the year; I am not sure if that contributed to the perceived admonishment, or if we're getting con fatigue, or what. Nonetheless, there were several bright spots - some, of course, in the cosplay:

I was thrilled to see a crossplay Jason Momoa Aquaman even before the movie is out!

Perhaps even more exciting was encountering this 80s/90s Kimiyo Hoshi version of Dr. Light! She seemed very grateful that someone recognized her...

I truncated my con attendance to one day, because Sunday I was DMing a big Dungeons and Dragon session at my old haunt, Wayward Coffeehouse. They made me feel very welcome after two years away, reserving the best table:

Here's the party of adventurers:

And here's the party of players:

Yup, after a six-year hiatus, it was the return of DM Walaka and his All-Girl Band of Murder Hoboes, renamed the Wonder Woman, Wonder Women Celebratory Campaign! It was a swell six-and-a-half hour adventure with an awesome group of creative and energetic players. Thrill, chills, and spills were all to be had, and an awesome (if I do say so myself) Unexpected Plot Twist at the end.

Fighting giant snakes!

Entering the dragon's skull!

A seriously great time.

Then Monday I was sick as a dog. Margaret called it Con Crud, and I found out she was under the weather that day as well, and that it was not uncommon for convention attendees to get sick. I was so far under the weather I'd have had to climb up to feel lousy, but it passed with a night's sleep. Disappointing that it was the perfect day for my memorial walk or bike ride, and I had to miss that.

Which left Tuesday for an adventure with Coco!

Using the power of the Nexus pass and our as yet still-friendly nearby border crossing, we headed up to Vancouver to visit a Value Village; the IKEA (to try the Swedish Veggie balls)...
 

... another Value Village; a comic book store; the beach; a game store; and what may be the finest vegetarian restaurant in North America, The Acorn. A fantastic day that won/t be beat for a long time.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were spent on college business in Longview, Washington. The less said about that the better, but oy vey was it depressing.

And Saturday capped off the revels with a party attended by friends I have known for up to 35 years and friends I have met since moving to Bellingham two years ago. It made me feel all George Bailey, really.

I have been told that at 60 I am now officially distinguished. I don't know about that, but I did get a senior discount at Value Village, so that's something. All in all, I feel like I'm finally getting the hang of this stuff called living. So here's to another 60 years of maybe getting it right - I promised Coco.

Ramp back up

Lexicon

So, way back in the primordial days of blogging, my now-friend and once-editor Richard Bensam was known to me only as RAB, the fellow who ran an interesting site:

The content was great fun, a mix of comics, pop culture, politics, movies, and quotidian tidbits. Now you can find some writings on Richard's Google+ account, and link farms on his newer blog, Avedon's Sideshow, but like most of us primeval bloggers, he has moved onto other things. (That's the actual most-recent post in the screenshot.)

As much as I loved that early content, that's not what I wanted to talk about today. I want to talk about the title: Estoreal. As it says on the tin, it's a made-up word that seems like it ought to mean something. Really, I checked the first time I saw it, just to make sure, because it feels so much like a genuine, bona fide word. It rolls off the tongue so easily and so familiarly that one is almost tempted to try to bluff one's way though and pretend to know the meaning. It is so captivating a word that it took me a while to realize that as a title it might be a modest meta-commentary on the blog entries themselves. A perfect blog title if I ever read one.

I was put in mind of Estoreal recently, when, on a quick trip across the border to the beachfront tourist town of White Rock, British Columbia, I came across this sign:

Besoreal! Oh, what a delightful counterpoint! Synonym? Antonym? Cousin? Who knows, but it tickles the ear just as satisfyingly. What a wonderful serendipity.


Not to bring us too much down to Earth, but, inspired by this reawakening of memory, I did play with these in Google Translate. If you cut the words in two just before the "real" and call them Spanish, esto real is rendered as this is real, but beso real returns royal kiss.

If the words have to mean something, those are pretty good choices (and Estoreal is still a great blog title). Me, I'll just hold onto them as half-heard scraps of some language that I think I know, but really don't.

Indulge me

So, some time back around 2011 I wrote a piece for a Minutes to Midnight, a collection of essays about Watchmen, the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel (actually a set of serialized comics), which ranks up there with Maus and The Dark Knight Returns as one of The Important Works of modern comics history from the 1980s. That's me up there discussing the project on YouTube a couple of years later with our editor and my interwebs pal Richard Bensam, Julian Darius from Sequart, the publisher, and contributor Geoff Klock.

This experience came back to me recently when I was notified by an academic papers website to which I subscribe that I had been cited in some papers. I knew it must be this essay that was cited. I didn't want to pay the premium to see the citations on the papers site, so I just Googled and found three academic papers that used my essay as source.

Only because I had mentioned to a friend at work today how, as a technical college dean, I do so little pedagogical work - most of my time is spent in administrivia, problem-solving, and negotiation - am I going to indulge myself here by going though the citations. It'll remind me that I once was a scholar, and may actually wind up being instructive and/or fun.

First up: a thesis for an M.A. in History of all things.

Here's the only citation from that paper:

 

Pretty straightforward. Next up is a dissertation for a doctorate in English - from Switzerland:

 

There were three citations in the text of this paper:

 ***

 ***

and one more acknowledgement in a footnote:

"All detais" - yeah, I'm comprehensive. And finally, there's this:

According to Google translate, this is another master's thesis, this time in Literature:

Oskari Rantala

Reddish-red copies of the brushes

Repeated boxes  in the cartoon novel Watchmen

Master's thesis  
University of Jyväskylä  
Department of Arts and Culture  
Literature  
March 2014

There are three citations in the paper, but I am only going to show one, since Finnish is so wildly different from English:
  Once again Google translate helps with the text:

Walter Hudsick (2011, pp. 14-16) mentions the MAD magazine parody strip Superduperman! (1953), science fiction book Larry Niven's "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" (1971) and Robert Mayer's novel Super-Folks (1977). Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns, however, brought this revisionist attitude to the first superhero mainstream.

But what I think is even cooler than being cited is having the paragraph in which you are cited interrupted by a footnote citing Umberto Eco! That footnote reads

Umberto Eco (1979, p. 114) has rightly pointed out that Story Men are surrounded by a dreamlike state in which both the earlier and subsequent adventures - the existence of which are known at some level - are very ambiguous, and the contradictions of the stories are not paid attention.

That's it - my academic glory, such as it is. Makes me want to get my own thesis out, and just hold it, like a high school hero holding the game ball from years before.

Nah.

Anyway, if you want to read my essay in its entirety along with a bunch of other good writing, just clock the image below to purchase a copy or look wherever fine, citeable, scholarly works on funnybooks are sold.

Have a Compassionate Fourth

So, I wanted to say something this Independence Day. The current political scene is fraught with the problematical nature of patriotic displays, which seem to have been co-opted by those willing to see our putative democracy slide from oligarchy into downright autocracy while they wave their flags and wear their red baseball caps. But I wanted to try.

I have always wanted feel more patriotic than I do; I suffer from the conflict between appreciating all that the USA promised to be and the understanding of all that it actually has been. Years ago, Robert Mayer's retired hero in Superfolks captured the quandary thus:

I have thought about how to resist that cynicism and support the justice and virtue that we are supposed to stand for.  How do we celebrate Independence Day when our history includes Manifest Destiny, slavery, and exploitation? Where do we start? Perhaps with the constitution.

Justice, tranquility, general welfare, blessings of liberty - those internal values are right there alongside common defense, the only outward-facing purpose articulated. Values which, I might add, seem threatened in some new way just about every day lately. I can get behind these values, the ones we, the people, are supposed to stand for.

We, the People - another piece of the patriotism puzzle that I can't let go of, even though university professors tell us we're no longer a democracy. This piece fits nicely beside the E Pluribus Unum that heads the page - the unifying motto of the U.S. until it was shoved aside by the theocratic In God We Trust in the red-baiting, atheist-hating fifties.

Maybe we can get past our bigotry and xenophobia, embrace the diversity in our country, mend the wounds of colonialism and slavery and sexism and nativism, and build the country that we say we want to be. United together, We, the People, can do this; I can celebrate that.

There's still a hitch in the giddyup before I go shooting off fireworks (although I really can't stand fireworks, since they make life miserable for pets and wildlife, not to mention many veterans.) Even if We, the People, can wrest our democracy back from the oligarchs and the autocrats, we're still stuck in a capitalist, consumerist, corporationist system that does no good to our souls, our world, or our society. Once upon a time, I thought there might be something like compassionate capitalism; I have come to the conclusion that that is a logical impossibility, since capitalism is by its nature exploitative and unfair. And compassion seems to be notably absent from the current political discourse. People seem willing to destroy the planet for profits and to allow people to die rather than feel empathy for them; capitalism is not reflective or empathetic or compassionate. And I believe compassion is what we need.

This divide between compassion and patriotism is explored in this article from the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, which is well worth the reading. But really, the circumstances only leave me with one place to go:

What could be more patriotic than the longstanding American tradition of the red, white, and blue, and, uh, red?

 No, seriously:

I'll be patriotic and keep working toward Democratic Socialism in the USA. That I can celebrate.

So here's some fireworks:

Happy Fourth of July everyone.