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.
Trying to respond to Louie, I find I’m a terrible critic. I lack perspective. I can’t formulate a consistent position, although I’m curious about the trend for adults to read YA literature. I feel like there’s something going on right now with adulthood and youth that’s fascinating – that really matters, even more than usual. The best I can do is wander around the borderlands between those categories. Maybe Louie’s right: maybe it’s some kind of strange intergenerational schadenfreude.
Ruth Graham tried to question adults reading YA at Salon.com earlier this year, but her piece fell into genre shaming – making readers feel bad for picking up a YA book as they might have once been for reading science fiction or romance. (Graham states: “Adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children.”). I don’t have a lot of time for people who demean YA literature as simplistic or unsophisticated, unworthy of serious attention.
And yet…I’m fascinated, and bemused, by this vogue among adult readers for a genre defined by its position as adulthood’s other. Louie’s Twitter correspondents expressed boredom with an adult literature obsessed with middle class neuroses, contrasted with the hope and opportunity represented by adolescence. YA then got compared to superheroes, sci-fi, and fantasy, those other great genres of freedom and possibility. All this chimed with the things that have been troubling me about “adult” and “YA” literature.
Often, this blog is full of libraries and literacy and museums and comics, and in recent weeks I’ve also been using the site to point out a few of the books I’ve been working on – but it’s not all work, work, work!
One of the reasons I walked across Spain earlier this year was to commemorate ten years since my friend Jules killed himself in London. Still hard to make sense either of my experiences on the walk or what Jules did, though I wrote about it once before on this site. I’m probably thinking about it again because of the latest celebrity death in the news.
Just a quick post from London, where I saw this poster at Turnham Green tube station:
Richard Wentworth’s When You Look You May Not See takes a postcard written by First World War soldier Herbert Wilson and simply reverses the original lettering.
The postcard comes from the University of Oxford Poetry Archive and is presented as part of Art on the Underground’s contribution to London’s commemoration of the 1914-18 war.
When You Look You May Not See being read with a mirror. Photo from Art on the Underground
To me it’s a perfect piece of public art. It uses genuine everyday communication from the archives; presents it in a simple, yet challenging, way; and it’s not bound within the walls of a museum or a prestigious city-centre location – it’s flung out to the platforms of public transport in the commuter suburbs.
Meeting your heroes – Splash page from Dean Trippe’s SOMETHING TERRIBLE
Given the huge part protagonists play in our own notions of what it means to do the right thing, I find myself exhausted by the long and seemingly unending trend for dour superheroes on our movie screens.
Every now and then, I get asked to run a writers’ group in whatever community I’m currently working in.
This is one of the most intimidating challenges for a stranger in town, because each group is its own unique beast. Some people go to these things because they’re working on their magnum opus and are seeking feedback; others want exercises to stimulate their creativity; still others want to write in silent company; and some will be simply be there for the social contact.
On a couple of occasions, I’ve found myself leading a three-hour group with participants ranging in age from 14 to 65, and trying to solve this riddle:
I’m just back from Manila after flitting around Australia and the Philippines for a couple of weeks, running various events for libraries and art galleries. 7 flights in 8 days…that’s more than enough!
Zombies are people too – a survivor tries to escape the zombie hordes in Tullamore with a disguise and some pro-zombie sentiments
On the 10th and 11th of October, Parkes Shire Library ran our biggest and best zombie roleplay event to date, working in collaboration with three local schools, police, firefighters, and student volunteers from Charles Sturt University. We had two days of around 70 people taking part in a 4 1/2 hour unbroken zombie-fighting roleplay with real emergency services. You can see video from the news coverage at the ABC website.
That event was the culmination of about a month’s work creating immersive theatre and learning activities in country libraries; you can find out more under the Finding Library Futures tag at this site. As the zombie dust settled, I spent a week training librarians around the region before flying to Sydney during the bushfires, which give the city a rather unnervingly apocalyptic skyline:
Sydney skyline – image via @peteresho’s Twitter account
Teens make comic book storytelling dice at Manila’s MCAD art museum
The kids were very cool but it was pretty intense work – in fact, just walking down the street was pretty intense! Tho’ I’ve been to bustling cities in Peru and Indonesia, this was another level of wild traffic, wealth disparity, and sheer volume of humanity. Five minute taxi rides generated impressions that will take a long time to process. I felt privileged to be invited to work with the talented staff at MCAD and the youth museum Museo Pambata.
On my last night in the city, I went to a gallery launch but ended up sneaking off with another artist, Leeroy New (designer of a Lady Gaga dress, not the infamous meat one), to see his exhibition Gates of Hell, which I found utterly wonderful:
Leeroy New as Buddha encased in expanding foam
Leeroy’s transgressive, playful, pop-cultural take on the sacred had an impact as soon as you entered the room, yet when you ventured beneath the carapace of oozy foam which encased many of his holy subjects, there was a serious engagement with the numinous and transcendent. Gates of Hell reminded me of one of my favourite novels, Toby Litt’s troubling, surrealist fairytale-for-adults Hospital. With its psychopomps and defiantly rebellious bodies, its unyielding but indefinable laws of magic, It’s one of those flawed yet lingering novels – see this Telegraph review for a decent skewering of the flaws – which, despite it all, I can’t recommend enough.
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I loved Leeroy’s work for recalling the grotesquerie of Bosch as much as the claymation splurge of the British 1980s cartoon Trap Door. Gates of Hell marked a perfect balance between pop culture and traditional spirituality, those two rival paths towards a world beyond the everyday. No wonder Lady Gaga had Leeroy make wearable art for her.
After escaping the Gates of Hell, I chaired an evening panel on monsters in children’s literature for the New South Wales Writers’ Centre (you can see a great write-up here from panellist Nyssa Harkness) before finally flying home (my 7th flight in 8 days)…
To recover from all that adventure, I spent a long weekend in a darkened room with too many comics and now I’m back in the game. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s big interview/discussion piece on e-books, publishing, and the future of libraries…
Awestruck Time Travel Detectives at Parkes Shire Library, New South Wales
Once again, it’s busy times over at Finch Towers. I owe this blog a report on Time Travel Detectives and Big Box Battle, two immersive roleplay activities that I’ve just run at Parkes Library. That’s coming, but in the meantime you can see a few photographs from the two events below. There’s no qualitative assessment quite as cool as the awestruck expression on a child’s face…or the air-punching victory of a seven-year-old girl who just took down a chainsaw wielding Elvis robot.
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Next week sees schools from around Central West New South Wales converge on Tullamore for the sequel to 2012’s zombie showdown, and after that I’ll be speaking in Manila and Sydney.
ALWAYS with the zombies…
In Manila, I’ll be running a youth activity for the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, (MCAD) as well as speaking to Filipino librarians on strategy and innovation. MCAD made a rather beautiful poster for the event:
After that, I’ll be speaking at a New South Wales Writers’ Centre event on Thursday 24th October, Monsters Under The Bed, alongside novelist Kate Forsyth and researcher Nyssa Harkness. We’ll be looking at the place of monsters in children’s and Young Adult fiction – and with Nyssa’s gaming background, I’m hoping we get to explore whether our relationship to monsters changes in an age when interactive storytelling and gaming often allow us to struggle with them directly… You can order tickets for the event at the Writers’ Centre Eventbrite page.
And when all that is done, I have a few words for you on immersive roleplay, performance and literacy, and embedding stories in a community. Stay tuned…
