Author: Eugene Fischer

Reading 2015: September

SeptemberReading2015

Another month of all comics. There will be novels again next month, though.

  1. More Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  2. New, Improved! Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  3. Dykes To Watch Out For The Sequel by Alison Bechdel
  4. Spawn Of Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  5. Unnatural Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  6. Hot, Throbbing Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  7. Split-Level Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  8. Post-Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  9. Dykes And Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life-Forms To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  10. Invasion Of The Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  11. The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel – This was a full reread of Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For comic strip, with the exception of the non-narrative material that makes up the very first volume. Starting halfway through volume 2, the strip becomes a continuing soap opera about a group of politically aware lesbian friends that continues for over twenty years. And it isn’t temporally static, like most long-running comic strips; time passes in Dykes To Watch Out For at its actual rate. Characters age and face new challenges, children grow, pets die. It’s an astonishing document, capturing in amber two and a half decades of leftwing political trends and cultural concerns, all deftly humanized. The final book in this group, The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For, contains about 75% of the material in the individual collections, plus all the strips published after Invasion Of The Dykes To Watch Out For was collected and an introduction in which Bechdel draws herself musing on the notion of essentialism. If you’ve never read these strips, that’s probably the easiest way to do it.
  12. Saga, vol. 5 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples – I’m still fully enjoying and invested in the lush SF depths of Saga, though I’d be lying if I said I felt as “Ohmigod this is great!” enthusiastic about it as I did at the start. The series has settled into its rhythms, no longer shocking me with every page turn, but just humming along with perfect confidence. That’s no bad thing. I look forward to the next volume.

Goodbye, Bikehaus

IMG_6504The bike shop that sold me my first road bike has closed its doors. Bikehaus is no more. I’m currently wearing shoes, shorts, and shirt I bought specifically for cycling, and my helmet is sitting right next to the keyboard, because I rode that bike to the coffee shop where I’m typing these words. I have all these things because Eric, the store’s erstwhile owner, made me a great deal that introduced me to what has become a cherished hobby. Alas, the same circumstance that got me the deal meant, in the end, that the place couldn’t stay open. I’m sorry to see it go, and grateful to Eric and Tim for the excellent service they gave me. My health and happiness are both greater for Bikehaus having existed.

Reading 2015: August

IMG_6437

Whoops, halfway through September and I forgot to put this up.

  1. Ms. Marvel vol. 1: No Normal by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona – The first book of one of the most acclaimed series last year. I get the enthusiasm; this is multicultural, YA superheroism at its most delightful. I’ll probably grab another volume or two of this, and will definitely be bumping G. Willow Wilson’s novel Alif the Unseen up toward the top of my stack.
  2. Captain Marvel vol. 2: Down by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Christopher Sebela, Dexter Soy, and Filipe Andrade – This book is richly written and structurally interesting–especially the issue shaped around Carol Danvers’s continually morphing to-do list–but I think I enjoyed it less than the previous one. That’s because it’s more tightly integrated with Marvel continuity and characters, and as a DC kid, I just don’t know who these people are. Too frequently I felt like the folks in the theater at the end of The Avengers, asking, “…so who was that purple guy?” This was especially true of the antagonists in the collection’s second story arc.
  3. This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki – What a gorgeous book. An achingly deep slice of adolescence, tender without being sentimental. I’ll be rereading this one.
  4. Miracleman Book 2: The Red King Syndrome by Alan Moore and Alan Davis
  5. Miracleman Book 3: Olympus by Alan Moore and John Totleben – I’d been waiting years to read these books in print. I found scans in the late 2000s of the second half of Alan Moore’s run on Miracleman (starting about halfway through book 2 here), which I had only ever heard written of as a lost masterpiece. Even back then, without getting to follow the story from the beginning, I thought Olympus matched the hype. To have the complete story on my shelves in glossy hardback feels like getting to make good on a promise to my younger self.

My Friends Write Things: Many friends, many things

We need a word for the feeling of being unable to keep up with the art output of all one’s clever friends. Here’s a start. More to come.

Fiction

  • Inscape by Yaa Gyasi – Gifty, a middle-aged literary scholar, must start caring for her Ghanaian mother, who believes she has been tasked by god with writing the next books of the bible. An immigrant and person of lost faith, Gifty revisits a lifetime of identity struggles as she learns her mother anew.
  • Tobacconist by Anna Noyes – a short short about a family man who fantasizes about, and then fantasizes about not fantasizing about, the affections of a stranger.
  • Woman at Exhibition by E. Lily Yu – I heard Lily read this at ICFA. A woman becomes part of an ambiguous history when she is moved by compulsion to eat an Edward Hopper painting on display at the Whitney. A story about gender politics and relationships between artists.
  • Subduction by Paul M. Berger – Oliver has a memory that only goes back four weeks and a compulsion to visit areas of geological instability. The engraved wristwatch he was wearing said he was a hero, but he can’t remember why, so he pawned it. And littering the edges of his incomprehensible life are small things with big teeth that no one else seems to notice.
  • The Fisher Queen by Alyssa Wong – Lily is fifteen, a deckhand on a trawler, and too old to believe anymore the family legend that her mother was a fish. A beautifully written story of disillusionment.

Nonfiction

  • Unmasking the Glow by Alea Adigwame –Swirling and imagistic rumination on sex work and self regard. “I think, or, at least, like to think, that, at the substratum of my allure, rests an exhaustive knowledge of the contours of shame that permits me, ever increasingly, to revel in the lavishness of my imperfections, instead mincing them into everythingness with an analytical santoku. Self-compassion, I have learned, is communicable.”

Tabclosing: Biologically Curated Images

Cycling

14_venturacomp_bkI have a punctuated history with bicycles. The earliest one I can recall owning is lodged in the amorphous mists of my first decade, a period of my life from which I can access only disordered fragments. I think I remember it was mostly black, with padding Velcroed around the bars, and some kind of branding that put me in mind of the SR-71 spy plane–its most salient feature to my young mind. If I ever rode it, I doubt it was more than around the driveway or up the block.

The first bicycle I ever really used was a blue Diamondback, eighteen speed. It was my main mode of personal transportation from around ages thirteen to sixteen. I used to ride through the neighborhood, down drainage ditches and around “private property” signs, scouting hidden paths to the corner store where I could binge on Tic-Tacs and Bubblicious. I would also ride across the street to the karate school, where I met my friend David Fernandez. Soon we were on bikes together, heading down to Blockbuster every weekend for a video game or three that we would try to beat by Monday. Those years were Peak Bike in my life, a high water mark I’ve never hit again.

That tide rolled all the way back and dried up when I turned sixteen and started driving. I got a car, and the blue Diamondback got a spot in the garage and gathered dust. Some years later, during a brief window when he was the right size to ride it, I gave it to my younger brother. He either destroyed it, outgrew it, or (likely) both.

My next notable bicycle experience was in 2009, when I borrowed my father’s bike (the one he bought at the same time he got me that blue Diamondback so we could ride together) as a way to strengthen my emaciated legs after spending ten months bedridden with Crohn’s disease. I bought a saddle soft enough for my still-tender posterior and resumed my childhood practice of riding up to the corner store and back. This time it was an eight or ten block roundtrip that took me most of the afternoon.

Eventually my lower body strength returned to me, and I returned my father’s bike to him, though I kept that nice, soft seat. I moved, worked, moved, and eventually found myself living in Iowa City, a midwestern college town so bike-friendly that I started to feel like I needed an excuse not to have one. It was the summer of 2012, and I had never personally purchased a bicycle before. “But this is easy,” I thought, “I’ll just get online, research what the experts say, and pick the perfect one.” After about fifteen minutes staring into the infinitely deep well that is online cycling culture, I thought, “This is easy. I’ll just go to a store and have a salesman sell me a bike.”

The 2012 Trek 7.2 FX

The 2012 Trek 7.2 FX

I ended up at World of Bikes, where after some discussion of my needs and experience level, a helpful employee sold me a Trek 7.2 FX hybrid. This is the entry-level bike that reviewing site The Sweethome would later name the best hybrid bike for two years running. It certainly did everything I asked it to in Iowa City, where the streets are mostly flat and mostly empty. I did struggle on what hills there were, but I’m someone who’d digested all the muscles in his legs not so long ago. That was surely to be expected, I figured.

Meghan McCarron on her Surly Cross Check. To the right, my Trek 7.2 FX. Not pictured: me on the ground, on my back, trying not to die.

Meghan McCarron, bicycle warrior, on her Surly Cross-Check. To the right: my Trek 7.2 FX. Behind: the brutal hill we had just ascended. Not pictured: me on the ground, trying not to die.

In 2014 I moved to Austin, which is very bikeable as cities go, but a nightmarish deathrap of traffic and hills when compared to Iowa City. The bicycle culture here is strong, and I wanted to take part, but every time I got on the saddle I would chicken out after a few blocks. Realizing that I would never make it out of my neighborhood without a push, I enlisted the help of my friend Meghan McCarron, a cycling badass who I knew used to commute between Austin and San Marcos–towns separated by more than thirty miles–during grad school. Knowing that the streets of Austin wouldn’t seem scary after a day with Meghan, I told her, “I want you to take me on a bike ride that will kill me.” And so, the day before my 31st birthday, she took me on a leg-melting trip, disappearing into the distance up hills she could barely feel that I crawled up in lowest gear. Twenty-four miles later, I was no longer afraid to bike around Austin.

At the clinic after my bike accident.

At the clinic after my bike accident.

I started riding my bike a lot. I rode to see friends’ gigs. I rode to restaurants to meet dates. I rode to bars with my laptop to write. But I never got much better at the hills, which remained brutal. This was especially troublesome since I live on one of the steepest hills in the city, a straight shot down to the river. Riding down that hill is breezy, but the way back up is a nearly two mile incline that would frequently find me walking my bike instead of riding it. And this hill is also where my cycle anxiety returned; while heading downhill to a coffee shop with my computer, my front brakes locked and sent my flying over the handlebars to the pavement. I denuded my shoulder, broke my wrist, and banged up my knee. It took about ten weeks to heal up enough to ride again, and even longer to do so with any confidence. To regain my courage, and to have a last athletic hurrah before she moved to Los Angeles, last weekend I went on another long ride with Meghan. This time, while we were out and about, she let me try riding her Surly Cross-Check, a steel, drop-handled “super commuter.” I’d never ridden a bicycle with drop handlebars before, and was impressed with how much more power I had in my pedal. Having outsourced responsibility for choosing a bicycle to World of Bikes three years earlier, this was my first time really thinking about how the details of the vehicle were affecting my experience. Maybe I wasn’t destined to always struggle up hills. Maybe a different machine would make my life easier.

I decided it was time to start actually learning about bicycles. I began at Austin’s largest bike shop, where I had staff take me through the showroom, explaining types, features, options. I figured out that what I wanted was probably a road bike, a light-framed bicycle made for riding on smooth pavement. The employee I spoke with there told me that, for the features I wanted, I was probably looking at a bike in the $1200-$1700 range. At that price point, I wouldn’t be changing rides any time soon. My Trek worked well enough that it wasn’t worth a thousand bucks to do better. But just for a second opinion, though, and because I happened to be riding by it, I decided to stop in at one of Austin’s newest cycle shops, Bikehaus. I met the owner, Eric Hess, who let me know that (a) he thought the folks at the previous store had overstated how much I would need to pay, and (b) he was offering some impressive deals.

The 2014 Jamis Ventura Comp. (Also pictured at the top.)

The 2014 Jamis Ventura Comp. (Also pictured at the top.)

Bikehaus isn’t only recently opened, but in a newly-built building. Apparently there were building delays, and while Eric had expected to be doing business in 2014, the doors were barely open before 2015 came around. That left him with a surplus of 2014 models he needed to move before the 2016s came out. He let me test ride a couple of bikes he thought might suit my needs, and told me he’d sell me my favorite one, a 2014 Jamis Ventura Comp, for $550. That’s 42% below the MSRP, and much better than the used prices I was able to find online. (Also a good deal based on the information here.) Even if it wasn’t for me, I figured I could turn around and sell it for little or no loss. With his discount, Eric turned me from a guy planning to get a new bicycle someday into one struggling not to impulse buy. I sat on the decision for two days, then got the bike. Eric spent an hour with me explaining things and adjusting it to my body.

That was four days ago. I love this bicycle. I’ve been riding it every day, and getting home afterward excited to ride again. The very first night I was cresting hills I would have had to walk before. It has eighteen speeds, an aluminum frame, and a carbon fork. It weighs seven very noticeable pounds less than my Trek (more when you consider I rode the Trek with a rack and basket). The shifters are silky-smooth, and it has quick-release breaks that makes removing the wheels much easier for those times I need to put it in the trunk of my car. Between the experience and the price, I’m head-over-heels for this thing. (Thankfully, only figuratively so far.) If the enjoyment lasts, my life might just reach a new Peak Bike.

Reading 2015: July

JulyReading2015

Hard month. Here’s what I read.

  1. Pluto vol. 1 by Naoki Urasawa
  2. Pluto vol. 2 by Naoki Urasawa – These two were lent my by Janalyn Guo. It’s a science fiction manga, a murder mystery set in a future populated by both humans and robots, some of which have human-level AI. It’s also a reimagining of an Astro Boy story by Osamu Tezuka. I’ve never read any Tezuka; he’s an author I’ve long intended to binge on, but just never gotten around to. So reading these was enjoyable, but I was constantly feeling they were relying on allusive plot points and images which were lost on me. For example, the ending notes of both volumes are introductions of new characters whose design and name are clearly intended to thunder with recognition of their famous antecedents. As I’m not familiar with the source material, the effect didn’t land. But I’m still finding the story interesting, and will likely read more.
  3. The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson – Naomi was a classmate at Iowa, and having read many pieces of her short fiction I was excited for her debut novel. It’s a story of four women–two sisters from Brooklyn, their grandmother, and their mother–over a summer in Barbados when the relationships between all four oscillate, solidify, shatter. The book is written in a fluid POV that illustrates each facet of the characters’ shared emotional experience so that the reader has access to the whole, just as perpendicular shadows, though flat, can reveal a three-dimensional shape. It’s a very effective technique, pulled off with a sure and sympathetic hand. Naomi’s writing is evocative throughout, and frequently piercing, as in this passage that I particularly loved.
  4. Vox by Nicholson Baker – I get why people like this book. It’s a novel all in dialogue between two strangers on a sex chat line; a structurally interesting exercise in playfully obsessive eroticism. I understand why sexy fiction pursued with a joyous, intellectual abandon is attractive to people. But as with House of Holes, I had to struggle to finish this. It’s one-note, and once I’d grasped the algorithm of its experimentation, I just got bored. While it’s laudably enthusiastic and uninhibited, I found the book neither arousing nor surprising, and so had little to keep me invested. Baker’s fiction may just not be for me.

My Office (Summer 2015)

Every so often I rearrange my home office setup, to keep it from becoming too familiar. I find I get less work done if I let it become just another room in my apartment. Even though it’s only ten steps from where I sleep, I like heading into my office to feel like I’m going someplace else. Here’s a look at the latest redesign.

My Armadillocon 37 Schedule

ArmadilloconArmadillocon is happening this coming weekend here in Austin, July 24-26. I’ve been invited to participate in some programming, so if you’re around and would like to see me, here’s where I’ll be.

Author Reading – Friday, 5:00-5:30 pm, Conference Center

Favorite Webcomics – Friday, 6:00-7:00 pm, Ballroom F

Short Fiction You Should Have Read Last Year – Sunday, 1:00-2:00 pm, Southpark A

A full schedule for the con is available here.

Gigasecond

Gigasecond

As of today I’ve been alive for one billion seconds and counting. You get a birthday every year, but how often do you turn a gigasecond older? Since a gigasecond is about 31.7 years, three times in your life if you’re lucky. That’s an event worth celebrating. Here I am, having drinks with some friends, toasting 109 ticks on my personal clock. Here’s to a few billion more.