Totally stole this link from a friend’s fb wall but it IS so awesome that I couldn’t help but share.

Totally forgot about Ani’s new album coming out until now. Woohoo!!

Ok, so I’m trying out another new format for my blog. New year demands such changes and all. Pending a substantive post, here’s some lovely art to look at. Isn’t Valerie Buess‘s work amazing!

I find it just breathtaking.

Extremely well put.

“To be alone with the as yet unwritten book is still to be in the primal sleep of humanity. That’s it. It also means being alone with the writing that is still lying fallow. It means trying not to die. It means being alone in a shelter during the war. But without prayer, without God, with no thought whatsoever except the insane desire to exterminate the German Nation down to the last Nazi” (“Writing” 15).

“Deliverance comes when night begins to settle in. When work stops outside. What remains is the luxury we all share, the ability to write about it at night. We can write at any hour of the day. We are not sanctioned by orders, schedules, bosses, weapons, fines, insults, cops, bosses, and bosses. Nor by the brooding hens of tomorrow’s fascisms” (31).

“Crying has to happen, too.

Even if it’s useless to cry, I still think we have to cry. Because despair is tangible. It remains. The memory of despair remains. Sometimes it kills.

To write.

I can’t.

No one can.

We have to admit: we cannot.

And yet we write.

It’s the unknown one carries within oneself: writing is what is attained. It’s that or nothing.

One can speak of a writing sickness.

What I’m trying to say isn’t easy, but I believe we can find our way here, comrades of the world.

There is a madness of writing that is in oneself, an insanity of writing, but that alone doesn’t make one insane. On the contrary.

Writing is the unknown. Before writing one knows nothing of what one is about to write. And in total lucidity.

It’s the unknown in oneself, one’s head, one’s body. Writing is not even a reflection, but a kind of faculty one has, that exists to one side of oneself, parallel to oneself: an other person who appears and comes forward, invisible, gifted with thought and anger, and who sometimes, through his own actions, risks losing his life.

If one had any idea what one was going to write, before doing it, one would never write. It wouldn’t be worth it anymore.

Writing is trying to known beforehand what one would write if one wrote, which one never knows until afterward; that is the most dangerous question one could ever ask oneself. But it’s also the most widespread.

Writing comes like the wind. It’s naked, it’s made of ink, it’s the thing written, and it passes like nothing else passes in life, nothing more, except life itself” (32-3).

Moment of zen

I wrote an essay on Fun Home back in 2008, I think? (Geez that seems forever ago). I still plan on publishing it but the essay needs some significant revisions.

First of all — I LOVE this book. It’s just masterfully done. And, I’m even more psyched about her new one coming out this May: Are You My Mother? Clearly, Bechdel’s playing off of Dr. Seus’s book which I read over and over and over again as a child. I’m anxious to read this new book & her portrayal of her mother.

There are a lot of links and images I’d like to include here but wordpress is being weird about letting me do that right now. They’ve changed the format here significantly so it might just be that I need to relearn how to utilize this space. At any rate, forgive the omissions of images and whatnot.

Here’s a little excerpt from my writings on Fun Home from three years ago. Note I refer to Bechdel as the author of this work and Alison as the character she presents in it. The distinction, I think, is important:

“Nancy K. Miller observes in Fun Home that ‘From beginning to end, the father-daughter bond takes the form of a knot that cannot be untied — in life or in autobiography” (from her PMLA article pg. 543) Despite their generational and gender differences, Alison and her dad share many similarities:  both grow up in the same town, share gender identifications with the opposite sex, try to foist their desired fashion sensibilities onto one another, enjoy reading literature, and experience same-sex desire. Bechdel portrays herself as having a very close relationship with her father, in spite of his impersonal nature. The first panels in Fun Home, in fact, show father-daughter playing “airplane” together. Alison turns this image of herself flying above her dad into a mythic reversal of the tale of Icarus, indicating that her father will fall instead of her. Eventually, however, Alison loses her balance and falls off the human pedestal he provides for her. Just as Miller and Bechdel herself suggest, the fate of both father and daughter in this autobiography become entangled in a knot. The relationship between Bruce’s death and Bechdel’s ending of the book is not causal.”

“Alison grows up in the same small town as her father, but instead of inheriting the cruel reality that propels him toward death, as he inherits the family funeral home, she finds a way to work through her trauma. Bechdel admits to herself and her readers that she, too, would consider taking he own life if she had to endure the same silent existence as her father. Even if only joked about, she can imagine her way out of this death wish by fantasizing about what she would like to say to her grieving mourners, if she felt the freedom to do so. That which deteriorates her father’s will to live, Alison discovers, can be altered by the imagination. The mystery of her father’s death, too, can be investigated through imaginative acts. The hybridity of the form Bechdel’s book takes, as both an autobiography as well as a graphic narrative, allows her to likewise create and mix different versions of what might have caused her father’s death. Images of Bruce working as a mortician in ‘fun home’ juxtaposed with his own funeral service in it, suggest that being trapped within close proximity to both his family and the funeral business corresponds to his desire to no longer be. Yet, the story that her grandmother repeatedly told about how her father got stuck in the mud when he was a toddler causes Alison to wonder if he had always felt that way. What compelled Bruce to jump backwards onto the highway, causing a Sunbean bread truck to literally plow him down, remains a mystery. But, Alison notes one thing for certain — he’s ‘stuck in the mud for good this time’ (54).

In one of the more dominate alternate versions of this story, her dad’s demise corresponds with her coming out as a lesbian. Alison fears her announcement ‘I am a lesbian’ cosmically altered her father’s universe, catapulting him into the middle of a highway.”

I, of course, have MUCH more to say on the subjects Bechdel brings up in her graphic memoir. But for now, I’ll leave it there. Ciao.

Part of the reason I’ve been tentative about writing in this space is because many of the ideas I’m working on directly relate to my dissertation and I feel as though I have to be protective of my work until it’s under some sort of serious copyright. But of course my fears about others poaching my work stem mostly from paranoia. So, in order to make myself feel safe writing in this space I won’t write directly about my diss. Instead I’ll likely write around the periphery of it. Or, at times, I’ll just write about things that inhabit my mind and daily life. This is a blog after all. What’s the use of it if I don’t feel free enough to write in it?

In terms of teaching — I’m super psyched about my students writing blogs. Next time around I’ll start this practice earlier in the semester. I’ve tried similar endeavors before but unless you utilize a form of technology that’s familiar to students sometimes they can be resistant, which is why I held off until now. But, so far, the blogs and the posts they’re writing are quite interesting. I actually hadn’t planned on reading through them tonight but found myself unable to stop myself from reading.

For the teachers, instructors, & profs out there — the way I’m facilitating this is by adding all my students blogs to my rss feed that I read on a daily basis. That way, I don’t have to click on 45-50 blogs a day to make sure they’re engaging in the daily writing practice that this exercise is meant to incite. Profhacker likely has various articles on similar or related topics, if you’re interested in further reading on using blogs in the classroom or on finding a good rss reader. At the moment, I’m just using GoogleReader, which is free. I use Reeder on my mobile devices though and may at some point switch entirely over to Reeder. We’ll see. None of these formats are entirely to my liking — or at least not enough to entice me to pay for the program.

Anyway, this is just a note to say — watch this space. I’ll be using it more! As my most excellent and wise advisor would say — “for reals” this time. : )

This is one of the best films I’ve seen in an exceptionally long time. Finally got around to watching it last night and then found myself watching it again tonight as I did some house chores. I love the bluegrass undertones but more than that I really appreciate the rawness of this film. Maybe I love it because I can relate, although my family’s by no means this violent. Yet, there is a reality here that the director, Debra Granik, captured here which I find utterly mesmerizing.

I have to give credit where it’s due, though. The banner image at the moment is not mine. It’s a cropped piece from one of Tom Gauld’s lovely works that I found on his flickr page. I am sort of obsessed with comics. Well, good art in general, actually, but falling in love with graphic novels over the past few years means that I have developed a particular affinity toward the comic drawn form. (None of the at superhero high-gloss crap. Sorry, super-hero fans. I prefer my comics raw & bare, like my words.) Anyway, I’d rather not get sued for using someone else’s image so I want to give Tom Gauld due credit. Go check out his work! It is so very HARD to resist the temptation to use someone else’s images as avatars on Facebook or as I’ve done here, as a focal point (or distraction, whathaveyou). There’s so much great art available on the web! I love it.

And, writing. I love writing. Particularly in quiet spaces such as this.

More to come. Nothing special. But more of it. : )

p.s. I did dive in and purchase wordpress’s typekit so I could change up the fonts here. Do you like it? Yeah, I’m so nerdy I wanted to choose my own font, rather than put up with the horrendous default ones the theme designer chose for some odd and misguided reason. What can I say? I care about design on lots and lots of levels. Enjoy the fancy fonts!