This week also saw the emergence and global domination of a particularly virulent meme: Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop.

This one is my grandma’s favorite. (Nah, actually it’s not. She really religious. But she’s also kind of a bitch, so…)

Is this what a police state looks like? Or was UC Davis police John Pike just in a hurry to get his copy of MW3? (He probably shouldn’t bother. According to my cousin, rejected titles included “Old Fashioned Warfare,” “Modern Recycling,” and “MW2 II: The Search for Curly’s Gold.”)

Of course pepper spraying fellow shoppers is no different from blowing a little rosemary and thyme their way. And it can’t help but spice up that drab old sacrificial Thanksgiving bird!

I hear it’s like Sriracha. Once you start using it, you put it on everything. Check out these Amazon reviews for tips from home chefs, and more!

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In the hot front city of Oakland, Scott Olsen, the first veteran seriously injured when police fired ordinance against their fellow American citizens, was released from the hospital, and much more is going on as well. Events are being live-blogged by local news here and here.

In Atlanta, Veterans foreclosed on Bank of America.

At least one story emphasized the veterans’ usefulness as people “expert at living in tents” who “take solace in the act of being useful. [As one vet] puts it: ‘I haven’t had one nightmare since I’ve been here.’”

In New York, the slogan was “Honor the Dead, Fight Like Hell for the Living.”

Deaths and other unfortunate events at Occupation sites are being used as rationale to support the desire some municipalities had to see the protests “go away.” (In my best Seven of Nine voice: “they will fail.”)

The Occupation is not just in big cities, and small local television stations are capable of some damn good reporting. This local TV report from Niles, Indiana tells us not just that veterans are part of the occupy movement, but why veterans have particular reason to get involved. Hint: it involves some troubling statistics.

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The Oakland Occupation is the hot front in the struggle against Corporate Exploitation: an attack by the police that injured Iraq vet Scott Olson led to a general strike and a large and successful march that closed the Port of Oakland. It was followed by a small destructive spree, and now a second Iraq vet has a lacerated spleen after being beaten by police batons.

Perhaps after this, more Americans will have an opinion on the movement?

Occupiers in cities across America are co-habitating with homeless people and working to make these ad-hoc communities safe for everyone.

The Atlanta Occupation has taken the issue a step further by moving the protest to a homeless shelter.

And the Des Moines Occupation wants Occupiers from the other 49 states to converge here in Iowa for the Republican Caucuses.

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Journalist and Fulbright scholar, Ana Menendez was raised in Florida by her parents who had fled the Cuban Revolution. Her Cuban heritage saturates her fiction from her first short story collection (In Cuba I was a German Shepard) to her newest book, Adios, Happy Homeland! which is sure to confound some readers. While the cover of the book announces that it is fiction by Ana Menendez, a glance at its form and content shows an anthology of Cuban authors, curated by an Irishman-living-in-Havana named Herberto Quain. No better cultural colonialist could be found, as his introduction makes clear: Quain adores all things Cuban, a love he traces to his childhood and blood heritage. He appropriates these authors’ works not just enthusiastically but affectionately—which (to this reader’s delight) just emphasizes how brutal a violation it is. The structure and the interplay between the authors and their aggressor-editor all but guarantees this book will become required reading in college Post-colonial Literature courses as a 21st Century fictional meta-commentary on appropriation that opens five doors for every five windows, and invites readers to look, look again, and wander through.

Menendez’s books up to this point have focused primarily on the universal experience of exile, but this book is far more interested in the universal experience of escape, of flight. Its greatest accomplishment is how well and how vividly it portrays the particular combination of madness, hope, ambition, and loneliness that drives us to harness the wind and fly away from the void we know into the void we do not.

Menendez spoke with us from Slovakia and Holland, via e-mail.

***

The Rumpus Interview with Ana Menendez

Rumpus: I’d like to start with the way in which this book is a departure—and not just from your own books. Formally, Adios, Happy Homeland is an anthology of stories by 21 invented, Cuba-connected authors curated by an invented (and probably under-qualified) Irish scholar-appropriator. Puzzling out the relationships and conflicts among the writers is a big part of the fun of the book, but their individual stories are playful and experimental too—one story travels backwards in time ["Journey Back to the Seed (Que Quieres, Vieja?)"], another operates as a series of infinitely recursive loops (“End-less Stories”), some appear to be excerpts from eccentric reference works (“Glossary of Caribbean Winds”; “Zodiac of Loss”), and so on. What led you to approach this book in this way?

Menendez: Yes, this book about departures, is its own kind of departure. It’s a book about freedom and I wanted the form to reflect that as much as possible. For me, it was a new way of thinking about fiction. It was born, as much of these things are I suppose, out of a certain uneasiness. After three books, I wanted to do something new, something that would liberate and delight me, and hopefully also the reader. While my characters are setting off into the blue, I too wanted to break free of convention, expectation, ambition—the whole gang of misfits that muck up honest work. The need to escape—preferably in a hot air balloon—is part of Cuban lore. But it’s also a very human impulse. Who hasn’t looked at their life at some point and longed for wings?

Rumpus: But it’s difficult, isn’t it? The characters must risk everything to achieve flight—and they are surrounded by forces trying to stop them: governments, relatives, historical events, physics, the winds themselves. Even the fictional authors must fight the cage their fictional editor tries to put them in. It all makes me wonder if they are flying or falling, if freedom is viewing doom through hope?

Menendez: Damned difficult. The winds are unreliable, if not outright malicious. Governments, friends, history are all in collusion to ground the aerostat. And the “real” author, trying to escape Cuba, finds herself curating yet another book in debt to its traditions. Our absurd lot as human beings is longing for a liberation that is ultimately impossible—existence is rooted in this reality. All our senses are tied to our mortal form (with what clouded corneas will we perceive heaven?). “Viewing doom through hope” indeed. Sometimes the balloon takes off, but the rider is never heard from again. Sometimes the escapee risks everything, only to long for return. And sometimes a lovely line of poetry is mauled in its transformation. And yet… we plan, we dream, we build tunnels beneath the dead…

Rumpus: Which to me was one of the most interesting ideas in your book—transformation is the dream, the admired thing, the legend, and yet… what remains after that beautiful moment is sometimes a memory, sometimes a corpse, and sometimes (as with the poems devastated by Google translation) a joke. After all, today (as he discovers in one of your stories), José Martí is an airport. Your first collection of short stories, In Cuba I was a German Shepard, transformed the Cuban exile experience into art—this collection seem to be questioning, if not the process, the product that kind of artistic transformation creates. “Un Cuento Extrano” seems especially to me a commentary on your own work. Do you see it this way as well? Do you expect your non-Spanish-speaking readers will use Google Translate (like I did) to read it?

Menendez: I wouldn’t call it a questioning, at least not in the negative sense of the word. Perhaps an inquiry: Why did my generation of Latino writers choose to write in this particular way, about these particular themes? What would have happened if say, the American-born Calvert Casey had written his Cuban stories in a similar style—a dash of nostalgia, a sprinkling of foreign words? “Un Cuento” turns the accepted form inside out to bring its contradictions into relief. In that sense, I think you’re right, it’s a commentary of sorts: an acknowledgement that to write today is to produce a product, as well as a private protest against the packaging.

There’s an English language translation of the story on my site, but, yes, I’d prefer readers put it through Google translate instead. I did, and the results were hilarious. I rather liked the story in that form!

Rumpus: This is just one among the many ways Adios, Happy Homeland! invites the reader to take a greater active role in bringing shape to the book—the authors’ names (C. Casey among them), the game-like “End-less Stories,” the many references within the stories. In some ways it is a fantastic puzzle, and I had to read with internet access always at hand, so I could research and translate, which was incredible fun. How do you picture (or intend) the reader’s experience? Do you have any special plans for releasing an interactive ebook?

Menendez: Well, as I writer, I dream of readers like you, who approach a book with the same kind of engagement that went into the writing. Writing for me begins with curiosity, with a “what if”. And a book, especially one of fragments, grows like a branching tree. Writing Adios was very much like building a puzzle: One story led to another, led to another in a series of interlocking images and tones. Some of them are obvious immediately, some require digging, and others are little more than private jokes. The layering, I hope, creates a sense of serendipity or perhaps we should call it happy coincidence—that fleeting recognition that creates a frisson of joy in our regular life. I also, in the multiple references, wanted to capture something of what it means to be a reader today, with the bounty of information at our fingertips. It’s one of the reasons Google features prominently. More than anything else on the internet, Google has transformed the way we approach the written word. And I think that’s not necessarily a bad thing: much of that transformation holds a world of possibility for the artist. Even Google Translate is a kind of contemporary art!

That said, I don’t know about an interactive e-book. It would have to involve something deeper than the usual click-for-more-info, because that would return the reading to a passive, almost academic, experience. I prefer the idea of reading as you did, search engine and Holmesian magnifying glass at hand. In that sense, thanks to the internet, every book has the potential to be a truly interactive e-book, one that reflects not just the author’s choices, but is guided by each individual reader’s curiosity.

Rumpus: Do you have any further plans for escape working at the moment? Any thoughts about where your next flight might take you?

Menendez: Ha! We just moved to Maastricht from Amsterdam and one day, amid the boxes, I decided to count how many homes I’d had: Since I moved out of my parents’ house 20 years ago, I’ve lived in 16 different places on four continents. In my twenties, it was all a great adventure and I really got a lot of joy out of travel. Now, we mostly just travel to visit family, and even that I find taxing. The planes seem smaller and more crowded; the people meaner. On my last transatlantic flight, Dutch immigration asked me to prove that I was the mother of my baby (I asked the young man if he wanted highlights of my 12-hour labor). Maybe I’m just getting old, but escaping just isn’t what it used to be.

Read the Rumpus Review of Adios, Happy Homeland!

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Based on the description in The Chronicle of Higher Education (which Harjo also posted on Facebook and commented upon fairly neutrally: “here’s some background”) I am not.

The crux of the matter is not that one faculty member, Lisa Chavez, took on side-work as a phone dominatrix and that this work put her into association with her students in ways that do not positively support the ideal student-professor relationship — that much was admitted by Chavez, and, as the Chronicle says, she “quickly quit the phone-sex job, admitted to a serious lapse of judgment, and was not found by the university’s administration to have violated any law or policy.”

No, the crux of the matter is that afterwards, other faculty in the English department went on a witch hunt. And “witch hunt” is really the phrase for it, with more-than-average appropriateness: just as Medieval women who did not sufficiently conform to contemporary ideas of womanliness were pursued without reason, taunted, tortured, and deprived of their lives, some at the U of New Mexico want to pursue Chavez without reason, shame her, torment her, and deprive her of her job.

Because despite her stopping, apologizing, and being cleared of wrongdoing, others from her department have quit and sued the university, angry to be denied the right to “punish” Chavez themselves by faculty panel. The fact that they believe she should be punished when she’s been cleared of any wrongdoing is irrelevant to them. They are seeing this situation through their own moral filter, and they are so upset that others don’t share that filtered vision, and so convinced that their vision is the correct one, they’re fighting well beyond the point of absurdity — it’s as much as madness.

I’m not going to boil this down to a simple fight between 2nd and 3rd wave feminism, or sex-positive feminism vs. anti-porn feminism, because, even though both dichotomies apply, what gets me more is the attitude (especially among those who have quit the department or are suing) that Chavez, because she has done this thing, is now somehow permanently tainted, that her admitting she made a mistake and quitting the side-work isn’t enough, that she must be dragged through a ritual whose only use would be to try to shame and humiliate her and then possibly oust her from the department.

It goes beyond “Biblical”: I mean, the Bible talks about forgiveness too. But those are the later parts. Bronze Age desert dwellers would certainly recognize what Harjo and Warner and the others want to do: they want to purge by fire what they perceive as an uncleanness in their community. They want to wash their hands in Chavez’s metaphorical blood.

I remind anyone who reads this that Chavez “was not found by the university’s administration to have violated any law or policy.” That sentence should read to you, if you value a just society of rules and laws, as a closed case. There are those, though, whose sense of “morality” obeys no rule or law: it is a creature capable of redefining “justice” to match its repulsion for the “other,” and its need for hierarchy and revenge.

The people in the U of New Mexico English department who took this witch hunt upon themselves actually left naughty photos of their colleague on their department chair’s desk with a note suggesting the pictures were from “Appalled Parents.” This crass maneuver, designed to shock their chair into taking action against Chavez, reveals a lot about their way of thinking.

First, it reveals that they see their students as children. This is an unfortunate way to see undergraduate students but a ridiculous way to see graduate students, who, especially in a creative writing program, are probably closer to 30 than 20, on average.

More importantly, though, their goal was to raise the specter of the disapproving authority. Parents are the persons between us and whom (rightly) lie the most sexual taboos and barriers, the most crushing moral judgments; parents are the people who can, with a word, return us to uncomprehending children twisting in the throes of guilt and shame, and make us feel those emotions with the intensity of childhood, when our yet-undeveloped brains couldn’t put feelings or events into perspective or context.

With that action and those two words they revealed that they want the others around them to get all a little bit more Lord of the Flies–only with more slut-shaming. They would prefer if everyone stopped thinking about inconvenient facts like, no university law or policy was violated, and started looking at emotionally incendiary pictures with their child- (if not their lizard-) brains.

It is not the role of universities (or creative writing programs) to degrade adults into judgmental shame-mongers who care not for the letter of the law. In fact, almost all university missions include expanding student empathy and acceptance of differences, and of respecting codes of ethics be they law or rules against plagiarism. But the goal with this little picture-leaving move was to get people to shut down the higher reasoning centers and “other” her into something “dirty” that must be hidden from mom and dad.

Again, there is no law or even a rule against what Chavez did. Her actions merely complicated the student-professor relationship — hardly an unprecedented consequence in the world of creative writing graduate programs, where everyone’s an adult and people get very close by virtue of the work they’re doing. Among us there are many male professors who are sleeping with their female students — an infraction far worse than anything Chavez did, one that actually does violate most universities’ rules of conduct (while Chavez violated none). Those rule-breaking men are often reprimanded, but rarely are they dragged through the mud, or fired, for what they do or did. They are certainly never saddled with a label as loaded as “prostitute.”

What’s happening to Chavez not only shows the bias against women in this position, but against sex work — even completely legal phone dominatrixing, which is essentially a kind of voice-only interactive performance. Her colleagues are characterizing her (wrongly) as a prostitute. This also tells us a lot about their frame of mind: to them, anyone who profits from something vaguely sexual is clearly an exploiter, a victimizer (of their grad school “children”), and they must be allowed to “protect” the students from this person — meanwhile, any woman who uses men’s desires to make a few bucks after work (even if it’s just voice work over the phone) is a prostitute.

Not, she used sex work to make a few bucks. No: she is a prostitute.

It’s the label-of-being as opposed to the describer-of-doing. The way our world (mis-)sees it, a man can be a fireman for 40 years, and when he quits, he’s not a fireman anymore. But if a woman “sells it” once, she is a whore. It becomes what she is. It’s the worst kind of sexism. It’s also common, and runs deep. Chavez never performed a sex act for money — her colleagues are just flat wrong to use that phrase — but because they are making this mistake, using this label, they are invoking the cultural biases that surround it.

And this is why, I believe, some in the U of New Mexico English department have lost their minds. They have ceased to see Chavez as a person — with whom you reason, from whom you accept apologies and make peace. They now see her as a beast: an unclean danger to the innocent who must be destroyed lest this imagined corruption spread. The basis for this view is sexism, but not the simple kind: it’s a complex built of the anti-woman attitudes that make some want to label and objectify and destroy a woman, just because they don’t like how she uses sex and her sexuality; attitudes that make them want to drag her before an assembly of disapproving peers to have them yell “shame, shame!” like the red-clad girls in The Handmaid’s Tale; attitudes that make them want to sew a scarlet “SW” for “sex worker” on the lapel of a woman who dared earn money dominating men on the phone.

I use the literary references for a reason. This is an English department we’re talking about. They study history and culture and society and psychology, they exercise empathy daily just to understand what they read, they live in the world of perspective and points of view. They should be able to see beyond their own. They should know better.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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Prior to interviewing her, I knew only vaguely about her furry-related adventures, and didn’t think much about them. Frankly I have lots of friends into lots of things, plenty of them plenty weird. Really, the only friends who make me lift a suspicious eyebrow are the ones whose interests seem too conventional or conformist, or whose interests seem a reaction to the perceived judgments of others.

But when Stephen Elliott sent out an email saying that he wanted to run 650-word interviews with ordinary people who are interesting, I thought of my friend: she’s an “ordinary” person in the sense that if you met her you’d think, “there’s a sharp, talented 20-something who does not flinch to give you her opinion!” And you’d never for a second guess that she likes to dress up like a lemur.

If I’m to trace back my awareness of the existence of furries, it would be to one of those MTV or HBO sex shows from the 90s, which featured an awkward young man who wants to have sex in what looked like a sports team’s mascot outfit, and follows him as he makes a hookup at a furry convention. The focus was wholly on sex, and the whole thing seemed rather strange and sordid and sad. It made furries look like totally random but entirely harmless sex fiends.

When I sat down to interview my friend, I was reminded of that impression, and how far off it is from her: she goes by Kilcodo or Killy when she’s among the furries, but I know her by a fairly ordinary name of the type you’d see an ode to in English Romantic Poetry. She’s outgoing, energetic, and in a long-term committed relationship with a great guy who’s getting a PhD in the social sciences. She’s politically aware and outspoken, an advocate for liberal causes who loves to argue philosophy and moral and logical reasoning, an “out” atheist/humanist who makes her case with kindness and precision, and a really talented writer (as a writer is of course the primary way I know her).

In short, there is nothing about her that is strange, sordid, or sad, and her attitude towards sex is supremely healthy. So even though I’d never thought much about that side of her life, when we sat down to do the interview, I immediately said to myself, “well, Amy, clearly everything you know is very little, and everything you know is probably wrong.” Her answers to my questions were fascinating — so fascinating that I could not possibly cut them down to 650 words. I sent it to the Rumpus at full-length, and they agreed that this was worth running as a longer feature. Most people will probably think this interview is on an “odd topic,” but I’m really proud of this interview. It goes into new and interesting territory, and it is real, and human, and valuable.

While we were doing the interview, she dressed up for me, and I just want to lay out my impressions. First, it’s way less weird than people make it out. Frankly, a big plush cartoon-animal shaped toy will put a smile on anyone’s face, and a big plush cartoon-animal shaped toy that is alive and jumps around and hugs you (or picks nits out of your hair) is about 1,000 times more fun than that. There’s nothing sexual about this part of it: cartoons are cute, cute is fun, and fun is happy.

Second, when she was dressed as a lemur, I was possessed by the irresistible urge to pet her. She was soft and cuddly like a (giant) toy or a (giant) pet, and afterwards I thought how, even though I’ve known my friend for years, I don’t touch her very often. Actually, I don’t touch many people very often, and when I do, it’s probably lightly, tentatively, so as not to offend. Maybe that’s part of the reason I love my cats so much: they’re the warm, loving, living things I can manhandle a little and shower with pet-pet affection. It was comforting for me, and I can only imagine it’s comforting for her to be in a suit that makes other people break down their barriers and be more openly physically affectionate.

It also broke down barriers for her: she was jumping around, playing in my hair, doing things that she would normally not, and all while I just laughed my head off. The only thing she did that I objected to was hit me with her tail, and even that didn’t bother me that much. Afterwards I thought: this must be very freeing for her, to be in this jolly outfit that makes it so you can get away with being more playful, and makes it so other people react really well to it, makes them more playful in return.

Lastly, it reminded me of a phase that I went through as a kid (a phase I think a lot of kids go through) when I acted like a dog. It drove my family crazy, but I ran around on my hands and knees barking and panting and begging and just all-around acting like a dog. I started thinking about how, as people, we are mammals, but we are mammals with a mind-bogglingly complex social structure. There are so many unspoken rules, small rituals, social expectations — so many things to get right and so much that can go wrong — that I think at a certain point we take comfort in the seeming simplicity of animal behavior. The way they communicate and behave seems so much more open and honest, so much less vexing and fraught, that to be for a short while like them is a relief.

I think that’s part of the reason why most people like having pets, or cherish moments when we commune with wild animals in nature. If we let go of our culture-bound bullshit, we can communicate with them on their level very easily, and it’s freeing. There are no mind games when you’re hanging out with a dog. If a dog likes you, he doesn’t hide it and try to send secret messages through his eyes or put a subtext into that last comment or heaven forbid try to “neg” you so you’ll like him more — a dog just jumps up and effing LIKES you and you know it. How does the song go: “if you want a friend, feed any animal.”

Now these are just some cursory impressions I had after spending a few minutes with a friend in a fursuit. She has a far more in-depth assessment about what the furry culture is all about, focusing more on art and creativity, in the interview. But from the point of view of a person who is not in this culture, I just have to say, once you spend a few minutes with someone in a fursuit, it’s far less odd than you’d think it would be. I think it’s like all things that seem strange at first: the more you know about it, the more normal and natural it comes to be. To me, especially, the “randomness” was erased when I realized that this does tap into some real human needs. And anything that makes people feel good and happy in a real, lasting way is valuable.

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The Rumpus: I want to start with this. I want you to look at this picture.

Kilcodo: You made like a little flow chart!

Rumpus: No, I didn’t make this, I found this online.

Kilcodo: Oh, I’ve seen this. I love the bottom one.

Rumpus: My first question is: this is the hierarchy of geeks, and obviously everything is above furries, and furries are above erotic furries, and erotic furries are above Star Trek fan fiction about furries. So, what is your take on this?

Kilcodo: My take on this is that because furry is a newer nerd phenomenon, all the other nerds need something to look down upon, so there needs to be an uber-nerd that all the other nerds can hate. I think also, here’s a community that isn’t legitimized by liking a pre-existing television show or set of novels that have been heralded by any kind of cultural tradition. This is just a group of people who want to draw pictures of animal people, watch cartoons, or dress up, or do whatever, and it’s this essentially user-controlled, user-made community.

Rumpus: So is there such a thing as furries who dress up as characters that already existed in some kind of a mainstream way?

Kilcodo: There is a small element of people who are costume players who might dress up as Star Fox, but it is actually centered around real people who are drawing right then and there, and their stuff is getting used and publicized by this community.

Rumpus: Are most people in the community artists?

Kilcodo: I’d say at least 75% are artists. The ones that can’t draw still draw. I’d say that creativity is promoted. One of the things I find fascinating is how from year to year it’s such a fluid changing group, and people can really dive in and create something that’s going to impact everybody. So anyone can get involved, and anyone can become important, and anyone can have their own creative power.

Rumpus: How many people in America do you know of who do what you do: making fursuits for furries?

Kilcodo: Not many. A handful.

Rumpus: How many costumes have you made?

Kilcodo: I think I’ve made about 30-35, at this point.

Rumpus: And how many do you own?

Kilcodo: I own 2. All the rest were made to be sold, or were created by commission.

Rumpus: How long does it take you to make a full-body fursuit?

Kilcodo: 2-3 weeks. Sometimes if I push myself I can get one done in five days, but I try to take my time and make each one an actual piece of art. I like to do airbrushing on the head, and individually sculpt the teeth and claws, and do the details that are going to make it original and not just a standard mascot costume. I work 6-7 hours a day, most days of the week.

Rumpus: So you can make a living making fursuits?

Kilcodo: Yes. Anyone who’s willing to do this full-time can make a fully livable very comfortable wage doing this. But it requires dedication, and you have to remain enthusiastic about the work you’re doing. You are catering to a very specific crowd of people who are very specific about the kind of custom details you’re putting on. You can’t treat it like an assembly line. Each one you make has to be a piece of art that stands on its own.

Rumpus: On your website, I saw that you’ll only repair the suits your customers buy for 2 years if they don’t use them for sex – it sounds like you don’t want them using them for sex.

Kilcodo: One of the biggest misconceptions about furries is that they are all just a bunch of people who get together in mascot costumes and have sex. I’m not saying some people don’t do that–I think in any fringe group, especially ones where you are talking about body suits (like uniform, zentai and superhero fans) there is some level of sexuality going on–but it’s much less common than the media likes to portray it. I personally don’t want to spend dozens of hours of a piece of wearable art just to have someone use it like a sex toy, which is why I have the addendum in the F.A.Q. I think in any kind of aesthetic where you’re revisualizing the human body, you’re going to eroticize it somehow, or some people will. I don’t think there’s anything that unnatural or bizarre about it, but it’s not the quintessential facet of the community.

Rumpus: Can you drive in a fursuit?

Kilcodo: I don’t recommend it. You can drive with the head off.

Rumpus: How good is your vision in a fursuit?

Kilcodo: It’s not terrible actually, but I wouldn’t recommend driving. We use this special material for the eyes that you can see out of but you can’t see in, and they’re usually painted. I have this effect that I use that makes it look like the eyes are following you.

Rumpus: Who are your heroes?

Kilcodo: Jim Henson is definitely my hero as far as costume making is concerned, but at my heart I’m a cartoonist. I absolutely love Ralph Bakshi, Robert Crumb, all these cartoonists that took the idea that you can make art with adult themes about anything, you can make funny drug-related insane perverted comics and you can have an ostrich chick and Fritz the cat, for example. Just because it’s a cartoon and just because it’s an animal person doesn’t mean it has to be childish.

Rumpus: When did you first become aware that this was a thing you could do?

Kilcodo: I’ve been drawing cartoons since I was 3. I always liked Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Bugs Bunny, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and any form of anthropomorphism. I continued to draw it until the Internet came around when I was 11, and I discovered there was this world of people that drew it and showed it to one another, and people creating their own characters, and to me that was more fascinating than just drawing someone else’s character. Because it was creator-controlled, it appealed to me. And because it’s mostly done by adults, and you could deal with more adult themes or draw more sexy or violent animal people, and I enjoyed that as well. I think it’s a cool theme to work with, artistically.

Rumpus: How did you come out to your parents?

Kilcodo: I grew up in a house where my artistic skill was really promoted. My parents are real free-thinkers. They saw that I liked to draw animal cartoons, and they just said go for it. They bought me an art table when I was five. And I’ve just been drawing ever since. And when they realized I was starting to make money from this, and that I’d joined a community that had a self-sustained economy of commissioners, they were even more supportive than they were before.

Rumpus: How many furry conventions have you been to?

Kilcodo: Well, three a year since 2005, so, a lot.

Rumpus: What is generally the reaction you get from people, as a furry?

Kilcodo: There’s 2 types of people you’ll confront at a con. There are people who are at the hotel, tourists, that don’t know anything about furry, who will find you adorable and entertaining. And then there are people from the Internet, who consider themselves Internet-savvy, who will taunt you and tell you to kill yourself. There does seem to be some kind of superiority complex going on among the nerd cultures, such as the group known as anonymous or any Internet bully or troll group. They’ll target furries, and anyone involved in this community is putting themselves at risk for being targeted by Internet bullies, because we make ourselves so widely available via email, and because the internet is where we exist. If you exist on the internet, you’re putting yourself at risk.

Rumpus: Is making yourself vulnerable a part of this?

Kilcodo: It’s an unfortunate side effect of being public. I think people involved in any kind of subculture tend to be shy, and they are actually quite bothered by being the butt of a joke, because they come to this place for comfort and escape, and they wind up being tortured for it.

Rumpus: Do you think that mainly comes from other kinds of geeks?

Kilcodo: I think the reason anyone targets anyone is because they have their own insecurities.

Rumpus: Are cartoons sexy? Are animals sexy? Or are both of those statements irrelevant? Is it more the re-imaging idea?

Kilcodo: It depends on the person, but I think if you look at the way that we use language and the way we think about what is and isn’t sexy, we’ve constantly used anthropomorphic language. We call a sexy woman a fox. We call an older sexy woman a cougar. We call men bear, wolf. I’ve heard otter being used in the gay community. And I think that’s because as sexual beings we can see eroticism in many different organic forms, and I think because animals are beautiful, people like to meld the two forms together, so you have a human body and a majestic head of an animal, and people find that beautiful and even erotic.

Rumpus: Is your boyfriend a lemur too?

Kilcodo: He’s not a furry, but he’s an artist, and that’s the most important thing to me, because this fandom is mainly understood by artistic people. Furry is an idea. When you go to a convention you’re going to a place where people conglomerate on the idea that you like anthropomorphism. That’s it. People go and they’re writers. People go and they’re cartoonists, people go and they like to draw ultra-realistic animal portraits. Some people are into leather and they do pony play and puppy play and that’s that for them. Some people are a-sexual Christians and they like to go and read the Bible and relate it to Aesop’s tales…

Rumpus: For real?

Kilcodo: For real. There are religious furries.

Rumpus: That’s the first thing you’ve said that’s shocked me.

Kilcodo: And not everyone wears a costume. Sometimes people don’t like the costumes, they find it creepy, but everyone likes creativity, that’s the central focus.

What really makes this subculture different from others, like the comic book subculture or Star Trek-kies, is that instead of being fanatical about the work of another person who is famous and legitimized in the culture, furry is entirely user-created. Anyone can go into furry, draw art, get friends, wear a costume, and become relevant in the culture. People are talking about art, and artists, and the way people draw and make costumes. To many people, furry is the only way that they feel they can express the side of them that society tells them is uncool or immature–the side of them that still likes cartoons and still likes dressing up and playing ‘make believe’, still likes drawing and inventing worlds and a new identity. Furry is all about creative participation, and it’s unfortunate that it gets misrepresented the way it does. I’m proud of what I do–I can make a living as an artist, people wear my art and perform and have a great time wearing it. That makes me really happy.

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Ana Menendez’s new novel,

**

The Rumpus Review of The Last War

Ana Menendez’s new novel, The Last War, follows the path laid by her previous books into new, darker territory. Her first book, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, gave us a glimpse into the Cuban exile community, treating its characters with care while revealing their vulnerabilities: the lies exiles tell themselves and others, the tangled webs of memory and desire complicated by regret and frustration. Menendez took these themes deeper in Loving Che, in which an exile discovers notes and photos that document her mother’s torrid love affair with Che Guevara.

The Last War is also about exile and memory, desire and regret and frustration. It also centers around photographs, and a letter with words as destructive as C4—powerful enough to blast apart a city, or a life. In this novel Menendez shows that “the exile experience” is not a function of ethnicity or nationality, but of choices—often bad choices—and our perverse but entirely human need to hold onto the ugliness of our pasts.

Who among us has not played this stubborn pantomime of grief? Away from home, alone, we stroll the streets, keeping our sour thoughts to ourselves. We write angsty notes, drink too much, delight too much in our drinking too much. It is self-indulgent and ridiculous, but we persist. I myself spent months in Arkansas writing bad poetry in imitation of Ovid’s Tristia, the poems he wrote at the Black Sea while in exile from Rome. I spent one drunken night in Reading, England recopying Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol” with a Sharpie on the walls of my room—yes, you see, because my room there was like his prison.

In The Last War, an American war photographer waits in a comfortable apartment in Istanbul for permission to enter Iraq. Her husband, a reporter, is already there. Wonderboy and Flash sound like the names of a cartoon crime-fighting duo, but they are merely a modern power couple: Wonderboy is the straight-laced and hawkish reporter addicted to war; Flash is the artistic and ambivalent photographer who married him and wound up living in his world. In time, Flash’s life on the Bosporus becomes as much an exile as Ovid’s life on the Black Sea, a sad purgatory soaked in bad wine. But she is not exiled because of war or politics or nationality—Flash’s exile comes from within.

The extent of her alienation only becomes clear in the novel’s long and breathtaking epilogue—it is a daring move, an epilogue that through careful revelation of detail recasts the entire novel, and especially its main character, in a murkier, more troubling light. The Last War haunted me for days after I read it, details that seemed small in the initial reading (she does not notice, until told, that her doorman lives in a windowless closet) suddenly taking on a fresh, bitter taste. Events that once evoked pity for the main character (her upstairs neighbors make noise at night to wake her on purpose) came to seem like just deserts. And tics in the telling (an obsession with drinking coffee, drinking red wine) fell into relief as a sort of self-mocking, the narrator revealing the absurdity of her own suffering through repetition.

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It’s a tiny book full of literal LOLs and jaw-dropping no-she-didn’ts – a perfectly paced and structured page-turner with an ingenious, confident narrator whose humor brings the world’s most frustrating absurdities into focus, then kicks them down like a pack of cards.

Molly’s is the universal heroine’s journey. Anyone who rejects traditional gender roles or has smarted at the sting of prejudice will nod along in recognition. Molly debates family members, lovers, and friends, not just about what sexual rules to reject, but what life rules to follow: how is having your career handed to you by a powerful lover different from depending on a husband to buy you a dress?

It’s a book about finding a meaningful path, about obeying the soul and denying the gods of custom, about being yourself, even if that means people won’t like you. The novel ends on an unsettled, unresolved note – a fitting non-conclusion, since Molly’s struggle begins anew with the first awareness of each creative, determined kid who looks around and realizes the whole world is against her, or him.

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spoilers ahead

Dr. Manhattan is a great big blue man who doesn’t wear clothes. He has a great big blue penis that moves when he walks, like a penis should. Now, I for one am glad they didn’t do a “Ken” on him, and I’m also glad they refrained from hanging him like Michelangelo’s “David” (the industry standard for acceptable “frontal”) — but I was disappointed to hear the giggles of 7th-graders coming out of the mouths of adults every time he took a step, no matter what was going on in the scene.

This was, for me, a sort of metaphor for how too many people are going to “take” this movie: the story offers its reality, with the ugly and appealing in equal parts, its art to make us question our expectations, our fantasies, and our idealism. Frankly, that’s big-boy and big-girl grown up stuff. And I’m wondering if we can handle it.

I read some of the reviews before we went and saw it, and most of them were negative. I completely get what these reviewers were complaining about, but the reality is that they simply didn’t get it. They thought they were watching something too dumb to meet their eye for art. But they were actually watching something that made fun of their eye for art. That might be why they didn’t like it. But rather than complain that the movie upends their expectations, mocks their tastes, and makes fun of their ideals, they berate it.

Anthony Lane in the New Yorker was naive enough to say:

Nite Owl [...] keeps his old superhero outfit, rubbery and sharp-eared, locked away in his basement, presumably for fear of being sued for plagiarism by Bruce Wayne.

As though he’s suddenly forgotten that he’s watching a story in which Batman and his ilk are being criticized and displayed.

AO Scott writes a several paragraph description of what he sees as the Watchmen‘s “ideal viewer”:

The ideal viewer … would probably be a mid-’80s college sophomore with a smattering of Nietzsche, an extensive record collection and a comic-book nerd for a roommate. The film’s carefully preserved themes of apocalypse and decay might have proved powerfully unsettling to that anxious undergraduate sitting in his dorm room, listening to “99 Luftballons” and waiting for the world to end or the Berlin Wall to come down.

Scott’s “ideal viewer” would be someone young, ignorant, and angsty, with just the faintest knowledge of comic books. Or perhaps an annoyance with them? But real comic book lovers and real lovers of literature love Watchmen. Scott continues:

He would also no doubt have been stirred by the costumes of the female superheroes — Carla Gugino and Malin Akerman, both gamely giving solid performances — who sensibly accessorize their shoulder-padded spandex leotards with garter belts and high-heeled boots. And the dense involution of the narrative might have seemed exhilarating rather than exhausting.

Here Scott misses the whole point (intentionally?) that the movie makes about the female superheroes dressing ridiculously — something discussed more in the comic, no doubt, but not ignored in the movie. The men also dress absurdly. The whole idea of being a masked vigilante is absurd, but it’s something comics (and now comics-based movies) long took for granted. I also wonder why he doesn’t have a similarly snarky comment about the “lady version” of this “ideal viewer” being driven to distraction by the completely perfect male specimen strolling stark naked through the film? As for the narrative’s “dense involution” — all I can say is that it was notably pared down from what’s in the original story, and that while I did miss some of the stuff excised, what was presented on screen was tight and compelling.

I’m not sure that this hypothetical young man — not to be confused with the middle-aged, 21st-century moviegoer he most likely grew into, whose old copy of “Watchmen” lies in a box somewhere alongside a dog-eared Penguin Classics edition of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” — would necessarily say that Mr. Snyder’s “Watchmen” is a good movie.

This is the part of his description that most mystifies me — because I know many, many people who, like me, have a long-standing relationship with this story, who first read it in the late 80s or early 90s, who have re-read it and loaned it out and had the loan-out loaned out and ended up buying another copy because everyone who laid a finger on it was enthralled, and to suggest that this is a book most readers read through once and then shove into a box of barely-thought-of books is just absurd.

It’s clear these mainstream reviewers just don’t get it. And I don’t mean that to say that they’re stupid; they’re not. I mean that to say that they just don’t understand what this art form is doing, and they’re looking for the wrong things.

In many ways Watchmen is hard. It is a story without heroes. Earlier today I read a Salon interview with Alan Moore in which the interviewer says this of Moore:

Unlike his evil Watchmen protagonist Ozymandias, Moore does not feel the spirits of history move him to fight injustice or destroy the world.

That sentence threw me. Ozymandias is evil? If he is evil, every character in the Watchmen is evil. Okay, if that’s how you want to view it. But getting past the whole “good/evil” thing is what the story is, in large part, all about.

Ozymandias is an “enlightened” engineer of the world, willing to murder millions “to save billions.” Does that make him worse than the Comedian, who commits wholesale murder on the government payroll? Does that make him better than a nearly-omnipotent once-man who can barely be brought to care about human kind? And how is that nearly-omnipotent once-man who “walks away” in Earth’s time of need (because his girlfriend dumps him) any different from people like the Silk Spectre and Nite Owl who obey the Keene act and hang up their crime-fighting suits leaving only the near-lunatic Rorschach to do the work once done by all of them?

In other words, every character in this story is explicitly not a hero. And only Rorschach is an anti-hero. In the kingdom of the relativists, the man with one misguided but firm ideal seems to be the one we wish to follow — yet we know we should not. We know this because he is horrible, he is a walking nightmare. We might glance from him back to Ozymandias and conclude that all idealists are nightmares. Jelly-spined compromisers like Nite Owl are much better dinner company, and much better members of a civilized society, thank you very much.

Yet the thing this movie did perhaps best of all was portray Nite Owl and Silk Spectre as icky. The mainstream reviewers are booing the sex scene between them as a stink extraordinaire without realizing that we should be grossed out by two people who get sexually excited by dressing up and playing vigilante. If you didn’t see them as something akin to the duo from Natural Born Killers, you had your “mainstream filters” on (I’m talking to you AO Scott), and had them in “rose shades” because they are “good guys.” That is what this movie is insisting you not do.

Our weak, coddled brains, used to latching passively to the character we’re “supposed to” like and sympathize with, have trouble handling a story that asks a bit more of us than Batman. And we giggle at the big blue penis. Sigh. Rorschach was right. About some of it, at least.

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