Essential Dykes to Watch Out For
Nov. 20th, 2008 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
susanstinsonI've got to prep for a work planning meeting in a couple of hours (I know I've mentioned that I do this with friends -- it's hugely helpful, and this one's particularly charged and important to me), but I would feel derelict in my bloggerly duties if I didn't report that Alison Bechdel made a post this morning which includes both a link to a video of one of her highly entertaining presentations about The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For and a picture of Alison and me at her talk last night.
We met for tea before the talk. Alison didn't spot The Haymarket, although she did see my parked trike. I went out to stand by it as landmark, and there she was, was rushing down the main street of Northampton carrying a full, heavy case of some kind of soda pop that she had promised a reader of her blog who had won a contest there. She had lugged it all of the way from the hotel, and if that's not way beyond the call of bloggerly duty (and probably my first inkling of such a concept in the first place), I don't know what is.
I stayed up way too late reading (in most cases rereading) the Dykes To Watch Out For strips in the anthology. Doing that makes me feel like I'm inhaling clove cigarettes and patchouli in the backseat of a small car on the way to the Women's Peace Encampment and/or the Marquee (name your nostalgia dyke bar -- the Duchess definitely works, too, or the Globe, or, way, way back -- the Apartment). It's just so wild, that Alison's eye and her artist's obsessiveness and her wit caught so much detail (right now I'm looking at panel of Lois spraying Windex to polish the bookstore's display case of crystals and goddess figures and labryses -- God, she's got it down to the credit card sign and the pen jar with joined women's symbols next to the cash register) of these worlds that really are pretty much gone. It just nails formerly obscure mileaux that I spent a lot of time in, too. (And nails the wood grain on the play structure when Clarice and Toni move on out to the suburbs, too.) It's trippy. The strip and the books were/are there in real time, too, in the past, in the present. The artist's introduction raises questions about the effects of all of this observation, and there's plenty to mull over, but yeah, no, to me, despite the "nailed it" thing, this is not a case of a butterfly pinned (thereby killed) and preserved for better, more meticulous observation, but, because this is art, there is heat and mystery alive here, there just is, rising from a heightened, expansive dyke quotidian. And yeah, that turns out to be a heightened, expansive human quotidian. It kind of had to turn out that way, and part of the trick of both this work and negotiating the weird melting edges of identity through time is both the inescapable awareness of that, and the insistence of the particulars.
PS Holly Rae Taylor, who is Alison's girlfriend, took the picture. Check out her new website: Waste Free Living.
We met for tea before the talk. Alison didn't spot The Haymarket, although she did see my parked trike. I went out to stand by it as landmark, and there she was, was rushing down the main street of Northampton carrying a full, heavy case of some kind of soda pop that she had promised a reader of her blog who had won a contest there. She had lugged it all of the way from the hotel, and if that's not way beyond the call of bloggerly duty (and probably my first inkling of such a concept in the first place), I don't know what is.
I stayed up way too late reading (in most cases rereading) the Dykes To Watch Out For strips in the anthology. Doing that makes me feel like I'm inhaling clove cigarettes and patchouli in the backseat of a small car on the way to the Women's Peace Encampment and/or the Marquee (name your nostalgia dyke bar -- the Duchess definitely works, too, or the Globe, or, way, way back -- the Apartment). It's just so wild, that Alison's eye and her artist's obsessiveness and her wit caught so much detail (right now I'm looking at panel of Lois spraying Windex to polish the bookstore's display case of crystals and goddess figures and labryses -- God, she's got it down to the credit card sign and the pen jar with joined women's symbols next to the cash register) of these worlds that really are pretty much gone. It just nails formerly obscure mileaux that I spent a lot of time in, too. (And nails the wood grain on the play structure when Clarice and Toni move on out to the suburbs, too.) It's trippy. The strip and the books were/are there in real time, too, in the past, in the present. The artist's introduction raises questions about the effects of all of this observation, and there's plenty to mull over, but yeah, no, to me, despite the "nailed it" thing, this is not a case of a butterfly pinned (thereby killed) and preserved for better, more meticulous observation, but, because this is art, there is heat and mystery alive here, there just is, rising from a heightened, expansive dyke quotidian. And yeah, that turns out to be a heightened, expansive human quotidian. It kind of had to turn out that way, and part of the trick of both this work and negotiating the weird melting edges of identity through time is both the inescapable awareness of that, and the insistence of the particulars.
PS Holly Rae Taylor, who is Alison's girlfriend, took the picture. Check out her new website: Waste Free Living.
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Date: 2008-11-20 05:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-11-21 04:46 am (UTC)ha ha ha ha ha ha
bechdel is perfect about everything, and her details are absolutely killer. and yes, some of it is now artifact, but what astounds me about her work is that she kept it moving. in real time.
and yes, those were the first queer books i ever saw in the subversive regulator bookshop in durham nc in the '80's. BRIGHT COLORS / SCARY WORD right there on the tabletop when you walked in the door.
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Date: 2008-11-21 02:26 pm (UTC)Yeah, the colors and shapes plus, right, DYKE, make those books so redolent of the bookstores themselves and everything that went into getting them to exist and getting me into them.
I'm older than you -- my first queer book, besides Leaves of Grass, which I bought at a used book sale to benefit the high school marching band when I was in junior high, was RubyFruit Jungle at the Cinderella City Mall in Englewood, CO.
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Date: 2008-11-21 05:50 am (UTC)Luckily I have the framed original "Signs o' the ZODIAC to Watch Out For" to console me ;)
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Date: 2008-11-21 02:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-11-21 02:30 pm (UTC)Thoughts on "Essential" community
Date: 2008-11-26 04:35 pm (UTC)How awesome it is to discover your wonderful blog! I must heartily concur with your commenters' sentiments that the picture of you with Alison is beautiful. Thank you for giving me photo credits on that along with a shout out about my website--every little bit of spreading the word helps!
It was fun tagging along on that last leg with Alison. I got to meet you and then later, the sharp and sassy Hilary Price. And of course it was great to see Alison's talk, which I had only heard her think and talk about up till then. At the talk I felt sort of melancholy as I looked around and realized that this was a capstone or end of an era. I was feeling sad at how much we've lost our sense of community, and how losing these characters was perhaps another way of losing the connection with the dykes who have loved them. But I know that we will continue to find ways to connect, and it was certainly encouraging to see such a wide range in age in the audience. Yikes, this is probably more than you bargained for when you added the post script to your "Essentials" post. I guess I just feel very strongly about dykes and dyke culture and dyke community!
Have a happy Thanksgiving.
Holly
www.wastefreeliving.com
Re: Thoughts on "Essential" community
Date: 2008-11-26 11:52 pm (UTC)How great to have you pop up here. It was really nice to see you -- maybe one of these times, we'll get to hang out and talk a little more. I've got that strange internet thing, where I've seen you in videos (planting garlic! and all) pictures, and read your blog -- I always wonder how to carry that as it translates in actual human presence.
And, yeah, you know, at one point Northampton had two women's bookstores -- there's a queer bookstore, Pride&Joy, now -- and a lesbian calendar that came out every month that made it really easy to find out what folks were doing. I saw women at Alison's talk who I hadn't seen in years, and wouldn't know how to find -- including someone I'm always going to have huge, warm feelings for because she stepped up to help organize a speak out against fat hatred when I got some fat hate mail that shook me up. The Lesbian Calendar ran Dykes To Watch Out For, as did Sojourner, out of Boston, gone now, too. I think you're onto something with that capstone feeling.
But one of the gorgeous thing about the moment of the talk is that, along with the loss, there's Alison busting out all over the larger culture and getting serious support to do the work she most wants to do, and that it seems to me that she got there by having the nerve, energy and crazed persistence to keep going deeper and to being as true as she could be to the things she observed, the things that caught her eye and sensibility. One of the things I miss about Dykes -- as much, I think, as lesbian culture as the center of that expanding, multi-layered universe -- is that it was fiction, and so gave readers work and pleasures in its stories that, as a novelist, I particularly love.
And that is probably more than you bargained for! It's so nice to connect with you. I'm drawn by the great cutting board (edited to say it's a rack, not the board itself!) and lunch totes and bamboo utensils on your site! Plus, the urge to learn how to can! My love has a huge garden, and I've always kind of wanted to try it, but have also been a little intimidated (and scared of botulism!), too. If I get bold, I'm going to get one of your -- what are they called again? -- those bell jar sets and immersion things -- very cool.
Re: Thoughts on "Essential" community
Date: 2008-11-28 02:05 pm (UTC)Cheers!
Holly Rae