Fun Home: A Review Friday, Jan 12 2007 

books thisgaudygildedstage 2:24 pm

I’ve just finished reading Alison Bechdel‘s graphic novel/non-fiction text, Fun Home. Bechdel is already kind of famous for her Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip. Fun Home promises to make her one of the most important GLBT writers working today. It is an amazing book. I urge anyone who enjoys reading to rush out and get it.

Fun Home cover Fun Home is, on one level, Bechdel’s effort to come to terms with her father, a high school English teacher/funeral home director in small town Pennsylvania who also restores old homes to museum-like quality on the side. Already strained, their relationship is made more complicated by the fact that Alison’s father is hiding a substantial secret, one that she only discovers after leaving home for college. Part homage to her father, part indictment of him, Fun Home is both the particular story of these two characters’ relationship and a universal story of the constant renegotiation of the parent-child relationship as the child grows into adulthood.

There are many things that recommend this book. I should first admit that this is the first graphic novel (or autobiography or memoir — whatever the correct genre is) that I’ve read. My assumptions about graphic novels have all been upended by this book. I assumed they were rather basic and intellectually unengaging. If Fun Home is any indication, these assumptions are clearly wrong.

Bechdel uses the graphic elements of her medium to create a rich and intellectually engaging text in which words and images play off of one another. Early in the work an image includes a copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina that at first glance appears to be just a random book lying next to a character. As we continue reading, however, we realize that this image is actually an inter-text, a literary reference that guides the reader’s expectations of Bechdel’s story. This is just one of the many ways that she uses the graphic medium successfully to add to the reader’s engagement with her text.

(more…)

 

The Graffiti Artist: A Review Tuesday, Jan 9 2007 

movies thisgaudygildedstage 2:34 pm

Since my last few posts have been about academic and professional interests, I thought I would post a movie review today. PJ and I watched James Bolton’s The Graffiti Artist (2004) over the weekend. The movie’s webpage has a link to trailers and images from the film, if you want to check them out.

The Graffiti Artist The movie is about a kid named Nick, played by Ruben Bansie-Snellman (pictured here), who is a homeless graffiti artist in Portland, Oregon. In the larger sense, the movie traces the effects of the city’s efforts to cut down on such graffiti by arresting the artists and charging them with a felony. Nick is arrested early in the film and decides to skip town in order to avoid the fine and community service. He goes to Seattle, where he runs into Jesse, played by Pepper Fajans, another artist who’s from a middle class family. Where Nick has made a life for himself by stealing food and sleeping in alleys, Jesse pays for everything he wants and has his own small apartment. Nick believes in graffiti art for graffiti art’s sake; Jesse sells pictures of his art to magazines.

Despite these differences, the two boys become friends. Their friendship is tested, however, when it becomes physically intimate and the lines between friendship and romance begin to break down.

I really like how quiet this film is. There’s a kind of emotional intimacy cultivated between the characters and the audience that I found very effective. In part, this sense of quiet is literal — the score doesn’t overwhelm the film and is often quite muted and there is often little or no dialogue in the film. Indeed, it is several minutes into the film before Nick speaks his first lines. I thought this worked really well.

(more…)

 

The Party’s Over Monday, Jan 8 2007 

academia thisgaudygildedstage 1:20 pm

My sabbatical/leave is now officially over. The winter quarter began last week, but today was the first day that I actually had to admit that I’m not on leave any more. It’s sooooo depressing! Getting paid to read, think, and write without actually having to interact with anyone else has been wonderful. Now it’s back to the grind. Oh well.

First, I had to finish up several letters of recommendation. I am finally done with all of the letters that I’ve agreed to write so far. So, I’m glad that I have accomplished that.

Second, I distributed a memo to the members of a committee that I’m chairing. We’ll be reviewing our department’s policies and procedures and creating a set of by-laws, though I want to call the final document our “Policies and Procedures” rather than by-laws. I’ll have to schedule a committee meeting at some point soon, but that can wait a while.

Next, I participated in my department’s seven-year review. Since I’m on the review committees for two departments later this term, I was glad to see how it’s supposed (or not supposed) to work. And my involvement was really limited: all I did was attend an open meeting with the outside reviewer.

And then I went to my first faculty senate meeting since June. When I left the June meeting, I told a couple of my colleagues that I would see them in six months. Now those six months have passed. The meeting was as tedious as usual. Several speakers kept telling us that, since there wasn’t much on the agenda, they would go ahead and tell us about x, y, or z, which meant that each speaker actually spoke longer than usual. So, for a meeting with a short agenda, we had a longer than usual meeting. On the one hand, I love being involved and knowing what’s going on. And I do really feel obliged to participate in faculty governance and service. On the other hand, these meetings are tedious and I can’t help but wonder why we spend so much of the time discussing minutia. But ultimately all I have to do is sit and listen, so there’s not that much to complain about.

Now that I’m back at work, the important question is: what did I accomplish?

(more…)

 

Eighteenth-Century Wigs Sunday, Jan 7 2007 

research and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 1:08 pm

I just finished reading Lynn Festa’s article entitled “Personal Effects: Wigs and Possessive Individualism in the Long Eighteenth Century,” published in Eighteenth-Century Life volume 29, issue 2 in 2005. It’s an excellent essay on what wearing a wig meant in the eighteenth century.

William Wycherley I read the essay in part because I’m looking for an article to begin my eighteenth-century class with next quarter. My course is going to focus on “The Making of the Modern Self: Writing Identity in the Long Eighteenth century,” so I want to begin with an article about identity that is kind of fun too. What could be more fun than wigs? Maybe I can help bring back wigs as a male fashion necessity! Here’s a portrait of William Wycherley — wouldn’t I look great in big, curly wig like his?!

Eighteenth-Century Life has become one of my favorite journals. I like that it publishes high quality articles about a wide range of interesting subjects. The most recent issue, for example, has articles on the significance of Venice for Scots in the Age of the Grand Tour; Violence, Virtue, and Politics in the Visual Culture of the French Revolution; displaying curiosities; and entomology. This article by Festa is typical in its ability to construct a complex argument that is of interest to general eighteenth-century scholars.

In this essay, Festa “addresses the shifting relation between personal possessions and personal identity, the objects one owns and the characteristics individuals are deemed to possess” (49). She’s interested in how wigs marked, but also obscured, individuality at various points in the long eighteenth century. It’s a fascinating study.

(more…)

 

What I’m Reading: The Great Fire of London Thursday, Jan 4 2007 

books thisgaudygildedstage 11:35 am

I’ve started reading several Restoration-related books with the intention of reviewing each of them once I’m done. However, since I seem to keep starting new ones before finishing the old ones, I thought I’d go ahead and write about some of them as readings-in-progress.

Fire of London The first is Stephen Porter’s The Great Fire of London (Sutton Publishing, 1996). The Great Fire occured in 1666, “raged for our days and destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 churches, and 44 of the City of London’s great livery halls.” It is one of the most important disasters in British history and had a profound effect on the subsequent development of London as a city. Most students of Restoration literature are familiar with Samuel Pepys’s narration of the fire in his Diary.

Porter’s The Great Fire of London begins by surveying the dangers of fire in 1660s London and recounting the precautions people took to avoid these dangers. One of the things I’ve already learned from reading it is just how prevalent fires were in the seventeenth century. Like so many disasters throughout history, this one was not unforeseen nor did it come out of no where. I’ve also been interested to learn about fire fighting techniques (if that phrase isn’t a misnomer) in 1660s London — let’s just say that they were surprisingly rudimentary and chaotic compared to those of the other great cities of Europe at the time.

(more…)

 

Lesbian Fiction: Curious Tea Tuesday, Jan 2 2007 

books and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 11:19 am

Over the past week, I’ve read two novels that I enjoyed very much: Katherine Forrest‘s Curious Wine and Michelle Tea‘s Valencia. I’m making a concerted effort to read some lesbian fiction over the next several weeks in preparation for my Lesbian and Gay Lit class in the spring.

When I read my evaluations from last winter recently, a few of the lesbian students mentioned that they thought we should read more works by women than we did that term. I usually include Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues as an honorary lesbian text, but at least one student thought that wasn’t right: she argued that this novel was really about being transgendered, not about being a lesbian. That’s kind of debatable, but I take her point. Last year, we read Feinberg, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Isabel Miller’s Patience and Sarah, and a few poems by lesbian writers. (One of these poems, by the poet Chrystos, is one of my favorite poems ever: “I Suck” is the title. I highly recommend it. I also love Susan Griffin’s “In Response to a Man’s Question ….”) We also read a chapter from Song of the Loon, a chapter from Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, Larry Kramer’s Faggots, and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. So, the number of texts by women and by men were roughly the same, but the amount of class time spent on “lesbian texts” and “gay male texts” favored the men a little.

Ultimately, there are three problems that make this favoring difficult to address. First, OU is on 10-week quarters. This means that we simply don’t have time to read as much as I would like. So, I tend to change the reading list from year to year to address the changing demographics and tastes of my students. Of course this means that I’m always a year behind: this year’s class will address last year’s suggestions for improvement. Second, I know less about lesbian writers and texts than I do gay male authors and their works, and the lesbian texts I do know about don’t always stand up in quality and importance to the male-authored ones. I recognize my own bias in making that assertion — to some degree, I’m sure that I think some of the male texts are better and more important than some of the female-authored texts because I’m a gay male, but it’s not just that inherent bias. As much as I like Rubyfruit Jungle (a novel that I teach from time to time), it’s simply not in the same league as Angels in America or Stone Butch Blues. And finally, I am the only member of my department that teaches this course. If someone else taught the course, students would undoubtedly get a different take on Lesbian and Gay Lit, one that might include more (or at least different) knowledge and discussion of lesbian works.

(more…)

 

« Previous Page