Misogyny

“Misogyny” (2021)
by Carson Grubaugh (1981- )
8.5 x 11 in., ink on paper
Coppola Collection

At the Patreon site organized by Sean Michael Robinson and Carson Grubaugh, which accompanies their collaboration on “Living the Line,” they offer a premium based on Carson’s Google Grab-Bag schtick.

He offers an original straight-to-ink sketch. Here is how that works. You are asked to provide a word or phrase (and obviously you can game this a bit). Carson then searches this word or phrase using Google Images. The first photographic image listed by Google Images will be the source material for the straight-to-ink sketch.

Carson has got a great eye. In fact, it freaks me out. He can use a brush (or pen) on paper with NO underlying outline, lay down lines or brushstrokes all over the page, and in about 20-30 minutes he produces a sketch. And all without the training wheels! He records it live. There are videos of this on YouTube (and at the Patreon site).

The October 2021 Grab-Bag phrase came from me. In fact, all three words that were voted on came from me. I figured to put voters in the lesser-of-three-evils position by suggesting misogyny, racism, and homophobia as the words.

Misogyny won.

The Patreon Site: https://www.patreon.com/livingtheline/posts

The Home Site: https://www.livingthelinebooks.com

The Matrix Morpheus

“The Matrix Morpheus” (2021)
by Carson Grubaugh (1981- )
8.5 x 11 in., ink on paper
Coppola Collection

At the Patreon site organized by Sean Michael Robinson and Carson Grubaugh, which accompanies their collaboration on “Living the Line,” they offer a premium based on Carson’s Google Grab-Bag schtick.

He offers an original straight-to-ink sketch. Here is how that works. You are asked to provide a word or phrase (and obviously you can game this a bit). Carson then searches this word or phrase using Google Images. The first photographic image listed by Google Images will be the source material for the straight-to-ink sketch.

Carson has got a great eye. In fact, it freaks me out. He can use a brush (or pen) on paper with NO underlying outline, lay down lines or brushstrokes all over the page, and in about 20-30 minutes he produces a sketch. And all without the training wheels! He records it live. There are videos of this on YouTube (and at the Patreon site).

The December 2021 Grab-Bag phrase came from me. In fact, all three words that were voted on came from me. In honors of the new Matrix movie, I offered up “The Matrix Morpheus,” “The Matrix Neo,” and “The Matrix Trinity.”

Morpheus won.

The Patreon Site: https://www.patreon.com/livingtheline/posts

The Home Site: https://www.livingthelinebooks.com

Mapplethorpe Dance

“Mapplethorpe Dance” (2021)
by Carson Grubaugh (1981- )
8.5 x 11 in., ink on paper
Coppola Collection

At the Patreon site organized by Sean Michael Robinson and Carson Grubaugh, which accompanies their collaboration on “Living the Line,” they offer a premium based on Carson’s Google Grab-Bag schtick.

He offers an original straight-to-ink sketch. Here is how that works. You are asked to provide a word or phrase (and obviously you can game this a bit). Carson then searches this word or phrase using Google Images. The first photographic image listed by Google Images will be the source material for the straight-to-ink sketch.

Carson has got a great eye. In fact, it freaks me out. He can use a brush (or pen) on paper with NO underlying outline, lay down lines or brushstrokes all over the page, and in about 20-30 minutes he produces a sketch. And all without the training wheels! He records it live. There are videos of this on YouTube (and at the Patreon site).

The November 2021 Grab-Bag phrase came from me. In fact, all three words that were voted on came from me. Given the things you can put after the name Mapplethorpe, I am a kind devil, so “Mapplethorpe Dance,” “Mapplethorpe Kiss,” and “Mapplethorpe Hug.”

Mapplethorpe Dance was the winner.

The Patreon Site: https://www.patreon.com/livingtheline/posts

The Home Site: https://www.livingthelinebooks.com

 

“Strange Academy” #4 p 9

“Strange Academy” #4 p 9
by Humberto Ramos (1970-)
11 x 17 in, ink over graphite on Bristol board
Coppola Collection

Ramos is a prolific and highly talented artist, and has contributed lots of covers and interiors to the comics field since launching his career in 1989. He’s got a super-distinctive and fun style that I thought was exemplified well by this frenetic gathering of pupils at the Strange Academy.

This issue, from December 2020, contains the memorable “TAG, YOU’RE IT!” where the students at the Strange Academy blow off their homework for the craziest game of tag ever.

Textbook Part 6

I started my first faculty position in Sept 1982 when I was 25 years old. At the end of the current semester, I hit 40 years in the profession (yes, you can do that other math, too).

January 2021: Books A and B are ready to be produced. Book C is barely underway. And it is now pretty clear that the publisher has cold feet about investing at all – as it becomes a lot clearer what I am doing with it as a Creator-owned property. That’s OK, I have worked as the editor for a quarterly publication since 1998, and I trust my production person there for advice.

February 2021: That self-same production person offered to take on the project (at roughly 1/3 the net cost that the publisher would have been looking for). Starting now, I moved from toggling between author and development editor to also being production manager. I like understanding how things work.

At right about this time, the Grand Calendar was set. Some of my colleagues were interested in starting with the books in fall 2021 (a year early and estimated pre-covid). Because the fall term would only have been Books A and B, pulling this trigger would set a series of related events in motion if Books A and B were to be in student hands at the end of August and Books C and D in hands on January 4, 2022.

June 15: Books A and B press ready
Oct 15: Books C and D press ready

It’s February. Books A and B are Word files with pasted in art and questions (although the art is 100% final form, and the text is complete… it’s about 95% of a book). Book C was, I think, about 3 chapters in (of 4 plus 5 appendices), and Book D was a sparkle in my eye. That is easy math: I needed to start hitting about 3 weeks per chapter while dealing with whatever was going to be needed during production (responding to questions and proofing inquiries, at least). I also needed to commission the covers from the wonderful art studio that does some spectacular scientific illustration (Ella Maru).

No pain. No gain. I was going to be doing a lot of bike riding in 2021, and no travel anyhow.

Without that time loss from covid, this would have been easier. On the other hand, work fills the available space, so it might not have been that different.

It was clear in April that Book A would be ready for press by Jun 15 but Book B was not. I was this|close to pulling the trigger on 2021 when Plan B hit me. Book B is already 95% OK. Send it to press as a one-time, collector’s as an ashcan or bootleg version, printed from my own Word files.

And that is what happened.

June 15: Book A and bootleg B went to press. Book B was ready at the end of July. So close.

Aug 1: I wrote the last word in Book D. If you take from this that I wrote the entire thing linearly from chapter 1, page 1, through to the end, without changing the outline, you would be correct.

Aug 15: started the first page of the answer key – 2 weeks before it might conceivably be needed. Why do anything the easy way?

Aug 30: books were in hand, and within days they were being used – vociferously. A design prediction from 2018 was being tested for the first time.

I was staying about 2-3 weeks ahead on the answer key. The fact that the future slots on the web site were blank went almost completely unnoticed.

Oct 15: Book C ready for press, but Book D in as a bootleg.

Nov 20: Book D done.

Jan 5: Books C and D in hand as the second term begins. I was now about a month ahead on the answer key thanks to the holiday break. Some supply chain hiccups and learning more than I wanted to know about how quote/unquote bookstores work these days (managing editor work).

Mar 1, 2022: answer key completed. The first edition was finally “done” in a real sense, and we had been using it for 7 months already thanks to a little luck and the idiosyncratic design.

How much of the original Ege text remains? A couple of homages… a few bits of its DNA linger. There were, I think, 3 passages that I lifted and only needed to edit slightly, which I simply wanted to do in a few places, so her voice was there in the background as a guest speaker. Getting permissions for using spectral data (and anything else) is a giant pain in the ass. So I already had secured permission to continue using those items from the 5th edition in as many new works as I created after I took ownership (playing the long game). We had also generated our own NMR spectra for the 5th edition, so that whole permissions issue was off the table (and if you can tell which of those images I fabricated from the raw materials I had to work with, pat yourself on the back).

As I wrote elsewhere at this site:

The books are designed to expand the pedagogical mission of a standard textbook with detailed explanations, a guided analysis of important ideas, and scaffolded set of open response questions to be worked on and filled in as the learner progresses. The approach is practical and to the point, reflecting the benefits of learning from thousands of students over 40 years. The writing style favors a more personal story-telling narrative that emphasizes explanation.

The text is the singular vision of its author. The project was self-funded and self-produced without changes being dictated by market forces or editorial demands. The book is a wholly owned property of the author.

I had two points I wanted to make upon starting this project.

First, that what constitutes a “textbook” could be different and it would promote student engagement.

Second, that what constitutes “authorship” and the issues surrounding Creator’s Rights could be different and still work.

I think the jury is still out, despite the early positive returns. The book appears to be at least one of the factors leading to an extreme polarization of the students. The A/B end is skewing positive (which is amazing) and the C/D/E end is skewing negative (not really moving negatively, just not advancing like the others). There are multiple contributing factors, including the post-covid bad habits.

Let’s see how this plays out over the next few years.

I’m satisfied that the real experiment is getting done. If it works, great; if it does not, it was not for lack of trying or from compromising the design.

We get these expensive graduate educations to identify and think about new solutions to vexing problems. I’ve always been interested in taking my education and thinking about the vexing problems in education. Not everyone understood or agreed with my decision.

Fortunately, I am singularly bad at both listening and at normative behavior.

 

Textbook Part 5

January 4, 2020: We were on our usual interview trip in China for the PhD program. The first student we interviewed, coincidentally enough, was from Wuhan University. The irony of that would be evident within about 3 weeks.

March 4, 2020: Admit the stirrings of concerns, travelled out to San Francisco. The most evident thing was people not lingering as much in shared spaces, and lots of scrubbing of surfaces. During free time, I was not hanging out with my computer at the local Starbucks, but rather sitting in a less crowded lounge area of the hotel.

March 11, 2020: As I was flying back from San Francisco, the University of Michigan was announcing its decision to close down for two days and let everyone go home. I was not teaching that term, for which I was quite happy. I started to worry about the fall, though, and the loss of student-student social aspects of learning, and particularly about the impossibility of testing fairly. Heads down on Book C… easy enough to stay home with.

By May-June, it seemed pretty clear and advisable to me that fall term was going to be online (and I wrote my cruise ship essay here at this site). I also ended up completely bringing writing to a halt as I started to think about the fall 2020 term.

It took weeks to master an online testing system and develop new genres of questions, all of which to try and stick with machine scoring only, but still preserve what would could get with open response, while at the same time circumventing as much cheating as possible by delivering individual exams to individual students. I could never solve the “friendly expert sitting with you” problem, but I was pretty sure I could stop collaboration.

Learning how to do this, and then actually doing it, was a huge (and I mean YUGE) time sink. I got nothing written July-Dec 2020, and came back up for air in January 2021.

The fact that I am coming back up for air in March 2022 tells you everything about the last 15 months you might want to know.

The New Arms Race

“The New Arms Race” (Non Sequitur, January 3, 2022)
by Wiley Miller (1951-)
8.5 x 14 in., ink on heavy paper
Coppola Collection

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiley_Miller

In 1991, Wiley launched his popular Non Sequitur strip, eventually syndicated to 700 newspapers as well as published on Go Comics and distributed via email. The strip oscillates between one-panel commentary and stories with recurring characters. In either event, the strips have a history of politically leaning and sharp commentary. I was strongly taken by the comment here and I am pleased to have this art to display.

The note from Wiley: “The true West Side Story of 2022. ‘Only in America’”

A reminder – Wiley composes these to be able to be cropped as a horizontal or vertical format (see additional images).

Textbook Part 4

At the outset, I was taking about 2 months to do a chapter. So at 20 chapters, 4 years seemed like the right estimate.

I hate revising. Here was my game plan; really, just a game. Write the text (words) and leave placeholders for the figures (Fig 0101, 0102, 0103…) along with a reminder for what I thought needed to be shown. And try to get the placements right without needing to go back and renumber them (at least once the writing part was finished for that chapter). The detailed outline was important to this game, as was the dead time before writing anything and keeping the entire plot in my head. Casual bike rides along a familiar path ended up being indispensable ways to simply think and plan and revise before writing. I was definitely writing and revising drafts in my head.

With a chapter’s text completed and the spots for figures placed, I went back and started to work on the art. While writing a chapter might take anywhere from 5-10 days, grinding through the art took twice that time. And there were about 70 questions to write and format for each chapter, which are also merely art.

As the end of the first term course (Books A and B) got closer to completion, near the end of 2019, I started thinking about production (taking my manuscript with its pasted in art and using publishing software to make it look more like a book, along with the editorial proofing). I planned on using the resources of the printer, and more or less hiring them as a service, the cost of which would be deducted as books were eventually sold. The preliminary negotiations with them seemed fine, so I soldiered on to Book C.

Worry about production when the time comes.

Are you keeping track of the time?

I clearly missed the memo when it said 2020 was going to go sideways with a global pandemic.

Fucking covid.

The Lone Voyager

“The Lone Voyager” (p 21 of The World Around Us #37 The Sea)
by Jack Kirby (1917-1994), Dick Ayers (1924-2014)
14 x 21 in, ink over graphite on Bristol board
Coppola Collection

Produced in 1961, on the cusp of Kirby’s work on The Fantastic Four, “The World Around Us” was an anthology spinoff of the Classics Illustrated series, published by the Gilbertson company, that ran from 1958-1961. The US series had ended with the previous issue (#36), and 48 of 59 known pages for issue #37 were included in the actual comic that appeared in Europe. Kirby and Ayers contributed a 10-page story (The Lone Voyager) that ran on pp 21-30. This is the title page (p 21) for that story.

The story features the legendary Naval Capt. Joshua Slocum, who was the first person to sail around the world. In Fairhaven, Massachusetts, from 1891 to 1892, Slocum rebuilt an oyster boat named Spray. On June 21, 1892, he launched the rebuilt vessel. And on April 24, 1895, he set sail from Boston, Massachusetts, as The Lone Voyager.

Textbook Part 3

By summer 2018 I had my plan.

Nothing in and of a textbook today needs to be particularly useful once the course is over, including the book itself. A crossword puzzle book is not written to be preserved in a full color, glossy, hardbound splendor. It is consumable. No effort at all is spent on its shelf legacy. Textbooks, in other words, are now squarely in the realm of the majority of most other books.

I had years of experience with “course packs” (a cheap, spiral-bound b/w printing of collections of our old exams, updated annually). Our examinations are open response, (posed with data, write real answers on paper). And students consumed these course packs year after year: puzzle books. Convenient to carry, the spiral binding allows you to fold them open while working and to share your work with others. As a book, it looks cheap and invites writing. For decades, these things were universally deemed the most essential resource we had, and we were at a point when students were obsessing over ONLY old exam questions instead of reading the book and working on those preparatory exercises. It was a problem.

But this experience with the course packs gave me a plan: a consumable version of a textbook with its pedagogical focus.

Good thing I was doing this on my own. No publisher would have understood it. No one they sent their marketing prospectus out to would have understood it. And the conversation about doing it would have ended with filling the water glasses over that dinner meeting along with a plea “Just write us a book we can sell, will you?”

Um, negatory to that, good buddy. See ya on the flip side.

During most of July-August 2018, I committed a detailed outline to the design of this textbook and its content.

Ch 1: TOPIC
Intro essay, at least marginally related to the TOPIC
Sec 1.1 subtopic, parts A/B/C/D
questions about Sec 1.1 (formatted as our exam questions are)
Sec 1.2 subtopic, parts A/B/C/D
questions about Sec 1.2 (formatted as our exam questions are)
Sec 1.3 subtopic, parts A/B/C/D
questions about Sec 1.3 (formatted as our exam questions are)
Sec 1.4 subtopic, parts A/B/C/D
questions about Sec 1.4 (formatted as our exam questions are)
Outro essay: “What did we learn on the show tonight, Craig?”
Chapter questions.

There are 3-4 subtopics per chapter; always chopped up as A/B/C/D; each section more or less representing 1-2 class days (usually 1); always a set of questions to follow, separated from the Haiku of the pacing in the section. And then at the appropriate breaks, sets of exam questions (the old course pack content). Appendices for the critical reference materials that are part of the learning (think of them as subroutines: GoSub nomenclature, GoSub spectroscopy). There needed to be 4 volumes (2 per term, to keep things portable). Each inside front cover gives the big plan; each chapter has its detailed table of contents; but there is no index. Indices are a reference feature for a shelf item. Someone learning from the book does not need an index.

All this stuff needed to be figured out up front, of course. You cannot be deciding on a new feature while you are writing chapter 10 – not if you want to ever finish and be sane. Think it through; commit; don’t look back.

I wrote word 1 on page 1 of chapter 1 on September 1, 2018. I figured maybe 4 years before it could be in the hands of students (Fall 2022).