RIP Studs Terkel

I am very sad to hear that Studs Terkel has passed away. I have only had the chance to read two of his books: Will the Circle be Unbroken? and Hard Times. Both were extremely good, and highly recommend them to anyone. Earlier this year I had meant to visit him in Chicago. Now it is starting to look look a lost opportunity. He was a fiery man, and always reliably interesting. A website devoted to him can be found here, and his wiki page is here.

Media--New and Old

I read an article by Benedict Anderson today relating the uses of print to the formation of nation-states, and the rise of capitalism. Very interesting. One of the points Anderson makes in the essay, which is extracted from His book Imagined Communittes, is that languages from the 8th to the 12th century are vastly different. It's an obvious point that the Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf is vastly different from the Anglo-Norman of Chaucer. However, after the invention of the printing press, language started to change less frequently. The English of Donne is not so removed from the English that I use today. So, the way in which this connects with the rise of capitalism and nation-state, is that the printing media needed to find an audience, so it therefore expanded into the vernacular market, and needing to connect the vernacular with a lger audience fueled the need to have a unified language. Therefore the English of one part of England needed to be understood in another part. Therefore, as the markets for print expnaded, so did a uniformity of the country, and therefore created a representation tthrough language of the nation-state.
However, I was thinking about newspapers, and how they reflected the movement towards the nation, and the rise of a mass auience to print to. And thought of how that market has been collapsing for the past fifty years, and found this interesting article about newspapers's future.

The Noble Prize in Literature

I haven't been able to read anything by the recent Noble laureate, but I was a little peeved by the Noble committee's remarks concerning American literature. I also haven't read all of this article, but it has been interesting so far. I will read it later and post some thoughts, and relate a story about tiny people in tiny books.

Great Library Alert!

I was sent a link to this article about this man's library. He has a lot of really neat artifacts, and this is the kind of library I dream of owning someday.

Revamping the Old Blog

Hello All,

I am redoing the old blog, once dedicated to graphic novels via ENG 300. Instead, as inspired by my ENG 301 class, Approaches to Literary Theory. Mostly I will be writing about things that interest me, literary theory, narrative structure, criticism, graphic novels and so forth. I will try to post original creative writings as well. Due to my time constraints it may not be produced as often as I would like, but I will try to make it daily, and to make the postings interactive, photos, videos, etc.... Anyways, I'm hoping this jump starts a creativity that has been lacking for the past two years, and provides a vehicle for thought. Also, please excuse the grammar and spelling.

Hello Out There?

Is anybody still reading this? Spencer? I meant to write on this throughout the summer, but work too damn much, and am really to tired to do anything. I think I read three books all summer. One being Eight Men Out, which was a nice read. Mostly I watched baseball (I'm a Cubs fan), and got angry at the tv (old man yells at cloud type stuff). Oh, well. I think I'm gonna start posting again anyways.

Final Paper- or what I've been up to.

So the thing I've been researching lately is the way panaling works in the graphic narrative. When I was working on my mini-comic I had to use the program comic life one of the interesting things I found on it was the grid layouts that were exempiary of the different stages of the comic book. For instance, the forties and fifties predominantly had a style close to this one:
(I can't post it right now, but I'll try to later)


A style that is highly formatted. The panels are boxes which roughly all the same size, and spaced evenly. The most interesting thing about these comics, although they did have their stories, is that these are the comics that influenced the generations of writers and illustrators to come. The sales of the comics ranged between 80-100 million books a week in 1952, and passed along to something in the range of six other kids a week (according to statistics in David Hajdu's book The Ten-Cent Plague). How this had an effect on the culture, and how it has moved the graphic novel seems to be what is at stake here. On April 21, 1954, a senate subcommittee found it neccessary enough to hold hearings on comic books.

Just Because

Fun Home Continued

I thought this was the best book we've read since V for Vendetta.
I heard a lot of discussion about the mom, and how we get a little closure on her. That is certainly true to a certain extant. Both the mother and father still don't quite resolve the issue that they seem to have with their kids, both still seem distant, and both still don't resolve the fact that their relationship with their children is borderline abusive, neglect, violence etc.
I haven't thought it over enough, but I am still a left a little vague about what the Ulysses connection is in the book. I think it has more to do with the whole not taking any English classes, and then the symbolism between Stephen and Poldy as a spiritual relationship rather than a biological relationship, which seems more like Alison and her father's relationship at the end of the book.
I'll mull it over a little more though.

Fun Home

I think the point I was trying to make in class didn't come out so well, as it usually doesn't. My point was that their personalities are hinged on the fact that they are a hyper-literate family, and the way they approach reading, the way they analyze books, reflects who they are. It seems more like an insulated family, and each member is isolated to a certain extant from the family. After all, all families are weird in their own way. But rather than expressing emotion, or love, of any sort, they instead jot down their feelings in books, sometimes expressed with just an underlined sentence. Repressing their analysis sort of reflects a repressed sexuality. I have to get to another class right now. Oh, well. I'll try to expand later.

If You Fancy It

Here's a review of a new book by David Hajdu. It's about the comic book scare in the 1950's, and he argues that it paved the way for rock and roll to happen in the last 50's. I haven't read it, but I think it's going on my summer list. I read a lot of another book by him called Positively 4th Street, which was really good.

The Class Mini-Comics- Out of the Fjordinary!!!!

I thought the comics I read by everyone were very well done. Thanks for not laughing me out of the room for my silly comic. Fjordinary is now my new favorite word. I was thinking about what Spencer said about having a class in the future do a series of mini-comics throughout the semester. I wouldn't take the class because I hate working with groups, but after creating this comic I would like to do more of them. I had to scrap a storyboarded, and half-finished mini comic, so that I would have a comic to turn in. I think I might be able to scrap that together, and perhaps manipulate the one I turned in. Oh, I see the Cubs are done with the rain delay, so I'll try to finish this later.

eamus catuli!

Glar!

So many problems finishing my comic. I was going to turn in two of them. One, the one I worked the hardest on, was about the anthropology surrounding area 51, and was going to be a dichotomy between government and civilian, truth versus conspiracy, abstraction versus reality. Told in two parts, the first the story of Bob Lasar, and the skywatchers surrounding the base, who would constitute reality and conspiracy, but be more believable. And the second about General Lemay, who ran SAC throughout the cold war, and was certifiably nuts. It would resent this to you, and you could choice to be believe one, and the world in the story would make sense, or all the desperate parts, and it would make no sense at all. My talents, and my time were not enough to get this finished.
NO big deal, I had a second one done. An adaptation of a Donald Bartheleme story. I was going to turn this one in last Wednesday--since it is more like a readymade--, but all last week I started getting back spasms in the morning, and migraines at night.
NO BIG DEAL. Spencer gave us until next Monday to turn it in. So I spend all weekend tidying the Don B. one up, and trying to get the Dreamland one done-the title of the area 51 comic, partly based on the book by Phil Patton.
So, I print it out last night, which I certainly could have done much earlier, since I actually had this one, the Don B. one, done a while ago. Whoops, formatting is wrong, and the pages are full paper length, not mini-comic length. So, I spent all night reformatting it, it looks pretty good. I have to stick it together and go see Spencer to get copies made. Which I was also going to do for this one last week, but was getting migraines last Friday. Oh, and my back spasms occur because I tore the muscles in between my shoulder blades when I was doing road construction when I was seventeen. Woe is me.


Also, this assignment was awesome, and really challenging. Of course I failed at it, but I still loved doing it.

The Dramatic Entrance--Revised Feelings Toward Stuck Rubber Baby, Blankets, and Grey Owl

I had been complaining in an earlier post about the corner that the story of Stuck Rubber Baby had been putting me in, and how I hate being placed in a corner, no matter who's writing it. However, I actually think the story line evolves to a point in the end where the characters have far more nuance than I'd given them credit for. And the nuance really wasn't that subtle. It has a lot to do with the flaws in human nature. And the thing I get upset about is when characters are presented with flaws, but the flaws are either enduring, or stressing the point of how they are actually really great people because of their flaws, as if the flaws we have just don't simply make us flawed people. And I think the fact the Toland is kind of an asshole throughout portions of the book is what made me reconsider my feelings about him as a character, and most of my early dislike of the book stemmed from him. It went from seeming like a book about a confused gay man living in a very rigid and strict environment--and my point earlier about being conned into feeling something for a character stemmed from this, because who doesn't sympathize for someone in that situation. There was a certain fuck you that Toland exerted on his own character, which developed throughout the book, which I liked.
Other than that, something I had been thinking about was the opening panels for a lot of the chapters, or really, the creative panel designs, which I really liked and have been trying to do with my mini-comic, although not being able to draw has really slowed the process down. I actually think it serves as a far more dramatic device than a historical device, but that doesn't discount the idea that the historical element serves to heighten the dramatic experience. Using the historical, which comes with preconceived notions that the writer doesn't need to explain, serves the openings well. As many of the convoluted pages show, there is a whole lot going on, both on the high historical abstract level, and emotional human level. And I think the only pitfall to this is that the reader may only get out of the comic what he brings in to it.
I would say that because of the way the paneling was done, and I really did like a lot of it, that I have had a renewed appreciation for Blankets, which to me is still the best artwork we have seen yet. And on a storytelling level, from writing out a mini-comic, I have a renewed appreciation for Portraits From Life, because I think that book dealt with real stories in a way that did not cheat the reader into feeling something. There was also something bout the monotony of the stories that I felt more connected to. Like he was saying this is fucking reality, and sometimes it's boring, and sometimes our most dramatic moments in life will be someone yelling us to shut up as he's driving on the freeway. And with the Grey Owl story, which I had built up in my mind before reading the book perhaps a little too much, I think the message that I took out of it, that perhaps the bullshit someone tells to make his message more believable may be ignored in order to appreciate the message, and that the life he lived was a sort of postmodern performance art, where identity is perhaps interchangeable and not an absolute.

I Should Just Wake Up And Blog

I know I haven't been as consistent with my blogging in the last few weeks as I had been before. I'm trying to wake up earlier, around 7, so that I can start the morning reading, drinking coffee, and writing on the blog. I've always that the morning was very pleasant to write during. And this becomes truer as the months warm up a bit. I get to open up the windows and listen to the light traffic that flows on Springfield Ave. After the semester ends, I think I want to turn this blog into a general reading blog, and perhaps an occasional political commentary--tis the season. Or perhaps I should just start doing that now? I don't think people really want to hear my thoughts on Wuthering Heights or Lord, Alfred Tennyson.

Oh, well.

"I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow."
-Theodore Roethke

Actuall, I now think this book has been far more nuanced thn I previously thought. I'll expand on this later.

Stuck Rubber Baby

I'll preface this with the fact that I do indeed like Stuck Rubber baby. However, I have a problem with the presentation of it in the beginning of the book. My problem has to with the fact that the writer gets an unfair advantage on the writer. And this is a problem that I often come across in literature that I've had to lately read, namely someone binging a gun to a knifefight. It occurs when someone starts off a book with a really woe is me, woe has been my life kind of plot. My choice with Stuck Rubber Baby seems to be: Do I like this books, or do I hate gays, blacks, and orphans? Obviously, I'm not a bigot, so my choice seems to be that I like this book--as I've already admitted. However, I don't know what I gain from reading this book, and what nuance would be expanded that I would gain benefit from reading this book. I have more to say on this, but I have to go into a class right now, so I'll put up another post later, but this was bugging me over the weekend as I was reading.

I don't know exactly what it is is, but I did not enjoy Protraits from Life as much as I thought I would. Grey Owl is a cool story that I thought would go somewhere, but instead we got a couple of dudes telling eac other obvious things like, hey, isn't that town really far north, or biographical facts which they both obviousl knew but had to repeat to each other in the form of a question, or inquiring statement, so as to let the reader know the story. It's sort of like when in a crime show the person turns to his/her partner and says, now we'll run run this to lab, and see if blah blu blah adds up. And the partner in real life would respond, I know that! We've been working together for ten years.

Thoughts on Writing a Wiki Page and a Manifesto

Writing a wikipedia page is like writing an essay without transition sentences.

Writing a manifesto, I feel like it should have errors, many tangents, and tons of different fonts. I love it.

Love Stories in V for Vendetta

I'm not sure if I like some of the subplots of the book. The stuff with Almond's widow, and Evey relationship with Gordon. Some of it strikes me as a bit cheesy, and a little unnecessary. But I'll try to write more on this later.

Guy Fawkes, V for Vendetta and Subversion of Tradition

After having finished the second book of V for Vendetta, far from unsettling, I would say that reading all of the anarchistic viewpoint, contrasted with the sleazy underworld--and corrupt elite--makes me feel a little giddy at times. Some of it feels like a brazen kid walking out his high school bathroom as he's putting a cigarette out.
Don't Get me wrong, I totally love V.
I love when something is inverted. Take the Guy Fawkes mask, and V's blowing up parliament on Guy Fawkes Day.
The rhyme that V sings:


Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, taw’s his intent
To blow up King and Parli'ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England's overthrow;
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!

A variant on the foregoing:
Remember, remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason, why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot!
A stick or a stake for King James' sake
Will you please to give us a faggot
If you can't give us one, we'll take two;
The better for us and the worse for you!



Traditionally the following verse was also sung, but it has fallen out of favour because of its content.
A penny loaf to feed the Pope
A farthing o' cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah hoorah!


Another piece of popular doggerel:
Guy, guy, guy
Poke him in the eye,
Put him on the bonfire,
And there let him die.

The easiest place to find these songs was on Wikipedia, so that is where I copied them.

Now, the gunpowder treason was a reactionary backlash against Queen Elizabeth, by a Catholic group. As this nursery rhyme makes apparent, Guy Fawkes was not a beloved figure. The song, and the November Fifth--a national holiday in Britain--is a celebration of the state. V uses it as a celebration against the state. Rather than making Guy Fawkes into the traditional villain, instead we get Guy Fawkes as an actual liberator. Rather than using the idea of Guy Fawkes as a tool to continue the status quo, V uses Fawkes as a way of subverting the status quo.
I find this all delightful and is one of the reasons that I am enjoying the book so much.

The Blue Beetle Radio Program

http://www.archive.org/details/OTRR_Blue_Beetle_Singles

Manga Bible

I just read about a new version of the Bible in Manga form, and this is a picture of it. I thought it was interesting.

Today is the Day

So this is a link to a series of picture that I thought was interesting
http://istheday.blogspot.com/ . It made me wonder what must be in a comic for it to be a comic, or graphic novel. These are static images using abstract representations to tell a story from panel to panel. One of my hang-ups on why a graphic novel may not be literature—although I think it may be—is the use of painting and drawing. Nobody would consider a statue with a plaque to be literature.

It must go beyond the form it is using to express ideas beautifully to be literature to me. This at least sets up the possibility of including more than just fiction, or history fictionalized, into the canon. And I do think a canon is important, but I realize that it is also someone's opinion of what should be our canon, and not something set in stone--which is bullshit to large degree. Take my definition of literature for instance, and then also see why I put Watchmen into my canon. One of my bases for including some books is whether or not my favorite writers would be influenced or enjoy the book, and I can easily imagine James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon or Kurt Vonnegut or William Shakespeare reading Watchmen.

Literature and Graphic Novels

It must go beyond the form it is using to express ideas beautifully to be literature to me. This at least sets up the possibility of including more than just fiction, or history fictionalized, into the canon. And I do think a canon is important, but I realize that it is also someone's opinion of what should be our canon, and not something set in stone--which is bullshit to large degree. Take my definition of literature for instance, and then also see why I put Watchmen into my canon. One of my bases for including some books is whether or not my favorite writers would be influenced or enjoy the book, and I can easily imagine James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon or Kurt Vonnegut or William Shakespeare reading Watchmen.

Self-Indulgence and Autobiography

The dislike of Blankets in class on Monday about how self-involved Craig is certainly true, and I would understand why one wouldn’t like it. I, however, did in fact like the book. And this issue—that sounds a little too serious—of Craig being too self-involved in the text, too hard on female characters, and so forth. I know it sounds callous but I do think characters exist in order to advance the plot of the main character—oh, I guess that doesn’t sound too bad. And this is something I truly believe, which is that even when the story contains characters not so self-involved that the writer has spread his personality out through many characters. With Blankets, and because it is an attempt to write an autobiography, this process isn’t filtered through the other characters—sort of making it end up being The Catcher in the Rye on steroids.

For me this isn’t too bad though. I’m not the biggest Catcher in the Rye fans, but it was a book I enjoyed the first time I read. Ever other time I’ve read it I have been fairly annoyed by it, and that’s how I imagine Blankets would be.

What I would like to convey here is that the autobiographical form, more than fictional, lends itself to this over-indulgent storytelling.

It's The Sixth Sense All Over Again! Spoiler Alert

Last week on Friday, I was sitting outside of a class before it began. I had Blankets sitting next to me. Looking up I met this kid’s gaze, and nonchalantly says “Blankets”. Now, I’m fairly reticent and just sort of said “yeah, I’m reading it for a class. It’s pretty good.” Other Kid: “Sad ending though, when they break up, and hangs the phone up on her.” Me: “Yeah… I’ve only read half of it.” Me thinking: See that gigantic bookmark in the middle of the book. Just because I’m carrying it around doesn’t mean I’ve finished it. This is why I keep my head buried in a book all the time, even when I’m not actually reading it.

This is the Sixth Sense all over again. My brother’s girlfriend walked into our living room, and says, “hey we just saw The Sixth Sense.” Me: “Oh, I want to go see that. I hear it’s…” Interrupting brother’s girlfriend: “I Can’t believe he was dead the WHOLE TIME!”

Thoughts on the Bullies

Something about the bullies that was pointed out last week about the bullies was how generic they were. And though I think it is true that the bullies are indeed that archetype of the bully which, if not seen in the hallways of elementary or high school, have certainly been represented on TV or film for the last thirty or forty years—my favorite being the ones in Back to the Future WHAT YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT MCFLY!! A couple of thoughts I was having about the bullies was that the way they are presented which is as a stereotype, is that it is both true that they say the things quite a lot, are not the most clever bunch, and therefore portraying them as such serves as both accurate and a way to ridicule them.

Limits on Reader

So, one of the things I’ve thought about a little over the course of now having read a few graphic novels—which by the way sounds a little too professional for my taste, but then I’d rather be called a sportswriter than a journalist—is how does the art and imagery limit or expand the way I perceive and enjoy the story. One of the major reasons that I love literature, and am therefore majoring in English is the fact that my mind gets to play around with and create the landscape of the setting, the accent of the character’s voice, and layer the story with what in my imagination becomes the meaning, and is the thrill and enjoyment of the story—my imagination is put to work and the interaction between the words and me blend together. But it is my imagination which must produce the images. With a graphic placed in front of my face it seems to almost limit the amount of work the reader has to do.
However, I have not found this to be the case with Blankets or any of the other novels. And this is due to the fact that the storytelling itself is so compelling, and I get so invested in it that my mind doe get transported and does go into those places which any other story would go.

Hello All

One of the reasons that it has taken me so long to get into graphic novels is that I have dwelled so long on the nature of abstraction, what McCloud refers to as invisible ideas, represented by words. For the longest time I didn’t take the form seriously. However, I am one who rarely takes himself too seriously, and it seemed peculiar to my girlfriend that I could quote entire episodes of the Simpsons and yet hadn’t ever opened up a graphic novel. So, she lent me Watchmen to decompress with after reading a whole lot of Puritan lit. last semester, and oh my god…