BETTYCAM

Dear Workbook 52 students,

I left out an important step when I was showing you how to use the words and questions method of approaching academic writing.

It should have gone like this:

Pick a word and a question and do an X page jam about it for three minutes.

Then write for seven minutes.

Then do a review frame about what you’ve written.

When I demonstrated it, I forgot to have you write. 

Best,

The Absent-Minded Professor HotDog

In canceling Milo’s book contract, Simon & Schuster made a business decision the same way they made a business decision when they decided to publish that man in the first place. When his comments about pedophilia/pederasty came to light, Simon & Schuster realized it would cost them more money to do business with Milo than he could earn for them. They did not finally “do the right thing” and now we know where their threshold, pun intended, lies. They were fine with his racist and xenophobic and sexist ideologies. They were fine with his transphobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. They were fine with how he encourages his followers to harass women and people of color and transgender people online. Let me assure you, as someone who endured a bit of that harassment, it is breathtaking in its scope, intensity, and cruelty but hey, we must protect the freedom of speech. Certainly, Simon & Schuster was not alone in what they were willing to tolerate. A great many people were perfectly comfortable with the targets of Milo’s hateful attention until that attention hit too close to home.

Because I’ve been asked, I will not be publishing my book with Simon & Schuster now that they have dropped Milo. After I pulled my book, they changed the release date of Dangerous from March to June 13, the day my next book, Hunger, comes out. I said nothing because I was neither threatened nor concerned but it did reinforce for me that this was not a company I wanted to do business with. My protest stands. Simon & Schuster should have never enabled Milo in the first place. I see what they are willing to tolerate and I stand against all of it. Also, I’ve received far better offers for How to Be Heard from other publishers.

A perennial favorite for our desiccated, I mean dedicated readers!  A DIY Hallowe’en mask based on an image from Clowes’s “Immortal, Invisible.”  This DEADpan holiday tale first appeared in Eightball #16 (1995) and reappears in the collection Caricature.

See here for all the “how to” details: