#kate breton | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jakethesequel · 1 year

Text

Just read Ducks, by Kate Beaton

last night. I bought it a few weeks ago on a whim, with a Christmas gift card. I read Hark, a Vagrant! when I was younger, so I recognized the author, and decided to check it out even if just to support a fellow local comic creator. I was vaguely aware she had released a book about the oil sands to great reviews, but hadn't looked much into it. Finding out it was a memoir, and that she had worked on the oil sands to pay off her art school debt, interested me enough to buy it.

Nevertheless, it just hung around on my shelf for weeks. That's often the way it is with me, I have a constant backlog of books waiting to be started, and even more waiting to be finished. But I've been trying to make more time for reading in my life, so I cracked it open last night, hoping to read for maybe ten minutes before bed.

I read the whole book. All 400-some pages of it. Before I finally went to sleep, I cried.

A work of art making me cry is a very rare thing. Maybe the estrogen treatment makes me more emotional, but it still came as a shock. But, maybe I shouldn't be surprised. The memoir is incredibly close to so many facets of my own life, it was nearly impossible to detach my feelings.

The very format of the book is in service to its emotional impact. The sign, in my opinion, of a master comic artist is not just to tell a great story through the medium, but to know how to use the medium to enhance a great story. Beaton does wonderfully. Most of the book is formatted in 9-panel grids, on book-size paper rather than a TPB's ~6.67x10.25in pages. It does wonders to enhance the claustrophobia of living in either the Maritimes or the Alberta work camps, and makes it all the more intense when panels expand outward for emotionally critical moments. Especially when Beaton devotes to a single or even double page spread to the landscapes of her journey, from the sad and beautiful shores of Atlantic Canada to the eerie marvel of Northern Alberta oil fields.

Beaton is from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia; and I'm from Prince Edward Island. Very similar places, all things considered, though PEI at least has the benefit of being its own province. The privilege of hosting the Confederation conference, I suppose. We're islands on the exact same latitude in the exact same bay, only separated by the Northumberland Strait.

We have the highest concentration of Scottish people in the world outside of Scotland, to the point that there's even a small minority of Gaelic speakers, and thats bleeds through into those who haven't lost their accents. (Of course, we all seem to get it back when we get pissed off.) I recognize every little quirk Beaton puts into the dialogue, and from it I know how a character would say any other word. PEI has a higher concentration of Scots than Nova Scotia as a whole, though I'd not be surprised if Cape Breton specifically was higher than us.

We're both fuck poor, but the whole Atlantic region is, really. Beaton calls Cape Breton "the have-not region of a have-not province," and that strikes pretty true. I didn't grow up in what you might consider the have-not region of PEI (though you might say my mother did), but to tell the truth, there isn't much even in the more populated part of PEI. Our provincial capital is most other places' small town, and even then, it isn't built for the Islanders. It's built for the tourists, like the rest of the Island.

Halifax, Nova Scotia is probably the closest we have to a proper city in the three Maritime provinces. That is to say, it can almost support its population on its own. And still, it's the least affordable city for young people to live in the whole country. An average deficit every month of $1290 (956USD). So it's no oasis. It's not entirely right to say it's supporting its population on its own, either, considering it hosts the country's largest military base.

Cape Breton's main industries are seafood, coal, steel, and what little Atlantic ocean shipping that wants a port a little bit closer to Europe than Halifax is already. But like the book shows, most of those industries are getting smaller and paying less.

Here in PEI, pretty much all we have is seafood, potatoes, and tourism. Farming and fishing is honest work, but hard on the body, and often difficult cut a profit unless you own the farm or the boat. And good luck with that, there's only so much to go around on an island. When a farmer or fisherman dies without heirs it usually gets bought up by a corporation anyway. Tourism -- fuck the tourism. A majority of our hospitality industry is run by members of the same goddamn rich family. The rest is government, like the national park. That fucking tourism industry takes every cent of public money to make the place look quaint and perfect for tourists to have a beach day without thinking about the people who live here. It's a fucking sham.

"Our main export is people" is a quote from the book, but also a truism I've hear time and again in the Maritimes. There's nothing for us here. Most of us, as the book mentions, don't really want to leave, we love the land and the sea. But we can't afford to stay.

I went to school in Arizona for a year. It's an incredibly beautiful place. But I think any east coaster, especially an Islander, feels inherently disoriented when landlocked. The sea is a constant, an even better navigator than a compass point. Taking it away feels like losing one of your senses. There's a scene in Ducks where the author stands in the Atlantic water before leaving for Alberta, and it reminded me of when I came home from Arizona. I'm not big with exercise, and I'm not huge on swimming because of body image stuff, but I made sure to go out and swim that summer, to walk out and just float effortlessly in the salt. It was rejuvenating, it felt like I was beyond myself, like I was a part of the island, in the way seaweed is.

Now that I'm back, I'm training to be a welder. Arizona didn't work out for a variety of reasons. I told myself before I started training that I'd never work in the oil industry. I can't justify it knowing the environmental impact and harm to indigenous people. But I'm very familiar with the process Beaton describes, people leaving home for the work camps so they can make money they'd never be able to here. I can't say it isn't tempting, considering my lack of money, apartment, car, anything. Hell, some places I wouldn't even have to finish my training. They'd take me as an apprentice and train me on the job. But I can't.

Still, I can't avoid its prescence. It's mentioned in classes all the time, which is no surprise. I'm sure half my classmates will be off there afterwards, it'd be insane for the instructors not to mention the most likely employ. It's mentioned by people when I say I'm learning welding. It's even been proposed by my environmentalist mom and stepdad, which surprised me. Even when I do find work, there's always going to be the knowledge I could be making more money with less work if I just sold my soul. I imagine I'll think about it with every bill.

CW Sexual Assault, Misogyny, Transphobia

I've never been sexually assaulted, so I won't speak too much about that element of the book, except to say that it's portrayal was incredibly moving.

I don't pass -- equally by choice as by circumstance -- so I am not a target for violent and aggressive sexual interest. But I am painfully aware of what the men around me think and say. I hear them just inside earshot. I see the graffiti on their locker doors. I know many of them, if they went out to the fields, would be no better than the men in Beaton's memoir.

I also know what it's like to feel unsafe as the minority in and around work in trades. To have to be always on your toes around the cis men that surround you. I'm forced to be aware of the height of every bathroom stall, to make sure I don't pull my underwear down far enough that someone might see. I'm lucky work clothes are ambiguous and baggy enough to grant plausible deniability. I still have to remind myself to keep my jumpsuit zipped up as often as possible, because I don't want to know what would happen if one of the guys saw a bra strap by the neck of my shirt. Or even just the outline of my bra through my shirt. They can be extremely perceptive when they aren't busy being ignorant. It's a dangerous world out there, if you aren't the social norm.

/CW

What I'm trying to get at is that this book is an intensely personal read, and strikes at the emotional core of fundamental subjects in my own life. To describe the feeling of reading it, it was like a conversation with your sibling about shared trauma you both previously left buried. Of course, I'm not actually that close with my sibling. But I am that close with this book. It felt like kin. Long-lost family, from just across the Strait.

#cw #ducks #kate beaton #cape breton #nova scotia #alberta #prince edward island #pei #comics #maritimes #atlantic canada

4 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months

Text

All the books I reviewed in 2023 (Graphic Novels)

Next Tuesday (December 5), I'm at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC, with my new solarpunk novel The Lost Cause, which 350.org's Bill McKibben called "The first great YIMBY novel: perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful."

It's that time of year again, when I round up all the books I reviewed for my newsletter in the previous year. I posted 21 reviews last year, covering 31 books (there are two series in there!). I also published three books of my own last year (two novels and one nonfiction). A busy year in books!

Every year, these roundups remind me that I did actually manager to get a lot of reading done, even if the list of extremely good books that I didn't read is much longer than the list of books I did read. I read many of these books while doing physiotherapy for my chronic pain, specifically as audiobooks I listened to on my underwater MP3 player while doing my daily laps at the public pool across the street from my house.

After many years of using generic Chinese waterproof MP3s players – whose quality steadily declined over a decade – I gave up and bought a brand-name player, a Shokz Openswim. So far, I have no complaints. Thanks to reader Abbas Halai for recommending this!

https://shokz.com/products/openswim

I load up this gadget with audiobook MP3s bought from Libro.fm, a fantastic, DRM-free alternative to Audible, which is both a monopolist and a prolific wage-thief with a documented history of stealing from writers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

All right, enough with the process notes, on to the reviews!

GRAPHIC NOVELS

I. Shubiek Lubiek by Deena Mohamed

An intricate alternate history in which wishes are real, and must be refined from a kind of raw wish-stuff that has to be dug out of the earth. Naturally, this has been an important element of geopolitics and colonization, especially since the wish-stuff is concentrated in the global south, particularly Egypt, the setting for our tale. The framing device for the trilogy is the tale of three "first class" wishes: these are the most powerful wishes that civilians are allowed to use, the kind of thing you might use to cure cancer or reverse a crop-failure.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/11/your-wish/#is-my-command

II. Ducks by Kate Beaton

In 2005, Beaton was a newly minted art-school grad facing a crushing load of student debt, a debt she would never be able to manage in the crumbling, post-boom economy of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Like so many Maritimers, she left the home that meant everything for her to travel to Alberta, where the tar sands oil boom promised unmatched riches for anyone willing to take them. Beaton's memoir describes the following four years, as she works her way into a series of oil industry jobs in isolated company towns where men outnumber women 50:1 and where whole communities marinate in a literally toxic brew of carcinogens, misogyny, economic desperation and environmental degradation. The story that follows is – naturally – wrenching, but it is also subtle and ambivalent. Beaton finds camaraderie with – and empathy for – the people she works alongside, even amidst unimaginable, grinding workplace harassment that manifests in both obvious and glancing ways.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/14/hark-an-oilpatch/#kate-beaton

III. Justice Warriors by Matt Bors

Justice Warriors is what you'd get if you put Judge Dredd in a blender with Transmetropolitan and set it to chunky. The setup: the elites of a wasted, tormented world have retreated into Bubble City, beneath a hermetically sealed zone. Within Bubble City, everything is run according to the priorities of the descendants of the most internet-poisoned freaks of the modern internet, click- and clout-chasing mushminds full of corporate-washed platitudes about self-care, diversity and equity, wrapped around come-ons for sugary drinks and dubious dropshipper crapola. It's a cop buddy-story dreamed up by Very Online, very angry creators who live in a present-day world where reality is consistently stupider than satire.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/22/libras-assemble/#the-uz

IV. Roaming by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

The story of three young Canadian women meeting up for a getaway to New York City. Zoe and Dani are high-school best friends who haven't seen each other since they graduated and decamped for universities in different cities. Fiona is Dani's art-school classmate, a glamorous and cantankerous artist with an affected air of sophistication. It's a dizzying, beautifully wrought three-body problem as the three protagonists struggle with resentments and love, sex and insecurity. The relationships between Zoe, Dani and Fiona careen wildly from scene to scene and even panel to panel, propelled by sly graphic cues and fantastically understated dialog.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/11/as-canadian-as/#possible-under-the-circumstances

Like I said, this has been a good year in books for me, and it included three books of my own:

I. Red Team Blues (novel, Tor Books US, Head of Zeus UK)

Martin Hench is 67 years old, single, and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He lives and roams California in a very comfortable fully-furnished touring bus, The Unsalted Hash, that he bought years ago from a fading rock star. He knows his way around good food and fine drink. He likes intelligent women, and they like him back often enough. Martin is a—contain your excitement—self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He’s as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he’s a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike. He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. Now he’s been roped into a job that’s more dangerous than anything he’s ever agreed to before—and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

II. The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (nonfiction, Verso)

We can – we must – dismantle the tech platforms. We must to seize the means of computation by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users to leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission. Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet.

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

III. The Lost Cause (novel, Tor Books US, Head of Zeus UK)

For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn't controversial. It's just an overwhelming fact of life. And so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programs cannot be stopped in their tracks.

But there are still those Americans, mostly elderly, who cling to their red baseball caps, their grievances, their huge vehicles, their anger. To their "alternative" news sources that reassure them that their resentment is right and pure and that "climate change" is just a giant scam. And they're your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. And they're not going anywhere. And they’re armed to the teeth. The Lost Cause asks: What do we do about people who cling to the belief that their own children are the enemy? When, in fact, they're often the elders that we love?

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

I wrote nine books during lockdown, and there's plenty more to come. The next one is The Bezzle, a followup to Red Team Blues, which comes out in February:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

While you're waiting for that one, I hope the reviews above will help you connect with some excellent books. If you want more of my reviews, here's my annual roundup from 2022:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/01/bookishness/#2022-in-review

Here's my book reviews from 2021:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/08/required-ish-reading/#bibliography

And here's my book reviews from 2020:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#recommended-reading

It's EFF's Power Up Your Donation Week: this week, donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation are matched 1:1, meaning your money goes twice as far. I've worked with EFF for 22 years now and I have always been - and remain - a major donor, because I've seen firsthand how effective, responsible and brilliant this organization is. Please join me in helping EFF continue its work!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/01/bookmaker/#2023-in-review

#pluralistic #books #reviews #science fiction #gift guide #graphic novels #2023 in review #novels

58 notes · View notes

anonymoushouseplantfan · 1 year

Note

Why is she merching winter boots in the summer?

Hiking boots. It’s the start of sportswear season so people go hiking and camping.

Lol, I should do a bingo. The last time she did this, she merched: a J Crew raincoat, a Kate-style Breton t-shirt, a J Crew beach tote, a Chanel purse, sunglasses, a sundress, Rothy’s, and a ton of Birk’s jewelry.

39 notes · View notes

mediaevalmusereads · 2 months

Text

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. By Kate Beaton. Drawn and Quarterly, 2022.

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

Genre: graphic memoir

Series: N/A

Summary: Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant fame, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. After university, Beaton heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Beaton will be far more than she anticipates.

Arriving in Fort McMurray, Beaton finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world’s largest oil companies. Being one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. She encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. Her wounds may never heal.

Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full-length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.

***Full review below***

CONTENT WARNINGS: sexual harassment, rape

I was familiar with Kate Beaton's series Hark! A Vagrant before reading this book. I didn't know much about her or her life, but I was charmed by her comics, so I decided to pick up this memoir to see what she could do with a related genre (through still graphic in nature).

The first thing I was struck by was Beaton's masterful depiction of identity and community. Where a person is from in Canada matters more than I realized and is integral to one's sense of self, and I admire the way Beaton reflects that on the page through things like accent, music, etc.

Another thing that struck me was Beaton's sense of empathy. The camps, as she describes, are liminal spaces that wreak havoc on mental health, and I think Beaton portrayed that deftly without sensationalizing it. I was also touched by the way she portrayed trauma and how she portrays herself grappling with the after effects of her assaults, highlighting how people's lives can be changed in an instant.

I'm also glad that Beaton took the time to acknowledge the harm oil sands do to Indigenous communities. In her afterward, Beaton talks about how her experience was overwhelmingly male and white, and that it is just one way white supremacy/settler colonialism manifests.

Lastly, I think Beaton did a wonderful job integrating her personal art style with a structured narrative. I like the way Beaton's simple style delivers a lot of pathos through expressive body language, and the almost monochrome color palette creates a kind of hazy mood. Beaton also has a good sense of pacing and how to set up a scene, so the reading experience is fluid and easy to follow.

TL;DR: Ducks is a graphic memoir that takes a hard look at the effects capitalism has on the working class, noting how oil companies exploit itinerant workers and create both environmental and mental health problems.

4 notes · View notes

fortressofserenity · 5 months

Text

X-Men and Cultural Appropriation

I think this has to be said, if because even if X-Men stories preach a message of diversity and tolerance yet some X-Men fans are racist. Either they mock people of other ethnicities, outright dislike them or fetishise them but never show any real interest in them as people. This isn’t helped by that the X-Men stories are built on a flawed foundation, one built on a false equivalence in comparing otherwise potentially murderous (and currently murderous) characters to victims of racism. Kate Pryde has killed a lot of people these days, I don’t think a lot of black people go on killing people and committing crime.

As for Storm or Ororo Munroe, she comes off as a white person’s idea of an exotic black person. Not so much as an actual Kenyan, which is why she doesn’t speak any degree of Swahili (or even Luo and Gikuyu), doesn’t eat or cook Kenyan dishes and doesn’t even celebrate Boxing Day every 26 of December. Karma has been recently rectified by a writer of actual Vietnamese descent, who knows if Storm will eventually get the same treatment. Besides African comics fans exist, I’m even part of a Nigerian comics fan Facebook group.

Africans have done fan art of things like Hunter x Hunter and Bugs Bunny, so they’re not that ignorant of international pop culture in this sense. But I think because X-Men tends to appropriate a lot from African Americans that it’s telling it hasn’t led people to appreciating actual black people, as if the African American experience is more palatable if done by white people. It’s not hard to see why African Americans do complain about cultural appropriation when they see it, as if the things they’ve been mocked for look cool on anybody else.

I also don’t think X-Men stories delved on those who speak or know minority languages, that is other than Yiddish and it becomes telling why there’s not a single mutant who speaks any degree of Welsh or East Frisian as far as I know. I could be wrong in here, you might say that these languages are irrelevant. But people have been ostracised for speaking those languages, to the point where they don’t want to pass it down to others to avoid being stigmatised even further. Perhaps this goes a long way in explaining why X-Men writers’ tendency towards false equivalence always fails actual ethnic minorities and minority language speakers.

There’s not a single mutant in the X-Men world that I know of who speaks Irish to some extent, not a single mutant who speaks something like Lakota or Cheyenne even if it provides representation to those who speak these languages. So X-Men will never be a good stand-in for ethnic minorities, not helped by that they’re barely if ever written by these people. Actually I don’t think there are any X-Men fans who bother learning minority languages, I have tried the same with Irish and Breton but mostly due to Irish folk music.

So if there is a gap between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation, it becomes more evident in the X-Men world in how writers try to position mutants as the most oppressed yet not a single mutant speaks in almost any given minority language and how others come off as white people’s impressions of ‘exotic’ people until now.

#racism #cultural appropriation #ororo munroe #x-men #marvel #marvel comics #irish language #minority languages #new mutants

5 notes · View notes

royal-confessions · 2 years

Photo

“Even if you personally don’t like Kate’s style you cannot deny that she has a signature way of dressing that’s both influential and distinctively hers. Like I take more inspiration from Queen Letizia’s style in my day to day life but there isn’t a piece of attire that I automatically connect to her. But when you say coat dresses, Breton stripes and nude patent leather high heels I instantly think of Kate. And for that my friends, she’s a style icon. Even if it hurts your feelings.” - Submitted by Anonymous

#kate middleton #Catherine Duchess of Cambridge #popular

52 notes · View notes

pfenniged · 9 months

Note

Hellooooo :) For the sleepover asks: do you have any book/song/movie/tv/literally anything recommendations? I always see you reblogging cool stuff for different fandoms 🤭

Okay, I do, but this is the most random assortment of my recent favourite media/music, but hopefully someone can pick out something from this (And thanks, babe <3):

Books:

Wham! George Michael and Me by Andrew Ridgeley:

In 1975 Andrew took a shy new boy at school under his wing. They instantly hit it off, and their boyhood escapades at Bushy Meads School built a bond that was never broken. The duo found themselves riding an astonishing roller coaster of success, taking them all over the world. They made and broke iconic records, they were treated like gods, but they stayed true to their friendship and ultimately to themselves. It was a party that seemed as if it would never end. And then it did, in front of tens of thousands of tearful fans at Wembley Stadium in 1986.

Andrew’s memoir covers in wonderful detail those years, up until that last iconic concert: the scrapes, the laughs, the relationships, the good, and the bad. It’s a unique and one-and-only time to remember that era, that band, and those boys.

Digital Minimalism: Choosing A Focused Life in A Noisy World by Cal Newport:

Digital minimalists are all around us. They're the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones. They can get lost in a good book, a woodworking project, or a leisurely morning run. They can have fun with friends and family without the obsessive urge to document the experience. They stay informed about the news of the day, but don't feel overwhelmed by it. They don't experience "fear of missing out" because they already know which activities provide them meaning and satisfaction.

Now, Newport gives us a name for this quiet movement, and makes a persuasive case for its urgency in our tech-saturated world. Common sense tips, like turning off notifications, or occasional rituals like observing a digital sabbath, don't go far enough in helping us take back control of our technological lives, and attempts to unplug completely are complicated by the demands of family, friends and work. What we need instead is a thoughtful method to decide what tools to use, for what purposes, and under what conditions.

(I've been feeling burned out from tech lately with work, and I'm trying to pull back as much as I can from using screens every moment of the day).

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton:

Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark! A Vagrant, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beaton, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush―part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can’t find it in the homeland they love so much. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed.

Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, northern lights, and boreal forest. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.

(I had to go to Alberta to get my training completed, and I experienced a lot of the similar themes explored in this graphic novel. Might be stupidly Canadian for some, but a great graphic novel overall).

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore:

Discover the gripping and inspiring true story of The Radium Girls, a groundbreaking work by acclaimed author Kate Moore. Immerse yourself in this compelling narrative that unravels the extraordinary lives of these fearless women who fought against all odds.

The Curies' newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise dark years of the First World War.

Meanwhile, hundreds of girls toil amidst the glowing dust of the radium-dial factories. The glittering chemical covers their bodies from head to toe; they light up the night like industrious fireflies. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" are the luckiest alive―until they begin to fall mysteriously ill.

Songs:

You Deserve an Oscar by Matt Maltese

Love and War in Your Twenties by Jordan Searcy

Wham Rap! by Wham!

Everything She Wants by Wham!

She's Got a Way by Billy Joel

Movies:

The Wham! Documentary on Netflix was just a hell of a lot of fun, and inspired me reading both Andrew Ridgeley's memoir and get into more of Wham's music.

Good Will Hunting: It's the first time I properly watched it through, and loved it.

TV:

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: I wasn't a fan of the first season, but the crossover and musical episodes (Plus adding James T. Kirk, spoilers), has really brought it around for me.

#this is the most random assortment of fandoms but THERE YA GO PRINCESS #<3 #softguarnere #personal

4 notes · View notes

princesscatherinemiddleton · 2 years

Text

WALK WALK FASHION BABY | The Duchess of Cambridge decided to combine all eras of "Kate Sailing Fashion" by wearing a blue and white breton top from Erdem, a pair of tailored 'oyster' shorts from Holland Cooper, and her white Supergas. She also wore her Orelia huggie earrings and left her hair down.

#mine #royaltyedit #kate #outfits #day #p: 1851 #sailgp

30 notes · View notes

polkadotpatterson · 1 year

Note

Hm how about top 5 blaseball players who have never played for the Talkers? And/or top 5 movies/shows/books from the last year you've enjoyed!

Top 5 non-Talkers tends to fluctuate but off the top of my head rn it's:

Dunlap Figueroa, my first non-Talker blorbo who still lives rent free in my head

Ji-Eun Clove. players you learn about through writing them in a fanwork exchange and then love forever

PolkaDot Zavala. I may be The PolkaDot Patterson Person but that doesn't mean I don't adore the less appreciated PolkaDot too!

Nagomi Nava! I love her and her dynamic with Passenger

can't believe I almost forgot about EVE MCBLASE my favourite fun little cartoon supervillain I love her

And, top 5 things I've enjoyed lately (definitely not movies, I don't watch enough of those riv):

the locked tomb series! my favourite books I read last year, they drive me bonkers

I'm currently rereading wings of fire and honestly it holds up even better than I expected. they're genuinely very good books

stardew valley!!! I'm slowly easing back into playing video games more regularly again, and starting to get properly into this one has been a lot of fun

I'm not remotely caught up but I finally checked out d20 for neverafter and I've been enjoying it a lot! I love creative fairy tale retellings and there's sure a lot going on in this one lol

honestly I've read too many good books in the past year for it to be easy to just pick one more, but I want to give a shoutout to ducks by kate beaton. it's already a great and important book in a lot of ways but as someone with cape breton roots, that aspect of it resonated with me very deeply

#thank you <3 #yes I will take more of these I love asks I love lists I love sitting around doing nothing on tumblr #answering moistly #mossy-kit

7 notes · View notes

sessilywatt · 1 year

Text

2023 Week 9: Tracks and shadows in the snow.

Currently reading Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton. A quote from a graphic memoir or novel is always incomplete, but I was particularly struck by an early line about growing up on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada: “I learn that I can have opportunity or I can have home. I cannot have both, and either will always hurt.”

#pen and ink #ink drawing #line drawing #currently reading #sketchbook #nature drawing #nature illustration #pen and ink drawing #tree drawing #nature sketch #crosshatching #2023week9

1 note · View note

thefree-online · 3 months

Text

The Environmental Disaster That Is the Tar Sands

A young Canadian writer-artist named Kate Beaton wrote an extraordinary graphic novel titled Ducks. It’s an autobiography, the story of her two years working in the tar sands of northern Alberta, Canada, to pay off her student loans. Beaton is from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, which she describes: The only message (from guidance counsellors) we […]The Environmental Disaster That Is the Tar Sands

View On WordPress

0 notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

Text

Kate Beaton's "Ducks"

It’s been more than a decade since I began thrilling to Kate Beaton’s spectacular, hilarious snark-history webcomic “Hark! A Vagrant,” pioneering work that mixed deceptively simple lines, superb facial expressions, and devastating historical humor:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/03/23/hark-a-vagrant-the-book/

Beaton developed Hark! into a more explicit political allegory, managing the near-impossible trick of being trenchant and topical while still being explosively funny. Her second Hark! collection, Step Aside, Pops, remains essential reading, if only for her brilliant “straw feminists”:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/15/step-aside-pops-a-new-hark-a-vagrant-collection-that-delights-and-dazzles/

Beaton is nothing if not versatile. In 2015, she published The Princess and the Pony, a picture book that I read to my own daughter — and which inspired me to write my own first picture book, Poesy the Monster-Slayer:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/07/the-princess-and-the-pony-from-kate-hark-a-vagrant-beaton/

Beaton, then, has a long history of crossing genres in her graphic novels, so the fact that she published a memoir in graphic novel form is no surprise. But that memoir, Ducks: Two Years In the Oil Sands, still marks a departure for her, trading explosive laughs for subtle, keen observations about labor, climate and gender:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/ducks/

Beaton’s memoir describes the following four years, as she works her way into a series of oil industry jobs in isolated company towns where men outnumber women 50:1 and where whole communities marinate in a literally toxic brew of carcinogens, misogyny, economic desperation and environmental degradation.

The story that follows is — naturally — wrenching, but it is also subtle and ambivalent. Beaton finds camaraderie with — and empathy for — the people she works alongside, even amidst unimaginable, grinding workplace harassment that manifests in both obvious and glancing ways.

Early reviews of Ducks rightly praised it for this subtlety and ambivalence. This is a book that makes no easy characterizations, and while it has villains — a content warning, the book depicts multiple sexual assaults — it carefully apportions blame in the mix of individual failings and a brutal system.

This is as true for the environmental tale as it is for the labor story: the tar sands are the world’s filthiest oil, an energy source that is only viable when oil prices peak, because extracting and refining that oil is so energy-intensive. The slow, implacable, irreversible impact that burning Canadian oil has on our shared planet is diffuse and takes place over long timescales, making it hard to measure and attribute.

But the impact of the tar sands on the bodies and minds of the workers in the oil patch, on the First Nations whose land is stolen and despoiled in service to oil, and on the politics of Canada are far more immediate. Beaton paints all this in with the subtlest of brushstrokes, a thousand delicate cuts that leave the reader bleeding in sympathy by the time the tale is told.

Beaton’s memoir is a political and social triumph, a subtle knife that cuts at our carefully cultivated blind-spots about industry, labor, energy, gender, and the climate. But it’s also — and not incidentally — a narrative and artistic triumph.

In other words, Beaton’s not just telling an important story, she’s also telling a fantastically engrossing story — a page-turner, filled with human drama, delicious tension, likable and complex characters, all the elements of a first-rate tale.

Likewise, Beaton’s art is perfectly on point. Hark!’s secret weapon was always Beaton’s gift for drawing deceptively simple human faces whose facial expressions were indescribably, superbly perfect, conveying irreducible mixtures of emotion and sentiment. If anything, Ducks does this even better. I think you could remix this book so that it’s just a series of facial expressions and you’d still convey all the major emotional beats of the story.

Graphic memoirs have emerged as a potent and important genre in this century. And women have led that genre, starting with books like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006):

https://cbldf.org/banned-challenged-comics/case-study-fun-home/

But also the increasingly autobiographical work of Lynda Barry, culminating in her 2008 One! Hundred! Demons!:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/one-hundred-demons/

(which should really be read alongside her masterwork on creativity, 2019’s Making Comics):

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/05/lynda-barrys-making-comics-is-one-of-the-best-most-practical-books-ever-written-about-creativity/

In 2014, we got Cece Bell’s wonderful El Deafo:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/11/25/el-deafo-moving-fresh-ya-comic-book-memoir-about-growing-up-deaf/

Which was part of the lineage that includes the work of Lucy Knisley, especially later volumes like 2020’s Stepping Stones:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/09/enhanced-rock-weathering/#knisley

Along with Jen Wang’s 2019 Stargazing:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/25/stargazing-jen-wangs-semi-autobiographical-graphic-novel-for-young-readers-is-a-complex-tale-of-identity-talent-and-loyalty/

2019 was actually a bumper-crop year for stupendous graphic memoirs by women, rounded out by Ebony Flowers’s Hot Comb:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/hot-comb/

And don’t forget 2017’s dazzling My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

This rapidly expanding, enthralling canon is one of the most exciting literary trends of this century, and Ducks stands with the best of it.

[Image ID: The cover of the Drawn & Quarterly edition of Kate Beaton's 'Ducks.']

#pluralistic #kate beaton #hark a vagrant #tar sands #oil sands #big oil #carbon #climate emergency #memoir #books #graphic novels #alberta #fort mac #fort macmurray #misogyny #boomtowns #gift guide #drawn and quarterly #reviews

191 notes · View notes