how we read now

A while ago, a friend of mine recommended that I read a book called How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff. It takes place, apparently, during a third world war, so it sort of falls into that apocalyptic/dystopian world sort of fiction that I really love right now. I haven't read it yet, but there's something about the title that always floats into my head lately, and this could have something to do with the fact that I have an inherent sense that everything in my world has changed very recently, and more is about to change. Much is uncertain for me right now, and I think all the time about what my life will be like six months from now. How I live now, indeed.

I've been thinking a lot about grad school too, and where I would like to apply, and what I would like to really focus my studies on. Part of me wants to study life writing. Part of me wants to study dystopias. Part of me wants to study comic books. I get kind of tired of trying to convince people that comics are worth studying, and this will continue until scholarship starts to be generated and people start to realize that comics are actually ridiculously cool (it took me at least a decade to convince my brother of the awesomeness of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but he finally gave it a chance, and he is firmly on my side of the argument now - I believe that the same thing can happen for comics in general). I've already spoken out about how I feel about comics on this blog, and I'm not going to go into it again, but whenever I find someone who loves comics I feel a kind of immediate bond with him/her, and when I find these people in university English departments, I get really excited.

A large part of how I live now is connected to the idea of how I read now. And that has changed significantly in the last five years, since I've been in school. Sometimes I wish I could read a book just for plot, just to see what happens next, just in a casual, layman's kind of way. Not anymore, though. I read and I think of imagery and symbols and reoccurring motifs, and I think about plot development more than I think about the plot itself, I think about reader response and historical contexts and reliable versus unreliable narrators. All of this seems good to me, all of this seems like an indication that I'm really reading now, like I finally understand that reading a book is about so much more than reading a plot. Consequently, I read much more carefully, and much more slowly than I used to. I do it with comics too. I've been reading V for Vendetta for the last four days or so, at work. I've been talking to Dawson Creek about it; he read it about 15 or 20 years ago, he says, and he really liked it, and he wants to know all about what I think of it. And, of course, I think lots of things about it now. But today, my co-worker asked me why it was taking so long for me to read it when there's hardly any text, and then he said, "although I suppose it's kind of fun to look at the pictures." I forget the point of telling this, except my general annoyance at him for not understanding that the illustrations are an integral part of a comic's narrative structure. I mean, how can you understand V for Vendetta without reading the pictures too? What about the frames with no text at all? They don't cease to have meaning. They can't just be removed from the book because their lack of text renders them unimportant.

But this brings me back to the idea of how we read. And the question of how we read, to me, seems inextricably linked to the question of what we read. At the risk of offending a huge demographic, I think a lot of English departments are a bit stuck right now. Imagine you're a fifth-year English major and you're reading Shakespeare's sonnets for the eighteenth time of your degree. I imagine that every single one of us can understand this example. Have you begun to wonder yet if there's a reason that you're reading Shakespeare for the eighteenth time, other than the fact that Shakespeare is in the canon and we always study the history of literature? I'm not suggesting that we should stop studying Shakespeare, but I don't necessarily disagree with the students who question the relevance of studying Shakespeare today. Why do we still study these things? Why do we study Dickens, or Jane Austen, or Wordsworth, or any of the others? How is it relevant to our world, to the way we read now, to what we read now, to the way we approach learning and teaching, and perhaps most importantly, to the way young people understand and use language today? English departments are shrinking, at least in part for this very reason, because people are starting to have trouble seeing exactly why studying Dickens is going to help them understand their world.

Part of the reason I love comics is that they challenge the way we read. Yeah, actually, take something that hardly has any words and call it literary, and that is a challenge to what the word literary means. I'm not saying that comics are the answer, but how can we get people to start seeing the importance of literature again? And how can we deny that students seem to want something different from their English departments when courses in Harry Potter, science fiction, and Game of Thrones are packed full while courses in the Romantics are stuttering on with an enrolment of four or five students? I remember encountering this same debate when I was going to photography school, and digital happened. No one saw the need to teach dark room work anymore, and people didn't seem to want to learn about exposure, because if an image doesn't turn out well, it can just be fixed in Photoshop now. But working in the darkroom and learning about light teaches you about so many fundamentally important aspects of making images - basic things like contrast, colour balance and saturation, quality and colour of light, movement and depth of field, all of the things that essentially allow you to be in control of the image you're making right from the start, from its origin - in the same way that people who want to understand literature really must understand it from its origin. But the cost of film and chemical-based photo instruction became prohibitive, and no one in the industry used it anymore, and funnily enough, no one wants to study medieval literature anymore either. What do we do about this? Is literature of the past facing its own apocalyptic ending, like the world as we know it in Rosoff's novel?

I want to do something that is going to take literature studies forward, if I decide to study literature in grad school. But I've spent so much time studying the past over the last five years, that I don't know how to study the present. What's happening in books today? What are they saying? How do they work? Do I need to learn how to read all over again?

So, books are what I love

Can I say for the record that I'm a little bit tired of cops?

Here's the thing - it's not that I don't like cops. I mean, sure, when they're being cops, they're jerks. Of course they are - how can they not be? They have to be and I get it. And okay, Mounties have this bizarre sort of male chauvinist thing going on, it's quite disconcerting. I think maybe it has something to do with the military-like quality of Depot. Never in all the years of my life combined have so many men winked at me as they have in the last year since I started at Depot. But this is sort of the point, too. I mean, my job is both real easy and real boring, and I do a lot of homework while I'm on shift at ye olde Trading Post, and these men either wink at me or look at me like I'm a weirdo because I'm reading books (some of which are classics, and they can't seem to understand that someone would want to read something like that for fun). These are not uneducated people - many, many of them have university degrees, some of them have worked as teachers, others have owned businesses or been artists or mechanics or military men. But they don't read.

All of the cadets are super nice to me - 97% of them are just super nice in general, so nice. There's one cadet who talks to me about books. One. And he's finished his training and heading to Mile 0 of the Alaska Highway next week. In my head, I refer to this cadet as Dawson Creek, because that's where he's going, and I refuse to learn their real names or let them learn mine. It's best this way, do trust me.

Aside: talking to me about books is pretty much the only certain way to my heart.

I'm finding myself at a crossroads. I mentioned in the last post that my degree is finished very soon. There's been lots of encouragement from my professors, lots of recommendations that I carry on and go to grad school. One prof even told me that I could go to any top-notch grad school I want. Whether or not this is true, I have no idea. What I do know is that I haven't applied to grad school (this is because I didn't know if I would be done my degree in the spring or the fall, and I also have the Imposter Syndrome), so I'm not going in the fall, and that means that I have a year of being outside of a university environment, where it's okay for me to be smart and read classic literature and other stuff for fun. And so I'll be working at Depot at least until the end of summer, where nothing that I do is valued, and where it's better for me to smile pretty than it is to be smart because the chaplain tells me that if I ever want to get married (presumably he means to a cop), I'm really going to have to dumb myself down (yes - he really said that to me). It means that I won't have anyone to talk to about books, because I won't be at school and most of my academically inclined friends are going to grad school, and the only cadet who pretends to be interested in what I do is going to the middle of nowhere. I find this disheartening. Books are what I love.

Dear Dawson Creek,
   
     I will miss your pretend interest in my academics.

                              Sincerely,
                                    Blonde girl at Trading Post


Dear University of Regina,
   
     You are a little bit of a disaster and sometimes you look at me like I'm a dummy, but what I am going to do without you?

                               Sincerely,
                                     Student 2002*****

Soap and Bubbles

It's been ages. You can tell it's been ages. I don't know if anyone's reading anymore, but I feel the need to keep blogging.

It's summer now, and I dream of writing poems and playing the flute and having endless amounts of time in which to do these things. Instead, I'm taking the last class of my degree and doing poorly in it (possibly because I am dreaming of writing poems and playing the flute) and I'm working full time, and all of this... Well, you know. That's life.

I recently defended my undergraduate thesis. I wonder if this is what I should expect for the rest of my academic career? It was a tremendous amount of work. Like, 8 months worth of research and writing, it was nearly 50 pages, and then I defended it, and a couple of hours later its worth had been determined and I had a mark, and all I could think was... "That's it? That's all I get. 8 months of my life, and that's the end?" Well, that just happened. So anti-climactic. I don't know what I was expecting, to be honest, but it involved some sort of hoopla, some sort of celebration, some sort of acknowledgement that I just bloody well did this. No one even bought me a beer. *Sigh*

Sometimes I don't know if I'll keep writing, now that I have to enter the world and get a real job and pay my rent all by myself and pay back all of these loans. How do I reconcile the fact that the only thing I've even been semi-good at in my whole life will not in any way help me pay the bills? I'm 2.5 weeks away from having a degree in literature and then I'll keep selling shoe polish and soap to cadets for $12 an hour. What's my next step? Will I fall into that bubble that everyone seems to fall into and find a job that leaves me feeling unsatisfied and wearing khaki pants and collared shirts?

Oh, god.

Very Last Minute Steps...

Well, here it is, 2:30 in the morning. Hello, 2:30 a.m. We haven't seen each other since I wrote the paper on Nazi aesthetic policies (it kept me up all night).

I like the middle of the night. There's something sort of... I don't want to use the word peaceful, but it's the only one coming to mind. Tranquil. Calm. Solitary. A very learned person that I know once said that there are no true synonyms, and I like the idea of that and think it's true. There is a difference between tranquil and calm. And the middle of the night is quiet. My asshole neighbours are sleeping, and the only sounds in my flat are the murmured tappings of my fingers on computer keys and the slightest rustling of the liquorice package as I remove another bright red stick... The middle of the night is good for writing.

I am tired now, though. I am still trying to finish the paper that was due on Monday (for a while I thought that I would write the entire thing in caps lock, or maybe wingdings - honestly what is the purpose of the wingding font? there are no letters here, and who has time to work out this ingenious code of symbols? am i missing something?) and while my creative writing portfolio and artist's statement are finished, my story does not yet have a title and that concerns me a little. Something about apples? Something about strings? In my last packet of stories, one of the comments was that one of my titles was too postmodern... I don't really know if that was a bad thing, but the "too" that modified the "postmodern" might indicate so... In which case, I don't really know what that means. I'm not sure why the postmodern is bad. Lately I love the postmodern. Différence.

Oh, look at that. Now it's 3 a.m.

Time for that middle of the night burst of genius.

Last Minute Steps to Pathways That Lead Through Trees

I'm procrastinating. There's a paper I need to write, about the nature of tragedy in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. I have an intense dislike of Willy Loman; I think he's a dummy. I mean, maybe it's not entirely his fault, but he is. He's a dummy. And he's not tragic. I need that to fill 8-10 pages.

Whenever I am faced with writing something that I don't want to write, I end up doing one of two things: I clean (my flat is pretty tidy when there are papers due) or I think about all the other things that I would rather be writing. Sometimes both. When I have to read something that I don't really want to read, I think about all the other things I'd rather be reading. It's like that; I know I'm not alone in this. For example, right now I am dreaming about Christmas vacation, because I want to read comics. I literally can't wait until finals are over, so I can read comics. And write poems! I kind of want to write poems again... (By the way, there's a link on the right side of the page for CV2, which is the journal that just accepted some of Cassidy's poetry. Check it out, because they tell you the themes of the upcoming issues so that you can customize your submissions. The journal is poetry-only, but I think most of us write poems too...)

I'm so going to read this over the holidays - it's
entirely done with watercolours. So cool.

I've been a little out of touch lately, with what's been going on in the world outside the university. I don't even know if there are awesome new comics coming out! I haven't even clicked on the links on my own blog for weeks and weeks now (and it looks like I missed a few deadlines... ) but now that it's the end of the semester and I still need to talk about those other guys who are also cool, and as I am procrastinating at the moment, I'll talk about Drawn and Quarterly, top comics publisher extraordinaire.

This is my brother's publisher. Have I ever talked about my bro's book on this blog? I don't think so. It's cool, it's historical fiction, called The Klondike. It is naturally about the Klondike gold rush. He did the entire thing with a fountain pen tip and a bottle of ink, which I think is amazing, because it's over 300 pages. It took like, five years. That's pretty much all I'm going to say about it. D&Q is really cool; they publish all the cool comics in Canada, mostly stuff that is considered to be literary, like Seth's stuff, and Chester Brown's. Other artists: Daniel Clowes, Matt Forsythe (notorious for a distinct lack of words in his stories...), Jillian Tamaki, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Shigero Mizuki, Kate Beaton, Lynda Barry, and Guy Delisle. And they are based in Quebec, so they have a really strong base of French comic artists too. I think they recently got my bro a French publisher, like, a publisher in France, which is pretty cool. (Le Klondike?) What else can I say about D&Q? They harness new talent, are preposterously supportive (which I think I am discovering about smaller presses), and publish high quality work, stuff that takes comics so far past fanboy superhero stuff, stuff that elevates comics to a whole new level. I mean, superhero stuff is all right (I have a special soft spot for Hellboy comics, which is a different kind of hero, I think), but comics are so versatile, and D&Q is so good for the industry. I mean, that's what I think, anyway.

My bro's comic

By the way, Matt Forsythe and Jillian Tamaki also have blogs and websites that I've linked to in the cool guys list. I've already talked about Jillian, in a previous post, but Matt is an interesting sort of creature. He's got degrees in Journalism and he lived in Korea for a while (in his book Ojingogo, the only words are Korean characters), and he does a whole series of comic strips on one of his pages that are about a comics class he teaches at an elementary school. People who do comics are interesting. I really like his art style a lot. (Click on the link. Do it.)

Recent illustration Forsythe did for The Walrus magazine,
of one of my favourite bands,  Arcade Fire.

End procrastination?

Sunday at Depot

Today it was red serge everywhere, high brown boots, stetson hats, brown gloves, puffy pants with yellow stripes down the sides. Troop graduation. Families of cadets everywhere. A desperate need for a badge wallet (among other things), because tomorrow, suddenly they'll have badges. My co-worker recommends that one of the cadets buy the flashlight that runs on double A batteries, because where she's going, lithium ions will be hard to come by, and the other flashlight we sell runs on those. We can't sell her the rechargeable flashlight because it's bigger and her waist is too small, and with a flashlight on her belt, she won't have room for her gun. She needs a pocket flashlight. Already she is having trouble finding room for an extra pair of handcuffs. I think to myself, "I could never do this."

It's a busy day. In between customers I pick up the very old and damaged copy of Russian literary theory that I am trying to wade through for my honours proposal, and I get nowhere. I keep having to reread the previous four sentences, and I make little headway. The cadets look at the title of my book, The Dialogic Imagination, and they shake their heads. They tell me that they're so glad they're not in university. I tell them that this is awesome, it's Einstein's theory of relativity applied to the continuum of time and space in a literary text. Their eyes glaze over. I sell them a copy of Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement. They'll need it.

Our worlds are different.

Lalala Human Steps

However, in good standard fashion, I think I will post a video about the body as well.

You know how we've been talking about writing the body, and the way the body is used to say particular stuff in a story? Well, here is that made literal - the body telling the story, i.e. Dance, the body as narrative.

I don't really understand dance, nor do I understand how I am meant to interpret it, the things I am supposed to look for in order to find the story in the dance, but one of my bestest fwends is a dancer, and he showed me this video - Wow. Just check it out.

Part of me has always wished that I could dance, but I'm clumsy and chubby; I tell my stories other ways. Still, you have to admire the skill here.

Is writing ever like a dance? I wonder.