Anatomy of a Dress

“With twenty pages to go until the Charles Atlas ad on the inside back cover… in panels that crowded, jostled, piled one on top of the other, and threatened to burst the margins of the page, the Whermacht, the Luftwaffe, and the Escapist had duked it out. With the Steel Gauntlet out of the picture, it was a fair fight. On the very last page, in a transcendent moment in the history of wishful figments, the Escapist had captured Adolf Hitler and dragged him before a world tribunal. Head finally bowed in defeat and shame, Hitler was sentenced to die for his crimes against humanity. The war was over; a universal era of peace was declared, the imprisoned and persecuted peoples of Europe–among them, implicitly and passionately, the Kavalier family of Prague–were free.”

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

There is something very interesting here when you contrast this scene with Art Spiegelman’s Maus (which I can’t help but do, because I read the two books alongside each other). Because in 1940, Josef Kavalier was a plucky comic book artist using the medium to make a fairy tale, a good-guy-wins narrative to express all of his best aspirations and shining god-like-man qualities (an escape artist who singlehandedly releases Europe from Hitler’s stranglehold) –all of the things that made him want to go on hoping/fighting the good fight/&c.

Whereas in the 1980s, Art Spiegelman used the same medium for memoir, to tell a real story with a horrific end (a mother and father who starve and hide like animals for nearly a decade and wind up fighting tooth and nail for their lives  in a death camp) and a frustrating and tedious afterword (the author’s uneasy relationship with his ailing and difficult father in a world that has moved on from those atrocities).

Two very different impulses at two different historical moments with one common denominator: a versatile two-dimensional medium comprised of rectangular panels and line drawings. Lessons? Well, the medium and its uses has definitely deepened and diversified. Comics have gotten serious. Is this a reflection of a culture sobered by the vagaries of the ensuing 20th century? Or just a tribute to the versatility of the medium and its artists? What about the confessional impulse in graphic novels? (When did the world of the comic transition out of otherworlds modeled loosely on the real world and plant us squarely in the awkward and uncomfortable real world–Gotham City to Bechdel home?) What are the other lessons to be gleaned here?

In the past two days I have worked 30 hours and made $400. (Really haven’t done much else.) Now back to my regularly scheduled life — please pause for caffeination.

Buy. Read. Repeat.

Dear you, the ulcer is acting up again and I have no one to blame but myself. I’m just a calcified perimeter fence girding a cauldron that makes its own light, and breathable air. It’s Episcopal, but anyway

I was thinking of a voice on the radio, whoever she was, one blue mistress resurrected a capella because you are her two fingers and three ounces and how could you do it again, you? I was sick to my stomach, I was

implicated. As if, having broken into your house while you were seeing your kid’s school play and listened to your answering machine in the dark. Having smelled your pillows and stroked your checkbook’s cover. As if, having thought of you and me in bed while the telephone yowled on the back fence: I went still as a rabbit

On a hill of bones. Scorched earth. I am burning, where are my fingers, where is my white.

Oh you, it isn’t all your fault, you mobilize the venom in me. Someways we are all in this together, body forges pulled taut against a godhand. You’re merely mastering your stroke at a craftery. When eyes are the machines of want its best to know which direction is up. I still haven’t learned nuance, I have no one to blame but myself, the truth, left untended, will dissolve my esophagus hour by hour.

Un, I think you’ll agree that the sentence about eyes being the machines of want needs to come out, right now, all of it, nice and easy, line up, hands where I can see them, no funny business.

Update: I would like to amend this post to include inputting all the textual edits I made on my manuscript while waiting to have coffee with Susan Briante this afternoon and a subsequent round of paper edits. Also, I did START my CV, so…put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Did not do much of anything at all today, unfortunately.

PMSing and random errands seem to have consumed my whole day. Not that I wanted to write my CV or finish my Statement of Purpose anyway…

And yet I “could not” write like that because of a gut suspicion that I (and I mean me, I don’t speak generally) could get very lost in the glamour of intellect and aesthetic surface, in a world of idea ungrounded by body: the dirty body, with blood and hungers, its proliferation into other bodies, all of them with feelings and sufferings and psychic lives that often went untended…How else, in the face of apocalypse (socio-political and environmental), can we preserve this existence than to first believe in it, hope for it, emphatically?

GC Waldrep interviews Dana Levin in this month’s Kenyon Review

Take a good hard look at that semi-circle of muscle around the eye in the picture below.

Now squint.

…

I KNOW, RIGHT?!?!

Gray’s ANATOMY, y’all. Medical texts! How do I not own any MEDICAL texts to freak myself out with? ?? ?

i browsed some of your blog yesterday – i am really impressed with how much your poetry has evolved. it’s fucking great.

That’s right, bitches! Now let’s GO TO GRADUATE SCHOOL.