suffragette city
Interesting Things I Have Recently Discovered, courtesy of my mother: apparently at the age of 9 months I attended a fancy dress Christmas party dressed as Lawrence of Arabia. I feel as though I probably ought to be scarred for life.
Interesting Things I Have Recently Done include reading the Alan Moore/Melinda Gebbie porno/graphic novel Lost Girls, kindly lent to me by librsa, who is probably wondering if he's ever going to get it back. It's been both fascinating and subtly annoying me over the course of reading it, but now that I've finally finished it, I feel more able to legitimately comment.
I have to say, upfront, that this is an exquisitely beautiful piece of graphic literature: Melinda Gebbie's art has a curious mix of innocence and sophistication, and it glows with a sort of inner light that wouldn't be out of place in religious iconography. I also have to applaud its very deliberate project, which is to champion the place of the erotic in actual literature instead of its usual low-status ghetto. The story itself is a fascinating scenario very carefully thought through in terms of its historical, artistic and literary contexts: the libertine European hotel venue for the meeting of the adult Wendy, Dorothy and Alice, is set against the backdrop of World War I and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, with a resulting build in pressure and increasingly desperate freneticism. It's beautifully done.
The partnering of Moore and Gebbie also does interesting things to the usual gaze-issues around pornography, since, while this is definitely about female sexuality, it's always a bit dodgy to have a male purveyor of what are largely lesbian interactions. Gebbie's presence undercuts that, but not completely: I found that, while the focus of the story was on the exploration of sexuality between the three women, one of them exclusively lesbian, there was quite a high incidence of what I can only call unbridled phallicism in their sexual games. This is fine if you're assuming that two of the three women are not actually lesbian, but I found it jarring for the novel to ultimately assume that Alice's lesbianism was solely the result of trauma, and that what she really wanted all along was a good screw. I mean, isn't lesbianism a valid choice in itself? must she be saved from herself and restored to the orthodoxy of the great big dick? Disappointing.
Strangely, the things that bothered me about the book weren't the things I thought might. I'm not madly familiar with visual pornography, but wasn't alienated by the explicitness of it all, and I particularly enjoyed the self-consciously unrealistic games with representation, what one of the embedded stories calls the innocence of explicitly pornographic characters. I also liked the clever weaving in of Art Nouveau decadence, the situating of the whole thing in a context of a literary tradition of graphic representation rather than one that is realistic.
Mostly, however, I reacted strongly against Moore's use, strangely enough, of fantasy. His three characters are icons of alternate-world children's fantasy experience, in the magical realms of Wonderland, Neverland and Oz: what they stand for, primarily, is the primacy and power of the imagination. To harness this notion of the imagination in the symbolic service of sexuality makes perfect sense to me, but I really wish he hadn't found it necessary to invoke sexuality in a way which effectively erases the fantastic. We are encouraged to see these three women as realistic characters whose fantastic-world experiences are seen as existing only in their own minds, simply a metaphor for sexuality and very often for sexual trauma; in the process, we are asked to accept that those iconic fantasy realms never existed, even while their heroines quite clearly exist. It's all bloody Freudian, and Freud is a sexist sod who makes me twitch. Thus, while I have to acknowledge that imagery from the fantastic worlds is used with extreme delicacy and subtlety and packs not a little emotional punch, I find I resent the appropriation of the worlds themselves, not because this sexualised image of them desecrates them (fantasy is generally jam-packed with sublimated sexuality), but because it overwrites them. I think I'm feeling something akin to the irritation I feel with Carroll himself, who insists that his marvellous realms were all a dream, really. Cheating. Fantasy should have the courage of its own convictions.
Last Night I Dreamed: I was infiltrating a giant corporation by, among other things, swopping out vital documents with fakes in board meetings, and introducing subversive goldfish into the plumbing.
Interesting Things I Have Recently Done include reading the Alan Moore/Melinda Gebbie porno/graphic novel Lost Girls, kindly lent to me by librsa, who is probably wondering if he's ever going to get it back. It's been both fascinating and subtly annoying me over the course of reading it, but now that I've finally finished it, I feel more able to legitimately comment.
I have to say, upfront, that this is an exquisitely beautiful piece of graphic literature: Melinda Gebbie's art has a curious mix of innocence and sophistication, and it glows with a sort of inner light that wouldn't be out of place in religious iconography. I also have to applaud its very deliberate project, which is to champion the place of the erotic in actual literature instead of its usual low-status ghetto. The story itself is a fascinating scenario very carefully thought through in terms of its historical, artistic and literary contexts: the libertine European hotel venue for the meeting of the adult Wendy, Dorothy and Alice, is set against the backdrop of World War I and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, with a resulting build in pressure and increasingly desperate freneticism. It's beautifully done.
The partnering of Moore and Gebbie also does interesting things to the usual gaze-issues around pornography, since, while this is definitely about female sexuality, it's always a bit dodgy to have a male purveyor of what are largely lesbian interactions. Gebbie's presence undercuts that, but not completely: I found that, while the focus of the story was on the exploration of sexuality between the three women, one of them exclusively lesbian, there was quite a high incidence of what I can only call unbridled phallicism in their sexual games. This is fine if you're assuming that two of the three women are not actually lesbian, but I found it jarring for the novel to ultimately assume that Alice's lesbianism was solely the result of trauma, and that what she really wanted all along was a good screw. I mean, isn't lesbianism a valid choice in itself? must she be saved from herself and restored to the orthodoxy of the great big dick? Disappointing.
Strangely, the things that bothered me about the book weren't the things I thought might. I'm not madly familiar with visual pornography, but wasn't alienated by the explicitness of it all, and I particularly enjoyed the self-consciously unrealistic games with representation, what one of the embedded stories calls the innocence of explicitly pornographic characters. I also liked the clever weaving in of Art Nouveau decadence, the situating of the whole thing in a context of a literary tradition of graphic representation rather than one that is realistic.
Mostly, however, I reacted strongly against Moore's use, strangely enough, of fantasy. His three characters are icons of alternate-world children's fantasy experience, in the magical realms of Wonderland, Neverland and Oz: what they stand for, primarily, is the primacy and power of the imagination. To harness this notion of the imagination in the symbolic service of sexuality makes perfect sense to me, but I really wish he hadn't found it necessary to invoke sexuality in a way which effectively erases the fantastic. We are encouraged to see these three women as realistic characters whose fantastic-world experiences are seen as existing only in their own minds, simply a metaphor for sexuality and very often for sexual trauma; in the process, we are asked to accept that those iconic fantasy realms never existed, even while their heroines quite clearly exist. It's all bloody Freudian, and Freud is a sexist sod who makes me twitch. Thus, while I have to acknowledge that imagery from the fantastic worlds is used with extreme delicacy and subtlety and packs not a little emotional punch, I find I resent the appropriation of the worlds themselves, not because this sexualised image of them desecrates them (fantasy is generally jam-packed with sublimated sexuality), but because it overwrites them. I think I'm feeling something akin to the irritation I feel with Carroll himself, who insists that his marvellous realms were all a dream, really. Cheating. Fantasy should have the courage of its own convictions.
Last Night I Dreamed: I was infiltrating a giant corporation by, among other things, swopping out vital documents with fakes in board meetings, and introducing subversive goldfish into the plumbing.