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May 24th, 2012
 | 02:35 pm - Finally!
Man, this took me way longer than it should have, but here you go. I've been fiddling with the damn thing for so long that I have to go put my head between my knees now or something, but first a few remarks, such as that I recently reread the Book of Job, specifically Stephen Mitchell's translation, and I was thinking when I drew the whale minyan last time of a few verses from Chapter 12: "But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the LORD hath wrought this?" A fish of the sea totally declares unto Jonah. And God speaks unto the fish! I do that all the time to Bela, but he mostly ignores me.
Another thing about Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Book of Job is his argument in the introduction that Job doesn't get a whole new family at the end of the story, but rather gets his old family back. He points out that God gives Job twice as much of everything else, but the same amount of children, seven sons and three daughters, who seem to be magically grown up at once, and besides this is a fairy tale and it just doesn't work unless the kids come back to life. I agree. So in my mind the dove Jonah gets back in this installment, his soul, is the same dove that was sacrificed by the sailors a few verses ago. After all he has the same soul, and when I rip off Philip Pullman I do it wholeheartedly, by gum.
One more thing: deliberately beaching themselves to snatch prey is something some orca populations do. It looks amazing. Here's the reference photo I used for the first panel:
Of course when I draw a head-on orca it comes out looking like some kind of evil Pokemon, but that actually kind of works.
That's the end of Chapter Two, but if you're worried that Jonah has learned anything from his experiences, put your mind at rest. We'll shortly see that he's the same whiny, ungenerous bigot that he was to begin with. I love this guy!
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May 21st, 2012
| 02:23 am - It's a whale minyan!
I have to edit more so I won't say much this time but the last time Jonah mentioned God's holy temple (it was "thy holy temple" last time and it's "thine holy temple" this time, the letter h has proven confusing in this way for centuries and perhaps millennia) I illustrated the phrase with a breaching killer whale. This time I wanted to do the same, because breaching brings the whale closer to God, but then I got to thinking, how would whales worship, anyway? It seems clear that they would do this in part by spyhopping, which is what they're doing in panel two. Whales spyhop to get a look at what's going on on the surface and to see if maybe there are tasty seals around, but it looks quite prayerful. It's like the weird dance my white rat Melissa used to do, when she'd slowly rise to her hind legs and begin to sway back and forth. It turns out white rats do this because they can barely see and it enables them to use parallax to get a rough idea of the distance of surrounding objects, but they appear to be worshipping some kind of rat god, especially when you don't know the sciencey explanation and you find them doing it at three in the morning.
It occurred to me recently that Jonah is the only Hebrew in this whole book. The sailors are foreigners and the Ninevites, to whom Jonah is to preach, are in what is now Iraq; they aren't Jews, though I imagine they worship the same God or he wouldn't bother with them. And something we'll learn later is that Jonah rejected God's commands because he didn't want the Ninevites to be saved. So one of the things this book teaches is that it's not OK to treat people like crap just because they're different from you, and that if you don't show them kindness you're going to end up inside a fish and then won't you feel silly. Yes! You will! And the prayerful whales of panel two are another rebuke to Jonah because see even whales worship better than you, and as you can see they do not defy God: when God says to swallow a prophet they don't try to swim to Tarshish to get out of it. And if a whale is better to you than you are to other humans, and if its conduct pleases God more than yours does, it's time to rethink the choices you've made in life. Think about them for three days and three nights in this fish. It's a Chosen People time-out for Jonah.
Marginally related: today I saw a good thing, which was a pigeon attacking a hawk. The hawk was circling and the pigeon was dive-bombing it. Probably the hawk was hovering over her nest and the chicks inside. I think she won, too, because after a while I saw the two birds fly off in opposite directions. Hooray for the brave little dove!
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May 17th, 2012
| 03:51 am - Disk blur, motherfuckers!
I remember reading a blog entry in which a cartoonist mentioned how much she loved drawing the back of the knee. I thought, now that's the kind of thing a real artist says. At the moment I have a love-hate relationship with Jonah's robe as he sinks: I don't have confidence in my ability when I start drawing it, but then when I finish it's very satisfying. Look, I drew billows! And a ray. That's an eagle ray.
A few people have asked me why I feel the need to illustrate the Book of Jonah. Well, there's a lot I like about it, but what makes it necessary for me is this part of Jonah's prayer from within the fish. He is talking about drowning, but he's not talking only about drowning literally: he's talking about his soul drowning, fainting, imprisoned, crushed, blind, forever. He says this in the past tense: "the earth with her bars was about me for ever." The mere grammar of this sentiment makes it impossible, but of course it isn't impossible, anyone who has suffered knows it's not impossible. Suffering stops time. That's what makes this part the kernel of the book, for me: Jonah's words here are the best description of depression I have ever read.
I'd like to point out that this is the third time in the book that Jonah has been not-really-alive. The first time was when he went to sleep in the hold while the storm raged outside. That was a spiritual deadness, a numbness to the presence (and omnipresence) of God, and if you think that's a reach, consider how closely it is paralleled later by Jonah's time in the womb-grave of the fish's belly. As above, so below (far, far below): if Jonah wants to play dead, God can help him with that. That's the second time. And the third time, seen in a flashback, is Jonah's drowning, which lasts forever even though it doesn't. I don't know if this is what the author of the book had in mind, but as I set out to draw the second panel I realized that Jonah is bound in weeds as a corpse is bound in cerements. Remember Lazarus tottering out of the vault with a napkin over his face? How scary must that have been to watch? "And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go." Dude, you loose him and let him go. It's scary when people are only kind of dead, and once is bad enough, but Jonah's making a habit of it.
Maybe this is why God chose Jonah specifically for this episode: he wanted someone who would really sell that prayer from inside the fish. He wanted someone so full of himself that he could actually exaggerate a near-death experience.
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May 14th, 2012
| 12:53 pm - Great fish
While Bela is great, he's a freshwater fish. I've promised to include him if I ever draw a story in which a prophet is thrown into a rice paddy.
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May 10th, 2012
| 01:00 am - Jonah Minus Jonah
I tried drawing Jonah in the belly of the whale in the first panel, but it didn't seem to work. I might revisit that idea. (The orca stomach, happily for me, is right below the dorsal fin, which should look nice.) But don't worry, he'll be back after these four verses, because after this is when he spins off into metaphor. The things he talks about in these three panels are things that more or less have really happened to him, except for how he says he's in sheol when really where he is is the belly of a fish. Maybe one of you can tell me if narrating ongoing events as if they were in the past is a common rhetorical device for Hebrew storytellers, because otherwise I have lots of guesses. Is Jonah's monologue in the past tense because he wants to suggest to God that his salvation is inevitable, like the end of The Mikado? Is he in so much pain that he can talk about it only by pretending it's already over? Or is it just that being thankful suggests the past tense, and Jonah wants to express thanks as powerfully as he can?
I like the way God turns Jonah's escape attempt upside down here. Jonah fled by ship in the hope of getting out of God's service area, basically; the storm already showed him how mistaken that idea was, but God, instead of stopping there, actually shoves Jonah farther away -- not to get rid of him, but just the opposite, to show him that there's nowhere God can't find him. There is no such thing as being far away from God. Jonah has clearly learned that lesson, because he's praying now, knowing (or at least fervently hoping) that God hears him in there.
Or, if Jonah is talking about things that really happened in the past, not about what he's currently going through, this is a neat piece of revisionist history: "Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple." Is that right? Because I don't remember it that way, Jonah. The holy temple's back that way, in the opposite direction from Tarshish.
Whichever way he means it, it's soon going to become clear that Jonah is suffering, or has suffered, in ways that can't be explained by what he's literally endured so far. As in the Book of Job, another of my favorites, here the immediate suffering is an excuse to make our antihero a conduit for a universal howl of pain. Job after all has endured a lot, but you'll notice that when he's complaining he doesn't mention any of the specifics, the camels that got hit by lightning or the children crushed by a wall. He speaks of a pain even bigger than that, the suffering of the whole world, spoken of in universal terms. You might expect altruism on such a scale from a guy like Job, who is the most upright man of his time, a father who loves his children and treats everyone with kindness, but we're about to get a bit of something similar from our misanthropic protagonist Jonah. Being in a fish is bad but there's more to it than that, isn't there, Jonah? That's not what's really bothering you. Let's open that up, as my therapist says.
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May 7th, 2012
| 01:51 am - Gruss vom grampus
Finally! How's that for a great fish? Did you know that orcas can get to be about thirty feet long? I didn't! This is a male, as you can tell by his imposing six-foot dorsal fin. I considered drawing a female, as the sea is given a feminine pronoun, but I figured God would want his very greatest great fish on the job and male orcas get a bit bigger than females.
The big question for anyone who illustrates Jonah is how to draw the fish. Most modern readers imagine it as a whale, though there are a few true fish that present themselves as possible candidates, like the great white shark. Of course God could have custom-made his fish -- the text says he "prepared" it -- so it could be just about anything with fins, and I was tempted to draw an enormous betta, but no, I want to figure this out, what would I send if I were God? Sadly I soon ruled out baleen whales, as despite their great size they have tiny throats because they eat tiny things. A blue whale would choke on a full-grown prophet! But most toothed whales and fish tear their food to pieces. And also we want a species that might have been under the boat Jonah was on.
The killer whale is occasionally found in the Mediterranean, it's easily big enough to hold a grown man, and it sometimes swallows its prey whole. It also sometimes partially beaches itself to grab animals off the shore, such as seal pups or what I have to imagine are very surprised deer, and that will come in handy for the reverse process of "vomit[ing] out Jonah upon the dry land." But the real reason I chose the killer whale is that even in antiquity it was associated with death and the underworld. This is a story in which the symbolic sacrifice and death map so closely to what really happens that it's almost not an allegory at all, it almost really is a story of a man who dies and keeps up a running commentary of what it's like to be dead, and that is clearly how we're meant to understand it. The great fish is Jonah's personal portable sheol, and no existing animal fits that description like Orcinus orca, the creature whose scientific name means "whale of the kingdom of the dead." If you prefer, you can call it a grampus, a word I had only ever heard in the old phrase "blowing like a grampus" and didn't even realize referred to a real creature, but there you are, a grampus is an orca. Or, according to my slang dictionary, a blustering person. They both blow, so take your choice.
Also, you can't see a killer whale's eyes. Presumably they've got eyes, but you can't make them out. Here comes toothy eyeless death, Jonah!
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May 3rd, 2012
| 02:53 pm - Between the devil and the deep blue sea
This is only a verse and a half. I wanted to get three verses, but I ran out of draw-juice. And it's quite a dramatic place to break off! Those poor sailors, trying to supplicate someone else's god. What can you do in a situation like that? You can only try to reason with him. And this situation is particularly weird because once you are in the awkward position of standing between a foreign god and the object of his wrath, how often does it then happen that you are told to appease that god by killing one of his followers? No wonder the sailors are beseeching God so earnestly in the first verse: this seems like a big setup, and God's going to say HOW DARE YOU HARM ONE OF MY CHOSEN PEOPLE! as soon as Jonah hits the water.
So that probably explains, at least in part, why the sailors are so reluctant to throw Jonah overboard: you don't appease the Hebrew god by killing a Hebrew, do you? That can't be right! But here's a question: why doesn't Jonah jump? He knows that the only answer is for him to go over the side, and that if he doesn't everyone on board will probably die, yet he lets the sailors waste valuable time trying to row to shore. At first I thought this was yet another example of his refusing to do the right thing until there's no other choice, and of his insistence upon seeing himself as the victim when really he is victimizing others. I won't jump, you have to throw me! You're all mean to me, just like God! I hate you!
But there's another explanation that I think might fit better. In considering how Jesus compared his future three-day death with Jonah's three days in the fish, I began to wonder if being sacrificed might be a necessary part of this ritual. Because let's be clear: Jonah is symbolically dead while in that fish. He speaks of himself as being in hell (I assume that's the Hebrew sheol, the grave, the abode of the dead), and emerging from water is a symbol of rebirth that's probably as old as humanity. Like Jesus, Jonah dies and is reborn to save others -- though he complains about it a lot more; is it possible that he is also like Jesus in that he must not only die but be killed?
And then I realized that Jonah is who Jesus would be if he didn't like people. And if the guys who crucified him were really sympathetic. Jonah is Bizarro Jesus!
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April 30th, 2012
| 01:16 am - T minus four verses to fish
Now I'm just being weird. Dunno if the waves work next to a dark gray surface -- does that make the white between the lines pop and ruin everything forever?
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April 26th, 2012
| 02:06 am - Plot twist!
DING! That's the bell that rings whenever Jonah thinks of someone besides himself. You have not heard it before and will not hear it again.
This is a big chunk of verses, but I wanted this particular series all at once. Look at all that happens here! First, dig how the sailors freak out when they learn just which god's wrath they're experiencing. This guy's a Hebrew! Game over, man! I love that about the Hebrew Bible, how it freely acknowledges that there are other gods and even that those gods have some power. Remember Moses playing any-snake-you-can-conjure-I-can-conjure-better with the Egyptian priests? I'd look up chapter and verse but I'm too tired, I spent about an hour and a half moving that damn dove's eye around to make it look up at Jonah in the last panel. And I'm not sure I succeeded. Anyway, the point is that everyone on that ship has a god, no one expects the sailors to convert to Judaism, a word I think didn't even exist yet, hell they even know how badass the Hebrew god is but until he directly affects their lives there's no call for them to have any truck with him. I like that system. Can we all go back to that system?
Once again the sailors show admirable sangfroid, despite their terror. (I guess you don't go into sailing as a career if you can't keep it together during a storm.) They figure out Jonah is the problem; then they ask him which god they've pissed off; then they ask him how to appease that god. And then, mirabile visu! Jonah, faced with a choice between everyone probably dying and only him probably dying, tells the sailors to throw him overboard. It's not much of an act of altruism, but I think it counts.
And this verse is remarkable for another reason: it marks the first time in the book that Jonah actually makes a prediction. Isn't that nice, that he signals his willingness to prophesy by starting immediately? You win, God. See? I'm predicting the future. I'm predicting the hell out of the future. Now will you stop killing everyone?
Guys, only five more verses until the fish shows up. I'm so excited for the fish.
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April 23rd, 2012
| 01:24 pm - Worst. Hebrew. Ever.
I'm not as enthusiastic about this one as about the previous two, though I do like the groomy dove. I may redo it. Let me know how you think it works.
I find this casting-of-lots thing interesting. Deuteronomy 18 forbids "divination," and casting lots sounds like divination to me, so that the sailors propose it seems to emphasize their non-Hebrewness and that Jonah agrees to it seems to emphasize (once again) that he is a pretty lousy Hebrew. He just won't do what God wants unless he has no other option. God's patience with him throughout this book may be unparalleled in the Bible.
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April 19th, 2012
| 03:23 pm - And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth
Today's Phoenician galley question: what kind of ladders do you suppose they had leading down into "the sides of the ship"? They had rope ladders between the deck and the mast, but that's probably the only kind of ladder you can have for that purpose. Rope ladders are harder to climb, and you wouldn't ever need to move the ladder between the deck and the hold, so probably that would be a wooden ladder, don't you think? The bonus of a rope ladder is that I could make it the kind with wooden rungs: a Jacob's ladder!
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April 16th, 2012
| 01:23 pm - Wake up, time to die
That's a single-masted Phoenician galley Jonah and the sailors are on. I learned a lot about them here and cribbed the design mainly from this tile by nineteenth-century tile designer William de Morgan, who had a thing for ships; also, delightfully, a team of sailors, shipwrights, and historians of various kinds recently built an authentic replica Phoenician galley, so I was able to look at photographs of one, which I had not expected to be able to do. But Eyeteeth, you ask, how did they steer that thing? There's no wheel! I lucked out there in that Phoenician galleys employed steering oars, which meant one less thing to draw, because I figure the sailors wouldn't be using them in this situation.
As for the text, here's where shit gets real. Have I mentioned that I find the Book of Jonah hilarious? Jonah has got to be the worst prophet who ever lived, which I think is kind of the point: that whoever you are, however much of a whiner or a chunkhead, God can use you and he will use you so you'd better be ready to go when you're chosen. Don't be like Jonah here, who is so self-absorbed, so spiritually clueless, that he is about to sleep through the wrath of God. The captain of the ship has to wake him up to pray, which all the other guys on the ship are already doing -- which is the first indication of what is going to become my favorite thing about this episode, the highly sympathetic portrayal of the non-Hebrews. It seems safe to say that Jonah is the only Hebrew on the ship: his people weren't sailors, and he appears to be the only passenger. (Maybe Jonah fled by water because he figured the god of his agrarian people wouldn't think to look for him on a ship among a bunch of Phoenicians and Assyrians.) But all those foreigners are already doing their spiritual duty, calling upon their various gods; it's only the Hebrew, the most chosen individual among the Chosen People, who has to be woken up and told to pray.
Consider Jonah's mission: he has to go to Nineveh and preach to it specifically. The sailors are going to be impressed in a few minutes when they witness the power of Jonah's god, but impressing people of other nations is incidental. Generally, they are to be left alone to worship however they want -- it's not Jonah's problem if they want to worship other, lesser gods. In fact, he is clearly the asshole here for putting them in the path of his god's anger. We'll see in a couple of verses that they repay his disregard for their lives with a regard for his that he has in no way earned. So as I see it, one of the lessons of the Book of Jonah is that people whose beliefs differ from your own can be good, and that you can maybe even learn a thing or two from them about being a good person. And that it's a dick move to endanger people's lives, even if those people aren't from your tribe.
Man, I love this book more and more. It's funny! It's profound! The protagonist is a total jackass who gets swallowed by a fish!
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April 12th, 2012
| 02:59 am - Welcome, doves
The Book of Jonah keeps changing shape as I look at it, and each little part opens like a flower. The name Jonah means "dove," so as you can see I gave him a few. This became all the more appropriate when I learned that Jesus likened himself to Jonah, on account of they both spent three days approximately dead before being approximately reborn: "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." Jesus was a dovey guy too. The one speaking here is sitting in what is supposed to be an almond tree, which is biblical: Genesis calls it "among the best of fruits," and it is one of the first Israeli trees to flower, so it seems fitting for beginnings like the first panel of a comic.
So what is Jonah's problem? Why doesn't he want to go to Nineveh and prophesy? It's not as if he's never prophesied before: he does it in 2 Kings, in which he has a walk-on role as "Jonah, the son of Amittai, the prophet, which was of Gathhepher." (Joppa was about sixty miles from Gathhepher -- not an inconsiderable distance if you have to walk or ride a camel, but a lot closer than Nineveh, which was about 550 miles away.) Partially it could be because being a prophet wasn't a great way to make friends: just ask Jeremiah (if you can find him; he got exiled). But also it's going to turn out later that Jonah just doesn't like the Ninevites. Jonah, you see, is kind of a jerk, and that's one of the things I like so much about his book. He spends the whole time kvetching, disobeying, and putting innocent people at risk, and why? All in an attempt to trick God into destroying a city. (Like God's going to say, "Well, I was going to give Nineveh a chance, but Jonah got on a boat instead so what the hell, I'll just smite them.") It's a good thing Jonah chooses the technique known as "running the hell away," because God can cope with that pretty readily. You naughty prophet, I didn't say go to Tarshish. I said go to Nineveh, back there.
And hey, where the heck is Tarshish? We don't know, evidently. It's to the west, and it might be Tarsus, where Paul is from, but then again it might not be. It might be Carthage or part of India or one of a bunch of other places. It might not even be an actual place at all, but instead biblical shorthand for "way far away." I think I will start saying "Go to Tarshish!" when I'm being dismissive.
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April 10th, 2012
| 02:44 am - Announcement
It is suddenly extremely important that I illustrate the Book of Jonah.
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April 9th, 2012
 | 01:27 am - Stix of the desert
I'm quite pleased with this series of terrible jokes, but even more pleased with the camel. That's my first camel. I like how they fold themselves -- "like a two-foot rule," as Kipling says.
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April 5th, 2012
 | 08:37 pm - Cat.
I'm so tired that New Age radio broadcasts are starting to make sense to me. Last year.
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April 2nd, 2012
| 03:13 pm - Just when you thought it was safe
I've had Bela for two and a half years now, but I don't know how old he is, because Siamese fighting fish don't achieve their full beauty for some time after hatching. I'm told that the ones you see for sale in shops can be as old as one and a half. So he might be four, which is getting on in months. It's true that he is not as lovely as he once was, though that might be because he had fin rot a couple of times: his fringe is not quite as full or quite as richly colored. He is actually pinkish in some places these days. His ventral fins, however -- the ones at the very front, which branch delicately at the ends -- are longer than when I first got him, which I think is an improvement, aesthetically speaking.
I don't know if spring is getting into his blood too, or if it's because he likes the plant I got him for Chanukkah, or if he's just taunting me with the possibility of a nest, but he has been blowing a few experimental bubbles recently. It's surprisingly loud when he does that. Betta bubbles are strong enough to last for days, because they're no ordinary bubbles: they're coated with saliva. I think the BONK BONK CLONK sound he makes before bubbling is the sound of working up a mouthful of spit. When he's in the little travel bowl, such as when I take him to house-sit in Brooklyn, the sound becomes weirdly metallic, like someone tapping a coin against a Coke bottle far away.
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March 29th, 2012
| 03:17 am - Bubble-burst-world problems
I hate this phrase for three reasons. First of all, is the idea that genuine problems can't exist in first-world countries? Because obviously that idea is absurd. No nation does not have poverty, hunger, mental illness, murder, and rape. OK, maybe there's no poverty in Vatican City, I don't actually know about that, but that can't be what the phrase means, right? It must refer to those problems that affect only the relatively affluent, like when you lose your iPod charger. That's not absurd in the same way as the first thing but it still bugs me, because I don't think you can have it both ways. You can either complain about losing your iPod charger, or you can be the kind of person whose awareness of her relative affluence prevents her from complaining, but you can't do both. It's like when people say "no offense" right before they insult you. You don't get off the hook that easily!
Ultimately, though, what annoys me about this phrase is the implication that people living in non-first-world countries somehow give a shit about your iPod charger, that it counts as a good deed simply to acknowledge your affluence. That is literally the most egotistical thing I can imagine.
I could probably explain this whole thing better but I'm tired and my eyes kind of hurt from playing one of those bubble-shooting games online when I should have been editing.
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March 26th, 2012
| 06:31 pm - I feel so funky
It did cause a bruise, but an invisible one, to my chagrin: I would have liked my honorable wound to be apparent to all. Did any of you come to the show? It was awesome.
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March 22nd, 2012
 | 03:11 pm - Polymorphous pansexuality
I like the term polymorphous pansexuality a lot. It's not to be confused with Freud's polymorphous perversity, although that also relates to bisexual urges that one is supposed to grow out of.
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March 19th, 2012
 | 03:24 pm - So, she's a dog.
Shameless self-promotion? Yes! But you'll thank me for it if you come to the show. It's a shadowcast, which means we act out what's happening on the screen, but it's much more involved than that brief explanation suggests. There's song, dance, writhing, snarling, simulated psychosurgery, light-up costumes, full-trance mediums, spirit photography, the Loch Ness Monster, and the theory of Atlantis. If you crossed Ghostbusters with the scene in Gone With the Wind where Scarlett makes a ball gown out of the curtains, you'd get the Minions of Gozer. Seriously, if you're in New York or you can get here, click to buy tickets. And tell all your weird friends to buy tickets too.
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March 15th, 2012
| 02:49 pm - Burning for you
Patrick was such a badass miracle worker that the conversion of the Irish to Catholicism reads like a supernatural reality show. You may recall the story in which an Irish druid calls on his gods to raise him into the air, whereupon Patrick calls on his God and the druid falls to his death. Catholicism wins that round. Similarly, Benignus faithed off against another druid at the behest of an Irish king. The specifics of the trial vary, but the gist of it is that Benignus and the druid were both set on fire; Benignus was unscathed, while the druid perished in agony. You can't blame the onlookers for converting in a hurry after that.
I bet Benignus was eager to be chosen for this trial. Pick me, Patrick! I want to prove my faith! And you wouldn't pick me unless you liked me best, right? Unless you thought of me as a kind of extension of yourself? Hooray, Patrick's gonna set me on fire because he likes me best!
Incidentally, don't forget to print out your official Small Peculiar guide to the symbolism of St. Patrick before you go out drinking on Saturday. Watch Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty again too, while you're feeling Irish.
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March 12th, 2012
| 03:52 pm - From the homo file
"In the homosexual life, fidelity is almost impossible. Since part of the compulsion of homosexuality seems to be a need on the part of the homophile to absorb masculinity from his sexual partners, there is a compulsion to be constantly on the lookout for new partners." A guy named William Aaron wrote that in 1972 in Straight, his book about converting to Christianity and becoming heterosexual. (I find his use of the word "seems" interesting, don't you? I mean, dude, if you're presenting yourself as the faggotry expert, shouldn't you know? Did you get that from someone straight-splaining your homosexuality to you?) I haven't read the book, which is OK with me because trying to would doubtless make me angry; I know about it because of anti-gay-marriage types quoting it online. OMG THIS IS PROOF FAGS CAN'T BE MONOGAMOUS!!! ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN GAY CULTURE HAS CHANGED SINCE 1972!!! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!! Et cetera. I wonder what's become of William Aaron in the intervening forty years.
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March 8th, 2012
| 02:57 pm - An ineffective strategy
Did you miss these guys? I did. I find lots of material for them to discuss in the dollar racks outside the Strand after therapy. Yesterday I also found a psychiatric encyclopedia to which Walter Freeman had contributed, but sadly it was only Volume One, and his article was in Volume Two.
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March 5th, 2012
| 02:50 pm - Right in der Führer's face
I was tempted to see The Human Centipede, I really was. You know how much I love mad scientists, and people with secret operating rooms in their basements, and misanthropes who abduct people and do awful things to them, and all of that stuff. But it's funny: as soon as you make that mad scientist a German it's like putting a big sign on his head that says THIS GUY'S MENGELE AND WE'RE TALKING ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST NOW. And I have no objection to talking about the Holocaust, quite the opposite; but I object to using it to evoke sentiment in your novelty horror movie about sewing people together. Why go there? Is kidnapping people and sewing them together not horrific enough? I guess not!
Wikipedia says that the father of Dieter Laser, the guy who plays the crypto-Mengele, "participated in the war," and that an an interview he spoke of growing up feeling "like a child whose father was in jail for murder." I don't think I'm being unreasonable in assuming that Laser's father was a Nazi, and I bet it was cathartic for him to Nazi it up himself after a lifetime of German guilt, but if you're going to talk about how personally meaningful the role of Dr. Heiter was for you I think the literal absolute least you can do is actually bring yourself to say "my father was a Nazi." That's the sort of thing you really can't coyly allude to.
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