Wednesday, December 21, 2016

phoebe gloeckner diary of a teenage girl


with allison we really get inside that world. you go from the very very personal intimate detail really detailed, that's what people relate to "oh this is what she was like as a kid" and thisis you know looking at maps of pennsylvania thosekinds of specifics playing duets with her father onthe piano in the points of connection and you know what she wants to wear and allthose details help people get inside

a very specific experience and it moves from there out into the world. it's like knowing a life, it's life writing it's very vivid and you learn aboutyourself, you learn about other people from reading it. there's often those moments when you see sort of layers time or layers of generation all in oneframe and so you get a sense that something'sbeing handed to you in this kind of digestible nugget

but also invited to kinda go quiteliterally deep into each individual frame. it's obvious that she's like obsessive. she goes over things again and again in her head and she eventalks about her obsessions when she was a young kid like 10 or 12 and it's funny i mean i think so manycartoonists that i know they have this real attention to detail whether it's verbal or factual or details of events or images where it's like you experiencethings and you have to

in order to keep them alive andunderstand them you have to constantly be turning them around in your head. part of what's interesting about relationships in alison bechdel's work is the way, not only do different characters have relationships but there's relationships within onecharacter across time and there's something really interestingtout the way those characters are sort of thinking back on earlier versions ofthemselves and not just in some judgment oriented way

"oh i was young and i wish i knew better" but really reveling in moments a younger self realizedsomething. alison takes up a kind of space in the work that is not defensive that is expansive that opens windows so that lots of people can see themselves through this specifically lesbian story. she managed to examine her life

i think intellectually and her intellect gave voice to herheart in a sense and it's very powerful. all of her work takes really seriously that one's personal life and daily lifeis actually a way to make change and sothat's another reason i think of it as an important feminist intervention that probably could only happen through some sort ofpopular form like this. one of the things that was sogreat about dykes to watch out for

is that you could drop into it at any moment and understand what wasgoing on. they were and they remain sort of the one of the few culturalrepresentations of lesbian life as we've reallyexperienced it and it was amazing how in just a few short images, she could really capture a story in a sense of acommunity, in a sense of a world, in a sense of politics and i feel likeshe's made the world larger.

she's made the world larger and she's i think a huge imaginative gift to everyone that reads it. so alison i want to know what moe from dykes to watch out for is up to now i think if you were spice girl youwould be sporty spice not posh, not scary, but sporty spice am i right?

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