isozyme | Recent Entries

At long last, another installment of isozyme's Comic Art Gripes!

This time, featuring a particular splash page:

I'm going to go hard on this page because it exemplifies a giant problem I see with a lot of superhero comics. The text is telling the audience one thing, and the art is haring off in its own direction, doing another. For effective visual storytelling, you have to be conscious of what information is being conveyed by the drawing, and make sure that's the same stuff you mean to say. The above example is not managing that.

The text gives us these key takeaways:

It's 2 in the morning
She's late, she's broke, and she's had a bad week
And she just got an exciting last-minute gig
But it's eerie that the streets are empty

What the artist has instead decided to portray is:

SEXY LADY
SEXY
SEXXXXY LADY
LADY SEXY DON'T YOU WANNA FUCK HER

Let's go through point by point and see how well the illustration is doing at conveying this information.

It's 2 in the morning: Well, the sky is colored the pink/purple of dusk, and there aren't any visible streetlights but the trees are still casting sharp shadows, and the buildings in the distance are reflecting a blue sky instead of lit from within, so if I had to guess from just looking at the picture I would assume it was closer to dusk. The real kicker, though, is that somewhere there's an incredibly bright light source making sure to outline her thighs and boobs with shiny. It doesn't jive with the story, but boy are those spheriboobs picked out in incredible contrast.

She's late, she's broke, and she's had a bad week: I will forgive you if you missed that Dazzler is rollerskating. If I was rollerskating with my legs like that, I would be 3 seconds from eating pavement. I love the character note that her solution to being late is to get out her skates to go fast! I do not love that the artist has chosen a bizarre floating pose that would only make sense if she could fly. This is particularly egregious because these are comic books; it is not outside the realm of possibility that I would be introduced to a flying character. But the pose is sexy, so that's been prioritized over making sure the audience doesn't mistakenly conclude things about the character. As far as being tired and beat up by the past week of X-men shenanigans and broke -- she looks perfectly put together. I'm not saying that a person who's had a bad week can't cover it up and look fab, but this is a story: for the love of god, man, give us some visual cues! Of course, broke and tired is not sexy.

She's just got an exciting last-minute gig: I am down with her being already in her performing outfit; that's a good decision because it means there'll be continuity in what she's wearing from scene to scene. The crazy outfit is great as a stage costume. But you could show she's late and harried and going to a job by giving her a bag that's larger than a postage stamp! But, say it with me again: duffel bags full of performing equipment are not sexy. Having your makeup only half-on and planning to do the rest of it on the subway is not sexy. Storytelling is secondary to sexy.

It's eerie that the streets are empty: This one is, I think, more subtle but extremely telling. The background does, indeed, show an empty street. But this picture doesn't convey eerie. The city around her looks like the swanky Upper East Side, with nice landscaping and clean windows: no broken pavement, no garbage out on the curb. (ETA: even the richest parts of NYC have shitty sidewalks, construction, and garbage. it's new york! so it's even failing to convey the most basic parts of the setting. and it's the 80s! nyc was notoriously not the nicest town back in the day. I also can't believe that someone broke would live within a few minutes walk from an area that looks so blandly affluent.) So that's working against the story the text is telling straight away. But the real kicker is that absolutely no woman would go out at night, alone, in a strange place, wearing a skin-tight jumpsuit cut down to the navel, and -- just -- that's not -- c'mon, man!!! C'MON! The fact that she's dressed up very sexy and doesn't have a coat or jacket to cover up conveys to me, a woman reading this, that she feels safe. And the story is saying with its words that she definitely isn't safe -- on the next page she gets grabbed by some robot-dudes. But the art -- you get it by now. Sexy.

For each of the four key takeaways, the art is sacrificing a way it could be helping the story in favor of being sexy. In some cases, it's actively working against the text. This is bad storytelling! It's squandering the medium! It's infuriating! I'm not saying that I don't like sexy lady pictures. I am a huge lesbian. Women are great! The skin-tight outfit and plunge neckline are sexy and make sense for the story at the same time. Great! Boobies! Love 'em. But sexy lady is not the most important idea going on here! If I wanted that, I'd look through my tumblr likes. I want to read a good story about superheroes and their emotions! Comics are awesome. They have all these cool tools to make narrative, which is why it's so disappointing when they ditch half of them and use them to draw tits.

Okay, one last note: I wasn't going to make any fuss over the anatomy here but LOOK AT THOSE PERFECT HEMISPHERES ON HER CHEST. The colorist has shaded around them like there's a right angle between her boob-flesh and her chest. Sir. Please sir. I beg you. Take advice from a homosexuelle and look at some breasts. There are lots of pictures of them on the internet. I swear you'll enjoy it. Look at an actual tit just one time because I swear to dyke god they do not look the way you seem to think they look.

i'm so behind on all my dw comment replies, but i'll catch up eventually!

i feel sort of silly writing fandom-y meta specifically about steve/tony here, which is very silly because i'm perfectly happy to write 40k of messy emotions about steve rogers but apparently saying I CARE A LOT ABOUT SUPERHEROES is too much for me on my personal-ass blog.

i've been more active on twitter (a small amount, at least -- it's gayjlucy if you want to see a lot of politics moaning and pictures of critters that i see on my way to work). but not a lot of fandom meta there either!

the fact that MCU is trying to call itself Earth-616 is MADDENING and i'm so angry at them for being stupid stupid idiots who are terrible and don't know their own canon. give me liberty from canon or give me death.

RBB proceeds apace. i'm over the wordcount minimum, yay! i have a sex scene to write and a conclusion and maybe a few more flashbacks, and then it'll be down to the editing. as soon as i finish it i'm going to put up a huge list of all my WIPs and fic ideas and poll everyone to see what they want, and then probably ignore their wishes and arbitrarily pick one based on my short-term whims.

i haven't been reading comics at ALL, which i'm sad about; i just haven't had the right brain for it. maybe tonight i'll sit down with a glass of wine and roll through more v3 iron man.

that aside, my apartment is pretty clean, i'm in good health, and i made a perfect poached egg on the first try for lunch (they are way easier than advertised! easier even than soft-boiled eggs! what the fuck, false egg advertising! eggs are forgiving and wonderful and you can cook them at least 59 ways.)

the purpose of personal morality/ethics is not to determine edge cases

your morals don't have to account for every possibility. you can say things in absolute terms AND expect people to understand that you don't mean literally every contorted possible refuting scenario.

it's okay to say "dunno, depends probably, and i don't give a fuck"

i'm mad about everything! god damn it! the abortion debate is killing me. fuck you, georgia!!!!!

april's been a lot.

today i made black peppercorn and rosemary old fashioneds (needed more pepper), hung art, and threw away a bunch of old ikea instruction booklets and an air mattress with a hole in it.

changed scab-cat's bandage vest; was lime green, now fluorescent orange.

learned a bunch about the history of screws.

looked up the past twenty years of award winning bearded iris varieties.

flowers behind the cut

( dykes medal winning flowers (yep that's what it's called) )

When I first conceived of my art museum for everyone, I thought mostly about Modern Art (yeah, the kind with the capital letters that's specifically from about 1910 to 1980-ish, not the recent stuff that the pretentious among us, me included, call Contemporary). It's what I have the most complete background in, and it's probably the most hated of all art genres, except maybe performance.

But the older stuff deserves to be treated right too. Museums treat the old masters like treasures or sources of historical factoids, but they're also art. Monet's paintings are beautiful, but they're also the product of an intellectual obsession: LIGHT.

(More days than not, I believe that all famous art is produced by obsession.)

Here are three of the thirty paintings Monet made of the cathedral in Rouen, trying to capture the light.

Monet would set up ten canvases in front of the cathedral, moving from painting to painting as the sun rose and fell. Every day, he would paint from dawn until dusk. It makes sense as soon as you hear it, that he worked in this way. The noon light only exists for a short time. If he painted each canvas one by one, he could only work an hour a day.

The great tragedy of Monet's thirty paintings of the Rouen cathedral is that he felt they fell short. He was never satisfied; he went home to his garden defeated by the play of light on stone. "Things don’t advance sensibly, primarily because each day I discover something that I hadn’t seen before. […] In the end, I am trying to do the impossible," he wrote to his wife Alice.

So how do you capture this level of devotion to the sunlight in a museum?

I would, of course, put his words on the wall, not in tiny font but in a big panel; along with photographs of the cathedral.

I'd want big, blown-up close-ups of the brushstrokes, showing the texture and the color. It would be lovely to see the brush strokes on the actual painting in front of you large enough to pick out the indentations of the paintbrush's bristles. Let's also put examples of the paints he used next to this macro view. A lot of Monet's colors are mixed on the canvas or straight out of the tube because stirring the paint together muddies the pure color. Show it directly; point out the colors next to each other in Monet's painting, next to the same paints mixed together. Is it dull?

Further investigating the impossibility of capturing light on a canvas, I would include lasers. Lasers are the purest, most intense of colors. The hot blue of the 405 nm wavelength can't be reproduced in paint. Put every blue pigment we have next to that laser, and maybe we can feel Monet's frustration at how faded they look.

But the most important thing to me is to convince everyone who looks at Monet's cathedrals is that the thing he was seeing was real. The light really is radically different on a February dawn compared to a March afternoon. I imagine a scale model of the cathedral, with tiny versions of Monet's ten easels standing before it. And above it, a light on an animatronic boom. Let the viewer push a button for each time of day, and watch the light pass over the cathedral. (It would be a hell of a design challenge to make this model effectively capture a complex enough lighting environment, but also would be worth it.) I'd want to help people see that light can be colors, without cheapening it with a tinted bulb. Above each button I would put a small reproduction of the corresponding painting by Monet. The soft blue of his shadow -- can you see it in the same place on the model? Are you convinced that the dusky hue isn't better captured in grey? That's what I want people to see.

would anyone be interested in, say, hypothetically, a 3000 word informal, no-jargon, bio-beginner-friendly essay about the evolution of why does biological sex exist (why are male and female even a thing!) and how the sex binary does a piss-poor job at describing nature?

i definitely haven't already written half of this and done a ton of research into fungi reproduction

could i sell it somewhere? post it on medium? would y'all like to read it here? pls indicate interest y/n

fungi reproduction is really interesting, they've tried all SORTS of wild stuff. god bless the primitive eukaryote.

my lab nemesis is making the name thing an issue

it's a damn good thing that i spent half of last week having a gender breakdown and got it all out of my system because if i hadn't this motherfucker's health would be in danger

this morning i got the daily "hey [name]" when he came in, and i was like "yo fyi it's AJ"

and then in the ensuing conversation was the most fun, including hits such as "it'll take me a while to remember that" and "oh yeah [beloved undergrad] told me last week that you preferred to be called AJ and apparently i completely ignored him because now we're having this conversation were you're trying desperately to be chill and i'm being defensive and garbage"

so this evening i got the world's most exaggerated and shitty "evening, AJ"

i hate this man. so much.

also this dude randomly makes trumpet noises. with his mouth. in public. toot-de-toot it's the battle hymn of the republic at full trumpet volume, today, literally today, while i was working! at our unconscious bias training last month his straight-white-male ass tried to say that he was discriminated against because his research topic isn't well-represented in the subfield. he uses a photo background on his powerpoint slides. words cannot express.

"Agnes Martin!" I shouted out loud when I saw the featured gallery last time I was in the contemporary section of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. "I love her so much, I love her, look, look at these, oh my god they have her letters!"

Agnes Martin's art looks like this:

a drawing by agnes martin; it's a grid drawn freehanded neatly in pencil on cream paper

She was obsessed with the appearance of perfection in things that are, by nature, not perfect. Her grid drawings aren't completely regular, even though they look it. I think her work is about how despite the fact that we all see the same reality, there's a difference between the vista in front of us and the way we construct it in our mind. "When I think of art, I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is in the mind, not in the eye. In our minds, we have an awareness of perfection that leads us on." In a letter, she writes: "Your work must hold some of this reality for you. If it does not it will not mean anything to anyone."

To me, her drawings are absolutely beautiful, meditative, and rigorous. They have soul. If I had several thousand dollars to spare, I would be sorely tempted to buy one and place it in my home.

How could the museum do a better job conveying this?

This gallery did a better job than usual -- there were many of her works next to each other, and her letters were displayed alongside them. The words of the artist are always important to me. They're the starting point

The letters were written the artist's brisk cursive: beautiful objects, but difficult to read. Anyone using a wheelchair couldn't get close enough to see the words. Posting transcripts in a large, clear font would be a good first step. She gave many recorded lectures; there's no reason not to play her voice and show her face in motion. I'd propose playing video in addition to the letters. The audio could be piped through headphones, as well as subtitled.

But to truly understand something, it's not good enough to have the ideas told to you in words; they're best when they come from one's own mind. A museum should pose a question and then present us with the objects we need to answer that question.

Early in her career Agnes Martin left New York for New Mexico. Her relationship with nature and land is obvious. She despised squares, and was suspicious of vertical lines in general. In her own words: "When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square. Destroys its power." "And I thought there wasn’t a line that affected me like a horizontal line. [...] And I thought to myself, there aren’t too many verticals I like. But I did put a few in there." Place two photographs on the wall: one of the long, flat horizon of New Mexico, one of the towering buildings in Manhattan. Now do her paintings have more meaning?

She was insistent that although her drawings looked like flawless grids, they were filled with errors. It would be easy to print a crisp, computer-generated grid with the same number and arrangement of lines as an Agnes Martin piece and place them side by side; the same size, the same color, only one is actually perfect.

Here is a copy of the above drawing perfected by photoshop. Does this illuminate the soul and beauty of the work? It's okay if it doesn't. You may like or dislike both equally. But I believe the comparison is interesting no matter your reaction.

And last, I would provide pencils (without erasers), and pads of paper, and invite anyone who wished to draw their own grids. Do you take pride, too, in the ability to draw many straight lines? It's difficult! It's easy to make mistakes. The museum could help you to feel an echo of the body of the artist in your own body.

When I look at a room filled with only her drawings, hung on white walls with tiny placards, I think of all these things and more. That's the benefit of an art degree. That's why I bounced with glee walking into that room, and why I hurried to stand as close to the glass as was polite, and it's why I wouldn't leave until I had read all the letters, to the annoyance of my companions.

alas, there were a couple facts about agnes martin i couldn't fit in the essay, so here they are: 1) she burned her drawings and paintings ALL THE TIME, she'd get fed up and just be like "time for fire!" 2) she resisted selling her stuff until she was really starving. then afterwards she said she always regretted it because she hated thinking about her art being in the home of someone she didn't like (and i get the impression there were a lot of people she disliked)

Art museums are a failure. I wrote about this in 2015, that tumblr post is reproduced below:

Imagine the modern art wing of a museum.

Spare white walls.
Intense, even lighting.
Hard wooden floors.
No seating.
Maze-like, interconnected galleries.
Small plaques identifying the artist, year and title in clean sans-serif font.

These design choices are all in the service of making the art museum the best possible habitat for art. The museum is a neutral void into which we place great works of beauty to be appreciated. The work shines. It’s unburdened by context. It’s alluring and impressive and an utter fucking cipher if you don’t already know why it’s interesting.

Art museums, while being very nice places for art, are fucking miserable places for people. (And I say this as someone who absolutely loves art museums.) They’re hostile. It’s easy to get lost. All the expository information is given in either tiny little bricks of text next to the art (and it’s boring) or in big sprawling banners of text next to the door of the gallery, totally divorced from the art (and it’s still boring).

So we walk into this awful space, with its glaring emptiness and its lack of anything friendly and we think “I don’t understand this, this is ugly not-art, why did this cost millions of dollars, I would like millions of dollars and nobody has given it to me so I can make ugly not-art.”

How dare the modern art museum lead us to think this. We have come through its doors, willing to be awed, willing to engage with beauty, and the art museum punches us in the nose. It says “I am a museum so this art is good art. If you don’t understand, you’re stupid and I don’t care.”

Art appreciation is bullshit. It puts all the burden of interest on the viewer and requires they walk in with extensive knowledge of an esoteric field. I have never been to a natural history museum that sits back and asks me to appreciate the bones. I’m not a fucking paleontologist and they know that, so they step up to help.

Museums can generate curiosity! Engagement! Wonder! The best museums do this by prompting us to think of a question, and then offering up the object that answers that question. That’s exciting! It makes us feel powerful and smart!

Say you are wandering a museum, wondering how the horse got its hooves, perhaps because you saw a skeleton that highlighted the hooves of the horse and their articulation. You wander into a little room full of fossil feet from the ancestors of the horse, slowly progressing from something that looks like a paw to something that looks like a hoof, accompanied by descriptive text. The most important text is large and can be read from a few steps away, while the more detailed information is smaller, so if you are curious you may step forward and read on. The museum has masterfully given you the tools to answer your own question.

Modern art museums almost never do this and it’s very frustrating because there’s no reason they can’t.

There is no reason for these museums to be interesting only for people who have taken classes in art history.

I think that part of why modern art museums think they can get away with this is that they are allowed to get away with it in their older collections. We are pretty happy to walk through a huge gallery of Dutch still life paintings because they’re a spectacle. We see them and baffle at the utter impossibility of how such a wonderful thing could be made. It is pretty, and we don’t mind so much that we’re being condescended to, denied any deeper understanding or education because the museum has assumed that all we want is to gape at a nice picture.

Then we walk out of that wing and into the modern art wing and everything is blocky and off-putting. Of course we don’t instantly like it; in the previous gallery the art was easy to love, but now the art is asking a lot more of the viewer. Meanwhile the museum shrugs and continues to help 0%.

What if when you looked at an old Dutch painting and wondered “how did they do that?” the museum gave you the tools to answer that question. What if you were then shown x-rays of the painting to see the process of revision, or encouraged to compare a photograph of a vase to a painting of the same.

What if when you looked at a Frank Stella painting you had first been led to ask “why are paintings rectangular?” or “what is the difference between a painting and a sculpture?” ”Is a painting only beautiful when it depicts something lovely or can the painting itself (the canvas, the board, the paint) be beautiful?” These are questions that I already know to ask because someone sat me down in a class with powerpoint and flashcards and taught me to ask them, but not everyone in the museum has that because not everyone in the museum is a giant art nerd! Can you imagine a world where everyone is a giant art nerd? Awful thought. We would all kill each other immediately.

If modern art museums extended a hand, I honestly think we would reach back. Modern art is full of cheeky, delightful moments that I want to share with people every time I drag them through the Art Since 1950 gallery. Ad Reinhardt and and Yves Klein are hilarious bastards and I’m certain their sense of artistic humor has mass appeal. If only the art museum would let us all in on the joke.

Art museums are making small steps towards being less hostile. Guided audio tours help, but the pace is slow, the headphones isolating, and the viewer passively receives facts instead of becoming curious and seeking them out. There is a little more seating. There is a little more interest in displaying process documentation and artist interviews. However, these things are not the norm and they are not enough.

I often look at museums and galleries and cannot distinguish between the two. In a museum the public wishes to appreciate and learn about the art; in a gallery the avant-garde wishes to evaluate and purchase the art. With such different audiences and goals, surely they should look nothing alike. And yet, they are the same.

Thus, the failure of the modern art museum.

Ever since writing this essay, I've kept coming back to an imaginary art museum that solves these problems. In my mind I've described enough exhibits for it to fill wings and wings. I've been thinking about turning those thoughts into a series of essays/blog posts for four years. Now I'm going to try to do it.

So, incoming: THE IMAGINARY HANDS-ON ART MUSEUM. I want to share my dream of a children's art museum. One where you can touch things, one where you learn. This is what, in a different universe where I went into museum studies, I would devote my life to.

my twitter feed is getting down on ol' jrrt, which is getting my goat

i was going to argue about how tolkein-derivative doorstopper fantasy is different from tolkein's writing, so would people please fucking step off. then i got distracted and wrote instead a sprawling ramble about tolkein's deliberate metatextuality.

one of my favorite things to imagine about tolkein's universe is working out who's writing down the stories for each book. the silmarillion is a history made by the elves and comes along with all the elf religion. the silm happens on an elf time scale: a gazillion years of history, from the start of time through the end of two ages.

lotr is, i think, a mashup of histories from men and hobbits. fotr has a lot of hobbit worldview running through it. tom bombadil is part of the mythology of hobbits, not elves. he doesn't work in the world because the definitive texts we read about middle earth were put down by elves, and the elves ascribe to a very specific cosmology and historical narrative. (one that, by chance, features elves extremely prominently.) barrow wights!!! everyone should talk more about the barrow wights, who are so strikingly within the purview of men and SO TERRIFYING. i have no idea how the silmarillion would describe a barrow wight, or if barrow wights could exist in a story told by elves, or by hobbits, or by dwarves.

the hobbit is particularly hobbit-y, and also narrated by one person instead of by a large host of sources. bilbo tells this tale how he wants, without corroborating evidence to make it less, um, bilbo-congratulatory. plus, without anyone to fold it into the more global mythology of middle earth, the story feels wildly disjointed from what tolkein's world is "really" like, because bilbo doesn't know shit about elf gods and wants to tell a fun story more than he wants to further the massive epic of history. of course, the hobbit is also different from the rest of lotr and the red book because tolkein wrote it first, and for his children. but it's more fun, to me, to play pretend about it, and in my fandom heart i believe tolkein wanted everyone to play pretend as well, and imagine that his stories had the same kind of cultural history as oral tales like beowulf.

lotr nerds want to make it clear that gandalf is actually a cool elf-angel (the maiar) and not actually an old wizard guy. but that comes from the silmarillion, which is an elf book. in the hobbit there's a whole bunch about other wizards, blue ones and a brown one and so on, and i don't know if it ever becomes clear how those fit in with what the silmarillion lays out. (someone who is a bigger nerd than me probably knows, but to me it feels like different cultures have different explanations for weird secretive dudes that bumbled around their world doing radical magic junk)

maybe other people think that tolkein's just covering his ass since he wrote down a lot of stuff and never quite decided how a lot of it should go. there was a lot of unfinished stuff in his head, and he was always building and ret-conning and getting sidetracked by deciding to construct YET ANOTHER LANGUAGE. but i like to think about it in the context of how history in real life does those same things. to this day stories from history contradicts themselves based on who is writing the story down. we find out a new thing and then scramble backwards in time to re-explain things that don't make sense now, given our better understanding of the world. and we get distracted a lot and leave a ton of things unexamined and half-done, so nobody quite knows the truth anyways, just the scraps to either side and a couple plausible ways it could have gone.

smarter and better-informed fans than me have made all these arguments, but i like them a lot so here they are in my words!

thinking about this with respect to tolkein makes me also think about it in superhero comics. they too have mythological stories that repeat themselves and self-edit and contradict constantly. all the different comics runs have different groups describing their own history (the x-men and the avengers have very different views on how friendly and fair the avengers are). are superhero comics metatextually related to orally-transmitted poetic epics? FOOD FOR THOUGHTS

ETA that the twitter disc horse was actually about how like, duh obviously you don't have to have read tolkein to be a Real SFF Fan, but like all twitter it devolved into "i haven't read tolkein because tolkein is stupid, so THERE gatekeepers" and i just. i can't. i can't take these fucking people any longer, why doesn't anyone have a single interesting thing to say.

told my boss of 6 years that, hey, could you call my AJ, that's what i go by these days
(it's been years, plural)

spent the whole time wanting to shout IT'S NOT A GENDER THING, DON'T TREAT ME LIKE IT'S A GENDER THING
(it's a gender thing)

JUST PLEASE CALL ME MY NAME AND DON'T ASK QUESTIONS
(don't think questions. don't think about it at all, please, i don't want anyone to analyze. i want people to say "hi aj" not "hi [anything else]." i want it to be invisible like everyone else's fucking name is invisible)

THIS IS NOT FOR YOU. YOU DON'T NEED A SINGLE REASON FROM ME. DON'T GO LOOKING FOR EXPLANATIONS. FOR YOU, THIS IS NOT A GENDER THING.

"you must be the new rotation student, hi, bailey, right?"
"hi! are you allison"
"yeah, i'm AJ"
wait, no, that response didn't make sense
and there's coworkers around who don't know who AJ is
and i don't talk about this, i never talk about this
but i'm not introducing myself as anything else anymore, it's a reflex, it's my name --
"sorry my name is [that other thing] but i go by AJ"
and maybe the coworkers will just pick it up and i won't have to FUCKING DO THIS FOR EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM

IT'S JUST A THING. AN UNMARKED THING. A NO-INFORMATION THING. VERY BORING.
it's just my fucking name, leave me alone, fuck.

hell.
imma smoke a bowl and write some absolutely FILTHY lesbian fucking, and anyone who wants to stop me can eat my whole goddamn ass.

There are an awful lot of ways to conceive gender. It’s been a binary, a spectrum, a triangle, a coordinate plane.

But to me, gender is a constellation.

I imagine a scattering of stars, thrown across space, and each point of light is a little chunk of gender. A star for every stereotype, every specific role, a star for all the words we have for gender and a star for all the ones we don’t (after all, space is infinite).

Here is a star called Cowgirl (orbiting with its sister-stars Cowboy and Ranch Hand), off to the north a star for the elfin child-gender of small boys around age six; there’s Androgynous Model and Volleyball Chick and Douche Who Wears Salmon. There’s abstract gender-pieces like Void, and definable genders like American Apparel Customer and Legalize Marijuana Activist. All these gender-stars come with rules for presentation and actions and inform how a person moves through the world.

Of course some little genders are grouped close together, and some are far-flung, and some look side-by-side from the ground but are actually a hundred billion light years apart.

But nobody’s gender is limited to one star. Hirsute Gay Man isn’t a complete picture of a person, and neither is 50’s Housewife. Most everyone has a whole collection of gender-stars. Maybe more, maybe less, maybe mostly woman stars, or mostly man stars, perhaps generally androgyne or generally unmarked (which are two different things), or an eclectic mix. There’s not a lot of rules; I believe even cis/binary people often have a diverse set. You can pick up and discard stars over time, on purpose or not; they may be arranged in a tight cluster or span galaxies, they can be precious or incidental, meticulously studied or mysterious.

Each person takes their scattered handful of sparkling gender-bits and connects them up with bits of string, until they have a network of all the ways their particular gender fragments interact with each other.

Now, finally, one can step back and see their full gender. It’s not the stars themselves, although those are important: it’s their shape in relation to each other. From a distance, finally the constellation of one’s identity can be given a name.

No wonder it can take years to figure out.

The constellation may align in a satisfactory way with a simple, easy identifier (man, woman), or it may be fractious and demand a queer vocabulary. It may be on friendly terms with the body, or it may battle the physical form in perpetuity, or both may be molded over time until they are in harmony.

I appreciate this model for its ability to encompass complexity in a single metaphor; the combination of granularity with a holistic view; and for the way it can make gender both absurd and describable. Sometimes I see someone on the train and, wow, one of that person’s gender bits is Literal Voldemort, that’s an experience. I laugh at myself when I look in the mirror and see Absentminded Professor staring brightly back at me.

There are other metaphors. Someone’s gender may be a carefully tended garden. It may be an ocean filled with small difficult fish. Perhaps a wardrobe, perhaps a riot, perhaps a graduate thesis in gender mathematics, complete with footnotes and references.

For me, whether I am looking inwards or outwards, I see a field of stars.

fucked off from work on account of SURPRISE ANNOYING ER VISIT LAST NIGHT. student health was all "we dislike how your EKG looks go to the hospital" so i got to sit in a waiting room for 6 hours to be told that i was fine and should lay off the caffeine. when we finally got out at 1:30 in the morning we went to the store for ice cream and caffeine-free diet coke, and today my body is feeling normal, which is very appreciated!

hospitals are a weird place to be gay, because suddenly nobody knows again how to read you and your wife. most of the staff were cool -- they're ER nurses, they've seen everything -- but sometimes bad vibes would creep in and i couldn't help thinking a lot about how glad i was to be married to my wife so we'd have rights if something actually serious happened.

i assembled our new cat tree -- right now i'm too lazy to upload photographs but fluff-cat likes it a LOT, even though he is kind of too big for it. scab-cat is sleeping so he hasn't tried it yet. also, scab-cat has figured out how to lick his scabs through his cone, so he's a mess. fluff-cat is having one of his twice-a-year sheds so EVERYTHING IS A FLUFF now.

overall, things are better today than yesterday! i love an upward trajectory

i can't believe i have to live caffeine-free now. what is this healthy bullshit. who authorized this. fuck them.

we went to see a Mother Mother concert in nyc last week and it was excellent, i love them and the lightshow was excellent and their lead guy has gotten wicked good at guitar since the last time we saw them live. also i took over my friends' kitchen to make kouign amann, which scratched my puff pastry itch. also, delicious. also, i'm going to make croissants next. maybe the itch wasn't so much scratched as enabled. homemade flaky pastry is really really good, guys.

i have art to hang -- an audubon-style print of a bird, a cool modernist print on silver-backed glass, a huge mirror and huger painting on canvas to put up when they get delivered on wednesday, and two prints (one intaglio, one probably a screenprint) to find frames for. i also need to assemble the cat tree that's currently in a box on the stoop. our hunt for a new couch is ongoing; we really need a new couch. the arm is coming off of our current one and it's depending on the wall for structural integrity.

got a lot of thoughts about the accessibility of art museums, still. that's a LONG essay series.

( and lastly, health issues under the cut )

I have the itch to try making puff pastry from scratch -- I taught myself how to make macaron shells, surely i can do kouign-amann! I need to buy a rolling pin. So far in my baking exploits I've been using a combination of fingers and an empty vodka bottle any time I need to roll something out, which I admit isn't....ideal. I also really need some new silicone spatulas because scab-cat ATE not one, but BOTH of my spatulas and now I am stuck with only wooden spoons.

Since I am too mad at Jeff Bezos to use Amazon I need to work out which stores actually sell kitchen supplies. I know that my small protest of Amazon in particular doesn't do anything but I'm fucking pissy. Amazon has made me forget what normal businesses are! That's weird! Paying for shipping is a bummer, but it turns out that I save money because I don't buy extra shit that I don't need to make it to the $50 limit for free shipping.

In other online business news, literally one time I visited the Rural King website and put in my email for free shipping because I was looking for pine pellets to use as cat litter and I heard you could get them cheaper if you bought them as horse bedding instead. Then, stupidly, I opened ONE promotional email because they said it was Chick Month and I wanted to see if they'd literally send you baby chickens in the mail. Yes, they will. Amazing. Unfortunately, this had consequences: now I get an email from Rural King literally every single day telling me to buy live rodent traps and fencing and bulk livestock feed. I should unsubscribe from their ads, but it's so on-brand that I can't bring myself to do so.

Still out of creative words post 40k of emotionally intense fanfiction. I edited two original stories and sent them out again -- they're both ones that have gotten a lot of rejections, but re-reading them convinced me that they're good, just bad fits for a lot of markets. They're not written in what I've been calling "genre prose," and I think that hurts my chances for publication. On the other hand, I'm fucking tired of writing genre prose. I know how to do it and it's not actually that literary or sophisticated. Being "lyrical" isn't one of my main goals. I want to be clear, compelling and insightful. I want my prose to reflect the POV character's voice. My dialogue aims to be distinct and different from character to character, reflecting personality and not just whatever seems the most bleak or punchy or plot-required. Salty post incoming about Clarkesworld.

Fed the fish yesterday. Unfortunately this is not just sprinkling flakes into an aquarium. It took ten hours to feed the whole scientific zebrafish facility -- longer than usual because one of the systems' automatic water management computery-bits have broken and I had to do all of it manually -- and I came home exhausted and extremely crabby and reeking of brine shrimp and paramecia. I won't have to do it for another 6 to 12 months, and that's the only blessing.

hey sorry i went awol for a while!

i was busy finishing a 40k fanfiction that was eating my goddamn brain (will make a post abt it later) and adjusting to a new medicine. i'm going to get back in the groove soon!

for example i have some things to say about the beauty of making macarons and how it is fussy but creates the world's best cookie. and maybe some more essays about prose. and i should crosspost that salty-ass post about splash pages in comics and maybe expand on it...

just sent the last files for the Monster Project along to my boss, including an update that she sent me last minute.

my heart is going like i've been running flat out for several blocks. definitely have shakes. i'm happy to say i didn't have any crying breakdowns in front of my computer while working on this godawful thing, but getting that last comment of "i think it'd be good to add..." at the 11th hour pushed me pretty close.

i won't feel good until it all gets turned in tomorrow and it's not my problem for at least a couple weeks, but my to do list is empty.

phew. phew. haaaah. jesus.

(whoa oh god, pray for me)

two of the four figures done for the Monster Project!

the other two need to get done TODAY, because everything is due tomorrow at 10am. luckily they're the smaller ones where I don't have to do much (if any) actual drawing. boss wants a phylogenetic tree, we'll see how THAT goes. she might have to settle for a table.

UDATE ON THE MENTAL STATE OF ISOZYME:

i wandered away from this post to work on more figures, and in the meantime several goddamn hours have passed basically without me noticing, and i'm up to 3.5 finished figures. the phylogenetic tree happened, PLUS i hand-drew animal illustrations for every branch. the last figure is just arranging pictures.

i
am
so
close

thank you, ADHD medicines. wait!!! did i tell dw that i have a new medicine? I HAVE NEW MEDS, Y'ALL. i can focus like a motherfucker now. my mood is up, too. fuck yeah stimulants. do i have an appetite? wellllllll we're working on it. are they disrupting my sleep? who knows!!! i have too much work to consider insomnia a possibility!!!! i'm more scattered while taking them, and i feel like i mis-speak more? but i'm way happier and I WILL TAKE IT

current reference count: ~~144~~ 166
sections still lacking references: ~~3.5~~ ZERO
purposely inflammatory attempts to start science fights: 2
abstract: ~~NOT WRITTEN~~ LATER PROBLEM
conclusion: ~~NOT WRITTEN~~ ALSO LATER PROBLEM
revisions to address mentor's comments: ~~half-assed~~ ~~one more really irritating one~~ done
chrome tabs: ~~we don't talk about chrome tabs right now~~ DUMPED THAT SHIT INTO ONETAB

second draft in mentor's inbox. i still need to do a lot of work but that was definitely the worst of it!!! which is good because it was very much the worst!

(okay not as bad as writing the draft but. bad.)

i was talking the other day about how being gay is pretty frictionless for me these days, generally comfortable and easy, and I don't know why I'm so compelled to write about being gay and being in a place that's hostile to those of us who aren't straight

and my wife asked me point-blank "what name to you use at work"

the name i use at work is not the same one i use with my friends, folks

that's not a thing i think about every day. it's just how it is. a battle i didn't want to fight. a thing -- hah -- that i don't feel comfortable dragging myself through in public. not at work. nope.

so that's revealing, i suppose

sorry for not posting/responding to comments for a while, i have a deadline that's killing me and a fanfiction that is EATING MY BRAIN so i haven't been in the headspace for bloggin'. i'm wondering if i can use light grey text to give myself back some whisperspace? i don't know if it'll work, we'll see. i miss tags.

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Be BRAVE and TRUE

i just want to be safe from the news

Recent Entries

Visual Storytelling

behind!

on whataboutism

rattlin' about

THE IMAGINARY HANDS-ON ART MUSEUM: MONET'S ROUEN CATHEDRALS

nonfiction brain-bug

gonna strangle a bitch

THE IMAGINARY HANDS-ON ART MUSEUM: AGNES MARTIN

THE IMAGINARY HANDS-ON ART MUSEUM: INTRODUCTION

tolkein's cool actually

/shrieks like a harpy, flies into the sun

Gender and the Starfield

good 2 go

dear online diary that the whole internet can read,

hope y'all like my stream-of-consciousness

whoops

got a little tremor going on here

whoa we're halfway there

SCREAMING PROGRESS INTO THE VOID

gay stuff