(no subject)

[philena]

So a little while ago, Margaretta and her friend Michelle (a Fort Wayne gal like me, but we don't hold that against each other) went to a fabulous used bookstore in Wicker Park called Myopic Books, that had just about everything there a bookstore should have: lots of books, a little half-mezzanine level just because there's not enough room on the first floor for all the ficiton, a fairly minimal wicca/alternative spiritualism section that is prominently displayed as if to invite mockery, and a beautiful, humongous fiction section, where I found lots of editions of War and Peace, including one that was perfect: it was the Maude translation, which is very well-regarded, all the names had accents on them to mark the proper stress, maps of the various campaigns, chapter summaries at the beginning of each chapter (summaries along the lines of "Count Rostov and Natasha call on Prince N. Bolkonski. They are received by Princess Mary. Prince Bolkonski's strange behavior. Mary and Natasha dislike one another." Not Cliff's notes, summaries, but classical-type summaries like, "in which Rasselas learns that Gwin Kolb has a Humongous number of Books about him, and Donated all of them to the Library, wherein poor Labbies must Process them All."), and two lists of characters: a short character list describing their main features, and a long, detailed one that introduces every character in order of appearance. It's lovely. I love it. But that's not what this entry is about.


In this bookstore, Margaretta and Michelle and I were discussing what makes a novel "Canon," and she mentioned with some dismay that even comic books now are considered Canon. In particular, she mentioned one about the holocaust, and seemed a bit put-off by the use of comics to discuss such a topic. I, although I have never read it, knew from its reputation that she was referring to Maus, by Art Spiegelman. It's something I've wanted to read for a while, but I never got around to it. But my understanding of it is that it is a classic in its own right, not just a classic among comic books (or even graphic novels,if you prefer that terminology. My sister Phoebe would probably beat me if I didn't mention this.*) However hard it might be for it to buck the stigma of being a "comic book" or even a "graphic novel," Maus has succeeded, and is now considered "canon."

A similar process is occurring n my head with regard to web-comics. Normally consider myself quite the snob when it comes to internet stuff, largely because I don't like to grant anything the courtesy of considering it to be of any quality if it hasn't already passed a for-profit screening process of being published. However, recently I've discovered two web-comics ("Questionable Content" and "Something Positive") that completely blow me away. The story telling is thoughtful, the characters are thoroughly developed, and all the strips are archived from day one, so I can read everything from the beginning. Sure, they sometimes have an excessively low-brow attitude towards sexual humor; sure, they occasionally feature those dreadful your/you're their/they're me/I errors that make my teeth ache (and then make it worse by having a character ridicule another character for using back grammar); sure, the talking computer/boneless cat occasionally gets old, but I'm consistently impressed by the thought and intelligence and hysterically funny humor that goes into these strips. The similar "serious" strips that are syndicated are all dreadful, so I've never really had a chance to see what could be done with the medium when the author isn't constricted by the newspaper space to find a punchline in three panels. But the result of this is remarkable, and I like finally getting a chance to see why self-publishing on the internet is good for more than those dreadful fan-fictions.

*Speaking of beating, I would like to relate a funny conversation that I had last night with pariesienne. She was describing her time in Jordan teaching English to immigrant kids. Most of the time she was treated very respectfully, with the prevailing attitude being that if the foreign white woman screamed, everyone would rush to her aid and dispense vigilante justice to the wrongdoer. But sometimes she dispensed the justice herself, like when a twelve-year-old boy grabbed her breast. She said to me, "I kind of beat him." "Really?" I asked. "How?" When I was in middle school this one kid once looked at me and said, "big boobies," which made me so furious (even though at the time it was patently false) that I wanted to beat him, but I had already been suspended once for smacking a guy, and this kid had Down syndrome, so the sexual harassment defense wouldn't have been strong enough to overrule the you-hit-a-special-needs-kid offense. But since then I've been very interested in hearing about people disciplining obnoxious hormone-driven kids. Amy said, "I grabbed his arm and shook him and yelled, 'Allah frowns upon people who do what you just did! Would you touch your aunt that way?' He kept trying to get away, but I wouldn't let him." That's one of many reasons why she's cool.

Amy is like that, both when beating people and loving them. There were two cats at the party last night, one of which was friendly, the other of which wasn't. I grabbed the friendly cat and petted him. She grabbed the unfriendly one, held it captive in her lap while it struggled, and petted it firmly, demanding that it purr. After a while it gave up struggling, purred resentfully, and even sat there when she let go of it. Her approach appears to work pretty well.


Nothing makes me appreciate my divacup more than having it not function properly one day.

Comments

[summercomfort]

I hear Achewood is excellent