Grace Reading Series

Wednesday, 11/1, 7pm, Mo Pitkins, FREE!

The Grace Comics Showcase continues with ALLISON COLE, Providence-based silkscreener and paper-cutter extraordinaire who will read from her novel Never Ending Summer.

Joining her is Brooklyn's LAUREN WEINSTEIN, author of Inside Vineyland and Girl Stories reads from her new story Horse Camp.

AND! Don't miss it!! THIS Saturday November 4th, Bluestockings Bookstore, 7pm, FREE!

An Open Mic celebration of the fabulous ladies of comics with short readings by Heidi MacDonald, Fly, Lauren Weinstein, Ariel Bordeaux (that's me) and anyone else daring enough to step up to the mic in praise of female cartoonists. All of the above mentioned will be available to sign books and also attending to sign will be Megan Kelso, Allison Cole, Gabrielle Bell and Sara Edward-Corbett!

Posted by Ariel Bordeaux at 04:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Every Monday, Grace recommends a book by a woman writing literary prose.

The Position by Meg Wolitzer

Assume The Position is about sex and you’d be perfectly right. If you’ve ever walked in on your parents in flagrante delicato, or thumbed through a copy of The Joy of Sex with its shaggy partners deep into the trip of lovemaking, and wondered how children of the sexual revolution feel about all that sexual flowering thirty years later, Meg Wolitzer’s seventh novel, out in paperback from Scribner, is one for tackling the subject with wit and poignancy. Wolitzer is an impressive novelist, a careful observer of the interstices of society and of family as she explores sexual politics, shame, and intimacy in two very different generations.

Thirty years after the publication of Paul and Roz Mellow’s best-selling 1975 sex book, “Pleasuring,” complete with illustrations, the Mellow family is scattered: an older brother on anti-depressants that blunt his sex drive, the lonely youngest girl attempting a documentary about a cherished Long Island elementary school, the older sister, a former drug addict and new mother in California, and the younger brother, a gay Republican in Rhode Island diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease. The Mellow's divorce following the wake of the book's phenomenal success has left the family doubly exposed, adrift in degrees of dissatisfaction, repression, and disillusion. As each chapter chronicles present compromises and disappointments that tie them to the past (and, inevitably, to the shame, confusion, and embarrasment surrounding the public airing of their parents' sex life), Wolitzer’s unsparing exploration of how "the sounds of parents traveled through walls, traveled up stairs" is commanding and bittersweet.There seems to be a simmering adolescent inside most adult children, which Wolitzer manages alternately to indulge and to pull up short.

The suspense in the novel revolves around the re-issue of Pleasuring and the complicated rewards of letting go of old ways of thinking about the past. Let the most famous position in the Mellow's book, called “Electric Forgiveness,” provide a way of thinking about intimacy. When your parents stop being to blame, quit being the defining drama of all that has happened or will happen to you, you can look through the keyhole, open up and find a new way of embracing the long arm of the past.

Posted by Emberly Nesbitt at 12:17 AM | Permalink

Tori Amos has pretty much the very best lessons on how to survive as a woman artist. Unfortunately, if you can't fight the administrative and political battles as well as plug into the big creative stuff, you're toast. (If you're rehashing books that a bunch of dudes have already written, you might not have to do this. But if you're really getting to the good, fresh art, then it's necessary to be this prepared.) When guy friends or corporate types roll their eyes when you say "Tori Amos," just smile and let them buy you another drink. It's better that the ferocity and genius involved is invisible.

"There was no way that these piano parts were coming off, but they held the master tapes," she explains. "I said 'If you do that, then I won't be part of the project. You will have no artist to promote or perform these songs.'" In the end, some songs were removed and replaced by new ones, but the piano stayed.

In 1998 she faced yet another battle, this time over royalties and creative control. "It was a war that went on until 2002," she recalls. "I still created, as I knew that I had to keep my value up on the street. If I had just sat it out, they would have won, so I decided to retain my musical integrity. There's a chess-game that you play when you're battling with a something that is so much bigger than you or your resources. I have seen the lilies trampled in the field, great artists who are back singing tiny clubs because they can't fight this fight."

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Check it out, over there on the right hand sidebar of this page you'll notice a link to purchase the Grace Comics Showcase Zine online! What the heck is this zine all about, you may ask? The main idea was to highlight more artists than I was able to invite to read at Grace. Also, I've been curious about how other female cartoonists have been responding to a 2005 article from Art News titled, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Comic-Book Artists", so there's a lot of talk about that in the zine.

Great women comics artists emerged in the 1960s,” says Laura Hoptman, who curated the 2004 Carnegie International, as well as R. Crumb’s recent show there. She notes Aline Kominsky-Crumb in particular. “The argument could be made that there’s a female Chris Ware, but up until recently it was a guy’s thing,” says Hoptman. But if there were a female Ware, would we know her if we saw her?

This question cracks me up. A female Chris Ware? No offense to Mr. Ware, but no thanks. Humorously enough, the inestimable Lorna Miller thumbed her nose at this very idea shortly before the Art News article came out. The larger point of this question is a good one though. Recognition of greatness in women cartoonists involves a willingness to expand ones horizons not just beyond the mainstream, but beyond even the women-friendly indy publishers who mean well but are still stuck in a predominantly masculine aesthetic, rather than, like, a totally yin-yang balanced holistic aesthetic.

Posted by Ariel Bordeaux at 10:49 AM | Permalink

I'd like to give props to writer, cartoonist and "herstorian" Trina Robbins. Trina (who wrote the Hilda Terry obituary) has made a career of unearthing and exposing the forgotten women of comics history. When respected male cartoonists Chris Ware or Seth tell the world about a forgotten male cartoonist, many glossy articles in fancy artsy comics mags featuring lush color pictorials of the work of said historical male cartoonist will follow. When Trina Robbins tells the world about Tarpe Mills, Nell Brinkley, Rose O'Neill, or Hilda Terry ... well ... let's just say there's a distinct attitude on the part of much of the comics elite (I'll confess guilty to having had attitude about Trina's writing in the past). One doesn't easily find glimpses of comics by not so well known cartoonists from days gone by, especially women, without very very religiously digging through bins of old comics ... or without seeing easily accessible fancy pictorials in contemporary books and magazines. Luckily, there's Trina, because it is a rare breed indeed who religiously digs through bins of old comics ... looking specifically for work by women to share with the public.

Posted by Ariel Bordeaux at 08:01 AM | Permalink

Every Monday, Miss Grace will recommend a book by a woman writing quality literary fiction, memoirs, graphic novels, etc. We’ll keep it short and sweet, because we know you’re busy – need the dirt and then need to get on with the show – but here is a book we love and hope you'll find your way to reading.

SINS OF THE INNOCENT by Mireille Marokvia

Mireille Marokvia has pluck. In her memoir, Sins of the Innocent, recently out in hardcover from Unbridled Books, she tells the story of her young adult life as a French woman, a student at the Sorbonne, who follows her German artist lover to Stuttgart in 1939 for a stay of six months and ends up staying in Germany for the duration of the war. There is a keen and immensely likable intelligence at work as Marokvia’s story turns from the bright bohemian light of Parisian cafés to beam down the increasingly narrow and harrowing paths of life in Hitler’s Germany. As Marokvia’s lover, an outspoken anti-Nazi, manages to secure a post abroad completing military illustrations, coming home only on leave, Marokvia’s struggle becomes as much a struggle against isolation as against the dangers her outsider and anti-Nazi status pose. This is where the pluck comes in. Marokvia’s physical existence – hiking, biking, skiing, milking, weaving – plays into her dynamic, complicated form of survival and resistance. She is often scared, but never stops. The more dramatic episodes – being denounced as a spy, helping escaped prisoners reach the Swiss border – carry a good deal of novelistic suspense, but it is the portrait of daily life that quietly opens up a new perspective on life inside Germany during the war. And it is the light-and-air quality Marokvia brings to her prose, this compelling voice of a confident, adventuresome woman settled on what she wants, who is able to give such a complete, riveting, and idiosyncratic account of a wholly unexpected life.

Posted by Emberly Nesbitt at 02:53 AM | Permalink

Hey there--it's Ariel Bordeaux here, and I'll be blogging periodically through this fall as the Guest Curator of the Grace Comics Showcase.

Thanks to Heidi "Scoop" MacDonald at The Beat, by way of Trina Robbins, I've just learned of the existence and recent passing of a cartoonist named Hilda Terry.

I'm very sorry to inform you that pioneer woman cartoonist Hilda Terry passed away on October 13. Hilda’s strip, Teena, ran in national newspapers from 1941 - 1966, after which she became a pioneer computer animator, animating baseball scoreboards for the Mets, for which she won a National Cartoonist Society award. There’s a little irony there, since Hilda was responsible for breaking the gender barrier of the NCS, which up till 1950 was a male-only organization. Hilda’s husband, the late cartoonist Gregory D’Allessio, submitted Hilda’s name for membership, and the ensuing fight between members about whether or not to open up their membership finally ended with Hilda being accepted into the society a year later, after which she submitted the names of all her women cartoonist friends, thus breaking the gender barrier. -Trina Robbins

Ninety-something Hilda Terry maintained a website which includes her essays about a myriad of topics including politics, religion and the paranormal. She was apparently a bit of an eccentric, but in a totally awesome wise woman witchy kind of way. A woman after my own heart, whom I hope to meet on the astral plane someday.

Posted by Ariel Bordeaux at 01:58 AM | Permalink

Heather Woodbury is so amazing and she is in New York at P.S. 122 performing her new work "Tale of Two Cities" through 10/29. Don't miss:

Inspired by the Brooklyn Dodgers' move to L.A. in 1957, this two-part epic delves into the lasting effects of that upheaval - and subsequent acts of urban erasure - on three generations of characters from both coasts. A modern-day Latino DJ spins together this collision of life stories, spanning decades and neighborhoods, connecting a multitude of American lives to our own.

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 07:36 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Personality disorders--how many of us have them?

(Besides our leader:

"He has no trouble speaking off the cuff when he's speaking punitively, when he's talking about violence, when he's talking about revenge.

"It's only when he leaps into the wild blue yonder of compassion, or idealism, or altruism, that he makes these hilarious mistakes.")

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I just cleaned out about 200 books from my apartment, got help from a very sweet car service driver (thank you, again, Arecibo), and hauled them to Housing Works. I realized that if it felt like it was someone's big pitch with their agent for their nonfiction blockbuster or like it really could have been several (even fascinating) magazine articles or just a sort of ego book pitch, I didn't want it in my house. Just the real books--the ones that insist on being written, the ones that are lucky as hell to make any money at all, the ones that really just appear through the ether and demand existence on planet earth--these are the books I'm keeping in my apartment. (I chose completely intuitively, but my intuition was based on: does the writer's ego have more of a grip here than the wild divine structure of the narrative? If so, see ya later, honeybunch).

A lot of the keepers, recently, are graphic novels, I guess that shouldn't be a surprise, because that's where the publishers are taking risks.

At the last minute, I was scared to get rid of those books. Then: so relieved. Especially to ditch the motherfucking Chicago Manual, let me tell you (as someone who even briefly proofread encyclopedia bibliographies for a living, this was heaven).

I guess you could say it's sad, but I don't think it is--that most books are pretty predictable, and only a small number every year really floor me, would stay on my bookshelf. Only a few would tempt me to make out with them at the bar and piss off my boyfriend, let's say. Okay that's a crap metaphor. Because I get to gather a lot of these authors of the real books that are not just a media pitch together for the reading series and there is no making out happening there, perverts.

I was reading about how in the UK they are serving amazing healthy food that the children despise and this is so much more exciting to me than most art happening at the moment. You know? I think I was spoiled being 16 years old in 1988--Public Enemy and Cindy Sherman and Spike Lee--I thought it was always going to be that exciting.

Anyway, at least there is Weeds. xoooElizabeth

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 10:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Bob Herbert in the Times. It's really amazing how powerful it is for a man to speak up about this nasty ass sexism we've got going on right now:

The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show their breasts. An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, “When was the last time you got screwed?”

What have we learned since then? That there’s big money to be made from thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a misogynistic culture, it’s never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what really matters is their appearance and their ability to please men sexually.

He makes the point that people are more upset that the Nickel Mines shooting happened in Amish country than that the murderer separated the girls, and that this act is not separate from internet porn and gangsta rap. Remember your bell hooks, though: the gangsta rap is the socially sanctioned place to publicly display the violent sexism. You've got the exact same level of violence as in hip hop videos at every big financial institution in New York, I can tell you that much, it's just hidden at Scores and in the emails the banker boys send each other. You've also got a very hidden wing of the same violence (repressed, silencing version thereof) in the 20 percent female bylines in our important intellectual publications.

In her amazing essay on gangsta rap that I wish everyone would read right now, bell hooks says:

Gangsta rap is part of the anti-feminist backlash that is the rage right now. When young black males labor in the plantations of misogyny and sexism to produce gangsta rap, their right to speak this violence and be materially rewarded is extended to them by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Far from being an expression of their "manhood," it is an expression of their own subjugation and humiliation by more powerful, less visible forces of patriarchal gangsterism. They give voice to the brutal raw anger and rage against women that it is taboo for "civilized" adult men to speak. No wonder then that they have the task of tutoring the young, teaching them to eroticize and enjoy the brutal expressions of that rage (teaching them language and acts) before they learn to cloak it in middle-class decorum or Robert Bly style reclaimings of lost manhood.

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 11:51 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Save the date: on Tuesday, Nov. 7 I'll be reading in Seattle at the University Bookstore with This Is Not Chick Lit contributor Holiday Reinhorn, Rebecca Brown, and Brangien Davis of Swivel. Very exciting--don't miss it if you are in town. xxooE

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 08:24 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sleepy weekend and major chocolate bar discussion with Anne Ishii on narcissists, catalysts, narcissists as catalysts and as weird bringers of alarming psychic synchronicities. We decided that Bed Bath and Beyond is hell and the nearby ABC carpet is heaven especially if you beeline past the $1200 freestanding greek columns for sale, past the sort of astonishing section of spiritual books, straight to Michel Cluizel in the back and let the nice man make you special pomegranate drinks to go with your plate of dark bonbons.

You know who your real friends are when one of them comes to the special torture of Manhattan Bed Bath and Beyond with you. I am certain it would have taken me 40 minutes to find the shower curtains without her.

In more exciting news than my hobbling attempts at domesticity, Ariel Bordeaux who is doing an amazing job curating our fall comics festival has put together a gorgeous zine with her own amazing essay as well as major contributions from Heidi MacDonald and Trina Robbins among others. We will have it for sale here soon--it is so gorgeous. Also Ariel will start blogging soon! So you will have more than my frustrated pottymouth commentary on women in comics, yes you will.

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 09:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Times reviews "The Masters of American Comics" exhibition currently on view in Newark and New York .

There are no women artists in this show. What the fuck is wrong with you people?

The Times doesn't really worry about that, but does notice the damage done by trimming the R. Crumb dirty bits:

Never mind the offense their exclusion does to the public’s intelligence and the show’s integrity.

Thank you, happy weekend, love, Elizabeth
(whose words continue to fail her when people curate like motherfucking Neanderthals). xxooo

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 08:33 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Marjane Satrapi from a recent interview in the Independent:

"Iranian women are a hundred times stronger than the women I see here," she says. "Parisian women spend their whole time sobbing. 'Oh'" she adopts a plaintive tone, "'I am so strong - or do I mean weak - anyhow, have you noticed how my stomach isn't quite so flat as it used to be - and do you think I'm as attractive as I could be?' You've seen them whingeing. People call me strong; you should meet the women in Iran."

Also she loves smoking:

Recently, on a street in Los Angeles, she saw a woman glaring at her cigarette. "There were traffic fumes everywhere. I saw her staring, so I muttered: 'Fuck you.' She came over and said, 'Did you say something?' I said, 'Yes - fuck you.' She replied: 'But I am so sensitive to cigarette smoke.' I told her, 'OK - be sensitive - and die. Or give me a break.'"

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 10:34 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

We had a fabulous time on Wednesday--big thanks to Ariel for doing an amazing job curating and to Megan and Gabrielle for sharing their work with us so beautifully. Everyone who came out, too! What a fun night. Don't miss the next one, November 1 with Alison Cole and Lauren Weinstein.

Posted by Elizabeth Merrick at 05:41 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Join us Wednesday, October 4th, 7pm:

THE GRACE COMICS SHOWCASE!
Girly Stories, Teenage Diaries, and Other Marvels of Women's Graphic Fiction

PRESENTING:
Megan Kelso: author of The Squirrel Mother and Queen of the Black Black articulates the role of "place" in fiction.

Gabrielle Bell: author of When I'm Old reads from her forthcoming graphic novel Lucky.

Mo Pitkin's is located at 34 Ave. A
between East 2nd and 3rd streets.

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