a feral child raised by librarians, apologizing to lampposts

[starlady]

First off, I still have three two Dreamwidth invite codes. Leave a comment to this post, or send me a private message on LJ with your email, if you would like one. Slight preference will be given to mutual LJ or RL friends, but I think on Wednesday morning I will release my codes into the wild if no one claims them before then.

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So I went up to New York yesterday for the "International Graphic Novelists" segment of the PEN World Voices Festival. Over the course of three panels I heard Neil Gaiman, Emmanuel Guibert, David Polonsky, Shaun Tan, and Tatsumi Yoshihiro speak about comics and their work. It was quite an interesting set of panels (though I was sad that there didn't seem to be much crossover, and that I forgot my copy of The Graveyard Book to be signed, and that Kinokuniya didn't have any of Tatsumi's work in Japanese), though I was sort of miffed that out of the nine people total who appeared on the stage, only one of the interviewers and the interpreter were female. Alison Bechdel and Fun Home were name-checked in the second panel, but come on, where's the gender equity? Comics aren't just by (or for) men.

• Both Gaiman and Tatsumi admitted that in some ways they miss the old days when comics were hated and feared; as Gaiman said, "there's a lot of freedom when you're creating in the gutter." Not, however, that the state of gekiga in Japan is really much better these days; when asked about it, Tatsumi attributed it to the lack of a readers' revolution in manga consumption, and lamented the freedom that the "rambunctiousness" of the weekly magazines afforded before their demise in the 70s.
• While the subject of politics in comics, and in art in general, was more danced around than addressed, Gaiman did say that he thought that "At any point that you are saying things that other people do not want said--writing about people others don't want written about--it's absolutely political." Tan and most of the rest said that they thought that any time you write about people, the political is always there, but Tan said that he thought the responsibility of the artist is honesty, and that politics flows from that. Tan also said that the act of drawing is about defamiliarizing yourself with the everyday, to take nothing for granted, which he finds very similar to the immigrant experience. David Polonsky remarked that the artist's job is to make sense of things that most people only feel.
• Tatsumi's monumental manga memoir 漫画漂流 has just been published in English as A Drifting Life (flipped, unfortunately, but otherwise gorgeous), but when asked he admitted that he changed the protagonist's name and the names of people in his life so that he could be completely honest about the events of his life. He cited the Japanese 私小説 (I-novel) tradition as precedent for this, but I was reminded of what Guibert said about biography (he's done graphic novel biographies of two his friends), which is that in a hidden way it is autobiography, since it's filtered through the biographer.
• Shaun Tan said some of the most interesting things of the afternoon, to my mind, when he explicitly situated his work in the space between graphic novels and picture books--his wordless graphic novel The Arrival is printed like a picture book, but has no words (so that it would be universal, he said, and to lengthen the viewing experience) and uses panel layouts at times--which he said he lifted from The Snowman. He also said that he was inspired by photo albums, which tell a choronogical story but lack narration, which one fills in as one looks through them, so that the story resides somewhere between you and the photos themselves.
• Similarly, Guibert said he was inspired to create The Photographer after noting the similarity between panel layouts and contact sheets of undeveloped photos, though, as he said, when photographs and drawings are juxtaposed (as he does in his work), "there's always one trying to kill the other."

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They sold out of The Arrival right before I got to the sale table, so I bought Shaun Tan's new book Tales from Outer Suburbia for him to sign instead. I read it while on my way home on the train (side note: I ♥ trains so much), and I was utterly charmed. I've liked Tan since I first encountered his illustrations in Pretty Monsters, but he himself gives Kelly Link a run for her money in his strategic deployment of oddness, in his twisting reality just a bit differently from what we know. I'd say that TfOS is suitable for older children (8+ maybe? I don't know about children), since one of its stories, "The Amnesia Machine," is the most trenchant two-page criticism of George W. Bush's administration (or of John Howard's government, since Tan is Australian) that I've ever encountered, and its mordant humor only heightens its creepy effect.

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I also went with some friends to the redhead, which is an amazing (and pretty decently priced) New Southern restaurant on the east side just south of Union Square. The fried chicken was glorious, my cocktail quite tasty, and the bacon peanut brittle pretty damn delicious. Check it out if you get the chance.

Comments

[dancinglights]

Er, hello. I found you sort of wandering at ease in dreamwidth profile and community pages, was intrigued by your username, and now have found all sorts of wonderful things about books I think I could use as suggestions for more reading. Since your profile mentions such, I'm adding you for updates. And more reading. :)

[starlady]

Welcome! I'm always looking for more people to add to the book discussion, glad to have you. ^^

[aquaeri]

Tan also said that the act of drawing is about defamiliarizing yourself with the everyday, to take nothing for granted, which he finds very similar to the immigrant experience.

Wow, that comment resonates with me. Not that I can draw, but that even in my everyday life I often find myself looking at my everyday surroundings like a visitor might (I'm a Denmark -> Australia migrant). And I could never explain why it seemed like such a natural pattern to fall into, and this might be the reason.

[starlady]

You see why I thought he was the most interesting speaker. I was really, really glad to have had the chance to have heard him talk, since he's Australian-Malaysian Chinese and lives in Australia, and thus doesn't get to the States very often.

I lived in Japan for a year, with a middling language ability, and his comment really resonated with my frequent experience of having to look up really basic words that I'd never learned in order to carry out everyday tasks that I would never think twice about in the States.

[http://users.livejournal.com/my_wanderlust_/]

I can has dreamwidth?

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

You can has Dreamwidth! Should I use your Facebook email, or a different address?

[(Anonymous)]

Seriously bacon peanut brittle?

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah bacon peanut brittle. Though I was expecting something like peanut brittle--as in the slightly sticky candy that comes in bar form--and it was really something like sweet/salted roasted peanuts with bacon in it. Really good, but not quite what I pictured in my mind.

[socair.livejournal.com]

Can I try this dreamwidth thing? (if other people are more passionate about it that is OK-- I'm just curious!)

[http://users.livejournal.com/my_wanderlust_/]

Facebook is just fine :)

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Surely!

Should I use your umich address, or do you want to message me a different email?

[socair.livejournal.com]

The umich one is fine so long as the program doesn't depend on me keeping the same e-mail account Forever And Ever (as my umich account will expire after I graduate). If it does I can e-mail you a different one. :-)

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Nope, you can change it as soon as you've set up your account. Right, invite sent!

P.S. This is a really good introductory post: http://rydra-wong.dreamwidth.org/178823.html

[socair.livejournal.com]

Got it, thank you! :o)

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

You're welcome!

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Sent, and have an introductory post: http://rydra-wong.dreamwidth.org/178823.html

[hisui-ryoshi.livejournal.com]

So dreamwidth is looking better and better. If you still have a code I'd love to get one. my e-mail is rwynslow@gmail.com.

You talk about all this good food and it makes me hungry, or it just makes me want to visit the east coast.

I like your observation on the graphic novel pannel. I don't know why it's so hard to get women on these things. More to add to my reading list though. Thanks.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Based on my entirely unscientific observations in DW's "dreamchasers" community, I'd say that the DW userbase seems to be skewing older than the LJ median, and a bit more...I don't want to say serious, but calmer. Hopefully the invite code system will keep out the riffraff.

I make myself hungry too.

Yeah, I don't know, the shelves are full of comics by women, it doesn't seem too much to expect that one out of five be female.

Invite sent!

[http://users.livejournal.com/my_wanderlust_/]

For reference, can you clarify what the difference between 'subscribes' vs 'gives access' is?

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Subscribing is putting someone's journal on your reading page; giving access is allowing them to see your locked posts.

[hisui-ryoshi.livejournal.com]

Calmer would be nice. I imagine the calm won't last forever though. I'm looking forward to the add free, and what I think are better organizational systems.

Ah yes hunger. It is dinner time, but yet nothing in my fridge looks like I want to cook it. What a surprise.

Thanks again.