So many crazy things are happening this weekend!
1. My cousin's getting married this Sunday! (She's like a sister, and she's totally doing one of those small weddings, then a big wedding later on, kinda events. Really excited!)
2. I'm seeing my mom after five years. And after not talking after five years. We're going to dinner. Don't wanna divulge my familia's drama online, but it's a pretty ironic situation.
So, I'll be in Vegas till Monday! I'll try my best to get my blog up by Monday night. Again, apologies.
~ melissa
Showing posts with label melissa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label melissa. Show all posts
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Monday, March 11, 2013
Pairing surrealism with poetry
Reading Mother's Urn: Memoir Dust was a fantastical experience for me. The book acted like music, in that nonverbal, visceral way, creating a dream so fleeting and hard to touch that I had to linger at each portrait. It was hard to describe. From a design standpoint, the text bothered me aesthetically--red on black hurts the eyes--but on a literary standpoint, the mixture of text and variation of style and size reminded me of the high and low notes of a musical composition, and when they were paired with the portraits, it worked. Mother's Urn is a pandora's box. It's emotionally vibrant and haunting. It leaves you with questions but with enough space to contemplate how to infuse the fictional dream into memoir.
My favorite part was Christmas Myth. I love the structure of this section. It begins with the parents' love, and the lines "Those mouths of / merlot and mint, spilling hot and life / tales back and forth" stayed with me. Also the first and second art pieces of this piece were the most haunting, personally, in the book. The carved out children on the woman's wrists left me speechless. The blood draining from the woman's and man's eyes was shifted me visually, like a car crash. The poem read like a car crash. You're speeding down this marriage with the narrator and you end up being swallowed up by the bitterness and passion.
I also really, really loved the artwork in Somebody's Mother. It struck chords I deep within me because I don't like talking about my mother. The women in the drawings looked serene and then would shift into an angry glance which I somehow understood. Although Kalamity J creates this incredibly intricate and complicated dream, we somehow reach an entry point through her imagery and tonality that we come to understand her pain. It's a great book that left me cold. I read it on the plane coming back from AWP, and somehow was able to slip into its compelling and relentless dream.
One of the last images of the child's back and the countless mothers/bodies meshing into the background stayed with me. The poem's feelings of alienation and desire became so evocative and impressed on me a yearning I've stucked away for a long time. The line grabbed me: "lonely forgiveness."
My favorite part was Christmas Myth. I love the structure of this section. It begins with the parents' love, and the lines "Those mouths of / merlot and mint, spilling hot and life / tales back and forth" stayed with me. Also the first and second art pieces of this piece were the most haunting, personally, in the book. The carved out children on the woman's wrists left me speechless. The blood draining from the woman's and man's eyes was shifted me visually, like a car crash. The poem read like a car crash. You're speeding down this marriage with the narrator and you end up being swallowed up by the bitterness and passion.
I also really, really loved the artwork in Somebody's Mother. It struck chords I deep within me because I don't like talking about my mother. The women in the drawings looked serene and then would shift into an angry glance which I somehow understood. Although Kalamity J creates this incredibly intricate and complicated dream, we somehow reach an entry point through her imagery and tonality that we come to understand her pain. It's a great book that left me cold. I read it on the plane coming back from AWP, and somehow was able to slip into its compelling and relentless dream.
One of the last images of the child's back and the countless mothers/bodies meshing into the background stayed with me. The poem's feelings of alienation and desire became so evocative and impressed on me a yearning I've stucked away for a long time. The line grabbed me: "lonely forgiveness."
Monday, March 4, 2013
"The moment when a feeling enters a body..."
"The moment when a feeling enters a body is political."
-- Adrienne Rich
---
I want to apologize, again, for being late. I had a terrible weekend! In order to not get into too many details, my husband left for another long sea trial, my computer crashed, and I spent all night trying to repair it and didn't sleep until 4 'o clock or so. It's been a long, trying day, and tomorrow after class I fly to Boston (trying to prepare for that, too), and to be honest, I am simply trying to get by!
But enough of me. When I finished Are You My Mother? : A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel, I knew that I had in my hands a literary graphic masterpiece. It went beyond Fun Home: A Tragic Comic in ways I can't fully describe, but it may have to do with its insularity, its deconstruction of a multiplicity of texts--both visually and intellectually and metaphysically--and the extraction of the self via the archetype and mythology of the mother. To be perfectly honest, I don't know, at least, I don't feel quite apt or readily "smart" enough to deconstruct it myself. I have longed enjoyed graphic comics since a young child, as I had once said, and never had I let myself be "taught" by a visual text to read it like a literary form. But when I finished this book, I knew it had churned something in me in the same ways great literature has shifted my core. I have to admit, Fun Home may be a more easily digestive narrative and it, too, is a great literary comic. But there is something Are You My Mother? that does a tenfold more than Fun Home. In my most layman terms, I'll try to get to the bottom of it.
The visual landscape of Mother transcribe the monotonous undertones of what creates a memoir, what the process of writing the self is, and how the consumption of images via the sequence of panels build a realistic world in the mind, in the grandiose mindscape of the human psyche. First, the panels surround the thematic linkages of each chapter's title and dream. The book is built and depends on the cyclicality, on the structure, and what's interesting is that Bechdel juts to-and-fro from the book's sense of "present" (example, page 286, the narration explains that her mother has finally given her the positive appreciation of Bechdel's art in present tense: "But today she seems to want to say something positive) to the past, focusing and distilling the writing process itself as an act of, as Virginia Woolf says, a way to put one's past "to rest." To free oneself, to purify oneself, is a common modality that seeps into this book like a fire or a ripple or rage, and the book beautifully shows the arduous and painstaking task of writing and living. Bechdel ruminates in the beginning: "You cannot live and write at the same time." And yet, Bechdel shows her everyday process, the meticulous details of her life, her relationships, her phone calls with her mother, her journaling (and her mother's, which is more detail-oriented than an exploration of the mind), and the events that move Bechdel along, the passion that moves her along, and the "good-enough" mothers she finds in her two therapists.
As I read this book, I couldn't help but thank Bechdel for divulging her conversations with her two therapists and her search for her own self through the obsessed analyst and deconstruction of Winnicott's and Freud's work. Her forays into Adrienne Rich's and Virginia Wolf's work, alongside their speeches, allows me to see, and almost touch, the way that words permeate into the mind and fixate themselves onto our souls. What makes this memoir do ten thousand things at once is the way it plays with the consumption of images and text. Textual information given in a visual sense does something to the mind that's nonverbal and verbal at the same time. This book was, to me, like a film, like a written novel, and like drawn comic all in one. It reminded me quite readily of Last Year in Marienbad, a film so obsessed with memory and its faulty compulsions, and I felt as if Bechdel was visually and mentally playing with the act of memoir and memory as much as discovering herself through her mother.
This book is so much more about Bechdel, as Bechdel stands and is, than her mother--but at the same time, it mirrors itself and becomes more about her mother. It's a piece of art rich with the conundrums of the writer and her daily life. Writing, in my experience, is a selfish and insular act, but is also an expression that directly correlates to the outside world by virtue of recording what can easily be forgotten.
Sincerely, this is a heavy book laden with textual images, memories, dreams, insecurities, and a mesh of self-hatred and self-love and narcissism. But it's a masterpiece. And I'm thankful to have read it at this period of my life when my own narcissism, fear of success, and tendencies toward annihilation of myself and my relationships with others are drastically affecting my writing process and my soul. Bechdel says at the end that she has successfully destroyed her mother and her mother has surmounted the destruction. But in the same way, I feel like she has also destroyed herself, exposing the self literally through this seminal work of interplay between words and images, exposing herself to a degree that's more intentional, more honest, more lying, more mirrored, more everything, and in that process of deconstruction, has finally found herself in the rumble.
-- Adrienne Rich
---
I want to apologize, again, for being late. I had a terrible weekend! In order to not get into too many details, my husband left for another long sea trial, my computer crashed, and I spent all night trying to repair it and didn't sleep until 4 'o clock or so. It's been a long, trying day, and tomorrow after class I fly to Boston (trying to prepare for that, too), and to be honest, I am simply trying to get by!
But enough of me. When I finished Are You My Mother? : A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel, I knew that I had in my hands a literary graphic masterpiece. It went beyond Fun Home: A Tragic Comic in ways I can't fully describe, but it may have to do with its insularity, its deconstruction of a multiplicity of texts--both visually and intellectually and metaphysically--and the extraction of the self via the archetype and mythology of the mother. To be perfectly honest, I don't know, at least, I don't feel quite apt or readily "smart" enough to deconstruct it myself. I have longed enjoyed graphic comics since a young child, as I had once said, and never had I let myself be "taught" by a visual text to read it like a literary form. But when I finished this book, I knew it had churned something in me in the same ways great literature has shifted my core. I have to admit, Fun Home may be a more easily digestive narrative and it, too, is a great literary comic. But there is something Are You My Mother? that does a tenfold more than Fun Home. In my most layman terms, I'll try to get to the bottom of it.
The visual landscape of Mother transcribe the monotonous undertones of what creates a memoir, what the process of writing the self is, and how the consumption of images via the sequence of panels build a realistic world in the mind, in the grandiose mindscape of the human psyche. First, the panels surround the thematic linkages of each chapter's title and dream. The book is built and depends on the cyclicality, on the structure, and what's interesting is that Bechdel juts to-and-fro from the book's sense of "present" (example, page 286, the narration explains that her mother has finally given her the positive appreciation of Bechdel's art in present tense: "But today she seems to want to say something positive) to the past, focusing and distilling the writing process itself as an act of, as Virginia Woolf says, a way to put one's past "to rest." To free oneself, to purify oneself, is a common modality that seeps into this book like a fire or a ripple or rage, and the book beautifully shows the arduous and painstaking task of writing and living. Bechdel ruminates in the beginning: "You cannot live and write at the same time." And yet, Bechdel shows her everyday process, the meticulous details of her life, her relationships, her phone calls with her mother, her journaling (and her mother's, which is more detail-oriented than an exploration of the mind), and the events that move Bechdel along, the passion that moves her along, and the "good-enough" mothers she finds in her two therapists.
As I read this book, I couldn't help but thank Bechdel for divulging her conversations with her two therapists and her search for her own self through the obsessed analyst and deconstruction of Winnicott's and Freud's work. Her forays into Adrienne Rich's and Virginia Wolf's work, alongside their speeches, allows me to see, and almost touch, the way that words permeate into the mind and fixate themselves onto our souls. What makes this memoir do ten thousand things at once is the way it plays with the consumption of images and text. Textual information given in a visual sense does something to the mind that's nonverbal and verbal at the same time. This book was, to me, like a film, like a written novel, and like drawn comic all in one. It reminded me quite readily of Last Year in Marienbad, a film so obsessed with memory and its faulty compulsions, and I felt as if Bechdel was visually and mentally playing with the act of memoir and memory as much as discovering herself through her mother.
This book is so much more about Bechdel, as Bechdel stands and is, than her mother--but at the same time, it mirrors itself and becomes more about her mother. It's a piece of art rich with the conundrums of the writer and her daily life. Writing, in my experience, is a selfish and insular act, but is also an expression that directly correlates to the outside world by virtue of recording what can easily be forgotten.
Sincerely, this is a heavy book laden with textual images, memories, dreams, insecurities, and a mesh of self-hatred and self-love and narcissism. But it's a masterpiece. And I'm thankful to have read it at this period of my life when my own narcissism, fear of success, and tendencies toward annihilation of myself and my relationships with others are drastically affecting my writing process and my soul. Bechdel says at the end that she has successfully destroyed her mother and her mother has surmounted the destruction. But in the same way, I feel like she has also destroyed herself, exposing the self literally through this seminal work of interplay between words and images, exposing herself to a degree that's more intentional, more honest, more lying, more mirrored, more everything, and in that process of deconstruction, has finally found herself in the rumble.
Sunday, March 3, 2013
That's life...
Hey guys, sorry to do this but my blog will come tomorrow morning or night. Unfortunately, my computer is acting salty and I have to fix it. Also, can't use the Mills computers because the intern at the Parking Department accidentally kept my Student ID and I can't pick it up until tomorrow at CPM 113, Lost and Found!
Sorry about this. I really loved "Are You My Mother?" and want to write a proper blog response. Until mañana...
Sorry about this. I really loved "Are You My Mother?" and want to write a proper blog response. Until mañana...
Sunday, February 24, 2013
But I Can't: the way we deal with memories
I really appreciated this short because of its honesty, vibrancy, and unique way of displaying memories via bright watercolors, slippery panels, and journalistic visual text. It's a lovely and sad homage to the narrator's friend, Harriot, who mysteriously disappeared during high school.
The mustard yellows and plum purples really intrigued my eye. The curvature of the panels created a sense of whimsicality and playfulness, but the seriousness and intricate details of the characters, while juxtaposed to darker tones of earthy colors, added depth and an emotional willingness. It's a really lovely comic that's drawn to compliment the eye. The overall design strikes a strange nuance between structured and minimalistic to free and playful and alive. In a way, it reflects the mystery of her friend's disappearance and the existence of UFOs.
In terms of narrative structure, the shape of this story is a simple one: a bathroom tub. It starts in media res in the present, over a conversation with friends on UFOs, and then it slips back into the past, further into it by chronicling the events of Harriet's disappearance, and then it wraps back up toward the present, ending. It's linear, in a way, and moves forward thematically and emotionally by tying Harriet with her obsessions.
I have to say, I really love the art here. My only sadness is that the short was quite short. I wish it were longer. The detail of the narrator's face was lovely, and I love how the artist captured and embodied herself.
~ Melissa Sipin
The mustard yellows and plum purples really intrigued my eye. The curvature of the panels created a sense of whimsicality and playfulness, but the seriousness and intricate details of the characters, while juxtaposed to darker tones of earthy colors, added depth and an emotional willingness. It's a really lovely comic that's drawn to compliment the eye. The overall design strikes a strange nuance between structured and minimalistic to free and playful and alive. In a way, it reflects the mystery of her friend's disappearance and the existence of UFOs.
In terms of narrative structure, the shape of this story is a simple one: a bathroom tub. It starts in media res in the present, over a conversation with friends on UFOs, and then it slips back into the past, further into it by chronicling the events of Harriet's disappearance, and then it wraps back up toward the present, ending. It's linear, in a way, and moves forward thematically and emotionally by tying Harriet with her obsessions.
I have to say, I really love the art here. My only sadness is that the short was quite short. I wish it were longer. The detail of the narrator's face was lovely, and I love how the artist captured and embodied herself.
~ Melissa Sipin
Monday, February 18, 2013
A missing limb [updated]
"Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb." (Page 23)
There is just so many things to say about Fun Home, and unfortunately my body is too exhausted to write. I plan on expanding this blog entry tomorrow morning. This graphic memoir lingered with me throughout this holiday weekend, and I've been immersed in its storytelling, unable to process exactly what it's done to me. I've been saturating my thoughts on it for quite some time.
One thing I want to ruminate on before I lay my head to sleep is that cyclical thematic nature of this graphic memoir. Alison Bechdel employs this technique effortlessly. The panels illuminate cyclicality by their pacing, strong and bold lines within its structure, and the grayscale watercolor details that evade the backdrop. The way Bechdel uses textuality and allusion reveals that cyclicality, and her relationship with her face, how they meet and don't meet spiritually and physically embodies that impeccable and and obtuse cyclicality. Bechdel is able to breathe into this narrative a longing representative of that "missing limb," an undercurrent of emotion that is revealed through disparity, which in turn reveals loss, cognitive dissonance, and dysfunction. Bechdel immerses us into American culture, which its through our English canonical literature to culture tropes and obsessions to her individual loyalty to Greek mythology. But all through the grandiose allusions, she brings us back to her family, to herself, through a cyclical specificity, and it's through that individualism, through building her world and showing us through a multilayer storytelling narration of image and text, that we extrapolate the universal missing limbs of family and sexuality. Fun Home left me breathless at the end. The image of her jumping into the pool with her father's arms outstretched reminded me too much of how literature can deconstruct you as much as it can itself. It's another layer of its cyclicality.
More tomorrow morning. More specificity when my body can write with more fluidity.
---
It may be 4pm, but I have a lot to say!
First, I want to focus on the non-linear narrative of Fun Home. It's reminiscent of how The Lover was written by Duras but with that unique twist of being a graphic memoir. Duras used objects, like gold lamé shoes, to bring the narrative back to certain memories and fling the story along, and Bechdel employs similar techniques, refocusing on singular objects and the milieu of her life--whether it's the funeral home, her father's distance through the intricacies of his home decor, through her journals, through allusions to the literature that shaped her and her family's life, through old maps of her town and letters of her parents and even words in the dictionary. There is also a section where Bechdel reveals her OCD tendencies as a child. The way the narrative moves about has an obsessive, cyclical property to it, and it works like a dream, it works like how memory works, and it reveals itself and distances itself, allowing us to peer into a vivid, complicated world. This non-linear narrative works because it's reflective of Bechdel's relationship with her father thematically:
"Not only were we inverts, we were inversions of each other. While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him, he was attempting to express something feminine through me. It was a war of cross-purposes, and so doomed to perpetual escalation." (98)
Second, I want to talk about the art in this book. In The Comics Journal, Bechdel says:
"It's very important for me that people be able to read the images in the same kind of gradually unfolding way as they're reading the text. I don't like pictures that don't have information in them. I want pictures that you have to read, that you have to decode, that take time, that you can get lost in. Otherwise what's the point?"
Like how I am moved/affected by films differently than I am by books, I was moved utterly by Fun Home, in ways that were different and the same, and it brought me back to my childhood and adult memories in modes that are more immediate than had I read this in a textual form. The medium of juxtaposing images and text plays with the idea of narrative and memory through the work and pangs of the "image." Even textual information are images; they're symbols as much as pictures are. The tremendous pangs that Bechdel goes through to get every panel right, every image right (even by photographing herself in different body positions so that the cartoon version is perfected) is what builds the magic and technical artistry of this book. It makes it come alive; the panels, the narration, comes off as alive, as if we are watching or experiencing these moments with Bechdel panel by panel, memory by memory, book by book, thought by thought. Bechdel has a knack of confining the narration in singular panels or grouped panels, and each story arc is built into the larger story arc of her father's death, his coming out, and her coming out. The cyclicality of Fun Home is novel because of its form. The immediacy of this medium is somehow more direct than film, than books, because it's the mixture of the two. Bechdel builds her world wholly and utterly for you, as any novelist or filmmaker should. And in that sense, I can live and breathe and touch in Bechdel's world because of the intricate, painstaking details of her work.
I don't know how I can fully explain how much I love Bechdel's work. The fact that it took her 7 obsessive years to create this graphic novel renews my faith in the tortured artist. This book moved me. I felt the tears, the lies, the wanting to come out, the "debunking of protagonist" feelings in a family drama, the want of love and acceptance, gender identity and closeted vs. open homosexuality. And I knew the moments that moved me had moved Bechdel. She inspired me to make my own art, no matter how long it takes, out of my own tragicomic family. One day I will.
-- Melissa Sipin
There is just so many things to say about Fun Home, and unfortunately my body is too exhausted to write. I plan on expanding this blog entry tomorrow morning. This graphic memoir lingered with me throughout this holiday weekend, and I've been immersed in its storytelling, unable to process exactly what it's done to me. I've been saturating my thoughts on it for quite some time.
One thing I want to ruminate on before I lay my head to sleep is that cyclical thematic nature of this graphic memoir. Alison Bechdel employs this technique effortlessly. The panels illuminate cyclicality by their pacing, strong and bold lines within its structure, and the grayscale watercolor details that evade the backdrop. The way Bechdel uses textuality and allusion reveals that cyclicality, and her relationship with her face, how they meet and don't meet spiritually and physically embodies that impeccable and and obtuse cyclicality. Bechdel is able to breathe into this narrative a longing representative of that "missing limb," an undercurrent of emotion that is revealed through disparity, which in turn reveals loss, cognitive dissonance, and dysfunction. Bechdel immerses us into American culture, which its through our English canonical literature to culture tropes and obsessions to her individual loyalty to Greek mythology. But all through the grandiose allusions, she brings us back to her family, to herself, through a cyclical specificity, and it's through that individualism, through building her world and showing us through a multilayer storytelling narration of image and text, that we extrapolate the universal missing limbs of family and sexuality. Fun Home left me breathless at the end. The image of her jumping into the pool with her father's arms outstretched reminded me too much of how literature can deconstruct you as much as it can itself. It's another layer of its cyclicality.
More tomorrow morning. More specificity when my body can write with more fluidity.
---
It may be 4pm, but I have a lot to say!
First, I want to focus on the non-linear narrative of Fun Home. It's reminiscent of how The Lover was written by Duras but with that unique twist of being a graphic memoir. Duras used objects, like gold lamé shoes, to bring the narrative back to certain memories and fling the story along, and Bechdel employs similar techniques, refocusing on singular objects and the milieu of her life--whether it's the funeral home, her father's distance through the intricacies of his home decor, through her journals, through allusions to the literature that shaped her and her family's life, through old maps of her town and letters of her parents and even words in the dictionary. There is also a section where Bechdel reveals her OCD tendencies as a child. The way the narrative moves about has an obsessive, cyclical property to it, and it works like a dream, it works like how memory works, and it reveals itself and distances itself, allowing us to peer into a vivid, complicated world. This non-linear narrative works because it's reflective of Bechdel's relationship with her father thematically:
"Not only were we inverts, we were inversions of each other. While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him, he was attempting to express something feminine through me. It was a war of cross-purposes, and so doomed to perpetual escalation." (98)
Second, I want to talk about the art in this book. In The Comics Journal, Bechdel says:
"It's very important for me that people be able to read the images in the same kind of gradually unfolding way as they're reading the text. I don't like pictures that don't have information in them. I want pictures that you have to read, that you have to decode, that take time, that you can get lost in. Otherwise what's the point?"
Like how I am moved/affected by films differently than I am by books, I was moved utterly by Fun Home, in ways that were different and the same, and it brought me back to my childhood and adult memories in modes that are more immediate than had I read this in a textual form. The medium of juxtaposing images and text plays with the idea of narrative and memory through the work and pangs of the "image." Even textual information are images; they're symbols as much as pictures are. The tremendous pangs that Bechdel goes through to get every panel right, every image right (even by photographing herself in different body positions so that the cartoon version is perfected) is what builds the magic and technical artistry of this book. It makes it come alive; the panels, the narration, comes off as alive, as if we are watching or experiencing these moments with Bechdel panel by panel, memory by memory, book by book, thought by thought. Bechdel has a knack of confining the narration in singular panels or grouped panels, and each story arc is built into the larger story arc of her father's death, his coming out, and her coming out. The cyclicality of Fun Home is novel because of its form. The immediacy of this medium is somehow more direct than film, than books, because it's the mixture of the two. Bechdel builds her world wholly and utterly for you, as any novelist or filmmaker should. And in that sense, I can live and breathe and touch in Bechdel's world because of the intricate, painstaking details of her work.
I don't know how I can fully explain how much I love Bechdel's work. The fact that it took her 7 obsessive years to create this graphic novel renews my faith in the tortured artist. This book moved me. I felt the tears, the lies, the wanting to come out, the "debunking of protagonist" feelings in a family drama, the want of love and acceptance, gender identity and closeted vs. open homosexuality. And I knew the moments that moved me had moved Bechdel. She inspired me to make my own art, no matter how long it takes, out of my own tragicomic family. One day I will.
-- Melissa Sipin
Saturday, February 9, 2013
"Andy, how do you keep from going crazy?"
Throughout reading Lucky, I began to question the unique quality of the graphic memoir--its bilinear existence as an artistic form of 'memoir' and 'cartoon.' How does it work as a piece of art that mechanically uses a sequential framework to fling the story along, how does it work as a medium of intersection, juxtaposing drawings and textual narration, how does it become successful, engaging, and representative of reality and realism through its memoir-esque quality?
For me, interestingly enough, the answers divulge and differentiate. And lucky for me, the way Lucky dealt with these questions formulated a multiplicity of answers.
I highly enjoyed Lucky. I felt like the definitive black lines and minimalistic drawings provided a landscape and environment that reached an immediate directness to realism, something more relatable when compared to a more intricate and highly detailed cartoon. I liked how Sailor brought Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics to our attention. In a way, I agree with his statement--Lucky's minimalism helped me connect with the narrator quite readily and immediately. I didn't necessarily "see myself," but I connected with Gabrielle and her semi-autobiographical memoir with an instantaneous, fleeting of joy that's reminiscent of when I meet a stranger who could relate to my troubles and ills with ease. Her black and white drawings almost came off a bit more honestly, as strange as that may seem. They shattered the walls of the panels, if you will, and their sequential humdrum--they way she narrated, how her voice was in media res and set up each scene with authority, how her comics read like a diary, how her voice sounded journalistic and humorous--she enclosed the distance that I felt with Laurie Sandell's The Impostor's Daughter, and I found that difference compelling and delightful. Both graphic memoirs use different chapter book breakdowns and jumped from one moment to the next through a linear, narrative framework of panels, and they somehow dealt with distance and narration quite differently and wonderfully. For me, how you can tell a story through a graphic memoir has opened my mind to the myriad of possibilities with the genre's narrative forms. At first glance, you would think that the graphic memoir is banal and simplistic--you use sequence and a linear narrative to tell a story--but that's not the case. There are many ways to weave your story across the blankness of the page, and how Gabrielle Bell did it stuck to my soul. She was the tortured artist living the banality of life. I commiserated with her, laughed with her, drank a glass of red wine or two alone with her. Her relationship with Tom was sweet and endearing and awkwardly monotonous and passionate and insatiable all at the same time--I couldn't help but not relate.
I thoroughly enjoyed how Gabrielle manipulated her panels in Lucky #1, #2, #3, and her extra stories (which read to me like short stories, and her last one was my favorite; it was so fun and almost Aimee Bender-esque [I'm referring to her short story, "The Rememberer," where the narrator's lover experiences a backwards evolution]). The six panels in #1 was a bit difficult to keep up with--the text was rather small--but it was still a brisk read and the lines were much thinner and the spatial detail of the panels and their backdrop were less descriptive. The text took the center stage in #1, which made the tonal expression culminate to a diary-like, journaling-type of writing, but it helped form the narrator and her memoir; it helped build who she was, what her world was like while she was trapped in the confines of her mind, and how she perceived the world artistically, idealistically, and how it also failed her. The dates helped move along the monotony tone of everyday life humorously, and it provided a fresh way to analyze that monotony. The hunt for Tom's apartment in New York city was definitely a great subplot that undercut her artistic frustration. It provided the tension of the artisan's life--how to live (eat, sleep, keep oneself afloat) versus the creation of art. Tom's subplot flooded into her own plot of searching for a job and making a living, to how she dealt with her crazy apartment mates and landlords' fallout and disdain for each other, to why she came back to modeling and settled with it, coping with the nude occupation by sucking it in and doing it. I loved the last panels where her "self" becomes fully drawn and more detailed, and then the panels shift back to the minimalism and she's walking down the street singing: "At least I'm not modeling!" It's a great way to converge the reality and survival of the artist, and to do it with the immediacy and charming black, fine lines/drawings. It just made me appreciate Lucky even more.
I loved #2 and #3, how Gabrielle took out the six panels and replaced it with four, large panels that filled up most of the blank page. The details were more filled out, the use of empty space was more direct, and you can see through the progression of the panels her growth as an artistan and cartoonist. One of my most favorite panels is on page 54, where her feet is placed in the water bubbles and fish and lizards are swimming about, surrounding her toes. The panel moved like a film and it's like Gabrielle shifted her camera (or angles within the panels) to a more closed position, like a very close third. I loved how Gabrielle used the boldness and directness of the color black more, especially in the panels where she began to sell her comic books on the street. The panel where she's trying to climb the stairs and her supplies fall and collapse--with the stairs heightened by the background's/hallway's blackness--alludes to, at least in my mind, the tale of Orpheus and his wife. Instead of looking away form her art--her books and supplies--she climbs the stairs looking directly at them, and she fails. Her materials collapse. When she finally puts everything together, Tom unknowingly gives her a compliment that's brash and she doesn't receive it well. Maybe it's because of her failure to sell any books at the vendor, which influenced her reception of it, disallowing her to receive his comment with heart. Whatever the case, the story/panels shift immediately (in #2 and #3, they shift without warning, but you feel that narrative arc. Each change of scene/moment is not recorded with a date as it was in #1; however, each narrative arc has a closing [almost that of a short story]. Though it's a bit more abrupt, the moments fit and blend into each other, like an abstract painting, or watercolors blending on a canvas). You get a feeling of abrupt loss or misunderstanding in this arc panel on page 64, but it doesn't make Gabrielle stop her art. On the next story/panel arc, she's in a park with a friend discussing her isolation, her feelings of failure as an artisan, and her friend Andy is able to put her back into perspective. It was lovely shift that led one scene into the other, and it was thematic, almost cyclical.
I could go on and on about #3, but I'll just say for now that I loved how more detailed its backdrops and panels were, how Gabrielle was even more drawn out than #2, and the use of four, large, focused panels. The French boys were darling and rambunctious, she used the monotonous humdrum of her job as a jewelry maker as another way to analyze the artist's frustration with survival and creation of art, and I loved how she focused on her body (through her drawings and scenes) and the awkwardness of social situations. I also could go on and on about her Extra Stories, which I loved. As I said, the last one was my personal favorite. The magical realism of the hole was fun and integrated well with the whimsicality of her voice and tonal style. I wished she used the hole a bit more throughout, to be honest. I just loved it. It was such a compelling and fun plot device.
And last but not least: the last line of the book... loved, loved it. I felt like most of my life is reminiscent of that very line, whether it comes to my husband (why else would I be in Norfolk, alone, in a hotel, in a city foreign and strange to me?) or my writing (it's why I'm here at Mills, isn't it?)
"But with surprising ease, I slid inside, to go and be with the one I love" (111).
~ Melissa Sipin
For me, interestingly enough, the answers divulge and differentiate. And lucky for me, the way Lucky dealt with these questions formulated a multiplicity of answers.
I highly enjoyed Lucky. I felt like the definitive black lines and minimalistic drawings provided a landscape and environment that reached an immediate directness to realism, something more relatable when compared to a more intricate and highly detailed cartoon. I liked how Sailor brought Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics to our attention. In a way, I agree with his statement--Lucky's minimalism helped me connect with the narrator quite readily and immediately. I didn't necessarily "see myself," but I connected with Gabrielle and her semi-autobiographical memoir with an instantaneous, fleeting of joy that's reminiscent of when I meet a stranger who could relate to my troubles and ills with ease. Her black and white drawings almost came off a bit more honestly, as strange as that may seem. They shattered the walls of the panels, if you will, and their sequential humdrum--they way she narrated, how her voice was in media res and set up each scene with authority, how her comics read like a diary, how her voice sounded journalistic and humorous--she enclosed the distance that I felt with Laurie Sandell's The Impostor's Daughter, and I found that difference compelling and delightful. Both graphic memoirs use different chapter book breakdowns and jumped from one moment to the next through a linear, narrative framework of panels, and they somehow dealt with distance and narration quite differently and wonderfully. For me, how you can tell a story through a graphic memoir has opened my mind to the myriad of possibilities with the genre's narrative forms. At first glance, you would think that the graphic memoir is banal and simplistic--you use sequence and a linear narrative to tell a story--but that's not the case. There are many ways to weave your story across the blankness of the page, and how Gabrielle Bell did it stuck to my soul. She was the tortured artist living the banality of life. I commiserated with her, laughed with her, drank a glass of red wine or two alone with her. Her relationship with Tom was sweet and endearing and awkwardly monotonous and passionate and insatiable all at the same time--I couldn't help but not relate.
I thoroughly enjoyed how Gabrielle manipulated her panels in Lucky #1, #2, #3, and her extra stories (which read to me like short stories, and her last one was my favorite; it was so fun and almost Aimee Bender-esque [I'm referring to her short story, "The Rememberer," where the narrator's lover experiences a backwards evolution]). The six panels in #1 was a bit difficult to keep up with--the text was rather small--but it was still a brisk read and the lines were much thinner and the spatial detail of the panels and their backdrop were less descriptive. The text took the center stage in #1, which made the tonal expression culminate to a diary-like, journaling-type of writing, but it helped form the narrator and her memoir; it helped build who she was, what her world was like while she was trapped in the confines of her mind, and how she perceived the world artistically, idealistically, and how it also failed her. The dates helped move along the monotony tone of everyday life humorously, and it provided a fresh way to analyze that monotony. The hunt for Tom's apartment in New York city was definitely a great subplot that undercut her artistic frustration. It provided the tension of the artisan's life--how to live (eat, sleep, keep oneself afloat) versus the creation of art. Tom's subplot flooded into her own plot of searching for a job and making a living, to how she dealt with her crazy apartment mates and landlords' fallout and disdain for each other, to why she came back to modeling and settled with it, coping with the nude occupation by sucking it in and doing it. I loved the last panels where her "self" becomes fully drawn and more detailed, and then the panels shift back to the minimalism and she's walking down the street singing: "At least I'm not modeling!" It's a great way to converge the reality and survival of the artist, and to do it with the immediacy and charming black, fine lines/drawings. It just made me appreciate Lucky even more.
I loved #2 and #3, how Gabrielle took out the six panels and replaced it with four, large panels that filled up most of the blank page. The details were more filled out, the use of empty space was more direct, and you can see through the progression of the panels her growth as an artistan and cartoonist. One of my most favorite panels is on page 54, where her feet is placed in the water bubbles and fish and lizards are swimming about, surrounding her toes. The panel moved like a film and it's like Gabrielle shifted her camera (or angles within the panels) to a more closed position, like a very close third. I loved how Gabrielle used the boldness and directness of the color black more, especially in the panels where she began to sell her comic books on the street. The panel where she's trying to climb the stairs and her supplies fall and collapse--with the stairs heightened by the background's/hallway's blackness--alludes to, at least in my mind, the tale of Orpheus and his wife. Instead of looking away form her art--her books and supplies--she climbs the stairs looking directly at them, and she fails. Her materials collapse. When she finally puts everything together, Tom unknowingly gives her a compliment that's brash and she doesn't receive it well. Maybe it's because of her failure to sell any books at the vendor, which influenced her reception of it, disallowing her to receive his comment with heart. Whatever the case, the story/panels shift immediately (in #2 and #3, they shift without warning, but you feel that narrative arc. Each change of scene/moment is not recorded with a date as it was in #1; however, each narrative arc has a closing [almost that of a short story]. Though it's a bit more abrupt, the moments fit and blend into each other, like an abstract painting, or watercolors blending on a canvas). You get a feeling of abrupt loss or misunderstanding in this arc panel on page 64, but it doesn't make Gabrielle stop her art. On the next story/panel arc, she's in a park with a friend discussing her isolation, her feelings of failure as an artisan, and her friend Andy is able to put her back into perspective. It was lovely shift that led one scene into the other, and it was thematic, almost cyclical.
I could go on and on about #3, but I'll just say for now that I loved how more detailed its backdrops and panels were, how Gabrielle was even more drawn out than #2, and the use of four, large, focused panels. The French boys were darling and rambunctious, she used the monotonous humdrum of her job as a jewelry maker as another way to analyze the artist's frustration with survival and creation of art, and I loved how she focused on her body (through her drawings and scenes) and the awkwardness of social situations. I also could go on and on about her Extra Stories, which I loved. As I said, the last one was my personal favorite. The magical realism of the hole was fun and integrated well with the whimsicality of her voice and tonal style. I wished she used the hole a bit more throughout, to be honest. I just loved it. It was such a compelling and fun plot device.
And last but not least: the last line of the book... loved, loved it. I felt like most of my life is reminiscent of that very line, whether it comes to my husband (why else would I be in Norfolk, alone, in a hotel, in a city foreign and strange to me?) or my writing (it's why I'm here at Mills, isn't it?)
"But with surprising ease, I slid inside, to go and be with the one I love" (111).
~ Melissa Sipin
Friday, February 1, 2013
the impostor's daughter: melissa sipin
Micheline Marcom once told me last semester that there are books in your life that are "right"--perfectly right-- for that ephemeral and particular and youthful moment of your life. Maybe it's the way the book reflects the emotions processing or in need to process and divulge in you. Blankets, which was used in one of the examples in the syllabus, was perfect for my state in mind ten years ago in high school--it was about processing the loss of faith in Christianity, about the truth and the shadows via perceptions and Plato's cave, about falling and losing your firth love, and of course, the story was filtered through the Bildungsroman literary concept, the act of being a child and becoming an adult. I also read Catcher in the Rye during that intensified and youthful period, which had also impressed upon me a thousand of swirling emotions. But, to repeat Micheline, it doesn't mean that they're good books. Blankets and Catcher in the Rye were right for me at that age, and though I hold them both dearly to my heart and disagree with Micheline on their literary validity (I think they're still great books; she does not), I have to say that The Impostor's Daughter carries that same dilemma for me.
Had I read The Impostor's Daughter in high school or undergrad, maybe I would have loved it, or processed it with an adoring eye, or... well maybe it would've touched me more. But at this certain point of my life, this book didn't move me as much as Catcher or Blankets did. I know the point of these blogs is not whether or not we liked these books, that's hardly a topic of good conversation, but it does start an interesting discussion: even though I didn't like this book, did its craft succeed in the Bildungsroman genre? To me, it's a yes and a no.
It had technical craft. The sections paced effortlessly and I read it in twice in two different sittings. Her voice and character was engaging, her task of figuring out her father--and thus herself--relatable and intriguing. But it lacked "umph" for me. It lacked emotional integrity, and it has to do with the unfitting and almost cliché and indeterminate and "blah" ending. It has to do with her obsession over the relationship with Ben--which was, sure, interesting--but it lacked the emotional stirrings of a 'first' love (which she freely admitted to--she wasn't "in love with Ben" and you know what, I felt it. I felt the shallowness of the relationship and experienced nothing when it ended.) What excited me the most was her father and the father figure because he was exactly like my father--eccentric, a con artist, a liar, someone who took my social security number and filed for a numerous amount of credit cards, someone who kept secrets and more secrets--like a third wedding--but also someone who raised me and loved me and--in his own twisted way--gave me everything he could, and loved me as much as he could. The anger she felt toward him is the anger I felt toward my own father, but the way she processed it and filtered it through this graphic memoir, or mainly through her narrative arcs, was flat and shallow and disappointing. Her father was the star of this novel. Her anger, which I felt I should've felt more, was flatlined. I didn't quite understand it. So what he lied? My father lied to me. I missed the intensity and meaning of her quest to "expose him," and if it were just based on principals, I wasn't convinced.
Her addiction to ambien, however, was an intriguing narrative arc and it definitely kept me reading. I feel like I'm rambling here, but I do have a good point: the only time I felt like I really knew this character, or felt like she fully divulged herself to an audience and created a fully fleshed out protagonist was when she wrote of her troubles with sleeping pills and her process in conquering that problem. She felt real there, and I liked her, or at least, respected her and was convinced of her struggles. The struggle with her Dad? I didn't really believe it. I'm not even sure if she truly figured herself out at the end of this memoir. And maybe that's the point of it, and why, in some sense it did succeed--she ends on a very abrupt note. But it's a note that ends on a new beginning, on starting from scratch. Though I was surprised that the memoir ended on the last scene, with the Thanksgiving dinner, her father isolated still, and a focus on an image of her pen and a reflective statement to the beginning of the memoir--it's was a way to show the cyclical nature of the coming-of-age experience. We are constantly growing, ending certain points of our lives (especially at points where we give up or outgrow certain people and go back to the ones who we'll never outgrow--namely, our families) and starting these points all over again, holding onto the few things that will always be constant in our lives. Maybe Laurie didn't want to simply end the story. She wanted to show that even at the end, her and her family will keep on living, and this was simply a way to show how her family shifted.
I didn't hate the memoir. What I really appreciated was the craft of the primitive drawings. They were fun, light, and created a tonal easygoing-ness that made the novel a quick, fast-paced read. As a kid, I was a frequent reader of mangas, and as a teenager, I geeked out over V for Vendetta, Watchmen, and the like, and so it was refreshing for me to see a memoir that displayed itself as serious but still light-hearted and lovely. The nudity really took me by surprise, but in a good way. What really intrigued me were the panels where she focused specifically on one object or face or expression. The book's a very expressionistic memoir, and I liked that--it translated into a honesty that I believed.
But, at the same time, that honesty's well was too shallow for me. I'm not well-versed at the technicality of memoir, but a lot of her problems in this book seemed trivial. I just wish that Laurie displayed her struggle with her father's lies more convincingly, with more urgency. There was a lack of urgency in that struggle, and I really wasn't convinced at her protagonist's obsession and hurt over it. Maybe the problem was that the narrative arcs were too confined in neatly paneled vignettes, or maybe it was a problem of character development in Laurie's portrayed protagonist.
~m
Had I read The Impostor's Daughter in high school or undergrad, maybe I would have loved it, or processed it with an adoring eye, or... well maybe it would've touched me more. But at this certain point of my life, this book didn't move me as much as Catcher or Blankets did. I know the point of these blogs is not whether or not we liked these books, that's hardly a topic of good conversation, but it does start an interesting discussion: even though I didn't like this book, did its craft succeed in the Bildungsroman genre? To me, it's a yes and a no.
It had technical craft. The sections paced effortlessly and I read it in twice in two different sittings. Her voice and character was engaging, her task of figuring out her father--and thus herself--relatable and intriguing. But it lacked "umph" for me. It lacked emotional integrity, and it has to do with the unfitting and almost cliché and indeterminate and "blah" ending. It has to do with her obsession over the relationship with Ben--which was, sure, interesting--but it lacked the emotional stirrings of a 'first' love (which she freely admitted to--she wasn't "in love with Ben" and you know what, I felt it. I felt the shallowness of the relationship and experienced nothing when it ended.) What excited me the most was her father and the father figure because he was exactly like my father--eccentric, a con artist, a liar, someone who took my social security number and filed for a numerous amount of credit cards, someone who kept secrets and more secrets--like a third wedding--but also someone who raised me and loved me and--in his own twisted way--gave me everything he could, and loved me as much as he could. The anger she felt toward him is the anger I felt toward my own father, but the way she processed it and filtered it through this graphic memoir, or mainly through her narrative arcs, was flat and shallow and disappointing. Her father was the star of this novel. Her anger, which I felt I should've felt more, was flatlined. I didn't quite understand it. So what he lied? My father lied to me. I missed the intensity and meaning of her quest to "expose him," and if it were just based on principals, I wasn't convinced.
Her addiction to ambien, however, was an intriguing narrative arc and it definitely kept me reading. I feel like I'm rambling here, but I do have a good point: the only time I felt like I really knew this character, or felt like she fully divulged herself to an audience and created a fully fleshed out protagonist was when she wrote of her troubles with sleeping pills and her process in conquering that problem. She felt real there, and I liked her, or at least, respected her and was convinced of her struggles. The struggle with her Dad? I didn't really believe it. I'm not even sure if she truly figured herself out at the end of this memoir. And maybe that's the point of it, and why, in some sense it did succeed--she ends on a very abrupt note. But it's a note that ends on a new beginning, on starting from scratch. Though I was surprised that the memoir ended on the last scene, with the Thanksgiving dinner, her father isolated still, and a focus on an image of her pen and a reflective statement to the beginning of the memoir--it's was a way to show the cyclical nature of the coming-of-age experience. We are constantly growing, ending certain points of our lives (especially at points where we give up or outgrow certain people and go back to the ones who we'll never outgrow--namely, our families) and starting these points all over again, holding onto the few things that will always be constant in our lives. Maybe Laurie didn't want to simply end the story. She wanted to show that even at the end, her and her family will keep on living, and this was simply a way to show how her family shifted.
I didn't hate the memoir. What I really appreciated was the craft of the primitive drawings. They were fun, light, and created a tonal easygoing-ness that made the novel a quick, fast-paced read. As a kid, I was a frequent reader of mangas, and as a teenager, I geeked out over V for Vendetta, Watchmen, and the like, and so it was refreshing for me to see a memoir that displayed itself as serious but still light-hearted and lovely. The nudity really took me by surprise, but in a good way. What really intrigued me were the panels where she focused specifically on one object or face or expression. The book's a very expressionistic memoir, and I liked that--it translated into a honesty that I believed.
But, at the same time, that honesty's well was too shallow for me. I'm not well-versed at the technicality of memoir, but a lot of her problems in this book seemed trivial. I just wish that Laurie displayed her struggle with her father's lies more convincingly, with more urgency. There was a lack of urgency in that struggle, and I really wasn't convinced at her protagonist's obsession and hurt over it. Maybe the problem was that the narrative arcs were too confined in neatly paneled vignettes, or maybe it was a problem of character development in Laurie's portrayed protagonist.
~m
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