After books like this I lament my lack of a silver-tongued gift for persuasion. I'm robbed of the secondary pleasures of waiting for a friend to read it and hoping they feel the exuberance and tenderness I felt as I reached the end. The book is a memoir of Alison Bechdel's youth in a rural Pennsylvania town and her father's death while she was away at college. It opens with her and her father playing airplane as she recalls the story of another father and child, Icarus and Daedalus.

She circles through her story repeatedly but peels away new insights each time. Each time through she finds a way to fit the details of her life into a literary or historical narrative. Sometimes she describes her family life with passages from Proust. Sometimes her story finds resonance in Nixon's resignation. But the larger narrative that all the stories fit into is one dealing with Homer's Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses. A device that could be pretentious but isn't because she carries the novice reader into those stories at the same time. It also makes practical sense that the daughter of an english teacher and actress would frame her narrative with those books.

Her illustrations carry on the same narrative. A snake devouring its own tale reminds us of the narrative circles. Book titles casually appear in the background to clue the reader in to what is happening. Pop-up Video style balloons call our attention to minute details that add color to the story (is this subtext?). The image that will stay with me the longest is her and her father silhouetted by a setting sun as they stand on the porch of the family's Gothic Revival style home. She is playfully hanging off a column, and he's standing in quiet reverie watching all the colors mix.

What charmed me the most is how honestly she comes at the story of her youth, which is apparently the story of her father. She chronicles the highs and the lows without melodrama. She doesn't hesitate to offer up her own conflicted understanding. The literary devices she does use she is almost apologetic for and reminds the reader that it isn't pretension but these are the tools she was brought up with for understanding her world.

After the strength of this and fellow Eisner nominee American Born Chinese I am sure to check out the other Best New Graphic Album nominees.

North Texas competitors continue to underperform. The Dallas Mavericks finished first in the regular season and were bounced out in the first round of the playoffs. The Dallas Stars ambled through the regular season and hit a first round playoff exit.

Now comes news that five time national spelling bee competitor, and favorite to win it all this year, Samir Patel is out. Bummer. North Texas seems to have hit a slump. I blame the rain.

In a little over six months Texas has gone from 77.4% of the state in some kind of drought to 29.5%. I remember driving past fires in North Texas last Summer because it was so dry. I don't think the state has been this well hydrated since I've lived here.

As I write this yet another thunderstorm is pounding Dallas. It's been maybe a decade or more since I've been around thunderstorms this strong, especially with this kind of daily regularity. I miss the stretches of no rain that spanned for months.

On the plus side Julie and I were caught out in a storm as we walked around downtown on Sunday. That was really kinda fun. One of those moments every relationship should probably have.

Bloom points out in The American Religion that Mormonism, in the early days especially, was driven by a dialectic between the need to create the new Kingdom on Earth, but to also remain outside the mainstream. This conflict powered the growth of Mormonism.

I'm seeing this same dialectic play out in the comments on Free Republic about Reverend Falwell. Here are some relevant comments:

Hatred of Falwell by those on the left illustrates just how effective he was. The darkness hates the light.

A man is sometimes honored by the number and passion of the enemies he makes.

This is exactly what the Bible warned would happen. Right[e]ous people WILL be persecuted, even after their death.

A large number, perhaps a majority, of the comments are concerned with how their political enemies are responding to the news. Every time an outsider to their world condemns their icon they post how it renews their faith and vindicates their beliefs. Their faith would apparently suffer if they were completely mainstream and did not have a political enemy to struggle against. Yet to be the mainstream is what they want! Apparently there is no condition where both parties can win, and they can sustain their beliefs.

What surprises me is how little they seem to be celebrating specific things that Falwell did. I really haven't seen any posts praising his segregationist views, anti-homosexual views, Christian Zionism, etc. There has been praise in general for his good works but really only in generalities. That may be a fault of the the Free Republic forums. Their forums tend to only contain short snarky or pious comments and don't reward more in-depth posts. A condition that is common across all forums on the Internet, not just Free Republic.