Hey Readers!

In ASTU we just read thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs by Juliana Spahr. It’s a collections of two poems that she wrote after 9/11. The first one focuses on how connected everyone is, and how we all breath the same air and the same space. It was extremely repetitive and slow paced, but but also relaxing and almost meditative. We also read a poem called “The Names” by Billy Collins, which has a similar feeling of slow repetition. After reading these, however, the question was brought up about whether or not we would know these poems were about 9/11 if we weren’t told. We spoke about how in Collins’ poem the images of names inscribed on stone and flesh and up in the air around buildings is what gives it away. We can associate 9/11 with hundreds of names swirling through our minds because of News papers, and the memorial.

This got me thinking about how there is certain imagery that we have just learned to associate with 9/11. For instance, I recently saw a post  by Humans of New York  (an amazing blog done by a man, Brandon Stanton I believe, who photographs people and tells bits and pieces of their stories.) of a man talking about his experience in 9/11. However, as I was reading the post, it occurred to me that no where in the piece did it actually say what he was talking about. I was just making an assumption based on some of the imagery. This passage specifically made it very clear to me: “A lot of people were out of shape, so we were moving slowly. Occasionally we’d move out of the way to let a fireman run past. People didn’t begin to panic until we reached the ground floor because there was broken glass everywhere and bodies on the ground. That’s the first time we started running. The police actually tried to keep us inside the lobby because bodies were falling outside, but we pushed past them.” The bodies falling to the ground is what made me associate it with 9/11.

It makes me wonder what other specific images trigger the memory of an event that I can’t actual remember.   

Thanks for reading and see you next time!

Olivea

Hey guys!

So as you know from last week’s blog post, we just finished the book Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. This week we followed our usual ASTU protocol and read a couple of journal articles that pertain to the novel. First we read ‘Regarding the Pain of Self and Other: Trauma Transfer and Narrative Framing in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ by Ilka Saal, and then we read “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect” (Frames of was: when is life grievable?) by Judith Butler.

Just a quick side note: In class today Dr. Luger explained to us that if Foer is our primary source, then Saal would be our secondary source or textual analysis of Foer’s novel, and Butler’s article would provide us with our lens.

Though I found Butler’s article to be a bit dense and hard to understand at times, there were a few points that could not be mistaken. For instance, early on she writes “If I identify a community of belonging on the basis of nation, territory, language, or culture, and if I then base my sense of responsibility on that community, I implicitly hold to the view that I am responsible only for those who are recognizable to me in some way” (Butler 36). Through this she is explaining that we often only care about the lives of those in which we consider to be apart of our “community”. In class we talk and read a lot about the distinction that many people make between “the us” and “the them”. I find that this passage from Butler’s argument really solidifies that idea.

Another passage that I felt really stood out reads “public grieving was dedicated to making these images iconic for the nation, which meant of course that there was considerably less public grieving for non-US nationals, and none at all for illegal workers” (Butler 38). This struck me as important. I hadn’t considered the fact that there were many people lost in 9/11 who American’s didn’t really mourn.

As I was only five old on September 11, 2001 I wasn’t old enough to understand what was going on, and I have no real memories of that day, and anything I know about it I learned through school, American media, and American adults. Because of this the idea that there were many people killed on that horrible day that were never grieved by my country was never mentioned, or considered. I reading Butler’s article I found the idea so upsetting in tragic.

http://www.911memorial.org/explore-memorial

Oh, and one more side note. You might not be able to read this, but when I was searching for an image of the 9/11 memorial I typed in “9/11” and one of the first things that came up was “9/11 jokes”…. I just thought that was completely messed up, and I wanted to share it with you guys.

Thanks for reading this week!

Olivea

Hey there readers!

Welcome back, and happy New Year! This semester in ASTU we got right into it with a novel called Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. It’s a wonderful novel that follows a young boy, Oskar, on his journey in the search of a lock that fits a mysterious key. He found the key in the closet of his father who was tragically killed in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. In parallel to his story we follow the stories of his grandparents through letters.

As I read this novel something that stood out to me was the sadness that I felt for the Oskar’s mother. Along with the struggle of losing her husband, she tries her best to make her son happy, but it is a struggle at best. When she tries to stay strong for him he doesn’t believe she’s showing enough sadness over the loss of his father, and when she makes a friend through a loss support group, he accuses her of being in love with another man too quickly. He asks her to promise never to fall in love with another man. When she can’t make such a promise he says “If I could have chosen, I would have chosen you,” (171). Through this he means that he would rather have lost her than his beloved father. Though he’s just a child and he immediately takes his words back, I can’t imagine the pain she must have felt in that moment.

As I read the book I could tell that Oskar had always been much closer with his father. And after the tragedy the distance between mother and son was probably felt more deeply. He struggles to open up to her throughout the book.

For some reason those scenes between Oskar and his mother really stood out for me as heart breaking.

Thanks for reading!

Olivea

Hey guys!

So last week in ASTU we went on a field trip! We got to go check out the  Rare Books and Special Collections  in the Irving K. Barber Library. We learned a bit about how the system works, and how all of the materials are organized and filed,. but the main event was getting to look through Archives from Joy Kogawa the author of Obasan.

Right here on UBC’s campus is a massive collection of all of her records from her time writing the book. It includes drafts of the book, letters from her editor, fan mail and other correspondences, rejection letters from publishers, academic articles, etc. I found it so interesting to look through all of these little pieces of her process, but the most interesting part for me, and I would imagine many of my fellow students, was looking through some of the letters she sent and received. The first that caught my attention was in one of the “academic articles” files. It was a letter from around 1984 I believe written by a professor called Donald to Joy Kogawa asking if she remembered him. He told her they had met earlier that year and he was sorry for being delayed about it, but that he was finally sending her the essay he had written on Obasan. To my surprise, stapled to it was a typed response. Not only did she tell him that she did in fact remember him and looked forward to reading his paper, but she offered to meet with him to discuss it. I unfortunately didn’t get a photograph of this one, but it can be found in box 73 file 6 (73-6).

The next folder that caught my attention was marked “letters from readers” (box 13 file 3). It is filled with beautiful hand written letters from the 1980’s. My classmate Alex described it perfectly. He said “I love this, It’s like looking through a time capsule”.

From this file one letter in particular caught my attention. It is written to Kogawa’s editor and is very short, but her last line reads: “I would appreciate very much if you would forward me Ms. Kogawa’s address. Much to my surprise, she was my childhood friend”.

Here is a photo of that letter and a couple of others that I enjoyed reading through::

Thanks for reading!

Olivea

Hi guys!

So this week in ASTU we were still pretty focused on the graphic memoir Persepolis, and an article about it called “The texture of of retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis'” by Hillary Chute. But because I focused on Persepolis in my last blog post I thought I would write about something a bit different this week…

In our class lecture a few days ago Dr. Luger briefly mentioned one of my all time favorite books. It’s another wonderful graphic narrative called Maus (and it’s sequel Maus II of course) by Art Spiegelman, it’s an incredible (Pulitzer prize-winning) story about Spiegelman’s parents and how they survived the Holocaust, and I was really excited when it came up again in Chute’s article.

Though Chute was primarily writing about Persepolis and the power of Satrapi’s choice to tell her story as a graphic memoir, and she only mentioned Spiegelman’s work briefly along with a few other examples, I felt as though many of her main ideas applied very nicely to Maus as well. She explains that through her illustrations, Satrapi is able to show us the “practice” of remembering (97). She writes “She shows us, then, the visual and discursive process of ‘never forgetting'” (97). I believe that this is something that Maus is successful at as well, as it is also the recollection of war, and family, and survival told through the same medium through more than one perspective (his and his father’s).

Chute argues that Satrapi’s “monochromatic” (98) visuals bring more power to her story and they really portray depth or “thickness”(98) of her memories, and she quotes Satrapi on page 99 saying “To draw it and put it in color — the color of flesh and the red of the blood, and so forth — reduces it by making it realistic,” . I found this quote and Chute’s expansion on the idea applied to Maus so perfectly, because not only does he also take the black and white approach to his illustrations (though he uses lots of shading and doesn’t use as much flat black on pure white as Satrapi), he takes the idea of making the images less realistic even further by turning all of the characters into animals. He represents the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats, the Americans as dogs, and so forth, taking these truly horrific human experiences and assigning them to creatures we can’t really relate to. I’ve always thought that this made the whole piece even more intriguing and powerful, and it’s so interesting to have the reasoning put into words so nicely.

If you haven’t read Maus I would highly recommend it! Seriously, you guys, it’s amazing.

Thanks for reading!

Olivea

Welcome back readers!

So this week in our ASTU class we’ve been reading and discussing the graphic memoir Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

It is the auto biographical story of Satrapi’s life as a young girl growing up in Iran during and after the revolution in 1979. In the introduction Satrapi explains that one of her reasons for wanting to share her story is to show the world what life in Iran was like for her and her family, and to show people that the way her country has been perceived by the West is “far from the truth”.

Because Persepolis is “the story of a childhood” and not simply about war and terror, there are many experiences that Satrapi goes through that we can all relate to on some level. Some examples would be when she smokes her first cigarette to rebel agains her mother on page 117, or when she asks her parents to bring posters of her favorite musicians back from their vacation and hangs them up in her bedroom on pages 126-131. Although her experiences are different and generally far more extreme, we can all relate to listening to new music, falling in love with a new band or rebelling against our parents in one way or another. I think the fact that we can connect to Satrapi’s experiences makes her story even more powerful. It makes us stop and think about just how different we aren’t.

There was one passage in particular that really made me stop and think for a moment. On the bottom of page 52 we see a frame of Satrapi’s mother shouting “All torturers should be massacred!” and in the next frame we see a young Satrapi walking alone with the caption “My father was not a hero, my mother wanted to kill people… so I went out to play in the street”.

This is a very extreme example, but it made me think about those moments that people always talk about when you see for the first time that your parents are actually people with lives outside of just being your mom and dad.

I personally can’t really remember that exact moment of realization in my life, so I looked around online for posts people have made about having that experience, and found this really cool blog post that I thought described what these frames made me think about really nicely. It’s called The First Time I Realized My Parents Were Human by Sherry Levine. She wrote “As people I realized, they must have regrets, insecurities and fears just like I do and will when I’m older. . . Between body changes, perception changes and new obstacles to face, every year to them is just as new as every year to us”.

Though having your mother express thoughts about wanted people to be killed is not the most common experience (I hope), I think everyone has these moments of “whoa, did my mom really just say that?!” or “my parents think that way?!” where it kind of occurs to you that they have this whole other side that you haven’t really seen or gotten to know yet, as your relationship hasn’t yet developed beyond parent and child.

Anyway, that’s just a thought I had while doing the reading this week! Hopefully some of you know the feeling I’m talking about.

Thanks for reading.

Olivea

Welcome to UBC Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!