http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/ en info@gwillowwilson.com Copyright 2008 2008-06-18T22:23:01+02:00 http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/tagged/ http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/tagged/#When:22:23:01Z The music meme is making its way around the blogosphere: Renegade Evolution tagged Natalia Antonova tagged Parallel Sidewalk tagged moi with the following: List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to. Parallel added: I think she should include notes on what she listens to while working, like Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan do I don’t typically listen to music while I work, but I listen to a ton of music at the gym in the morning while gearing up to work. What I play sets the tone for what I write that day, and as a result I closely associate certain songs with certain projects. Right now: Coldplay: Viva La Vida. Yeah, I know, it’s Coldplay, but this song could be a rock opera. Delerium: Consensual Worlds. Minute 5:25 through 6:43 is a musical analog for AIR #1. Imogen Heap: Hide and Seek. Sad for sad moments. Iggy Pop: The Passenger. This is one of my personal anthems. Wolfsheim: The Sparrows and the Nightingales. German gothpop. Dead Can Dance: Ullysses. This is a good song for transitional moments. Massive Attack: Teardrop. You’ve heard a sample of this song if you’ve heard the House theme music. I tag Aziz, Fatima, and Borbor-Chan. It’s not seven but it’ll do for now. Blogging 2008-06-18T22:23:01+02:00 http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/there_is_more_i_want_to_say/ http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/there_is_more_i_want_to_say/#When:03:51:00Z It rained, but what else is new. On the bus there was a man who smiled a certain way. In profile he looked like a Norman lord: monkish blond hair and a dusky beard; a slim, straight nose, as on a tomb effigy. He wore khakis and leather shoes, but this didn’t matter. For ten minutes he had another history: he had seen a few battles but preferred books; a second son maybe, destined for the Church but handed a sword and a title upon the death of an elder brother. It didn’t help that next to him was a man with a hood pulled up around his face, who wore a similarly medieval expression--ascetic yes, but lit by some harsh beautiful idea. An unwilling vassal, let’s say, called off the land to fight for his liege. Our lord has read books, as we know, and perhaps he has cultivated shocking ideas about equality--he is traveling with his men, spattered by the same grit and rain, something his older brother would never have done. This is why he smiles. There was a sun-break (this is what we have instead of ‘sun’ here) in the late afternoon. Over the hill there were swallows--the kind with blue-grey backs and orange bellies--darting along the street, up and down. Catching insects while the light was good. They are so polite about avoiding you, coming to within six inches of your shoulder and veering away, singing the whole time. It made me want to thank someone who was kind to me when I was being particularly unbearable--someone I’d already thanked, and for whom more thanks would stray into impropriety. It’s an awful burden for someone who turns things inside-out for a living to have to be proper. So instead I stood on the hill gilded terrace by terrace in half an hour of light, near a corner garden, and wondered how there could be swallows and damask-roses at a time like this. That is a kind of thanks.  Personal 2008-06-10T03:51:00+02:00 http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/i_have_so_arrived/ http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/i_have_so_arrived/#When:05:43:01Z Jason Aaron, writer of the excellent and much-admired Vertigo series SCALPED, has with Brians Wood and Azzarello (DMZ, 100 Bullets, and a host of other stuff...if you’re coming from the comics side you know them well) offered me my own forum on their consolidated Virtual Machine of Power, Standard Attrition. That’s right. You don’t really write comics until you’ve got one of these babies. I am so pumped to be knocking around the internet with these guys, all of whom are well on their way to being cult legends. Where the internet is concerned, I have now achieved market saturation. You can’t hide from me. I m in ur blogz, writing ur content. If you’re literary, I’ve cornered you at RedRoom. If you’re a hipster, I’ll get you at Standard Attrition. If you’re Muslim, I yak at you on TalkIslam, if you’re conservative I’ve probably fought with you on Dean’s World, and if you’re here...you probably know me. I sometimes don’t know when to be a respectable print maven and when to be 25 and living in a world of unstuck content, the meme-driven Gen Why interculture, the New Society, whatever you want to call it. Today I’m the latter. The revolution will be podcast. m/.  Blogging, Comics, Media 2008-04-30T05:43:01+02:00 http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/the_10_a_review_of_unaccustomed_earth/ http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/the_10_a_review_of_unaccustomed_earth/#When:20:48:00Z I’ve been avidly following Jhumpa Lahiri’s work since her debut collection of short stories won the Pulitzer. That’s no easy thing, landing the most coveted prize in literature on your first try. Lahiri followed this triumph with a novel, The Namesake, which was short-listed for half a dozen other awards and made into a middling film by Mira Nair. Last week, she gave us Unaccustomed Earth, a short story collection that is darker and more pensive than either of her previous works. I would argue that Interpreter of Maladies is still her best book--the stories are exquisitely realized, and the prose feels like a couture suit: fitted, elegant, spare. Few writers can make economy that beautiful. About the quality of Lahiri’s craft there can be no argument. Her ideas, however, can be somewhat more controversial. In her first two books, Lahiri comes down somewhat hard on white women, who she portrays as culturally ignorant homewreckers, interlopers in a complex and very tightly-wound world of transplanted desi culture. The protagonist of “Sexy” doesn’t know what the Gramin Bank is, thinks Bengali is a religion, and waltzes into an affair with a married Indian man. To be fair, she grows both a conscience and a complex sense of self as the story evolves, but the raw materials of which she is made feel less thought-out and more stereotyped than Lahiri’s other characters. The same is true of Max, the flippant upper class girlfriend of hero Gogol in The Namesake, who reads like she’s been ripped out of a Pottery Barn catalog and pasted into an otherwise beautiful book. Despite the faulty ingredients Lahiri puts in her white-woman characters, her portrayals of romantic relationships between western women and non-western men are almost painfully well-observed. Her general conclusion: there is no love big enough to stop the cross-cultural shoe from pinching. Trying to cram your foot into it is almost always a bad idea. I agree with her. Intercultural relationships are hard 100% of the time; 90% of the time they’re so hard that they’re not worth the sacrifices both partners must make. Between these books and Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri joined the 10%: she married a white man and seems to have recanted of her rigid attitude toward white women. And developed a much more complex one toward arranged marriage. In Interpreter, the final and best story, “The Third and Final Continent”, tells of an arranged marriage that develops into tender regard and acceptance. Gogol’s parents in Namesake have a similarly warm relationship. In Unaccustomed Earth, arranged marriage is a source of anxiety and even an inkling of defeat. The heroine of the final three interlinked stories accepts an arranged marriage at the age of 37, after a prolonged affair that goes nowhere and another affair that promises nothing. Lahiri’s conclusions here are much less cheery: she seems to be mourning the fact that passion means nothing without commitment, and at the end of the day, commitment is so important that passion is an acceptable sacrifice. It seems old-fashioned but is in fact highly sophisticated: in an era when there is zero reward (socially, emotionally, financially) for growing up and taking on adult responsibilities, these are the kinds of choices people must make. The stories in Earth are fraught with anxiety and loss--the endings are ambiguous both morally and emotionally. But there is poetry here that is absent in her previous books: Lahiri is sad without being grim, and out of their disjointed lives her characters speak with frank honesty. The movement of God over the earth is more obvious here; she makes freer use of deus ex machina to send her characters in and out of one another’s lives. I’m not sure I like what Lahiri has given up to make room for this new maturity and willingness to explore the banal and the isolated--Namesake and Interpreter were fervent with unspoken joy, and I looked out at a brighter earth after reading them. This Unaccustomed Earth lives up to its name: in Lahiri’s eyes, we are all adrift upon it, never quite at home, and never quite able to leave home behind. Like this post? Join the conversation at TalkIslam.info. Literature 2008-04-10T20:48:00+02:00 http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/april_2008_appearances/ http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/april_2008_appearances/#When:19:28:00Z For those of you in the Northeast Corridor, I may just be making a stop in your hometown next week: SUN APRIL 13 11AM-12:30PM Creator Q&A Panel, Graven Images Conference, Boston MA 3-4:30PM Graphically Religious FRI APRIL 18 4-5PM Vertigo Editorial Panel, New York ComicCon 5-6PM Signing @ the Vertigo booth, New York ComicCon SAT APRIL 19 12-1PM Signing @ the Vertigo booth, New York ComicCon 3-4PM Vertigo Voices Panel, New York ComicCon TUES APRIL 22 6:30-8:30PM An Evening with the Creators of CAIRO @ NYU Kimmel Center for University Life, Rm 914 See you there! 2008-04-10T19:28:00+02:00 http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/talk_it_out/ http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/talk_it_out/#When:04:42:00Z The internet is getting really nuts. First it was blogs. Then Facebook. Then Twitter. And now there’s TalkIslam.info, where you can engage in a facimile of all three while discussing burning questions with some of the best minds of the Brass Crescent. (If I do say so myself.) Go, sign up, post your comments, your observations; indulge your idle love of comment threads. All faiths, opinions and philosophical bents welcome. Off you go! 2008-04-03T04:42:00+02:00 http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/i_support_your_right_to_watch_crap/ http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/i_support_your_right_to_watch_crap/#When:19:05:00Z Aziz is a good man. He’s hosting Fitna, that awful anti-Islamic movie that’s gotten so much press. Many of the sites and theatres that originally planned to host the film have ended up removing it from their content, citing security concerns and possible threats. Naturally, the release of the film was followed by a great heaving passive-aggressive free-speech lovefest (the Muslims will kill us all for expressing ourselves!) by the same people who like to pull comics with nudity in them out of public libraries, because the human body is so much more offensive than violence and carnage. Aziz is doing a public service: he’s saying “This tripe offends me as a Muslim and a human being, but it should not be censored.” I admire people who have the moral courage to do things like this--the Jewish ACLU lawyer who defended the KKK’s right to hold public rallies comes to mind. However, I won’t be following Aziz’s example. The reasons why are purely aesthetic. I decided long ago not to defend crap on principle--I’ll defend people’s right to make crap, watch crap and consume crap, but I refuse to defend the crap itself. Distributing crap is, on some level, defending it. Why won’t I defend crap? Because in this society, we’ve come to the mind-numbingly stupid, poseurish, self-congratulating conclusion that anything controversial must be good. This is nonsense. I will not contribute. The agitprop emperor has no clothes. Since most people only discover their free speech gene when it comes to hateful smut (you don’t see any of the people who defended the original Mohammad cartoons also defending the journalists and opposition leaders who are censored around the world every single day), I feel totally justified conserving my free speech energy for genuine art. If you want to start a campaign to put Titian nudes on display at your local art museum, give me a call. However, the crappy and the controversial have a right to be made available just like the transcendent and the truthful, so if you have a burning desire to waste half an hour of your life, you can do so at City of Brass.  2008-03-29T19:05:00+02:00 http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/aaah/ http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/aaah/#When:16:48:01Z The lovely Shazia has just installed Akismet, so the recent spam avalanche should be taken care of. Now I get to delete those damn pharmaceutical ads all at once instead of hunting them down one by one. That, my friends, is power.  2008-03-29T16:48:01+02:00 http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/on_sight/ http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/on_sight/#When:23:07:00Z I want to talk about the way I see. Imagine a world that is flat: undifferentiated, in your eyes, from a painting or a photograph, in which distance and depth are intuited rather than seen. ‘Far away’ is not far away, but up—higher in your field of vision than things that are close to you. You know that the coffee mug at your elbow is closer than the coffee mug on the kitchen shelf beyond it, because it looks bigger; you know the orange in the bowl before you is spherical rather than flat because of the way light and shadow bend around it. Superimposed over this flat world is another world, dimmer and flatter still: a fleeting double or doppelganger that hovers like a halo over the first, disappearing when you scrutinize it closely. When you look at a person you see two faces: one flat, one ghostly, clumsily meeting; this is your brain’s attempt to simulate the third dimension. The reality you cobble together from these disparate images is tinged with fiction—you don’t ‘see’, not really. You guess. You imagine. You have stared for hours at your hand with its painted-on shadows and its prismatic twin, and wondered how other people see. I was diagnosed with strabismus when I was less than a year old, and have lived with it ever since. When I was young, science didn’t yet comprehend how many visual disorders are rooted in the brain, not the eye. Even though I could hold both eyes perfectly straight—though only one at a time—my malady was said to be muscular, and surgery was suggested. I had three; each failed. My brain only knew how to see one way, and that was by splitting up the images it received from my eyes. When science and I got older, doctors began to ask me how I thought, not how I saw, and discovered the intricate way my mind had worked to compensate for the lack of depth perception: like a blind person, I had some facial vision, and an overdeveloped sense of hearing. I would walk through an optometrist’s office blindfolded and identify, with 100% accuracy, which doors were open and which were closed. I could hear sounds that were just a note or two out of the typical human register, flinching at dog whistles. My first and second vision therapists were half-admiring, half-exasperated: the way I saw was so complex that disassembling it and reassembling it along the normal pattern was a daunting, perhaps impossible, task. I didn’t see any reason to try, beyond the cosmetic. I worry more about the way people see me than about the way I see. On good days I’ve been told it seems as though I look past people, or through them; my husband calls my expression ‘ecstatic’. On bad days, or when I’m tired, it’s clear there’s something wrong. If I try very hard, I can appear as though I’m looking straight at things for a moment or two—but it makes the world go blurry and gives me a splitting headache. My first meetings with people are usually spent in a great deal of pain as I try to appear focused. The irony, of course, is that the more focused I seem, the less I see. After I’m comfortable with someone, I drop this pretense, and look sibyl-like into the middle distance. Sometimes I catch people staring at the same point I am, trying to figure out what is so interesting in the space that hangs just beyond their right shoulders, a space inhabited (though they don’t know it) by their halo-selves, their shimmering non-selves, beloved of my intractable eyes. What am I looking at? I can hear them thinking. Well, you, I’m looking at you. Where you probably use cues in facial expression to judge how a conversation is going, I use tiny changes in voice modulation, pauses you don’t know you make, word choices, breathing patterns. After one conversation, I will be able to identify your prose on paper—the words you use are, to me, as unique as your face, and they will be what I remember, handily stored in the hyperfunctional language center of my brain. I am looking at you, with steady affectionate attention. Would I rather be normal? Of course I would. I would like to see in prose instead of poetry. I would like to pass a vision test at the DMV without having to move heaven and earth in my own visual cortex, telling half-truths (I tell them what I should see, not what I do see), and emerging exhausted. I’m not going to pretend this is a gift. But my strange sight is a constant reminder that the only things we truly own, the only things that are divinely and solely ours, are our obstacles. If I have to give up literal perspective for this perspective, well, it’s not a bad trade. It’s not a bad trade at all. When you turn away at the end of our meeting, saying “I’ll see you later,” you mean it; when you turn your head, I am gone. But for me, who never saw you properly at all, you persist. I can conjure you in the air, not as an image but as a collection of linked sensations, habits, a vibrant lingual pattern. I can feel a finely attenuated pressure on my face; the echo of the precise distance you like to put between your body and mine when we speak. In this way, I never stop seeing you. Not a gift—far from a gift. But, in its own way, perfect. Personal 2008-03-15T23:07:00+02:00 http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/hooray/ http://www.gwillowwilson.com/index.php/site/blog/hooray/#When:22:45:00Z I’ve been named the Red Room Rising Star this month. I love that site, and not just because they’ve been awfully nice to me. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a site claim to ‘bring together the largest and best group of minds in Field X’ and deliver exactly that, no exaggeration necessary. Amy Tan blogs at RR a few times a month, and Barack Obama just signed on. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t already. It’s very probable that at least one of your favorite authors hangs out there.  News 2008-03-10T22:45:00+02:00