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He really is that tall: meeting Lyle Lovett, once, for a second

Since he has a new album out today, the first in ten years, here’s a Lyle Lovett memory:

My first full-time professional career was as a consulting nuclear engineer. Kind of like Sherlock Holmes’ “consulting detective”, maybe, but practiced in places where they’d only put nuke plants. So when, during the job interview, the company asked if I was open to travel I should have figured that they weren’t going to send me to London or Tokyo or some other cool city.

Anyway, when I wasn’t living in an extended stay hotel room out in the middle of nowhere I lived in Philadelphia, but I didn’t like it there either. It is a cool city, but it turns out I like living near big cities, not in ’em. I’m currently not far from Detroit, and can get to Toronto or Chicago in a few hours, and that’s how I like it.

One of the fine things about Philadelphia was the music scene. I saw performers ranging from the Indigo Girls (not so great live, at least on that tour) to John Lee Hooker (so so great live). I’m not sure I’d even recognize this version of me now, but record hunting on South Street was a thing I actually did many Friday nights.

And the radio was terrific. WHYY, home of Fresh Air, for news and WXPN for music. Around 1990, towards the end of my time there, the latter did the unthinkable for a college station and hired a professional morning host named Michaela Majoun. Professional, as in she showed up on time and didn’t leave your clock radio to serve up absolute dead air when the alarm went off so you didn’t wake up in time for work, an experience I had with previous college stations…looking at you WCBN in Ann Arbor. (Yes, I hold a grudge.)

I had an invisible crush on her. Or at least her taste in music, and between her and Terry Gross she locked me in as a public radio listener. So much so that I started sending money in to pledge drives. And at some point, I decided I should volunteer to help take those pledges, so one morning in the spring of 1990, I think, I got up even before her show began and stumbled over to Penn’s campus to answer a land-line and eat stale bagels and glance over to the broadcast booth when it was quiet to see the magic happen.

It was fun, but Ms. Majoun didn’t have much time to hang out, meaning her good taste wasn’t going to literally rub off on me. So when my shift was over and I had to head for the door and the day job, I got a wave and a mouthed “thank you,” which was cool.

On the way out I stopped for a drink of water, and with head down, out of the corner of my eye I saw that the person waiting to get a drink after me was wearing a truly fine pair of cowboy boots. I wore a truly utilitarian pair of cowboy boots when I was on site at the nuke plant — they were quite comfortable for a full day on my feet, it turns out. So I appreciated ’em, and as I lifted my head from drinking I was about to compliment the owner when I realized I had to keep looking up. And up. And then up some more. When I reached Lyle Lovett’s eyes I realized I had to keep looking even further if I wanted to see all the hair, but I stopped myself from doing that, stuttered out “I really like your new album,” and he gave that crooked smile he has and out of the corner of his mouth he drawled “Well, thank ya verruh much.” and maybe we shook hands, but I don’t remember anything more than that the encounter carried me through the rest of the day.

Through to now, in fact.

There’s no point to this story, I guess, but there is a take-away: go listen to “If I Had a Boat” now and read your copy of “Becoming Duchess Goldblatt” tonight (trust me) and wake up to your local public radio station tomorrow and discover something new and cool.

The (First) Year of the Dog

After wanting to have a dog in my life basically all of my life, it finally happened a year ago today. That’s when we had Bella in for an sleepover, in part to find out whether she and Pepper (our cat) would get along…or at least tolerate each other. That went fine, and when the next day arrived we decided to tell the person we adopted her from that unless they objected, it might be less confusing if she just stayed.

In for a penny, in for 35 pounds.

Everyone shed some tears that day — she’d been well-loved at her previous home, but circumstances had changed there and she needed a new place. So we abandoned our original plan, which was to wait a while longer and then adopt an older, non-shedding breed/mix. What we ended up with is an energetic** three year old Australian Cattle Dog, Golden Retriever, Miniature American Shepherd, Pomeranian, Beagle, Portuguese Podengo Pequeno, etcetera etcetera mix. Yeah, we did the DNA test thing, and they may as well have just returned a verdict of “Breed: Dog.” She has all the fur colors you could ever want to find, and we do find them everywhere, so I’m sure at this point our respective microbiomes are all well integrated too.

She’s not perfect — Bella had spent almost no time on a leash until she moved in with us, and that coupled with a very strong “OMG I SMELL RABBITS DON’T YOU SMELL RABBITS LET’S GO GET ALL THE RABBITS!” attitude makes her a challenge on walks. And though I can get them both to eat treats out of the same hand at the same time without any fuss, she’s too jealous of attention given to Pepper. There are other non-ideal aspects, but most are in the “Hey, dogs are gonna act like dogs, so whaddaya gonna do?” category.

(For instance, there are days when we feel like we’re on the wrong side of the window in Patrick McDonnell’s “Mutts”.)

All that aside, we think her life is better here, but she loves to be loved so Bella probably would have done fine anywhere. She sure has made our lives better, though, so here’s to you sharing the same happiness we feel (and that she feels) when we see her run or flop over or meet a new friend. And every new person’s a friend.

 

** Energetic is okay! Bella arrived just as my human running partner needed an extended time off to heal up from some injuries. So in this first year she and I logged 74 runs for 339.6 miles together. It would have been more except we didn’t run together for the first two months: she was a country dog and her feet needed to get used to sidewalks and roads.

In those 74 runs I’ve tired her out exactly zero times.

Favorite Books I read in 2020

Everybody responded differently to 2020’s awfulness, and I know many couldn’t concentrate on reading. I found that I could, and got even more comfort (and yes, escape) than usual from it.

Not counting books I read as research, I clocked in at 13 graphic novels and 80 prose works (46 fiction, 34 non). Here are my favorites, in case you need some recommendations for the coming year.

Fiction

Circe by Madelaine Miller
Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
The Given Day by Dennis Lehane
In the Woods by Tana French
The Necessary Beggar by Susan Palwick
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Nonfiction

Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch
The Falcon Thief by Joshua Hammer
Human Compatible by Stuart Russell
The Library Book by Susan Orlean
Lucky Dog Lessons by Brandon McMillan
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and Gregory Hays (trans.)
Midnight in Chernobyl by Andrew Higginbotham
Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars by Kate Green
The Sirens of Mars by Sarah Stewart Johnson
Vesper Flights by Helen MacDonald
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

Graphic Novels

Prince of Cats by Ron Wimberly
Rusty Brown by Chris Ware
Silver Surfer Black by Donny Cates and Tradd Moore
Slaughterhouse-Five by Ryan North, Albert Monteys, and Kurt Vonnegut

I also read a lot of old comic books (ostensibly because I’m weeding the collection, but in part just for fun) and, as mentioned, a bunch of books for future projects. Here’s hoping you found comfort in something this year as well, and that next year is a better one.

The bar for that is set low…

NATURALIST: Circumnavigating the uncanny valley

 

My latest book isn’t mine, really.

The first name on the cover is E.O. Wilson’s, since Naturalist (on sale Nov. 10, but you can pre-order it now!), is an adaptation of his memoir of the same name. I’d never adapted a book before, and had no idea how to do such a thing when an editor at Island Press asked me to consider it. I think I came clean to Rebecca (hi Rebecca!) about this right away, but she sent me the book anyway. By the time it arrived I was having a hard time stopping myself from underlining passages in a copy I’d already borrowed from the library.

(Hi library! It’s 2020 and I miss visiting you!)

That copy she sent me is now beat up and marked up and I’ve underlined stuff on almost every page. Not surprisingly, the book is visually rich and verbally dense. It wasn’t quite a “choose your own adventure” experience, but there were many pathways through the book to explore in adapting it to comics. But to me, what happened between the lines was just as interesting, and to my mind it was this: Prof. Wilson was talking to us, sure, but he was also talking to himself.

So what does this mean for the comic? It meant, to me, that Wilson should talk to himself in the book. Obviously. But also literally. The present day Wilson — “PDW” in my script — should appear as a character during his early life, and vice versa.

Present Day Wilson walking (underwater!) with his younger self
PDW and Kid Wilson

I knew Chris (hi Chris!) was up to the artistic challenge of that, but I had no idea whether Rebecca would buy in, much less Prof. Wilson himself.

(Hi Prof. Wilson; I still can’t bring myself to call you Ed!)

To their credit, though they were skeptical (especially at the script stage, where the story is only words on the page, so it’s all theory…or maybe just hypothesis!) they let me proceed. And once it was reality, and they could see it in the art, they bought in completely. And that’s because comics is so good at keeping readers out of the uncanny valley.

Briefly, the uncanny valley is a phrase from the 1970s introduced by Masahiro Mori, at the time a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He used it to describe how as robots appear more human-like, they become more appealing — but only up to a point. When they get close to human-like, but not close enough, they start to look creepy. That’s when they’re in the valley. There are lots of reasons why 3D animators (think Pixar movies) don’t try to make their characters resemble real humans or animals too perfectly. One of the main ones is they don’t want to trap them, and then the audience, in the uncanny valley.

The comics medium has an advantage here, I think. A somewhat cartoony style, which I prefer over hyper-realistic ones, makes falling into the uncanny valley almost impossible. For one thing, the first image you see of a character fixes the look of that person in your mind, at least in the context of the book. It becomes the baseline for what you expect to see.

That’s not much different from movies, of course, so the real difference is that in comics you’re a reader, not a viewer. And as a reader, you fill in more details — and all the movement and humanity — that happens between the panels. The subtle failures in how light plays over real flesh, or wind moves hair, or the dissonance of hearing a famous actor’s voice coming out of someone else’s mouth? Those can’t happen in comics.

There are valleys and mountains and amazing vistas and wonderful animals of all kinds in our book, of course. It’s about Nature-with-a-capital-N, after all. But I can say that if you agree to accept that first image of E.O. Wilson as The Naturalist, you can trust him, and us, to move you through both space and time and never even approach the uncanny. What you’ll get instead is the wonder and joy of discovery.

More virtual events: July 16 and July 22

If you can read this, you can join me for a couple of online events! Check the “Upcoming Events” link on my site for more info, but briefly:

July 16: In conversation with Kate Greene about her new book Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars.

July 22: A Comic-con panel with Maris Wicks, Gene Yang, and Chad Sell about “The Power of Teamwork in Kids Comics.”

I hope to see** you there.

**Even though, thanks to the magic of how online meetings sometimes disable audience audio+video, I might not actually get to see you, I’m sure you look fabulous!

Virtual Astronauts Events: May 20 and June 6

If you can read this, you can join us for a couple of online events!

May 20 (Wednesday), 1pm EDT
Live Chat: Pioneering Women in Aerospace
https://airandspace.si.edu/events/live-chat-pioneering-women-aerospace

Mary Cleave, Maris Wicks, and I will talk about our graphic novel ASTRONAUTS and the first women in space…Mary was one of those astronauts! Could it be cooler? Yes: it’s sponsored and hosted by the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum!

June 6 (Saturday), 12pm EDT
Comics Relief: “Space Comics”

Alison Wilgus (@aliwilgus), Maris Wicks (@mariswicks), and I will talk about space comics as part of a cool event sponsored by our pals (and publishers) at First Second!

More details in the events link when they’re available.