honestly, i can probably count on my one hand the number of texts (poetry collections, memoirs, novels, stories, etc) i've read that focus on the lives and experiences of elders, which is both pretty sad and points to a definite issue of ageism and limited/exclusive representation when it comes to art and literature. in this way, i really appreciate special exits. also because i imagine this memoir must've been really grueling and taxing to create. i know that it was often very difficult, emotional, and triggering to read (because it so pointedly refers to the inevitability of death and the complex emotions involved when family and loved ones age and are facing mortality).
one thing i have to say about style and the technical: i very much appreciated the detail and texture of the drawings, but also felt that, sometimes, there was so much detail, shading, and crosshatching that the images in the frames felt dark, cluttered, and really busy. sometimes this fit really well with the content/story/scene: it makes sense for the visual representation of rachel and lars's house (both inside and outside) to feel really messy and chaotic.. because it is messy and chaotic, but at other times, i felt the built up markings distracted me from processing the entirety of the image. and also sometimes it felt inconsistent in terms of what the light source would theoretically be in some settings (when outdoors, when it was daylight inside or outside, etc). the contrast was sometimes off in this way.
something that i was turned on to right off the bat was the way identity and class were marked through food items. it's an interesting choice and points to how food items and brands act as visual markers of class and also how food choices point to stratified consumption and access. i was just talking today and yesterday with friends about this: folks essentially need to be of a certain class to have easy access (both in terms of affordability and knowledge) to good, healthy, balanced foods. it's not only about price, but also about location. high end grocery stores typically aren't even built in low-income neighborhoods. but i digress... in terms of rachel and lars, the food depicted (cheetos, sizzler, junky canned stuff, tv dinners, no veggies) coincides with their status as older adults and not particularly well-off: these items are quick to make and require not much effort--their health problems would make it difficult for them to spend a lot of time preparing and cooking meals, cheap, keep for long-- helpful because they can't get themselves to the store often, etc). i was immediately keyed in to these food depictions because it reminded me of my own working class family and food choices... what my grandmother used to prepare for herself, what my mom keeps in the house, etc. it also brought me back to sailor's drawing a few weeks ago when she did the two different perspectives on the low-income family buying food at the grocery: the working class woman sees her choices as healthy, the class-privileged person sees them as disturbing, caricatured, gross, etc.
riffing off of this, a lot was resonating with me around mobility, access, class, health, etc. though partially lars and rachel's health problems and their worsening were influenced by their denial (or maybe inflated belief/hope that their bodies would persevere and recuperate without help), farmer pointed to how class, their escalating inability to get around: walking, driving, etc. contributed to their worsening health. they couldn't get themselves to the doctor when they had problems, they couldn't get themselves to the store to get food and other necessary items, they couldn't properly bathe themselves, etc etc.
one of the most profound and honestly somewhat disturbing (disheartening? sobering? saddening?) quotes that stuck out for me from this memoir came from lars when he was discussing how he dealt with rachel's bathroom needs in relation to her couchridden-ness: "things get worse in such small increments that you can get used to anything." it seemed like the crux/tuning fork of the memoir. their health deteriorates slowly and incrementally, slowly and incrementally the house becomes cluttered, dusty, dirty, routines that seem abnormal and unexpected and unsettling become run-of-the-mill (especially bathing and bathroom related ones), health problems and pain become tolerable/unnoticed/accepted.
this quote seemed especially poignant in relation to what was going on with the aging body and mind in this memoir. the body and brain are incrementally deteriorating, breaking down, malfunctioning, becoming weaker. the body and mind are coming up against failure, even when lars and rachel believe in their own resilience. however, despite their remembrance of their bodies as more functional, they kinda adapt to the changes (they "get used to anything.") it feels so sad because it is a kind of resignation. an acceptance. but then again, what else are they supposed to do? spiraling into self-loathing and deep depression isn't a good look. though they all (laura included) seem to function under a veil of mild depression. i wouldn't say anyone in this text is happy... just resigned, blank, etc.
memory was really interesting in here, too. time collapses when we're brought into one of the characters' memories. not only does time collapse, but the character (rachel or lars) goes so into their own head and becomes so keyed into the memory, they become disconnected from what's happening in real time... and that's when the car crash happens or someone fails to care about what's going on around them. there's also the issue of rachel's memory both deteriorating and remaining very vivid. her sense of time, memory, and reality become confused. she believes her dead cousin is visiting the house. she forgets to take her eye drops for stretches at a time. lars's sense of time, memory, and reality become confused, too. he forgets what day it is, etc.
i was really interested (slash sometimes confused) by the way time plays out in this memoir. i wasn't sure i trusted farmer's chronology and time lapses. i wondered if her choices were hyperbolized because it felt impossible that some time frames were correct. like, is it possible that rachel really didn't wash herself since her fall when, if you go back and look at how long ago that would have been, it would've been more than seven months earlier? maybe this is true, but it seems like a lot. that was a consistency issue often, but also i felt like the way she represented time as trudging along as well as seemingly stagnant was effective and fitting: their lives have become routinized, not much changes from day to day (until their are blowouts-- the car crash, the fall, the rodney king riots, etc). their lives/days are pretty predictable until minor hiccups happen-- the ant invasion, the poisoned hand, the blown out microwave, etc. then the major ones-- the glaucoma turning to blindness, the mite issue, the fall, the blisters, the riots, etc-- cause a bit more drama and a stir, but eventually, they get used to them, accept them, move on. (depressing)
um, okay, also everything that was going on on pages 26-27 pissed me off re: the representation of black people, in relation to caricature, stereotype, and character depth. violent black male who is scary! white people save the poor whorish black woman from angry black male! feel sorry for this family!
and the visual representation of the woman and her boys is so part of the caricature canon dating back to slavery-- the coiled crazy hair of the mother, her lips and expressions (panels 7-8 on 26, panel 6 on 27). the boys are very picaninny-esque, also quiet and docile looking and distorted facial features-- lips, eyes, facial profile (frame 5 on 26, frame 2-3, 7 on 27). i am tempted to post a million links to problematic imagery antebellum south to now, but i won't.
i will just say i was really disturbed and the connections are obvious. not to mention the lack of depth of all three of them and also the woman's pleading, hopeless, uninformed way, etc. this situation may very well have happened: a woman with an abusive brother needs an abortion and is struggling. sure. but there is definitely something problematic about the way it is visually and textually represented. i don't think white people inherently cannot positively represent people of color, i think white people need to challenge the stereotypes we embed about people of color and definitely be clued into how people of color are and have been represented visually, artistically, and in media historically and contemporarily. this particular instance of representation is a massive fail. i don't necessarily get the sense that farmer was depicting it this way to show that rachel and lars have a covert racism embedded in them and that, from their perspective, this is how this woman appeared to them. it didn't feel subjective like that or particularly from their eyes... it was still kinda omniscient. so, i dunno. i kinda didn't want to read on after those pages because they so rubbed me the wrong way.
Showing posts with label rex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rex. Show all posts
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Sunday, March 3, 2013
buncha stuff
as much as this book sets out to be about alison bechdel's mother, it becomes more of a cerebral, layered, introspective reflection of self and how both self and mother become mirrored, transposed, grafted upon each other. obviously this occurred in fun home as well and was as much about bechdel trying to come to terms with her own identity as it was about coming to terms with her father's, but this one feels different. as opposed to focusing on telling the stories of the past events themselves (obviously, these stories are there and do get shown, but this memoir is heavily focused on the mental process and various methods of therapy/healing/understanding), we are propelled into the mind, the intellectual and emotional journey of trying to make meaning out of experiences, connections, relationships. we see alison in her home element, at her computer, talking to and obsessively recording her mother's conversations (while barely contributing to them), we see her working out her anxieties, confusions, hang-ups in her therapist appointments, we see her postulating while driving, walking the dog at midnight, we see her dreams. the focus on the process of getting to the story of what's going on in her relationship with her mother feels connected to the fact that, unlike woolf, she has not "expressed some very long and felt and deeply felt emotion" (18). she is obsessed with her mother, with figuring out what exactly is at stake in their relationship, how they have and do interact with each other, but she can't get to the satisfaction and relief of writing it. she and her writing are both impeded and fueled by it.
at various points in this book, we see alison asking not only "are you my mother?" but "am i my mother?" (not necessarily in the sense of, am i becoming my mother, but am i acting as my own mother, am i getting what i need from a mother from myself?) and "is my therapist my mother?" and "am i my mother's therapist?" "which person is my mother, which person is my therapist, who am i in relation to any of them?" nothing is simply one thing, indeed. these questions and associations, also, frequently fold into each other. alison, indeed, has become a version of her own psychoanalyst, gorging herself on freud, winnicott, miller so that she may filter her experiences through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. though her mother may not be saying much, she also sits back, listens, records her mother for long stints, as is the role of the therapist-- listen, notate, filter, investigate. she comments that, in these conversations, she rarely offers up information of her own and her mother rarely asks deep questions about her. alison both values this and faults her mother for it. in her own relationships, she somewhat takes on this role. she is often pictured in her own little world obsessively reading at bedtime, barely listening to or asking about her girlfriend.
i wonder if this shifting out of self into mother, into therapist, into lover and changing of roles has to do with the quote from alice miller that she was so compelled by:
"the true self has been in 'a state of noncommunication,' as winnicott said, because it had to be protected. the patient never needs to hide anything else so thoroughly, so deeply, and for so long a time as he has hidden his true self. thus it is like a miracle each time to see how much individuality has survived behind such dissimulation, denial, and self-alienation, and can reappear as soon as the work of mourning brings freedom from the introjects." (54)
there seems to be a lot of introjection going on (meaning when you unconsciously take on other people's ideas or ways), especially in the case of this constant transposition of roles. acting as her own mother and therapist, also, seems to be a strategy that fills in for the absence of something personally needed that she feels frustrated without, which goes back to the winnicott stuff around the good-enough mother ("the good-enough 'mother' (not necessarily the infant's own mother) is one who makes active adaptation to the infant's needs, an active adaptation that gradually lessens, according to the infant's growing ability to account for failure of adaptation and to tolerate the results of frustration" (61). alison, in some senses, is her own good-enough mother until jocelyn becomes another version of a good-enough mother. her own mother was, to an extent, and for a time, but bechdel seems to suggest that that basically ended during that moment pictured in that series of photos where she is an infant and becomes aware of the camera's presence (31-32). she says somewhere (can't find the page) that her childhood ended in that moment. pretty intense to suggest an entire childhood ended in a short instant during infancy. but, in those moments, bechdel's mother is making active adaptation to alison's needs and alison's needs only and they are very rooted in physical expression and intimacy. that same fragment from winnicott continues to say "this active adaptation demands an easy and unresented preoccupation with the one infant; in fact, success in infant care depends on the fact of devotion, not on cleverness or intellectual enlightenment." a) we know that alison's mom is pregnant again in that photo, so that preoccupation with the one infant is about to decrease as her mother becomes more focused on the fact of being pregnant in itself, preparing for a new child, and then the arrival of that child. so maybe, due to the quickness with which that focused devotion had to necessarily shift, alison's childhood did, to an extent, end. if we are thinking of childhood as the period before the active adaptation lessens and a child has to deal with their aloneness and the waning influence/constant attention of a parent.
subconsciously (in dreams where jocelyn is filling the role of her mother-- particularly the pants-patching dream) and often consciously (51), alison expresses desire for her therapist to be her mother. jocelyn listens, jocelyn offers intimacy, solutions, relief, life wisdom. jocelyn shows obvious care. not that bechdel's mom does not, but she often comes off cold and more affectionate to her sons than to alison.
at various points in this book, we see alison asking not only "are you my mother?" but "am i my mother?" (not necessarily in the sense of, am i becoming my mother, but am i acting as my own mother, am i getting what i need from a mother from myself?) and "is my therapist my mother?" and "am i my mother's therapist?" "which person is my mother, which person is my therapist, who am i in relation to any of them?" nothing is simply one thing, indeed. these questions and associations, also, frequently fold into each other. alison, indeed, has become a version of her own psychoanalyst, gorging herself on freud, winnicott, miller so that she may filter her experiences through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. though her mother may not be saying much, she also sits back, listens, records her mother for long stints, as is the role of the therapist-- listen, notate, filter, investigate. she comments that, in these conversations, she rarely offers up information of her own and her mother rarely asks deep questions about her. alison both values this and faults her mother for it. in her own relationships, she somewhat takes on this role. she is often pictured in her own little world obsessively reading at bedtime, barely listening to or asking about her girlfriend.
i wonder if this shifting out of self into mother, into therapist, into lover and changing of roles has to do with the quote from alice miller that she was so compelled by:
"the true self has been in 'a state of noncommunication,' as winnicott said, because it had to be protected. the patient never needs to hide anything else so thoroughly, so deeply, and for so long a time as he has hidden his true self. thus it is like a miracle each time to see how much individuality has survived behind such dissimulation, denial, and self-alienation, and can reappear as soon as the work of mourning brings freedom from the introjects." (54)
there seems to be a lot of introjection going on (meaning when you unconsciously take on other people's ideas or ways), especially in the case of this constant transposition of roles. acting as her own mother and therapist, also, seems to be a strategy that fills in for the absence of something personally needed that she feels frustrated without, which goes back to the winnicott stuff around the good-enough mother ("the good-enough 'mother' (not necessarily the infant's own mother) is one who makes active adaptation to the infant's needs, an active adaptation that gradually lessens, according to the infant's growing ability to account for failure of adaptation and to tolerate the results of frustration" (61). alison, in some senses, is her own good-enough mother until jocelyn becomes another version of a good-enough mother. her own mother was, to an extent, and for a time, but bechdel seems to suggest that that basically ended during that moment pictured in that series of photos where she is an infant and becomes aware of the camera's presence (31-32). she says somewhere (can't find the page) that her childhood ended in that moment. pretty intense to suggest an entire childhood ended in a short instant during infancy. but, in those moments, bechdel's mother is making active adaptation to alison's needs and alison's needs only and they are very rooted in physical expression and intimacy. that same fragment from winnicott continues to say "this active adaptation demands an easy and unresented preoccupation with the one infant; in fact, success in infant care depends on the fact of devotion, not on cleverness or intellectual enlightenment." a) we know that alison's mom is pregnant again in that photo, so that preoccupation with the one infant is about to decrease as her mother becomes more focused on the fact of being pregnant in itself, preparing for a new child, and then the arrival of that child. so maybe, due to the quickness with which that focused devotion had to necessarily shift, alison's childhood did, to an extent, end. if we are thinking of childhood as the period before the active adaptation lessens and a child has to deal with their aloneness and the waning influence/constant attention of a parent.
subconsciously (in dreams where jocelyn is filling the role of her mother-- particularly the pants-patching dream) and often consciously (51), alison expresses desire for her therapist to be her mother. jocelyn listens, jocelyn offers intimacy, solutions, relief, life wisdom. jocelyn shows obvious care. not that bechdel's mom does not, but she often comes off cold and more affectionate to her sons than to alison.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
a lot, a little, scratching the surface.
i felt fascinated and at times overwhelmed by the ways bechdel transforms certain literary devices into artistic ones, making the art read as texts, in a certain way. it was really interesting to me in this graphic memoir how bechdel uses specific visual cues continuously as sort-of visual metaphors throughout. we continuously see things like the pledge can, the sunbelt bread logo, the quisp cereal, obelisks, crystal liquor bottles, the grease stain on her grandma's bed, etc. many of these (the obelisks and pledge can in particular) also seem to act as visual synecdoches (the pledge can standing for the whole of her father's obsessive attention to cleanliness and order. the obelisks standing for his secret homosexuality and fixation on men). the sunbelt bread, not so much a synecdoche, but a foreshadowing strategy-- bechdel's dad eventually gets hit and killed by a sunbelt truck. also, it occurred to me that these obsessive, small inclusions cycle back to the way sense memory works. though she can't "describe" a smell and chooses not to write out that the sunbelt bread was always in the house-- she shows/draws the pledge spray, which i'm sure her house reeked of, she shows/draws the quisp cereal and brand of bread they used. she conjures the sensory presence of these items, drawing things that cue our senses to kick in. these visual cues/metaphors/etc set the scene for this life (or these intersecting lives) in this home. while the written text is meditative, retrospective, speculative, explanatory, the visual text holds the craft of making, in a way. maybe the only way she could possibly attempt to show EVERYTHING and hint at the convolution of EVERYTHING coming together was through the interplay of the written and the visual. she was, in this way, able to embed so much more and plant so many cues to the way things were or would come to pass.
it was also so interesting to me how she uses the visual to represent textual metaphors and textual comparisons to the literary. books litter the pages of this memoir. she references literature via image. often not stated in the text, just shown in the drawings. she doesn't always explicitly explain how the books she depicts in her images corollate back or weave a more complicated portrait of her father or herself, she just plants the seeds. anna karenina, the nude by kenneth clark, the stones of venice, a happy death by camus, the tin drum, the addams family, grimms fairy tales, the myth of sisyphus, sappho was a right-on woman, the sun also rises, portrait of a lady, the great gatsby, zelda, remembrance of things past, etc etc. all of these are chosen to particularly relate to the specific moment we see the characters in. the specific books she chooses often delineate a particular time in the character's life and seek to reinforce something about their life and how they are influenced at that particular time. of course bruce would be handing a copy of gatsby to roy when he is first beginning to court him. of course sappho was a right-on woman would be strewn across alison's dorm room floor as she talks to her mom on the phone re: her coming out letter.
i also was interested in how she often drew newspaper front pages to contextualize and set us in a specific time, while also changing perspective. these headlines gave us insight into the textured world swimming around this particular family's history, how they all both are and are not interacting with the wider cultural/political/national atmosphere. i also was interested in the choices she made with this, what headlines she chose to highlight. the southwest heatwave w/ "wheat in trouble" on pg 27 (another loose connection to sunbelt?) and the hyde amendment passing along with headlines concerning nixon and bush... though we are mainly existing in the realm of this house and the small radius of life they had in pennsylvania, she's retroactively going back and situating us within the outer environment that is most definitely helping to shape their existence.
perspective is really interesting throughout this memoir, also. for the most part, though you would probably call the written text "first person," the visual text's point of view often is from far away, looking in at the family, observatory and at a distance, rather than existing right alongside the characters. we get a lot of panorama-type shots, a lot of aerial ones.. we even zoom out as far as the maps on page 30-31. we often see bruce in frames observing and overlooking the family, as if he is observing his work, his art (page 12-13, 21). he is presiding over everyone/everything, much like sandell's father in the impostor's daughter. in these scenes, he's often in dark silhouette.
something about the perspective is a little jarring at times... because she often moves us to experience events in the time that they are occurring, along with the character that is experiencing it, yet there's an upsetting dissociative feeling that accompanies the representation. an instance of this in particular is the scene in bruce's mortician's office when he calls her in (page 44). something about the angles bechdel draws these frames from/ the way that she is in silhouette in the first frame, then there's a closeup of his compartmentalized body (just the torso and genitals) then a shot coming from behind bruce's head, then the handing over of the scissors over his body, then back to a shot coming from behind bruce's head as alison leaves... alll produce this disconnected/dissociated feeling, which coincides with how she actually experienced the event emotionally, but still... disturbing effect. it makes sense, though, given bechdel's admission of emotional detachment and desensitization, a trait that exists in reappears in many of the characters of this family. she also continues to replay scenes from different angles and perspectives, often when she is coming to different possible conclusions about the event. this happens with her dad's death. we get the scenes of him just before getting hit by the truck and a few days prior to his death from various angles, peppered throughout the book. each time it is different and each time she is unpacking another possibility or link to what could've happened.
wow, this is only me expanding on about half-a-page of my notes (so many more pages of notes!!) and i've barely said anything about anything.
one thing i wanna broadly mention/kinda touch on before i sign off... bechdel constantly draws (literally DRAWS and also makes) comparisons and divergences (between herself and her father, between her mother and father, etc). i was sooo intrigued by what was going on visually/textually on pages 94-101 re: their inverted queer identities and transposed masculinities. the framing and perspective in these scenes are particularly interesting. on 94 in the 3rd panel, we have this broad view of roy entering the scene (with a small smile), alison in the middle excited to see him, and her dad on the far right with her brothers, almost turned away, expression unclear. so interesting to see her pitted in the middle of them because it says a lot about her own relationship to masculinity. she is pulled in both directions-- to roy's somewhat sweet burliness and her father's effete sissiness. "butch" is the middle...? the next page, too, draws corrolations between roy and the rugged cowboy simply by way of the two frames existing next to each other (alison admiring roy on the left and alison admiring the cowboy on tv on the right). then we get this split scene on the bottom of alison looking over to her dad fiddling with flowers in the other room as she watches a cowboy shootout. SO MUCH GOING ON AROUND MASCULINITIES. and also so much convergence. because all of these hegemonic representations of (hyper)masculinity are also often really homoerotic. and lgbtq folks claim/queer "all-american" cultural reps of men all the time (cowboys, musclemen, etc etc).
ummm, also, i think there's just sooo much going on around bruce's gayness in this. i feel like, in some ways, bechdel moves us to think critically about his identity in connection to his time and placement. in a sense, his world was his home and then the school he worked at. she kinda leads us to ask...in his rural context, what were his options for cruising? not to excuse the fact that he preyed on teenage boys, obviously. but he did pass judgment on/draw a line between himself and the chickenhawks... more on this later.
it was also so interesting to me how she uses the visual to represent textual metaphors and textual comparisons to the literary. books litter the pages of this memoir. she references literature via image. often not stated in the text, just shown in the drawings. she doesn't always explicitly explain how the books she depicts in her images corollate back or weave a more complicated portrait of her father or herself, she just plants the seeds. anna karenina, the nude by kenneth clark, the stones of venice, a happy death by camus, the tin drum, the addams family, grimms fairy tales, the myth of sisyphus, sappho was a right-on woman, the sun also rises, portrait of a lady, the great gatsby, zelda, remembrance of things past, etc etc. all of these are chosen to particularly relate to the specific moment we see the characters in. the specific books she chooses often delineate a particular time in the character's life and seek to reinforce something about their life and how they are influenced at that particular time. of course bruce would be handing a copy of gatsby to roy when he is first beginning to court him. of course sappho was a right-on woman would be strewn across alison's dorm room floor as she talks to her mom on the phone re: her coming out letter.
i also was interested in how she often drew newspaper front pages to contextualize and set us in a specific time, while also changing perspective. these headlines gave us insight into the textured world swimming around this particular family's history, how they all both are and are not interacting with the wider cultural/political/national atmosphere. i also was interested in the choices she made with this, what headlines she chose to highlight. the southwest heatwave w/ "wheat in trouble" on pg 27 (another loose connection to sunbelt?) and the hyde amendment passing along with headlines concerning nixon and bush... though we are mainly existing in the realm of this house and the small radius of life they had in pennsylvania, she's retroactively going back and situating us within the outer environment that is most definitely helping to shape their existence.
perspective is really interesting throughout this memoir, also. for the most part, though you would probably call the written text "first person," the visual text's point of view often is from far away, looking in at the family, observatory and at a distance, rather than existing right alongside the characters. we get a lot of panorama-type shots, a lot of aerial ones.. we even zoom out as far as the maps on page 30-31. we often see bruce in frames observing and overlooking the family, as if he is observing his work, his art (page 12-13, 21). he is presiding over everyone/everything, much like sandell's father in the impostor's daughter. in these scenes, he's often in dark silhouette.
something about the perspective is a little jarring at times... because she often moves us to experience events in the time that they are occurring, along with the character that is experiencing it, yet there's an upsetting dissociative feeling that accompanies the representation. an instance of this in particular is the scene in bruce's mortician's office when he calls her in (page 44). something about the angles bechdel draws these frames from/ the way that she is in silhouette in the first frame, then there's a closeup of his compartmentalized body (just the torso and genitals) then a shot coming from behind bruce's head, then the handing over of the scissors over his body, then back to a shot coming from behind bruce's head as alison leaves... alll produce this disconnected/dissociated feeling, which coincides with how she actually experienced the event emotionally, but still... disturbing effect. it makes sense, though, given bechdel's admission of emotional detachment and desensitization, a trait that exists in reappears in many of the characters of this family. she also continues to replay scenes from different angles and perspectives, often when she is coming to different possible conclusions about the event. this happens with her dad's death. we get the scenes of him just before getting hit by the truck and a few days prior to his death from various angles, peppered throughout the book. each time it is different and each time she is unpacking another possibility or link to what could've happened.
wow, this is only me expanding on about half-a-page of my notes (so many more pages of notes!!) and i've barely said anything about anything.
one thing i wanna broadly mention/kinda touch on before i sign off... bechdel constantly draws (literally DRAWS and also makes) comparisons and divergences (between herself and her father, between her mother and father, etc). i was sooo intrigued by what was going on visually/textually on pages 94-101 re: their inverted queer identities and transposed masculinities. the framing and perspective in these scenes are particularly interesting. on 94 in the 3rd panel, we have this broad view of roy entering the scene (with a small smile), alison in the middle excited to see him, and her dad on the far right with her brothers, almost turned away, expression unclear. so interesting to see her pitted in the middle of them because it says a lot about her own relationship to masculinity. she is pulled in both directions-- to roy's somewhat sweet burliness and her father's effete sissiness. "butch" is the middle...? the next page, too, draws corrolations between roy and the rugged cowboy simply by way of the two frames existing next to each other (alison admiring roy on the left and alison admiring the cowboy on tv on the right). then we get this split scene on the bottom of alison looking over to her dad fiddling with flowers in the other room as she watches a cowboy shootout. SO MUCH GOING ON AROUND MASCULINITIES. and also so much convergence. because all of these hegemonic representations of (hyper)masculinity are also often really homoerotic. and lgbtq folks claim/queer "all-american" cultural reps of men all the time (cowboys, musclemen, etc etc).
ummm, also, i think there's just sooo much going on around bruce's gayness in this. i feel like, in some ways, bechdel moves us to think critically about his identity in connection to his time and placement. in a sense, his world was his home and then the school he worked at. she kinda leads us to ask...in his rural context, what were his options for cruising? not to excuse the fact that he preyed on teenage boys, obviously. but he did pass judgment on/draw a line between himself and the chickenhawks... more on this later.
Monday, February 11, 2013
new canon- the gentrification narrative.
first, i apologize for being so late on posting this blog. it's been one of those weekends.
having grown up in nyc, there were so many red flags, blaring alarms, lightbulbs exploding, etc etc going off in my head while reading this. but, because i know the point of these discussions isn't to rant about how irritating or unlikeable a text/voice is, i will refrain and attempt to mold my criticisms into something useful, nuanced. i have to first say that this narrative is like the graphic memoir accompaniment to the show girls, also about young, educated transplants living in new york city sloughing through daily existential crises, carting themselves throughout brooklyn and downtown manhattan, just trying to figure it all out, make art, and avoid work that requires too much energy output. both feel like the anti-coming-of-age narrative to me: we don't wanna grow up because it means we have to be real people and like have a job narrative. some sick hipster peter pan twist or something, with an interlude of "it's a hard knock life." anyway.
my first notes after reading the first few pages of this was "what is at stake?"(for these characters, in terms of plot, for the narrative, etc). i was wondering about the narrative arc and timeline of it. we kinda just jump right into the middle of gabrielle's life. there isn't much of an introduction to characters or setting up of scene, we're just right there, close to gabrielle, as she tries to write with tom staying in her apartment.
while reading this text, i was thinking SOOO much about the "urban" narrative and the way place is represented and mapped throughout the three sections of lucky. i almost wonder if this kind of story can be categorized as a narrative of gentrification. to me, it kinda feels like what this is, and that there is a literary lineage this book falls into that can also be defined as that. i'm thinking about the centrality of place in this text. what is the significance of nyc (brooklyn, greenwich village, the bronx) as the backdrop of this story? in a way, it's hard to parse exactly the significance because the location seems kind of secondary and uncomplicated. there's not much context around how/why the characters we meet are in nyc or if there's some sort of level of complication to their presence there (historical context?). this is why i think it fits within a canon of gentrification narratives. there is an underlying assumption threaded throughout the text: we don't need to know or ask why these young white liberal types are in nyc because it's a given: nyc is a progressive hub where young white artists from all over go to escape suburbia/oberlin college/etc so that they may be creative and interesting, do something crazy, get a taste of the city that never sleeps, find cheap rent and scramble by in brooklyn, and then have their art break out onto a scene (located in nyc even though these semi-place-based arts/narratives are kinda ones of privileged displacement). this is a common representation of the life of the artist in nyc.
we are dropped off in new york city. brooklyn. williamsburg to be exact-- bedford ave, what we would now know as the hipster hub of nyc. havemeyer st., the L train, cafes, bookstores, boutiques, mccarren park. little loft apartments everywhere. we spill into areas like bushwick and greenpoint, which in 2003, were beginning to be gentrified (call gabrielle's friends that she visits there the pioneers of that spill-over). tom is looking at apartments on the upper west side and in greenwich village, areas that, for native new yorkers who have been living in nyc for decades, are virtually untouchable in terms of affordability. (we get the one mention that the building in greenwich used to be an 'irish tenement,' which i think is really interesting... it's the one mention of the history behind the area... a poor, working class, immigrant history that is essentially unknown now due to the stark demographical shifts in residence. and also, is greenwich village alluded to at all as a hub for the lgbtq community? no. that's confusing...).
there are other interesting things going on around representation and affiliation in this text. it's clear to me that the characters in this text are privileged in a number of ways: race, class, sexuality, and in terms of movement. they have the ability to keep moving from apt to apt, putting down security deposits, not having steady work (where the f does their money come from?), getting jobs as art assistants, etc. somehow, throughout all their travel through nyc during the whole book, we never happen to come in contact with any people of color or people of other classes until page 74 and 108. on 74, a bum with intense stink lines is lying on a subway seat. and on 108, we're in the big scary bronx that no one wants to go to in a classroom full of students of color where gabrielle does more like "crowd control" than actual teaching. nice. upsetting. oh and we also somehow only come into contact with lgbtq people when gabrielle is at that weird performance art event where she talks about butches and femmes in "QUOTATION MARKS." but, so these are the identity markers of these central characters: gabrielle, tom, her friends, her roommates, and this is the way they see others in their world: the peripheral hobos, the rowdy brown and black kids they teach in neighborhoods they don't wanna go to, the "butches" and "femmes" and their really compelling, fascinating art. what i think is interesting on the affiliation front is that these characters, though class privileged, white, straight, and from elsewhere, refuse to affiliate or align with the trust fund babies at nyu who are also questionably existing in nyc without context, with expendable income coming seemingly from nowhere, etc. it pointed to an interesting aspect of perceived classlessness and lack of desire to place yourself within privileged circles (and take on the identity of "hipster") which is soooo alive and well in nyc (and in other rapidly-gentrified cities-- dc, baltimore, oakland, sf, asheville, milwaukee, philly, etc ON & ON & ON).
so, i guess there's something (disturbingly) genuine about this identity-based (and it is identity-based, it's not neutral), urban narrative? because however troubling seeing nyc through the lens of this subjectivity is, it is pretty accurate? i kept wondering how interesting it was that in a post-9/11 (really recently post, too, we're talking 2003), we don't see any of that reality reflected in the comings and goings of these people. it's like they aren't existing in the same city as so many other new yorkers who were going under severe surveillance just for being brown and carrying a backpack. or for having any sort of voiced political feeling at all. this was the advent of IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING and subway searches, patriot act raging, nypd going insane, a lot of extreme, unexplained disappearances of muslim or perceived muslim nyc residents, insane anti-immigrant stuff, the RNC about to happen in nyc in 2004, etc etc.
i don't know. these are my scattered thoughts and attempts to show that there is a specificity to this type of place-based, city, artist narrative. and gentrification has a lot to do with it, whiteness does as well, lack of affiliation also, mapping, etc.
having grown up in nyc, there were so many red flags, blaring alarms, lightbulbs exploding, etc etc going off in my head while reading this. but, because i know the point of these discussions isn't to rant about how irritating or unlikeable a text/voice is, i will refrain and attempt to mold my criticisms into something useful, nuanced. i have to first say that this narrative is like the graphic memoir accompaniment to the show girls, also about young, educated transplants living in new york city sloughing through daily existential crises, carting themselves throughout brooklyn and downtown manhattan, just trying to figure it all out, make art, and avoid work that requires too much energy output. both feel like the anti-coming-of-age narrative to me: we don't wanna grow up because it means we have to be real people and like have a job narrative. some sick hipster peter pan twist or something, with an interlude of "it's a hard knock life." anyway.
my first notes after reading the first few pages of this was "what is at stake?"(for these characters, in terms of plot, for the narrative, etc). i was wondering about the narrative arc and timeline of it. we kinda just jump right into the middle of gabrielle's life. there isn't much of an introduction to characters or setting up of scene, we're just right there, close to gabrielle, as she tries to write with tom staying in her apartment.
while reading this text, i was thinking SOOO much about the "urban" narrative and the way place is represented and mapped throughout the three sections of lucky. i almost wonder if this kind of story can be categorized as a narrative of gentrification. to me, it kinda feels like what this is, and that there is a literary lineage this book falls into that can also be defined as that. i'm thinking about the centrality of place in this text. what is the significance of nyc (brooklyn, greenwich village, the bronx) as the backdrop of this story? in a way, it's hard to parse exactly the significance because the location seems kind of secondary and uncomplicated. there's not much context around how/why the characters we meet are in nyc or if there's some sort of level of complication to their presence there (historical context?). this is why i think it fits within a canon of gentrification narratives. there is an underlying assumption threaded throughout the text: we don't need to know or ask why these young white liberal types are in nyc because it's a given: nyc is a progressive hub where young white artists from all over go to escape suburbia/oberlin college/etc so that they may be creative and interesting, do something crazy, get a taste of the city that never sleeps, find cheap rent and scramble by in brooklyn, and then have their art break out onto a scene (located in nyc even though these semi-place-based arts/narratives are kinda ones of privileged displacement). this is a common representation of the life of the artist in nyc.
we are dropped off in new york city. brooklyn. williamsburg to be exact-- bedford ave, what we would now know as the hipster hub of nyc. havemeyer st., the L train, cafes, bookstores, boutiques, mccarren park. little loft apartments everywhere. we spill into areas like bushwick and greenpoint, which in 2003, were beginning to be gentrified (call gabrielle's friends that she visits there the pioneers of that spill-over). tom is looking at apartments on the upper west side and in greenwich village, areas that, for native new yorkers who have been living in nyc for decades, are virtually untouchable in terms of affordability. (we get the one mention that the building in greenwich used to be an 'irish tenement,' which i think is really interesting... it's the one mention of the history behind the area... a poor, working class, immigrant history that is essentially unknown now due to the stark demographical shifts in residence. and also, is greenwich village alluded to at all as a hub for the lgbtq community? no. that's confusing...).
there are other interesting things going on around representation and affiliation in this text. it's clear to me that the characters in this text are privileged in a number of ways: race, class, sexuality, and in terms of movement. they have the ability to keep moving from apt to apt, putting down security deposits, not having steady work (where the f does their money come from?), getting jobs as art assistants, etc. somehow, throughout all their travel through nyc during the whole book, we never happen to come in contact with any people of color or people of other classes until page 74 and 108. on 74, a bum with intense stink lines is lying on a subway seat. and on 108, we're in the big scary bronx that no one wants to go to in a classroom full of students of color where gabrielle does more like "crowd control" than actual teaching. nice. upsetting. oh and we also somehow only come into contact with lgbtq people when gabrielle is at that weird performance art event where she talks about butches and femmes in "QUOTATION MARKS." but, so these are the identity markers of these central characters: gabrielle, tom, her friends, her roommates, and this is the way they see others in their world: the peripheral hobos, the rowdy brown and black kids they teach in neighborhoods they don't wanna go to, the "butches" and "femmes" and their really compelling, fascinating art. what i think is interesting on the affiliation front is that these characters, though class privileged, white, straight, and from elsewhere, refuse to affiliate or align with the trust fund babies at nyu who are also questionably existing in nyc without context, with expendable income coming seemingly from nowhere, etc. it pointed to an interesting aspect of perceived classlessness and lack of desire to place yourself within privileged circles (and take on the identity of "hipster") which is soooo alive and well in nyc (and in other rapidly-gentrified cities-- dc, baltimore, oakland, sf, asheville, milwaukee, philly, etc ON & ON & ON).
so, i guess there's something (disturbingly) genuine about this identity-based (and it is identity-based, it's not neutral), urban narrative? because however troubling seeing nyc through the lens of this subjectivity is, it is pretty accurate? i kept wondering how interesting it was that in a post-9/11 (really recently post, too, we're talking 2003), we don't see any of that reality reflected in the comings and goings of these people. it's like they aren't existing in the same city as so many other new yorkers who were going under severe surveillance just for being brown and carrying a backpack. or for having any sort of voiced political feeling at all. this was the advent of IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING and subway searches, patriot act raging, nypd going insane, a lot of extreme, unexplained disappearances of muslim or perceived muslim nyc residents, insane anti-immigrant stuff, the RNC about to happen in nyc in 2004, etc etc.
i don't know. these are my scattered thoughts and attempts to show that there is a specificity to this type of place-based, city, artist narrative. and gentrification has a lot to do with it, whiteness does as well, lack of affiliation also, mapping, etc.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
patchwork thoughts for a patchwork text
in reading this graphic memoir, i've been thinking a lot about how family and complex personal history influences/shapes individual identities. and what that drive is, or what the necessity is, in writing and making art that works out these connections and histories. i realized that my defenses went up when laurie's sister asked her why she insisted on digging deeper into the background of their father, and further, why she insisted on publishing an expose about it, as opposed to just getting a therapist, working out the damage and confusion on her own. it seems like a natural impulse for one to use art as a means for understanding (not only this, but actually FINDING OUT) persistent and often underlying family dramas. it seems that the point when we recognize our own families and personalities as fallible, suspect, and NOT normal/average jumpstarts this process of recounting and reassessing what we believed were personal and/or family truths.
i'm interested in the connection between the chosen form (not just memoir, but GRAPHIC memoir) and the way memory is working in this. the way the text is divided into shorts and the mixes both the visual and written create a memory patchwork. she uses various strategies to weave together memories and stories she's recalled, interviews with her father and others that she's recorded, old drawings, etc. this patchwork feels particularly fitting because memory recollection (especially when dealing with ones from childhood ) works that way-- everything comes at us at once, we don't recall things in a linear, chronological fashion, and scenes come to us in clumps, with life in real time interrupting our process of piecing together our pasts. this graphic memoir with its collection of shorts pictorially represents the way we tend to replay memories, scene by scene. it seems like the choice to include the visual is a grounding mechanism. it's hard enough to keep track of all we've remembered, heard, directly experienced, etc. illustrating and writing out these events and mythologies makes it feel real, tangible, not just fabricated. sandell had a hard enough time throughout her life trying to grasp what stories were actually true that it probably seemed necessary to chronicle every possible version-- from beloved tall tale to a private investigator's harsh truth.
back to identity formation and family history. this whole text made me wonder how we wind up coming out alive after experiencing such conflicted childhoods/adolescences/adulthoods, and what we should do once we have survived. what do we do with our own complicated stories and family experiences when we need outlets to process them, but know the public act of doing so may hurt/embarrass/create complications/etc for the people we love? how do we deal with relationships that are constantly in crisis? does writing/speaking them actually heal?
i'm interested in the connection between the chosen form (not just memoir, but GRAPHIC memoir) and the way memory is working in this. the way the text is divided into shorts and the mixes both the visual and written create a memory patchwork. she uses various strategies to weave together memories and stories she's recalled, interviews with her father and others that she's recorded, old drawings, etc. this patchwork feels particularly fitting because memory recollection (especially when dealing with ones from childhood ) works that way-- everything comes at us at once, we don't recall things in a linear, chronological fashion, and scenes come to us in clumps, with life in real time interrupting our process of piecing together our pasts. this graphic memoir with its collection of shorts pictorially represents the way we tend to replay memories, scene by scene. it seems like the choice to include the visual is a grounding mechanism. it's hard enough to keep track of all we've remembered, heard, directly experienced, etc. illustrating and writing out these events and mythologies makes it feel real, tangible, not just fabricated. sandell had a hard enough time throughout her life trying to grasp what stories were actually true that it probably seemed necessary to chronicle every possible version-- from beloved tall tale to a private investigator's harsh truth.
back to identity formation and family history. this whole text made me wonder how we wind up coming out alive after experiencing such conflicted childhoods/adolescences/adulthoods, and what we should do once we have survived. what do we do with our own complicated stories and family experiences when we need outlets to process them, but know the public act of doing so may hurt/embarrass/create complications/etc for the people we love? how do we deal with relationships that are constantly in crisis? does writing/speaking them actually heal?
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