Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I found a very good write-up of the panel by morchades, who pointed to it on the wiscon community. She got, I think, most if not all of the essentials, and pointed out something I didn't really have time to go into on the panel, namely the way that the Watergate hearings, specifically Sirica's rulings about the tapes and then Nixon's resignation, are part of the context and background of the story. I'm wondering if one of the reasons the book caught the mainstream, and specifically Time magazine attention, is that the editors find that Watergate resonates with current government secrecy, lies, and crimes.

Morchades and rachel_edidin confirm that the panelist who surprised me so much by saying she hadn't previously read much about lesbians, and the only one who hadn't already been a Bechdel fan via Dykes to Watch Out For, was Jenni Moody.

desayunoencama just posted that he'd noticed, and been unhappy with, a lack of an organized queer presence at Wiscon, something he had felt and appreciated in previous years. In response, I wrote a bit about one of my panels, and am expanding that a bit here to talk more about the panel itself.

Sunday afternoon, I was on a panel about Alison Bechdel's book Fun Home, which by design and in practice discussed the possible reasons for and effects of the book's unexpected acceptance in mainstream contexts as well as the book as book, in terms of structure, content, stylistic choices, and how we (panelists and audience members) had reacted to it. The discussion went into details like the book as artifact, and what that says about support by the publisher; Bechdel's choice to use limited color; the inclusion of quotes from the Western literary canon; the nonlinear, or maybe spiraling narration; and the ways that Bechdel grounds her personal story in what was going on in the world, and how that connects to what she's done over many years in Dykes to Watch Out For.

It was a very good panel. At the end, the moderator asked each of us what we would like to have happen as a consequence (either causal or sequential) of Fun Home success. I came up with something about more cross-fertilization, I don't remember what the next three people said, and then the last panelist, who came at things from a comics background, actually said that she expected to read more by and about lesbians, which she hadn't previously done because she isn't one. I interrupted and said "We read about straight people."

I shouldn't have to be having that interaction at Wiscon, at a panel about a book by Alison Bechdel.

[footnotes: I'm not naming the person who said that because there were two panelists I didn't know, and I'm not sure which it was. Janet Lafler might, but she's not reachable right now. And yes, I'm bisexual rather than exclusively lesbian.]

I picked up adrian_turtle's copy of Fugue State, by John M. Ford, this afternoon. I've been reading it in bits, in between helping her carry stuff around her lab, dinner, and such. The structure of the story seems to go with that.

When I got to the end, I said, quietly, "Mike, you are a strange man."

I've been reading too many things that have unreliable narrators, or are about the inherent unreliability of narrative, or both. I'll have some things to say about Alison Bechdel's excellent memoir Fun Home in a day or five, and I'm most of the way through Midnight's Children.

Rereading Sorcery and Cecilia between the Bechdel and the Ford was rather a relief.