Well, I’ve done something odd. I went back and tagged my old India blog posts. I guess I’d intended to let them sidle out of sight, since this blog has continued to change so much. But after the events of this past week, it suddenly seemed disloyal to be hiding my wonderful trip to Mumbai under a basket… So, you will notice links to pix from the trip and the cloud tag now also contains tags from the trip… I can’t imagine Mumbai will be a huge topic going forward, but reading this OP ED in the NYTimes from Sonny Mehta, I suddenly want go back and reclaim the Mumbai I remember. I read Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found in preparation for my trip. It’s an amazing read–all the disparate elements that make up this character that is Mumbai. I even had a bibliography for my trip that at one time was attached to this blog, but has disappeared. And I have to stop looking for it right now because the Third Year Review (TYR) is due tomorrow. I need to (sigh) read it one more time.

I’ve been making connections in my frazzled brain about why Graphic Novels are a natural next step for me. One is my (occassionally hidden or obscured) passion for all things Sci Fi and Heroic. Like all latch-key children of the eighties, I absorbed the cartoon ethic. I would watch anything from Godzilla to She-ra to GI Joe with equal fervor. It was what we did. As I grew older, I hid my love of cartoons until I fell in with computer scientists and anime fanatics in Boston. I saw all of Cowboy Beebop on “Anime” night with Fletch and Kathie and Will, along with several things I’d love to forget. I’ve watched every episode of Farscape, Stargate, Babylon 5, Deep Space 9, Star Trek Voyager, and on and on. I adore almost anything the SciFi channel is willing to serialize, though I generally can’t stand any full-length movies they air. Must be the attention span issue.

I also love mysteries. I didn’t grow up reading comics or graphic novels, I grew up reading Agatha Christie and Trixie Belden. My first job was in editorial at a mass market publisher working with mystery novels. I have a deep appreciation (along with an occasional loathing) for the formulaic. I am a House addict.

I see every animated movie that comes out. Luckily my roommate shares my passion, so I’m not alone with the tots and the parents in the theater. Or even worse, with the teenagers. So, combining my passion for the literary, the formulaic, the mystery, the cartoonish, the weird, the sci fi, the bizarre, and you can see that Graphic Novels have no doubt been standing in my path for some time now.

As an aside…I cannot bear most grown-up movies–I really only like the emotionally disconnected ones. Like Lost in Translation or anything by Wes Anderson—LOVED The Darjeeling Limited. But, thanks to my stepmother, it has become apparent that I am turning thirty-six on the eleventh of this month. So I’ve done this piece of analysis in part to redeem my childish nature, and to justify my love of all things graphic with my well-earned literature degree. (I was really excited about turning thirty-five–I’d even considered having a party.)

In the process of writing the TYR, I have finished Watchmen and read Dark Knight. Loved both of them. Analysis will have to wait until I don’t feel like I should be editing the TYR (which I do…right now…so I have to stop…).

I am almost done with the Watchmen, and I have really turned a corner with it. I have been amazed by the intricacy of the storylines, and the characters at some point became real (no, real is the wrong word…tangible? sympathetic?). I’m going to go back and do a more in-depth analysis when I have a little time. My third year review for tenure is due December 1st, and I’m overwhelmed and a little bit obsessed with it. Probably what I’ll do is just put snippets of observations up that I can do during my study-breaks.

I’m trying to decide what to read next. I was thinking The Dark Knight, but now I’m not sure. Someone (you know who you are!) has promised the NYTimes “cartoons” that he has compiled on CD Rom, and that might be a fun break from the statistics and compilation of everything I’ve done here for the past three years…yikes!

So, I lost my mind a little bit…I get grandiose…

I’m reading Watchmen, and it’s very challenging. I was never a comic book fan, so there’s that element. I also love words, so I’m always looking for the words first, then going back and trying to match them with the pictures. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Watchmen, but it’s a graphic novel, interspersed with longer essay-type entries of various sorts (or at least it is so far). Definitely disconcerting…and purposefully. At times, it reminds me of Ulysses in the way you have to track so many threads at the same time. It’s as though it’s hanging in time, space, and between various worlds (including its own comic book world that one of the characters is reading and which occasionally intrudes into the narrative) as well as straddling various media.

The only parallel that I can imagine would be if Thomas Pynchon had added pictures and color into Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon wrote in a vivid, eye-popping, comic style that I think might lend itself to visual aids. There is much more required from the reader’s part reading (viewing? experiencing?) Watchmen, though. Gravity’s Rainbow let the reader float around in the complexity of its language and multiple narratives. Watchmen grabs the reader by the throat and forces him/her along violently.

I think I’m comparing it to Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow because it is pushing me in a similar way–out of my comfort zone to a place where reading is an intellectual pursuit, rather than an immersion in narrative. So many threads. I’m not actually sure that I like Watchmen. Maybe I’m too old to be challenged? Or too set in my text-only ways to appreciate the additional information from visual media? Or maybe I didn’t grow up experiencing the world in this way, so it’s just an adjustment.

To be honest, I got so frustrated this weekend I went and read the end. To see if it was worth going on. Which is something I’ve done before. Quite a confession, lol. But so far I’m hanging in there…the experience of reading it is good for me, I think. Like vitamins.

Like the issue of competing standards, that question of values can be answered only in terms of criteria that lie outside of normal science altogether, and it is that recourse to external criteria that most obviously makes paradigm debates revolutionary. –Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p.110

Do you remember reading The Secret Garden? It was one of my favorite books and movies and I loved everything about it. As a fairly willful girl-child in rural Mississippi, I could easily imagine myself ripped from a luxurious life in India, and transported to the damp chill of the English countryside to ramble around in a decrepit manor house. Left to fend for myself, surely I would be triumphant, encouraging health and vigor around me and learning the mysteries of the heath. And although I loathed all forms of yardwork and whined piteously when my mother forced me into the open air, I knew that in the proper environment, the life I was meant to have, I would immediately understand how to judge the wick from the dead and coax gorgeous rose gardens back to life…and win the hearts of everyone in the process, in particular the handsome simple-in-his-wisdom country ruffian.

What I really turned into is a woman who loves a metaphor. And the wick-ness of dead-seeming things is one that I cherish. And tonight I found that a long-dark, petrified piece of my brain still had some life in it….and had indeed been waking up without my noticing it at all.

I’ve been treating this blog like a bottle tree…just a structure on which to hang my shiny, colorful bottle-shaped (let’s go with this metaphor please) triumphs. And lord knows I love a bottle tree. Love a bottle tree. Would love to have a real one in my yard. (There will be some future discussion about bottle trees and nkisi and fetish objects and Southern culture at some point in the future, but I digress.)

I started this blog in July of 2005 as a way to share my solo trek through India with my family and friends (I have been preoccupied with India my entire life…it may have started with The Secret Garden, but Rushdie contributed a great deal). After I got back from India, I did all of those things on that “Most Stressful Things To Do or Have Happen To You In Life” list. I finished grad school, quit my job, sold a house, bought a house, got a divorce, moved from Massachusetts back home to Mississippi to start a new career on the day Katrina hit. Afterwards my NOLA refugee (and yes, I know it’s not the right word) brother, sister-in-law and nine-month-old nephew moved in to my new home in time to greet the 18 wheeler who arrived with my belongings. My gas was in my brother’s name forever because he was the one around during the day to go get it hooked up.

They ended up in Savannah (10 hours instead of 5 hours away), and my brother went to SCAD and became a documentarian. I moved again after a year to a rental house with a roommate, sold the house in Mississippi, and I’ve been hiding out since. I believe I’ve been spinning some sort of cocoon, but I’d forgotten that eventually I was going to emerge.

Tonight I went to the bookstore on campus looking for The Watchmen. Apparently it’s either library-use-only or checked out at every place our Interlibrary Loan folks tried. It’s part of a new project I inadvertently started via Twitter, but it may be the first non-librarian brain-project I’ve had in years. It was hard to find. It wasn’t in the Graphic Novel section, but I knew they had it (I’d called ahead). Like all our patrons, I’m loathe to ask for help, and I had some time to kill. So I started wandering. And I wandered all the way up to the econ / science / technology / neurology / section-ish area on the second floor all the way in the back. And then I started finding books that were in my Amazon shopping cart. First, Everything is Miscellaneous, and then Here Comes Everybody. And right there, on the very same shelves was Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And I realized that part of my brain was waking up again.

And I owe it all to the Mississippi Library Association and Twitter and this strange Graphic Novels project.

So, that’s what this blog is going to be now. I’m going to document this part. Some of it will be about libraries. Some may be about Graphic Novels. Or revolutions. Or “that recourse to external criteria that most obviously makes paradigm debates revolutionary.” And maybe we will see what emerges from the cocoon. And if it’s nothing more than a pair of silk pjs, that will be fine. I’ve been looking for a nice set to go with the embroidered dragon bathrobe Kathi got me in Beijing.

*McCloud, Understanding Comics, p.8