Category Archives: Roundtables

In Search of “It”: A response to a review of Potential

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My first contact with the work of Ariel Schrag occurred almost ten years ago following the release of Potential from Slave Labor Graphics. My renewed interest in her work stems from my host’s, Noah Berlatsky’s, enthusiasm for her comics which he considers among the best produced this past decade.

Noah is probably Schrag’s most articulate apologists and I was especially interested in hearing his views on her work before I found a review he did for The Chicago Reader which neatly summarizes his affection for the book (it might be wise to read Noah’s review before continuing with this response to that piece of criticism):

” Written while Schrag was still an adolescent, Potential seems pitched more toward her peer group than the New York Times editorial board. It doesn’t have the purple rhetorical flourishes of Fun Home or the pomo magical realist tics of Maus. Its focus is the non-highbrow subject of teen-girl angst.”

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Dick Talk (Likewise Roundtable)

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For a memoir about a lesbian coming of age, Likewise is absolutely full to bursting with penises. There are Schrodinger’s penises attached to various possible boys who may or may not be fucking Ariel’s not-nearly-gay-enough ex Sally. There’s a much touted artificial penis which Ariel purchases on her eighteenth birthday. There are daydream penises, which keep intruding, somewhat queasily, into Ariel’s masturbatory fantasies. And there are even some real live honest to goodness actual penises attached to guys with whom Ariel does assorted non-lesbian type things.

In short, to get all alliterative, the penis-to-panel proportion is patently preposterous. Even the most drooling male sybarite fueled by the most unforgiving mid-life crisis (Kingsley Amis, say, or Dan Clowes) couldn’t have conceived that teen lesbians were this obsessed with male genitalia. I mean, really, it’s difficult to imagine that straight women think about it that much.

Which is sort of the point. Ariel thinks about penises the way constipated people think about their bowels. When your bowels are in good shape, they only draw your attention every so often, and otherwise you don’t need to worry about them. If your bowels are off though — well, you focus on them a lot.

As it happens, in one of the rare interludes when Likewise is not focusing on penises, it turns instead lightly to thoughts of…bowels.

That bit above occurs during what is possibly the most searingly embarrassing sequence in the book; a 30+ page marathon gab session in which Ariel and several friends try with all the earnest might of high school seniors to define It — that elusive virtue which casts a glamor on the doings of some, and the absence of which turns others, despite their best efforts, into lame assholes. Ariel is, in the manner of these things, fairly certain that she has It, even though her asshole is, alas, exceedingly lame, and keeps dragging her off to the bathroom.

So what is It? Ariel defines It as “sort of like an appreciation of certain things in the world…that like not very many people have, but you can tell if someone or something has it.” She also says, “you either have It or you don’t and it has to do with like getting to the root of things? like when you talk about something you talk about what it essentially is.” It, then, is cool; It’s ease with authority; It’s mastery. I think Freud would call it the phallus.

Which makes Ariel’s thoughts about Sally elsewhere in the conversation very a propos:

“crazy=perfect=It=I can’t deal?! hush, I have It. oh god, what if Sally doesn’t think I have It….Yeah, I think I’m going to throw up.”

Thinking about Sally makes Ariel worry that she doesn’t have It — which makes sense since, during their relationship, the thing that Ariel always worried was lacking, the thing she feared that maybe-not-so-gay Sally wanted, was the very thing, a penis.

Anxiety about Sally, then, leads to thoughts of penises, and to efforts to grasp and wield them. As in this scene:

Ariel’s fantasy here starts with Sally naked…and then spins off in somewhat unexpected directions. The person fucking Sally is not Ariel, but a man — and the way Ariel seems to be sliding off her slanting bed in the top right panel and onto the similarly slanting guy in the panel below suggests that she may be fantasizing herself as the man. Then, in the last panel, the person being fucked isn’t Sally but someone who, with the glasses and the larger chest, seems like it might be Ariel herself, or perhaps Ariel combined with Sally. Schrag uses the repetitive panel compositions (the starred bed cover across the bottom of the panel, the white space) to emphasize the substitution of identities and desires; the phallus-as-fetish seems to move about the empty half-dream world, looking for the perfect place to attach and center. Wanting Sally leads to chasing the phallus around and around, or in and out, until mastery is finally both achieved and not-so-much:

for the climax we shift back to Sally on the bed…but the guy who is, presumably, climaxing has lost his mouth, which makes him look more than a little ridiculous. He looks, in fact, surprised — and quite a bit like Ariel in the top left of the last facing page, who has also misplaced an orifice, and is also looking at Sally (Ariel is looking at her and Sally’s prom picture):

The man and Ariel both look at Sally the same way; with both desire and alienation. You try to grasp the phallus but the phallus escapes, leaving you nonplussed, gaping, and forced to try to grasp the phallus again. Or just wondering where it is:

I kind of want to get that put on a T-shirt.

As a man, it’s easy to relate to Ariel’s worries about measuring up — worries about measuring up being pretty much what masculinity is about. Ariel’s struggles are especially fraught, though, because it’s not clear what victory would look like. Guys know they want to be Superman, more or less. But Ariel? Succeeding in being a man is, from her perspective, even worse than failing.

That last panel, where she thinks “I’m not a woman” — that’s not a victory. Being taken for a man doesn’t make her a man; it unsexes her. When her phallus is most manifest is when she measures up least.

So the book is a self-hating tale of how a young lesbian wants to be a man, but can’t quite measure up? Well, no. Ariel, like lots of queer high school students, does have got a certain amount of internalized homophobia to work through, as she’d be the first to acknowledge. But that’s not the only thing that’s going on. On the contrary, far from being constitutionally inadequate, Likewise is, in the way of ambitious art, swaggering. If the book’s about wondering where your dick is, it’s also about pointing down and saying, “check this motherfucker!” The long discussion of “It”, for example, contains some of Schrag’s most detailed, obsessive drawing, with carefully delineated leaf placed next to carefully delineated leaf, until the virtuoso craft of the background almost overwhelms the vacuous teen discussion of virtuoso It in the foreground. When Ariel in the comic decares “my comic has It,” it’s both wishful thinking and, in the care and beauty of the drawing, actually true. The very way in which Ariel’s bowel problems undercut her hold on the phallus are in fact a laugh-out-loud delight in playing with It. She demonstrates she has the thing by the skill and humor with which she shows she doesn’t.

Creativity, in short, is the biggest, most potent penis of all — which is why Ariel comes while holding her pen.

It’s also why Ulysses is so important to this book. My sense is that many readers (like Kristian Williams) see the Joyce influence in Likewise as a more or less insufferable late adolescent affectation. I think this rather misses the point, which is that Joyce in Likewise is thematically presented, not as random anonymous affectation, but as deliberate, specific, lifeline. Ariel is drawn to Ulysses because Sally suggested it. In part, she picks the book up to be like Sally — but in part she picks it up to be to Sally what Joyce has been:

There’s Ulysses standing straight up, a huge tower on the bookshelf, while Ariel thinks “when did she [Sally] read it? whole thing, and made her who she is. under belt, gone. whole book passed through her, blacked her in”. The vision of Ulysses as phallus entering Sally couldn’t be much more clear…and we then move from that, to the next page, where Ariel starts contemplating her own lack of Itness and inadequacy in relation to Sally.

Ariel’s sudden realization that she can have the book is accompanied by grasping It and clutching it to her chest while holding onto that suggestively shaped bedpole. Then she curls under the covers…and starts reading, not Joyce, but the frontmatter account of the obscenity trial. The book is pornography, both because it’s about sex and because it’s instrumental — Ariel is using it to get It up. The page is both triumphant and self-mocking; there’s a recognition I think that metaphor can remake gender, and also a recognition that it can’t. Reading Joyce can turn Ariel into Joyce, and it also really can’t. I find that last panel heartbreakingly funny; big-eyed Ariel clutching the little sliver of light that’s going to keep all that darkness back, so certain she’s found the secret formula that she’s even going to read the boring damn introduction.

The Joyce-as-penis analogy is made even more explicitly later in the book:

In this sequence, Ariel’s reading Ulysses, and she comes to a section where Joyce describes a penis. He calls it “father of thousands” comparing it to Saxifragia stolonifera, a plant that “spreads by runners that seem to float its flowers” according to the reference book she’s using.

Ariel is wowed: “Oh my god, that is so perfect,” she thinks. This is supposed to refer to Joyce’s genius. But I think it also refers to his penis, especially given the way Schrag draws it — as a sensuously expressive charcoal illustration, perhaps the most beautiful image in the comic.

The best bit here, though, is not the visionary penis, but rather the vision itself. The wobbly panel borders above are not just filligree; they’re there because Ariel’s stoned. Her paean to Joyce’s penis can partially be read as “Joyce — he is a genius, and I appreciate him.” But it can also be read as, “Wow—like— everything’s really meaningful when you’re stoned, dude.” Literary critics singing modernism’s hosannahs are deftly equated with gently tripping potheads.

Joyce’s penis in this passage is, then, lovely, ridiculous — and also feminine. The “father of thousands” is based on the mother of thousands; woman by metaphor, becomes man. Ariel, as creator and character, attempts something similar; taking Joyce’s rhetoric makes her him. She is no longer just a high school journal keeper. She’s an artist, with exactly the kind of It that Sally likes.

Of course, Ariel isn’t actually Joyce. The Inkwell Bookstore blog notes that Schrag’s stream-of-consciousness reads at moments “like a slam poetry parody of Ulysses.” But surely that’s intentional — or, at least, self-aware and thematized. Being Joyce isn’t a realistic option any more than being a man is a realistic option — which is to say, it is and it isn’t. Ariel can buy a dildo and enjoy aspects of her butchness

And she can enjoy Joyce and adopt bits of his language and mojo. But none of that magically give her a phallus.

Or perhaps the real problem is that it does. The phallus is basically a magic totem anyway. If Alan Moore can worship an imaginary snake deity and derive real power from it, then Ariel Schrag can surely get the same effect by worshiping an actual historical Joyce. But precisely because they have power, metaphors have consequences. If you’re going to use Joyce as your phallus, then you’re committed to rotating round that center. Ariel picks up Ulysses in order to possess Sally — and as long as she’s holding Ulysses, she can’t let Sally go.

Ulysses is, for Schrag, a metaphor for run-on sexual obsession. Which is why, Ariel’s decision to move on with her live has to be accompanied by a decision to stop talking like (a slam poetry version of) Joyce.

Up to this moment, about two-thirds of the way through the book, Schrag has mostly been using stream of consciousness, and mostly writing about Sally. In this scene, though, she pulls back to a meta-moment; we see her typing on the computer…and what she’s typing is that she’s sick of writing about Sally.

In my interview with Schrag she explained the stylistic shift in the book following this scene as follows:

what happened in the senior year, the ways I was recording everything became more important than what was happening…I was totally removed from my surroundings. So the way in which I recorded the present ended up dominating everything. So halfway through the book, the stream of consciousness narration sort of recedes and the story is only told through these three different methods: what’s typed on a computer, what’s handwritten in a journal, and what’s recorded on a handheld tape recorder. So halfway through the book the methods are…I mean the methods are introduced as recording methods in the beginning, but the narration is just her stream of consciousness, but later in the book the narration changes so it’s the actual typed words or the actual words in the notebook, or the actual tape recording. Things that are typed on the computer, the text box is actual computer type and the drawing is done with an ink wash; things that are hand-written in a journal, the text is scrawled and the drawings are very loose and rough; things that are tape recorded, there’s no narration, and the dialogue appears in square boxes, and it’s done all in black and white. I wanted to shift between those modes of recording and have which mode was being used be more obvious.

Here Schrag sees the stylistic change in the book as a meta-pocalypse; a swallowing of reality by recording. I think it’s also possible to see it, though, as about rejection of both Sally and the Joycean penis that Ariel has been carrying for her. Almost immediately following the stylistic change, Ariel deliberately pees in Sally’s car:

Peeing your pants pretty much defines infantilizing — it’s not, in any case, very masterful, and certainly not It. And yet, at the same time, Ariel obviously sees it as a kind of triumph — “fainting failed – throw up not possible, pee= last resort you must!” Peeing here is a calculated tantrum; a rejection of one of the earliest-learned social conventions, which is also a rejection of the law, or phallus.

The rest of the book follows from there, as the obsessively controlled Schrag goes about, just as obsessively, releasing control. The focus on the means of recording becomes (in a proud avant-garde tradition) a way of introducing randomness into the creative process, of finessing authorial intent. Long passages of the comic are direct transcriptions of tape recordings, complete with tape hiss and scenes ending whenever someone happens to turn the machine off. Other sections are taken directly from Ariel’s journal notes, with the drawings done as uncompleted sketches.

The effect of both of these choices is to create narratives that are closer, in some ways, to Schrag’s earlier comics than to the first part of Likewise. A sequence taken from recordings made by Ariel and her friend Julia at a comic convention is built around laugh-out-loud dialogue, acid observation, and gossip, and has the episodic structure of much of Awkward and Definition.

Analogously, Schrag’s sketchy pencil drawings evoke the cruder style of Awkward, her first comic done when she was a sophomore.

There’s also a long section in which Ariel and her friend Zally go to a strip club to see if Ariel can get off, which is very reminiscent of the long episode in Potential when Ariel and Zally planned and executed Ariel’s loss of virginity (complete with anticlimactic, though ultimately satisfying, ending). And, perhaps most obviously, as the book moves towards its conclusion, Ariel starts messing around with a guy, pointing back to her freshman and sophomore years, when she identified as straight or bi.

As this suggests, though Joyce and It are in some sense shelved, penises still pop up throughout the last portion of the book.

Ariel isn’t really, after all, going back to her older work (which, in any case, featured a certain number of penises itself.) She’s not so much laying down her desire to measure up as she is looking around for different modes, shifting away from Joyce’s style in order to experiment with different modes and ideas — in a way which is also (as she mentioned in our interview) inspired by Ulysses. She’s not returning to an unconscious childhood, but rather reworking her past into something she can use now. Her sketches look like Awkward, and may be inspired by Awkward, but they’re definitely not Awkward, either in their origin or their execution. The drawings in Awkward were cute but restrained — they looked like cartoons. The sketches here, on the other hand, look like artist’s sketches; the lines are quick, with a messy, expressive brio, and the shading (when there is any) has a delightful, scribbly energy. Purely as art, they may be my favorite of her drawings,and they can convey remarkable subtlety. In the sequence below, for example, there’s a sensuality in the way Mary’s shaded form bends back and forth towards Ariel as they walk, while all the figures around them dissolve into background blobs.

I also love the panicked violence in the panels below, as Ariel’s distorted arms sweep across her desk looking for her protractor, and then the clumsy heaviness of her body in the second panel, contrasting with the vibrating scribbles of the dark.

If this is Awkward, it’s Awkward that’s gotten older and wiser and cockier; Awkward with a swagger.

Perhaps the best account of where Ariel’s phallus seems to have gone and why is in the strip club scene with Zally. Here’s the back and forth about that section from the interview I did with her:

That’s interesting. Because there’s also the scene where you go to the strip club with Zally, and you seem to be really trying to approach it in a guy way — a kind of swaggering, I’m going to get off on this approach.

The thing I thought about was funny in the whole scene…Zally went to the strip club and the girl rubbed on him and came, and I’m thinking, so that’s what I’m going to do…a five-minute ordeal. And then my experience is this long ordeal and I’m intellectualizing and over-thinking and it’s like the opposite. What I wanted was the macho posturing, but instead there’s this twenty minute ramble about every minute detail.

It seems to me that that’s kind of reflected in your comics as well though. That is, part of the reason that you have trouble getting off is that you are thinking about what the woman is thinking, or you’re interested in that. In your comics in general, even though they’re autobiography, you’re really interested in other people.

I don’t really understand comics that don’t have more about other people. I mean if I’m writing in my diary I’m going to write down the quotes that other people said, I’m not going to write down what I said to other people.

What happens at the strip club is that Ariel doesn’t get off…essentially because she doesn’t have a penis.

And yet, if she doesn’t have a penis, she does have a phallus:

The tape-recorder itself functions through the last part of the book as a violent stick; Ariel’s always shoving it into people’s faces and trying to get them to talk about sex. She uses it to control the other people’s responses, and to control the narrative (by trying to record what’s going on, sometimes even surreptitiously.)

But if it’s a phallus, it’s a phallus that’s about conversation and connection, rather than about the more self-contained drives in Ariel’s Joycean stream-of-consciousness. The fun here is about back and forth; about figuring out what the girl is thinking and then analyzing the experience by talking it over with a friend rather than by internalized obsession.

In the interview, I characterized Schrag’s take on the strip club as gendered female, in comparison to some male autobio writers. I think that’s defensible — but I also think that one thing that happens in Ariel’s experience in the strip club is that the exact gender implications become hard to pin down. Is talking sex over with your friends really gendered feminine? That’s an awfully guy thing to do. Similarly, jerking off with a friend in a club seems definition male homosocial.

In this narrative mode, though, the sliding back and forth and around the phallus, or lack thereof, doesn’t seem nearly as fraught; if the lap dance was kind of uncomfortable, it was also funny, and if she didn’t cum from that, she can always cum later with a buddy. Similarly, her sexual encounters with various friends, and even her interactions with Sally (with whom she finally, finally breaks up), become less emotionally overwhelming. Is that the distancing of meta; the constant drive to observe and record herself pushing authentic reality away? Or is it working through different ways of holding onto reality — and maybe finding that grasping it a little less firmly makes it easier to hold?

“man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition…modern man’s plight is choice” That’s a gendered statement; we’re talking about man, and, indeed, about the way Ariel relates to Joyce and to It in the beginning of the book. She wants to repeat her experience with Sally; she wants the mastery of choosing and control.

In the second part of the book, though, she escapes both these things, at least provisionally. She finds a way to create which to some extent undercuts choice, and in so doing ceases to try quite so hard for repetition.

The last page of the book returns to the Joycean stream-of-consciousness, but not to any penises that I can find. Instead, the sequence is about Ariel popping her zits, and she seems contented enough. The stream-of-consciousness seems not like a self-circling outlet for obsession, nor a way to wow and possess, but just another style she can use. “This is the most important year of my life, and this is what I do with my time,” she concludes, staring into the mirror with the last pimple popped.

The “this” she’s doing with her time is in part finishing her book— a massive, ambitious work of art which she can pull out and brandish to awe and stun the neighbors. But “this” is also the everyday task of popping pimples. To finally have capital-It is to know you don’t need It after all. Which leaves your hands free for all sorts of things, both trivial and otherwise.

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This is the second post in the Likewise Roundtable. The first post surveying reviews of Likewise is here.

You can read the entire LIkewise Roundtable here.

Reviewing the Reviews: Likewise

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This week, HU is going to do a roundtable on Ariel Schrag’s Likewise. We’ll have guest posts by Jason Thompson, one of my favorite comics critics…and by Ariel Schrag herself, who has kindly agreed to weigh in at the end.

So, in preparation for that, I thought I’d look at what’s been written about Likewise thus far on the old internets. A little while back Suat looked at the extant reviews of Dash Shaw’s Bottomless Belly Button and found them wanting. Likewise was considerably lower profile…but nonetheless, I was surprised to find how little had been written about it. I was certain, for example, that the folks at Comics Worth Reading would have something to say about it…but nope. Nothing at Comics Reporter either, which has run reviews of Schrag in the past (I know…I wrote one of them!) Nor did the Comics Journal review it…though, given the lag time with the magazine, it’s possible that something is still in the works, I suppose.

Schrag conveniently lists a number of shorter reviews on her website, though these are mostly of the quick descriptive sort that Suat dismisses rather roughly in his post. I’m not the completist (and/or masochist) Suat is, so I can’t say I read them all closely, but they’re basically (to paraphrase Suat) more interested in giving you a sense of whether you want to buy the thing, rather than in trying to analyze it.

The Kirkus Reviews blurb is a good example — traumas are listed (parent’s divorce, struggles with homosexual identity, conflicted relationship with straight girlfriend); literary references are cited (Ulysses, Brothers Karamazov); metatextual aspects are briefly touched on; the varied art styles are highlighted, and the whole thing summed up positively as “A big leap of artistic ambition and self-discovery; Schrag saved the best for last.”

The best of these buyer’s guide efforts may be Shauna Miller at NPR who bases her piece upon the assumption that Schrag wrote Likewise a decade after the events depicted…a perfect peg for the piece, save for the one unfortunate fact that it happens to be false. (Schrag wrote and drew the entire book in the year following her graduation from high school; it just took her a decade to ink and publish it.)

I did manage to find three substantial reviews of Likewise.

The first is by tcj.com stalwart, Rob Clough Clough’s review is more a series of impressions than a sustained single argument. He does make several nice points: I liked his take on the very end as an anticlimax. As he puts it, “The book ends on a goofy, self-effacing note, deflating both the expectations of senior year of high school and her own obsessions.”

Still, overall, the review felt to me like Clough had trouble coming to grips with the (admittedly difficult) book. He notes the connection to Ulysses, mentions Ariel’s obsessive disorder, talks about her focus on school science subjects, notes that the book gets faster as it approaches the end…and finally throws up his hands, resting his assessment not on the work, but on his vision of the author’s strength of character. Or, as he puts it “Reading LIKEWISE is frequently a rocky and frustrating experience, but Schrag’s sheer ambition and drive behind this comic is so compelling that one can’t help but get swept along.”

The second long review I found is by Kristian Williams. Like Rob Clough’s review, this one is frustrating, though for somewhat different reasons. To me, a big part of the interest of Likewise is the way the book shifts between different styles for different scenes, trying to match visual and emotional content. Instead of trying to engage with this variation, Williams just punts and declares it chaos:

The best thing that can be said about Likewise is it shows Schrag’s expanding range as an artist. Unfortunately, where her earlier volumes used changes in style and technique sparingly to create mood or convey information about the character’s subjective experience, here the style changes frequently, sometimes for no apparent reason. It feels like Schrag just periodically got bored with what she was doing, and decided to try something else, often mid-page. In fact, dozens of pages are left un-done, with polished panels appearing alongside sketches of barely-humanoid blobs with speech balloons tacked to them.

The unwillingness to entertain the idea that Schrag might actually know what she’s doing is especially irritating because Williams is in some ways an astute reader. He notes, for example, that one of the effects of Schrag’s style towards the end of the book is that “Without time, causation and character development become impossibilities as well” — which is surely what Schrag is aiming for. He adds “The border between the story and the life blurs, producing a confused life and a confused story. And given the nature of autobiography, Ariel — writing the story of a relationship that’s still somewhere in the process of collapsing — ends up living a lot in the past.” But instead of trying to see how this works out in specifics, he simply dismisses it because “it still reads like somebody knocked the manuscript off the desk, and just didn’t bother to get the pages back into the right order.”

In short, Williams recognizes that Schrag is working in a modernist idiom, where form follows function. He finds this alienating. He recognizes that the alienation is a deliberate artistic decision. And he responds by…sneering at Schrag for successfully alienating him when she should be writing entertaining, unambitious anecdotes, since that is what high-school girls do best.

The saddest part about that is, with a devoted editor and 200 fewer pages, Likewise could have been a pretty good book. Schrag just needed to go back to the format of Awkward. The story of Likewise is not well suited to the novel form; it would work better as a loose series of vignettes that show us pieces of the life of a young girl, without any grand claims about Life, Love, Art, and the rest of it. Perhaps Schrag wanted to push her talents to the limit. The problem is, she found it.

I mean, if you don’t like highbrow modernism, go after highbrow modernism. It’s a worthy target; I’ve been known to take shots at it myself. But the recognition, on the one hand, of the successful fusing of form and content, the refusal to figure out why you find that fusion alienating, and the conclusion that the alienation has something to do with the fact that a high school girl has gotten too big for her britches — to me that all seems profoundly condescending. Williams would rather dismiss the book altogether than treat a high-school girl as a potential equal — someone who could, and in fact did, write a book that is too highbrow for his tastes.

The last substantial review is by the Inkwell Bookstore and is easily my favorite of the bunch. It’s true that it’s short, and not especially detailed. But in its limited space, it very thoughtfully compares Schrag’s work to that of Dash Shaw and Alison Bechdel, arguing that Schrag is better than either of them at using structural elements of her comic to emotional effect:

With Likewise, Schrag has crafted a comic that is as structurally daring as it is emotionally affecting. Every time she plays with panel layouts or switches art styles or f**ks up her fonts, she is intentionally entrancing the reader with an explicit expressionistic effect. Sometimes it’s giddy, drunken glee, sometimes it’s the harrowing disorientation of a recurring heartbreak, but there’s always an extra layer of emotional imbalance being added.

The review also notes that Schrag’s Joycean monologue sometimes reads as a “slam poetry parody of Ulysses, which is a palpable hit (though I think the effect may be somewhat more intentional than the review suggests.)

Also Inkwell credits my interview with Schrag for pushing him to read the book. So that obviously proves his superior taste.

Despite Inkwell’s review, though, I was overall quite disappointed Schrag’s book is a lengthy, ambitious, complicated, long-awaited work by a well know creator. And the critical response to it has been, for the most part, indifference, dismissive praise, and confusion.

Admittedly, Likewise isn’t an easy book, and our roundtable next week may well not get to grips with it either. We’ll give it a try, though, starting tomorrow.

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Update: You can see all posts in the roundtable here.

Update 2: Kristian Williams defends himself here.

Update 3: Ed Howard has an interesting short take on Likewise in his round up of the decades best comics.

Copyright Kills Culture: Lethem and Paley sing the blues

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In 2007, Jonathan Lethem published an extended essay in Harper’s on the nature of creative inspiration and the ways in which all creativity draws on a cultural wellspring of ideas and representations. Called “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” it contains the following passage describing the “open source” culture behind the origins of the Muddy Waters song “Country Blues”:

“I made it on about the eighth of October ’38,” Waters said, “It was fixin’ a puncture on a car. I had been mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and it come to me just like that and I started singing.” Then Lomax, who knew of the Robert Johnson recording called “Walkin’ Blues,” asked Waters if there were any other songs that used the same tune. “There’s been some blues played like that,” Waters replied. “This song comes from the cotton field and a boy once put a record out – Robert Johnson. He put it out as named “Walkin’ Blues. I heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House.”  In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts [of the song’s authorship]…

Lethem’s essay is, as the title suggests, entirely composed of plagiarized fragments of text, knitted together into a new whole. Whether due to his fame, to Harper’s influence as a literary publication, or to some resistance to commodification inherent to natural language, nobody objected too vociferously to the use of his or her words, although Lethem’s strategy did prompt some commentary (all of which is behind subscription locks.)

Around the same time that Lethem’s article was hitting the newsstands, cartoonist Nina Paley was hitting a brick wall in the production and distribution of her blues-inflected animated full-length feature film, Sita Sings the Blues. Made by Paley single-handedly in her Manhattan apartment, Sita brings together an embarrassment of source-material richness: Paley’s own humor-filled story of breakup-by-email, the ancient Indian epic Ramayana, and the blues songs of ‘20s American songstress Annette Hanshaw.

Despite the “open source” culture of indigenous blues, it’s those Hanshaw recordings that led her to the brick wall: the recordings’ are restricted by copyrights held by large corporations like Sony and EMI. The cost of licensing the music used in Sita would have cost her more than it cost to make the entire film. She explains the copyright obstacles facing the film and its soundtrack on her blog.

Paley’s imaginative solution to the problem has been to give the film away for free, and the result has been a firestorm of enthusiasm for all things Sita. Paley says that her new “free culture” lifestyle has eradicated her cynicism and made her even more creative than before. A lot of that creativity at the moment is going into promoting the idea of free culture: her Facebook page boasts a charming jingle and accompanying animation clip promoting the idea that “copying isn’t theft”:

(The “draft needs your audio” refers to Paley’s request that musicians make their own versions of the ditty she sings in this vid.)

You can watch Sita online (click through rather than watching the embedding ’cause the right side is cut off):


or download it from its homepage.

Lethem explains in his essay that the surrealists felt our experience of life is “dulled by everyday use and utility,” and understood cinema and photography as art forms that “reanimate the dormant intensity” of the “matter that made up the world.” Paley’s animated film accomplishes a similar “reanimation”, but it’s not corporeal material that’s made more relevant and compelling through her representation, it’s the “primal stories” of the source material. In her own words:

Sita’s story has been told a million times, not just in India, not just through the Ramayana, but also through American blues. Hers is a story so primal, so basic to human experience, it has been told by people who never heard of the Ramayana. The Hanshaw songs deal with exactly the same themes as the epic, but they emerged completely independent of it. Their sound is distinctly ‘20s American, and therein lies their power: the listener/viewer knows I didn’t make them up. They are authentic. They are historical evidence supporting the film’s central point: the story of the Ramayana transcends time, place, and culture.

Lethem probably wouldn’t use the language of timelessness to describe this effect – his essay observes that “serious fiction” is “liberally strewn with innately topical, commercial, and timebound references,” pretty much like everything else. But Paley’s point is really more about primacy than timelessness – things common to human experience, things not transcendent to culture but merely so common among cultures that they seem universal.

But it’s not just that juxtaposition of those common elements from several cultures that animates Sita: it’s also the mark of the artist’s hand. At the risk of tautology, the animator re-animates. But not just in the literal sense: for culture to remain alive and to become mature, to learn from accumulated experience and insight, artists have to be able to take it into their hands and renew, revitalize, and re-animate it. The more locked down it is behind copyright, the harder it is for artists to do that, and the less alive the culture is.

Listen to Paley talk about free culture to the non-profit Public Knowledge:

Or if you’re interested in the business model, here’s her presentation to the National Film Board of Canada:

xxxHOLiC Followup

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When I was invited to do a guest post on xxxHOLiC vols. 1-3, I took the assignment literally. Even though I had read the whole series (though not recently), I wrote my review with reference to the first three volumes alone. Since these volumes are episodic and largely self-contained, this struck me as reasonable. But I can see why fans of the series might be unhappy. So I took up Kristy and Kate’s implicit challenge and read the entire series so far, including scanlations of what del Rey hasn’t published yet: these cover volumes 15 and 16, and a few chapters of what will be volume 17. (For those who want to do the same, the new stuff begins with Chapter 171.)

It is quite true that the first three volumes are not representative of the series. It’s also true that the later volumes fix some of the problems with the first three. For one thing, they gradually drop the episodic structure and focus on the regulars rather than the customers, so the “simplistic morality tales” I complained about are gone. For another, some of the characters’ annoying quirks are minimized. (Not all, though: Watanuki’s irrational dislike of Domeki is still prominent, and still not funny.) But for most of the series, Watanuki and Yuko
remain one-dimensional characters, and Yuko is still more of a plot device than a character.

Moreover, the later volumes provide an additional ground for complaint. As the series progresses, the link with Tsubasa becomes much more important. Although it’s still possible to read xxxHOLiC without reading Tsubasa, unless you read Tsubasa you won’t know the full story of who Watanuki is, or why Yuko’s shop exists in the first place, among other important questions. I have read Tsubasa, or tried to. Not only is it long and bad, its plot is a labyrinth which few who enter ever find their way out of. To be fair, Tsubasa does provide a thematic counterpoint to xxxHOLiC; but that’s not enough to make it worth slogging through all 28 volumes.

The first volume of xxxHOLiC I really enjoyed was volume 15. For one thing, the characters of Watanuki, and to a lesser extent Yuko, finally acquire some depth. For another, something big actually happens, as opposed to Yuko telling us that something is about to happen, as she does repeatedly in the preceding volumes. (Even though xxxHOLiC originally appeared in a magazine for young men, CLAMP seems to think that they need to explicitly explain important points over and over, or their readers won’t get them.) And for once, the ending doesn’t disappoint: it’s powerful and affecting, more so than anything else up to that point. And there’s some beautiful and striking art.

It turns out that volume 15 and the first chapter of volume 16 mark the end of an arc that encompasses the entire series up to that point. And when the second arc starts, there are major changes, including in characterization and tone.

If xxxHOLiC ended where the first arc ends, I’d conclude by saying that one good volume isn’t enough to outweigh fourteen mediocre ones. But the second arc feels like it will be a long one, possibly as long as the first. And while it starts off slowly, it may wind up being good enough to redeem the series as a whole. While I stand by what I wrote about the first three volumes, all I can conclude about the series as a whole is that it’s too soon to say.

Update by Noah: The entire xxxholic roundtable is here.

xxxHOLiC Followup

Posted on by

When I was invited to do a guest post on xxxHOLiC vols. 1-3, I took the assignment literally. Even though I had read the whole series (though not recently), I wrote my review with reference to the first three volumes alone. Since these volumes are episodic and largely self-contained, this struck me as reasonable. But I can see why fans of the series might be unhappy. So I took up Kristy and Kate’s implicit challenge and read the entire series so far, including scanlations of what del Rey hasn’t published yet: these cover volumes 15 and 16, and a few chapters of what will be volume 17. (For those who want to do the same, the new stuff begins with Chapter 171.)

It is quite true that the first three volumes are not representative of the series. It’s also true that the later volumes fix some of the problems with the first three. For one thing, they gradually drop the episodic structure and focus on the regulars rather than the customers, so the “simplistic morality tales” I complained about are gone. For another, some of the characters’ annoying quirks are minimized. (Not all, though: Watanuki’s irrational dislike of Domeki is still prominent, and still not funny.) But for most of the series, Watanuki and Yuko
remain one-dimensional characters, and Yuko is still more of a plot device than a character.

Moreover, the later volumes provide an additional ground for complaint. As the series progresses, the link with Tsubasa becomes much more important. Although it’s still possible to read xxxHOLiC without reading Tsubasa, unless you read Tsubasa you won’t know the full story of who Watanuki is, or why Yuko’s shop exists in the first place, among other important questions. I have read Tsubasa, or tried to. Not only is it long and bad, its plot is a labyrinth which few who enter ever find their way out of. To be fair, Tsubasa does provide a thematic counterpoint to xxxHOLiC; but that’s not enough to make it worth slogging through all 28 volumes.

The first volume of xxxHOLiC I really enjoyed was volume 15. For one thing, the characters of Watanuki, and to a lesser extent Yuko, finally acquire some depth. For another, something big actually happens, as opposed to Yuko telling us that something is about to happen, as she does repeatedly in the preceding volumes. (Even though xxxHOLiC originally appeared in a magazine for young men, CLAMP seems to think that they need to explicitly explain important points over and over, or their readers won’t get them.) And for once, the ending doesn’t disappoint: it’s powerful and affecting, more so than anything else up to that point. And there’s some beautiful and striking art.

It turns out that volume 15 and the first chapter of volume 16 mark the end of an arc that encompasses the entire series up to that point. And when the second arc starts, there are major changes, including in characterization and tone.

If xxxHOLiC ended where the first arc ends, I’d conclude by saying that one good volume isn’t enough to outweigh fourteen mediocre ones. But the second arc feels like it will be a long one, possibly as long as the first. And while it starts off slowly, it may wind up being good enough to redeem the series as a whole. While I stand by what I wrote about the first three volumes, all I can conclude about the series as a whole is that it’s too soon to say.

Update by Noah: The entire xxxholic roundtable is here.

Breaking News: Manga Critics Not Nice!

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During our xxxholic roundtable last week, Suat intimated that manga critics were too nice. M. at coffeeandink, in a post titled: “Summary of some recent comments in a discussion of manga, refutes him thus:

GUY #1: Manga critics are much too nice and praise substandard work. Naturally, I feel no need to provide any evidence of this contention. Maybe it is because of all the girls.

GUY #2: Yeah, I don’t like any manga. Even when it’s good, it’s made for girls. No, wait, I do like one manga — it is by a man, and about stereotypical guy stuff. Since it is male, it is gender-neutral, unlike yaoi or shojo, which people only seem to like for political reasons. My reasons for liking things are completely apolitical and entirely justified by intellectual arguments. When women write in detail about relationships, it’s just not aimed at me. When men write in detail about relationships, it shows complex emotional realism.

Also, why don’t you ever talk about boys’ comics?

GUY #2: Once again, I must assert that people are lying about their opinions of manga for political reasons, without evidence or example, and my list of all male great comics artists is completely without political bias. Also, I am going to cite Osamu Tezuka as a great comics artist, even though his career and oeuvre actually contradict everything else I’ve been claiming about audience and identification.

GUY #2: Wait, I haven’t named enough great male comics artists yet.

I am going to continue to assume that girls’ comics = comics about romance is such an obvious statement that it will inform all my thinking and yet never need to be clearly stated.

GUY #1: Whether situations are realistic, how intellectual they are, and how deeply invested the reader becomes in the story are totally objective metrics that are completely independent of all individual tastes and socio-cultural influences.

GUY #3: The problem is an age bias, not just a gender bias. To prove this, for the rest of this comment, I will only talk about comics written by men.

I would submit that this is truly high class snark, and not even a little bit nice.

I had a back and forth discussion with m that I thought I’d reproduce here, at least in part.

Me: I did want to point out though, that, whatever their failings, Suat and Matthias, were both very open to dialogue, and unfailingly polite when contradicted (as, indeed, were people like Melinda and VM with whom they were arguing.)

m: …comments like Suat and Matthias’ are why I basically gave up on looking at comics or manga blogs not specifically recommended by friends. You characterize Suat and Matthias as “very open to dialogue, and unfailingly polite when contradicted,” and indeed they seemed respectful of the people to whom they were directly speaking. But their comments are not open, polite, or respectful; their comments are extremely sexist. By this I don’t mean that they hate women or spoke with any malice or ill intent; I mean that their comments treated men’s responses and men’s experiences as the default and characterized women’s responses and experiences as deviations from the normal, special exceptions, and less meaningful or authoritative than men’s experiences.

They are hardly the worst cases of this I’ve seen, particularly in the comics blogosphere, but I’m not sure you understand the weariness that comes from encountering this over and over and over again–even in cases, such as this one, where these voices are not in the majority. Ultimately, it was a lot less painful and exhausting for me to stick to a different set of blogs and communities, where the readers and writers did not by default consider women’s writing or women’s reading less significant or less interesting than men’s.

Me: I’ve engaged in a number of irritating interactions with mainstream and arts comics readers on behalf of shojo and manga, so I have some sense of how wearying it is to have the same argument over and over — though, obviously, not being a woman, I’m probably not as personally infuriated. In any case, I certainly understand the impulse not to want to engage with that sort of thing. You certainly have no responsibility to tell people they’re wrong on the internet. I wish I was less prone to do that myself, honestly.

Nonetheless, for me — and I’m coming from a slightly different place, as I said — I think it’s worthwhile to try to have people from different kinds of communities talk to each other. That’s going to entail some (though not necessarily equal, alas) frustration for everyone. But I think the results can also be worthwhile — and seemed to me to be so in this case, where the back and forth was fascinating, and brought up a number of really interesting points (I thought Shaenon and Kristy in particular were fascinating on why they felt manga was worthwhile and/or different from Western comics.)

Along those lines, I think its useful to make some distinctions at least. I think calling Matthias’ and Suat’s comments “extremely sexist” is a bit harsh. It’s not hard to find extreme sexism on the web or in life, alas, but does this really qualify? Neither Suat nor Matthias dismisses women’s writing out of hand; in fact, both have read a fair bit of shojo and acknowledge some of its virtues, despite their reservations. Neither categorically dismisses either women’s writing or romance — in fact, elsewhere in comments, Suat basically says his problem with xxxholic isn’t that it is romance, but that it didn’t move him to tears. Both Matthias and Suat express an eagerness to read more by women critics and to think about these issues in greater depth. Suat linked to Melinda Beasi at the end of his original post; Matthias pressed VM for links (and she linked you, among others.)

I just feel like both Matthias and Suat were very much trying to meet their interlocutors halfway — as indeed, were folks like Melinda and Shaenon and VM. I think that’s worth something, and worth respecting, even if, at the end of the day, my own views are much closer to yours than to theirs.

You can read the whole thing, along with some interesting comments from other folks, at M.’s page here.