Continue reading »]]> Lest the last post be too disparaging about fairy tale ladies in iffy marriage situations, let me bring a seriously rad lady to your attention:

SHAHRAZAD, heroine of The Arabian Nights

illustration from the Edumund Dulac edition

So here’s the deal with The Arabian Nights: it’s one large frame story with several smaller frame stories grouped inside of it. Tales within tales within tales.

This is accurate.

In the outmost story, the Vizier’s daughter Shahrazad seeks to save her own life and the lives of all the city’s women by telling the king stories and thus staying her execution. The entirety of the Nights is Shahrazad’s slow, clever campaign to save her society from its murderous leader.

So here’s what I always somehow misunderstood: Shahrazad willingly enters her situation with the King. For some reason, I thought she was just next up on the chopping block, a victim of circumstances.

But no, Shahrazad wants to marry the King. She actually blackmails her father into letting her marry a murderer. This is the total opposite western Animal Husband tales where, as Bruno Bettleheim puts it, the heroine goes to a beastly husband “because of love for or obedience to her father.”

*cougheveryDisneyPrincesscough*

So why does Shahrazad put herself in such a deadly situation? Because she’s one smart cookie. And she has a plan.

The first description of her doesn’t go on about her beauty (the number one trait of all Perrault and Grimm princesses), but her intelligence: “[She] had read the books of literature, philosophy, and medicine. She knew poetry by hreat, had studied historial  reports, and was acquainted with the saying of men and the maxims of sages and kings. She was intelligent, knowledgeable, wise, and refined.”

"Damn it, all *I* got were these really heavy earrings and a pet tiger that didn't actually rip anyone's throat out."

Shahrazad knows exactly what she wants to do, and lays it all out for her sister: “Then I will begin to tell a story, and it will cause the king to stop his practice [of killing women], save myself, and deliver the people.” Even by Joseph Campbell’s standards, this is a large-scale, heroic goal.

Shahrazad chooses an incredibly clever setup for her time with King Shahrayar. Firstly, she brings her sister Dinarzad into the picture. Her plea to get Dinarzad in the bedroom is heartfelt and simple, “I have a sister, and I wish to bid good-bye before daybreak.” Of course Shahrayar sends for the sister, and at the opportune moment Dinarzad speaks the words for the first time that will become a refrain throughout the book: “Sister, if you are not sleepy, tell us one of your lovely little tales to while away the night…” Shahrazad asks permission, of course. But when the king agrees, he is entrapped.

illustration by Kay Neilsen

Shahrazad never gets quite all the way through a story on any given night, at least not without hinting at the next one. She never finishes the tale during the daytime, presumably because dawn is the time of her supposed execution. The king never demands her to finish except at night, when Dinarzad has again asked for a story. The king himself never asks for a story directly; Dinarzad becomes the innocent voice of the eager listener, and the catalyst of the storytelling. Shahrazad never pleads for her life with the King, she merely tells her sister what further amazing tales she has in store “if the king spares me and lets me live!” The King is never threatened or directly coerced, giving him the illusion of control. In fact, Shahrazad controls the stories, and thus the action, the whole time.

Within the stories themselves, there are a number of frame stories that bear a striking resemblance to Shahrazad’s situation. In one tale, three Dervishes must tell their tales or be executed by the fearsome mistress of a house in which they stayed. In another tale, a vizier named Ja’far must stay his execution by telling a strange story to his Caliph. In yet another, four characters plead for their lives to the King of China. There are several life-or-death situations.

Shahrazad unquestionably holds the most power in The Arabian Nights. She willingly throws herself into a deadly situation to save her people. She stops and starts the stories at will, aided by the soft, inoffensive voice of her sister. She succeeds at every heroic goal she set forth for herself. In the end, she wins the ultimate boon, saving not only of her life, but the lives of all the other women, and even the life of King Shahrayar. As translator Husain Haddawy notes, “Shahrazad cures Shahrayar of his hatred of women, teaches him to love, and by doing so saves her own life and wins a good man.” So, yeah, she got the guy in the end, but it was a kind of bonus effect after she saved the women of her culture from violent death.

Oddly, this does not all end in tears. (illus. Kay Neilsen)

By the way, if you want to pick up a copy and check it out, I highly recommend Husain Haddawy’s translation. It’s really readable and feels faithful to the source material. Also, he has a big honkin’ introduction about how Sir Richard Burton’s translations sucked….because Burton and others loved to Anglicize (and pontificate about) Eastern stories. It’s a proud Western tradition.

Snow White and the Sultan from Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall by Bill Willingham. The book in general is lovely and completely beautiful. But its frame story makes the actual character Shahrazad look all like she's a victim of circumstances following in Snow White's footsteps.

There are two volumes from Haddawy, The Arabian Nights and Arabian Nights II: Sinbad and Other Popular Stories. The second one has the more well-known stories (Aladdin, Sinbad, Ali Baba, etc), but the first one has the beginning frame story with Shahrazad, which is the best bit in my opinion. Click on the pic for an Amazon link:

Translated by Husain Haddawy from the 14th century manuscript edited by Muhsin Mahdi, published by Norton.

I highly recommend checking the tales out! They are approachable and worth experiencing firsthand. Besides, badass fairy tale ladies are a sight for sore eyes after the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen.

Continue reading »]]> So, Disney Princess movies.

I know you have a range of feelings and thoughts conjured by the term. In our culture, whether it’s nostalgia, irritation, boredom, hatred, glee, adoration, or nausea, Disney Princess movies probably mean something to you.

And I’ve got to take down everyone’s favorite darling today, my friends. The one that people say, “Well, I don’t like Disney Princess movies much, except….” Especially to my smart, bookish female friends, I apologize. (Here’s David Tennant looking sad to make you feel a little better.)

I am really so, so sorry.

We all know Snow White is creepily racist and Sleeping Beauty is a classic Damsel in Distress with no personal agency. We all know Cinderella’s Happily-Ever-After doesn’t deal with how creep-ass her baby crazy father-in-law is or what kind of a living hell her stepmother could make her life after marriage, much less how it’s a little weird to marry a dude you’ve met once.

But Disney became more enlightened later, I hear you cry. They started to have heroines that were active and intelligent and interesting. No beauties sleeping here!

Oh, yes. So it would seem.

But I’ve got to take down Beauty and the Beast. Because, ladies, for smart and bookish folk like us, it perpetrates a major lie.

…a delicious, delicious lie...

First of, we all love Belle:

*I* wander around town with my nose in a book too, but hey, that's me.

As a nerdy girl, I can connect to Belle. We’re introduced to Belle and her vague social awkwardness, bookish yearning, and awesome ability to outwit assholes with cunning. This is one likable, awesome girl.

I also hang around farm animals as part of my job every day. Clearly, Belle and I have plenty in common.

Unfortunately, this movie is not about Belle, or what she wants, or her getting what she wants.

Belle says that “There must be more than this provincial life,” and doesn’t really know what that might mean for her. She’s reading a lot of adventure stories, and seems to like the ones that have a lot of swashing and buckling. She is entranced with the romance in one of the stories with the Prince in disguise, which sets up her romance with Beast. “She doesn’t know it’s him ’til Chapter Three!” But she’s reading Count of Monte Cristo type adventure-romances, not Jane Austen type domestic tales. Clearly, Belle wants adventure, travel, and maybe some love, too.

Let’s keep in mind that Belle is not an ordinary peasant in the French countryside. She’s an inventor’s daughter. Her father makes crazy interesting stuff all the time. He is actually “something more than this provincial life.” Like most Disney heroines, Belle does not have a mother, nor any apparent grieving for/ongoing connection with her presumably dead mother. She puts all her love and energy into her father, but doesn’t think that *she* could be inventing things too, or seeking out actively the types of adventure that she reads about in her books. She has always believed in her father’s dreams–she says as much. But has he believed in hers? Has she dared to seek support in her dreams, aside from her dream of having more books?

…not that rampant book acquisition isn't a totally legit goal, too….

So who’s story is this, then?

From a storytelling perspective, it’s Beast’s. Allow me to go all Joseph Campbell* on your ass. (Actually, I’m going to go a bit Christopher Vogler on your ass, because he has adapted the monomyth to be a little more useful and less gendered. You can check out his book, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers if you want to know more.) The arrogant and unnamed Prince get a Call of Adventure in the form of a hideous old woman’s request for aid. He refuses the call, and with the Supernatural Aid of the enchantress, he is transformed into the Beast and thus over the threshold into the “special world” of his adventure.

Well, what about Belle? I hear you cry. Didn’t she get a call to adventure in the form of her father being abducted by the Beast? Yes, that happened more than a quarter of the way through the movie…and it wasn’t Belle’s call. Belle’s call was Gaston’s marriage proposal, which she refuses in order to pursue her dream of romantic adventure. The tragedy of the story is that Belle’s dream is ultimately tamed and made banal, much as Beast himself is made into a dull, Fabio-esque human prince at the end.

But let’s pause for a moment on Belle’s choice to save her father and enter the Beast’s servitude. This is one of the few active choices that Belle makes during the movie: she rides out to find her father (with an active, masculine horse that takes up a lot of screen time) and volunteers to take his place. Unlike the traditional fairy tale, in which her father comes back and tells her that he has bargained her away without her knowledge, Belle gets a choice in this version of the tale. We like that she gets a choice–she is active and a mistress of her own destiny, yes?

Well, it would be, if she was the one with the character arc and purpose for the rest of the film. The central section of the film is Beast campaigning strategically to win Belle’s affection.

Ladies: Read out loud to your abusers. It will help with the Stockholm Syndrome.

Beast is the one making active choices throughout the section of the film when Belle is in the castle. He campaigns to win her love, and thus serve his own ends by breaking the curse. The Ordeal (or midpoint) of the film comes when Belle wanders up to Beast’s chambers, he scares her away, and then follows her and rescues her from the wolves. Had Beast not made the choice to rescue Belle, the movie would have ended about halfway through with a gory wolf-related death, since Belle was not a match for a pack of hungry wolves. Beast then was close enough to Belle to make connections with her via showing her things she enjoyed–books, mainly–and learning table manners.

Belle, in the meantime, is going more or less with the flow. She reacts to external circumstances in a logical way, but she is a reactive character rather than an active character. Heck, good ol’ Gaston has more of an active campaign to get what he wants than Belle does. I mean, who thinks sending his future father-in-law to the madhouse is the best way to win a woman’s affection? (…not that it’s unappealing, I’m sure, but the point is most men have more self-control.)

I will win the girl with cunning use of chest hair!

Gaston’s obnoxious pitchfork-and-torch mob forces Beast to make his ultimate choice that brings about his death and resurrection. Beast commits the ultimate act of selfless love: he lets Belle go even though he knows he may die. Beast is unquestionably heroic. Belle, on the other hand, gets saved by a damn teacup. Seriously. She and her father would have been screwed without a teacup with an axe.

He's got an axe! He killed your family!

So at the end of the movie, Beast has nicely completed his character arc, becoming the Master of Both Worlds. He can be a Prince, but also love and be loved in return. Also, he got to live again with sparkly lights. Yay for Beast. Belle, on the other hand, may or may not have found more than the provincial life she was seeking. Sure, she has a castle full of servants and a nice husband and a library. But adventure? Debatable. Did she get what she wanted, really? Maybe. Maybe not. In many Disney Princess movies, the heroine states a vague yet passionate wish at the beginning that they do not explicitly reveal. Let’s hope it was a man, ’cause that’s what they’re getting.

Marriage and Happily-Ever-After. Totally the same thing. …right?

Still, the message here is disturbing. Smart, bookish women need only to find a monstrous man to tame, and all their dreams will come true. If there are no compatible men in your hometown, geek girl, simply go find a lonely guy with few social skills and change the crap out of him. It’ll work.

Fairy tale scholar Karen E. Rowe points out that “Romantic tales thus transmit to young women the rather alarming prophecy that marriage is an enchantment which will shield her from harsh realities outside the domestic realm and guarantee everlasting happiness.” I would like to think that we geeky ladies are beyond such and obvious trap, but how many of you wanted to be Belle?

I would be a bit remiss in my duty as an internet literate human if I didn’t include this gem as a finale (check out the whole series!):

Please, let me know what you think. Do you have hope for Belle, or these Disney stories? What reactions do you have to Disney Princesses?

—————–

*With whom I issues. At length. But that is, as they say, another tale for another time. Suffice it so say that he’s got a handle on Jungian male psychology and his monomyth is an appropriate vessel to pour the story out of.

Continue reading »]]> Let me tell you about them.

Because, thing is, they are where all the bad-ass women of fairy tales have been hiding all this time.

Note who is seducing whom here.

First, the basics:

Compiled by Francis James Child in the mid to late 1800s, the full title is actually The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, and it is a collection of just that. Also they are all free and online, so that’s neat.

You probably know some of these ballads; for one, all the Robin Hood ballads are in it. Tam Lin is one of the more popular ones these days. A heck-ton of the ballads have been covered by 60s folk rock bands like Pentangle, Fairport Convention, and Steeleye Span. Simon and Garfunkle’s (and others’) cover of “Scarborough Fair” also comes from the Child’s Ballads. They’re little-known, and yet oddly pervasive. I know I listened to a bunch of them as a kid, so the stories got stuck in my head. They’re a good repository for British fairy lore, for one.

For another, the Child’s Ballads have some wacky wacky gender-swapping as compared to the rest of European fairy tales. The Germans and French have a cycle of “animal groom” tales, e.g. Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, the Frog King, and Snow White & Rose Red. The English and Scottish have what’s effectively a cycle of “animal bride” tales. They usually go something like this: There is a monstrous woman and/or a woman who’s been turned to a dragon. (Often she’s under some evil spell, sometimes she’s just a witch.) A man has to come along and be nice to her, and then he is rewarded. Alternately, he’s a jerk and she punishes him. Here’s one about a man who acted sensibly in the face of grisly destruction:

A much nicer ending than many tales of monstrous women. “Them sireens loved him up and turnt him to a toad!”

***

The ballad of Tam Lin, in particular, gender-reverses the classic “Prince saves damsel-in-distress” trope. Here’s two versions of the ballad, the more traditional Fairport Convention version and a wacky bassline double-voice new version by Tricky Pixie:

Despite the ballad’s title, “Tam Lin” follows the character arc of Janet, Tam Lin’s lover. Tam Lin, on the other hand, is a prisoner of circumstances and needs Janet to rescue him. While Janet herself is not a majorly dynamic character, in that she is brave and strong throughout the ballad, she does follow the footsteps of the hero’s journey and is the clear protagonist of the ballad.

Throughout the tale, Janet shows agency and in full control of her actions and choices. Janet shows her true spirit during the ordeal scene, where she declares, “If that I gae wi child, father,/Mysel maun bear the blame.” Janet takes responsibility for her actions and makes clear choices, including the choice to keep her child once she knows Tam Lin’s earthly parentage.

What am I doing? Oh, just waiting to steal my man back from the Faerie Queen. Like a badass.

Tam Lin is reactive and passive through much of the ballad. He displays agency related to his child: he stops Janet from aborting their child and tells her how to save him from the fairies, emphasizing, “I am your bairn’s father.” He would have been unable to escape the Fairy Queen and teind to hell had Janet not chosen to go to Carterhall. Even the method of Tam Lin’s entry into the fairy world is passive: He fell from his horse and was taken in by the Fairy Queen. Like many princesses in Grimms’ fairy tales, Tam Lin is valued by the Fairy Queen for his physical assets: “I am sae fair and fu o flesh I’m feared [the teind] be mysel.” Tam Lin’s character is defined less by him doing things and more by him being things, i.e. a father, a human, a teind payment.

Instead of a damsel in distress saved by a knight in shining armor, the ballad of Tam Lin reverses the paradigm. The damsel pulls the knight in shining armor off his horse and holds him through magical transformations until he regains his humanity. Janet pulling Tam Lin to ground reflects her agency as well as her particularly feminine, “grounded” sense. While Tam Lin’s metamorphoses are similar to many animal husband tales, few of such tales have a heroine who goes on a campaign to rescue the “animal” husband. For example, Beauty goes to the Beast not because she wants to save the Beast, but out of loyalty to her father. Beauty is a victim of circumstances. Janet aims to misbehave (and to save Tam Lin).

***

Aaaand that’s what I think about in my spare time. Which is why I’m going to grad school and rewriting fairy tales, obvs.

So, in conclusion, check out the Child’s Ballads. There are strong and/or excitingly monstrous women, and we don’t have enough of those in fairy tales, damn it. The ballads are written in pretty heavy Scots dialect, so just mutter along in a Scottish accent and you’ll be fine. If reading them is too heavy sledding, you can always listen to Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, and Pentangle on Youtube.

Continue reading »]]> So I’ve been wrestling with the tale of Bluebeard recently.

Serial wife-murder. Clearly from Forn Parts. Just in time for Christmas.

In case you’re not up on your psychosexual fairy tales, Bluebeard goes something like this:

Once upon a time, the youngest daughter in a family gets married off to a vaguely creepy dude because he has a lot of money. He also has a blue beard, which rather than being punk aesthetic is supposed to be a red flag of “something’s off about this guy,” but both the girl and her family ignore it because of the fat stacks of cash Bluebeard brings to the marriage. Once married, Bluebeard takes the girl back to his castle and presents her with a charmingly sadistic conundrum: He’s leaving, he says, on a trip. She is welcome to go in any of the rooms in castle, except one, for which he has specifically given her a key which she is not to use. He leaves and she wanders around in the rich castle, and eventually her curiosity overwhelms her and she enters the forbidden room. Turns out the room is filled with all the corpses of Bluebeard’s murdered former wives. (The faux loyalty test begs the question of Bluebeard’s first wife, of course. How did that one come about? Random murder? Her discovering some other dark secret of his? A stash of tentacle porn?)

Bluebeard gives his wife the key: engraving by Walter Crane in 1874

Anyway, in different versions of the tale, various things happen that make it impossible for the girl to conceal the fact that she’s found the body-locker: either she drops the key and it gets stained with blood, or the key starts bleeding and won’t stop, or she’s been entrusted an egg* rather than a key, and that gets stained with blood… whichever happens, Bluebeard comes back, finds out, flies into a rage, and decides he must kill the girl. She asks to go pray before her inevitable death, and in reality runs upstairs and screams for her brothers to come rescue her. They find her before Bluebeard can kill her, and justice is served, i.e. Bluebeard winds up dead in his own body locker in some versions, and tossed out to the carrion birds in other versions.

Obviously, Disney gave this one a pass.

Bruno Bettleheim, a Freudian scholar, says that the girl entering the forbidden room is a bit like losing one’s virginity: an act that “sullies” the girl (or the symbol of her sexuality, the key/egg) and cannot be undone. The body locker is supposed to represent a terrible sexual secret of Bluebeard’s. In The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, he says:

However one interprets “Bluebeard,” it is a cautionary tale which warns: Women, don’t give in to your sexual curiosity; men, don’t permit yourself to be carried away by your anger at being sexually betrayed. (p. 302)

I’d like to note that not only is this a destructive image for women (“Even if you are married, you may not have sexual curiosity; you will die.”) but a terrible image for men as well. Bluebeard is has not only closeted his sexuality, he has expressed sexual passion in the form of hacking up women. The message, easily passed over in favor of looking at the role of the girl, is that men’s sexuality can only be expressed in the form of violence.

Bettleheim also points out that neither Bluebeard nor the girl have undergone any kind of character development–”Earth-shaking events have taken place in the story and nobody is the better for them.” (p. 303) I think he’s got a mighty interesting point there. This isn’t really a story about people, at least, it doesn’t work like the rest of fiction in terms of having a character arc. It’s a fable. Fables supposedly serve a different psychological purpose, and there’s a lot of debate as to what that purpose is.

I’ve been reading Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves, and she has an entirely different take on the Bluebeard tale. Feminist scholar Marcia Lieberman notes that Bluebeard’s wife is the ultimate “damsel in distress” who is reactive and passive in the face of her own death and waits for her borhters to swoop in and rescue her. Estes says that this tale is less about her being helpless, and more about initiation through confrontation with the predator… “finally cutting down and rendering neutral the natural predator of the psyche.” (p. 61)

Estes sees the brothers rescuing the girl at the end not as literal, but as her animus aspect come to save the day. The animus**, Estes reminds us, is “a partly moral, partly instinctual, partly cultural element of a woman’s psyche that shows up in fairy tales and dream symbols as her husband, son, stranger, and/or lover […] invested with qualities that are traditionally bred out of women, aggression being one of the more common.” (p. 58) She says the tale is actually about the woman tapping into her animus in order to find the necessary agency to get out of a predator/prey situation. Never mind that the animus seems to be where she keeps all her agency…clearly this is not a self-actualized heroine if she doesn’t yet realize she can save herself. To be fair, many women don’t realize that. They may need to access heretofore untapped bits of their psyches to get out of being “prey”. As Estes states, “Many women’s alacrity and fighting natures are not as close to consciousness as is efficient.” (p. 57) Certainly Bluebeard is a horrible story…and it is terrible to think about all the time that it might be psychologically acted out in real life.

By "body locker" we mean "unfair divorce settlement."

So…in conclusion, I’m not sure what to think of Bluebeard. Is it a tale that stunts men’s and women’s psychic growth by having a backward, sex-negative view of sexuality? Is it a tale about naive women finding agency and escaping the victim role? My answer is a tentative yes to all. Also, I wish the girl had a name. It’s terribly hard to write an article about a nameless protagonist.

What do you think?

*The egg variant comes from the Grimm tale “Fitcher’s Bird”, which is very similar but with more wizards and dismemberment, and the girl has more agency in rescuing herself.

**I don’t think Jung’s animus/anima concept is jiggy with there being more than two genders, therefore I am less than jiggy with it. That being said, it’s still a useful idea. Example: The reason why the Manic Pixie Dream Girl bothers me so much is that she’s not a real woman, she’s the personified anima of the hero. If the Handsome Prince is the personified animus of the heroine in fairy tales, then perhaps that’s why he bothers me, too. He’s not a real person, either.

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A Tale of Two Daughters

SPOILER ALERT: I do talk about some events that happen during this book. I don’t give away everything, but if you want untouched, pristine snow of new reading, then go buy the book. And stop reading reviews, you silly.

Mary Talbot and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes explores the paths of two women: Mary Talbot and Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce. Mary’s memoir alternates with sections of biography about Lucia. The two are particularly suited for each other; Mary’s father was a Joycean scholar, and Mary grew up steeped in the language and culture of Joyce. While there are remarkable parallels between the women, the stories are not exact mirrors of each other. Mary and Lucia both struggle, during the tale, with their relationships with their stodgy, angry, and abusive fathers.

Talbot’s art is well designed to aid the reader in knowing exactly when and where the action is taking place. Scenes of Mary in her young adulthood are in crisp color, while scenes of Mary’s childhood are delicately watercolored sepias with less defined panel borders. Lucia Joyce’s stories are told with a watercolored blues-and-blacks palette that nicely mirrors Mary’s childhood stories.

Compared to Mary’s childhood, Lucia’s seems almost idyllic. Mary details her distant, academic, and angry father with details that cut right to the heart. “I’m not sure when longing for his presence turned into its diametrical opposite,” says Mary, as she details a scene of her father slapping her after a failed math homework session. The sophisticated, intelligent voice of Mary-the-writer blends nicely with the innocent, honest voice of Mary-the-child. Mary also uses quotes from Joyce and others in the narration, which helps Mary’s father truly become the “cold mad feary father” of Joycean prose.

While Mary’s story begins in depression and rises to somewhat of a happy ending, Lucia’s is the opposite. She begins on a high: a frugal-but-loving childhood, an adolescence pursuing the dream of dance, and an apparently decent relationship with her father. However, her story plunges into depths of tragedy and psychological turmoil even as Mary decides to get her life together and move on.

Mary’s story does not end definitely, certainly not as definitely as Lucia’s. In a way, the “soft ending” of Mary’s story is satisfying; it highlights the sadness and ridiculousness of reality, how life doesn’t follow a nice story-like path. To an extent, Mary-the-storyteller seems wrapped up in her anger with her father more than self-examination and a desire to save herself.  In some ways, however, the book suggests that these two women made different choices in their heroine’s journeys…each woman reacts to her father’s desire to infantilize and dismiss her differently. Lucia’s wild anger pushes her over the edge, while Mary’s persistence sees her through to some kind of a coherent adulthood.

In the realm of Graphic Memoirs, I find this a compelling read. It’s not as satisfying and justice-filled as Bryan Talbot’s intense fiction story about abuse, The Tale of One Bad Rat. Nor is it as nuanced and brilliant as Alison Bechdel’s Funhome. That being said, I think it has a place on the graphic novel enthusiast’s shelf, and certainly on the Joycean’s shelf and the memoirist’s shelf.

…

On a completely unrelated note, Mary and Bryan Talbot were adorable in the 70s. They were just the cloak-and-ankh-wearing Tolkien nerds that I would have been. Well, let’s be honest, I *was* that nerd in my early 20s. But I still would have been that nerd in the 70s. Just with more exciting hair.

Want to take a peek? Buy it at your local comic shop or online.

Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary Talbot, illus. Bryan Talbot. Dark Horse, 2012. $14.99

Continue reading »]]>

one soul, eighteen stories

*Spoiler alert: I do talk about things that happen in this book. That being said, I think that it doesn’t matter if you know what happens or not; you’ll still want to pick up the book and flip through it.

Ray Fawkes’ One Soul is like nothing else I’ve read. Really. People have tried parallel storytelling before, but not like this.

Firstly, I read the book eighteen times; rather, I flipped the pages eighteen times as I followed each of the eighteen stories Fawkes sets up. Each double-page spread consists of nine equally sized panels per page, tracing a total of eighteen life stories that are supposedly connected by a single soul. The strong narrative voice that shows up in the captions seems to serve as the voice of the soul, and is the reason the book holds together rather than seeming disjointed to the point of incoherence.

Fawkes makes a point of starting the book in blackness, all eighteen panels delineated, but dark. The first spark of life shows up after the page turn as a white paint splash in each panel. The concept of the soul is visible and supported by the captions that appear in several of the panels. The captions are the only words in the book; there is no direct dialogue. After the third page turn, we see all eighteen children being born in various circumstances. In effect, Fawkes is teaching us how to read the book by showing his concept through pictures and structure.

If you read the book like a traditional comic, left-to-right, then you’ll follow the stories chronologically, showing a moment from each person’s infancy, childhood, etc. The oldest story is a neolithic hunter, the newest a 70s punk girl. The characters range from slaves to military leaders, doctors to prostitutes. Aside from the interesting array of life circumstances, Fawkes’ structure allows you to compare the length and themes of the various lives. The first character dies about a quarter of the way through the book, and is thereafter represented as a black square. However, words appear in the blackness. As more and more characters die, more words appear in the blackness. The words of the dead seem to be specific to each character at first, but as the book goes on the language is more like a chorus. Eventually the words in the blackness overtake the pages and meld into one.

There is no clear moral to these stories, nor any obvious lesson to be learned. The longest-lived character, a woman who was raised by a chorus girl and grew up to be a singer, seems to be the closest the book gets to any kind of answer. At the very end, as an old woman, she says, “I’ve had some time/when I was small my mother taught me to say/thank you.” At the same time, the black panels of the dead have turned to one large panel which reads “this is me and all of this”. The character’s moment of gratitude seems to align with the uniting of the soul in darkness. This re-uniting—a striking change from the book’s opening image—seems to be the closest thing the book has to a conclusion.

In a way that mirrors the characters living and dying again and again, I read this book again and again. I read the individual stories. I read the pages across like a traditional comic, where each page took on a poem-like quality, connected by theme of events and images more than anything else. But overall, the thing that held this comic together for me was the voice. The voice asked the questions about what the point of the stories that I was wondering myself. The voice of the soul tied the stories together and allowed me to track themes across characters, both living and dead. While the voice may not have had too many answers, the visual unity of the panels at the end was enough for me.

Sounds interesting? Pick it up at your local comic shop or online.

Ray Fawkes, One Soul. Oni Press, 2011. $24.99

**article cross-posted at Geekerific**

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It's thinking about murder RIGHT NOW.

After exhaustive research, I have come to the following conclusion: swans are creep-ass.

I think swans are physically weird. This is a totally personal bias based on me being terrified of geese as a small child. My preschool had a farm right next to it, and geese (and once, a cow) would sometimes escape into the school grounds. Those fuckers were mean and as tall as I was; no way in hell I was gonna get near them. Besides, one bit my teacher, and they don’t even have real teeth, just burning ire. So, I still don’t like long-necked birds of any kind; the way their necks go is creepy. There’s a specific deformity of the finger called the Swan’s Neck.

Other than being physically weird, birds are connected with the souls of the dead, which heads us into questionable territory. Specifically, stories with swans in them tend to take weird, weird turns.

First up: Swan Lake. Swan-obsessed magician makes beautiful girl into swan. Okay, fine. There’s an imprisonment and/or necrophilia metaphor going on there, whatever. (Really: in the ending variation where the princess in condemned to be a swan forever…isn’t that a kind of death?) But the prince? I know he fell in love with the Swan Queen when she turned back into a human. But I think he was a bit of a swan fancier to begin with. Suspicious.

Speaking of swan fanciers, Jove. As in the rehashed Greek Ovid’s Metamorphoses version of Zeus. Now, to begin with, he was a weird dude. He liked to have sex, willing or not, with more or less anything that moved. He had some very weird sex brags (“one time I fucked a pregnant chick so hard she set on fire”; “one time I seduced some hot girl in the form of a cow”). He was like a more heterosexual and less classy version of Jesse Canon from Tominda Adkin’s series Vessel. Anyway, Jove gets his eyes on this girl, Leda. He seduces her (the nice term for “rape”, usually) in the form of a swan, which is weird even by hentai standards. Then apparently they have kids, and some parody of a family life. Family life with birds. Like you do.

Doesn't she look sick of it all?

That brings us to my third piece of Swan Creepass evidence: the tale with many variations known as the Six Swans, the Twelve Brothers, and other titles. It’s about a girl whose brothers are turned into swans for various reasons (Dad wants her to inherit the kingdom; the bros are turned into swans to escape actual death). Her job is to rescue them; the condition is that she must not speak or laugh for seven years, and also make shirts for her brothers out of some odd or unpleasant material (nettles, starwort, depends who you ask). Usually she succeeds, often with the sleeve of one shirt unfinished, so that one brother is left with an arm and a wing for the rest of his life.

I was thinking about this during a workshop about metamorphosis at the Richard Hugo House, and I wrote the following:

 Every Sunday, Laura would go to the shore of the lake to look for her brothers.
The swans at the lake had innate enough trust of her to swin right up, hop out of the water, and eat the chunks of bread she provided them out of a large plastic bag with a twist tie. Sometimes there would be a jogger or a dog and the swans would get spooked and flap out into the vast expanse of water, but most times they’d be bold enough to steal a piece of break right out of her hand.
She bided her time with the nettle shirts. You have to make sure a wild animal really trusts you before trying to wrestle a shirt meant for a human onto it. Besides, making cloth out of dried nettle was hard. The hippies down at the co-op must think she drank more nettle tea than any of several gods. They never said anything, even on weeks when her hands were still red and blotchy with stings. Baking soda was her #2 co-op purchase.
The day came when she had to put the shirts on or give up, be alone forever. The day marked by a red square on her calendar. She took the usual bag of bread and a backpack filled with the nettle shirts. She waited for the swans to come gliding over the water. She scattered bread and opened the sipper to the pack slowly, so as not to startle the birds.
The movement was quick, when she finally dared to do it. Woven nettle held in sweaty fingers, unable to feel the stings any more, a twist of the wrists, up and over the long struggling feathered neck. Wings beating, wind rushing past her face, her eyes, blinding her so that she never saw exactly what happened, if there was some moment that was half feathers and half skin, but in any case she was suddenly holding in her arms Richard, her eldest brother, naked except for the knit shirt made of strung-together dried leaves.
He was gasping for breath with a desperate look in his eyes, muscles under his skin still pulling against her, trying to escape. She released him, tried to not to glance down at his nakedness, and looked into his yees. For a moment her heart dropped; he wasn’t making eye contact and was breathing hard. What if he was still a swan inside his head? What if she’d revived him only to lose him to shock or insanity? She should have brought blankets. She should have brought real clothes. Richard knelt by the edge of the water and threw up noisily. The other swans had scattered.

And so. Swans. The ever-present reminder of death with weird-ass necks.

See? Murder. Told you so.

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Here is an erasure poem I did in my writing group a while ago. I found it while cleaning up paperwork on my desk. It came from an article about football. Football is not where it ended up. Here’s the text if I were to format it like a poem:

Every shudder of injury for the usual reasons

adds a third layer of dread.

Conjecture about his eventual return.

The when. The what-if. The where does that leave you know who.

This is the act we’ve reached now

the breaking collarbone, the absence, the relief

elevated him to legend

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I went to Vermont! It was strategic.

For those of you who do not know and/or are too lazy to look two posts back where I talked about it, I am a candidate for a Master’s of Fine Arts in Writing at Goddard College in Plainfield, VT. This means once a semester I go to Vermont for a week for to absorb arcane teachings and amazing people. Actually, I mostly hang out with the people and talk about books and stuff…there’s less absorption going on than with the teachings.

ANYWAY. I have proof that I’m doing Master’s Level Work…and by that I mean the following very silly play I wrote during residency…

Sherwood

Scene: Two desks and chairs sit on the stage, facing each other, each in their own pool of light. Each has a laptop on the desk. On the left sits ROBIN HOOD, wearing a green jerkin, skin-tight green leggings, boots, and his signature pointed green hat. On the right sits the SHERIFF OF NOTTINGHAM, a portly man wearing an unbuttoned navy collared shirt with a white undershirt beneath. The SHERIFF has a beer in hand and is reading a Men’s Health with a stony expression. ROBIN clicks aimlessly at his computer.

ROBIN

Next…Hi there, hotness, where are you from…oh. Really. What monastery? Yeah, that’s a little weird. No, it’s not you, there was this thing that happened when I was a kid. With a priest. Next… Maid who? You want to show me what? Oh my god, ew. Blocked.

The SHERIFF sighs and turns to the computer screen. He clicks something open.

ROBIN

Next…

ROBIN

Oh my god! Sheriff! I didn’t know you did Chatroulette!

He immediately sits up straighter and leans in.

SHERIFF

(crosses arms) Mr. Hood. I didn’t know there was internet service in the forest.

ROBIN

You only assume I’m in the forest. (raises eyebrows saucily) No, really, though, we get wireless. You don’t have any fancy tracking software, do you? You’re not going to storm the compound, guns ablaze?

He seems oddly excited at the prospect. The SHERIFF stares.

SHERIFF

I’m off duty.

ROBIN

Oh. Interesting. And who is the Sheriff of Nottingham, off duty?

SHERIFF

Same as I am on duty.

ROBIN

So single-minded, over-vigilant, and vicious, then? But not in uniform, which is a little unfortunate, I must say. I like seeing that big old ring of keys at your belt. Keys to the kingdom, and all that.

SHERIFF

You think I’m vicious?

ROBIN

Oh, I know it. (Beat.) So, no Mrs. Of Nottingham?

The SHERIFF takes a swig off his beer.

SHERIFF

No.

ROBIN

That sounds like some hurt feelings, if I’m any judge.

SHERIFF

You’re not.

ROBIN

(sighs) So, have you figured out where my secret forest lair is yet?

SHERIFF

You think I’d be sitting on my ass at home if I had?

ROBIN

You know, Sheriff, we used to play such devious little games, and now it seems like you hardly have the time for me. We never have fun anymore.

SHERIFF

Huh. You sound like my wife.

ROBIN

I thought there was no Mrs. Notty.

SHERIFF

She left me six months back.

ROBIN

No! Bitch.

The SHERIFF swigs his beer again and shrugs.

SHERIFF

It is what it is.

ROBIN

You know, Sheriff, I’ve never told you this, but I admire you very much.

The SHERIFF is taken by surprise. His beer freezes mid-swig.

SHERIFF

You do?

ROBIN

Kind of awkward, I know, us being enemies and all. But you just have this… animal magnetism, know what I mean?

SHERIFF

Animal? What do you mean, animal?

ROBIN

Like you’re some sort of…badger. A sexy badger.

SHERIFF

That’s dumb. Badgers don’t do shit. I think of myself as more of a wolf.

ROBIN

I could get behind that. (Beat.)

SHERIFF

Just what are you after, Mr. Hood?

ROBIN

I keep thinking how…satisfying it would be to meet an old enemy on equal ground.

SHERIFF

What, you think you could take me or something?

ROBIN

You have no idea what I could do to you.

The SHERIFF is silent and looks away from the computer for a beat. When he speaks, it’s quiet and furtive.

SHERIFF

There’s a motel on the edge of the forest.

ROBIN

Be there in twenty. It’s a duel.

Lights down on desks. There’s a brief sound of animalistic noises in the darkness as the scene changes: grunting, panting, and howling. Lights up on a bed. ROBIN is sitting in bed, on top of the sheets, wearing only his tights and smoking a cigarette. The SHERIFF is cuddled up next to him, wearing only novelty heart boxer shorts. The rest of their clothes are scattered all over the room. Next to the bed, a side table is covered in an oversized key ring loaded with keys, an ashtray, and a pack of cigarettes.

ROBIN checks to see if the SHERIFF is really asleep. He is. ROBIN grins. He carefully slides out of bed, grabs his shirt and boots, dons his cap, and slowly picks up the keys. He tiptoes to the exit, then pauses, turning back.

ROBIN

Catch you later, darling.

He blows a kiss as the sleeping SHERIFF and then leaves.

The sound of a truck roars from offstage. The SHERIFF wakes and discovers that Robin has gone. He spots the lack of keys on the bedside table. He tugs at his hair and lets out a howl of fury. He storms around the room, kicking at the bed, tearing at the sheets, ripping at his clothing. Finally he settles on the edge of the mattress and looks at the cigarette butt in the ashtray. He picks it up and twists it wistfully between thumb and forefinger.

SHERIFF

God damn it, old man. You’re such a fool.

Blackout.

***

Yep. I am totally getting an advanced degree. And using it for good.

Cheers,

Anne