Sadness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  It was dusk. Anna was alone, and waiting for him to come back from a bachelor dinner. She walked up and down in his study (the room where the noise from the street was least heard), and thought over every detail of their yesterday’s quarrel. Going back from the well-remembered, offensive words of the quarrel to what had been the ground of it, she arrived at last at its origin. For a long while she could hardly believe that their dissension had arisen from a conversation so inoffensive, of so little moment to either. But so it actually had been. It all arose from his laughing at the girls’ high schools, declaring they were useless, while she defended them. He had spoken slightingly of women’s education in general, and had said that Hannah, Anna’s English protégée, had not the slightest need to know anything of physics. This irritated Anna. She saw in this a contemptuous reference to her occupations. And she bethought her of a phrase to pay him back for the pain he had given her. “I don’t expect you to understand me, my feelings, as anyone who loved me might, but simple delicacy I did expect,” she said. And he had actually flushed with vexation, and had said something unpleasant. She could not recall her answer, but at that point, with an unmistakable desire to wound her too, he had said: “I feel no interest in your infatuation over this girl, that’s true, because I see it’s unnatural.” The cruelty with which he shattered the world she had built up for herself so laboriously to enable her to endure her hard life, the injustice with which he had accused her of affectation, of artificiality, aroused her. “I am very sorry that nothing but what’s coarse and material is comprehensible and natural to you,” she said and walked out of the room. When he had come in to her yesterday evening, they had not referred to the quarrel, but both felt that the quarrel had been smoothed over, but was not at an end. Today he had not been at home all day, and she felt so lonely and wretched in being on bad terms with him that she wanted to forget it all, to forgive him, and be reconciled with him; she wanted to throw the blame on herself and to justify him. “I am myself to blame. I’m irritable, I’m insanely jealous. I will make it up with him, and we’ll go away to the country; there I shall be more at peace.”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  So many independence movements were active in the early 1900s that New York tabloids printed fearful articles about the “Yellow Peril” of Asia joining the “Black Peril” of Africa to encircle the globe. The young Ho Chi Minh of those days is described in Jean Lacouture’s classic biography as slender and beardless, wearing a dark suit, a high-collared shirt, and “a small hat perched on top of his head, looking delicate and unsure of himself, a bit lost, a bit battered, like Chaplin at his most affecting.” When I walk past old New York buildings he might have seen, I try to imagine him looking at them, too. Due to the last-minute chaos and printing problems of the first issue of New York, my article is cut by two-thirds. It becomes so concentrated that readers will have to pour water on it.6 Still, I hope the Prophet of the Diner sees it. Now as I write this almost four decades later, Ho Chi Minh, who owned nothing in his life but a typewriter, remains the only leader ever to defeat the United States in a war. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than on all of Europe during World War II. About sixty thousand U.S. troops died; twice as many Vietnamese soldiers died; and nearly two million civilians in North and South Vietnam lost their lives. Both here and in a now-independent, unified, and prosperous Vietnam, where tourists travel, there are still broken families, traumatized veterans, chemicals in the soil—and much more. In South Korea when I visited in this new millennium, newspaper headlines were protesting Agent Orange, stored underground by the United States on its way to deforesting North Vietnam. Now it was leaking and poisoning the water table. According to the wisdom of Indian Country on my own continent, it takes four generations to heal one act of violence. What if Americans had heard the Prophet in the Diner? VI.In 1978 Father Harvey Egan, pastor of St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in Minneapolis, invites me to join him on a Sunday morning and give the homily or sermon to his congregation. This isn’t as surrealistic as it sounds. He has invited other laypeople, from union organizers to peace activists, and at least one woman, Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers. He also welcomes gays and lesbians into his congregation, supports peace movements from here to Latin America, and generally behaves in a way that he and many other Catholics believe Jesus had in mind. Though it’s just a coincidence that his church bears the name of a woman who was burned at the stake for being a heretic who wore men’s clothes (not for being a witch, as Hollywood told us), I think Father Egan enjoys inviting someone who’s been regarded as a jeans-wearing heretic, too. He himself prays to God the Mother to make up for centuries of Catholic priests and popes who pray only to God the Father.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour hooks, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep. 4 When, through decorations of light and shade, we drove up to 14 Thayer Street, a grave little lad met us with the keys and a note from Gaston who had rented the house for us. My Lo, without granting her new surroundings one glance, unseeingly turned on the radio to which instinct led her and lay down on the living room sofa with a batch of old magazines which in the same precise and blind manner she landed by dipping her hand into the nether anatomy of a lamp table. I really did not mind where to dwell provided I could lock my Lolita up somewhere; but I had, I suppose, in the course of my correspondence with vague Gaston, vaguely visualized a house of ivied brick. Actually the place bore a dejected resemblance to the Haze home (a mere 400 miles distant): it was the same sort of dull gray frame affair with a shingled roof and dull green drill awnings; and the rooms, though smaller and furnished in a more consistent plush-and-plate style, were arranged in much the same order. My study turned out to be, however, a much larger room, lined from floor to ceiling with some two thousand books on chemistry which my landlord (on sabbatical leave for the time being) taught at Beardsley College. I had hoped Beardsley School for girls, an expensive day school, with lunch thrown in and a glamorous gymnasium, would, while cultivating all those young bodies, provide some formal education for their minds as well. Gaston Godin, who was seldom right in his judgment of American habitus, had warned me that the institution might turn out to be one of those where girls are taught, as he put it with a foreigner’s love for such things: “not to spell very well, but to smell very well.” I don’t think they achieved even that. At my first interview with headmistress Pratt, she approved of my child’s “nice blue eyes” (blue! Lolita!) and of my own friendship with that “French genius” (a genius! Gaston!)—and then, having turned Dolly over to a Miss Cormorant, she wrinkled her brow in a kind of recueillement and said: “We are not so much concerned, Mr. Humbird, with having our students become bookworms or be able to reel off all the capitals of Europe which nobody knows anyway, or learn by heart the dates of forgotten battles. What we are concerned with is the adjustment of the child to group life. This is why we stress the four D’s: Dramatics, Dance, Debating and Dating. We are confronted by certain facts.

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  It created a secondary rationale for the revisitation. The act of creating the book was an act of generating strength, courage, and motivation for the protagonist to close one of the stories in his life. The book culminates in Ka showing the book-in-progress to Peter. The moments before and after this confrontation are a high-contrast collage of colored vague land scape photographs. The emotions here are rendered in abstractions that return to the concrete landscape, and then back to the characters. In the last two pages of the book, the lines are thin and sinewy, like a thread unraveling. The book itself isn’t just storytelling, it’s an experience that the au thor needed to create to move the story itself forward. Olivier by Alfred Images from the haunting ending of Why I Killed Peter. CALLING DR. LAURA by Nicole J. Georges Calling Dr. Laura (2013, Mariner Books) is a quirky and touching memoir by Nicole J. Georges about discovering that her real father is, to her surprise, still alive when she’s been told for two decades that he was dead. The story of this discovery is full of small twists and bigger turns, and Georges fills the book with so much personal story and detail about her love life and relationships with her pets and with the rest of her family that what comes out is a full story of a young woman growing into a mature adult. Nicole by Nicole Georges says that she’d been telling this story orally to friends for years when finally she decided to tell it to the broader world as a graphic memoir. In doing so, she says, “the book took me somewhere I needed to go with my family … and it ushered in an era of honesty.” She continues, “The book helped me process things. It helped me piece together all of the random bits of information I had, and to verbalize the attitudes I held and how they got me to where I was with my family.” So how did she continue? How did she push forward to finish her story? “I just kept going. I kept drawing, and I was sad and griefstricken, and luckily that was all transmitted to the page in a way that affected readers as well and brought them there with me.” In the end, through all that, she created a touching book full of detail, fun storytelling ideas, humane interactions, and real heart. ARE YOU MY MOTHER? by Alison Bechdel Alison Bechdel, in her second memoir, Are You My Mother? (2012, Houghton Mifflin), uses the art form to develop an external language intended to create an understanding of her fraught internal relationship with her mother. Are You My Mother? is an exploration and, in part a destruction of this relationship. The psychology of the mother/child bond is the book’s main theme and its events are almost entirely internal, as they relate to her relationships with her family, lovers, and therapists.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  The first one is like a spacious motel, with a couple of men sitting at the bar, waiting their turn. My friend goes out to the car to make phone calls, and I talk with a young dark-haired woman in a bikini and the highest heels I’ve ever seen. She, too, accepts my story and tells me her mother ran an illegal brothel in the South; it was where she grew up. The girls looked after her as a child and took the scariest S&M photos off their walls when she was around. Like the dancer in the topless bar, she also has dreams, and goes off to her room to bring back a notebook full of magazine illustrations that she has cut out and pasted into its pages. She confesses that she never went to school past the sixth grade, but she still hopes that her Dream Book will get her hired as a designer. Twice while we’re talking, she goes off briefly with a customer and comes back with breath smelling of disinfectant. In the daytime, she explains, it’s mainly truck drivers who stop for a blowjob. I ask if she feels safe, and she says management puts an alarm button in each room, but the times she’s had a bad guy, she couldn’t get to it. “It’s hard to do anything when they’re on top of you,” she says matter-of-factly. My friend and I drive to another brothel. This one is composed of house trailers parked at regular intervals behind a high chain-link fence. We go into a cement-walled windowless bar and tell our story to a middle-aged guy with a gun tucked under his belt. He seems to believe us, but he is not allowing any of his girls to be interviewed, even though it’s early for many customers and we offer to pay for their time. Instead, we go to a bar and restaurant that’s next door, in desert terms—about a city block away on the other side of the fence. Some big lunch party is going on, but we talk to the woman owner, someone my friend has met before. She says yes, she knows the brothel owner next door, everybody knows him, he pays off local officials, has helped to elect every judge in the state, and scares people off with his ever-present gun. She also sees him buying ramen noodles by the case in town. Knowing that this is what he feeds “his girls” and doubting that he feeds them enough, she, too, buys ramen noodles and throws them over the fence. That way she’s helping the girls in the trailers without making him suspicious. After lunch, we also meet with a local official who testified against the brothel owner with the gun—at considerable risk to herself—only to see him get off with minor probation. She says she would never do it again. It’s night when we arrive back at our hotel on the Strip. Tourist guides are hawking colorful pamphlets.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  diminishes, something tangible in our lives together is passing away. My suburb isn’t perfect. It isn’t a paradise or a utopia. Its failures as a place are corrected by those living here, and some of that involvement is harder to find. Life is more distracting now and coarser in some ways and less convivial. Making up what my town lacks takes even more effort than it did in the 1950s. But a large number of people still make the attempt. Those who do are increasingly men and women of color, just as the members of my parish church are. My community today is about as diverse as all of southern California is, meaning my suburb is one of the more ethnically and racially diverse places in the nation. My neighborhood has become somewhat younger. Many of its retired residents have left to return “home” to the Midwest and Border South communities they gave up to make a life in southern California. Some have moved to the new suburbs of Los Angeles, which are now Las Vegas and Phoenix. If I were writing Holy Land today, these changes would be essential to the story, but I’d also note that ethnic and generational differences haven’t screened my new neighbors from the influences of the past. They seem to have acquired enough of the habits built into this suburb that make a dignified life possible. Can you describe your daily life today? I can’t think of anything more ordinary. It’s exactly as described in Holy Land. The pedestrian and the sacred are both there. I still live alone. Critics—and they are many—describe lives of forced conformity and anonymity in the suburbs. Doesn’t conformity and anonymity dishonor the value of individuals and create a society that is neither healthy nor particularly creative? Everyday life is mostly anonymous and unremembered wherever it’s lived. We’re always looking for a human-scale solution to an American problem: reconciling the autonomy of individuals and the shared obligations of a community. American places—from urban high-rises to “off-the-grid” rural escapes—offer a range of solutions, none of them completely satisfying and each requiring something that might be called conformity. Some of these American places are more benign than others,

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  I hope that this notebook and my pictures will reach you.” Who is the rummager who is doing the writing? How has this notebook reached us? Who has had this near-death experience? Guibert writes, “I had to reconstitute a diary, a day-by-day documentary of a story which had taken place eighteen years before. So, under Didier’s control, I really tried to write as if I were in his shoes, living the adventure myself, but myself as Didier.” Guibert had to step in as translator, but also to relive the experience through his translation. Together, they created a book full of complicated social detail, rich visuals, sad and terrifying sequences, ultimately creating a second powerful experience out of the raw material from the single harrowing trip. The unique combination in this book of drawings and photography, and of experiencer and translator, combined to create a book unparalleled in its richness, grace, and depth. SOLDIER’S HEART by Carol Tyler AN ARMY OF MATERIAL, AN ARMY OF INKS Carol Tyler’s Soldier’s Heart is such a arresting, complicated book, it’s essential to look at it again here. Tyler uses sophisticated art techniques to connect the dramatic events—the fighting, the courting, the house-building, the drug addictions, the hospital stays, etc.—with her own internal world. The book is an artist’s attempt to paint her way out of rage and regret and into something that looks like acceptance. At the center of Tyler’s father’s story is his service in Italy in World War II. Over the course of 364 pages, she tackles the issue of her dad, his war trauma, and the effect on the family from every possible angle. “Once I found post-traumatic stress disorder as the central motif of the story, I found the organizing mechanism I needed to tell the story,” she says. “I amassed an army of written material,” she says, in the form of reference books from the library. But that’s not all. To tackle this subject, she wrote notes on adding machine tape, circling in red marker the items that mattered most. “You start by taking notes and then connecting the ideas on strips of paper… . I had them taped all over the house… . I would literally write on the walls at times… .” When Tyler took her stoic 1950s father to the World War II memorial, he broke down and cried. “I wrote the whole book to lead up to this climax,” she says. “He would have to undergo a transformation, but to get the importance, readers would have to know us as people… . I had to bring the emotion that I felt and that he felt to that point.” Developing the stories of all the people involved through all the eras of their lives was the goal. “I had three sections, and five characters.

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  Now in retrospect, I see that it implies a certain trauma, or at least a passionate drive to get somewhere, as it parallels other boat imagery in my book. This image of Polynesians in a shoe-boat was a metaphor before I even understood it. RIVER AS JOURNEY The rat turned up three times, and began engaging us as characters, pulling us back as we tried to get away. Related to that was the image of us on the life raft. That image was always in each of the rat panels, but very often alone, too, as a metaphor for our travels: half escape, half journey to unknown future. It bookmarks chapter nine, below. THE METAPHORICAL CRASHING INTO REALITY In another example, I struggled with this very literal image of Leela and me appearing at the front door of our friends’, Kate and Lisa. The initial drawing, which I never even finished, was uninspired and never worked in the story. Eventually, I realized that I had to bridge two main narratives in the book—the real journey and the cartoon analog—and push them into the same frame. This new image, at right, is much more alive and integrated into the story. THE SQUAWKING IN OUR BRAINS In a sequence that was mostly characters talking about real estate, I tried to at least make it lively by featuring the squawking of the pet bird our lawyer seemed to keep in his office. But it also served to illustrate the massive unreality of trying to deal with these administrative details during this time of horror. At the bottom, I combined text from our lives and experience with images borrowed from one of Rosalie’s favorite books. In other places I tried contrasting small abstract self-representations with more realistic but expressive ones, trying to cover as much expressive ground as possible. And sometimes I hoped the drawing itself would emulate the content, the scratching in this drawing reflecting the harsh frailness that I felt, for instance, in this snarl of traffic rendered as a tangle of lines. ART AS METAPHOR And because the book is about art and how it relates to the events, it became a journey through lots of different image-makers’ work: EC Comics, Osamu Tezuka, Harold Gray, Renaissance painters, and more. I borrowed lots more images and techniques as I went along. Through Osamu Tezuka, I tried to show how our story, too, was about rebuilding our bodies. PAGE LAYOUT AS METAPHOR Here the form of the page becomes metaphorical, as I show my character having difficulty listening, not ready yet for that kind of interaction. The pages return to the simple six-panel grid immediately after this one. In fact, I borrowed the top of this page layout from Kurt Wolfgang in order to make this dialogue-heavy sequence interesting, and only saw the metaphoric way in which it makes one speaker’s words seem like a series of equally weighted, impossible-to-comprehend phrases.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  On visits to India, for instance, I see the phrase sex work as the only English words in the Bengali signs that mark Sonagachi in Kolkata—one of the biggest and poorest red-light districts in the world—though no one disputes the fact that many are born into or sold into its brothels. I hear the phrase accepted by university students in India when they’re addressing the inhabitants of red-light districts, despite the fact that the Self-Employed Women’s Association, a union of 1.8 million of the poorest women in India—the ones who carry bricks to construction sites or sell vegetables in the street, by far the group most representative of poor women—voted against including prostitution as a job like any other. As its founder, Ela Bhatt, said, “Work is worship, noble and dignified.” Once in Las Vegas, I meet a friend who knows the sex industry there. We start off gently by going to one of the big hotels in the afternoon and having a drink at a topless bar. As a cover for two women alone asking questions, we say we are the wives of men about to arrive for a business convention and want to find places where it’s safe for our husbands to have a little adventure after all these years on the factory line. It’s always seemed to me that if I told a bald-faced lie I would be found out in a minute, but we try it on the male manager and it works. He says we can talk to one of the topless pole dancers during her break. She seems glad to get rest and a Coke, pulls a shawl over her three strategically placed pasties, and explains that she started out as a waitress, but soon she was told she would have to strip or be fired. Now she has just been told that she will lose her job stripping unless she also agrees to go into the Champagne Room. I have to say that I believed those separate rooms were only for lap dancing at the cost of a bottle of champagne, but it turns out I’m naïve. They are also for fast sex. She knows she is being drawn into prostitution, one step at a time in the routine way, but she needs the money. Because she is glad to have someone to talk to, we learn that she had to quit high school to earn money because her mother is sick, but she really hopes to write movies one day. She wants to tell the story of her life in the real Las Vegas, not this fancy hotel, but her one-room apartment with her mother. I end by giving her my real email address, if not my name, and watch her get up on stage, suddenly transformed by a blue spotlight and a phony smile. Then we drive in our rented car to tell our same old wives’ tale at two big brothels in the county where they are completely legal.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  When I moved away from home to go to college, I spoke to my parents once every two months because it was all I could bear. The shape of our conversation was the same every time: hello, yes, how are you, fine, guess who died. It was a never-ending stream of names, some old, some not, but all mostly too young to have died. Second cousins, third cousins, neighbors, friends of my parents, each passing out of this world and into whatever hangs behind this world like a second eyelid. My mother was placed on a ventilator, and later I was alerted via text message that she had died. I don’t mean to imply that I feel angry about this. It was by choice that I refused to speak on the phone to people who thought I needed comfort. The text message was from another cousin, a different cousin, not the daughter of my rapist. I found out my grandfather died by browsing Facebook one morning before a biochemistry exam. I imagine I’ll find out that W. died via Facebook—it must be what I keep looking for, that final update, that final confirmation that he is gone out of the world. SOMETIMES I WONDER IF MY COUSIN KNOWS THAT I AM HANGING around her Facebook like a ghost, like a fiend. Technology lets us believe we are living parallel lives, both in and out of the world, both here and there. I can skim the facts of other people’s lives from their posts like foam from boiled milk. How many people, when my mother died, came to my page to wish me love and light? How many returned time and again looking for some clue of my pain or anguish or grief? Isn’t that what we do? We scent a tragedy in the air and we try to trace it—not to its source, but to those most affected. We try to make sense of it by watching them grapple with it. In this way, we aren’t living parallel lives at all. We’re leeches, proliferating in a still pool of light. Spectating isn’t living, after all; it’s consumption. Grist for the mill. Yet I cannot look away from my cousin’s page. There is a point at which the glimpsed becomes the central, becomes the whole of the thing. I turn my head and look, I stare because I know how to watch a person wither from abundance. I know how to read status updates like a person reads the air to discern the chance of rain. There are the upbeat messages, the ones about the fight: At chemo with this guy! He’s so strong! He’s a fighter! When things are looking grim, there are more vague messages about God and the meaningfulness of His plan: God will always make a way! It’s not over until God says it’s over!

• From On Beauty (2005)

  us central – think of the position he paints himself in, right between those two inscribed empty globes on the wall . . .’ Howard kept talking along these almost automatic lines. He felt a breeze from the garden get into his system, deep, through channels a younger body would never permit. He felt very sad, retracing these arguments that had made him slightly notable in the tiny circle in which he moved. The retraction of love in one part of his life had made this other half of his life feel cold indeed. ‘Introduce me,’ instructed a woman suddenly, gripping the slack muscle in his upper arm. It was Claire Malcolm. ‘Oh, God, excuse me – can I steal him, just a moment?’ she said to the curator and his friend, ignoring their concerned faces. She pulled Howard some steps away towards the corner of the room. Diagonally across from them Monty Kipps’s enormous laugh announced itself first and mightiest over a refrain of hoots. ‘Introduce me to Kipps.’ They stood next to each other, Claire and Howard, looking out across the room like parents on the edge of a school football field, watching their boy. It was an oblique angle but also a close one. The peachy flush of alcohol had pushed through Claire’s deep tan, and the various moles and freckles of her face and dećolletage were ringed by this aroused pinkness; it brought youth back to her like no product or procedure could ever hope to. Howard hadn’t seen her in almost a year. They had managed this subtly, without drawing attention to the fact or conferring to achieve it. They had simply avoided each other on campus, giving up the cafeteria entirely and making certain they did not attend the same meetings. As an extra measure, Howard had stopped going to the Moroccan cafeín which, of an afternoon, one could see almost everybody in the English Department sitting alone, marking piles of essays. Then Claire had gone to Italy for the summer, which he had been thankful for. It was miserable seeing her now. She was in a simple shift dress of very thin cotton. Her tiny yogic body came up against it and then retreated once more – it depended on how she stood. You would have no idea, looking at her like this – make-up free, so simply dressed – no idea at all of the strange, minute cosmetic  kipps and belsey attentions she gave to other, more private parts of her body. Howard himself had been amazed to discover them. In what position had they been lying when she had offered the peculiar explanation of her mother being Parisian? ‘For Godssake, why would you want to meet him ?’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Doughnut?’ With one hand absently holding on to the blinds’ strings, Howard looked out of the window on to Wellington’s yard. Here was the white church and the grey library, antagonizing each other on opposite sides of the square. A pot-pourri of orange, red, yellow and purple leaves carpeted the ground. It was still warm enough, but only just, for kids to sit on the steps of the Greenman, reclining on their own knapsacks, wasting time. Howard scanned the scene for Warren or Claire. The news was that they were still together. This from Erskine, who got it from his wife Caroline, who was on the board of trustees at the Wellington Institute of Molecular Research where Warren spent his days. It was Kiki who had told Warren; the explosion had happened – but no one had died. It was just walking wounded as far as the eye could see. No packed bags, no final door slams, no relocation to different colleges, different towns. They were all going to stay put and suffer. It would be played out very slowly over years. The thought was debilitating. Everybody knew about it. Howard expected that the shorthand, water-cooler version, currently circulating the college would be ‘Warren’s forgiven her’ said with pity mixed with a little contempt – as if that covered it, the feeling. People said ‘She’s forgiven him’ about Kiki, and only now was Howard learning of the levels of purgatory forgiveness involves. People don’t know what they’re talking about. At the water cooler Howard was just another middle-aged professor suffering the expected mid-life crisis. And then there was the other reality, the one he had to live. Last night, very late,  On Beauty he had peeled himself off the crushing, too short divan in his study and gone into the bedroom. He lay down in his clothes, above the quilt, next to Kiki, a woman he had loved and lived with his entire adult life. On her bedside table he could not avoid seeing the packet of anti-depressants, sitting alongside a few coins, some earplugs, a teaspoon, all crushed in a small wooden Indian box with elephants carved upon its sides. He waited almost twenty minutes, never sure if she was awake or not.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  me in here . I’m still in here. And I don’t want to be resented or despised for changing . . . I’d rather be alone. I don’t want someone to have contempt for who I’ve become. I’ve watched you become too. And I feel like I’ve done my best to honour the past, and what you were and what you are now – but you want something more than that, something new. I can’t be new. Baby, we had a good run.’ Weeping, she lifted his palm and kissed it in the centre. ‘Thirty years – almost all of them really happy . That’s a lifetime, it’s incredible. Most people don’t get that. But maybe this is just over, you know? Maybe it’s over . . .’ Howard, crying himself now, got up from where he lay and sat behind his wife. He stretched his arms around her solid nakedness. In a whisper he began begging for – and, as the sun set, received – the concession people always beg for: a little more time.  on beauty and being wrong  Spring break arrived, budding pink and violet in the apple trees, streaking orange through the wet sky. It was still as cold as ever, but now Wellingtonians permitted themselves hope. Jerome came home. Not for him Cancuń, or Florida, or Europe. He wanted to see his family. Kiki, tremendously touched by this, took his hand in hers and led him into their chilly garden to witness the changes there. But she had other motives besides the simply horticultural. ‘I want you to know,’ she said, bending down to pluck a weed from the rose bed, ‘that we will support you in each and every choice that you will ever make.’ ‘Well,’ said Jerome mordantly, ‘I think that’s beautifully and euphemistically put.’ Kiki stood up and looked helplessly at her son and his gold cross. What else could she say? How could she follow him where he was going? ‘I’m joking,’ Jerome assured her. ‘I appreciate it, I do. And vice versa,’ he said, and gave his mother the same look she’d given him. They sat on the bench under the apple tree. The snow had peeled the paint and warped the wood, making it unsteady. They spread their weight to settle it. Kiki offered Jerome a portion of her giant shawl, but he declined. ‘So there’s something I wanted to talk to you about,’ said Kiki, cautiously. ‘Mom . . . I know what happens when a man puts his thing in a woman’s – ’ Kiki pinched him in his side. Kicked him on his ankle. ‘It’s Levi . You know that when you’re not around he’s got no one . . . Zora won’t spend any time with him, and Howard treats him like some piece of – I don’t know what – moon rock . I worry about him. Anyway, he’s got in with these people – it’s fine, I’ve  On Beauty

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  With these in mind, I looked for material for this story and worked. FOREST STORY Finishing REFLECTION For a lot of storytellers, the true drive to make the story is only understood after looking back and asking questions. What was I trying to accomplish? What did I accomplish? What did I experience while telling this story? For me, with Rosalie’s book, I was just trying to merely get through it, but upon reflection, I realized I was trying to internalize thoughts that I had already had in the immediate aftermath of her loss. I also realized much later that I was trying to keep her vivacious spirit alive, but I never could have vocalized that then. With this story, about the forest and my friend, I think I was trying to understand what it means to be growing old. I am trying to process loss, I think. I have always been moved by drawings, and have always tried to improve my own drawings, and stay engaged with the process of drawing. And now I see that my old friend is gone, but I have a new friend who helps me in this quest to be engaged with lines and art. I learned as I worked on this story that this was one part that was trying to come out. We often define ourselves by our young mind and ideals. Obsessed with youth and my younger, vibrant self, I think I was trying here to allow some space in my older self to be surprised and confused by things, in the way you are when you are younger. DEBRIEFING Looking back, I see that the gathering of material stirred up an interest in finding my old friend. It was the search for material that gave the story the key problem to solve: “Can I find my old friend?” Inspired by Why I Killed Peter, I suspected I was writing a story that would culminate in a reunion scene, but it never emerged. I had to let the search for my connection to the forest and for Kathryn become a part of my everyday life. When it did, I opened up to new experiences that could be a part of the story. I could ask again, What story needed to be experienced? Not fully aware of it, there were several. First, I LOVED drawing all those trees. And I loved abstracting them with ink line, lines I have used since I was a teenager. Ultimately the story became an answer to the question I raised in the first chapter of this book, Why Comics? The answer came as I was working: that I love lines, and I feel like something is right when I am making them. And finally, I have a friend under my nose now, who lives in the forest and with whom I can talk “books and life.” She became a guide back, through art, line and drawing, to the forest.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  A MONTH BEFORE MY MOTHER DIED, I GOT ON A PLANE AND went down to Alabama. I had been told that this would bring some measure of peace to her, but in retrospect, I can’t help but to think of how cruel a thing it was to do. After all, when she saw me and I saw her, we wouldn’t be able to hide from the fact that the whole thing was ending. There is a kind of magic to distance. As long as I stayed away, she could go on thinking that things weren’t as bad as they were, and I could go on thinking that I was doing something good for her by doing nothing, by not talking about it or seeing it. My uncle was having a birthday barbecue in the middle of August, and by some random chance, the party fell on the third day of my five-day trip. My mother was very tired. She found my presence irritating, which was flattering in a way—she wasn’t putting on a show of wanting me around. I thought to myself that things might not be so bad after all. At least she wasn’t trying to love on me as she had started to do with my brother. There were a lot of white gnats fluttering in the air like snowflakes with their own minds, so many of them pouring out of the pecan trees that the food had to be whisked directly from the grill and into the house. I was given the task of standing behind my mother and waving away the bugs from her. She leaned forward in her chair, swaying occasionally if she heard a song that she liked or felt a rhythm that moved her. People kept stopping by her chair to say a kind word to her on their way to grab beers from the cooler. She was loved by them.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Some contributors do indeed withhold their funds from this college, which is hurtful. But when the trustees hold firm to their support for free speech on campus, new contributions make up for the loss of the old. If anything, the archbishop has only brought more media coverage of an era of declining church membership, aging priests, shutdowns of a dozen historic churches, the revelations of sexual abuse by priests, and many other troubles that caused him to be summoned to the Vatican for a tactical consultation. On the day itself, I’m impressed to see a small protest plane circling over the amphitheater, pulling an anti-abortion banner. Someone yells out, “Look, the right-to-lifers have an air force!” There is laughter. The event goes right on. Even though I know this lonely little plane is a commercial one that can be hired for birthdays, weddings, and advertising, the symbolism of its constant circling makes me sad. Talking later to Dolores Huerta, my friend of thirty years—a lifetime organizer of farm workers and efforts to elect progressive women—I tell her that I can’t shake the sadness of this symbolic distance between an airplane representing the church and the real lives of women on the ground. She reminds me of the organizer’s mantra: Roots can exist without flowers, but no flower can exist without roots. Religion may be a flower, but people are its roots. Three months later, Archbishop John Quinn retires at the age of sixty-six, nine years ahead of schedule. San Francisco newspapers report that he was too distant from the people. • In rural Oklahoma, where oil wells grow in fields next to cattle and winter wheat, I’m talking with a university auditorium full of students in a postlecture discussion. Most people are trying to figure out how to make their daily lives more fair—whether it’s who gets tenure or who gets the kids ready for school—but I notice that an all-white group of twenty or so people in Jesus T-shirts are not taking part. Finally, a young T-shirted man stands up to protest my support for legal abortion, which is odd because we haven’t been talking about abortion at all. He says abortion isn’t even in the Constitution, so how can it be protected by it? A female college student who looks about twelve rises to say that women aren’t included in the Constitution either, but now that we’re citizens, we have reproductive freedom as part of a constitutional right to privacy. If the Founding Fathers had included Founding Mothers, that freedom would have been in the Bill of Rights to begin with. The crowd applauds. I can see we’ve reached the magical point when people start to answer each other’s questions. I can just listen and learn.

• From Querelle (1953)

  This search for a posture that would set him, Querelle, apart, and thus prevent him from '"being mistaken for any other member of the crew, originated in a kind of terrifying dandyism. As a chi.Jd he had used to amuse himself with solitary competitions with himself, trying to piss ever higher and farther. Querelle sn1iled, contracting his cheeks. A sad smile . . One might have called it ambiguous, intended for the giver rather than the receiver. Sometimes, in thinking about it, the image, the sadness Lieutenant Seblon must have seen in that smile, could be compared to that of watching, in a group of country choirboys, the most virile one, standing firm on sturdy feet, with sturdy thighs and neck, and chanting in a masculine voice the canticles to the Blessed Virgin. He puzzled his shipmates, made them uneasy. First, because of his physical strength, and secondly by the strangeness of his overly vulgar behavior. They watched him approaching, on his face the slight anguish of a sleeper under a mosquito net who hears the complaint of a mosquito held back by the netting and incensed by the impenetrable and invisible resistance. When we read " . . . his whole physiognomy had its changeable aspects : from the ferocious it could tum gentle, often ironic: his walk was a 36 I JEAN GENET sailor's, and standing up, he always kept his legs well apart. This murderer had traveled a great deal . . . ," we know that this description of Campi, beheaded April 30, 1884, fits like a glove. Being an interpretation, it is exact. Yet his mates were able to say of Querelle : "What a funny guy," for he presented them, almost daily, with another disconcerting and scandalous vision of himself. He shone among them with the brightness of a true freak. Sailors of our Fighting Navy exhibit a certain honesty which they owe to the sense of glory that attracts them to the service. If they wanted to go in for smuggling or any other form of trafficking they would not really know how to _ go about it. Heavily and lazily, because of the boredom inherent in their task, they perform it in a manner that seems to us like an act of faith. But Querelle kept his eye on the main chance. He felt no nostalgia for his time as a petty hoodlum-he had never really outgrown it-but he continued, under the protection of the French Bag, his dangerous exploits. All his early teens he had spent in the company of dockers and merchant seamen. He knew their game. Querelle strode along, his face damp and burning, without thinking about anything in particular. He felt a little uneasy, haunted by the unformulated glimmer of a suspicion that his exploits would gain him no glory in the eyes of Mario and

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  They have brought about change, from what gets taught to who gets tenure; from how the university invests its money to where athletic uniforms are made; from students taking a role in campus decision-making to Take Back the Night marches against sexualized violence on campus; from marginalizing some by class, race, sexuality, and physical ability to including diverse people and new courses of study. In my own college life, I got through four years as a government major without learning that women were not just “given” the vote, that the real number of slave rebellions was suppressed because rebelling was contagious, or that the model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy. Then, academic courses on Europe far outnumbered those on Africa, even though it is the birthplace of us all and is bigger than Europe, China, India, and the United States combined. When I’m on campus now and look at course listings, the relative importance reflected in them is much better but still way off. There has always been this question of what is being taught. As Gerda Lerner, a pioneer of women’s history in general and African American women’s history in particular, summed it up, “We have long known that rape has been a way of terrorizing us and keeping us in subjection. Now we also know that we have participated, although unwittingly, in the rape of our minds.”1 No wonder studies show that women’s intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence. I say this as a reminder that campuses not only help create social justice movements, they need them. Now, campuses look more like the country in terms of race and ethnicity—though we’re not there yet, and bias can survive college degrees. I see women outnumbering their male counterparts on some campuses, but degrees are often a way out of the pink-collar ghetto and into a white-collar one. Women still average much less in earnings over a lifetime than men do and have to pay back the same college debt. I see campuses representing more age diversity. More than a third of college students are over twenty-five, and this age group is growing faster than students of conventional age, a change that was pioneered by veterans and the GI Bill of Rights, then by older women returning to campus. I remember watching a thirty-year-old pregnant woman arguing about the health care system with an eighteen-year-old male student, and thinking: This has to be good for education.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I understood that LaDonna’s presence among the thirty-five International Women’s Year commissioners would send a signal to Native American women around the country who otherwise might not feel invited to state conferences. What I didn’t understand was how rare this was. At less than 1 percent of the population—at least, by the notorious undercount of the U.S. Census9 —the more than five hundred tribes and nations made up the smallest, poorest, and least formally educated group in the United States. Nations were very diverse, varying in size from the vast Navajo Nation that extended into several states to reservations of less than twenty acres. But across that diversity, they shared such common struggles as dealing with a federal government that had yet to honor one treaty in its entirety, gaining control of the schooling and treatment of their own children, protecting their land from exploitation for oil, uranium, and other resources on it—and much more. For instance, women on reservations suffered the highest rate of sexual assault in the country, yet the non-Native men who were the majority of their assaulters were not subject to tribal police or jurisdiction, and were mostly ignored by the larger legal system. From quiet, understated, and sometimes hesitant Native women who came to meetings and stayed to talk, I learned about the generations of Indian families who had been forced by law to send their children to Christian boarding schools often funded by tax dollars; never mind the separation of church and state. The nineteenth-century founder of those schools coined the motto “Kill the Indian, save the man.” They deprived children of their families, names, language, culture, and even their long hair. Then they were taught a history that measured progress by their defeat. Often, these children were subjected to forced labor, malnutrition, and physical and sexual abuse. Later, after several schools were closed down, the land around them yielded graves of starved and abused children. Saddest of all, two centuries of child abuse in Indian boarding schools had sometimes normalized punitive child rearing and sexualized violence within Indian families. Childhood patterns are repeated because they are what we know. Even when the schools were humane, teaching Native languages and practicing Native religion was illegal, something that continued until the 1970s. Listening to these stories reminded me of the words of the great Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah: “For seasons and seasons and seasons, all our movement has been going against our self, a journey into our killer’s desire.”10 In Indian Country, there is a belief that one act of violence takes four generations to heal. Because many centuries of such acts have yet to be known or taken seriously by most Americans, much less healed, this nation may keep repeating its violent childhood—until we find the wound and heal it. I began to sense that a big part of our problem is simple ignorance of what the oldest cultures have to teach.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “From this village, they say, it’s five miles.” The carriage drove along the village street and onto a bridge. On the bridge was a crowd of peasant women with coils of ties for the sheaves on their shoulders, gaily and noisily chattering. They stood still on the bridge, staring inquisitively at the carriage. All the faces turned to Darya Alexandrovna looked to her healthy and happy, making her envious of their enjoyment of life. “They’re all living, they’re all enjoying life,” Darya Alexandrovna still mused when she had passed the peasant women and was driving uphill again at a trot, seated comfortably on the soft springs of the old carriage, “while I, let out, as it were from prison, from the world of worries that fret me to death, am only looking about me now for an instant. They all live; those peasant women and my sister Natalia and Varenka and Anna, whom I am going to see—all, but not I. “And they attack Anna. What for? am I any better? I have, anyway, a husband I love—not as I should like to love him, still I do love him, while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame? She wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very likely I should have done the same. Even to this day I don’t feel sure I did right in listening to her at that terrible time when she came to me in Moscow. I ought then to have cast off my husband and have begun my life fresh. I might have loved and have been loved in reality. And is it any better as it is? I don’t respect him. He’s necessary to me,” she thought about her husband, “and I put up with him. Is that any better? At that time I could still have been admired, I had beauty left me still,” Darya Alexandrovna pursued her thoughts, and she would have liked to look at herself in the looking-glass. She had a traveling looking-glass in her handbag, and she wanted to take it out; but looking at the backs of the coachman and the swaying counting-house clerk, she felt that she would be ashamed if either of them were to look round, and she did not take out the glass.