Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, or How "Cartoons are like maps" Part 2

Alison Bechdel
Introduced by Hillary Chute
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
7:30 PM

[Part 2 of 2] Check out Part 1 here.

He used his artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not. That is impeccable.

After a wonderful "lecture" as she called it, Alison offered a reading of Fun Home's first chapter 'Old Father, Old Artificer.' Now, if you are wondering how one does a reading of a comic-book, you're not alone. I, myself, was wondering how it would work exactly. Aided by the beauty of technology, Alison had every panel blown up and projected, sans the 'narrative' dialogues that border every panel in the graphic novel, which she read out loud. The entire experience was haunting, moving and at times hysterically laugh out loud funny. Hearing Bechdel's very personal and confessional words in her own dry tone, seeing her wince and scrunch up her face at certain times, pausing for laughter or for dramatic effect, lingering on certain words to heighten the irony of certain text/image juxtapositions... was just wonderful.

After the reading, and changing the tone of the room completely (we were a black hair dye, some mascara and a pair of black tappered Levi's from going all emo by the time she finished chapter one) Alison proceeded to show us a bit about the graphic novel-ing process comes to pass. She ran through a typical page construction: everything from the laying out in Adobe Illustrator, to the creation of a font based off of her handwriting (she called it 'cheating' I call it practical - can you imagine that much work?!), to the rough draft of the panels through to the inking and then the watercolouring (done on a separate sheet, of course) giving us something that resembles the pages we have read avidly from our TPB purchased at Borders last Fall.

This led of course to the mandatory "Q&A" part of the session - a part of readings/lectures/etc. which I usually find tedious, uninteresting and honestly more times than not unnecessary. Oddly enough, the questions fired at Alison (usually prefaced with the usual 'you were awesome!') though seemingly obsessed with the IMAGE/TEXT dichotomy, still sparked great responses from the graphic novelist. Basically while the questions kept wanting her to choose ("If I had a gun to my head... words would edge out images... not by a lot though") Alison kept stressing that to think of the two as distinct was counter to the way she thought about them - which led her to go back to her interesting suggestion: "cartoons are like maps." That is to say, they are at once re-presentations of real places, but they also suggest a life of their own, there is depth and flatness, words and images, not distinct, not one, but both.

The more interesting questions?
"What are you working on next?" - Another memoir, and she told us she feels the weight of this book (and its advance!) every day when she sits down to work on it. Needless to say, we can't wait!
and
"Is Fun Home gonna be a movie?" Or something along those lines. To which Alison spilled a great spoiler, which I won't divulge here. Let's just say cryptically that Fun Home might not be going the Persepolis route ("Why does everything have to be a movie nowadays?" she pondered... too many answers came to mind haha) but might go the... Seussical route...

Favourite Alison lines:

"Thank you Writers (no apostrophe) House"
"Why am I so compelled to talk about myself? Cause my parents never listened to me and I wanted someone to! I felt neglected!"

Check out Alison's blog (and/or Part 1 of this blog post):

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, or How "Cartoons are like maps" Part 1

Alison Bechdel
Introduced by Hillary Chute
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
7:30 PM

He used his artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not. That is impeccable.

One of the things I really do love about the English Dept here at Rutgers is its incredible ability to have something happening every week (if not every day!) This Wednesday, for example I had the pleasure of attending the Alison Bechdel lecture/ presentation/ reading hosted by the Writers at Rutgers Reading Series (click here for more info) and thought - because I haven't been as prolific in my "Rutgers" blog posts as I was last term - that we could all revel in my fanboy-ness and (re)live the event through my (albeit limited) talents as a blogger.
Here goes, my 'retroactive live-blogging'™ for the event:

The evening began with the mandatory 'Thanks to everyone who made this possible' spiel, given by the soft-spoken (though, if I may so myself at the risk of sounding too much like a groupie - also brilliant) Richard Dienst. Following Richard, was a wonderfully witty and hilariously deadpan introduction by a former Rutgers Alum Hilary Chute. In her own words (and quoting her editor at the Village Voice at the time when Hilary wanted to interview Alison) she traced Fun Home's rave reviews (named one of the top books of 2006 by TIME, EW, the NYTimes and People - yah, try finding another book not bearing a certain Ms O's sticker that can cut across such diverse print behemoths!) and introduced her, not without offering a rave review as well: "I was ... blown away." And I couldn't have said it better myself.

[Sidenote, though not really: First thing Alison said once she got to the podium, "Look at all these people!" /end Sidenote]

Later in the talk [and I know, this entirely violates my whole 'retroactive live-blogging'™ approach] Alison said that the one thing she feared the most was to bore people. I can safely say (and the seemingly endless and overwhelming applause at the end of the talk seemed to agree with me) that she didn't bore anyone, nor could she. I mean, we are talking about a woman who wrote the bitingly sad (and funny!) Fun Home and who, in the middle of the talk, still had the grace to comment on Richard Miller's boisterous and greatly welcomed laugh. Boring is not something I think she'd be able to provide: not to a rapt audience at Rutgers, and not anywhere else.

Alison began her talk by discussing the influence of Charles Addams' cartoons (y'know... the cartoons that inspired those movies featuring a deliciously devilish Angelica Huston and introduced Christina Ricci to the world?) summing up the feeling she had when she contemplated Addams' cartoons (in the same she contemplated her own house, her own family) simplistically as "nothing matches up." "Nothing matches up" as in, word and image, reality and fiction, secrets and appearances.

Tracing her own 'coming into being as a graphic novelist,' Alison talked about the way the comic-book form, by bridging the gap between image and word, was the best outlet with which to both rebel against her parents (who wanted her to be a writer or an artist, never thinking she'd go with both!) and be able to live in that space between image and text. If language is deceiving and images shroud themselves in appearance, what better way to get beyond, within that, than to embrace the comic book form?

Like maps, she said (here also reminiscing about The Wind in the Willows' map we get in Fun Home) comic books offer a layout of words and image that apprehend reality and bridge that Saussurian gap Bechdel had been so suspicious of ever since she was a little kid, littering her diary entries with squiggles to mark the ways she wasn't sure what she was writing was accurate, real, true.

For more on this event (the reading and the Q&A session) check here and you can check Alison's blog here:

"On the internet, everyone thinks I'm a dog", or How it's a Roxie's World After All

Rutgers English Graduate Alumni Lecture Series

Marilee Lindemann
"On the Internet Everyone Thinks I'm a Dog"
The Queer Adventures of an English Prof in the Blogosphere

Blogging about an academic lecture (even one on blogging) seems like an attack on everything I get taught in grad school, but I do feel that the more interesting part of a talk like this is the experience of it, which is what I wish to re-produce here (consider it [retroactive] liveblogging in an academic setting).

What do you get when you take the opinionated tone of a political blog, the style, wit and flare of a queer blog, the subject matter of dog blogs and the vocabulary and conceptual thinking of an academic blog? I don't really know, but Roxie's World comes close to exploring what such a mixed-breed blog would look like.
More than just a case study on Roxie's blog, Marilee's talk worked to explore bigger ideas surrounding the greater blogosphere: What is our audience? How do statcounters dictate how and what we write? What is the process of reading a blog? It was a wonderfully choreographed self-reflection that led me to think about what it is that I (try and) do here at A Blog Next Door.

The lecture itself was divided in three separate parts, each exploring one of the subdivisions of the corporate-like structure of Roxie's World. I won't rehearse Marilee's lecture point by point (mainly because without her wit and without her Keynote Presentation - featuring flame effects and a great Notes on a Scandal shout-out, I don't think I'd be doing it justice). What I thought I'd do instead was to toy around with some of the ideas Marilee threw out there and explore them [INSERT MORE HERE]

I. Office of Persona Management

The ironist is ironical. Not because he does not care, but because he cares too much
Randolph Bourne "The Life of Irony" (1913)

Much of Marilee's talk worked to think about what blogging does, especially when one's own tone and subject matter seem to defy the kind of writing one does elsewhere - how does one write like a dog? With Irony, Marilee suggested (at least that's how one writers as Roxie); and she explained, irony (with Jon Stewart as its Elizabeth I) in a post-9/11 world seems to be a great tool with which to comment on the world we find ourselves in. Yet, to write as someone else, and in this case as dog offers a distinct possibility, calling into question the over-used "S" word (subjectivity): Marilee suggested that every 'blogger' works within a persona and this can be fluid enough to suggest a shift in subjectivity not just from blog to blog but from post to post, making every blog author a pseudonym for a 'virtual' subjectivity - transient and ephemeral as the posts themselves.

II. The Department of Clicks and Eye-balls: on audiences, real and imagined

Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashion'd, it is apropos;
Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved by strangers?
Do you know the talk of those turning eye-balls?
Walt Whitman "Song of Open Road"

This was probably my favourite part of the lecture, if only because it spoke very clearly to things that, as a new blogger, I find myself wrestling with. From the hypothetical (and hilarious) example of 'What if Shakespeare had had a StatCounter?' Marilee went on to talk about the ways blogging is a Reader Respone Theory 2.0 in the sense that it is constant and direct conversation with its readers, who, thanks to software like StatCounter monitors readership - from keywords, referring websites and the ever panic-inducing unique visitor graphs. So, what IF Shakespeare had had a StatCounter? Marilee suggested he would have written less plays, spending more time monitoring his audience's tastes rather than writing new material for them, but the question stands: what is our relationship with our readers and how closely should a blogger 'adapt' and 'write' for the endless longing for more (albeit ADHD afflicted) web-blog readers?
The other reason I really enjoyed this section was the invocation of the 'sorrow of bloggers' that comes about with the tacit rule of 'newer is better' that underruns the blogosphere. Marilee talked about the sadness she feels every time a new post displaces the earlier one and pushes it downward and I think I know exactly what she means - especially because it is so hard to trust readers to find those posts once they're exiled to the Archives...

III. Department of Eye Candy and Other Intertextualities: Visual and Other Pleasures in Roxie's World

Finally it hit her: the work embedded the verbal narrative in a topographical environment in which word was interwoven with world. The world contained the words but much else besides, including layered images, complex navigation functionalities, and simulated documents. By focusing on the words alone, she had missed the point.
Katherine Hayles "Writing Machines"

The final part of the talk focuses on spotlighting the issue of images in the blogosphere. I particularly enjoyed the qualification of 'visual quotation' which, I agree, sounds much better than 'theft' and the interesting discussion that followed on trying to understand what this new batch of 'Digital Humanists' can and do do with this new form of textuality - more interactive, visual and multilayered than the books, magazines and journals we're used to. The conversation, it seems, is still open for more opinions - there's still work to be done!

[Favourite concept: MLA going all CSI on Shakespeare's hypothetical hard drive. I can see the CBS-MLA co-production now, coming soon to a made-for-tv spot near you...

Closing remark: "Have a baby if you must, write a book if one is required for tenure, but if you just want to put stuff out there, dear, just get a blog!" - A perfect ending to what was an amusing and insightful talk - see you at Roxie's World Moose!]

After Sex? or How Writing since Queer Theory is Theorized Queerly Pt 2

After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory

SAQ Special Edition
Ed. Janet Halley & Andrew Parker

Blogging about an academic symposium - it seems like an attack on everything I get taught in grad school, but I do feel that the more interesting part of a panel like this are the interactions and the personal reactions from the audience (consider it [retroactive] liveblogging in an academic setting).
Check out part one here.

Jeff Nunokawa

When you begin an address with "Let's not fight" you have to wonder whether that's what Jeff wanted to do once it was his turn to talk - mainly because you could sense his (albeit playful and always purely academic) irritation at Lee and Joe's project and their conception of the big "QT" - queer theory. After parenthetically praising ("J'adore!") the wikipedia buzzword "disambiguation" Jeff proceeded to disambiguate both 'history' and 'nostalgia' as they were being discussed. If, as Jeff would have us think there are indeed many histories of Queer Theory, he made it very clear it was the one rooted in the late 80s and early 90s, with the looming fear of AIDS, the solidarity found in ACT UP and seminal academic texts (Gender Trouble, Epistemology of the Closet) the one he wished we would embrace. Campy as his tirade against Bersani (who can be "brilliantly nasty"), Lee and those who try and understand and perpetuate a vision of queer theory 'up here' (waving his hands in the air) where issues of (capital letter) Time and (capital letter) History make him think of Heidegger was, Jeff was nonetheless well received (at least by the vocal members of the audience) when he tried to think of Queer Theory as a historical and cultural moment in time even if to do so he had to 'crave the indulgence of quoting himself.'
[ed note: what was probably more interesting - for me at least - was not Jeff's speech but the hilarious, though arguably subtle and ambiguous reactions from fellow panel members who will remain unnamed - a demure smile, a bemused look, a quick scribble - priceless]

Kate Thomas
What a pleasant surprise Kate Thomas was. From the initial "I took the 'after' as post - but for me post refers to both postal office and posthumous" I knew it was going to be a good talk (anyone who can say "the promiscuity of the postal bag" in an academic setting is welcome in my books). Though I am a firm believer that everything sounds sexier in a British accent, what I think made Kate's presentation a perfect way to end the panel presentations was the way in which quite seamlessly she had managed to produce a piece that at once spoke about her interests (queer temporality, postal), her work and her field (I'm looking up Michael Field stuff as I type) but also framed the conversation in relation to the volume's contributors building up to her inspired image of 'being prone' as one which permeated the collection. Prone, as she explained it is to be bent (indeed she had isolated images of people lying down in the volume: sleeping, exhausted, dead) - "leaning forward but looking down." All in all, Kate's talk worked perfectly as a wrap-up and made for a nice segway into the Q&A session that followed.

Q&A
At this point my note-taking skills floundered and so instead of trying to weave a narrative out of them I'll just isolate some interesting snippets of the conversation:

The first thing to be brought up right after Kate was done was Lee's suggestion that the framing device of the volume (in particular the choice of putting Sedgwick's essay at the end, disregarding the alphabetical order the rest of the volume followed) sought to create a narrative drive within the works. Andrew Parker came out and quite politely took a stab at Lee by arguing that the framing of the piece did in no way try and privilege Eve's piece but that the main reason for placing her essay at the end visually presented the fact that it was the one piece that was not part of the call for submissions of the volume, something Janet echoed leaving Lee to smile and just say he had just offered "one observation" and that he never expected everyone to agree with his opinion, but that one couldn't help but agree that the placement also suggested an 'ending' - a framed and purposefully placed endpoint to an otherwise arbitrary (alphabetical) ordering.
After Lee and Joe left (to catch the train) the conversation veered towards (oddly enough) an attack on the vision of 'Queer Theory' that Jeff Nunokawa had already mulled over both in his essay and in his presentation. Aided by supportive comments from the audience this seemed to take on currency among the attendants: Queer Theory as rooted in a particular historical and cultural moment (Jeff had begun his talk with an acknowledgment of his nostalgia and never did he try and hide that during the panel).
One of the more interesting lines of discussion was actually brought up by the controversy over whether Queer Theory could ever be thought of as divorced from progressive politics to which Janet's anecdotal Law experiences offered a nice counter-argument.
Elin Diamond's comments and questions, cementing Jeff's currency in the discussion actually offered a nice compromise between this nostalgia of time long lost and an anxiety in graduate work regarding this past-ness of queer theory: she offered us a way to think about our present situation in light of theory (in times of theoretical upheaval that's what people do - "you have plenty of crises!" she told us, why not use those to help you theorise in the same way the ACT UP meetings did for those in the hey-day of Queer Theory?)
Also very welcome was this suggestion that one could understand QT as an object-less methodology; a praxis more than an object of study (something that echoed Janet's earlier idea of this volume being quite 'writerly' - it could be indeed style which cut across the essays if one did not want to see a thematic, narrative-like connection between them).

And there you have - mostly nonsensical ramblings of an audience member at this event. I will not try and talk about the dinner that proceeded the event for the conversations were much too fun and interesting to have them be put to public speculation.
Maybe blogging about Rutgers English Events will become a staple of A Blog Next Door - now if only that could have an attentive and responsive audience...

After Sex? or How Writing since Queer Theory is Theorized Queerly Pt 1

After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory

SAQ Special Edition
Ed. Janet Halley & Andrew Parker

Blogging about an academic symposium - it seems like an attack on everything I get taught in grad school, but I do feel that the more interesting part of a panel like this is the interactions and the personal reactions from the audience (consider it [retroactive] liveblogging in an academic setting).

Kicking off the Rutgers English Sexuality Speakers Series, we welcomed to the Rutgers New Brunswick campus a handful of respected scholars working in the field of 'queer theory,' celebrating the publication of the special issue of SAQ entitled 'After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory' and despite trying to trivialize the event, here goes a post dedicated to what I enjoyed about the talk.

After a slew of introductions and thanks, Michael Cobb took to podium and kicked off the event:

Michael Cobb
Apologizing for his rather casual presentation last time he was at Rutgers, Michael came prepared this time with a talk focusing on privacy and the couple - a nice companion to his piece on 'loneliness' (and 'singlehood') showcased in the volume. Swiftly moving from American Law, to Wizard of Oz references (in talking of how "there's no place like home," where both the concept of home and of privacy were contested in a queer context) to an attentive reading of Woolf, Michael kept the conversation light enough and even garnered some laughter ("and" is a terrible word sometimes, he quipped) in a presentation, that while a bit too formal (matching his suit and glasses) still proved to be a good start. I particularly enjoyed his discussion on 'the 'tyranny of two' (which reminded me of my favourite passage from his essay - his suggestion of appending an S to the LGBTQ... acronym to stand in for "singles" as yet another sexual minority) and the ways in which 'two' makes the private public - what happens when you're only one? Ending with the epigrammatic "When you're in love with someone else, you lose your privacy" Michael stepped down and opened the floor for Lee to begin:

Lee Edelman
Unaided by a script or even notes, Lee maintained the attention of the audience with the eloquence and 'airtight' theoretical model of thinking that was later to be criticized by a fellow member of the panel. Picking up on one of Michael's lines ("They've lost their protection of home") Lee pursued a rather hostile (abrasive?) take on 'queer theory' and the nostalgia of the volume, as well as its narratological framing (issues and questions that, for anyone familiar with Edelman's work, were not surprising). Lee argued for a concept of queer theory that does not look back on its 'founding texts' and a locatable 'origin' (circa early 1990s) and revels in nostalgia for a time where we didn't just look back in time and think of the time where the Academy was doing something. This nostalgic looking back, this reading queer theory in a narratological sense is unnerving for Edelman mainly because it fosters an optimism and a sense of home that he does not endorse - to work in queer theory is to lose one's sense of home. The 'Edelmanian line' (as opposed to the suggested Bersanian line that Halley and Parker suggest in the Introduction) works to disentagle this appraisal of 'goodness' (optimism, a vision of hope, of a horizon) in queer theory, that for Edelman negates the project of queer theory itself.

Joseph Litvak
Following Lee - being 'after Lee' must be hard. Unless you're Joe Litvak and then, with a theme like 'After the Jew' you know you can steer attention back to your work while the audience is still reeling from Lee's electric musings on Queer Theory and in particular his opinions regarding the framing and structure of the volume (but more on that later). "I will be incoherent" he began - clearly contrasting his own method of delivery with Lee's suspiciously understated eloquence. After savouring the word 'resentiment' more times than I could count, Litvack went on to flesh out what was 'queer' about blacklisted Hollywood Jews in 1954. If Lee had suggested we could say Plato and Shakespeare were footnotes to Queer Theory (or was it the other way round? I should have taken better notes) and could be placed at the 'beginning of Queer Theory, as opposed to the Queer triumvirate of Sedgwick, Butler and Warner; Litvak wanted to suggest we could also see the McCarthy era as creating one of the first notions of queerness in the figure of the Jew. The salient portion of Litvak's talk actually came towards the end when he veered away from his own project and suggested that one way we could think about current Queer Theory - as a provocatively autobiographical and writerly methodology: a stylistic marker rather than a theoretical one (which this humble grad student wishes had been fleshed out by other panelists).

Check out After Sex? or How Writing Since Queer Theory is Theorized Queerly Pt 2