Palestine: thoughts

I like how in Palestine, regardless of the panel set-up, the text seems to spill haphazardly across each page, tumbling over snapshots of daily life, yet the order of things is never hard to discern, the flow never interrupted. The effect makes for a fast read, even though the subject matter is about as far from Blankets fluff as one could hope to get.

Sacco seems harsh at times, but it's easy to see why he gets angry when he does. I think I'm too nice not to be completely broke and stranded down there within three days.

back in action

So, after a ridiculous gap in postings, I return to say "I'm alive".

Berlin was a great book. The smooth, subtle transitions between characters helped the thing to flow like the Rhine after a storm.

The only thing that really confused me was the similar look of every single character. I feel like a lot of side character threads get completely lost in this because everyone looks exactly the same. I'm unsure, for instance, if the frozen beggar the police found on p.162 was the man who went to war with Marthe's brother or not. I speculating that he is, though none of the rest of my Monday group seemed to have noticed that. Maybe I'm just going crazy, skewed by the clever little connections in Watchmen, linking any character with a thin resemblance to any other character ever to appear. Hey, wasn't that guy on the street corner once before? I swear to god, he's SO familiar! It's like I KNOW him!

With that, I'm going to go print my rough essay draft.

essays in chalk

I’m still doubting my own decisions as to the final paper, but as usual, I’ve taken the weird, though decidedly ethnographic path. I’m trying to find the graphic narrative on a campus level, in unexpected places. So far, this has led me to the quad, where chalking is governed by more of the aspects featured in McCloud’s book than one would at first imagine. I spent close to a half hour yesterday trying to capture some of the best examples before the rain really moved in and hopefully got a good start. The most intriguing things to me are the circle of concrete on one of the bridges over the Boneyard and the long stretch of panels/concrete segments leading to transit plaza from the north side of the English building. The former had been turned into a mini-earth with a dove over it, the latter touted the merits of an informatics minor vertically across four panels.

Having talked to a few people about it, the whole process appears more complex and strategic than I’d thought, and the advertising aspect less of a centralized theme. One of my friends drew a giant dragon in front of Foellinger while advertising for Tai Kwan Do, another lamented the “longer patches” being taken up by time she got to the quad to chalk for a NOW event. And everyone, no matter what they’re chalking for, seems to end their adventure with chalk outlines of someone’s body. My freshman year, after chalking for a car wash, my friends and I did chalk outlines with Clue guesses scrawled across them (i.e. – Professor Plum, with the wrench, in the Billiard Room).

Chalking isn’t always advertising, either, which, for my part in this, is a very good thing. Sometimes poetry is scrawled over everything, circa the Montage fall submission call chalking adventure last semester. Other times, the message is one of encouragement or ridiculousness (last semester my friends chalked the sidewalks around Busey for another friend who’d been have a difficult week full of exams and drama).

I’m hoping this dive into the chalk realm works out, and that if all else fails, I can think of a few more aspects of campus culture to tear apart, McCloud style.

Fun Home Reflections

I really liked Fun Home, but I have to say, the last chapter of the book probably would’ve meant a whole lot more to me had I ever read Ulysses. It’s practically an omnipresent theme right up to the end.

The conversation in the car on the way to Coal Miner’s Daughter says so much through subtle shifts in facial expression and arm position. The uniform, blocky frames barely change, especially where Alison’s father is concerned. It’s a strange way of conveying motion, but I can’t think of a better way, offhand, of depict a conversation taking place entirely in a car on the way to somewhere.

I also identified with Alison’s animosity toward literary criticism. I spent my first semester hating the way people over analyzed every word of stuff like The Dubliners, all of Hemingway’s short stories and pretty much every sonnet ever written. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" was probably the first piece I ever got into on that level, and even then I resented nit-pickiness. It seemed straightforward enough to me and I was not willing to argue over supposed Christ-like references on that stupid urn. As with many other aspects of my life, but here much more appropriately, I blame the new critics, those bigoted elitist sexist ass clowns, for tarnishing the face of criticism as a whole and creating this stuffy world of hidden symbolism and innovative bullshitting so pervasive in the literary world even today as post-structuralism has apparently taken the reigns. Wow, that was a bit of a rant. How horrid!

Malled/Malltopia/It's a Mall World After All

So work on the mini-comic is progressing smoothly. Malls are intriguing little worlds to study, if you think about it. Whole social hierarchies exist within the confines of those massive shoppingplexes. And everyone goes there – the early morning mall walkers, the teenage girls, the moms with twelve million children in tow, the couples. You could spend the whole day there, dining on greasy food court fair, relaxing by the obligatory wishing fountain, and still not experience everything a mall has to offer. Just ask the customer service guys. They should know. Really, they should – it’s sort of their job.

Random thoughts:

• The mall cops have less authority than the campus police and the ones at Marketplace mall look like Canadian Mounties stripped of their horses and dignity.
• I miss Natural Wonders. Anyone else know what I’m talking about? I was so sad to see that store go!
• Orange Julius and Auntie Anne’s Pretzels make up the two essential stops along the outer ring of any respectable food court. Also, I have the recipe for both signatures items. Damn, I need to have a mall party…the next time I feel like spending three hours on those pretzels.
• Parodying well-known stores is fun. But sometimes, the real names are even better: Perfumania, Deck the Walls, Alpaca Connection, Relax-a-daisical, Gizmo Pods, Jean Madeline Salon/Aveda Environmental Lifestyle, Hat Shark, Paradise Pen, etc. I mean, come on, those last two sound like someone just threw a couple of words together randomly on a sign and started hocking their wares – like a garage sale of unused things. And Gizmo Pods has got to be the best kiosk ever, just based on that name.
• The mall I grew up with: St.Claire Square

back from break

So I made through roughly a chapter of Stuck Rubber Baby over spring break (chapter 15 to be exact, with a total of seven people streaming by asking random questions to people in my room or getting ready to go sleep). Finishing it in the quiet of my own room was weird last night, but I did it and I harbor the sleep deprived glossy stare to prove it.
I loved the book. The only part that caught me by surprise, though, was the ending with Orley. I may or may not have cried a bit. The rest of the stuff had such thick foreshadowing prior to every event that I spent more time desperately wanting to be wrong than being blindsided by accidents, deaths, and the pregnancy (spoiler alert?).
The ridiculous chipmunk faces still bother me, though I've gotten surprisingly used to them and that worries me.

Also, aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh minicomic!

southward bound

Throughout the novel I keep hoping something will develop between Toland and Sammy. I’m seriously crossing my fingers. On the flipside, I’m constantly worried for all the characters. It’s becoming a real page turner, and I’m actually saying that seriously.

I’m headed down south this next week (really south, not just Southern Illinois) with this rich, sordid background once again. I’ve found in roaming around Mississippi before that it’s mostly the older white people of the community that get kind of tense and defensive about everything. It’s generally obvious when you strike up a conversation with someone whether or not it’s safe to travel down that road.

This time I’m headed to New Orleans, where the past is even more complicated to begin with and has been made infinitely more messy by the can of worms Katrina opened up. I’m not sure what that’ll actually mean for my trip at all, but I find it ironic that this adventure falls right in the midst of this particular book.