Alexander Chee's Blog, page 10

"Professors of Fiction"

1.

I have a conversation with my partner Dustin's Uncle Jack about how he fell on his good hip and, while painful, it reset his hips. The pain he's been suffering from the former bad hip is gone.

I wish that would happen to me, and then, a day later, on the plane home, it does, with a bag falling on my bad knee.

I'll be making some more wishes.

2.

I spend the month of November at a writer's colony, Ledig House, in upstate New York. I can't work without very good coffee, and so I investigate, and find some of the very best coffee I've ever had. This is consoling. Strongtree Coffee is an organic roaster local to Hudson, NY, located right by the train station.

The owner describes changing her business recently, due to climate change. Coffee business owners are not climate change skeptics. Instead, they are preparing to fight each other for the increasingly scarce beans.

I am already on board for saving the planet, but had not prepared, all the same, for a shortage of good coffee.

4.

There's a Turkish writer at the colony who describes living under the threat of constant arrest, due to several charges leveled against her by the Turkish government. After this conversation we watch an episode of Glee. I can't tell if she'd be happier in America, where the government doesn't care enough about writers to threaten them.

When she decides to leave early to return, I see the answer is no.

A few weeks later, as the election happens, I try to explain the US to the international writers, who watch, incredulous. The one who seems to understand best is an Israeli writer, who says, insightfully, that Far Right American governments are typically more favorable to Israel. No one is rooting for Obama in Israel, he says. It makes me wonder if he saw this.

5.

I reflect on the irony of trying to finish my novel during #Nanowrimo. Daily.

6.

On breaks, I read essays by people still trying to discredit the MFA, responses to them, responses to the responses. I wouldn't mind something written that was critical of the MFA in ways that were honest as to what is taught there, but this parade of paper tigers doesn't resemble the world.

In the meantime, it's a new business, created by the MFA: the industry of attacking the MFA.

6.

I find How to Write Like a Victorian, by Paul Collins, on the first book of writing instruction, a much-needed bit of comic relief. Which is to say, the attacks on the MFA begin perhaps here, and much as now, much of the complaint seems to be about the democratization of writing:

The whole discipline had been gestating for a decade, beginning with novelist Walter Besant musing in 1884 over the notion of "Professors of Fiction"—something then as fantastical as a steam-powered robot. It was a vision that at least one critic found "Appalling. As if there were not enough novels already. … [Now] we are to have our young maidens trained to the business, and let loose upon the world, in batches, every year to pursue their devastating calling, as if they were dentists or pharmaceutical chemists."

I will now imagine myself as a steam-powered robot professor and writer. Also: consider the much better The Writing of Fiction, by one such maiden, Edith Wharton.

7.

What worries me more is the celebrity, or the economy that struggles to exist around celebrity. In the same way that most people in the Hudson area now owe their livelihood to the needs of weekenders, publishing too often caters to celebrity. "Most of the people I see promoting their book on tv are already famous," my partner's sister observes a few days ago. She says this as she is asking me how the average writer can publicize their book.

"This is a big question," I say. I remember my idea for a tv show, born several years ago, out of the desire to have a show where my book would be the product placement, carried by the stars everywhere. I'm not entirely convinced it is a bad, cynical idea.

8.

I leave Ledig House, and go on to Philadelphia, making a short stop to read at Temple University and meet with students in their MFA program. I get a ride from a Tunisian cab driver who, it turns out, is a writer. He left Tunisia because of his political writing, unable to stay, but he doesn't speak English well enough to write and publish here. I encourage him, because he is entertaining, to try to write more in English.

I think of the Turkish writer.

In the US, I say, you would never have to leave because of your political writings. Writing itself has been discredited, which is something of a time-saver for the fascists. (This is still true for now, despite the best efforts, say, of the MFA and #Nanowrimo.)

You're right, he says, with a short laugh. And then drops me off.

Hudson, 11/11/10, 4:15PM

This is the view from the bench at Hudson's train station on Thursday, as I waited for the train that took me to Albany's College of St. Rose.

Every now and then, I have someone surprise me with an astute reading of my work that gives me a glimpse of myself I'd never otherwise have, and Thursday was one of those days.  Professor Kim Middleton in this case, who introduced me, gave me some very smart observations to think about, and introduced me in part by quoting from students' papers about my novel.  It was a beautiful thing.

Thank you to all of you who came out to see me and Kathleen Rooney read. And to the hilarious Daniel Nester, my host, and the wonderful Kim Middleton, and the great, great students there.  As I finish my edits on the Queen of the Night, it was great to go and be so well-appreciated.

Sexy Nerd

My former student, Victor Vazquez, is one of my pride and joys, despite his not having yet published his novel.*  He's since gone on to do much more important things–things that will in all likelihood guarantee the publication of his novel, such as be part of the wildly popular Das Racist–and most importantly, win a cartoon-off with the New Yorker, though as of yet the magazine hasn't made good on their promise to become, if losing, a magazine devoted to "rap and jewels".

He's the one here on the right, with the glint of triumph in his eyes.

Ok maybe that is arguable about the New Yorker but really they could have more coverage of the jewels. And to be fair, it's been a year.

Why am I saying any of this? Well, this Saturday, Das Racist uses its powers for good and joins Fred Ho, Tao Lin, Richard Price, Lorraine Adams, Karan Mahajan and Koreanish favorite Nami Mun for the Pageturner Sexy Nerd party at Chambers Fine Arts in New York City, located at 522 West 19th St. Admission is $40, $60 for two and free if you wear your sexy nerd glasses.  Come out and support the Asian American Writers' Workshop's Pageturner festival**, and have fun at the same time. I of course am, like Victor Hugo was once, with my party clothes locked away until I finish my residency here at Ledig House.***  But you go.  I insist.

I seriously do.

*Also, for publishers looking for a celebrity novel with some underground cred and some very real literary qualities, Victor is an astonishing talent.

**For bonus points, ask Ken Chen about the t-shirt ideas we came up with after Brooklyn Bookfest.

***Yes, Victor Hugo was never at Ledig House. But he did ask his wife to put chains on his party clothes, so he would not go out and instead write.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Wrote an homage in this month's GQ to the city of Portland, ME, for their "Best Small Cities in America" travel feature.

Yes, that's the one with the somehow controversial photos of the two female leads of Glee, Lea Michelle and Diana Agron.  The above pictured here is the very beautiful Fore Street restaurant, which I love almost as much as I love its bar.  In it I detail a new family secret: where to go for a lobster roll made from a lobster cooked to order, fresh, for you.  If you order it deluxe, they cook two.

"I think there are a lot of American critics who try to pretend that I don't exist at all."

I'm at Ledig House up near Hudson, New York, with my edits on my second novel, going over them, preparing to turn them in soon.  I printed it up single-spaced with wide margins, so it looks more like a book, and shrank the font, and now I sit with it on a clipboard and mark it with a pen, a notebook next to me to take notes.  I did this with Edinburgh also near the end, to bring the image into my mind of it being published and thus final. This scares me into fixing what's wrong with it in a different way. So is this what you want it to be, the whole thing says to me as I work.

I do this because a font can make something look so polished, and a screen is really just the size of a long paragraph, or of just two pages. This makes it easy to believe the words in front of you are right, when in fact they are only familiar.

When I'm not doing this, I'm putting together my seminar for next semester at Iowa, and today, reading from John Dos Passos' Paris Review interview online, because I'm thinking of teaching a seminar on his work or somehow including his USA Trilogy into the course. I first read that trilogy in college for a class, and I read those books with a ferocity I hadn't given to anything before, except books from my childhood, like maybe Tolkien, and Kon Tiki.  I've been talking about him with colleagues periodically throughout the year, and everyone agrees no one speaks of him now.  I can't think of why, though this quote from the interview is a clue: "I think there are a lot of American critics who try to pretend that I don't exist at all."

To my mind, few writers have radicalized narrative meaningfully in the way he did since. Most people who claim to be experimenting with narrative aren't; they're playing with something else. Worse, obfuscating the story, often passed off as a narrative experiment, isn't really a radicalization of narrative. It's like smearing the ink on a sentence and calling it a story.   

In any case, there's something about those novels from the trilogy that haunts me. They seem to project right into my brain.  Dos Passos was a part of the same group of American writers as Ford Madox Ford, Modernist writers who were trying to make novels not just out of the vernacular and introducing "the secret language of men" (i.e. obscenity) but also making them more impressionistic, to structure the reader's relationship to them in a way that might resemble the workings of their mind, or work with the workings of their mind.  Dos Passos used the pieces he put together to evoke, in the manner of a poet, but you never doubted you were reading a novel. His USA Trilogy was like eavesdropping on the mind of a country, but structured by dramatic irony.

The term "fragmented narrative" comes to mind when I think of him but this has always seemed like a fraught phrase to me.  Many have done it who are just imitating something they saw stylistically without understanding the architecture of it.  They don't display a sense that the fragmentation is intentional, not random, and moves towards being understood. Fragmented narrative is too often the hiding place of someone who fears being understood.  But this was not Dos Passos.  He greatly wanted to be understood. And the fragments of his narratives move toward creating an unforeseen (by the reader) whole out of their disparate parts.

The phrase I use for this is "articulate complexity"—something that when you take it apart seems intensely complicated, perhaps even chaotic, but that, when fit together, creates something the reader experiences as that direct communication Cheever spoke of in his Paris Review interview.  Dos Passos was my earliest apprehension of why you'd use a fragmented narrative, the way something could be broken apart in order to describe something larger than what it could if it were whole.  Reading Dos Passos, I had the feeling of watching a DJ put together tracks to make a whole—the movement between the pieces in the novel was called a collage, but that has never seemed very interesting to me.

I thought of creating something like a class reading fragmented narratives, but am unsure. Also something along the lines of stereoscopic narratives occurred to me, with the idea being novels created out of multiple points of view—this being another way to characterize the way Dos Passos worked, and allowing for a very different kind of discussion about the texts.  I've also thought of making it on novels and nations, i.e., looking not just at the Great American Novel but also something like Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, or The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst.

I think about Dos Passos a little differently of late because I've been working on an essay about the internet, the fragmentation of consciousness, the feared remapping of the brain and then an interesting accidental possible solution I found recently. That essay began as a column that was first just going to be a blog post, really, but it kept getting bigger, and now has progressed into something more serious than I expected. Nicholas Carr's The Shallows is what led this off (check out Emily Mandel's thoughtful review of it here at the Millions) and strikes me as the other topic of the year, (the others being Franzen, the Gulf Spill and the Tea Party).  I wonder what David Shields thinks of Carr's book and his argument, given Shields' own book—and there is a way to see his book as an outgrowth of Dos Passos.

Or Tao Lin, for that matter. David Haglund, writing in the London Review of Books, praised Tao Lin for using gmail chats in his books, for example—if Dos Passos were alive, I think he'd be doing that. I guess the point I'm making is that it may be that Dos Passos imagined or at least foreshadowed the experience these various writers are getting at back near the beginning of the 20th Century. This is very interesting to me.  I don't know that it's true, but I'm interested to re-read them and see, whatever this class ends up being by the end.

This wallet belongs to one of our friend's, Maggie. When...

This wallet belongs to one of our friend's, Maggie. When she bought it, there was a photo displayed in it, on the left. Later on, in using it, she discovered the photo on the right, of what appears to be him with a sweetheart, hidden behind one of the wallet's panels. She keeps both pictures in the wallet now.

HJ Freaks FTW

Kudos to Hyunmo Kim of HJ Freaks, the cross-dressing Korean bassist the Meg Whitman campaign made into a star this week by accidentally leaving a letter off their tweet of their endorsement by the San Diego Sheriff's Association, sending their followers instead to his youtube where he rocks his bass in pink lingerie. Fate, we love you.

Wear Purple Day

This morning I woke up and put on a purple v-neck t-shirt, in remembrance of Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg, Raymond Chase, Asher Brown, Billy Lucas, Zach Harrington and GLBT teens everywhere who took their lives out of fear. This shirt, previously, has been a favorite shirt, bought really because my 2-year-old niece Lucy loves purple, and it turns out to look good on me. It will always mean something different to me afterward. I have no idea if it will help, but if it stops even one more kid from taking his or her life during this season of homophobia and intolerance, I'll have done my job.

If you are a GLBT teen and a reader of this blog, and you're having trouble due to bullying, or you feel despair at the thought that you can't come out where you are now, please try to reach out to someone, somewhere. The internet provides you with the ability to get help I couldn't have imagined when I was that age. GLBT teens are at three times the risk for suicide as their heterosexual peers, due to bullying, parental disapproval and the physical, emotional and even sexual abuse that can occur when you are isolated and unable to assert yourself and your rights. I would also add that in my lifetime, in just 20 years, I've seen a new level of acceptance from the world for the lives of GLBT people that I couldn't have imagined. When the people in Dan Savage's campaign say, It gets better, it's true—it does. And not only for us as individuals, but collectively, as a community. Today there are gay-straight alliances, magazines, political organizations, internet-based communities and social networks, social groups, tv channels, films, in a variety I would have thought was impossible when I was sixteen and terrified to come out.

And if you are a Korean or Korean American GLBT teen, well, again, the level of acceptance for GLBT Koreans and Korean Americans is unprecedented and has expanded well past what I thought was possible as a teenager. You may think your family will say you're dead to them, you may fear being left to your own and cut out of family life, but just know that the world is more than what we imagine it to be, and in that is the possibility for unimaginable love and acceptance. I'm not saying homophobia isn't real, or the routine denial of even its existence by many Koreans. I'm saying that the world and your family can surprise you.

And if you are in the closet, and considering coming out, I'll add only that you should wait until you feel safe. Whether it is cues in your family that acceptance might be possible, or that you're finally on your own, and could make a living if your family throws you out, do not come out recklessly. When I came out to my mother, I did it after college, and I did it because I loved her and I didn't want us to have a dishonest relationship, where she didn't know about my life. She's now very close to my boyfriend, and they love talking to each other. I would never have imagined that back when I was sixteen, but that's more about the limits of my imagination then, and not about the world. It turned out to be just one of the moments I learned that the world was bigger and more interesting than my idea of it, and I've spent my life as a writer thinking about that.

Consider joining in today, and wearing purple, not just for the kids who've taken their lives, but for the ones who are still alive, vulnerable, and who need a show of support. It is a small thing in the face of something enormous, but sometimes all you need is that one small gesture at the right time.

 

This Korean gay drama was unimaginable when I was sixteen, and is part of what we mean by "It Gets Better." It may not feel like it right now, but acceptance and tolerance are on the rise. The current backlash against GLBT people is just a part of our enemies fearing that we've grown.

 

Storage

I saw Heathers again the other night. I remembered how I went to it twice the first night it appeared in theaters. My friend Libby and I drove out to it in her ancient and enormous Cadillac DeVille, and as we left the theater looked at each other in amazement and said, "Again."

Watching it, hearing the familiar phrases quoted so intensely over the years as the characters said them, it was weird. It was like they were copying me and my friends, who had, of course, been copying them.

I was back in Amherst for the weekend, to drop some things off in storage that hadn't fit into the apartment I share with my partner in New York (I prefer calling him my boyfriend as partner still sounds like maybe we just go home and look over contracts together). Fitting things into that apartment was a sort of miracle. He's very talented, though, especially with things of the world, and he can look at them and see ways of resolving their conflicts that are just not apparent to me or many others. Anyway, these things I was taking to storage were simply outside the realm of his considerable abilities but also mine. There was nothing to do with them except put them here.

There are things, as I said to friends at lunch today, that you both cannot have around you and cannot throw away. Do you imagine a future where you bring them back into your life, asked one of these friends. Sort of, I said. If we get a house, sure. He was almost twenty years younger than me, and I know he thought I was some sort of hoarder. Get rid of them? he asked.

I shrugged. It's no use explaining some things to people in their twenties, when time  and the world will team-teach it to them all the same.

People kept asking me if I was enjoying the fall weather. Sort of, was the answer. The spectacle of the changing leaves was lost on me for most of the weekend, as if it was just too much to bother with, to enjoy it. I was busy. I was seeing friends, meeting babies for the first time, I even raked a friend's yard out of some sort of mix of the desire to just do something physical and outdoors and repetitive and the pleasure of cleaning something.

As I left that friend's yard, I drove down her dirt road toward the paved one that would take me back to town and stopped, as a wild turkey delicately stepped into the road and gave me the long eye. It was followed by approximately thirty others. It was hardly the first time I've seen one, but I felt a visceral pleasure at the sight of them. They wandered into the road, and I waited patiently as they crossed, one of them even pausing to give me what could only have been the wild turkey version of a flipped bird. And as they hauled into the woods, glossy and dark and headed who knows where in their huge numbers, I drove off, and as if they'd pulled a veil off my eyes, the fall and the sun setting and the light in the trees were all beautiful to me, and I became excited, even. I bought my boyfriend a pumpkin and some apples, drove to the storage place and realized, as I pulled in, that I had not remembered the number of the locker, having been there just the one time back when I was moving and leaving town.

The storage place is behind a motel there, and the clerks run both. The motel easily dated to the era of Heathers, and standing there, I felt like I was a character somewhere out of the sight of the main characters of Heathers. If they'd required extras to play things they never filmed, in some insane theater of method acting that required, say, the world outside the film set to also be in on it, that was where I was. The desk clerk there had no power, he told me, to go into the manager's files to find out what my number was. "It's no problem," I said, which was my way of not saying, That sounds super sketchy. The image of all of my rental fees going to the manager where he could skim them filled my head. "I'll just try my key and I'm sure the lock it opens will be the one," I said.

Twenty minutes later, as I stood looking at someone's stuff that wasn't mine, lit up by the headlights of my car, I understood that Masterlock keys will open locks that are not yours. I think they have just counted on the idea that no one would ever try to open someone else's lock with their key.

I went back to my clerk. He called his manager, and while he'd been very friendly to me, and acted as if of course everyone did this, he was instantly dismissive of me in the third person to his manager in tone. "Yeah, uh, there's this guy here who forgot his locker number…" I said nothing because of course there was no way he was paid enough for the amount of acting he had to do with me and his manager. I couldn't mind seeing behind the curtain.

As I went to lock my own locker up, I wondered if I minded, that someone else could just open this locker up. They would of course have to know the secret I had just discovered. It was just incredibly heavy and sturdy modern furniture you couldn't steal without a rental truck, boxes of literary magazines, old notebooks. My key hadn't opened all of the Masterlocks I'd put it into, just one besides mine. It would take someone else a series of tries with several different keys. It wasn't exactly like it being safe, but it was good enough for now. I stopped in at the clerk one more time. "Tell people not to use Masterlocks," I said, as I told him my story. His eyes went wide in a horror I didn't feel, as if I'd told him all the lockers were just sort of…open. I saw him about to ask me which locker I'd opened. He didn't. I didn't offer it. It seemed like an invitation of a kind to tell him, the people would probably just accuse me of stealing something, when I'd just put the lock back on, and he seemed to realize this also as he stopped himself. I waved goodnight, enjoying our mutual recognition of the way people are, and drove off to bring my boyfriend home.

*When I drafted this post, without a title, it came up with the randomly assigned post number "1989″, the year Heathers came out. Make of it what you will.

On Teaching the Graphic Novel

 

 

About once a month, I get asked by a colleague or friend for the syllabus I used to teach my seminar on the Graphic Novel at Amherst. Included below is a list of the texts that I used to teach students. I also taught tutorials in the making of comics, and led two graphic novel theses to summa honors, both also awarded the English Department's prize for best thesis. Amherst's English department was very generous and supportive in the teaching I did there, and I'm incredibly grateful for the reception the class received from students as well.

I taught the class as an experiment, and so it was never the same every time. I began teaching it because more graphic novels have been published in the last ten years than in the 30 years prior to that—it is without question an explosion. I had questions about this explosion. I'd been reading into the history of comics, and found that the German Expressionist Picture Novel, an important forebear to the modern graphic novel, came of age in Germany in the age leading up to the Nazi Party's takeover of the government. For our selves now, we live in an anxiety about language, I think, that has created this boom, an Age of Euphemism, and I do think there's something about the comic that can move through the lies and subvert the euphemism in what we experience as victories for truth. Linda Barry, in her masterpiece, What It Is, included here, describes an idea of art, the making of it and the experiencing of it, as part of our immune system, and I like thinking about this idea.

The above, an Ukiyo-e woodblock print by Kuniyoshi, is one of the pieces of art that led me into my interest in the graphic novel. The visual pun at its center emits a narrative force, a dramatic irony—you are drawn into the story about to happen, the idea that the fox has cast this illusion around it and has not yet been caught by anyone except the artist and the reader. Comics and graphic novels at their best play with this and the other forces a visual pun brings to bear. It's one of the things a comic or graphic novel can do that prose alone has to play catch-up with—creating in the mind of the reader simultaneous contrasts, the fox as woman as fox as illusion.

I mention this because I am frequently challenged on the idea of teaching the form, much less reading it. Some of my students mistakenly think of graphic novels progressively, i.e., they will write papers for me saying why they are "better" than prose literature, as if that is our class mission. But it isn't. My sense of the form is that it is capable of uniquely expressing something, in a way that sets it apart from either prose literature, poetry or film. Discovering and articulating that capacity is among the class missions—there isn't one only.

For me, Marjane Satrapi explained "why comics" best, when she said, at an appearance at Smith College, "I write what I can't draw, and I draw what I can't write." This struck me as an important way to think about the artist-writer creator (a clumsy way to say "someone who can do both"). Most of the texts I taught were written by people of this category, but there are writers for the form, like Frank Miller and Alan Moore, who do not do their own drawings and it would be disingenuous at best not to include their cooperative works with artists, in terms of their cultural impact, but the distinction does ask important questions.

While the field is considered new at best (it is routinely dismissed as unserious by many) the boom also means that I could have easily taught the course as a year-long class, with a "History of Comics" first semester and a "Graphic Novel" second semester, and if the post I had at Amherst had been tenure track, I might have considered it, and could easily have filled it. Teaching the graphic novel typically means you'll be popular with students but potentially controversial with colleagues, to be clear—and on the job market, it has been both a plus and a minus, with faculty both intensely interested and intensely repulsed. It is a polarizing form to teach right now, more so than creative writing, which still suffers in the esteem of many academics, despite its popularity.

Of course, in my experience over the years, there are few things more politically dangerous within an English Department than teaching something popular with students. It makes whatever it is both valuable and suspect.

Having said that, for those interested in teaching this sort of course, or in just reading more of the form, here is…

The ENGL 74 Amherst College Memorial Reading List:

American Born Chinese, Gene Yang

Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine

Mother Come Home, Paul Hornschmeier

Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware

Pyongyang, Guy Delisle

Exit Wounds, Rutu Modan

Aya, Margaret Abouet

Blankets, Craig Thompson

In the Shadow of No Towers, Art Spiegelman

Maus, Art Spiegelman

Lucky, Gabrielle Bell

Jar of Fools, Jason Lutes

Curses, Kevin Huizenga

Life Sucks, Jessica Abel

La Perdida, Jessica Abel

Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, Jessica Abel & Matt Madden

Ghost World, Daniel Clowes

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller

Ronin, by Frank Miller

Night Fisher, R. Kikuo Johnson

Watchmen, Alan Moore

Top Ten: The 49′ers, Alan Moore

Black Hole, Charles Burns

McSweeney's 13, edited by Chris Ware

Scott Pilgrim 1, Brian Lee O'Malley

Battle Angel Alita 1, Yukito Kishiro

Banana Fish vol. 6, Akimi Yoshida (Volumes 1-19 exist)

Lone Wolf and Cub Vol. 1, Kazuo Koike

Astonishing X-Men, Vol. 1, Joss Whedon

The Tale of One Bad Rat, Bryan Talbot

Blue Pills, Frederik Peeters

Ordinary Victories, Manu Larcenet

Prosopopus, Nicolas de Crécy

Dogs and Water, Anders Nilsen

Monologues for Gauging the Density of Black Holes, Anders Nilsen

Poor Sailor, Sammy Harkham

Persepolis, Marjan Satrapi

Fun Home, Alison Bechdel

Epileptic, David B.

Powr Mstrs Vol. 1

What It Is, Lynda Barry

The City, Franz Ernst

Incognegro, Mat Johnson

7 Miles A Second, by David Wojnarowicz

MOME, various issues (a quarterly journal of comics)

I taught the class using a variety of texts to the side, like Freud's essays on the Uncanny, Jokes, Screen Memories and Dreams (Freud even made a comic called "Dream of the French Nurse" as an illustration for his work on dreams, without even feeling the need to describe why he thought comics were perfect to reflect dreams), and Simone Weil's The Iliad or a Poem of Force (Greek gods being the early cultural prototype for super heroes).

Some caveats for those attempting to teach these texts in the classroom: Comics may be thought of as inexpensive, but 4-color art illustrations on good paper means the average graphic novel is expensive. The class was a financial burden to some students, and while some texts can be bought second hand, consider approaching your library with your list in advance and having the books purchased and placed on reserve during the class.

Also, you will attract a mix of students, typically, some who know only a few of the most famous recent graphic novels, and, as a friend mentioned with her trial class recently, a group who may be more knowledgeable than you in terms of comics history. These people may even believe a mastery of arcana is necessary to even teach the class (not true). Comics Arcana is the gang handshake of the "fanboy/fangirl" as these readers are called (and yes, I fanboy). Comics fans are a fierce claque, comparable, I think, only to opera fans in terms of the withering scorn they can bring to bear when you come up short. Just remember that with a seminar you are reading to learn as much as there to teach, and encourage an atmosphere of group discovery. A series of midterm presentations can be informative and also allow those who invariably feel they should really be teaching the class a moment to express their nascent egotism creatively. I.e., to share their knowledge base with their peers (and you). They don't really want to teach the class—they want to learn something from you. But to do that, they need to respect you, and if you indicate you respect the years of obsessive reading they've done to the side of their main course work, unexpressed until this class, it's usually a win.