solipsism – Pathetic Fallacy

Hello (again) World!

I was feeling a bit down the other day, what with (gestures at everything), and I said to myself, what I really need to do is some old-fashioned blogging, the kind from 1999, when the Internet was a wild an wooly place and SEO meant typing your search terms a few hundred times into your website’s <header>.

I still had an old Blogger site, but I wanted to move to something more contemporary. So here am I at my new WordPress home! Maybe having to pay for hosting this will spur me to write more often; anything’s possible. I have imported the old blog’s content but some of it glitched out, and some of it embarrasses me, so I am pruning a lot of the old content, and will continue to. Sorry if you are a completionist? I guess your best bet is the Internet Archive.

Anyway, to reintroduce myself: I’m John McCoy. I am married (for 35 years!) to a beautiful philosophy professor who is smarter than me and dad to two kids who are a biochemist and a medical student and will therefore be richer than me. On the Internet I’m best known for being older brother to my more famous sibling, Dan, of the comedy Flop House podcast. But I am second best known for my own, only occasionally funny podcast, Sophomore Lit. The tagline for this podcast is “where we re-read your 10th grade reading list,” and in the beginning my goal was to focus on stuff you only read in high school, like Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird. Also I wanted it to be silly. But as time went by two things happened: first, I ran through the obvious list of books, and second, I found that my guest hosts and listeners were genuinely interested in having a podcast that discussed formative literature sincerely. So these days episodes might be about kids’ books, like The Twenty-0ne Balloons, or things you might have read in college, like the Bell Jar. Anyway I’ve been doing this podcast since my mid-forties and now…I’m not in my mid-forties.

Speaking of kids’ books, Phil Gonzales of the Deep in Bear Country podcast and I did a podcast called Klickitcast, where we read through the entirety of Beverly Cleary’s books. It took a few years but we made it all the way from Henry Huggins (1950) to Ramona’s World (1999) in 33 episodes. This podcast was always going to end, but it has a special place in my heart and I miss it.

What else? I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder in early 2020, just before the pandemic. Getting a late-life diagnosis was weird enough, but then there followed a sudden explosion of ASD discourse online as folks who became introspective during lock-down got diagnosed, or self-diagnosed, so I guess I was a trend-setter? A lot of people my age would have been clocked as autistic if we knew then what we know now. But self-knowledge is both liberating and anxiety-producing, and I’m still figuring this all out, as I probably will until I die (what we ASDers call “the Great Shutdown”).

Off the Internet, in the real world, I am an Assistant Director at an art museum. This probably isn’t as glamorous as it sounds to you, especially if you are a fan of The Da Vinci Code. But it does mean I get to work with art, and write about art, and plan exhibitions, and help produce exhibitions, and other art-adjacent things. So I am a lucky man.

That’s way more than you need to know about me! So what will this blog be about? Well, anything, I guess, but likely topics are: my podcast, literature, art, comics, autism, typography, art history, traveling, my dog (who I haven’t mentioned yet), creativity, intellectual property, web design, history, parenting, and, I don’t know…maybe a recipe or two?

I hope you’ll find something to think about here, either in the archives of posts I’ve migrated from Blogger or in the posts yet to come. You can also subscribe and get new essays in a convenient e-mail format! I think. I am still figuring that out as well.

I stop being polite and start being Real (McCoy)

My surname is McCoy, which is a funny name because when I tell it to people they either shoot back some incredibly witty question about whether I’m the real or or not, or they stare blankly and ask if I said McCory. This is odd because while there is a famous space doctor named McCoy and a famous feuding hillbilly family named McCoy and a famous pottery company named McCoy and a famous jazz pianist named McCoy and a famous perky cruise director named McCoy, I have never once met a McCory or even heard of the name aside from having it repeated back to me by the aforementioned vacant starers.

Out here in Boston everyone is Irish or pretending to be Irish and most of them will ask if my family is from Ulster or Cork and then squint intently as though my reply will result in either a hug or an uppercut. However, the story I was told as a wee bairn was that our family name was changed from MacKay when we came from Scotland, no doubt searching the new world for peat. My father had a book of the tartans of Highland clans and my brother Robert and I looked at the page for our ancestors family so often the spine cracked to fall open on the MacKay’s somewhat plain green-and-blue plaid.

I was a credulous child and I accepted this story about my heritage without question until my mid-twenties, when doubt began to settle in. Too many people I met seemed to think that the name was Irish. Digging around I discovered that while the McCoys were in fact related to the MacKays, the name variants go back many centuries and predate any Atlantic crossings: the name change may have originated with gallowglasses who moved to Ulster in the 13th century. My father has confirmed that the first immigrant in our family named McCoy, James, came to America in the 18th century from Ulster when he was 14, and there’s a charming story about how during the passage he boasted about being good with horses, eventurally secure employment in the New World at a stable.

The thing is, whoever he was and wherever he came from, he was just a guy who happened to share my last name. Going back a few generations I have more English surnames than Scots (or Scots-Irish or whatever), and somewhere in there are German names, and French, and allegedly four or five generations back I have Cherokee and Creek great-great-great-great grandmothers. Calling myself Scottish seems as ridiculous as calling myself Native American based on whatever fraction of genetic material I share with these ancestors. My father grew up in Oklahoma and Indiana; my mother in Virginia and Indiana; really I’m a mutt.

But don’t tell my uncle; he is proud enough of our alleged Scottishness to have purchased a kilt, a Tam o’Shanter, a set of bagpipes, and an Aberdeen Terrier. When I married my wife Marina (who is, by the way, unquestionably 100% Latvian in descent), he presented her with a pin to welcome her into the Clan MacKay. I often wonder what actual Scotts would think of him, if he were magically transported in full costume to some pub. Probably if it were in Edinburg they’d humor him, but I can’t imagine it ending in anything other than a pummeling in Glasgow.

The fact is, despite having a distinctively Gaelic name, I have no sense of myself as having any ethnicity at all. I have lived in small towns and big cities; even though I’ve lived in Boston for over 20 years, I don’t think of myself as “from” here. But I don’t think of myself as “from” anywhere. The idea of having a strong sense of ethnic identity is foreign to me. Maybe it’s my white male privilege talking, but I like to think that my personality and abilities arise organically from my own choices and experiences and are not the result of any national character. Ethnic pride has a dark side—the belief that your own clan or race or creed is exceptional is the seed of prejudice and nationalism.

Still, I am not immune to the charms of ethnic imagination. I see Marina’s strong connection to her Baltic heritage and it makes sense as the daughter of immigrant parents. Everywhere you go in Boston you see shamrock tattoos and that’s nuts, but kind of cool, too. And as for me, I will happily recite Burns if you hand me a wee drap o’ whisky. But bagpipes? That’s just silly.

If it don't happen here, it don't happen anywhere

In the hours leading up to Irene’s collision with New York City, there were cries of derision around the twitterverse and blogosphere (and not simply that “twitterverse” and “blogosphere” are godawful non-words). Whatsamatter, hipsters? Snarked the rest of the county. Can’t handle a tiny li’l category one? Try living in Florida, we get three category fives before most breakfasts.

Now I don’t live in New York, but I did once long ago, and my little brother does now, and so do about nineteen million other people, hipsters or not, and I couldn’t help but feel a little defensive on their behalf (especially since the minute a single snowflake falls in Texas they break out the sackcloth and ashes). The fact is, no one really knew what was going to happen with regards to the costal surge, and what effect hurricane winds would have on 19th century brownstones, and because it’s nineteen million people on a handful of fucking islands. I thought people could cut them a little slack for being a tiny bit jumpy.

So we all know now that, thank LaGuardia’s ghost, Irene had minimal-to-no impact on New York. The key words being: on New York. Pennsylvania got creamed. Vermont has sunk under water. Here in Boston, just a block from my home a half a tree fell on a neighbor’s home. Over twenty people died. And so of course, this morning all you see from the twitterverse and blogosphere (my apologies) is New Yorkers firing up their old swagger and complaining how everyone got excited about nothing.

So I take it back: you guys are all jerks.