October 25, 2018 Arts & Culture The Destabilizing Desire of Julie Doucet By Anne Elizabeth Moore From Dirty Plotte: The Complete Julie Doucet, courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly. It’s impossible to convey, to anyone who didn’t stumble across the stuff on their own, the evanescent but ferocious intensity to be found in the photocopied page of any zine or comic from the late eighties and early nineties. Self-publishing in those days showed you, the reader, a culture being ripped apart, at the seams and straight through the middle, while on fire, the raw guts of oppression and abuse and injustice exposed and left behind to rot while you watched with a beer from a spot near the stage. The French Canadian artist and comics creator Julie Doucet invented a character, named Julie Doucet, who let you tag along as she did exactly that, can in hand, enjoying the show. Starting in 1987 in the pages of the fanzine Dirty Plotte and then continuing on through a comic-book series of the same name as well as several graphic novels, Julie-the-character gallivanted semi-innocently about the club, the city, the country (any country), concerned primarily with her own pleasure as the Berlin Wall crumbled somewhere behind her, a sign that the cultural undoing you felt in your bones had tangible political effects. The daring adventures of Julie Doucet’s smart, hot, disheveled, and sometimes rageful imaginary self just goofing off or engaging in semierotic play with an array of mammalian coconspirators have seared themselves into the minds of a generation of readers. These fanciful images from a world in flux pointed the way for creators seeking inspiration from nocturnal visions and creators with stories to share from their own experiences. Not to mention creators—women and nonbinary ones, in particular—who hadn’t had impetus to imagine themselves in the creative role before coming across Doucet’s work. Among other merits, Doucet’s strips gifted the field of comics with the hope that creators who are not male might eventually see mainstream acceptance. I can’t stress enough how important this is. Yet I admit that when I’m asked about important comics, or the importance of comics, the signature scenes from Doucet’s oeuvre—Julie the man, Julie at a club, Julie hopping into a tub to scrub her cooter, Julie in flagrante with her elephant lover—are not the images that immediately pop into my head. The panel that springs to mind instead is a quiet, domestic scene. Julie-the-character plays a minor role while her various home goods—discarded beer bottles, half-used condiments, an iron, forks, lamps, et cetera—carry the action. The panel comes toward the end of one of her many dream comics, a plethora of narratives in which the renowned creator presumably lays bare the machinations of her subconscious mind. These are often transcribed in gruesome, delightful detail: Julie as a gunslinger dies alone in a saloon. Julie is upset that she can’t find a decent brassiere at a basement warehouse sale (clearly a dream; Julie-the-artist didn’t wear bras at the time). Julie turns into a man overnight and—lucky her—meets up with Micky Dolenz of the Monkees and makes a sex date with him. The very definition of dreamy! Read More
October 25, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: I Was No Good at Survival By Kaveh Akbar In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. ©Ellis Rosen Hi Poets, My husband and I decided to be friends instead of married a week ago, and although I’m confident it’s the right decision, and am mostly cheerful, I am also having brief flashes of terror about, you know, Tinder, and having to decide on what to do with an entire Sunday on my own or what I really want for lunch, for just me. Do you have any hopeful poems about the beginnings of things, or what makes a person and how to find it out? I would like to hear them if you did. Yours, Hopeful Read More
October 24, 2018 Look Scenes Dealing with Walking Dead, Torture, Vampires By The Paris Review In midtwentieth-century America, the appetite for comics was astounding. As many as a hundred million books were sold each month. Whereas the comics of the forties starred talking animals and muscle-bound superheroes, the fifties saw the rise of comics that grew darker and stranger. One publisher, Entertaining Comics (EC), altered the landscape of American pop culture with its twisted, vividly illustrated forays into genre: science fiction, horror, mysteries, suspense, war stories. Readers devoured EC’s gruesome tales, but the golden age of crypt-keepers and space dinosaurs was short-lived. In 1954, the Comics Magazine Association of America—besieged by obscenity trials, comic-book burnings, and claims that comics caused juvenile delinquency—established the infamous Comics Code. One criterion of the Code prohibited “scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism.” “Tales from the Crypt: The Revolutionary Art of MAD and EC Comics,” showing at the Society of Illustrators until October 27, collects more than seventy comic-book pages of pre-Code, ghoulish gore. Feast your eyes, and may your juvenile delinquency be long and prosperous. Johnny Craig, The Vault of Horror, issue no. 30 cover, ink on paper, April–May 1953. From the collection of Eugene Park and Anna Copland. Read More
October 24, 2018 Arts & Culture “Why Do You Write Political Stories?” By Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah I was in college when Trayvon Martin was murdered. I created an anonymous pamphlet, an artistic response to the atrocity. His killing deserved our outrage. Late one night, I scattered five hundred copies of the pamphlet around campus. I went to bed expecting unrest, a revival, a conversation, anything. When I got up later that day, nothing happened. That summer, I was at a barbecue in Riverside Park when Trayvon’s murderer was acquitted. I remember getting the notification on my phone. I felt exposed, fragile. I had been partying just a minute before. Years later, writing “The Finkelstein 5,” the story that now opens my first book, Friday Black, I tried to translate the ways in which the justice system is often a cruel joke for black Americans. I wanted to express the feeling of always being perceived as a threat by so many. The completion of this story was the closest I’ve ever come to a breakthrough. It was the second time I felt that I wanted people to read what I’d written, even if my name was not attached. I’m interested in the ways we dehumanize each other. I’m interested in our capacity for good, despite the insidious hatred and fear all around us. All the stories in Friday Black, including “The Finkelstein 5,” were tough to write. And yet, in that space of difficulty and fear, I found necessity and purpose. Read More
October 24, 2018 Arts & Culture Fighting with Czesław Miłosz By Anthony Madrid Czesław Miłosz. It is a blessing for a poet to have a Great Poet to fight with, forever. I don’t mean a Great Poet one merely despises. That’s nothing. It has to be someone you partly love, partly revere, but who lets you down over and over and over and makes you want to scream. The Great Poet has to be one from whom you are continuously learning, even if most of the time what you’re getting is a kind of cautionary tale. He or she has to be someone you can never get rid of. You keep going back. Does everybody remember Ezra Pound’s little epigram about his deal with Walt Whitman? Here, I can do it from memory: A Pact I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman. I have detested you long enough. I come to you like a grown child Who has had a pigheaded father. I am old enough now to make friends. It was you that broke the new wood; Now is a time for carving. We have one sap and one root: Let there be commerce between us. Get it? Pound couldn’t shake Whitman. Whitman got on his nerves, and that was never gonna change. But yer daddy is yer daddy. Maybe he and you can team up, after all, as long as everybody understands the new terms … Read More
October 23, 2018 Arts & Culture Toward Creating a Trans Literary Canon By RL Goldberg This fall, I’m teaching a course titled “Masculinity in Literature.” The small seminar is attended by men, all in their twenties, earning their college degrees while incarcerated. Before we began our discussion of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues—perhaps the only “canonical” trans book, if such a thing as a trans canon can be said to exist—we generated a partial list of gender terminology: transgender, transsexual, agender, two-spirit, trans woman, bigender, trans man, FTM, MTF, boi, femme, soft butch, cisgender. The students already knew, at least in rough contours, how these terms were used. They weren’t contentious. What was contentious: man and woman, and the course’s undergirding premise that reading texts about masculinity that have nothing to do with cisgender, heterosexual, white men can teach us a good deal about masculinities. As the discussion progressed, our collective sense of what determines “masculinity” and “maleness” decalcified. One student grew impatient. “Words have to mean something,” he said. “Being a man means something.” He wasn’t frustrated with the abstract possibilities of fluidity, with the notion that some people are trans, or with the idea that identification is not a given. Rather, his concern was that, if gender identity is mutable for others, then what does that mean for him, an adult man who has never questioned his gender? That is, if we refuse the idea of biological essentialism—if “men” and “women” are more than the sum of genitals, secondary sex characteristics, and chromosomes—what does that do to the definition of his own maleness? On October 21, the New York Times published a piece titled, “‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration.” The thrust of the article: the Trump administration may move toward defining gender as biological, immutable, and essentially determined by genitalia at birth, and transgender people could face a terrifying curtailing of civil protections and recognition as a result. As many people have said, such a move misunderstands the distinctions between gender and sex, and is viciously mean-spirited, a pathetic attempt to shore up support from a base whose hatred of “identity politics” manifests, paradoxically, as the inability to disconnect from them. In some ways, the redefinition under consideration by the Trump administration is what my student was arguing for: a coherent, unswerving, unshakable definition of gender that leaves no room for debate or deviance. You’re either a girl or you’re a boy, and how you feel about that is immaterial. Those words, and those roles, are left unexamined. But that’s not how my conversation with this student ended. He didn’t define me out of his reality, or choose to see the inconvenience of my trans body, my self, as a challenge to him and to the way he has, for the last two decades, understood the world. He tried, instead, to work toward a definition of gender by which our different truths wouldn’t invalidate one another. Lately I’ve been thinking about a corpus of texts that centers on trans writing. I’m apprehensive about the limitations inherent in canonization, mainly canon’s inadequate literary representation of difference as tokenism, and the prohibitive inaccessibility for those who can’t afford education at the highest levels. So it’s not a canon exactly, but a corpus. It’s something more like a body: mutable, evolving, flexible, open, exposed, exposing. It’s the opposite of erasure; it’s an inscription. Here are eleven books that have meant a great deal to me as I’ve tried to learn about both my own transness and experiences less familiar to me. I hope they might be recognized, read, and shared—which is to say, never erased. Read More