Utilitarian Review 4/18/15

Posted on April 18, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Sean Michael Robinson on why we need to translate more Adachi sports manga.

An index to the Blog Carnival on Censure vs. Censor on Women Write About Comics.

Nate Atkinson on freedom to speak and freedom from speech.

Domingos Isabelinho on Stefano Ricci’s “The Story of the Bear.”

Michael Carson on the military documentary “Point and Shoot” and overdetermined freedom fighting.

Chris Gavaler interviews Katy Simpson Smith about pirates and literary fiction.

On Ivan Brunetti’s New Yorker cover, gender, genre, and genius.

An interview with anDee of the amazing Aquarius Records.

Utilitarians Everywhere

In my first piece for Quartz I argued that the internet is making us smarter because we never read anything.

At Pacific Standard I reviewed Allison Pugh’s book on economic precarity and talked about how eroding worker/employer commitments damages personal relationships.

At the Atlantic I wrote about how clones on Orphan Black are really robots, and class war in R.U.R.

At Urbanfaith I wrote about the 20th anniversary of Dead Man Walking and how racism contributes to the death penalty.

I started writing for Playboy.com with articles about:

—why Idris Elba as Bond is only a start if you want diversity in film.

—why getting rid of indie rock doens’t address racism.

—Orphan Black, feminism, queerness and biological determinism.

On Ravishly I have a list of rockabilly women.

On Splice Today I wrote about

—America’s exceptional authoritarianism.

—the fact that there’s no media conspiracy in favor of Hillary.

Other Links

The Calgary Expo seems to have ejected a female MRA group that was disrupting panels there.

Katherine Cross on what’s wrong with Jon Ronson’s book on public shaming.

Arthur Chu on Madonna, Drake, and consent.

Ms. Marvel and female characters sell really, really well on digital.

Goat With a Thousand Record Reviews

Posted on April 17, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran in Madeloud way, way back in 2009. So out of date, but hopefully still entertaining.
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The Aquarius Records website is just about the most mind-bogglingly erudite font of esoteric music I could ever even imagine, much less witness. Every other week the store releases a massive 25,000-word-plus new arrivals list. They’ve published more than 300 of these monsters, and all are archived and accessible through their impressive search function. The result is a gargantuan, thorough, hysterical, learned, thoughtful mountain of obsessively cross-referenced prose about every kind of obscure metal, noise, psych, roots, electronica, funk, krautrock, shoegaze, and more. Store owner Andrew Connors (better known as aNDEE to AQ customers) spoke to me by email about the store and the list.

When did you start doing your reviews of new releases?

Not sure exactly. 10 years ago? We decided to start spreading the word about the store via short emails, original reviews were more like one sentence. If we were SUPER psyched about something maybe one paragraph, it was mostly for locals, to see what was new and come down and buy stuff. Eventually, people all over started signing up for our email list, and as it grew into a proper mailorder, the list sort of took on a life of its own, and the reviews blossomed into ESSAYS haha. I sometimes long for those one sentence days for sure. But folks love the list, and we do actually love writing it. And a lot of the stuff we sell and carry, is obscure enough that people might not check it out or give it a listen without the reviews. And in the store, we take those reviews and print them out and affix them to the cds, so people can come in, and it’s like a bookstore, with the little tags on each record, which hopefully makes browsing through all this crazy stuff, easier, and more interesting and fun.

How exactly do you compile these lists?

By the seat of our pants unfortunately. It just depends on what comes in, what gets released. Stuff we’ve been able to track down direct from bands and labels. We write about the stuff we have been most excited about. Sometimes we include old stuff we’ve always wanted to review, sometimes there’s some new release that folks are dying for, and maybe we’re not insanely psyched about it, but folks want to know what we think…

Everyone here writes reviews, regular readers of the list can usually discern who reviewed what, although it’s written in a collective voice, a very eclectic, weirdly varied voice, some folks write more than others. I tend to write about 40-50 reviews for each list, which comes out every other Friday. We all try to write them regularly, a few every day, bit more often than not, it gets right down to the deadline, and we’re scrambling to finish.

Do you review everything that comes into the store?

We get so much stuff, that would never be possible. New release wise, there are probably 100-200 every week, then cd-r’s and lps and 7″s submitted for review direct from bands and labels, another 50 or so every week? Just not enough time in the day. As it is, I try to listen to every single thing we get in, but it’s gotten harder and harder. As for how we decide, it really comes down to stuff we dig. The things we find ourselves listening to over and over and over. It’s very subjective, but it’s meant to be, we try to find the records we love and then champion them. I usually compare it to making a mixtape, the new arrivals list for me is like a massive mixtape we make for our friends every two weeks, stuff so good you want other people to hear it and love it, and hopefully buy it.

Do you feel that the lists are worth the effort in terms of sales?

Absolutely. It’s one of the things that defines our store. And unlike most stores, we have this list that people who live thousands of miles away can read, and feel like they’re a part of. We try to make it fun and friendly and interesting to read, our regular mailorder customers generally become friends of ours, when they visit here we hang out, when we’re traveling we end up meeting and sometimes staying with mailorder customer. It functions the way record stores have traditionally functioned, building a sense of community, cuz sure this is a business, but there’s not much money to be made, if we wanted to get rich, we sure as hell would be doing something else, but we LOVE music, as do the people who read the list, which for me, DOES make it good business, even just on that level, music nerds obsessing about new records and new bands and crazy sounds, and because of that, it does in fact generate much of our business, people anxiously await friday night to see what new stuff showed up and to order a bunch of cool crazy music.

It is a lot of work, and of course sometimes we wish, we didn’t have a list to send out, it certainly affects how we live our lives, when we can go away, how long we can go away, our days off, the way we feel about music, knowing that if we like something, we’re also gonna have to review it, but I definitely think it’s something super special, and I hope other folks feel the same way.

Looking at these lists online, you sort of get the feeling that the store itself must be gigantic. How big is the store? How many records do you have in stock at one time?

That’s funny. It really does. And I sometimes feel bad when someone finally gets to visit, having come all the way from Japan or the UK, I feel like we should apologize for how small the store is, but almost always, people dig it. It’s small-ISH, but there’s tons of records, cds, plants in the windows, posters and flyers, and crap all over the walls, doors and posts and windows have been painted by artists, there are video games (a Tron, a Rastan and a Joust, and we usually have a Ghosts And Goblins, but that one’s broken), there’s good music playing, it’s just really comfortable and worn and home-y, the way a record store should be.

As for how many records we have in the store, only a fraction of what’s on the website. we’re usually full to capacity, but the cool thing about visiting is, there’s always plenty of stuff that is NOT on the site, maybe stuff we haven’t reviewed yet, stuff that we were only able to get a few copies, not enough to post on the site, some stuff that just won’t make it on the site, for whatever reason, not to mention TONS of awesome used stuff, and new arrivals and more…..

What would you say is your favorite review on the site?

One of my favorites is probably for the M83 record, when we first heard them, mostly for the last couple sentences:

“Now imagine [the album] as the soundtrack to the love scene in some super bizarre Anime. You know, the part where the girl is going into space because she can’t live on earth because her tentacles keep killing cute little pandas, and her boyfriend is a giant panda, but they love each other so much her tears turn into jewels that the pandas can eat to make them invincible. It’s that heartbreakingly good.”

What releases are you looking forward to in the next few months?

Definitely excited about the new Velvet Cacoon, long time aQ faves, a band from Portland who do a super blissed out fuzz drenched eco black metal. REALLY PSYCHED on the forthcoming Teenage Filmstars reissues, one of THE best heavy druggy shoegaze bands EVER. Some of us think WAY better than My Bloody Valentine (I know, blasphemy! haha), the new Bunkur, killer crushing slow motion ultra doom from Holland, the new Yoga, super tripped out murky droney sort-of-black metal, and also pretty excited for the new Arctic Monkeys…. and sure there will be more more more!!

Skating Above It All

Posted on April 16, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Is that a girl or a boy skating there?

Ken Parille, in a recent analysis of this Ivan Brunetti cover at tcj.com argues that it’s a girl, and, partially on the strength of that gendering, places the cover in a tradition of sentimental art.

With eyes closed, her face wears a contented expression. While traditional sentimentality sees a woman’s value as defined by her relationship to others (as wife, mother, daughter, etc.), Brunetti’s cover celebrates female solitude and introspection — a romance with the self.

When I initially saw the cover, though, I saw the figure as a boy — and the gender switch arguably changes the genre. As Parille notes, the person here may be engaged in contemplation, but she (or he) also seems to be violating the rules; he’s jumped the fence and is now skating on a chunk of ice where there’s some danger he’ll fall in. Seeing her as a her, Parille ends up underlining the ominous threat; “Her rebellious actions are admirable, even inspirational, but a little reckless. Perhaps she should open her eyes.” But is she’s a he, you might switch that about — it seems a little reckless, but even so, inspirational and admirable. She isn’t a girl in need of saving; he’s Tom Sawyer on an escapade. The figure isolated against the city isn’t inward turned and contemplative, but serenely pleased with his daring. The New Yorker readers get to identify with that lone figure, impishly crossing boundaries and frolicking where one should not frolic. The three drops falling from the title, which Parille reads as tears, might perhaps be seen as bright stars, confetti — a small tribute to the daring youth, and the viewer who dares with him (at least intellectually, in the way of New Yorker readers.)

Parille is probably right about the gender, as far as the artist’s intentionality goes (I get the sense that he’s probably spoken to Brunetti about it.) But of course no one can be right about the gender in an absolute sense; images don’t have gender really; a drawing has no genitals; even if you draw genitals, they’re just lines on paper. The gender is a convention, and part of that convention is genre — in the sense that the genre you see has gendered implications, and vice versa.

Though at the same time, I do wonder — are the genres all that different? Girls’ sentiment and boy’s adventure seem less like opposites, here, and more like a different way of looking at the same image; a gestalt shift. Is he mildly mournful beneath a sorrowful moon? Is she impishly pleased with herself under cover of darkness? Will they fall into their lovers’ arms, or answer the Bat signal? Which melodrama do you choose? Or will you stay, poised and refined above it all, avoiding those damply gauche pulp pleasures by skating upon a thin surface of ambiguity? Male or female, our iconic representative floats upon self-conscious, ostentatious whimsy, the genre of genius.

AAARGH! Talking Pirates with Katy Simpson Smith

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

Katy Simpson Smith, author of The Story of Land and Sea, visited Washington and Lee University this semester, and, while not busy giving the Phi Beta Kappa convocation address, she dropped by my creative writing class to read from her novel and answer a few questions. The conversation was so good, I wanted to continue it by email. Since my course is focused on fiction that merges literary and genre fiction, I suggested we start there.
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KATY: My knowledge of literary genre fiction is pretty limited, but I’ll add whatever I can to the mix.

CHRIS: Actually, I think you’re writing your own brand of it, so you know tons. If we define the mode as writing formerly lowbrow pulp genres in a literary style, would it be fair to call The Story of Sea and Land a literary pirate novel?

KATY: I guess I’d have to read some full-on pirate novels to know how and if I’m subverting the genre! I think what I like about writing a character with such a Romantic background is that it builds expectations for the reader which are inevitably undermined. Everyone — from pirate to slave — encounters the same basic range of emotions, and it’s the intense and nuanced investigation of these emotions that I believe turns something “literary.” So there’s very little swashbuckling and there are no parrots, but there is parenthood and grieving. Perhaps I’m most interested in the ordinariness inherent in seemingly extraordinary circumstances.

CHRIS: That’s a pretty good definition of “literary.” I throw the phrase “psychological realism” around my class, and I think we’re talking about the same thing. Undermining expectations describes literary genre fiction well too. But that suggests an implicit risk in the mode. Do you find readers like having their Romantic expectations undermined with nuanced ordinariness?

KATY: Ah, well if we bring readers into it! My experience suggests that many do not, in fact, enjoy the undermining. But I think this also comes down to how a book is marketed. Those that might fall into literary-genre and are also successful (I don’t know, Lonesome Dove, Cormac McCarthy — all I can think of are westerns at the moment) are books that were quickly claimed by the critics and stamped as “great,” pinned with Pulitzers, so that readers knew that something above-and-beyond was going on when they opened the pages. I’ve certainly had readers who wanted my pirate and his lady to have their happy ending, and to be morally clear heroes, and when the book takes a different turn, I’m afraid some of them threw it out the window. The failing, of course, is probably mine. If I’d written Lonesome Dove, I could’ve swayed even the most Romantic reader. But in the end, you can’t write a book for readers, because none are alike. You just write the book that you believe in. (And thoughts about what category it fits into never arise until someone asks you!)

CHRIS: Well, your first novel is getting some serious stamps of approval, no Pulitzers yet, but, as NPR put it, you’re “a writer to watch.”And it’s interesting McCarthy popped to mind. When you described your next manuscript to me, I thought of Blood Meridian, a highly historical novel about the Galton gang of the 1840s. Your gang roams the 1780s, right? Bandits and pirates—are you always drawn to subjects who, at least in their “full-on” forms, are so much about traditional masculinity and violence?

KATY: I think the pull of violence comes from a Southern upbringing, where you can’t avoid being steeped in a very dark history (a history that also leaves violence on the surface of the present, oil spill-style). So I’ll always be fascinated by people pushed to their outer edge; we all have a limited range of responses, and though violence is usually the last tool we’d reach for, it’s still lying there in the toolbox, waiting. As for issues of masculinity, I have always been drawn to them, perhaps because I’ve seen men having an easier time of it in the self-theorizing department after the waves of brilliant scholarship on women and feminism. (I made a documentary in college about young men in the context of popular media, so I suppose it’s a long-abiding interest.) On the one hand, I don’t want to let men off the hook, but I’ll also admit that part of me is afraid to write a book populated only by women, given how little they seem to be valued–still–which is frankly appalling. I’ve been struggling recently with this deficiency of mine, worried that I’m giving in or selling out, but after my reading at W&L, at which I read a section told mostly from a man’s point of view and explained that this was a book mostly about men, a gentleman came up to me afterward and said, “I don’t usually read women’s fiction, but I’ll give this a chance.” That’s the world we’re writing in.

CHRIS: Women’s fiction! There’s a genre I wouldn’t have placed you in. I published a romantic suspense paperback once, and my editor kept my author pic off the back so potential readers would mistake my first name for an abbreviated “Christine,” which they did. It’s so odd that the gender of the author should seem to determine anything about a book. You could also theoretically label your novel “war fiction,” since the Revolutionary War is so key. And there you keep subverting expectation, holding us at the edge of battle instead of plunging in. I almost want to read this sentence as a metafictional aside: “It is hard for a colonel to keep his men camped out in a field at the far edge of a siege.” Do you think you avoid the entertainment of swashbuckling violence in order to get at that other kind of no-thrills oil spill violence of slavery?

KATY: I think you’re exactly right about my intentions (which only manifest themselves after the actual book is done and I can step back and say, “Oh, that’s what I was up to!” So maybe intentions is a generous term). But yes, the ultimate violence is never what takes place on a battlefield, the blood and the wounds, the bullets and the bayonets; it’s what is done to a person while they’re still living, in the context of an ordinary life. And the freedom that soldiers were fighting for in the Revolutionary War (or in any war since) pales in comparison to the freedoms they ignored. Slavery was a complicated web of evils that an entire segment of society came to see as normal, even morally justified. But I can think of few greater violences than asking a woman to choose between her children, as the character Moll is forced to do. I think a focus on the merely sensational allows the reader to distance herself from the fictional world, and I don’t want to give my readers that comfort.

CHRIS: You just encapsulated the standard critique of genre fiction: that it’s escapism, comfort food, easy fixes. And that’s one of the core expectations you undermine by casting a pirate as a grieving father. Since you just finished your second novel, can you step back and say “Oh!” about it too? Is it coated in the same Southern oil spill? Are your bandits camped at the far edge of sensational violence too?

KATY: I’m still too close to the second novel to have that perspective on it; I think readers help teach us the many things our books might be about (whether we agree or not). These bandits, whom I’m very fond of, get up to a few more hijinks than my pirate did, and there are a handful of out-and-out murders, but the story is mostly about their ordinary lives, the facets of their desires that make them (hopefully) sympathetic rather than villainous. I’m always looking to go deeper than protagonist vs. antagonist, because none of us are wholly good or evil either. I like to think that the job of writing is about building bridges over all the gaps in the world, whether that’s in time or in temperament.

CHRIS: Apparently I’ve been quoting you to my creative writing classes for years, pushing writers to find that nuanced gray area between black and white. When should we expect your sympathetic bandits to hit bookstores?

KATY: The new novel, Free Men, should hit stores around February 2016. My bandits will be eager for folks to hear their tales of woe!

Matthew VanDyke and Obsessive Compulsive Freedom Fighting

Posted on April 14, 2015 by Michael Carson

In a short non-fiction essay, “The Spirit of Place,” D.H. Lawrence rejects the idea that young men come to America for freedom. They go west, he argues, simply to “get away from everything they are and have been.” For Lawrence, those who come to America confuse the slavishness of escapism for the authority that comes with actual freedom. “It is not freedom,” he contends, “till you find something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about things they are not.” This negative freedom, which is to Lawrence not really freedom at all, but “the sound of chains rattling,” has worked to undermine the true freedom of place, the kind in which a person has responsibilities, “a believing community” organically understood rather than an “idealistic halfness” petulantly professed. “Men are freest when most unconscious of freedom,” he concludes.

Matthew VanDyke is an interesting study in what happens when people no longer go to America but away from it to find this peculiar variety of freedom. Profiled in the recent Marshall Curry documentary Point and Shoot, Baltimore native VanDyke grows up with few friends and little masculine influence. His childhood was defined by video games, old movies about Lawrence of Arabia, and struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder. As an adult he attended Georgetown University Master’s Program in Middle Eastern studies. After graduation, VanDyke continues to be troubled by the sense that he has not proved his manhood. To find this elusive reality he decides to visit the one place a person an American with an obsessive need to wash his hands would not dare to go: the Middle East. A few weeks later he is in North Africa armed with a camera and motorcycle.

After many misadventures, including a detour with the American Army in Iraq where he poses as a photojournalist, VanDyke eventually finds the fame he seeks in a Libyan prison cell, having been captured by Gadhafi’s forces and then freed by advancing coalition-backed militias. An international darling for a few moments, the dazed VanDyke refuses to go back home. He wants to battle with his friends for the freedom of Libya. Soon enough, he is back in the fighting, though fighting might be too strong a word. Mostly he seems to be hanging about videotaping the chaos, trying to give the solemnity and dignity of a revolution to the seemingly trivial and slap-dash proceedings (which characterizes all warfare and likely all revolutions as well), as well as making heroic efforts to overcome his disgust at the lack of sanitation.

The documentary ends with him not only overcoming his dirty-hands phobia – at least overseas – but also debating whether to shoot, to take another man’s life. He misses but he wants to make clear that he meant to do it. He had the guts, the manliness, and the freedom to kill. No phobia there. Mission accomplished.

Yet for all the exciting adventures VanDyke experiences, it is impossible to get out of one’s head the idea of a reenactment, of middle-aged office workers walking through the woods in Civil War uniforms and young men playing paintball between mounds of dirt. It is all so clumsy, so sad and trivial. He travels to Afghanistan to place an American flag in Bin Laden’s house. He makes the first real friends of his life in combat. Van Dyke’s whole life, his whole idea of freedom, consists in this idea of acting, repeating typically dangerous situations under the gaze of the camera, and while the adventures he finds himself in are ostensibly new, they feel old and worn out. VanDyke very much wants to believe otherwise. He wants to believe his experiences are immediately made hallowed through the ever-present camera, which turns the ephemeral and pointless violence he witnesses, the aimless and meandering journey he travels, into something much more. But it doesn’t quite come off. The camera instead dictates his adventures, hollowing out his experiences, transforming a war and people’s lives into an unfunny Jackass skit.

Garibaldi had politics. Byron had poetry. VanDyke has a camera. Context, ultimately, comes to little compared to the camera angle, the breadth of the shot. Whose freedom VanDyke fights for and against whom is immaterial, for the names and lives of the saved are as interchangeable as those who need to be killed. The war’s entire meaning is bound up in the existence of a picture, a video or a Huffington Post article, artifacts that answer one question and one question alone: was the person there or not? Like much recent war literature and movie fare, the thereness trumps what the author or auteur have to say about having gone. Movies like Lone Survivor and American Sniper have been celebrated not so much for what they have to say about the war, but for what they show about it. Some veteran writers have gone so far as to argue that documentaries best represent these particular wars because we live with ubiquitous lenses. Yet it could also be argued – and Marshall’s documentary seems a good example of this – that war documentaries become ignoble through repetition and overcompensate for lack of imagination with documentation.

From this perspective, VanDyke’s movement from 27 year-old video-game freedom fighter in his mom’s basement to actual freedom fighter does not seem all that surprising. War is a process of self-creation, and for many lost and insecure boys, a process of self-actualization as well. It has been one for likely much of warfare’s history. Yet in the self-reported story of VanDyke one gets the impression that this process of self-creation is done firmly within the constraints of previous documentaries, movies and stories. With the exception of his time in prison – which Marshall is forced to represent through animation – there is absolutely no space for truly disturbing experiences (i.e., not already expected, not scripted, and not violent) to inform who VanDyke is, or for politics to be anything other than a flimsily applied construct, a set of words used when dialogue is expected.

Watching this young man’s self-portrait, one gets the sense that the war itself, the fight for freedom VanDyke supposedly assists, does exist somewhere. But the particulars of why they fight and what happens after the fight are unimportant. Marshall and VanDyke try to craft the narrative as a triumph over his Western squeamishness. But this is not what happens at all. It is almost as if instead of VanDyke conquering his OCD, his OCD conquers his mind entirely. His adventures give an excuse for the despotic compulsions of his imagination, and validate the incessant and never ending cavalcade of toppled dictators and heroic liberators. He no longer has to deal with the particular, with the complications of not knowing exactly what to do, with a life without routine, without a script. He only has to clean again and again a damned spot that he has made everyone else believe is there, to purify the perception of weakness and captivity that a lifetime of cameras has made a tyrannical obsession. For what better way to pretend at dignity for ourselves, to make music with our chains, then to perpetually reenact the violence that keeps us bound?

Monthly Stumblings # 21: Stefano Ricci

Posted on April 13, 2015 by Domingos Isabelinho

La storia dell’Orso (the bear’s story) by Stefano Ricci

Some comics artists find the word balloons annoying. To them, it’s an intrusion in the purity of the drawings; holes in the composition, so to speak. This pushed them to find solutions to minimize the word balloon’s weight in the panel. Hal Foster, below, for instance, eliminated the word balloon altogether including captions and spoken captions (in italics between quotation marks) in the same caption box.

Hal Foster, “Prince Valiant” Sunday Page, December 21, 1952.

Hal Foster, Prince Valiant Sunday Page, January 7, 1956. Another procedure used by Foster: the elimination of the caption box putting the caption in a negative space.

Federico del Barrio, below, used the upper part of the panels, contiguous to the gutters, with a very discreet tail, to put the direct speech, freeing the images from the balloons’ intrusion.

Felipe Hernandez Cava (w), Federico del Barrio (a), Lope de Aguirre, La conjura [Lope de Aguirre, the conspiracy], Ikusager, 1993.

La storia dell’Orso by Stefano Ricci was first published in French as L’histoire de l’Ours (Futuropolis, 2014). The Italian edition, by Quodlibet, followed shortly after four refusals from other publishers. It definitely is, in my opinion, one of the best graphic novels published last year.

Stefano Ricci, La storia dell’Orso [the bear’s story], Quodlibet, 2014.

La storia dell’Orso is a graphic novel in cinemascope: every drawing is a double-page spread. Stefano Ricci has nothing against word balloons (his are computer lettered white fonts on a dark sepia background – the color of the grizzly), but, most of the times, he strategically puts them – single or coupled by connectors – on the right or on the left hand of his drawings.

Stefano’s innovation is the use of the page margin (see below) to achieve a counterpoint of narrative voices, sometimes diverging and sometimes converging with the images and the word balloons.

The bear referred to in the title is Bruno (a name that also means “brown” as in “brown bear”), famous in Italy, Slovenia, Austria and Germany for a while in 2006. Bruno was born in Italy as part of the Life-Ursus project in Adamello-Brenta park. It roamed between Austria and Germany for a while until, in spite of the World Wildlife Fund’s efforts, it was hunted down in Bavaria.

Stefano Ricci was living in Germany (Hamburg) at the time (he is Anke Feuchtenberger’s partner) and so, in his own words, connected with Bruno’s story at some level.

There are five main stories being told in the book: Bruno’s; Stefano’s (a Ricci alter-ego who writes letters to Stella reporting his travels in Pomerania – these are readable on the page margins) and is also a rabbit performing community service in an ambulance; Enrico [Tinti]’s and Sirio [Ricci]’s life stories during the American invasion of Italy in WWII (Enrico and Sirio were fascists who deserted the German army); Manfred’s (during the fall of the GDR). Bruno’s and Stefano’s stories are the only ones being enacted, all the other stories are told in the first person to Bruno or Manfred. Another story was told by boars on one of Manfred’s tapes. Yet another narrating a dream is told to Bruno by Anke (a Anke Feuchtenberger alter-ego).

Anke and Manfred (an alter-ego of Heinz Meinhardt, a GDR ethologist) are the only humans who help Bruno.

Manfred and Anke

Humanized animals (a grizzly bear, a rabbit, a chimpanzee, a dog), boars that talk: we must be in the fable realm. Stefano helps the reader, who expects verisimilitude, to decode the visual metaphor: Renzo, the ambulance driver and Stefano’s co-worker, calls him “the rabbit” because, according to him, Stefano is always scared. So, this is the ages old procedure of disguising people as animals giving them the latter’s humanized character traits. The boars though, are just wild boars, it’s Manfred who understands them. (This isn’t the time nor place to study all the very complex focalizations of this graphic novel, but this is one of the most interesting: the reader reads the boars’ speech balloons with Manfred’s mind.)

Bruno as man-dog-panda at the beginning of the book
and Bruno as grizzly bear, after hibernating, at the end.

When characters just tell their stories talking heads were to be expected, but are out of the question for Stefano Ricci. What he shows us are the storytellers talking while they walk in the landscape. Or, even more interesting, in one of the sequences the words have one focalization (Ernesto’s) and the drawings have another (Bruno’s or the ocularizer’s when it’s following Bruno). The landscape, by the way, is a true character. It is one of the most important characters even…

Stefano Ricci’s drawing style reminds its roots in animation — the paint-on-glass technique specifically. It’s interesting to note, as an aside, how many avant-garde European comics artists were seduced by this technique; I mean the Fréon artists Thierry van Hasselt and Vincent Fortemps, mainly). Parts of La storia dell’Orso were also animated.

The dog is detached from the background in order to be animated. The trees are constant vertical and horizontal visual barriers.

Stefano Ricci’s drawing style is materic and sensual, but, at the same time, creates a distance that reminds of a strangeness (the feeling that something is not quite right) akin to mute cinema. Not showing the characters’ faces – darkening them – also helps the estrangement.

As I put it above, the humanized animals could be a reference to fables… It’s not exactly what happens here though. Stefano Ricci’s inspiration came from Shamanic culture. Since he admired Heinz Meinhardt’s work he chose him to be the story’s shaman linking the human and the animal world.

Being the original habitat of the grizzly bear, the forest is now humanized: the landscape is punctuated by roads, railroads, houses. Created by a well intentioned human program the bear is not allowed to show its true nature. The humans in the story also mirror the absurd feeling of “not belonging” symbolized by the bear: either because they are being chased (Enrico and Sirio) or because they have to adapt to a completely different set of political circumstances (Manfred when the GDR was united with the West) or because of losing territorial references (Stefano). As Michel Foucault put it (in Le courage de la verité – the courage of truth, 244):

It was by distinguishing himself from animality that the human being affirmed and manifested his humanity. Animality was always a point of repulsion in this constitution of man as a human being endowed with reason.

Stefano Ricci tells us that we may very well substitute “animality” with “being on the wrong side of a war or a revolution,” “belonging to a minority,” “being an immigrant,” you name it… We construct ourselves by not being them… And that’s the root of violence…

The hunter and his spider web.

Freedom To and Freedom From

Posted on April 12, 2015 by Nate Atkinson

Editor’s Note: Nate Atkinson left this comment on my recent post, and I thought I’d highlight it here. It’s part of our recent discussion on Censure and Censorship in comics.
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Freedom of speech arguments suffer from the fact that the word “freedom” has become a God-term in US liberal-democratic discourse. In fact, what a lot of commenters are calling a value of the left is actually a value of classical liberalism, where “freedom-to” trumps “freedom-from.” This isn’t an accident, as liberalism views that the individual is the fundamental unit of society, and thus views anything that restricts those freedoms as a threat to the social order. Compare this to a society that defines freedom as “freedom-from,” as in freedom from want, or freedom from threat. In those societies, a person’s freedom-to is more readily limited to assure freedom from (that’s where we get truly progressive taxation). Importantly, both definitions of freedom allow for democracy, though freedom-to is more encouraging of laissez faire capitalism.

So what does this have to do with speech? The smart-ass answer is that in a country where money=speech, the emphasis on freedom-to provides an argument for unlimited campaign donations. But that’s not what we’re discussing here, is it?

When we talk about freedom of speech we default to the “freedom to speak.” We forget that when we protect the freedom to speak we risk impinging not only on freedom-from speech, which is to say freedom from speech that makes the world a difficult place in which to live, and for certain people, to speak. Paradoxically, the unreflective privileging of the freedom to speak actually creates an obstacle to freedom of speech. And this gets me to the question of moral goods.

As a society, the US has a long history of divorcing politics from questions of moral good. There’s a reason for this, which is that the pragmatism of Rawls (and to a lesser extent Dewey) greases the wheels of discourse by bracketing questions about what is “true” or “good” and focussing instead on questions about what is legitimate and procedures for securing a consensus. As a result, assumptions about moral goods sneak in through the backdoor and elude sustained examination. Everyone just agrees that freedom is good without actually examining what freedom means, not only to them, but to others. Freedom-to is conflated with freedom-from, and we all truck along under a false consensus about what freedom of speech means.

However, if we unpack the notion of freedom even a little, we see the dynamic between freedom-to-speak and freedom-from-speech. This creates dissensus, which makes it anathema to pragmatism, but it also allows us to recuperate freedom of speech as a moral good, something to nurture and protect. This would allow us to discuss it as more than means to an end, a means that might or might not outlive its usefulness.

by Winsor McCary

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: April 2015