Wednesday, August 14, 2002

 
Spent part of today working on the beginnings of the sabbatical proposal (due Sept 30). In the process of composing an email to JW, I recycled a couple of paragraphs from my missive to DM about comics. It occurs to me that this might be a good place to keep a record of some of these ideas.

First, a quick description of Getting Graphic @ Your Library:

I attended a conference called "Get Graphic @ Your Library" in June. It was sponsored by the Young Adult Services Division of ALA, which is geared entirely to Public Libraries. (Most research libraries, where I've always worked, don't give a damn about appealing to teens, even though our undergraduates arrive as exactly that.) PL's have lately noticed that subteen and teenage boys simply don't use libraries anymore. However, they've discovered that one thing that will draw them in in droves is comics. The original thinking was that once lured into the building, they could then be gently guided toward "better things," but in the process of selecting and providing access to comic book issues and their collected form, generically known as "graphic novels," librarians have discovered that many of these items themselves have considerable literary merit, and rather than discouraging kids from learning to read more challenging stuff, they actually increase literacy.

The workshop celebrated this revelation, offered a lot of "how to" advice on acquiring and dealing with comics (including just accepting that that the things will need to be frequently replaced due both to wear and tear and theft-- "adoption" as it was euphemistically called more than once), lists of recommended comics, and help for coping with the inevitable protests and censorship attempts both from within and outside the library. We were given tons (literally) of free stuff-- I had to make two trips to my hotel room to haul it all away, and by adding up the list value of it all, the $200 registration fee was more than recouped-- I made money on the deal, if you don't count the hotel.

And best of all, we had speakers to die for: Jeff Smith (Bone), Colleen Doran (who spoke about manga rather than her own work), Neil Gaiman, and Art Spiegelman. Neil spoke during lunch, and while he was delightful and funny, he was the least interesting to me, probably because I'd read so much by/about him already that I'd heard most of what he said before. Smith analyzed some of the graphic narrative techniques he uses, which opened up a window on another level I hadn't considered before. I knew nothing about manga, so Doran's descriptions of the place it has in Japanese culture were fascinating. And once Spiegelman tore himself away from moaning about how impossible it was for him to speak without smoking, his remarks about being at ground zero on 9/11 were moving. (I've gathered since that he's gotten a lot of mileage out of this).

Neil seems to be a genuinely nice person as well as being jaw-droppingly talented. I think this signing was probably an eye-opener for him, though. He's used to being a super-star at comic book conventions and recently in best-selling author signings, where mobs show up. The line for him was never more than a dozen or so, and right across the aisle, also in the Harper Collins area, Art Spiegelman's line stretched to nearly a hundred (I didn't bother). He has not quite entered the cultural mainstream as far as librarians go. I, of course, turned into a gibbering, tongue-tied fangirl when meeting him.On Friday, the day of the pre-con where he spoke, I'd been all dressed up in a "notice-me" outfit, but he didn't sign that day. He did sign at the exhibits Saturday, when I was in my native costume of jeans and t-shirt. I'd brought Day of the Dead, the script he wrote for Babylon 5, for him to sign, since that was my introduction to him. He usually signs American Gods or a Sandman book, so this was a bit different. (He wrote, "To Suzy--Zoot! Zoot!" a Bab5 inside joke.)

Which leads us into THE PROJECT

While reading up in preparation for the Eisner Symposium and in its aftermath, I thought I had better take a look at this guy Neil Gaiman they all kept talking about. Reading The Sandman over the next few months turned out to be one of those life altering events where one knows right then things will never be the same afterwards. When I was in college, I remember reading T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and what a watershed that was. Tracking down the references in the poem was like having a series of lightning flashes illuminate the unseen landscape of western civilization -- what there was out there, what was being lost, how shallow contemporary life was without some sense of the depths of what came before. The Sandman awakened the same kind of feeling in me, but more so. I realized that as dense as the allusions and references were, I was only getting a small percent of them; if I were to track them all down, I'd probably have the equivalent of a PhD in world culture.

As luck would have it, two weeks after the Atlanta conference I spent a week at UVa studying XML, a next generation web/data metalanguage authoring tool. It was inevitable that the two experiences would come together in my mind, so now I'm struggling to define an XML project for studying The Sandman in particular, but also serve as a model that could be applied to any graphic novel/comic. I also just learned that despite being officially retired (a program called DROP), I'm still eligible for another sabbatical next year. If I can get a one-semester type, I could do the project without support (I think); I've never had one, so I guess there's a chance. Two semester ones are pretty easy to get, but I'd need a grant of some kind to pull it off. I've got six weeks to get this going.

Here are my ideas for it so far:

Create an XML-based research tool for studying Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. This would be comprised of interlocking databases of creators, characters, source annotations, bibliographic citations and story commentaries. It would be capable of generating reports in a variety of formats.

The purpose is two fold:

To act as an introduction to literary research for undergraduates who might not have realized how much can lie beneath the surface of a work they read for pleasure. Graphic novels can draw young readers to the door of literature; this tool could help draw them inside.

To act as an aid to serious research on The Sandman.

Much information has been assembled on this work, in particular Hy Bender's The Sandman Companion and the online Sandman Annotations files compiled by Greg Morrow and David Goldfarb. However, the Bender book is not indexed, while the Annotations are text files that have not been kept up to date, and refer to pages/panels in the single issue publications rather than the more readily available graphic novel volumes. Neither has proper bibliographic citations. Bringing all this information together and making it available in one place in a searchable format should encourage scholarly study of this work and promote the serious consideration of graphic novels as literature.

When finished, the tool could answer queries such as "List all appearances or mentions of this character." "What are the literary or historical antecedents of this event?" "What is the significance of this object?" It woulc also aid in gathering research materials and citing bibliographic sources.




posted by Suzy 9:26 PM

Monday, August 12, 2002

 
And a bit more about The Rising. I want to write some more along this vein, as the ceramics metaphor appeals to me, but first I need to listen to it some more so I can get some more specific examples of what I mean.

I am still just astonished and rendered helpless with admiration by THE RISING. I've played it a few more times, but really, I'm listening to one song or another in my head every waking hour. (At the moment, it happens to be "You're Missing".) I've thought a lot about in what way it sounds like the Beatles, which I heard immediately. It reminds me of what I call "mid-era" Beatles, i.e., RUBBER SOUL and REVOLVER (before the quirky experiments and excesses of SGT PEPPER and beyond). They were in complete control of the pop song form, but starting to push it and expand its shape and tonal possibilities. THE RISING somehow captures that exact same feel; a demonstration of what pop song perfection can be in the hands of a master, one who uses that as a basis to build something exciting and new, like a potter who throws a perfect bowl on his wheel, then adds a structural detail and an exquisite glaze to create something much more than a mere bowl. By structural details, I mean things like the daring chord changes he uses for bridges, which follow a direction only hinted at in earlier in songs like "Hungry Heart". The sonic "glazes" are things like things like the middle eastern voices and instruments (George Harrison's discovery of the sitar added similar exotic touches to the Beatles' mid-era sound), the gospel choir sound, etc.
posted by Suzy 9:41 PM

 
Think I will transcribe several parts of what I wrote to DM here, just to have a backup of them somewhere. I think this is the first time I've tried to put what happened at the last Orlando show in writing. So here we have:

THE NIGHTMARE ON BRUCE STREET

The Orlando show in 2000 was a logistical nightmare in every respect. The first thing that went wrong was that the Holiday Inn right next to the arena was already sold out before the show was even announced due to a convention. All the other bad shit flowed from this. The only other lodging in the area was a HoJo about a mile away. It turned out to be a Hot Sheets special, a rundown 50's-era dump. We got there in plenty of time, but the desk was staffed by three men who didn't have three words of English between them. We were third in line, but it took an hour to get our turn. They had no record of anyone's reservation (including the people in front of us) and none of our credit cards were accepted (ditto) so we had to pay cash, and considerably more than the rate we'd reserved at. (Stupidly, I didn't get a receipt for the cash-- major mistake number 1-- so of course my credit card was also eventually charged.) By the time we were finished getting checked in, there was a huge line behind us, all obviously fans, and I wondered if they'd be able to even make the show on time. The room was dismal, with nice little touches like chewing gum on the wall in the bathroom and carpet you would never want to step on in bare feet. The plan originally was for the 6 of us to go to a restaurant about 15 miles away where we had a reservation, but there wasn't going to be time for that, so we drove to one only 2 miles away-- on the other side of the arena. (This was major mistake number 2: I've always had a rule to never eat before a show unless I can see the venue out the window of the restaurant.) We were there 2-1/2 hours! Trying to drive back to the hotel, we got caught in the concert traffic and had no choice but be routed into a parking garage. It was 7:30 (the show's ostensible start time) when we arrived at the arena and I still had to fight the massive chaos at the ticket windows to get to will-call. It was 8:00 by the time I got there, and none of my credit cards would work there either. (This was bullshit, because they're all paid up and have huge credit lines.) Luckily I had enough cash on me to pay for the tickets that way. By this time I was shattered, and was saying "Never again!" in my mind. But once inside, realizing the show hadn't started yet, and at our wonderful seats and seeing Bruce's guitar on the stage, I started to settle down, and then they all walked out and it was like seeing 8 of my closest friends again after a long time and realizing nothing had changed, we all still love each other... well... maybe I'll do this again... And of course, the show itself was magnificent. (There was an agonizing coda, of course-- it took Bill and me two hours to get the car out of that fucking garage and drive the mile to the the hotel; our friends left us and walked back in 15 minutes.) I should add that I was the one most traumatized by all this-- our friends had someone get tickets for them (me), got receipts at the hotel, did not have do deal with will-call or the parking garage captivity. They had a great time.

posted by Suzy 9:36 PM

 
Whoa. Spent literally all day writing to DM, only stopping long enough to fix and eat dinner. Will post some chunks of it here later. Right now I'm too tired to type another syllable. But I'm glad to have this done, finally.
posted by Suzy 12:28 AM