For years I thought my father was the story, though I knew nothing of his day to day. I just knew that his life was more cinematic than mine and my mother’s—for one thing, he was dealing his way through the grit and graffiti of 1970s and ’80s Manhattan. A surviving beatnik, he went from burning his draft card and feeding the poor on the Bowery at the Catholic Worker, to selling marijuana in a loft with special built-in bins for the various varieties he sold.

When I was three, he left our limestone apartment in Crown Heights and moved to a SoHo that still smelled like industry and garbage. It was bohemian existence. The loft wasn’t fancy, but the bathtub was made out of a whisky barrel, the antiquated elevator had a steel gate like an accordion, and Joey Ramone occasionally appeared in the elevator. My father met John Lennon at the Corner Bistro, knew that Kerouac’s preferred drink was Jack Daniels on the rocks because he’d sat with him at the bar. Once, when he was selling the Catholic Worker newspaper on the corner of 8th Street and 6th Avenue, he said that Allen Ginsberg’s boyfriend tried to pick him up.

So many stories we tell are about men known by their last names: Kerouac, Ramone, Lennon, Ginsberg. This is what tripped me up for so long. My father had a New York life that intersected with those of New York men and I thought I must be interesting by association. But my childhood story is that of a single woman raising her child alone in an unglamorous Northern city—my mother and I left New York City for Boston when I was four. My father looks like the Monopoly man, and growing up he was like the game’s top hat to me, a metal piece I moved from east to west, uptown and downtown across the map of Manhattan in my mind. My mother was my home.

When they were first separated, the year I turned three, I saw my father every weekend. Once we moved, he visited three times: my 8th birthday, a ballet recital when I was 12 and my high school graduation. He was getting arrested, on and off probation, visiting Mexico and Puerto Rico on business and to lie low, while my mother was a Montessori teacher, a waitress, a worker in the mailroom of Boston’s public television station, a graduate student, a Head Start teacher, a graduate student again, a waitress/adjunct professor, then finally a professor of adult students going back to college to get their undergraduate degrees. She did not get that job until I was a senior in high school. If we hadn’t had family friends with three daughters who fed me dinner at least twice a week, and opened their home to me whenever necessary, I don’t know what would have happened to me.

I was always clear, however, that my mother and I were better off alone. My father was not just a dealer, he is an addict, and there was never any way to divorce the two. He called occasionally and except for annual reunions, initiated by my mother at his mother’s house in New Jersey, he knew nothing of harsh New England winters or how the salt air wafts into Dorchester off of the Atlantic. My father once told me he got me a good mother as if he were some kind of god with the power to grant maternal favor, but there is some truth to this. He had a child with a woman whom he knew was more than capable of raising that child alone. He knew he could trust my mother to work like a dog and support me in a way he never could. And, he did, indeed, know that she had that indefinable something extra—she was a good mother.

But my mother is not unique. She is a member of a tribe of single women who work hard to support their children and do it well. Common as bread. Throughout my childhood, I thought I could avoid her fate. I told my grandfather not to worry, that I wouldn’t end up like her. When I was ten and my mother was raging yet again about how little money there was and how my absent father never contributed to my support, I vowed I would do better. Not in terms of career, I knew my mother was doing her best while fulfilling her intellectual gifts, and I never begrudged her making the choice to get her doctorate, but I promised myself I would find a partner I could depend on, a partner who would take care of me. And I did, but I didn’t marry him. My first love is one of the most steadfast men I have known, but we were too young. Years later I married an artist obsessed with painting. We separated when our daughter was four.

I didn’t escape the sins of my father. I thought my ex-husband would change after the baby was born. Instead I found myself in an enormous building alone. When he left he said his leaving would be okay, our daughter would be fine, as I had been, but he never connected my fatherlessness to what it was about me he had to leave—the fatherless child pretends not to need. He knew no matter what he did I would take care of our daughter as my mother had done for me.

For so many years, I worried I’d become my mother. To escape her fate, I trolled for love on OkCupid, dated all the unavailable fortysomething men in Brooklyn, then blamed my own unavailability on them. I understand as the years go by that I have inherited my father’s restlessness. And while our circumstances echo: single woman, urban apartment, cat, daughter, I now say I’m a single mother who was raised by a single mother without flinching. You’d be surprised how freely people comment on my situation. A lover who thoughtlessly asks, “Do you ever worry you’re just like your mother?” Worse is the unspoken judgment. The unsaid, “Poor you.”

My mother worked hard every day of my childhood. She wrote in the morning, ran hundreds of miles, served hundreds of people at one restaurant or another, went to school either as a student or a teacher. No one ever told her it was going to be okay. And we were lucky, my grandfather was a liquor salesman who paid for my sneakers and braces and bought me a cornflower blue Marimekko comforter and matching sheets for my 12th birthday. He left enough money when he died so that my mother’s cashing in her pension each time she switched jobs did not screw her financially in retirement. She lives carefully, but has a car, a small house, a horse and a cat.

Ultimately, there is no “leaning in” when you are raising kids alone, nor is there any leaning on. Being a single mother means constantly treading water to stay afloat, while holding your head up in the process. Maybe this is why there are so few single mothers who write about work. I have wanted to contribute article after article to the ongoing debate about working mothers, but finding time to write when you have a full-time job and are running a household, while possible and achieved by many, has been challenging for me. This is, in part, why I write poetry. A poem is jewel-like in its compression. It can be entered into and revised intermittently and on the fly.

It has always been ironic to me that that while society offers no real support for the single mama, there is, in concert with the pity, loads of condescending admiration. Friends and colleagues wonder how I do it alone. I never answer, “I don’t know how you do it and stay married.” I say that sharing my daughter with her father offers me time to myself, that while I miss her when she is with him, we have been doing this for nearly a decade. It has taken nearly that long to shed my skin, not to be afraid that I am living my mother’s life. We may not be models of partnership and interdependence, but no one can have it all. I am a second-generation single mother proud of my mother’s legacy of hard work and creativity. This is not such a bad inheritance.

Elsewhere, Caledonia Kearns in the Awl: “Louie” in Divorceland, Where a Fun Schlub is a Super-Stud.

[Children] don’t know that I’ve done those other things. They know me by my voice because children hear me in a supermarket; sometimes I’ll be chatting with a friend about lettuce, and suddenly a child will say, “Mrs. Potts!” It’s enchanting.
—Angela Lansbury

Image from Voice Actors Who Look Like Their Characters

Probably because my 20×200 bio links here, I’ve gotten a few emails asking when we’re going to start posting again, already. In 2012, I made a goal to get to Gmail Draft Zero. So how about getting to Blog Draft Zero in 2013? Look for posts we saved and forgot to finish, essays just missing that one copyright-free image, and cartoons that want only tender loving formatting. Our unofficial motto, after all, is “Old news is good news.” And, of course, there’s a whole world of symbols and punctuation and hieroglyphs and pictograms and semaphores to attend to.

Happy new year. And thanks for visiting, as always!

Once upon a time, from 2004 to about 2010, Emdashes was a New Yorker fan blog. But now that The New Yorker has so many blogs of its own for people to follow and be-fan, we’ve slowly started morphing back into what we intended to be in the first place: a punctuation blog.

Fortunately, sometimes our first love, The New Yorker, venntersects with our second love, punctuation. Today marks one such occasion. You probably already know that the magazine sponsors a weekly Twitter contest, Questioningly, in which people tweet entries (along with the hashtag #tnyquestion) in response to editor Ben Greenman’s inspired and loopy challenges. Greenman just posted the results of the most recent contest: Invent a new punctuation mark. Some of the winners:

There were inventions specific to the online world, such as @seancarman’s smÅ¿ticon, which consisted of “two colons on either side of an internet comment identifying it as an out-of-character expression of rage.” There were inventions characteristic of our age, such as @madbeyond’s sollipsis, “a personalized ellipsis points shifting the discussion back to me me me.” But for the winner we went beyond rage and self-absorption to @toddlerlit’s bad-writing apology mark.

Meanwhile, do you know what an interroverti is? It’s the winner of our own punctuation contest from a few years back, in which we asked reader to name the nameless upside-down question mark. There are pictures, too. Enjoy. And since readers seem undaunted by the winner having been announced in 2008 and are still posting submissions, we invite you to do the same. ]]> tag:emdashes.com,2012://2.4027 2012-07-09T10:13:50Z 2012-07-11T05:10:55Z

BNR: …Apart from all your second-guessing of your writing itself, I’ve noticed that you’re really hard on yourself for using a font based on your handwriting to letter your frames.

AB: I do feel guilty about it, like it’s somehow cheating to use a digital font, and to not actually hand-letter my work. But at the same time, I have these lengthy passages of quotations from [Donald] Winnicott or from Virginia Woolf that I have obsessively hand-lettered.

BNR: So interesting: the parts that aren’t your language.

AB: Yeah. In fact those things are treated as drawings in the book, even though they’re text. I frame them as a drawing and often overlay them with my digital narration. It’s almost like I’m giving those words more attention than my own words, but not really.

…

BNR: When I read about your font, I had the image of you sitting there trying to decide which —

AB: Actually, I basically did that. This guy had me write five or six versions of each letter, and then he kind of averaged them out.

BNR: Does it help with the niggly copyediting problems — its/it’s and whatnot — that pedants like me notice in a lot of graphic novels?

AB: Yeah, it enables me to make corrections of typos or to make last-minute editing changes in a way that would be just way too onerous to do by hand. You’d have to go in and manually erase and re-draw the “it’s” and take the apostrophe out and move the space. It would take you forever; it’s insane. So I feel like I’m able to write more carefully because I’m using a digital font. A lot of cartoonists, their stuff is filled with typos. It’s part of the charm, but I feel like my kind of writing I can’t do that. I can’t live with that.

Print is dead? I was watching Ghostbusters (1984) this weekend, and at one point the character Egon Spengler is asked a question, to which he responds: ‘Print is dead.” What is the earliest recorded use of this phrase?

I found a reference in the Antioch Review (1967) that uses “print is dead” as the characterization for Marshall McLuhan’s scholarship, which make a lot of sense to me in this context. This previously is also pertinent.

Someone else in that group also mentions that the “print is dead” line actually gained some popularity in the early 80s in tech circles as the personal computer gained prominence. It likely wasn’t the earliest recorded use, but Egon’s quote may have just been a result of the growing sentiment of the time.

Best of all, I learned from the Metafilter thread above that Harold Ramis went to the high school three blocks from my new home in Chicago! This must be why I keep watching his movies. Anita O’Day went there, too, which gives me shivers. So did Shecky Greene and Sidney Sheldon, but not all at the same time.

Related: The Contested Number of Years That Bill Murray Is Stuck in “Groundhog Day”]]> tag:emdashes.com,2012://2.4020 2012-03-12T07:26:25Z 2012-04-25T03:21:35Z

Lee Alexander writes:

It’s hard not to think of Alan Rickman as Severus Snape, curl-lipped and leering behind a smoking cauldron as Harry Potter’s ambiguously evil Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor. In Thersea Rebeck’s new comedy, Seminar (which opened on Sunday at the Golden Theatre), Rickman is once again in command of the classroom, abandoning his robe and wand for a somewhat more mundane task: instructing four twentysomethings on the craft of writing a novel.

Though Rickman’s character, the famous writer Leonard, snidely remarks that “the novel has fallen on hard times,” the audience is secure in the knowledge that the play has not. During the show—which gives us a sense of what highbrow reality television would be like if it existed—we watch with delight as the four hopefuls are eviscerated, one by one, under the cutting critiques of their fiercely disparaging instructor.

Seminar isn’t just a play about writing; it’s also a play about power. Director Sam Gold has a firm grasp on its subtleties in his staging and highlighting of the shifting power dynamics of this highly contentious and incestuous writing circle.

This is ensemble acting at its best, though there are two actors whose performances rise to Rickman’s star power. Kate (played skillfully by the talented Lily Rabe), an affluent young woman whose beautifully designed Upper West Side apartment serves as the group’s meeting spot, is dismissed by Leonard as a rich-girl feminist with an Emily Dickson complex (he dismisses Dickinson’s poetry as “words like lumps of shit”). Rabe has an expert sense of comedic timing, and is a joy to watch as she proves the ultimate literary cliché: Never judge a book—or, in this case, character—by its cover.

As Martin, Hamish Linklater perfectly captures the intensity and undeniable charm of a character whose self-doubt and lack of confidence make him a natural underdog in this cadre of big personalities and oversized egos.

Not everyone in the audience will share the dream of writing the great American novel, but we all face criticism in the pursuit of our own endeavors. Often, of course, the critical figure in the way of our dreams is not a dismissive authority but our own insecurity. After all the vicious insults and all the bruised egos, Seminar reminds us, it’s how we respond to criticism that informs our success. As Leonard warns: “If it gets in, you’re doomed.”

Lee Alexander has an MA in Text and Performance Studies from King’s College/RADA and currently lives in Brooklyn.

—Emily Gordon

AVC: How did you get involved with The New Yorker? Did they come to you, or did you go to them?

KB: No, you have to submit to them. You give them packages. The New Yorker doesn’t come to anybody, not even the people who’ve been published there for 20 years. You have to submit, and you just keep doing it until they buy one.

AVC: What’s it like doing comics for them?

KB: It’s just a different audience—and by “audience,” I mean the New Yorker editor who buys your comic or doesn’t, and he’s the guy you want to really impress. I could do anything I wanted on my site, but I just wanted to get in somewhere where an editor said, “This is good enough,” or, “This is not good enough.” There’s a certain New Yorker sensibility, style, sense of humor, that I thought about when I was making them, like, “I want this to look like a New Yorker cartoon.” And I thought that’s how I should go about it. I didn’t write them, Sam Means wrote them, and I drew them. We had a partnership. But recently, I was on a panel with Roz Chast. She’s amazing, and she was like, “You shouldn’t adhere to any style, you should just do what you wanna do. You shouldn’t make it look like a New Yorker cartoon, you should make it look like yours.” Which I never really considered. [Laughs.] I mean, The New Yorker’s kind of an institution. But she probably is right. I enjoyed doing it, but maybe I would enjoy it more if I had stuck to my own sensibilities more. I don’t know.

—Emily Gordon]]> tag:emdashes.com,2011://2.4008 2011-07-08T13:36:39Z 2011-10-21T05:04:22Z