On Tuesday, we discussed that Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is brimming with literary reference. Bechdel incorporates everything from Joyce to Salinger to Greek mythology in an effort to tell her "own" true story. And many of her allusions are not cited, as she has determined that they are part of culture's collective, general knowledge. I find this an ironic juxtaposition to Reality Hunger, which argues that everything is collective knowledge, yet still cites (albeit begrudgingly) all of its references (we think). In light of this, perhaps Bechdel's work is making a larger point about collective knowledge than Shields' work is, despite that the core intention of Shields' work is to destroy the ownership of ideas. But maybe I'm wrong.

 My favorite description of William Morris actually occurs on his wikipedia page where someone/ones have described him as an "English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement"

Two artistic movements, three professions and a radical political associate. Morris was definitely a busy man. He was a poet but also a printer and I have always said that if I could get enough money together I would buy his Kelmscott Chaucer. What I think is important about his version of Chaucer (he didn't write the text after all) is the way he presented the text.

After our discussion about how to read "Fun Home" I began reading the rest of the book, paying close attention to how I had been reading it because I didn't think it was as easy a read as some others in the class had thought. For me the reading is a little stressful because I feel as though I should be reading at the pace that Bechdel would be thinking it as though its a stream of memories. I feel like my attempting to follow her timeline of events accurately might be preventing me from analyzing the text as much as I might be able to. So I'm wondering how Bechdel would want the book to be read. I find that I read all of the text for each panel before looking at the picture..I even read her labels and the spoken words before looking at the pictures so that I don't miss any of the text.

 When I began reading "Reality Hunger", I was thrown off by the style. It was hard for me to read because traditional novels are not set up in the same manner. I did not realize until last class that the book was a compilation of quotes. Thereafter, I found that because I knew that the manifesto consisted of quotes, it had a better flow. I understood why the reading felt like incomplete pieces meshed together. I enjoyed parts of the book, but the different style was disconcerting. 

I was on the hunt to figure out how other people reacted to David Shield’s “Reality Hunger,” when I decided to identify for myself why this book was so hard to get through. For me, it wasn’t so much the fact that he didn’t cite the quotes, but that they seemed to have no overarching relation to each other. In class, my professor pointed out that maybe David Shields didn’t think that life was coherent, and thus gave us an appropriate portrayal of reality. However, we’ve been trained to look for coherence, and that’s what we tend to do when reading a book. To top it off, what we’re supposed to understand, once we’ve battled with the incoherence, is that great art makes us redefine our perceptions and ideas of what has been established before.

I feel like I've read Fun Home more than twice, but I've checked my course history a few times now and as far as I can tell, it was only listed in Graphic Novels and James Joyce. But maybe it's just that kind of book, the kind that clings to you and remains clear in your mind. Or maybe my memory is more fallible than I anticipated. Uh oh.