Peiratikos

And good riddance. We never liked you.

After a long spring of frustrating writer’s block, I suddenly find myself with so many things I want to talk about and things I’ve made promises to discuss that I finally feel ready to fulfill, but I’m not going to be doing any of that for a while. My job is more taxing than it really ought to be and we’re in a heavy season right now, which always brings a lot of pain for my poor curved spine. But now there’s something new, pain all along my right arm to the point where it’s hard to hold a hairbrush even. I’m using a trackball at work as of today, which does seem to help a bit, although it will be some time before I get my thumb motions coordinated enough to do a really good job moving the cursor. It will be another week until I can see a doctor and I have no idea what will happen next. I just want to feel better, and so I’m trying to stop as much recreational arm use as I can for now. So don’t think of this as a hiatus, just a medical leave of absence. If I get desperate enough, I can do what I’m doing now and peck with my left hand, but no matter what I’ll still be reading here and on the other blogs I enjoy and will return in full as soon as I’m able.

Actually, I’ll say one more thing about Klarion the Witch Boy.

Does it have the funniest Wiccan joke ever? It does. The whole Puritan pagan thing? Good stuff. The basic plot is nothing new (so far), as Jog points out, but, as Roger Ebert likes to say whenever he wants to justify his praise for an ‘immoral’ movie, a story is not about what it’s about but about how it’s about it. Which isn’t really true, but it’s sort of true. And how Morrison does Klarion is lovely. And how Frazer Irving does it, that’s lovely too. The art is also my favorite so far in Seven Soldiers, even with the monotonous coloring, which I actually like.

And while I’m here, I might as well announce that I’m probably not writing about comics for a few months. I’ve got my postmodern horror, a lot of science fiction (and maybe some fantasy). Look for H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, some cyberpunk and its literary and cinematic descendents. And that pomo horror. When? Whenever I stop being lazy, of course.

Yes, these are real baby names. Guess them right and win a prize!

• Ahlyivia. Origin: “Latin.” Original meaning: “Olive tree.”
• Aleena. Origin: “Greek.” Original meaning: “Rock.”
• Milen. Origin: “Greek.” Original meaning: “Dark skinned.”
• Qlowui. Origin: “Greek.” Original meaning: “Blooming, verdant.”
• Tearanie. Origin: unknown!

So I haven’t been here in a while, it seems. I’ve been sick a lot this winter, but also just completely worn down. I don’t know when either of those will relent for good, but I’ll aim for weekly posting and see if I can work up from there. If I have anything to say (and I do have a big post on identification festering, but it’s not written yet) I’ll try to get it up here somehow. For tonight, though, just a few quick truths with little analysis.

Vimanarama #2 made me cry a little, but only a little. Dig the Taj Mahal interior, though! I’m not sold on the coloring and I read a lot faster when the Fireborn are doing their thing. I wish this were going to be more than three issues long.

What’s up with the (potential) total depletion of other Kentucky comics bloggers? To make up for the gaps in my pseudopeer group, I’m pushing for a clique of comics bloggers who read manga in the bathtub. It looks like there may be some overlap with the comics bloggers who enjoy gin (a more casual grouping that exists only in my head, as far as I know) which suggests some clear options for socializing that I’ll bet we’ll never try.

Steven is on spring break and thus did a Wednesday comic run, which still seems sort of weird and obscene to me, but I hoped it would net us Project Superior, which the store had not ordered. They should have one for us next week, and I do realize that if we weren’t so passive and uncomfortable talking to people we would have had one now. So there was none of that and no manga for my bath, so I resorted to feminist essay collections. From Feminism Beside Itself, I liked Elspeth Probyn’s piece, “Perverts by Choice.” She writes of belonging/be-longing as “a loose combinatoire of being and longing, becoming and nostalgia, as composed of lines of desire that run along the singularities of sexualities, bodies, spaces and places.” (264) I quote this not to scare anyone off from drinking gin or enjoying bathtime manga, but because it’s something I’m going to be thinking about off-blog and possibly but probably not on-.

I know not everyone liked I ♥ Huckabees, but I think the mud sex scene was one of the most emotionally realistic portrayals I’ve ever seen in a movie. Anyone who disagrees is wrong, but that’s ok; I know beauty when I see it. I got the double-disc set as a birthday present (thanks!) and am looking forward to rewatching the film itself this weekend. I got very close to finishing a major in philosophy before dropping it, in large part because I hated so many of the other students, so I’m not sure if that means I’m more sensitive or less sensitive to dopey philosophy stuff, but nothing in Huckabees bothered me.

And continuing my trend of no real segues, I’m probably going to be teaching a class on sock knitting, so I’ve been doing a bit of it myself. I have a really hideous pair I made to test some techniques and a cotton/wool yarn (I’ll have to teach on larger than sock yarn, though, because apparently size 0 needles terrify new knitters) and I should probably put a picture of them up here so that the ugliness will be a good incentive to post something substantive to get it off the top of the page. The plus side is that they fit me perfectly and keep my feet warm when it is too, too cold in the apartment, which has definitely been the case over the last few nights.

I haven’t yet done any blogger interviews because I haven’t really done much of anything except work ridiculously long hours and try to sleep (well, and knit socks). I think I’m getting close to having my research done for the first, though. I’m hoping I live in enough of a shame culture that my commenting on this will push me to do it, but past performance has not been a positive indicator, to use work-speak. Maybe soon.

You say it’s your birthday!
It’s my birthday too—yeah!
They say it’s your birthday!
We’re gonna have a good time!
I’m glad it’s your birthday!
Happy birthday to you!

Yes we’re going to a party party!
Yes we’re going to a party party!
Yes we’re going to a party party!

I would like you to dance—birthday!
Take a cha-cha-cha-chance—birthday!
I would like you to dance—birthday!
Dance!

You say it’s your birthday!
Well it’s my birthday too—yeah!
You say it’s your birthday!
We’re gonna have a good time!
I’m glad it’s your birthday!
Happy birthday to you!

Last year we didn’t do this sort of thing, but now that we’ve had wedding photos here and all sorts of silly personal things I’ll go ahead and say that Steven turns 23 today! I always want to make elaborate Eve of St. Agnes jokes, but I don’t even remember last night’s dreams and I don’t think there’s a big audience for Keats jokes. And if there is, I probably don’t want to know about it.

Anyway, we’ll have a friend visiting from out of town (I hope) and I’m making German chocolate cake and we’ll have dinner out and watch some of our current Netflix holdings and just generally bum around. It sounds good to me. And while I’m not keen on my own birthday, it’s fun to celebrate someone else’s, especially because having all this extended family means tonight’s will be the third party (though none was really much of a party, thank goodness). And I can’t write well enough to really explain how exciting and reassuring and generally fun it is to have such a like-minded friend and husband in my life. Steven is basically the best friend I’ve ever had, which seems to me a particularly good base for a relationship.

We’re very much alike, but I think working on the blog together has highlighted some of the ways we differ in our approaches to humor and discourse and style. I’m glad we have this place because we both enjoy what we do and have done here, but also because it lets me track the last year in our relationship and the ways I’ve changed the way I write in conversation with his writing and also the way we have a sort of transcript of many of the things we’ve thought and talked about together. I’m sure not all relationships would benefit from joint blogs (and ours hasn’t always, either) but I’m glad we have a tangibly unified presence in the internet world. And while this is the first year we’ve been a couple that I haven’t bought Steven comics for his birthday, I have to enjoy having a husband who asked me to get him Derrida rather than the new Grand Theft Auto although he still wants both. While I complain sometimes about how dull our life is now, I can’t deny that I enjoy it!

So happy birthday, Steven, and thanks.

We’ve activated an anti-comment-spam option that’s new in WordPress 1.5: comments from authors with previously approved comments are whitelisted, and all other comments are queued for approval (or deletion) by us. The whitelisting is keyed on email address, so if you don’t provide an email address, your comment will be queued for moderation. To be clear: you aren’t required to provide an email address when you post a comment, but if you don’t, or if you’re commenting for the first time, your comment will not appear immediately. We get a few dozen comment spams a day, so we have a lot to sift through—if your comment doesn’t appear for several hours, don’t worry, and please don’t try to post it again.

Also, our WordPress seems to be having trouble remembering comment-author names—it should remember your name if you have cookies enabled—so check to see if your name has been filled in before you publish a comment. Hopefully we’ll have this minor problem fixed soon.

I can’t believe I’m making a new year’s resolution. Well, I’m not really, though, except in that I resolved to do this coincidentally at the beginning of the year.

This year, I am going to avoid snarky ripostes, gibes, and other such verbal attacks. They are seem counter to the spirit of public conversation I have claimed to enjoy most about blogging. I think most targets of past zingers deserved them (insofar as anybody deserves to be zinged), and I came up with some pretty good ones, and it was usually fun at the time. But I read a nasty bit of bile on a blog yesterday, and it annoyed me—until I remembered I’d spilled a little of my own bile on that same blogger a while ago. Oops.

I’m not asking “Why can’t we all get along?” or vowing never again to get into an argument or ‘agreeing to disagree’ with people I disagree with. I hope only to stop myself doing things that annoy me when other people do them and to engage in reasonable conversation—including argument.

(This might look like the sort of self-pitying sadness that bloggers with impaired self-esteem post so they can bask in sycophantic commenters telling them how wonderful they are and not at all as bad as they think. It isn’t, so you don’t need to comment to tell me how reasonable and kind I am. Because you were going to… right? Right?)

Edit: I also resolve to post much more often. Probably.

As you can probably see by now, we have dropped our bloggy subdomain for uninteresting technical reasons. Fear not, old URLs will redirect painlessly to new URLs. (If you find that some URL doesn’t redirect and doesn’t work, please let me know.)