Author Archives: Caro

Interview with Nina Paley, Part 1

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This is part of a roundtable on copyright and free culture issues. You can read the whole Cuckoo for Copyright roundtable here.

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Nina Paley’s adventures have taken her from Urbana, Illinois across the US and around the world to her current location in New York City, where I had the chance this past weekend to visit and talk with her about cartooning and copyright.

Paley worked as a cartoonist from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, writing comic books and then newspaper strips before switching to animation. If you aren’t familiar with her work, check out her website and blog as well as my recent post about the copyright controversy surrounding her film Sita Sings the Blues. Or search for her cartoons on Archive.org.

I was lucky enough to have a copy of a printed collection from 1987 of her very early work, from high school and college, which she hadn’t seen in years. That’s what we’re looking at during the start of this interview.
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I’m looking at these political cartoons, and they’re really disparate. It looks like someone said “we’ve got this article on this thing; draw something.”

Yes, that’s exactly how the political cartoons in the Daily Illini worked. I was just an illustrator, I was just drawing. I developed my drawing skills long before I developed my voice. So I was happy to illustrate anything.

Did they tell you the position to take in the cartoon? Did you have to agree with what was in the article?

I don’t even think I was paying attention. [Stops and points to a particular cartoon.] God, what an idiot I was! This is such bullshit. I was developing my politics according to people around me, ‘cause I was in college. So I was just sort of – if anyone I knew was outraged about something, I would say “what are you outraged by?” and they’re my friends, so I was like, “that’s outrageous!” Now that I’m a grown-up, I’m thinking, “what the hell?” [laughter] All these — what the hell, these are all opposite to what I think now. Apparently this one was calling for more parking on campus, and I hate cars now, and there’s way too much parking and paving, screw that. And here: “the US isn’t doing enough about terrorism.” But I was so dumb then, “oh, these people are doing bad things to other people and we should do something.”

But you did come from a political family, sort of. Your dad was the mayor of Urbana…

He was the mayor between my ages of 4-8, something like that. It was all very traumatic. Not his being mayor, but the crap I got at school from other students. My thing was, I was drawing very early, and I had my own needs for attention and stuff, and every time I drew something well, the other kids would say “you’re just showing off ‘cause you’re the mayor’s daughter.” And I would be [crying] “That has nothing to do with my art!”

I was going to ask you when you started drawing; so it was really early. You mention (in the intro to the 1987 collection) that you did a couple of comic strips with a history professor at Uni High (University High School in Urbana). Were you cartooning before that?

Not much, I mean, I didn’t get into cartooning. I thought cartooning was not art. I aspired to draw “real art” when I was a kid, when I was below 10, I thought the goal was to draw as realistically as possible and that cartooning was some sort of weird cheating thing, or not cheating but just, it wasn’t the same. But then as I got a little older, got into my early teens, I realized that cartooning was powerful. It had a powerful affect on people that just drawing pretty pictures did not have.

Were you reading things that made you see it that way, or what caused the epiphany?

The epiphany was when I started drawing them and I got all this attention. I gotta be honest about attention. I’m thinking a lot about attention and the attention economy, and I am remembering attention is sort of a dirty word from my childhood, to say “yes, I wanted attention”, you’re not supposed to say that. You’re supposed to say that you have higher motives or something, but wanting attention is really bad. And of course it was always way more than wanting attention, but attention is an essential component of communication, you know? [laughs] There’s expression and then there’s reception, and reception or attention are sort of synonymous in that respect. So when I said things, I wanted to be heard. When I drew things, I wanted them to be seen, and I just found that if I drew cartoons, lots of people were interested in looking at the cartoons, and not so many people with drawing pretty. People would say, “oh, that’s very well drawn,” but cartooning actually had an effect on people; they would actually be engaged.

It’s intimate in a way that fine art is distancing?

I don’t know! I don’t think it has to be. It’s not like the drawings of a 13-year-old explored all the aspects of fine art [laughs] or anything like that. But even when I was into the realistic drawing, I was always interested in mass media art, like books, newspapers, illustrations. And I didn’t even realize – it wasn’t until I was almost 20 that someone distinguished illustration from art. I would make these drawings and someone said “oh, those are illustrations”, and I was “oh, there’s a difference? This is some category of art? I just thought they were art.” But apparently everything I was thinking was art when I was young was actually illustration; I just didn’t know that. I thought it was art.

That was when you were in college? Were you studying art?

I think I was about 19, and it was actually a cousin. A cousin of mine, Debbie, who is a really great artist and designer who now lives in Chicago. [Editor’s note: Debbie’s website is here.] She paints objects, like shoes – I mean she paints on them – shoes and chairs and things like that. She was a designer for a shoe company and they lived in Toronto, and I had drawn these ink drawings of iguanas and showed them to her and asked “What do you think of these? Can I be an artist? I want to be an artist!” and she said “oh, I think you’re an illustrator.” So apparently I must have been fascinated and influenced by books, comics, newspapers. Scholastic books, those books you order in school and they come like Christmas every month? They had all these great things that you can’t find online because they’re under copyright and whomever owned them would never release them that way.

I remember I had a book called Captain Ecology, a cartoon by Tom Eaton. There’s another cartoonist named Tom Eaton but this is a different one. It was a comic strip book thing and I liked the drawings. And there was Escaped from the Zoo in the Daily Illini; this would have been in the early 80s.

I always drew, everybody drew when we were young. Other people stopped drawing and I didn’t. It’s really true, everybody drew.

When did they stop?

I don’t know because I wasn’t paying attention! It was just like I looked up [laugh] and “what happened to everyone? When did this start?” I don’t know what age people start really getting into shame, like feeling ashamed of themselves.

[flipping through book] PLATO! (Editor’s note: PLATO was the first computerized instruction system, built around 1960 by the University of Illinois and used by the university and local schools.)

There are lots of computers, and engineering stories and space stories in this early work. Was that the influence of the people who were writing for you?

That was my group. My father’s a mathematician, and my brother was studying math and computer science; I went to Uni High after my hellish three years at Urbana Junior High. I used the PLATO computers all the time. I was an early computer addict before most people had that opportunity; those were my friends, that was my life. When I was in college, I met other people, but I didn’t befriend other people. I always thought that the cooler people were the engineers and stuff, I did study art and I dropped out after 2 years. socially going into the art department: it was like a wasteland.

So the transition to doing Flash animation on the Mac was very natural.

Yes! Definitely.

It sounds like you were very interested in expression, in getting your drawings out.

Initially, I was just interested in developing my skills. I didn’t really learn how to really speak with my own voice until I was 20 and moved to Santa Cruz and started doing Nina’s Adventures in Santa Cruz. Up until that point, I was just interested in illustration and illustrating other people’s ideas. It just didn’t occur to me that I had that kind of voice. And I just wanted to draw. I think I was aware of the power of drawing; I didn’t know how to use it but I liked it. I was developing it. I couldn’t imagine writing my own comic strip.

And I look back on it, and I had no self-esteem, so I was continually anxious about doing this comic strip that was written by someone who wasn’t a student, (Joyride, originally written by David Gehrig), because there were these really explicit rules: Student Work Only in the paper. So I had to keep it a terrible secret that I was using an outside writer – David is writing it and he’s not a student! I gotta write this myself, ‘cause I can’t have that!

You mention (also in the introduction to the 1987 volume) that you thought you weren’t a writer. How did you figure out that you could write them yourself? At some point you must have come to terms with yourself as a writer; can you tell a little bit about how you got there?

I just started! [laughs] OK, that’s not entirely true.

When I was 17–18, I started writing a journal. I was doing a lot of very necessary self-searching because I was depressed. I was quite out about being very depressed as a kid, and basically depressive as an adult also although I take medication; I’ve been taking medication for 20 years.

And it works?

Yeah, fuck yeah. Which is not to say that I don’t still have episodes, but they’re spaced much farther apart. Devastating when they happen, but at least it’s not every day all the time. So, I was desperate, because that kind of mental illness, the older you get the worse it gets. So I was desperate for anything to help myself, and at some point I started writing this journal, this illustrated journal-y thing, where I was writing about real things that were actually going on. Things that I was feeling terrible about, and things that I was ashamed of, I would actually write them. I got better and better at looking at the hidden part of myself, and getting them out.

…externalizing them through both writing and pictures.

Yes.

Were those experiences of writing and drawing similar for you?

I wrote and drew.

Just seamless.

Yes. I wrote and drew pictures [laugh] of the inside of my head, punching people, killing myself, all those things. And they were funny, man, they were really funny. So I’d be writing these things and laughing.

And I saw shortly before I left Urbana, I saw Life in Hell for the first time, the Matt Groening books and I saw Lynda Barry’s older books. I mean, obviously they had to be older books because – that is what is now her early works. And both of them were actually doing comics about real things. They weren’t just doing fluff entertainment. They were doing psycho comics, and they were just so real. They were brilliant, and those were the first things, the first time I ever realized, oh wow, you can really discuss real stuff and deep stuff and profound stuff in comics, and be funny. So they showed me it was possible, and then I moved to Santa Cruz, when I was 20, which was a whole other world of trauma that I wasn’t prepared for.

Were you going to school?

Nope, I wanted to be a new-age crystal-wielding hippie. My friends in Urbana were hippies. In Urbana, the smart non-conformist people were hippies. And so I went to Santa Cruz, young and naïve, and was like, “oh, it’s all full of hippies; these are my people.” And I actually lived there, and then it was “no wait, in Santa Cruz, the dumb conformists are hippies and the smart non-conformists are something else.” [laugh]

So there I was – increasingly disillusioned, young, dumb, mentally ill, [laugh] and I’d just moved away from home, and I guess that was enough stress that it finally found an outlet with my Nina’s Adventures strips, which were taken from my journals, and so it began. Thus began my real life as an artist.

I was in Santa Cruz for 3 years, and then in 1991 I moved to Austin, Texas for 3 months, and it didn’t work out [laughter]. I had one hell of a depressive episode there. I kept moving away from anyone I had contact with. I didn’t realize that I actually had connections with people. I think that was a real problem with being depressed. There were people in my life but I felt like I was all alone, and nobody loved me and like that, so I thought I had nothing to lose, but you move away from it and it’s like, “oh wait, wait a minute, I did have friends, and [laugh] I’m calling them all long-distance now!”

Back before there was cheap long distance included with your cell phone.

Exactly. So then I moved to San Francisco because when I lived in Santa Cruz I’d met people who lived in San Francisco and I thought, “I’m just gonna try to live in a real city.” I was scared of real cities. I always wanted to live in college towns like Urbana. So I thought I’ll just try living in this horrible big city, and of course I took to the city like a duck to water and realized I always should have – I’m very well suited to cities.

So while we’re on the subject of how you became a cartoonist, I wanted to ask you about comments I’ve heard more than once from women who are interested in comics that they feel like cartooning is not an available profession for a woman, that they thought it was very hard to be a woman cartoonist. Did you have any particularly gendered experiences?

Cartooning is not a fucking profession. I certainly did have gendered experiences, but I do want to just say that this whole approach to cartooning and art like it’s a profession, as though it’s people with jobs, and “they’re not recruiting women, the cartoon jobs aren’t recruiting women at the job fair.” It doesn’t work like that. But yes, I had extremely gendered experiences in my youth. And I am happy to say that the last time I went to a comics event which was the Alternative Press Expo here in New York (put on by the Museum of Cartoon and Comic Art), there are so many more women doing alt comics. It was not like that at all in the early ‘90s. It was horrible in alternative comics, just horrid.

It’s not just that I was female: I had a lot of other “social handicaps.” Being a woman was a social handicap. I was so bitter, so fucking angry. And, for good reason, being angry did not help my career, and in fact, I did the right thing, which was just to get out of it, stop pounding on that particular door.

Is the reason you left comics tied to this frustrating set of experiences?

Well, I got into newspaper comics. Newspapers were much more friendly to me than alternative comics. It was a cultural thing. Alternative comics were newer, smaller, very male dominated, and for whatever reason, things happened because of socializing. Now, I’m pretty sure that with my other social handicaps – my other social handicaps are that I don’t drink, I don’t take drugs, I don’t smoke, I don’t like bars. They were all really into all of those things, so people would go to parties and drink and that’s where everything happened. So it wasn’t just that I was a woman. However, I am certain that had I not been a woman, and had everything else about me been the same, I would have gotten much further. It was also this whole thing where — the alternatives grew out of the underground comics, and there were a lot of underground comics that were overtly misogynistic. And the few women cartoonists would say, “this is misogynistic; we don’t like this” and then the response to that, and this is strange, is that people would respond to that as though they were being censored, not criticized. So they were just not able to process that this would criticism. They would immediately get into this anti-censorship stuff. Maybe that’s related to stuff in Canada, because Canada was and still is censoring anything that could be considered porn, which includes a lot of comics. So the threat of censorship in Canada was very real.

I think that might be giving them too much credit.

I’m trying! But you know I wasn’t out to censor anybody – a, how could we and b, why would we want to. We were criticizing it and then suddenly we were accused of being a censor, and they were not into that. I did notice that the few women who were relatively successful underground cartoonists were either married or having sex with successful men cartoonists. So I did sort of go, hmm. Now, I’m not going to name any of them, but that was the case. And there would be depressed or even autistic male underground cartoonists and they would be fine. They didn’t have to go to the bars and do all this stuff. They didn’t have to sleep with the other cartoonists [laugh]. They didn’t have to be cute and bouncy; they were fine. But if you were a woman and you were like that, that was nowhere. And to be honest…I don’t know. I don’t really fucking know. I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad I got out of it, and I’m really glad that when I went last, there were lots of women there and these issues seemed to be just infinitely smaller now.

But it was still happening when you got out?

Oh yeah, it was a nightmare, still, when I stopped going to any comic conventions in the mid-1990s. I remember the last gig, I don’t remember what year my last Diego con was, but I was just like, I can’t ever do this again. [laugh] This is self-abuse. I guess it was shortly before I started doing Fluff. I reached a point where, “ok, I’m not going to do comics. Newspaper comics are different from comic book comics. They have nothing in common, and I am pursuing the newspapers.” That was probably 1995; I don’t remember when I started Fluff.

So I did this syndicated strip at the Universal Press – thank you Universal Press for the glorious opportunity, which I am eternally grateful for – but I did burn out. It just wasn’t fun at all anymore.

Was it the routine deadlines and the need for consistency?

Yes, the routine deadlines and the need for consistency, and also just the volume of it, every damn day. I guess that’s the consistency. The same format every single day, and so I only had this vague memory of when art was fun, and I was like “how did this happen; how did I get here?” I was just thinking I gotta have fun again.

Do you think it affected the quality of you work near the end of the strip, or was it just that it wasn’t meaningful to you at that point?

No, I’m competent. I’m always competent. By the end though, I couldn’t bear to write it, so thank god, I got my friend Ian Akin to write it, so you’ll see at the end the later Fluff’s say “Akin/Paley” or “Paley/Akin”; he did a really good job.

That makes sense though with the way you were saying: you built your chops as an artist so the drawing was always fine.

Yeah, I call that craft, now. I can do the craft, although I can’t do that stuff anymore. My soul just rebels. And obviously I couldn’t really keep doing it then ‘cause I quit. But the quality didn’t suffer. I remembered the joy I felt when I was 13 and making Super8 animation, and I had also just started dating “Dave” (Editor’s Note: Dave is the character name she uses for her ex-husband in Sita Sings the Blues), who was a professional animator, and he had an animation table, which I’d never used before.

I did Super8 animation when I was a kid in Central Illinois with no real support. There were no animators there. If there were any, they weren’t going to help a 13-year-old girl, so I had books, and that’s it. But I never had any equipment for it. An animation table is like a light box, and there’s paper with pegs, and he had this animation table, and I was “wow, I wanna do this again,” so I did. I also borrowed a friend’s Super8 camera and just picked up where I left off when I was 13 or 14 – and sure enough it was fun. My joke is that I found something that took more work and paid less than comics. That’s what I needed to have fun.

Did you work as an animator, or was this something you just did for love?

No, I wanted to keep it pure, the love of the craft. When I was quitting Fluff, I said “make art not money, make art not money. Remember that.” And of course I forget periodically and get confused and think that I should be making money and not art. They’re not mutually exclusive, not at all; but you’ve got to remember: don’t do stuff that’s bad for your soul in order to make money.

One of the things that people do leverage against copyleft is that you don’t get the quality you get with traditional methods.

You just get more of everything: you get more crap and more quality. I’m also really excited about more voices getting to be heard. What’s so different for me now is that my work can reach an audience, and it was so frustrating in the age of gatekeepers. I am so fucking sick of gatekeepers, who just defined everything that happened to my art for so long.

Out of completely cost benefit analysis motivations?

No, no, it was just their own taste. These are human beings, they are extremely fallible. A lot of them are really fucked up people, and they have these jobs where they’re supposed to make decisions about what their audience wants, and they’re frequently wrong. Even really smart really nice people in those jobs are frequently wrong. Those are not jobs anyone should have.

It should be collective.

Right, let people see it and let people decide whether they like something. I’m freeing all of my old strips under copyleft licenses [Editor’s note: many are already available on archive.org; hyperlinked names of comics in this article point to the archive.org page where you can download them.] And I would so love a publisher to publish a book of them, or some of them – anything they want. And the fact is any publisher could do that. But whomever does it first will have the competitive advantage. People tend to buy copies that are available and accessible rather than putting together their own. I have a volunteer effort to put all my old strips on WordPress blogs so that all of them are accessible. I have an enormous amount of this stuff. I was really hoping it would be up and running sooner than it has been because I’m trying to set an example and I’m trying to get my work seen again. I’ve got all these great old comics, and my work is obscure. All my newspaper strips are on archive.org. They’re apparently not accessible enough for them to be easily shareable; they’re still too difficult to find, even though they’re free. I want people to build on them.

The only publishers doing open-licensed works are tech publishers. Pop culture publishers – it is anathema to them. And the tech publishers don’t do pop culture. I actually asked O’Reilly, but physically a lot of work needs to be done. I’ve done the work of making the comics and I’ve done some work to make them accessible, and if a publisher could put it together, then people could see it online and say “is there a book of this?” And then buy that publisher’s books!

So you can have niche audiences, which scares people. It’s true when you have lots of niche audiences it’s a lot harder to control the masses, because if you just have limited information from just a few centralized points of distribution, it’s much easier to control everyone and we’re getting a situation where all kinds of niches can get the kind of culture that they want and people are saying things like, oh, and this means they’re not going to be exposed to things that they don’t like and that’s terrible, and look, these people with politics that we abhor are forming their own little communities and saying these things that we don’t like to each other, and yeah, I don’t like it either. I realize that there will be little communities of people that say terrible things that I would never want to hear, and I don’t have to. But there’s so much fantastic art that never would have made it through a gatekeeper system.

The more gatekeeping there is, the more culture is funneled. It just gets funneled more and more and more. I understand the point that not having gatekeepers means you get a lot of niche audiences, but it seems like if you don’t have niche audiences you have niche culture.

Yes! One culture fits all – but it sure didn’t fit me, and mine didn’t fit it. Didn’t fit that niche, and so the gatekeepers were like, “No. I don’t think this is the lowest common denominator and we’re only looking for the lowest common denominator.” And mine wasn’t that. So if it’s out there, the right audience finds my stuff, and there’s plenty of people that appreciate my stuff.

Read Part 2.Sita-Still-2

Likewise Desire

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Sufficient for the day is the newspaper thereof. – Ulysses, Episode 7

The title of the last volume of Ariel Schrag’s graphic memoir, Likewise, appears four times in Joyce’s Ulysses, most prominently in Episode 7, Aeolus, as one of the hyperbolic newspaper headlines: What? – and Likewise – Where?

(Aeolus is the Greek god of wind and Episode 7 is the chapter where Joyce satirizes “windy and inflated” reporting. Suat might call this poetic irony.)

As Noah has pointed out, the role of Ulysses in Likewise is talismanic, not only in the senses that he describes – to be like Sally and to be(come) to Sally what Joyce has been – but also in the rigorously Freudian sense of an object that stands in for an unfulfilled wish. Ulysses acts in these pages as a substitute for Sally.

For this reason, it feels insufficient to argue that this book is about gender identity. The pages of this book are more saturated with the not-unrelated concept of desire: am I desired, do I desire the right people, why is there a mismatch between my biology and the people I desire, and most importantly, her constant and omnipresent desire to make this comic.

Noah rightly talks about Ulysses as phallus and about the phallus as mastery, but he doesn’t explicitly complete the syllogism. Yet Ulysses does indeed stand for mastery: to read it, to understand it, is to become what Lacan calls “The Subject Supposed to Know.” In this case, it’s not only to know Sally (as Noah suggests, although that’s certainly going on) but also to know … well, how to make sense of Ulysses. Ulysses is the ultimate symbol of the writer’s craft, considered the greatest achievement of English prose. As Likewise progresses, Ariel (the character) gets less preoccupied with Sally and questions of homosexual identity and more concerned with her identity as a writer, and those parts of the book are the ones that mimic the structure and rhetorical diversity of Joyce’s novel. The desire for the phallus in Likewise is not only the desire for mastery of the social dynamic of “It”; it is not only the desire for Sally or the desire for a clear identity – it is the striving for mastery of the comic itself: the obsession even greater than the obsession with Sally.

The equivalence of Sally and Ulysses as objects of desire is evident in the book’s mapping techniques (it’s not particularly evident in the memoir’s “plot”). Part I is concerned with mapping the contours of Sally’s body and the relationship between Sally and Ariel, and is mostly traditional: a literary cartography made from lived experience. The remaining parts prioritize grafting Schrag’s narrative onto the structure of Ulysses and are more Baudrillardian: she tries to follow the contours of Ulysses and ends up creating something that is not-quite-a-simulacrum but that certainly aims there.

This effort to make the comic “like” Ulysses plays counterpoint to her frustration over the naturalized ideas of sexual difference. She is frustrated that she can’t fit her own pleasure with the normative biological imagery and by a visceral sense that her homosexuality is biological too. She is frustrated by the actual lived awkwardness of teenage relationships (gay or otherwise), and the difficulties of sexual and emotional intimacy in general.

In contrast, intimacy with Ulysses is achievable — not the typical romance-novel version of “being meant for” or even being desired by, although those make an appearance in her record. The idealized intimacy is “being like.”

The comic demonstrates that similarity allows for a kind of intimacy that is likewise, in both dictionary senses of the adverb:

like•wise
? ?[lahyk-wahyz]
–adverb
1. moreover; in addition; also; too: She is likewise a fine lawyer.
2. in like manner; in the same way; similarly: I’m tempted to do likewise.

This is why this book is, to me, even with all its angst, a celebration of queer desire: desire that is both/and and not either/or.

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The construction of desire is immensely appealing and the most successful aspect of the book, as Noah’s post demonstrates. But it could have been accomplished in far fewer pages. The effort to create a simulacrum is staggeringly ambitious, and it fails spectacularly. It fails, however, primarily for reasons that are not Ariel Schrag’s fault.

Ulysses in many ways triggered the birth of experimental fiction: playing with style, form, structure, language, voice, and the dynamic interplay of meaning, it has exerted some sort of influence on almost every “literary” writer since its widespread publication in the early 1930s. The book is a puzzle-box, itself a simulacrum of The Odyssey and replete with literary references – the most obvious of which is a compendium of literary devices and styles. Pretty much every significant device from the history of Western literature makes it into Ulysses at some point (which is why most people, including Ariel, read it with a copy of Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated close at hand).

Western literature has had about 3000 years to codify devices and build references with widespread cultural relevance. Schrag’s novel suffers from the fact that graphic literature doesn’t have this much history. There isn’t a “Concise Oxford History of Graphic Literary Terms.” Art is much harder to pin down semiotically than literature. The success of Joyce’s novel relies on the fact that his starting point was a fairly rigid and well-established tradition of literary history and technique – it is easy to recognize at the surface level the use of drama, poetry, stream of consciousness, and other devices, even if the precise significance of each is a puzzle.

In contrast, Schrag is working in an idiom with about 100 years of history and an incredibly fluid semiotics. It’s really hard to get granular — and impossible to get granular enough for Joycean pleasure — because the interpretation of artistic variation is so impressionistic. Schrag’s choice to use very DIY visuals exacerbates this.

The deeper problem, I think, is that the Joycean project is fundamentally at odds with the autobiographical one: literary history and device are shared cultural phenomenon, whereas the interest of autobiography (as Suat points out) often comes from the uniqueness of the individual perspective. At 19, Schrag simply wasn’t quite deft enough to knit those two threads together into a completely successful text.

So she failed at the impossible task of writing a graphic equivalent to Ulysses — but fucking hell she tried, and that’s much more ambition than most graphic novelists show. I hope her example will inspire more experimental graphic fiction, because I don’t want to wait 3000 years to get the graphic novel that succeeds.

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Update by Caro: I was convinced by the comments below taking me to task for the sentence saying Ariel “resolved” the gender question. I edited the post to pull that sentence out. It’s not resolved; it’s just less important to me than the issue of desire.

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Update by Noah: The entire Likewise Roundtable is here.

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:

In which Caro reads The Bun Field, muses on gender and metaphor and remembers how hard it is to write short

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This is the first of a series of posts about art comics by women, combining reviews with critical attention to whether it matters that women wrote them. Bear with me through a little awkwardness; it’s been awhile since I’ve stretched these muscles.

In her response to last week’s “Gender and Cartooning in Chicago” thread, Erica Friedman gave an insightful and succinct summary of a theme that’s run through a number of recent HU posts: “Men represent men’s stories,” she said, “and set that as societal norm, so any women looking to rise in the field will have to write/draw those stories too or be relegated to an inferior ‘girl’s’ position.”

Hold that thought for a few paragraphs, will you, please?

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Finnish artist Amanda Vähäm?ki’s The Bun Field (Campo di Baba) got a decent amount of attention from critics when it came out in English translation last summer (June 2009). If you haven’t read it, Bart Beaty gave the following summary of the action in his review of the original Italian publication :

Campo de Baba is not much of a story, and it is probably not even a story at all in the classic sense of the word. A young man (sic) awakes from a dream — or does he? At breakfast he is confronted by a blob-like creature. He goes for a drive with a bear. He trades teeth with a dog. He is winked at by an apple. With a tractor, he slaughters a field. He disappears.

Most reviews of the English-language version follow Beaty’s lead and read it as a lushly drawn extended dream sequence that makes no particular attempt at specific meaning. Other critics, like Popmatters’ Sara Cole, go a little further and claim the book represents the “lived experience of a child,” the vulnerability and confusion, how nightmarish the adult world seems. But even Cole says it “lack(s) a coherent narrative.”

To the book’s credit and in defense of the reviewers, part of Vähäm?ki’s achievement is that the book satisfies equally well either way…

…but the incoherence is vastly overstated.

Up through the title scene, it works just fine to read The Bun Field using one or the other of these two interpretations. But the panels with the younger child on the bicycle don’t fit very well with those readings.

The younger child leaves our heroine crying and rides her bike back into the setting of the original sequence (with Donald duck and the brontosaurus).

Original sequence (second panel in book)

 This time, though, from the perspective of the younger child, this setting is not ominous and foreboding; the child is not vulnerable, and the world is not surreal.

To make the narrative coherent, we have to account for that shift in perspective.

There’s a double meaning in the title of this book that admittedly is a little weak in translation. The baba of the original title is an Italian pastry shaped like the buns in the bun field, but it’s also the way a baby says “baby.” In English, you’ve got to come up with “bun in the oven” before it starts to hang together.

A Google search for “Finnish bun metaphor” adds an additional image: “eating a dry bun” is something like “a hard pill to swallow.”

The coherence of the narrative – the scene in the bun field – hinges on this cluster of metaphors: the bun is a symbol for early childhood, plowing the field destroys (eats up) the buns, the loss of childhood innocence is “a hard pill to swallow” but an inescapable part of growing up.

The moment in childhood that the book’s narrative represents marks the collision of the affectionate, imagination-rich world of the young child, where animals drive cars and talk, with the colder, crueler, more violent adult world that the older child is becoming aware of – an awareness symbolized by the acquisition of the canine incisor.

That’s why the trigger for the sobbing is not her realizing that she’s killing the buns, but the younger child telling her she could “come home,” that “everybody was waiting” for her.


In the initial readings, the tears were trauma from the inescapable nightmare, or guilt and impotence over this “murder” she was forced to commit, and the younger child was an anomaly. Here they are tears of grief over the loss of that innocent perspective of childhood, over the fact that she really can’t return home to that beautiful place where the younger child still lives with the smiling dinosaur.

That’s a pretty coherent narrative, really. It’s a fully symbolic narrative, it isn’t transparently obvious or even particularly readily accessible, and I make no claims that it’s the only possible coherent narrative in the book – but it is coherent. What it isn’t, as Bart Beaty points out, is a “story.”

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Erica commented that “men write men’s stories.” The obvious corollary to this, which came up in other comments and threads, is that women write women’s stories. Erica’s point, though, is that both women and men end up writing men’s stories, men because they’re interested and women because they have to. But if this book isn’t a story, then it can’t really be a man’s story or a woman’s story in any obvious way.

I thought it might be helpful to see a piece of writing that was more obviously a “man’s” take on these themes – the casual cruelty of the grown-up world and the lack of control that naïve children have over their interaction with that world. I asked my well-read-in-comics friend Christopher Keels for an example (Thanks, Chris!), and while nothing set in early childhood came to mind, one selection stood out as a useful contrast. Josh Simmons’ Wholesome, from Kramer’s Ergot 4, also features a world-wise dog and the broad themes of cruelty and vulnerability/control, but the dominant emotion in Wholesome is anger.

Anger is aggressive and grief is passive, so in the most reductive, Pythagorean-opposites type of gender analysis I could say that based on these associations, Vähäm?ki’s book is feminine and Simmons’ story masculine. The comparison with Simmons certainly makes Vähäm?ki’s book feel more feminine than it does on its own, but there isn’t an equivalency. Simmons’ book feels more masculine than Vähäm?ki’s does feminine.

But Erica’s point is that women have to either mime male voices or accept a lower standing, and while it’s debatable whether the feminine perspective is important for reading this book, I can’t find a reading where Vähäm?ki’s miming an explicitly male voice. She privileges neither women nor men – we all experience childhood innocence and we all experience cruelty and grief. The main character is so neutral that Bart Beaty actually got the gender wrong (the English translation identifies her as a girl in the bar scene.)

“Stories” tend to work by invoking ideas and actions and relationships that are deeply embedded within a culture; stories have histories of their own independent of the specific manifestation of them in any given book. In many ways, “story” performs the same function in plot-driven fiction (like most genre) that “metaphor” performs in The Bun Field – it’s the thing that you have to recognize in order to tie the whole thing together and make it make sense.

So thinking about Erica’s point in light of Vähäm?ki’s work raises the question of whether metaphor takes on gender characteristics in the same way that story does – do “women’s metaphors” and “men’s metaphors” exist and work in the same way that men and women’s stories do? I think you have to answer that to determine whether any difference is made by the fact that The Bun Field was written by a woman.

It isn’t really a question that can be answered for myself by reading one book, though. I’ll just have to read some more art comics by women.

Next up: Renee French