The Latest:

2
Over the next few months we agreed on the topic of film language and drew up a list of important texts on film history and theory all dealing with the question of film as a kind of language or grammar. Another graduate student, Matt Rager, also expressed interest in joining us, and so, last August we began meeting once a week to discuss our readings.

from R. John Williams’ article on “What It’s Like to be James Franco’s Professor” at Slate.

What is interesting to me is this study of film as a grammar or language, which is something I wrote in my new introduction to my expanded thesis. A lot of the scholarly work regarding comics studies refers to the idea of using techniques from film and other cultural studies in critiquing comics, but like Douglas Wolk, I can’t see that working. Film and comics are two aesthetically different things. Film is meant to be shown on a big screen that does not have a rewind button, you can’t spend time on a singular shot as you can on a comics panel. Though in real time, in production, the composing of those shots or panels takes quite a bit of time. That is not to say that they’re completely different because most media like film, comics, television, literature, and art all have something that can relate to each other.

Regardless, the assigned reading list is interesting to me. I also like the idea of Franco publishing his first novel through Amazon’s new publishing tool, even though I’m not really sure whether I’m interested in reading it. It’s a library book, I would say. (Can I get it on my Nook? I’m guessing no.)    

James Franco
comics studies
grad school
douglas wolk
3

Dress and Writing Students.

At the reading Wednesday night I began to think about the MFAers in the audience, particularly their style. Somewhat disheveled and freshly rolled out bed, or rolled out from behind their desks at home where they no doubt take coffee intravenously, and shoved suddenly into the public with little time to prepare themselves. They wear stuff that shows that they don’t care, that the words are the most important thing and who cares what you look like. They wear their least-stained undershirt and some hoody and come to class.

How do writers dress? Is there a specific look that writers share? I think in this setting, those that are there to learn, they dress like that because their learning and their writing is all that they have time to think about. They’re saying, Yes, I’m not doing anything else but writing and learning about writing, and I don’t care if I’m wearing a cardigan and the same More Cowbell t-shirt every other day. Sure it is important to be comfortable but also it’s also important to be presentable. If you are going to be introducing a well-respected writer who is wearing jeans, nice shoes, a button down and a blazer, you should compliment that person with not just your words (let’s be clear: that is the most important part), but the person themselves by dressing like you respect what they do and dressing decently shows that you take this honor seriously. Wearing a long sleeved undershirt, jeans, and a pair of slip on Cole Haans does not show this.

What I’m really saying is not some bourgeois take on dress code but respect. Respect for yourself and respect for those you are learning from and though it pains me to say this as a t-shirt and jeans guy, how you present yourself does mean something especially when you don’t do it that much. So what is it about writing students? Why this expression of dressing like they don’t go out in public and have no idea what to wear? Once upon a time someone said to me that I dress like a writer, and I raised an eyebrow. What does a writer dress like? The shallow response may be something like these students. Maybe this has something to do with dating a girl who comes from finance for a long time, but, for me, I think dressing decently means I want people to get the idea that I respect this person and this environment when I walk into the room. Wearing a t-shirt and jeans and sneakers while introducing a well-respected writer will probably get some looks like who is this schlub who can’t even button a shirt and wear non-slip-on shoes? I’m not saying it’s right, it’s just how it is, and this comes from someone who once almost got in a fight with a bouncer for not allowing me into shitty Dorrians on the Upper East Side because I was wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Have you been to that place?

There is a certain level of enjoyment in dressing up when you don’t do it often enough, I think. It makes it feel special and is second only to the writing itself; caring how you look and respecting others by trying to look and write your best goes a long way in actually gaining that respect.

grad school
how do writers dress?
10
What for Nietzsche was a necessary but consistently overlooked feature in all philosophy became in his own case, through a lifetime of effort, a self-conscious achievement: he showed that writing is perhaps the most important part of thinking. And since he also believed that thinking “is an action”, we might with some appropriateness attribute to him the hyperbolic view which this book aims to investigate, that writing is also the most important part of living.
from Nietzsche: Life as Literature by Alexander Nehamas. We’re reading this book for faculty study group and it is the first time I’ve read anything regarding Nietzsche, but I’m finding it a great and edifying read as it forces me to think below the surface level of things and consider a deeper meaning. Since then I’ve picked up the Portable Nietzsche, which is just as ridiculous as it sounds, and it is full of great stuff that helps me dig below the skin-level of things and hopefully improves what I’m working on. All of these things give me a newfound energy to constantly write and that I’m not doing enough, which is tough. 
grad school
nietzsche
7
[This is from my presentation in my Critical Theory class this semester on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory and how it applies to Daredevil #1. I don’t know—it might be of interest, but it is pretty dry stuff so probably not.] Harvey Pekar, the creator of American Splendor said, “Words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.” Some of you may bristle at this because in your mind words with pictures take away from both art forms. Pictures do not allow you to use your imagination, and when coupled with words you can’t create your own word-image. This is a dilemma that most readers can not get over regarding comics. However that is not the case in presentation. In the script, a comic book writer describes the story that goes into the panels and the artist portrays that story, but the words that appear in the finished comic are usually first person and if they are not they enhance what is happening in the art, describing what is going through the character’s head, leaving the job of laying down that narrative or story action to the artist. A good writer almost never reiterates anything that is happening on the panel, the words in the panel instead build on the image of the action. Comics are an impossible medium, or should be. It marries words with pictures and yet doesn’t take away from either instead the two exist to do something fantastic. Pen Award winner and Marvel Comics writer Matt Fraction said in a presentation at San Diego Comic Con in July 2010: “Make no mistake: comics is absolutely alchemy. When you take language and drawing and synthesize them into comics, when they are observed by someone, you inflict meaning upon those images and you comprehend those pictures…when you inflict an order on those two things it is absolutely magic and the reader has to become a willing co-conspirator.” The form only works with you accepting that it does work. It works in dialogism as well as the carnivalesque, as Bakhtin would have put it. In “Discourse in the Novel” it offers Bakhtin’s most elaborate analysis of dialogism and its relationship to style in the novel. Between any word and its object, between any word and its speaking subject between any word and its active respondent(s), Bakhtin argues there exists an ‘elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object and this dialogically agitated and tension filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents’ that weaves in and out of discourse in complex patterns finds its most artistic expression in the novel.” Further, “These heterogeneous stylistic unities upon entering the novel combine to form a structured artistic system, and are subordinated to the higher stylistic unity of the work as a whole, a unity that cannot be identified with any single one of the unities subordinated to it.” How does this work for a comic book? The thing is Bakhtin’s theory kind of works with any form of literature. Specifically his theory of the carnivalesque bringing us closer to the comic book medium. This method details the idea that something fantastic or out of the norm can liberate assumptions of a dominating style through humor and chaos. For Bakhtin, carnivalesque turns the world upside down where human ideas and individual truths can be contested by fantastic elements. Now, I don’t know about you but I think a comic book definitely does that sort of thing. This is where Daredevil #1 comes in. The bonus story I presented on was a ten-page insert to the main issue. As a reminder, Daredevil the character is a blind lawyer named Matt Murdoch who lost his vision in an accident with an old man and a barrel of toxic waste. Though the toxic waste killed his vision it enhanced his other senses giving him a bat-like radar sense. In the above double-page spread, written by Mark Waid and drawn by Marcos Martin, [sorry for the lack of words, I was thinking about scanning the page, but I didn’t want to step into the legality of that and my scanner doesn’t get the entire page anyway] we get the full scope of Murdoch’s abilities as he and his firm’s partner Foggy Nelson, (yes, really, that’s the characters name) walk the streets to visit Murdoch’s father’s grave to celebrate his birthday. It is in this character’s fantastic perception that we witness the way Matt views the world in the carnivalesque tradition. By smell, he prevents his [non-disabled friend] Foggy from stepping in dog shit, they curse out the cab that is over the line in the cross walk, he hears the guy swearing on his cell phone, smells the Fedex truck leaking gas, hears the sound of the pigeon flying away, and smells the bike-riding blonde’s shampoo. In doing something we all do as New Yorkers every day, Waid and Martin are able to enhance it with Daredevil’s abilities creating a new way of comprehending reality. Within this culture and definition of carnivalesque is the fantastic, the fictional, that does not quite belong in our reality. That’s what comic books are: they are something impossible—two things together that shouldn’t work but do in the reader’s eye, demanding that you take a part in it, to be a co-conspirator as Fraction said. That is the magic ingredient you have to accept that makes the entire thing work, because not only does it work through precision of word and fantastic image but it forces you the reader to engage in something impossible but is without a doubt representative of human emotion and at the core of good fiction. As David Foster Wallace said, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” And that is exactly what Daredevil #1 does and Bakhtin’s theory verifies it. The comic book can teach us something about ourselves through these impossible beings like Daredevil and enhance our every day lives with something that is in no way our reality.  

[This is from my presentation in my Critical Theory class this semester on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory and how it applies to Daredevil #1. I don’t know—it might be of interest, but it is pretty dry stuff so probably not.]

Harvey Pekar, the creator of American Splendor said, “Words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.” Some of you may bristle at this because in your mind words with pictures take away from both art forms. Pictures do not allow you to use your imagination, and when coupled with words you can’t create your own word-image. This is a dilemma that most readers can not get over regarding comics. However that is not the case in presentation. In the script, a comic book writer describes the story that goes into the panels and the artist portrays that story, but the words that appear in the finished comic are usually first person and if they are not they enhance what is happening in the art, describing what is going through the character’s head, leaving the job of laying down that narrative or story action to the artist. A good writer almost never reiterates anything that is happening on the panel, the words in the panel instead build on the image of the action.

Comics are an impossible medium, or should be. It marries words with pictures and yet doesn’t take away from either instead the two exist to do something fantastic. Pen Award winner and Marvel Comics writer Matt Fraction said in a presentation at San Diego Comic Con in July 2010: “Make no mistake: comics is absolutely alchemy. When you take language and drawing and synthesize them into comics, when they are observed by someone, you inflict meaning upon those images and you comprehend those pictures…when you inflict an order on those two things it is absolutely magic and the reader has to become a willing co-conspirator.”

The form only works with you accepting that it does work. It works in dialogism as well as the carnivalesque, as Bakhtin would have put it. In “Discourse in the Novel” it offers Bakhtin’s most elaborate analysis of dialogism and its relationship to style in the novel.

Between any word and its object, between any word and its speaking subject between any word and its active respondent(s), Bakhtin argues there exists an ‘elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object and this dialogically agitated and tension filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents’ that weaves in and out of discourse in complex patterns finds its most artistic expression in the novel.”

Further, “These heterogeneous stylistic unities upon entering the novel combine to form a structured artistic system, and are subordinated to the higher stylistic unity of the work as a whole, a unity that cannot be identified with any single one of the unities subordinated to it.”

How does this work for a comic book? The thing is Bakhtin’s theory kind of works with any form of literature. Specifically his theory of the carnivalesque bringing us closer to the comic book medium. This method details the idea that something fantastic or out of the norm can liberate assumptions of a dominating style through humor and chaos. For Bakhtin, carnivalesque turns the world upside down where human ideas and individual truths can be contested by fantastic elements.

Now, I don’t know about you but I think a comic book definitely does that sort of thing.

This is where Daredevil #1 comes in. The bonus story I presented on was a ten-page insert to the main issue. As a reminder, Daredevil the character is a blind lawyer named Matt Murdoch who lost his vision in an accident with an old man and a barrel of toxic waste. Though the toxic waste killed his vision it enhanced his other senses giving him a bat-like radar sense. In the above double-page spread, written by Mark Waid and drawn by Marcos Martin, [sorry for the lack of words, I was thinking about scanning the page, but I didn’t want to step into the legality of that and my scanner doesn’t get the entire page anyway] we get the full scope of Murdoch’s abilities as he and his firm’s partner Foggy Nelson, (yes, really, that’s the characters name) walk the streets to visit Murdoch’s father’s grave to celebrate his birthday. It is in this character’s fantastic perception that we witness the way Matt views the world in the carnivalesque tradition. By smell, he prevents his [non-disabled friend] Foggy from stepping in dog shit, they curse out the cab that is over the line in the cross walk, he hears the guy swearing on his cell phone, smells the Fedex truck leaking gas, hears the sound of the pigeon flying away, and smells the bike-riding blonde’s shampoo.

In doing something we all do as New Yorkers every day, Waid and Martin are able to enhance it with Daredevil’s abilities creating a new way of comprehending reality.

Within this culture and definition of carnivalesque is the fantastic, the fictional, that does not quite belong in our reality. That’s what comic books are: they are something impossible—two things together that shouldn’t work but do in the reader’s eye, demanding that you take a part in it, to be a co-conspirator as Fraction said. That is the magic ingredient you have to accept that makes the entire thing work, because not only does it work through precision of word and fantastic image but it forces you the reader to engage in something impossible but is without a doubt representative of human emotion and at the core of good fiction. As David Foster Wallace said, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” And that is exactly what Daredevil #1 does and Bakhtin’s theory verifies it. The comic book can teach us something about ourselves through these impossible beings like Daredevil and enhance our every day lives with something that is in no way our reality.  

Marcos Martin
Mark Waid
grad school
my mom threw mine away
mikhail bakhtin
comics theory
2
I always thought that I had a real Scottish working class thing against the fact that these were done by privileged American college kids, and they were telling me the world was flat. “You’re telling me the world is flat, pal?” And it’s not helpful, it doesn’t get us anywhere. OK, so it is, then what? What are you going to do about it, college kid? My book wasn’t academic. I can’t take on those Comics Journal guys, they flattened me, as they did, it’s just defensive, smartass kids.

Grant Morrison on academic snobbery in comics. I think this is why I struggle with this whole academic atmosphere. I’m not an academic, and yet I’m trying very hard at trying to get academia to consider comics seriously. There are quite a few people doing it but it is still very much a newborn academic movement. “Movement” as in slightly faster than grass growing and slower than the turtle vs the hare.

I like writing about what I’m interested in and I can grasp the concepts of literary theory and present them in a very clear narrative but a note I get from all of my professors throughout my masters is I’m not academic enough. It’s like academic is a code word or a password into an exclusive language that only people who are chosen are able to understand it, which is probably why most people consider academia to be snooty. Snooty? Snotty! It sort of is—”Giving a paper” is an example of this.

During the critical theory class I had this summer—which was extremely fascinating—a frequent complaint was the language of a lot of these critics. These are complex concepts we’re dealing with but yet people like Derrida, De Man, and a few more are incapable of writing about it clearly. Mostly, I think it boils down to who you are as a person, and I think “academic” in this sense stems from the audience the writer thinks he or she is writing to and speaks the language to them. My style probably comes from deciding fairly early on in my life that I wanted to be a reporter, which meant training in writing up to an eighth grade reading level (I’m sure I barely even affect a third grade level) and that has affected me to this day. I want everyday people to get what I’m writing about and I think I’m getting to a kind of middle ground but it has taken a long time to get there, and I still don’t do it to the level they want. I don’t know, I suppose I’m not one of them. I’m not a critic, all I want is to show why this stuff is important and is freaking fun and amazing, and you can’t really do that affecting a language that most people turn their nose up and dismiss.

grant morrison
thesis
grad school
1
As to the youths of Jersey Shore, they are playing grotesques, like all minstrel-show caricatures. They are amusing—indeed, more so than most clowns with sad eyes. They have clearly found their moment and clearly touched a nerve. To the term Italian American, which has carried so many strings of dollar bills and ropes of sausage, they have added a new chain of fetishes – a tanning bed, a tube of gel, an old summer thong bearing the legend “I Love the Situation.
My boss writing about the “The Jersey Shore”.
Robert Viscusi
grad school
jersey shore
1
Look at this player. So! Some diverting topics, how about it? I went to the MET the other day for a topic for my summer class. We’re working in Nineteenth Century American literature reading McTeague by Frank Norris, Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, The Awkward Age by Henry James, and The Awakening by Kate Chopin. This weekend I have to write a museum paper on the obsession of things or objects in these works. We had to visit the MET and the Tenement Museum. Basically I have to use an example of a thing or a set of things in either of these museums and how it relates to something in one of those novels. I know. The characters in these pieces obsess over having money for things or living in a higher standing or being part of an elite social circle. We spend an awful lot of time working with Bill Brown’s Thing Theory, Walter Benn Michaels and his Gold Standard about how it relates  to literary naturalism while reading the exceptionally interesting The Incorporation of America by Alan Trachtenberg. That’s been the most interesting thing about the class so far. Here’s the thing though: I’m gaining an unhealthy obsession for this theory I’m developing that naturalism is an early element that eventually gave birth to literary journalism. The kind of shit Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe did with In Cold Blood and Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and, of course, Good Doctor Thompson’s Fear and Loathing; though that probably had more to do with creative nonfiction than naturalism. Anyway, my argument is this: that because Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser spent much of their careers writing for either Hearst or Pulitzer’s papers it developed this trend in their novels where they set their protagonists into this world which pit their hereditary belief system against the environment of that world to see which would win. That is something you can read in feature journalism. Who is this person? Where did he or she come from? How did they (the universal) get in this position? Why did they succeed or not succeed? Etc. McTeague died because he’s a dumbass and greed. Carrie went on to become a Broadway actress and is really the only success story in most of the naturalist lit I’ve read, and Maggie in Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets killed herself because she couldn’t live life after being disowned and for being very very naive. Now you could say that’s realist literature. But realism is just a blanket to give literature a feeling as if it is reality but it often isn’t, naturalism actually gives us the how’s and why’s. The 5 W’s, you know? Anyway, take me for example. Put me in some naturalist fucking literature. How can I, someone who comes from a pretty good lifestyle upstate, who went to high school in Connecticut, had a good drunken undergrad experience, met some good friends there, and is a person who has never really had any kind of confrontation with someone and almost never ever stands up for himself. How will I fair in a naturalist perspective for this? Will I win out? Or will there be a confrontation? Who knows. I got the dresser in front of my locked front door. Ain’t nobody getting in here and the 2003 room on Turntable with Choire and company is working wonders for my mood.

Look at this player.

So! Some diverting topics, how about it? I went to the MET the other day for a topic for my summer class.

We’re working in Nineteenth Century American literature reading McTeague by Frank Norris, Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, The Awkward Age by Henry James, and The Awakening by Kate Chopin.

This weekend I have to write a museum paper on the obsession of things or objects in these works. We had to visit the MET and the Tenement Museum. Basically I have to use an example of a thing or a set of things in either of these museums and how it relates to something in one of those novels. I know. The characters in these pieces obsess over having money for things or living in a higher standing or being part of an elite social circle. We spend an awful lot of time working with Bill Brown’s Thing Theory, Walter Benn Michaels and his Gold Standard about how it relates  to literary naturalism while reading the exceptionally interesting The Incorporation of America by Alan Trachtenberg. That’s been the most interesting thing about the class so far. Here’s the thing though: I’m gaining an unhealthy obsession for this theory I’m developing that naturalism is an early element that eventually gave birth to literary journalism. The kind of shit Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe did with In Cold Blood and Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and, of course, Good Doctor Thompson’s Fear and Loathing; though that probably had more to do with creative nonfiction than naturalism.

Anyway, my argument is this: that because Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser spent much of their careers writing for either Hearst or Pulitzer’s papers it developed this trend in their novels where they set their protagonists into this world which pit their hereditary belief system against the environment of that world to see which would win. That is something you can read in feature journalism. Who is this person? Where did he or she come from? How did they (the universal) get in this position? Why did they succeed or not succeed? Etc.

McTeague died because he’s a dumbass and greed. Carrie went on to become a Broadway actress and is really the only success story in most of the naturalist lit I’ve read, and Maggie in Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets killed herself because she couldn’t live life after being disowned and for being very very naive.

Now you could say that’s realist literature. But realism is just a blanket to give literature a feeling as if it is reality but it often isn’t, naturalism actually gives us the how’s and why’s. The 5 W’s, you know?

Anyway, take me for example. Put me in some naturalist fucking literature. How can I, someone who comes from a pretty good lifestyle upstate, who went to high school in Connecticut, had a good drunken undergrad experience, met some good friends there, and is a person who has never really had any kind of confrontation with someone and almost never ever stands up for himself. How will I fair in a naturalist perspective for this? Will I win out? Or will there be a confrontation? Who knows. I got the dresser in front of my locked front door. Ain’t nobody getting in here and the 2003 room on Turntable with Choire and company is working wonders for my mood.

anything to get me to stop thinking about the Sniffler
grad school
lit
MET