Notes on "Fun Home" (graphic novel)
Dec. 12th, 2022 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_los- The thing about "Fun Home" is, I’m reading it going "oh, a Hepplewhite chair! I have those--" This is, I think, not the point of "Fun Home".
- She doesn’t mention that these dogwoods they're planting smell: like pure shit. Yes, they’re attractive, but they reek like the dead. Maybe someone dealing in the funerary trade honestly doesn’t find it remarkable.
- The home renovation, which is unusually successful, puts me in mind of how most people can’t stand to leave a full period room unleavened by modern taste. This flicker of restraint or smug modernity is often just the feature that winds up making it the whole thing hideous in ten years' time.
- I don't know that I agree with Bechdel that "The Importance of Being Earnest" is a particularly gay play, or that the gluttony regarding cucumber sandwiches is a coded reference to other appetites. It's a startlingly thin, unconvincing reading in what's otherwise an enviably literary account. As Isaac put it, "I know people read the closet into the concept of Bunburying and having a double life, but if this were a Gilbert and Sullivan joke (which it easily could be) nobody would see anything in it. There’s a story hook in it not being a very gay play, too! Just write about the closetedness of a gay playwright producing something that a local theater company in a small and likely conservative town can put on in the sixties without a whisper of complaint." Wilde is, I think, enough of a craftsman that he doesn't have to exclusively write about Wilde! who is! a homosexual!! Playwriting demands that level of detachment: you're inherently not a soloist, but part of a collaborative company.
- It's weird to me that Bechdel has so much complex affection for her abuser, and I think it's tied up with her lesbian experience, which is constituted by an identification with and yearning towards masculinity that forms no part of my own (indeed, rather the reverse in my case). She identifies with her dad more than I'm interested in doing with my abusive step-father, and has more sympathy for and fascination with him him than I can dredge up for either the gay man who raised and abandoned me or my biological father, who killed himself last year (plus a month and two weeks). Bechdel says her father's abusiveness was all the worse because it was unpredictable, intermingled with kindness, which is absolutely my feeling. But she then extends her father this colossal patience, which I think she might not have done if he'd lived and she'd reckoned with his death as a fully-realised adult? I don't know, we're different people from different circumstances, but affording your abuser this much time and thought and kindness sticks in my craw, just a bit. It's not that I don't know where every bad father I've ever had (the three unwise men) was coming from, it's that I don't give a fuck anymore. When someone reveals another 'oh and there's yet more! terrible family incest' Twist to me, at this point I respond with glacial boredom, exhaustion. It's mawkish. And they don't deserve more of me, these men. Where does Bechdel find this energy?
- Had to look up like 5 words, which was interesting. Good to know the proper term for bargeboard.
- Maybe abuse narratives are for people who aren't bringing one of their own to the party? You're stuck weirdly comparing elements of your respective childhoods, like 'so what you had to make your own food, that's not even remarkable?', and that's not generous reading or thinking.
- She doesn’t mention that these dogwoods they're planting smell: like pure shit. Yes, they’re attractive, but they reek like the dead. Maybe someone dealing in the funerary trade honestly doesn’t find it remarkable.
- The home renovation, which is unusually successful, puts me in mind of how most people can’t stand to leave a full period room unleavened by modern taste. This flicker of restraint or smug modernity is often just the feature that winds up making it the whole thing hideous in ten years' time.
- I don't know that I agree with Bechdel that "The Importance of Being Earnest" is a particularly gay play, or that the gluttony regarding cucumber sandwiches is a coded reference to other appetites. It's a startlingly thin, unconvincing reading in what's otherwise an enviably literary account. As Isaac put it, "I know people read the closet into the concept of Bunburying and having a double life, but if this were a Gilbert and Sullivan joke (which it easily could be) nobody would see anything in it. There’s a story hook in it not being a very gay play, too! Just write about the closetedness of a gay playwright producing something that a local theater company in a small and likely conservative town can put on in the sixties without a whisper of complaint." Wilde is, I think, enough of a craftsman that he doesn't have to exclusively write about Wilde! who is! a homosexual!! Playwriting demands that level of detachment: you're inherently not a soloist, but part of a collaborative company.
- It's weird to me that Bechdel has so much complex affection for her abuser, and I think it's tied up with her lesbian experience, which is constituted by an identification with and yearning towards masculinity that forms no part of my own (indeed, rather the reverse in my case). She identifies with her dad more than I'm interested in doing with my abusive step-father, and has more sympathy for and fascination with him him than I can dredge up for either the gay man who raised and abandoned me or my biological father, who killed himself last year (plus a month and two weeks). Bechdel says her father's abusiveness was all the worse because it was unpredictable, intermingled with kindness, which is absolutely my feeling. But she then extends her father this colossal patience, which I think she might not have done if he'd lived and she'd reckoned with his death as a fully-realised adult? I don't know, we're different people from different circumstances, but affording your abuser this much time and thought and kindness sticks in my craw, just a bit. It's not that I don't know where every bad father I've ever had (the three unwise men) was coming from, it's that I don't give a fuck anymore. When someone reveals another 'oh and there's yet more! terrible family incest' Twist to me, at this point I respond with glacial boredom, exhaustion. It's mawkish. And they don't deserve more of me, these men. Where does Bechdel find this energy?
- Had to look up like 5 words, which was interesting. Good to know the proper term for bargeboard.
- Maybe abuse narratives are for people who aren't bringing one of their own to the party? You're stuck weirdly comparing elements of your respective childhoods, like 'so what you had to make your own food, that's not even remarkable?', and that's not generous reading or thinking.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-14 12:59 pm (UTC)what i still find of value in it is her depiction of her younger childhood, and its sense of standing to one side during it. the dissociation of watching the family rather that being in it? i don't know that i've seen that before. her relentless recounting of her ocd diaries. that feels plausible to me, the wretchedness of her felt-life at that time.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-18 06:39 pm (UTC)