Inspired by the work of M.C. Escher, the event saw teens exploring comics and biography through thirty boxes containing text and images from the life of a mysterious woman.
Over the course of a two-hour session, participants transformed the thirty boxes into individual artworks which together formed a biographical installation: a three-dimensional comic book which used perspective and storytelling to respond to the facts and feelings of a stranger’s life.
Last week I set off on a 1000 kilometre road trip across rural Australia on a kind of impulse Bowie pilgrimage.
I didn’t get to my destination, but found myself at the border between Queensland and New South Wales: a land of cotton farms, ice, drought, and drama.
I learned about beer and butchery, drugs and irrigation, the ballad of Kelly and Red, plus timezones, crime, and the One Ton Peg in the thick of the bush.
I was seriously late to discover David Bowie. When I was a kid, I didn’t like him very much; I was born in 1980, so the Bowie I grew up with was a pretty mainstream pop star, like Elton John or Cher. I remember the Bowie of Live Aid and “Dancing In The Streets”, not Ziggy Stardust or the Berlin years, and I hadn’t been around for the extraterrestrial visitations of the 70s, when he’d blown away a generation of kids desperate to know it was okay to be different.
my favorite bowie song is “modern love”: it proves that bowie’s art sprang from complete mastery of form. it was bowie declaring that just in case anyone thought he hadn’t written a perfect, chart-busting, commercial radio-friendly, movie-soundtrack baiting song that would make elton john blush with envy, it was purely by choice.
Dave Thompson’s Hallo Spaceboy quotes Bowie himself on the same era:“‘Let’s Dance’ put me in an extremely different orbit… artistically and aesthetically. It seemed obvious that the way to make money was to give people what they want, so I gave them what they wanted, and it dried me up.”
I guess I just hadn’t realised, as a little kid, that in seeing mainstream Bowie, I was missing the other chapters of his story.*
I was surprised how much I felt his death this week. Not so much because he was currently at a creative peak, but because he was a truly heroic figure for any of us who ever wondered about the ways you could choose to be different.
I heard the news of his death while I was en route from Europe to Australia. After landing, I spent my first couple of days in Australia on a kind of Bowie pilgrimage through the long, arid stretches of rural Queensland and New South Wales. The video for “Let’s Dance”, Bowie’s most successful and mainstream song, was shot in country Australia in 1983.
Busy times here at Finch Towers, both at home and work. My head was full of stuff and I needed a quick summer read. I was supposed to be reading John Tomb’s Head, a New Zealand novel about postcolonial heritage, but it was too intense. Then I stumbled on The Baba Yaga, by Una McCormack and Eric Brown.
I know Una vaguely from Twitter and I heard her speak once, brilliantly, on Doctor Who so I gave the book a whirl. Read more →
I love the author bios on books. Reading a good one is like reading old-time liner notes on records. The texts have an eccentric politeness, their formality spiked with unexpected jabs.
I first noticed this when my mum introduced me to The Day of the Triffids. John Wyndham’s bio on old Penguin paperbacks stated that he “decided to try a modified form of what is unhappily known as science fiction.” That adjective, that adverb, inflected everything that you read and thought about the man and his words.
'…and decided to try a modified form of what is unhappily known as "science fiction."' pic.twitter.com/B7nIbvgK6Z
I got a similar feeling from the author bio of Alice Munro, one of my favourite writers. When I discovered her in my first year at university, the bio included this comment:
I guess that maybe as a writer I’m a kind of anachronism…because I write about places where your roots are, and most people don’t live that kind of life any more. Most writers, probably, the writers who are most in tune with our time, write about places that have no texture because that is where most of us live.
I love that quotation. It is wry and quietly, Canadianly, contrary. At once it marginalises the speaker and humbly suggests that there might be a value in being out of tune with one’s time.
(And is there any better way of positing Alice Munro, of all people, as a science-fiction writer, than to suggest she is out of tune with our time, a fantastic voyager to the lost chronotopes of ordinary life, what she describes as “deep caves painted with kitchen linoleum”?).
Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, which I’ve just finished reading, deals with one of these archetypal “places that have no texture”, white suburban Los Angeles. But the central conceit of Bender’s novel is not the absence of texture which Munro describes. What troubles young Rose Edelstein is texture in excess.
Turning nine years old, Rose develops the power to taste the emotions of the people who make the food she eats. It begins when she detects hidden despair in her mother’s lemon-chocolate cake, but Rose is equally overwhelmed by food in the school cafeteria, her friends’ lunchboxes, or the restaurants she visits. Gradually she becomes able to taste the origins of each individual ingredient. She can read the story behind the apparently “effortless” business of putting food on her plate.
This is timely magic for an age when food production and consumption has come, for many in the developed world, to seem effortless. Supermarket ready meals seem not to have a history, but Rose can detect where the ingredients were grown, and in which factories they were produced, as well as the moods of the people involved in their making.
Bender doesn’t let this become a straightforward search for authenticity. Rose’s mother, the cook whose food triggers the trouble, is on a jittery quest for just such a thing, some deeper and more authentic sense of how to live. She treats Rose’s standoffish brother as a kind of guru, but comically misreads his signals. When he closes his eyes at dinner to avoid eye contact with the family, she thinks it is an unspoken directive to focus on the sense of taste above all others, yet she never detects any of the sensations that bother Rose’s palate. After flitting from one pastime to the next, Rose’s mother devotes herself to woodwork, yet her own daughter’s existence gently mocks the pursuit of traditional craft: Rose finds herself dependent on junk food and industrially produced snacks to survive. (Rose gives a paean to the Dorito: “What is good about a Dorito […] is that I’m not supposed to pay attention to it. As soon as I do, it tastes like every other ordinary chip. But if I stop paying attention, it becomes the most delicious thing in the world.”).
Rose is living in the world Alice Munro imagines, the world without texture, not because the world has been drained of meaning, but because she has become overly sensitised to the inescapable meaning of everything she consumes. Rose’s brother, who begins to disappear intermittently from the family home, faces a similar struggle. He fades away from a world that is too much, not too little.
It’s significant that Lemon Cake is set in Los Angeles, a city whose texture is dictated by the superficial blandness of suburbs and freeways. (A recent LA Review of Books piece on the historic home of sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury captures the complications of LA’s real estate battle between the past, present, and future).
It’s also important that Lemon Cake is set during Rose and her brother’s coming-of-age. As Bender puts it in her entry to Book Club Cookbook, Rose’s talent means that “what is normally one of the most lovely and innocent parts of childhood comes packed with complication.” In my previous discussion about the literature of adolescence, I focussed on a line which appeared first in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then in Doctor Who, articulating the idea that a character, in coming to know who they are, is “still cooking.”
BUFFY: I’m cookie dough. I’m not done baking. I’m not finished becoming whoever the hell it is I’m going to turn out to be.
The magic at the heart of Bender’s novel complicates this metaphor. Cooking is what undermines Rose’s straightforward growth to adulthood. She is an outsider, compared to the “Downhill Girls” she sees coasting their way through their teens, precisely because of what she tastes. Cooking reveals her mother’s secret sadness, and beyond that a wider, more complex world, with which Rose must learn to live. Rose’s struggle to understand her power leads to companionship, solace, and the truth about a family history of uncanny talents. It also leads to irrevocable loss, and the disappointment that Rose’s father has been unwilling to explore his own inherited abilities, for fear they would make his life a misery.
By the end of the novel, Rose comes to an accommodation with her ability which moderates its worst excesses. She even finds a way to use it for the good of others. Nonetheless, her compromise with the world remains imperfectly satisfying, and therefore “adult”. Rose remains, in a sense, as “out of tune with her time” as Munro. Perhaps we’re not yet done cooking, as we progress from adolescence to adulthood; but sooner or later, Bender seems to say, we will have to sit down to the meal we have prepared.
He looked slick, fought bad guys, and lived in luxurious style in a train caboose with his pal Artemus Gordon—every week a new location and a new adventure.
But more than that, the look: that snugly fitted suit, short jacket, broad shoulders and black boots. Sure, he did spend a lot of time shirtless and tied up, too. Somehow at the advent of the androgynous glam rock look of the 70s and the nascent punk scene, anything at all seemed possible—at least until my body betrayed me with the double-whammy of adolescent hormones and a thyroid that tipped over into overdrive, hitting my rangy frame with unexpected curves and a bewildered loss of identity.
That surge of hormones denying the androgynous dream brings us back to adolescence. I’ve never quite had that feeling of being forced into a category that didn’t fit me. As I sit fairly unproblematically within the straight white male box, coming to understand my identity has been more about what Eula Biss describes as “the need to acknowledge myself as dangerous.” It’s a slow and inconsistent process of learning how harmful, and how boring, we might be when our identity oppresses others. I read Biss’ words in a Harper’s interview about her book on vaccination; I’m now keen to pick up Biss’ Notes on No Man’s Land and give her thought further attention.
Still, I remember the feeling Laity describes at the tail end of my teens, before my body made the definitive shift away from androgyny.
As a kid, dressing up had been everything to me. Spaceman, spy, Indiana Jones, whatever could be cobbled together from party masks and old clothes in the attic. My earliest memory is jumping off the (very low) roof of our back garden’s buried World War II bomb shelter dressed as Batman. I remember going to school for Hallowe’en dressed as a witch; my mum had a moment of inspiration, cut through the point of the plastic hat to make a flip-top lid, and filled the insides with exposed “brains” made from red paper and bubble wrap. It was my all-time favourite dress-up and I’ve loved Hallowe’en ever since.
Mum stayed cool with this proto-drag as the years went on. There’s a photograph somewhere of my little brother and I in her old clothes, lip-syncing and pretending to be the girls from ABBA.
In my teens this sense of dressing up and trying on new identities became more my own, not just play shared with a parent. The stakes grew higher as adulthood bore down on us.
I remember being in the pub, brown suede jacket, satchel, a metal Miss Selfridge heart from a girl’s sandal pinned in the lapel; a kind of lingering Indiana Jones get-up. I remember a guy from school telling me that with my hair worn long, I looked just like Heather Graham. I savoured the conflicted feeling that showed in his eyes.
Some of us at the all-boys’ school cultivated an air of camp, deciding which girl you’d have been in The Craft and having earnest discussions about whether Madonna’s voice coaching for Evita, which seemed to have affected her vocals on Ray of Light, had spoiled the Material Girl’s vulgar edges. The gym I went to had stacks of magazines for people to read while on the cross-trainer. Men had FHM and Loaded, women had stuff like Vogue. I would make a big show of reading copies of Marie Claire; the women were hotter and the articles better.
Some of my campness was protective camouflage; a lonely teenager’s fear of socialising, a way to hide from the supposed obligations of being an eighteen year old boy. Some of it was the late 90s trend for androgynous indie musicians. Some was using a performance to keep from saying what you really felt. But it was also a feeling of potential, exultant display, the feeling that Laity reminds us of when she quotes RuPaul: “We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.”
Such a useful, powerful line that. Drag is every choice of clothes. It is signification, is language, is the art of conveying meaning. Think of Roland Barthes: “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.” (LH Johnson writes beautifully about her love for that quotation). Drag is everything that we use to communicate with the world.
The years go by, the body thickens and changes, the clothes I choose now speak a more conventional language. At thirty-four, the space marked masculinity is, in some ways, an increasingly comfortable – or at least taken-for-granted – fit.
Hell, one of the lads in the “Being A Girl” video grew up to be Danny Dyer.
Just whacked me tree up…..it's looking slightly camp this year…..can't work out how 2 give it a pair a bollocks. pic.twitter.com/6OHRpGm0GK
As I grew up, I had the luxury of nestling within a category which society more or less gives licence to behave as it wishes, straight, white, and privileged. If I stepped outside to play dress-up, I could always step back if things got scary. Hence why exploring identity can mean recognising oneself as vulnerable as well as dangerous.
I still savour the fact that all dressing is drag. That there is potential for expression, subversion, art, and play in every choice we make. But I also hope that getting older means listening better, and noticing when people are being hurt by the categories life imposes on them. It means remembering that RuPaul line not just as a manifesto for exultant display, but also one that guides compassion.
Boys’ hate was dangerous, it was keen and bright, a miraculous birthright, like Arthur’s sword snatched out of the stone, in the Grade Seven Reader. Girls’ hate, in comparison, seemed muddled and tearful, sourly defensive. Boys would bear down on you on their bicycles and cleave the air where you had been, magnificently, with no remorse, as if they wished there were knives on the wheels. And they would say anything.
[…]
The things they said stripped away freedom to be what you wanted, reduced you to what it was they saw, and that, plainly, was enough to make them gag. My friend Naomi and I told each other, “Don’t let on you heard,” since we were too proud to cross streets to avoid them. Sometimes we would yell back, “Go and wash out your mouth in the cow trough, clean water’s too good for you!”
– “Changes and Ceremonies”, in Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
Alice Munro is the most important writer in my life and that makes her hard to talk about. I’ve been trying to find the words since just before she won the Nobel Prize last year. They’ve been piling up in my hard drive, my inbox, in blog drafts and the Notes app on my phone.
Things came to a head when the recent debate about adults reading Young Adult (YA) fiction flared on the Internet. I had no sympathy for people who think YA unworthy of adult readers. But it was almost too easy to take up cudgels against literary snobs without acknowledging the strangeness of a world in which it’s all the rage for adults to read books explicitly not aimed at them.
In the ensuing squabble, I felt that other questions were barely touched.
Something different here at my website today. A podcast instead of a blog post. A podcast discussing that most profound of subjects… TRANSFORMERS!
What can giant fighting robots teach us about stories? What can they teach us about love? Are glorified toy commercials of interest to anyone other than kids, scholars, and nostalgics?
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Today’s discussion takes us from 1984 and the origins of the Transformers brand through cartoons, toys, and movies to the latest comics published by IDW. Daisy and Neill also discuss the mythic resonance of children’s television, the medium of comics, and the way pop culture shapes and is shaped by our own relationships with others. It runs for just under 30 minutes and you can find it below.
Daisy’s currently researching her doctorate in literary tourism and children’s literature at the University of York. She’s @chaletfan on Twitter, and you can also find her at Did You Ever Stop to Think.
I just finished rereading Clive Barker’s Weaveworld, the 1987 fantasy which sees a world of magic, concealed for a century in an enchanted carpet, unleashed on contemporary Britain. It’s timely: I’ve been writing about the borderland between adult and YA literature lately, and I read the book when I was just starting high school.
As I write this, the rain is streaming down on an August bank holiday in the UK — but I think I’ve just had the best summer of my adult life. One of those childhood summers that seem to go on forever. As if these months of 2014 had opened a gateway from adult mundanity into the eternal Dream Summer.
For me, that summer’s epicentre lay somewhere around 1989 or 1990. I was about ten years old. It’s not precise because events, details, things I imagined and things I later learned, have all since run together. They slip beneath the calendar’s boundaries in both directions.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 