Notes 11/2

TyL: including outside information would have ruined the interior perspective, the stream of consciousness, the idea that Tarnation is access to Caoutte’s interior canon his frame of reference

Anne: weren’t we/ were we disturbed by the inability to know… did his grandparents?

veritatemdilexi: experience as conversation stopper,

ckosarek: I think I had a weird reaction to the pumpkin scene. Before that he portrayed her as a bitter angry woman…and when she (had the lithium over dose) I was really happy for her…because she had escaped a maladjusted state

kgould: I kind of agree, because she was so anguished…but she still does have that awkward disturbing interaction with her father…yelling, tell us what happen "you shut up" the pumpkin scene is really memorable she seems like she’s happy

Anne:  veritatemdelixi's question, if we acknowledge that this film is really in JC’s head, how can we respond as critics to his …experience? Or does the whole notion of a critical response feel inappropriate

veritatamdilexi: it really does feel inappropriate. especially the clip of him acting when he was 11 … I really my mind cannot comprehend that I don’t mean to be judgmental

Anne: can we use literary methods

TyL: how well is it conveyed? He conveyed the experience, gave enough insight

Anne: how can you critique that, you weren’t there?

rachelr: it’s how you present the material rather than the material itself…getting the audience engrossed in artwork for ex rather than relying on the artist’s name..able to capture your attention and emotions

Amanda: it kept me riveted

EVD: this is the kind of thing we would watch in a science class to see an accurate portrayal of schizophrenia…or even the son’s mental state

Anne: so that’s a use value, but was that our goal here

veritatemdilexi: but the thing about it being a typical example of schizophrenia is that it isn’t that either, not everyone

SandraG: I would believe the outsider more. Bias is everywhere

Anne: this is taking me back, do we believe things more when they are in personal testimony. Think about the use value of literary theory…for handling a text like this. If we move beyond, the idea of comprehension and how the text is constructed…if we move to an empathetic reading (which we seem to be more prone to) Being effected/controlled to the text

kgould: I don’t think the film resists it—I did a critical analysis in a film. We need to be careful, because unless we were right there and for example had a schizophrenic mother, or have had a dissociative disorder…I think its evoking emotion, but… we’re not there

Anne: does your training as a literary critic…discourage you from engaging empathically with the film?

Owl: I don’t like this critical theory thing, it means…you’re given a way to look at it, you don’t get it look at it as yourself

Anne: Bill T Jones—constructed a dance, people who had terminal illness, using some of them as dancer—the critics couldn’t do a critical reading, the dancers were performing their lives on stage, I can’t be a critic of someone performing their lives… kgould say’s she’s done it?

kgould: I found a critical analysis of this, and not only did they misinterpret it, the critic was very confused…and we felt like he was a jerk. You have to tread on eggshells when you’re critiquing a work like this

Anne: once it’s made into a film it’s up for reading

SandraG: this really reminds me of fun home could we…criticize that…

Anne: we were talking more, was it ok for bechdel to talk about her father’s?

EVD: comparison to other mental-illness fictional films (one flew over…) use that mind, and you can analyze it critically

ckosarek: that post? It belongs on you-tube…the guy seemed like a huge jerk, when you criticize something like this you run the risk of being as asshole, and also of being dismissive

TyL: you can criticize the form, you can criticize the form, the story, the way the images are used,

Anne: so we can talk about

AyaSeaver: narrative is part of the structure, plot is part of the performance

kgould: but we shouldn’t make judgment calls I think we can’t really can’t separate form from content

TyL: you can critique what he puts in and what he doesn’t put it

Veritatemdelixi: We can all edit our lives, couldn’t we? And I’m not belittling, but its all editing

pfischer: I found it very indulgent, very narcissistic (and you’ll hate me for saying this) distanced me from the empathy, allowed me to have a critical response

FatCatRex: what has been added by the way he has put this together, it’s a highly constructed film, a highly constructed narrative, constructed to really add a feeling to it

kgould: and the one I saw was different than the one on Netflix and I think I came away with a very different impression, and

Anne: he’s coming back, the film is part of a very long line of confessional memoirs. We have watched three films and listened to a radio play as that was your all’s decision, so, how has this changed your attitude towards prose—what difference was the genre make. Coming back to fixed words and images as opposed to…fixed words

veritamdilexi: I parsed-prose, latin ‘prosa’ straight forward anything that is straight-forward is prose. Anything that we don’t have  to analyze to understand. I think it’s broadened my understanding of prose…documentary films are a subset of non fictional prose

Kgould: I agree, up to a certain point.

Anne: what has our brief foray into this genre taught us?

ckosareck:…we’re talking a lot about reality and I don’t want to go there, but we’re talking about a different kind of persuasion as to ‘what’s going on’ and the radio show and the film try and persuade us in a different way. You can see it, there fore it’s reality

kgould: seeing is believing

veritamdilexi: film is so much more communal than reading

ckosarek: the war of the worlds was a text, but it didn’t cause a panic but when it was a radio show, it did

Anne: highlights the solitary nature of reading

Anne: Difference in the two covers?

EVD: this kind of has to do with it, did the 9/11 report have pictures in it at all? No because I was wondering why they used actual photographs and sometimes graphics and why they didn’t then just use photographs. Because then I would feel like the 9/11 commission report, the official, would have to be all photographs (it doesn’t actually have any)

SandraG: the regular commission report has more of a serious air, there’s nothing unnecessary there

Anne: the absence of imagery adds to a serious-ness

Owl: there’s emotional, and personal perspective on the graphic cover

veritatemdelixi: there’s kind of a back-story, who got selected to be on the committee that wrote the report, with the seal and everything. The 9/11 committee report was trying to address two different audiences

Anne: which would you trust more?

SandraG: I would want more of a feel—I would go for a graphic adaptation. Less of what the government thinks.

Anne: of course, they’re the same report?

SandraG: that the pictures will portray what actually happened

EVD: I would never want to read something like that (the graphic) without reading reviews, because I would never want to get a bias,

pfischer: the graphic treats the report itself as a primary resource that the graphic narrative interprets

veritatemdelixi: I feel like it over simplifies

rachelr: isn’t that one of the advantages, I think I would start with the graphic report and then move onto the actual one.. we need background knowledge

kgould: you would need both. In an event specially a scattered one like 9/11 you always need more sources

Owl: there were all these politics going into deciding who got to be on the committees that wrote the reports

FatCatRex: I haven’t read the ‘chunkier version’ the intro says ‘we hope that readers of all ages’… the intent of this volume is not to replace the original but to make it easier to read the original

Anne: does it make you want to read ‘the actual’ or not? What does it do for that?

ckosarek: I didn’t want to read the ‘chunkier version’ a lot of this revealed…it was all about what went wrong…and I don’t want to ‘get re-angry’ I just want to move forward (she said in her jersey accent)

Owl: in the actual commission report do they establish context?

Veritatemdelixi: yes

EVD: I think the books gives us a completely different perspective b/c it’s written from the perspective of an outsider, not government officials

Anne: very struck by the graphics of the first chapter, all the blackness  I couldn’t bear to see. that one plane was crashing and the others were still flying..it felt to me like I was reliving the experience

Kgould: Art Spiegleman did a comic called in the shadows of no towers its his story of 9/11 running to school and trying to get his daughter with his wife…and for me that was much more emotional..there is something more lent to the personal story..the 9/11 report is an adaptation… it’s not actually personal even though there are images

FatCatRex: At what point does a person become a terrorist?  I think I was just more interested in that…and that was not the point of this books to discuss this

Anne: this book does not attempt to understand. terrorism

veritatemdelixi: the original report actually goes into detail like that…the example of using flags, it generalized who the terrorists are, it misrepresents the nature of terrorism

Anne: science comic books. Science depends desperately on images. (input/summarize) a comic by genre is going to facilitate and more rapid access to received information. What simplification/over simplification occurs when…thinks like all the flags? Makes it more accessible, more easily received…and yet we should beware?

pfischer: reading from her posting (in course notes)

SandraM: it looks like they’re doing something evil

pfischer: I had such an issue, draw in on their vocabulary…I didn’t even have to read the captions..so much inherently racist nationalist propaganda

veritatemdelixi: and there’s a whole interview style that you miss without the actual 9/22 commission report..i.e. ‘I am obsessed with Osama bin Laden”…it’s even more critical of government officials than the original report

SandraG: not only that but right next to that (p47)…the narrative, it acts/represents this as a personal event when…there were a lot of policy, non personal reasons

Smacholdt: I was ten years old when this happened…I have no recollection of the event really, just of the adults around me being frightened, afraid

Anne: did you not want to know what you were leaning from the book

smacholdt: if was kind of interesting…it sounds macabre, but like—the timeline?

jaranda: I thought it was kind of hard to read overall just because the conversations, like the speech bubbles jump around it was kind of hard to figure out, where I was going

Anne: is that appropriate or inappropriate

jaranda: I guess so? Because if no one knew what was going on?

TyL: except..this is supposed to be a clarification

tgarber: for me is was a different…esp because, being from California, young at the time, it didn’t effect me much because, I didn’t know exactly where it was from, what was going on

maht91: what I heard from people back home, I didn’t know details, I didn’t know how it started, the politics—I just really didn’t know that much about it. We just heard, there were two planes and that was it—I thought I knew a lot but then I realized I didn’t know what was happening.

platano: it was a source of information but it also felt, incomplete I wanted to know..the other side. I was left…with the desire to like take a course on the middle east.

Anne: the terms of the project, were to think about our security system but as many of you are noticing our attitudes and problems, it all trickles down. Our officials, where will they get knowledge…if they don’t get it in school?

SandraG: it really made me want to learn Arabic..we are very unrepeated, how are we supposed to deal with this? I feel like the point of having so much going on wasn’t artistic to construct a confused narrative but was actually because they were trying to condense so much information

Anne: What about the a-d-a-p-t-ation. Do all the visuals detract from the truth telling. It seems like we learned things about the event that we didn’t know before

platano: I feel like it gave me something to start with but..I would have believed it more, without pictures

Owl: but who …this isn’t the whole story/picture

veritatemdilexi: the commission report interviewed a lot of people, it wasn’t just Americans

SandraG: but a lot of it is what they think happened, but there’s a lot of hearsay or what we think happened

Anne: We haven’t read the original, our part is to discuss the artistic adaptation

veritatemdelixi: more appealing to a  younger audience and I don’t want younger audiences readings it

EVD: it can be really misleading just because if you look at this, if you don’t know its based upon the actual committee report…if you don’t know that then you think it’s the ‘the actual story of 9/11’