His name is Salvatore...can't be coincidence.

I just finished reading Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, by Rachel Cohn & David Levithan. If you're from the Eighties, have any affinity for the Eighties, or you're addicted to romance--you should read this book. A key character in the story is "Salvatore," which is a name I love. One of my favorite poems features a "Salvatore." [The poet and his book are quite obscure, and I will now tear apart my apartment to find this poem. I think I turned it into a graphic poster because I loved it so much.]

And, I just came across a great interview with Salvatore Scibona. He's a former fellow, of the Mass. Cultural Council, and he discusses his experience as an author on their awesome (and getting better) blog, ArtSake. I'm going to quote the lines that made me swoon, but you should take the time to hit the blog and read the full interview. I'll post links below.

Mr. Salvatore Scibona:

"But also, what could be more unlikely, more uncanny from a writer’s point of view, than that a stranger he will never know should walk down a street with years of the writer’s thoughts in her bag? A book is such an elegant technology, something so complex in such a crude device."

"The finished novel is like a house that stands on the ruins of a previous house that stood on the ruins of another house that was built on a meaningless little patch of ground."

These expressive and lovely ideas will now drive me to a bookstore where I can peruse his new novel, The End. The description on the book's website states that it's a "...about a single day in 1953 as lived by six people in an Ohio carnival crowd." I've requested the book through my library, but impatience might drive me to purchase it despite my scholar's income. As well as checking out this book, I will browse August: Osage County, Madonna's brother's dish-all, and keep desperately searching for the July Vogue Italia, which is the issue featuring black models (editorial, not ads, and, yes, that makes a difference).

Links:

ArtSake interview with Salvatore Scibona
The End
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

Biblio Notes: I Heart Cecil Castelluci, Aug. 11, 2007

"Love is All Around," (a.k.a. the theme to The Mary Tyler Moore Show)
- Joan Jett & The Blackhearts

Working at the marble counter, this title passed through my hands. A story about a group of misfit girls conducting covert art attacks on their suburban cookie-cutter town? (Aaaah. Sporking. Good times. OK, sporking isn't art...yet.) I loved, loved, loved this graphic novel. Yes. Graphic novel. Normally, I eschew le novel graphique. Usually the number of panels crammed on a page, and the visual info crammed into each panel makes my eyes twitch. Eeyuch. In this case, Jim Rugg's illustrations are much cleaner and sooooo appealing, but not saccharine. And, Ms. Cecil Castellucci's story is very well written. Her characterizations and dialogue take delicate bites out of the typical teenager stereotypes pushed in the mainstream. This is the graphic novel Jane Austen would read with hot tea and snickerdoodles. You will be left very satisfied with a smile and crumbs on your mouth.

Pre-Plain Janes comic/g.n. experience:

• Archie (crushed on Jughead, chose Veronica),
• Richie Rich,
• JTHM (he reminded me of my first schoolyard crush),]

Post-Plain Janes comic/g.n. experience:

• American Born Chinese (a beautiful rendering of fractured identity),
• Street Angel (almost reminds me of tween Spinner before she moved to Wisconsin--haven't finished it yet)

Cecil Castellucci:

The Plain Janes (co-creator), graphic novel, sequel on the way

Beige, YA novel

Boy Proof, YA novel (on request through ILL)

Queen of Cool, YA novel

a.k.a. : Cecil Seaskull, she makes films and music as well
www.misscecil.com

Jim Rugg:

The Plain Janes (co-creator)

Street Angel (co-creator)

Afrodisiac (co-creator)

Pittsburgh Steelers fan (I'm pretty sure. Way to Go, Steelers! Way to Go!)
www.jimrugg.com

Storyville Portraits/Bellocq's Ophelia

(Plate 2, circa 1912, EJ Bellocq, printed by Lee Friedlander, Storyville Portraits)

After reading a great essay on poets.org, I discovered a book called Bellocq's Ophelia written by Natasha Trethewey. It's a series of poems written as letters from a Storyville prostitute to her girlhood friend, now a schoolmarm in their rural hometown. Ophelia is black, but can pass. The letters reveal her path to the brothel and how she endures her time there. Trethewey meditates on "the gaze," those who wield it and those subject to it. At first, Ophelia is just a possession/thing to be looked at and be looked through. After her encounters with Bellocq, we see her reclaim her own gaze, her own "looking," and develop her skill of seeing through photography.

E.J. Bellocq was an early twentieth-century photographer who took a series of portraits of the workers of Storyville, a closed and legal district for prostitution in New Orleans. His glass negatives were discovered by Lee Friedlander, who reproduced and printed the portraits for the Museum of Modern Art. Trewethey was inspired by the portraits, and some poems are hung on the imagery of specific plates. I think it's phenomenal. Not only does she flesh out the women snapped by Bellocq, she has a sincere appreciation of how vision can be transformed/carried by a camera.

I highly recommend this slim volume of poetry. And, I recommend you get to your nearest library and find E.J. Bellocq: Storyville Portraits and view the lovely pictures that inspired Ms. Trethewey. I knew of Bellocq and his portraits, especially from the cover of Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society by Nickie Roberts. [Those striped stockings are irresistible.]

"In his own way, in these pictures, Bellocq consummates many love affairs. Johnny Wiggs understood this when he saw, to his amazement, that Bellocq's prostitutes are beautiful....Beautiful innocently or tenderly or wickedly or joyfully or obscenely, but all beautiful, in the sense that they are present, unique, irreplaceable, believable, receptive. Each of these pictures is the product of a successful alliance.

A skillful photographer can photograph anything well. To do better than that he must photograph what he loves. Some love geometry; some love sunlight on mountains; some love the streets of their city. Bellocq apparently loved women, with the undiscriminating constancy of a genius. If he was in conventional terms impotent, he was in his eyes and spirit an indefatigable lover." ---John Szarkowski

I think Szarkowski is perceptive about a photographer's process (if chauvinistic in his pronouns), and I like that he understood that Bellocq saw prostitutes as living humans, not immobile objects to be used, ignored or shunned. If you're not familiar with Bellocq, he was oddly shaped, and that might have hindered any normal relationships with females. Bellocq paid the prostitutes for their time, but apparently not for sexual favors. It would be interesting to compare this series with Philip-Lorca diCorcia's series with male hookers.

Trethewey creating not only a poem, but a biography, that was framed by a previous work of art is fascinating to me. I recently heard someone describe historians as people who want to know about the unnamed, unmentioned and overlooked characters in the history books. I think artists pursue these questions as well, but instead of collecting facts, they dig for visual evidence (discovered or constructed).

Reading her poems, you will gain insight on what existence is like for "the other." You will recognize or begin to glean what it is like to be viewed with an assigned identity, not necessarily your own. And, what it's like for "the other" to walk with the included when the ability to blend in puts them--the included--at ease. The anxiety of waiting for them to finally notice your difference, and watching the behaviour perceptibly shift. Or, the included stumble over their prejudice, and "the other" speaks up and makes them aware the target is in their presence.

"October 1911"

Just the other day I fancied myself
a club woman, like you,
in my proper street clothes--

a new bow on my white straw hat,
my white linen jacket cleaned
and pressed, a modest bit of gingham

at the collar. So attired, I ventured out,
beyond the confines of the district,
to do my share of good deeds, visit

the sanatorium, a sick sister, her body
invaded by the invisible specter
of our work. Bellocq met me there,

set his camera to this scene: a woman
standing in the middle of the frame,
and off to the right, barely in the picture,

what she might become--the sick one
sleeping, hospital curtain pulled back,
only her face showing, disconnected

from the body she has begun to lose.
To the left, dressing gowns hanging empty
on the door. And beyond that door,

what you cannot see

Later, my visit over,
I walked out into bright afternoon, the sun
harsh, scouring everything--my face

the face a man recognized. (And here
I hesitate to tell you--) I was escorted
to the police station, guilty of being

where I was not allowed to be, a woman
notoriously abandoned to lewdness.
There, I posed for another lens, suffered

indecencies I cannot bear to describe.
You will not see those photographs--
paint smeared on my face, my hair

loosed and wild--a doppelganger
whose face I loathe but must confront.
I know now that if we choose

to keep any part of what is behind us,
we must take all of it, hold each moment
up to the light like a photograph--

this picture I send you of my good work,
a modest portrait for my mother,
even my rough image in a police file.

--Natasha Trethewey
Bellocq's Ophelia

Biblio Aside July 14, 2007

Happy Bastille Day!

I just finished reading The Bloody Chamber, by Angela Carter. The book fortuitously came to my attention while I manned a marble counter last Saturday. The cover's wailing maiden in a tower caught my eye. Perusing the description, I discerned that the author was reclaiming the female perspective in fairy tales. Instead of helpless and incognizant victims, her versions would be populated by cunning and compulsive wenches. Males would take their turn being the prize, the tool, or mere embellishment. The book itself was quite skinny, so I felt no guilt in placing it on my tippling stack of to-be-read's. Plus, one of the stories was the basis for a movie, The Company of Wolves. One of those great flickers to stumble on in the strange hours between sleep and waking.

At first, I thought I had picked up that weird genre of "British and extremely literate pornography." The opening story titillated me into a state of flustered agitation. For all my forthrightness, I have a wide streak of prudery that stiffens my back. [I don't approve of the brazen way pornography has been mainstreamed into American culture. While I don't care what people do in their homes, I really would like for them to keep it in their homes---don't casually broadcast your dirtiness on computer screens, on the subway, and, really, not even on the streets of Vegas.] Although the story stirred me up, I was compelled to reach for a dictionary and not my smelling salts.

All my boon companions know how I love to rattle off my five-dollar words, but I still needed to look up at least a dozen new ones. I don't know how I'll be able to insert "catafalque" into common chit-chat, but I will cram it in somehow. After that first story, La Carter toned down her language or I became a jaded sophisticate after 33 pages. What I had hoped for was delivered to me in lusciously wrapped packages. Her writing style is unusual--at least to me--and forces you to readjust your expectations with every story. Symbols and the languor of dreams dominate most of the stories with the delightful exception of "Puss In Boots." "Puss" displays that raucous humor of Chaucer and low-down Shakespeare. Earthy and full of farts.

I leave you with an excerpt I jotted down in one of my handy notebooks:

"This knowledge gave me a certain fearfulness still; but, I would say, not much...I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves, in all their unreason."

page 63, The Bloody Chamber, "The Tiger's Bride," Angela Carter