Jeff Seiler: Dave Sim & Me

JEFF SEILER:

Eleven years ago, when Cerebus ended, Dave Sim decided to answer all of his back mail. A month or so later, he had his "Jeff Seiler Day" in which he answered multiple letters I had written over the previous year. After I received that letter, I decided to keep writing, and he kept his promise to answer every letter he received. Now, I have a foot-high stack of letters written and received over 10 years or so. I'll be running interesting excerpts from those letters each week.

Continuing sequentially and chronologically, we come next to a letter from Dave dated 24 October, 2005, when I still lived in Addison, Texas. This is a timely post, given that I am currently beginning what will (I hope) become a long time of proofreading the reprints of the Cerebus volumes. Two down, one half done, 13 to go.

Dear Jeff:

Thanks for your letter and enclosures of October 16.

No offence intended by my remark on red pens. [Ed: A reference to my having started proofreading the first volume of Collected Letters.] I used to pick up on the same thing from Diana Schutz [Ed: A former proofreader and girlfriend(?) of Dave’s.] that it really does become an addiction. I think anyone who knows the universal symbols (which I don’t) is already pretty far gone. They not only correct things, but they have to correct things CORRECTLY. My own proof-reader [sic.] nature is all “ear”. I fix it until it sounds right to me. Proper lilt, proper cadence which is very often not the same thing as grammar and phraseology.

[Ed: May I just, as an aside, say here that, when I proofread Cerebus volumes, I don’t mess with the “voices” or the sound of things. And, rarely, with the cadence. I look first for the typographical errors {straight-up errors}, then punctuation, and misused words. Plus, Dave told me that his use of single quotation marks in, say, Reads, was an affectation and that they all needed to be fixed, except, of course, when they set off a quotation within a quotation. That’s why the proofreading on Reads took 30 hours. What’s that? Oh, no; not straight through. Do you think I’m crazy?]

Glad you finally got the postcard. [Ed: From when he went to Niagara Falls {his favorite place}, to meet Neal Adams to do the interview/conversation that was printed in Following Cerebus.]

Glad as well that you weren’t offended at my “red cape in front of a bull” analogy in announcing celibacy to a woman. It isn’t just the woman in question: remember, they’re all linked up both in the conventional terms of gossip and telepathically or “telepathically” with those with whom they’re sympatico. You set it in motion and it will come back to bite you on the ass. Fair warning is all.

Tried reading the Critical Thinking brochure [Ed: That I sent to him. I have forgotten where I got it or what it contained, other than generally speaking.] and I’m afraid that there were areas of it with which I disagreed. As with grammar and phraseology (and theology and any number of subjects) I just don’t do it by prescribed numbers. I doubt I would’ve “smelled a rat” in feminism going A to B to C to D in proper alignments. Nor would I have come up with the [Ed: then] 14 Impossible Things To Believe Before Breakfast. As it says in the Koran: You to Your Religion and Me to Mine.

When I’m watching Niagara Falls, I am literally just experiencing watching Niagara Falls. I watch a particle descend from the precipice and then watch another. Then I look at the overall picture. Then I look at the mist. Then I look at the people standing at the edge and compare them to various dips in the water right before it goes over. Several of them are twice the height of an average man. If you were in the river, you would descend twice your full height and then suddenly get hurled aloft just before going over the edge. I watch the shale jutting out below the surface shimmering in that dark coloured green that it has, counterbalanced by the “Coke bottle bottom” green of the descending water, marvelling at the fact that it’s seventeen-feet deep but, owing to the refraction of the light, it looks as if you could put your foot down and push off from the precipice. The fact that it never stops. Every second, 50,000 bathtub’s worth of water is plunging over the edge. Realizing that the channel at the base of the falls is the same height as the falls. Watching the way the thin ribbon of water at Prospect Point sways from side to side. That’s really it. Five hours, six hours, twelve hours. I paid eighteen dollars for two cookies and two bottles of peach juice at the Starbucks in the lobby just because I didn’t want to be away from the Falls (and I was finishing my four-day fast).

Thanks for the clippings. Yes, the Cathy Young quote was interesting [Ed: {excerpt}: What’s clear is that, in the 40 years since the rise of the modern women’s movement, large numbers of women blessed with the opportunities denied to previous generations have not followed the egalitarian feminist script. Instead, they have, to a greater or lesser extent, embraced traditional female roles--much to the chagrin of feminists such as Yale’s women’s and gender studies professor Laura Wexler. “I really believed 25 years ago,” Dr. Wexler told The New York TImes, “that this would be solved by now.”].

I forget how it goes but there’s a quote that insanity consists of repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result. The vast majority of women want to wives and mothers. Because a small percentage finds that inconceivable, we have to run society as if they are in the majority for as long as it takes them to realize that they aren’t. Given their intransigent natures in virtually everything that’s going to be quite a spell, I reckon.

Likewise, thanks for the clipping on Charles Carroll. [Ed: From the Dallas Morning News, October 1, 2005. It pertained to a talk to be given by one Scott McDermott, a then circulation librarian at the Vanderbilt University. Carroll was, obscurely, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. {Excerpts from the article: “How may well-educated Americans -- even well-educated Catholic Americans -- can name the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence? Charles Carroll was that man. He was the richest of the signers, and he outlived all the rest, dying in 1832 at age 95.” Carroll “signed the Declaration of Independence not on July 4, 1776, but on August 2, 1776, as did most of the other signers.” He “served on the Board of War and Ordnance” during the Revolutionary War. And, “he invented the first working electoral college in the United States, for the election of Maryland state senators.” “He was briefly both a U.S. senator and a Maryland state senator. When the Maryland Legislature declared that state politicians could only hold one office at a time, he resigned his U.S. Senate seat.”}]

It’s always good to be reminded that there have [sic.] been no shortage of impediments along the way and that feminism is just the latest one. I can understand your regret at missing Mr. McDermott’s lecture. Thanks again for writing--gotta run. I’ve got a prayer time in fifteen minutes. Twenty down, inshallah 10 to go!

Best,

Dave