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While "Lifting Bellies" was undoubtedly more a stream of consciousness text than the prose we are given in The Book of Salt, I think that there are places in The Book of Salt that seem like they could be imitating a stream of consciousness form. We are mostly given the story in first person, but at other points, there is a direct switch that Binh makes.

"Quinces are ripe, GertrudeStein, when there are the yellow of canary wings in midflight. They are ripe when their scent teases you with the snap of green apples and the perfumed embrace of coral roses. But even then quinces remain a fruit, hard and obstinate--unless, GertrudeStein, until they are simmered, coddled for hours above a low, steady flame....a color you can taste...love is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched."

The prose here is so aware of taste and scent and vision, and seems to pave the way for a conversation about how sexuality can be described -- and maybe best so-- when using terms of the five senses (This passage brought to mind Goblin Market in regards to the sense of taste/fruits). I think that it is interesting the way in which Truong has presented the main character -- we get to see what he is really thinking in a way that is a little disjointed sometimes.

This past week, we had two speakers come to class to speak about two vastly different topics: teaching reading and writing to students and women's agency through microfinance in Zimbabwe. These lectures marked a shift from the conceptual framework we were exploring during the first section of the class to more contextualized information in the second half. The connections between the two speakers were not necessary explicit which encouraged me to really expand my thinking and see how the many different concepts and material we have explored have been related.

                A big connection I saw between the two lectures was the theme of empowerment and what it means to be educated. Reading gave power and agency to the children in Anna’s class while the women selling their products in Zimbabwe gave them power and agency. I appreciated that Mary’s presentation portrayed literacy and empowerment outside of an educational context since most of what we have been focusing on is literacy in an academic setting.

I am wondering how the rest of the semester is going to look for our class since we have presentations up until spring break. I am curious to see how we will be connecting our trip to Ghana to the different placements to new materials and speakers in class.

Image above: Persepolis, capital of the Arachaemenid kings of Persia, now located in the province of Fars in southwestern Iran.

I have come to realize that I enjoy reading comics. I am more of a visual person and tend to be a slow reader, but what I found to be most intriguing about reading comics is the suspense in the gutter:  the space in between the frames that calls for your boundless imagination to be filled. As Scott McCloud describes it in Understanding Comics, “human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea” (66). The gutter allows for an imaginative, individualized experience as one sways their eyes from one frame to the next, connecting the trails of an unfinished story in their own mind.

In Chapter One of Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud writes of his youthful assumptions about comics; he "knew exactly what comics were.  Comics were those bright, colorful magazines filled with bad art, stupid stories and guys in tights.  [He] read real books, naturally" (pages 1-2, emphasis omitted).  This genre snobbery -- the idea of "real books" and other, lesser forms of reading material struck me, and it came to mind during part of our discussion in class on Tuesday.

Romance novels popped up in this discussion when Anne mentioned Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot and whether, in fact, this literary genre/storyline is still relevant today.  I said that I think it is; after all, romance novels are one of the best-selling genres out there.  Anne agreed that romance feeds a certain emotional requisite for some people.  A few minutes later, she mentioned that romance novels may "fulfill emotional needs for someone who has just been divorced or can't find a partner."

Aha!  I thought, writing it down in my notes.  That's a stereotype.  (And, I should add, one very widely-held, though untrue.)

So at Plenary today I bought myself a hand-made Pikachu hat.  Pikachu got me thinking about Pokemon which led me to a pretty big realization.  I don't know where Pokemon originated.  There's the TV show, but before that their were the video games.  There was also the card game, and there are a number of comics that explore the same world.  However, without actually typing it into google I couldn't tell you which came first.

This got me thinking about a lot of American Comics.  Primarily superhero ones.  I love comics, but I never really read a lot of American ones; and yet I can tell you who Superman and Batman and Spiderman all are, and I could pick them out of a crowd.  If I've never read any of their comics, how come I know them all so well?

Thinking back to Maria's demonstration of how to visually make a text more feminist, I wonder how this idea of recuperating a text might apply to "Born in Brothels" and documentary film in general. In class, we discussed how the editing of the film privileged some students over the others while also promoting a certain narrative. How might the film have been made in a more democratic way? Given that editing is a necessary part of filmmaking, is a fuller representation even possible? To all the future filmmakers/those who have a background in film, have there been/are there filmmakers who try to do this? What are their perspectives/techniques? What is the critical film theory regarding objectivity, especially in documentary-making?

I just wanted to highlight my newfound respect for comics as a result of Satrapi's Persepolis. I was fully engrossed in the narrative and I found Satrapi's story extremely compelling. I read the entire thing from cover to cover in one sitting. But I can't help wonder why this was so different from my experience with Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics.

I believe that this was because McCloud, though extremely casual and "chatty", writes non-fiction. Satrapi, on the other hand, is telling a story. This made me realize that the genre of the "comic" or "graphic narrative" is a lot more complex that we imagine. What interests me, however, is why the "comic" genre is separate from other genres.

Think about what we define as "genre" in literature. There's "drama", "thriller", "romance" etc. They're characterized by their content, not by the way they are layed out on the page. So why are we creating this label of "comic" when really, the comics themselves have content that lends itself to (sometimes multiple) genres? And in reverse, why do we characterize in terms of content if the content can also lend itself to genres by the ways that pages are laid out? So what does genre actually mean and how are we defining it?

Last week's keyword for me was, "Disconnect." Although I appreciated the guest lecturers, I found myself either not paying attention at all or zoning in and out. When the first woman, I forgot her name, came in to speak, initially I was intrigued by the handouts -- I liked that they had practical teaching methods for reading. I also payed attention when she explained how the iPad was used in the classroom as a tool for gathering data and as a tool for visual communication between parents and teachers. However, I'm not going to lie, I barely listened to her speaking for most of the lecture and the same thing happened when Mary came in to speak about the Zimbabwean (?) women and their role in the trade markets.

The fact that I paid very little attention to the guest lectures bothered me. So, I began to wonder, is it me or is it what was being said? I think it was a combination of both. 

The more we talk about literacy, the more I realize about myself as a learner. I know now that I get completely lost when a connection between what is being taught and the overall "picture" is not made. Take for instance Mary's lecture, it would have never occurred to me that the women of Zimbabwe had become literate in a different setting, the market, if Mia had not made that connection for me. And I find myself experiencing similar disconnects in Pim's and Rob's class during discussions.

related to our talkings about interruptions and disability.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/opinion/sunday/the-art-of-distraction.html?ref=todayspaper#

I did not understand Lifting Belly when I attempted to read it for class. I didn't remember (or particularly care) who the author was because usually authors give you context to start with, because they generally want you to understand where they're coming from. My only hint was that Anne said it was erotic stuff, but I figured she just meant Canzone because of the tongues.

So, it didn't occur to me that either of these poems were about lesbian sex. Now that I loo at Canzone, I can definitely see it there. But I'm still not convinced for Lifting Belly. I'll believe you if you tell me it's about sex, because that seems to work, it just doesn't make sense to me any way I look at it.

At first, I thought that Lifting Belly was dialogue between two people, maybe three. Taking the hint into account, I could see that it would be a love story, maybe even a polyamorous relationship? I let that one go pretty quickly.  For the definition of Lifting Belly, I noticed a note in the margins pointing to those words saying -Person? So I took that as an idea as well. Two people and a person named Lifting Belly?

I made it to the part about giving birth (Lifting belly. Cry. Lifting belly. Lifting belly splendid. Jack Johnson Henry.  Henry is his name sir.) and a few pages after that small success in deciphering the only thing in the poem I was certain about, I skimmed the rest for important words and gave up.