On Being Married in a Hectic Time

Also, some New Yorker Rejects

Hello again. Every week, I make cartoons for the New Yorker, the dear, always two-steps-ahead pinnacle of culture that represents, more than anything else, New York, sophistication, wit, and in some specific ways America, and which celebrates its hundredth birthday this month.

Under ideal circumstances, I spend two or three days a week drawing cartoons for the magazine, and, under ideal circumstances, the magazine buys one. I’ve almost never published the ones they don’t buy. Why? I can’t tell if it’s good business sense (maybe they’ll appreciate in value somehow if I keep them to myself!) or something more Isak Dinesen-like.

That’s a metaphor it will take me a good paragraph to explain, so here goes:

Isak Dinesen was the pen name of the elusive Danish writer Karen Blixen, 1885-1962. I love exactly ONE of her books, dislike most of the others, and am ambivalent about the rest. This is precisely how I feel about most of my favorite writers and artists. I’m drawn to unevenness and believe the best artists are uneven. (I would never have the guts to be uneven, and therefore all my work is solid and none is transcendent. Did I just say that out loud?). The Isak Dinesen book I love is Seven Gothic Tales. I read it when I was fourteen, which is the year my world turned upside-down for reasons that would take many, many paragraphs to detail (let’s just say: puberty). Isak Dinesen—that one book of hers, at least—summed up the upside-downness, the poetry and the sadness, the slight but constant insanity that were to define the next decade of my life, as well as the type of humor that is knee-snappingly hilarious only when you’re a little bit off your rocker.

Isak Dinesen was a strange choice for a teenage girl. Why not Patti Smith? I don’t know. Maybe if I’d loved Patti Smith instead I’d have had friends. Isak was an obscure shit-starter. In my opinion, her specialty was taking unpleasant and outdated beliefs (which in her case, in her day, meant things like the idea of being a lady, snobbery, aristocracy) and, rather than tearing holes in them as one should, pushing them, in all earnestness, to the point of absurdity. Her paeans on ladies not showing their feet were hilarious to fourteen-year-old me, and I would still fight a duel of honor with anyone who said they weren’t intended to be funny. The books I dislike by Isak Dinesen—Winter’s Tales, for example—present the same ideas, but in actual seriousness. Without the arch humor, she’s nothing but an Ayn Rand: scary, conservative, out of touch. To be fair, when she wrote that second book, she had syphilis, and was legitimately going mad. She’d also lost her home and her lover and was desperately sad, I think. I still own several copies of that Winter’s Tales, or at least did before our last move.

At any rate, working many hours per week on cartoons, the vast majority of which never see the light of day, would be something Isak Dinesen would approve of, and something that feels beautiful to me in a way I can’t put into words: a poetic, screw-everything labor of love. Still. I think I will share some with you now. Here are a couple from last week.

(Um I️ feel I️ should apologize for how I drew the Upper East Side type, she looks like a horrible stereotype. To be fair, it’s partly that I just don’t draw people well from that angle).

I hope you’re satisfied. The reason I gave you those was, like a fox cutting off one if its paws, so I could hide the rest of this newsletter behind a paywall.

Without further ado, for paid subscribers, some deeply personal thoughts on marriage during a maelstrom of hecticness.

And a lil reminder that you can AND MUST buy my latest book, Mixed Feelings, wherever books are sold -

And that I️’ve got a slew of new letterpress prints up over at lianafinck.com.

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Gabe and I are in an extremely hectic time now—renovating the new house, packing to move, gestating a soon-to-be actual delivered baby, figuring out how and when and whether to hire a nanny, watching the government tighten like a fist and pull back for the punch; for many punches.

It’s a lot. That’s an understatement.