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Putting it Together: Letter 47

--
I bought a banjo recently.

I had been thinking about it for a while, ever since I rewatched Cool Hand Luke a couple of years ago during a Paul Newman marathon, and as summer rolled in slowly (so slowly, as it's still grey in SoCal), I wanted a new musical hobby.

I play the guitar (poorly) as well as the ukelele, and I figured picking up the banjo would mostly the same and thus, easy to pick up.

It's not at all the same.

Though I got myself a five string banjo, it's really more of a four string when you're looking at the top frets, and the bass note is in the middle of all that, which keeps throwing me off. Plus, banjo playing and music has a rich, specific history and playing style(s). It's not all just chords and strumming when you're starting off, like with a guitar.

This has all been a bit of a brain-twist. Though a good one, as I can feel my brain stretching each time I practice. That lowest string is still really throwing me off, each time I reach for it and a high note gets plucked out. It's gotten me thinking about how our brains get set in those regular patterns, where we think we know what to expect, where that low note is. And when we're faced with a new experience and that string changes spots, it takes longer to catch up than if we were learning with a completely blank slate.

This is why it's so important to try new things. In my opinion, it's good for the soul to be off-kilter and a little ungrounded, a little unsure. That's where we find new ways of seeing and new connections through which we can experience the world. It's also where a lot of the fun is.

My life has changed a lot in the past few weeks, as I've left Popverse to return to freelancing. But as much as my daily routine and life has been thrown off-kilter, it's a good thing. I'm looking forward to all of those new experiences, to being surprised and confused and experimenting until I find new patterns that work and start to feel familiar again. It's a good place to be.

Have you picked up an instrument lately?
Reply to this email and let me know.

In the past month from me...

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

Some thoughts on baseball

Interesting stuff I’ve watched/read/listened to lately…

Still reading The Power Broker
Y/N by Esther Yi

A LIST OF THINGS I'VE LOST
is now available for purchase
Order from publisher
Order from Bookshop.org
Order from Barnes and Noble
Order from Amazon

It's Spring! Hope you're seeing your favorite flowers about!

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
05/16/2024

Putting it Together: Letter 46

The relationship between an artist and their most recognizable work is complex. Or, to be more accurate, the relationship between an artist and their audience's interest in their best known work is complex.

Kara Walker is famous for her silhouettes in conversation with the history of American slavery, but has worked quite a lot in sculpture. Still, what do people who are looking into Walker's work look for? Silhouettes.

What if famous glass sculptor Chihuly began to work in stone? Or became a poet?

This dynamic becomes even more complicated with the introduction of live performance, when artist and audience are tied together through the experience of playing - and listening to - music.

I recently went to hear The Mountain Goats, who are most well known for some of their early songs, "This Year," "No Children," "Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton" and "Up The Wolves." While I'm sure a strong minority of the people at the gig were just there to hear whatever they wanted to play (including me - I LOVE The Mountain Goats), you could easily tell that a large percentage of the audience was there specifically to hear those songs.

This feeling was represented when, fairly early on in the set, a fan shouted out a request for "No Children." John Darnielle replied "In the middle of the set, you think? I don't see it man.... the top half has the obscurities and the stuff people didn't expect to hear."

Of course the hits are always saved for the end, that way the audience goes out on a high. Such is the way of concerts. Billy Joel ends with "Piano Man." The Mountain Goats end with "No Children" and "This Year."

And when the big hits did come at the end of the set, the energy in the room markedly changed. It was joyous, for sure, but it was strangely sad too. There was so much energy that had been stood waiting for those songs, instead of listening to what the artists wanted to share earlier. If I could feel that, I'm certain the artists could too.

As the set came to an end, a fan shouted out a request for "Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton." Darnielle thought about it a second and said in return, "I know. But... this one will be funnier," and began to sing a little banger called "Foreign Object" in which he sings, over and over again "I want to stab you in the eye with a foreign object." The song, while a bop, obviously does not have the deep emotional resonance of "Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton," a song about quashed dreams, but I can see why Darnielle chose it.

While it does make sense on one level to give fans what they want, it also makes sense that an artist would want to buck against that convention. Especially if they're continuing to make new music and try new things. Musicians are, after all, not jukebox players - they're artists. And while they're living and creating, their body of work is also living and growing, and should be represented as and understood as so much more than a few hit songs they wrote decades ago.

What did you think musicians should play at their shows?
Reply to this email and let me know.

In the past month from me...

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

Some thoughts on baseball

Interesting stuff I’ve watched/read/listened to lately…

Still reading The Power Broker

A LIST OF THINGS I'VE LOST
is now available for purchase
Order from publisher
Order from Bookshop.org
Order from Barnes and Noble
Order from Amazon

Happy February (and almost March too)

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
2/25/24

Putting it Together: Letter 45

I think that leading men should be allowed to cry in movies, and it's a shame that, in Western movies aimed at large audiences, they so rarely are. Sure, if a beloved friend or wife dies, a leading man may be allowed to drop a tasteful tear or two, but true tear-laden grief so rarely graces the screen. Grief can happen of course, but it has to be stoic, angry, violent even before it ever gets teary.

This is something I've thought about for a long time, but it came to mind again more recently, after I watched the movie Godzilla Minus One. Leading man Ryunosuke Kamiki plays a failed kamikaze pilot named Shikishima, who later fails to kill Godzilla, leading to the death of many men. After the war, this past follows him, and he just can't move on, even when Godzilla comes back, bigger and more dangerous than ever.

What stood out to me so much about Kamiki's performance was the wide range of emotion he showed throughout the movie. He shouted, screamed, and yes -- cried. Big ugly tears. It made his performance interesting, moving. It made narrative sense considering what he had gone through, and what he was still facing, and it fit into the real world in a way that the more restrained grief of our movies don't.

It made me think about all of the performances that we just haven't seen, movies featuring men going through PTSD, serious trauma, heartbreak, grief, without ever expressing their emotions in one of humanity's most natural ways, about how half of screen actors have been limited in their range of expression for years and years.

I really enjoyed seeing Kamiki's performance in Godzilla Minus One, and hope that maybe one day we'll be able to see more of the same in an American action movie. And when you really think about it, considering the kinds of battles that action heroes face time and time again, would it really be so bad to see one of them shed a few tears?

Have you seen Godzilla Minus One? What did you think?
Reply to this email and let me know.

In the past month from me...

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

Some thoughts on baseball

Interesting stuff I’ve watched/read/listened to lately…

99 Percent Invisible's The Power Broker book club
Percy Jackson and the Olympians

A LIST OF THINGS I'VE LOST
is now available for purchase
Order from publisher
Order from Bookshop.org
Order from Barnes and Noble
Order from Amazon

It's a new year.
What are you looking forward to?

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
1/21/24

Putting it Together: Letter 44

Over the weekend, I spent a couple of days in New York. Since I was staying near the Bronx, I decided to stop by Yankee Stadium for a tour, which was a fairly interesting experience, but strange. It was cool because we got to go onto the field (I'm told was rare), but as much as the tour was focused on Yankees history with exhibits featuring memorabilia from Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Yogi Berra, there was something sterile about the stadium, which was built only in 2009.

The site of the original stadium AKA The House That Ruth Built was just a little ways away. It had been in use since 1923 before being torn down. While I'm sure there were reasons for the old park being torn down, the new park didn't have much of a historic feel to it, as much as the tour guide and the literature kept saying that it was built to reflect the history of the old park (the outer facade is modeled after the old stadium, and some design elements were transfered over). It felt bland and cold, more concrete than anything else.

What seemed most curious to me, though, was that I don't think a new park would necessarily have to feel as ahistoric as Yankee Stadium does. You can bring charm and an old fashiondness to the new if you want to. It just seemed, for some reason, that the Yankees felt that the new stadium had to be, well, completely new, to justify itself.

But perhaps that's just me speaking from a 2023 design perspective. In 09, streamlined concrete probably seemed more cool before it became the architectural style we see everywhere and are exhausted by. Either way, Yankee Stadium didn't quite have the magic I had hoped it would.

It did pique my curiosity about ballpark design, and kind of makes me want to visit more parks to see what I think about them. Perhaps a road trip is in order.

Do you have a favorite baseball stadium?
Reply to this email and let me know.

In the past month from me...

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

Some thoughts on baseball

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Asteroid City
Past Lives

A LIST OF THINGS I'VE LOST
is now available for purchase
Order from publisher
Order from Bookshop.org
Order from Barnes and Noble
Order from Amazon

It's almost Christmas time.
I hope you have a merry one.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
12/20/23

Putting it Together: Letter 43

Normally, I'd have an essay here on something that I've been thinking about lately. However, funnily enough, I ended up writing about that something at work yesterday.

So instead of my regular text essay here, I present you with a link to my tribute to the Smithsonian Giant Panda Cam.

I hope you enjoy.

What's your favorite zoo animal?
Reply to this email and let me know.

In the past month from me...

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An article about Kate Beaton's Ducks
An interview with a music critic

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Say Hey! Willie Mays, documentary on Max

A LIST OF THINGS I'VE LOST
is now available for purchase
Order from publisher
Order from Bookshop.org
Order from Barnes and Noble
Order from Amazon

Oof, if I didn't know health was important last month,
I've certainly learned my lesson now.
Slowly getting back on my feet.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
11.09.2023

Putting it Together: Letter 42

Gina Chung’s Sea Change is a dreamy novel, set in the near future or an alternate reality where it’s gotten untenably hot on earth, humans are beginning to flee to Mars, and the ocean is even more dangerous and mysterious than ever. The novel follows Ro, as she adjusts to life with her ex-boyfriend heading to Mars, the octopus that she takes care of at risk being taken away, and memories of her long-gone father, all the while navigating her relationships with the people who remain in her life - her childhood best her friend Yoonhee, her cousin, and her mother.

Sea Change is a novel of the untethered self, but it doesn’t stay in that space, and the path that Ro goes through, a later in life coming-of-age path, is both relatable and terrifying, like all tales of transformation. Excitingly, I got to chat to Gina about Sea Change, and a little bit too about her upcoming short story collection Green Frog (which is available for pre-order now). In this interview, Gina speaks to her fascination and fear of the ocean, her interest in stories about women being complicated together, and how absence takes up space in our lives.

What interests you about the ocean?

Gina Chung: I'm really scared of the ocean, actually. I think I'm fascinated by the ocean because I find it very scary, and I have a lot of respect for it. There's just so much out there that we just don't know about the ocean, and the stuff that we do know about it is just still mysterious to us, including the fact that there are these animals that exist at untold depths in the ocean. It's just fascinating to me to think about how they evolve in different ways to survive in really adverse and difficult conditions. Octopuses are certainly no exception to that. They're just really fascinating creatures.

Also, as a writer, I feel like the ocean can be a metaphor for so many things in one's work, like the turbulence of the ocean, the mystery of it, and the magic.

There's so much absence at the heart of your book. The ocean is present in the book and it isn't in the same way as Ro’s father is present and he isn't, and Tae is present and he isn't. What space did you want absence to take up in Ro's life?

I think that was definitely intentional on my part in terms of making absence a bigger theme of the novel, and loss, of course, because she's just lost so much in terms of the relationships that she's left in the wake of. I really wanted to show how absence could become, in a lot of ways, almost weightier than a person's presence when they were in your life. We've all been there, whether it's an actual bereavement or a breakup or even just like a friend breakup, where suddenly if someone is gone from your life, in some ways, that loss can take up just as much or if not more space than they took up when you were in each other's lives.

I think that happens for a variety of reasons. If it's a breakup, for example, you might be thinking— what went wrong? Could I have done something differently? Or was it always going to end this way? In the case of Ro, with her father being missing, I wanted to show in the book too, especially in the flashback sections, how she feels like her father has been leaving her family all her life, especially with the strained relationship that he has with her mother, the fact that he has a tendency to wander off on his own. I wanted to show how that could really affect a person over the course of a lifetime and how, when her father does disappear, it's devastating, but it feels like it's been coming all along for her, because she has this story in her head that she tells herself that people tend to leave her.

Speaking of that story Ro tells herself about people leaving her, with her father, then Tae, and possibly with the octopus— there's this flip of that story at the end of Sea Change. Can you talk about the breaking of that pattern and how Ro is active in that final decision?

Ro is someone who tells herself that, “It's inevitable people leave me behind or they leave me altogether.” I think she also feels that a bit with her relationship with her best friend Yoonhee, she feels that she's being left behind, even though Yoonhee is still physically present. I think when you are a person like that, you also end up finding all these ways to leave yourself in the process. For [Ro], that often happens through drinking, through making impulsive, often unsafe decisions, especially with things related to the drinking.
I think that by the end of the novel, hopefully this isn't a spoiler, I really wanted to show how she has to learn how to stay for herself. That was actually one of the first things that I articulated for myself, even in thinking about the novel. I was talking to a friend about our manuscripts, because we were both working on books at the time, and she was like, "Well, what's like your one-liner about the book?" I said, "Well, I think it's about learning how to stay for yourself when you feel like everyone is constantly leaving you. That's a thing that I think many people deal with, and you don't have to have been physically left in the way that Ro has been in order to feel like you have a hard time staying present for yourself.

Speaking of staying for yourself, there's this ongoing tension in Sea Change about the way people pay attention and care for each other, but also the way that people harm each other. Was that always at the center of your book, or did that come later?

Yes, I think that that interplay is always around us. Sometimes the very same person who might really love and care for you, if it's a parent or a guardian or a friend or a partner, might also turn around and be really hurtful, whether they intend to or not, and I think that's something that really fascinates me about human beings.

I think that as a writer, when I'm thinking about characters, I always want to show both sides of that. If it is a character that is going to hurt your main character, for example, I think it's always useful to show not just the hurt that happened and the pain that happened, but also the ways in which maybe they were actually really good for you or really, I don't know, able to help you access a different part of yourself.

I think breakups, for example, are often so much more complex than they seem. I think if we know someone who goes through a breakup, it's very tempting to be like, "Oh, you're better off without them. You'll be fine." Even if, let's say the person was a terrible partner, which I'm not saying that Tae was, in many ways he was far from it, but I think there's always an interplay of how this person may have been really good for you, even though ultimately they ended up not working out. I think that that contradiction is inherent to a lot of humanity.

We live in a world where we are seeing in real-time the impacts of climate change, of injustice, of sometimes unimaginable but still very real cruelties and injustices in the world. At the same time, I don't feel like I want to give up on humans. I think that we are capable of so much great kindness and empathy for one another. I think that that's something that's always going to be with us no matter what happens to the world and to the climate. That's something that's always going to fascinate me as a writer, and I think fiction is a really interesting way to explore that, to think more about how humanity can just be incredibly complex across different hypothetical scenarios.

The people who remain around Ro all happen to be women, and the people that she ends up learning to show up for are all women. Was that intentional? If so, what were you exploring there?

It actually wasn't entirely intentional when I was writing it. I knew, for example, that I wanted to explore her relationship with her best friend, with her mother… at the beginning of the book, there's this moment where she's telling the reader that her mother has always said that the women in their family have bad luck with men. It was a throwaway line for me when I first wrote it, but I ended up keeping it because I liked this idea of this matrilineage within their family of women who have to make do in the absence of men in their lives. Or in the case of Rachel, Ro's cousin, she's left her husband, so she actually made the choice to not have him in her life anymore. You see her wrestling with the impact of that decision in real time. I don't know. I'm always fascinated by stories where you get to see women working things out together, whether it's in the context of hurts or injustices or traumas they've experienced at the hands of men or men don't even have to be part of the equation in some cases.

I think Ro's relationship with her mother is definitely impacted by the role that the father played growing up for her, but also, things with her mother have always been weird for her because they don't always quite understand each other. I wanted to show how that relationship would be impacted by the absence of her father, by the sudden loss of her father, but also how they have to continue trying to work out who they are to each other without the presence of her father around.

I think that's just something that interests me. I just love reading about women being complicated together.

Are there any authors or works that you feel like Sea Changes in dialogue with?

Oh, yes. Well, one book that I held really close to my heart-- Well, there are several, but one of my favorite books of all time is Chemistry by Weike Wang. It's also a coming-of-age story, I think, in a lot of ways for a character who's maybe a bit later in life than most people think of when they think of coming-of-age.

I love how in that book, that character, because she's a chemist and in a PhD program that she leaves, she can’t not see the world through the lens of being a chemist who's very interested in how things work and knows a lot about the compounds that make up everything in the world. I loved the way that [Wang] was able to use that character's interest and knowledge base to then tell the rest of the story in this very funny- and it's very scientifically-minded- but still quite an accessible way. When I first read that book, it just blew my mind. I'd never seen anything like that done before.

Another book that I really loved and felt inspired by was Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett, which does a really cool alternating past/present structure. I was really inspired by that structure and tried to do something similar with Sea Change.

The reason I really loved how she did that was because she gives us this character who's very taciturn, very damaged, has a lot going on underneath the surface that she doesn't bring to her exterior in the world. I think Ro is a little bit similar in that way, but I loved how in Mostly Dead Things, she shows how those past sections incidents from her childhood— not all of them are like big trauma moments either, they're sometimes little things that happen to her in her day to day. You really get to see, over the course of that novel, that emotional and psychological DNA that makes up that character. I wanted to do something similar with Sea Change as well, where I'm building up a portrait of a character as she's going through some pretty extraordinary and difficult circumstances.

Another book that I love is Severance by Ling Ma, which is one of my favorite workplace-type novels where it's about someone who's navigating the mundanities and indignities of the workplace, but in, again, pretty extraordinary circumstances because it's like a zombie apocalypse story. It's so funny and quietly sad too in a way.

I love when a story can marry to different textures like that, like the humor, but also the gentle and deep sorrow of being a person in the world who experiences loss and difficulties, particularly from the subjectivity of a marginalized person with an Asian American person, or a queer person, or both, or just being a woman.

What interests you about coming-of-age, especially at a later than expected stage of life?

I think it's because I'm often comparing myself to other people who are around my age and often just thinking like, “oh, here's another way I don't measure up,” which isn't to say that I have terrible self-esteem. I think it's just probably something that comes from my own childhood in background.

I think we all do it to an extent, especially around certain milestone markers, like 25 or 30 or 40, for example. We all march around with these unspoken rules in our head of what we're all supposed to have achieved by whatever X date. Before I actually turned 30, I remember thinking like, “Oh, my God, it's coming up, I really have to have all this stuff figured out in my life.”

I have to be with someone who I think I'm going to be with the rest of my life. I have to have the perfect job and earn this amount of money, all this stuff. So much pressure and expectation. When I actually turned 30, I was like, “Oh, I'm fine. I don't have to have most of this stuff figured out at this age.” I think that that happens to everyone, no matter what age you're at.

I also think coming-of-age, it never really ends because you are always changing, your life is always changing and your understanding of that life is always going to be changing. I think that's one reason why I really like that theme and gravitate to stories that are in that realm. It's interesting to watch characters struggle and learn how to size up in relation to the whatever it is that they're dealing with, to see a character grow over the course of the novel or the story that you're reading.

With fiction, you have the luxury of staying with the character for a given amount of time and seeing how they learn and grow and develop over that period of time. I think that's one thing that fiction can do that real life often doesn't. With life, it doesn't really end until it does; you never really get to see how it all turns out.

Can you tell us anything about your upcoming short story collection?

It's called Green Frog and it deals with a lot of similar themes to Sea Change, including Korean American girlhood and womanhood and bodies and animals. Because it's a collection of stories, it's a little bit more experimental in parts. There are some stories that are much more speculative or much more fantastical. There are some mythical creatures in there.

I'm also constantly, continually inspired by the stories that I grew up hearing as a child, like Korean folk tales and fairy tales, for example. There's definitely some of that influence in the collection, including in the title story. Green Frog is a reference to a Korean folk tale about a little green frog who always does the opposite of whatever his mother tells him to do. It's like a cautionary tale for disobedient children, I explore themes of that in the collection as well.

Make sure to pick up Gina's book Sea Change and pre-order her upcoming collection Green Frog.

In the past month from me...

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

Romance novel
Pre-NYCC writing

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Brian by Jeremy Cooper
Absolute Friends by John Le Carre

A LIST OF THINGS I'VE LOST
is now available for purchase
Order from publisher
Order from Bookshop.org
Order from Barnes and Noble
Order from Amazon

Got hit bad by a nasty flu last month.
Glad to be back on my feet.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
09.07.2023

Putting it Together: Letter 41

Over the past six years, PanelxPanel Magazine has been a central part of my life as a comics critic. I started writing for the magazine when I was in grad school. I had already gotten a few bylines here and there (shoutout to WWAC and Shelfdust), but PanelxPanel was the first place I was really writing regularly.

Because of the quality of the other writers in the magazine, I was driven to work harder, write better, read more widely. I also made friends through the magazine, and even later, became more involved as guest editor and then co-editor of the magazine.

Not only was writing for the magazine something I was incredibly proud of, it was also a great way for me to meet other critics and find a bit of a foothold in this industry I'm now a full-time part of. Recently, after 70 issues of a monthly schedule, the magazine has gone on hiatus. I thought it a good time to shout out Hass Otsmane-Elhaou, the founder of the magazine, and the guy who put it together in a beautifully designed format for six years. He's got a love for comics that runs deep and an eye for analysis that I always find exciting. Plus, he's pretty amazing to work with.

Last week, the magazine won its second Eisner Award for Best Comics Periodical/Journalism. I was at the Eisners to accept the award, and part of my speech was about the importance of independent projects, when we make them and when we support them.

My life was not only positively impacted but also completely changed by my work on this magazine, by the existence of the magazine. I think that it makes for a pretty powerful example of what independent projects can do, and why it is so important to support them with our dollars, time, and attention.

I am so grateful for PanelxPanel and the work that Hass and all of PxP's amazing writers put into it month after month for six years. I am lucky to have been able to work alongside such great colleagues for such a lengthy amount of time, and I highly recommend you reading through some of the magazine's back issues if you haven't read it yet. It's pretty great, if I can say so myself.

Do you have a favorite critic or piece of criticism?

Reply to this email-- I'd love to hear from you!

In the past month from me...

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

Romance novel
Post-SDCC writing

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Good Omens 2

Night Fever by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Jacob Phillips

A LIST OF THINGS I'VE LOST
is now available for purchase
Order from publisher
Order from Bookshop.org
Order from Barnes and Noble
Order from Amazon

San Diego Comic Con really knocked the wind out of me.
I'm excited to have some time to rest.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
07.29.2023

Putting it Together: Letter 40

Last weekend I drove to Las Vegas for the first time in years, and I was quite excited. I'm not much of a card player, but I did want to try my hand at the slot machines. Unfortunately, what I found was... not what I remembered.

The slot machines at all of the casinos I walked through had been replaced by digital monstrosities! These new machines were nothing more than glorified LED screens with onscreen buttons (what happened to slot machine arms?), beeping and booping in false manufactured excitement. Who wanted to collect their winnings on a receipt voucher? What had happened to the happy clinking of coins? Where was the fun in that?

Luckily, not all hope was lost. I turned to the handy dandy internet and found that there was still coin operated slot machines in one casino on the strip. In Circus Circus, there was a full section of slot machines you could put real quarters (and dollar tokens) in and pull a real lever and hear that satisfyingly real clik-clik-clik as the wheels turn and find their final position. And when you won, yes, you got to hear the joyful clink of coins hitting that tin tray.

The experience between playing a digital machine versus playing an analog machine was night and day. And it did make me think about what we lose sometimes when we go fully digital.

Phones and computers are amazing for sure, and we have more access to information (and many more things as well) due to the digital revolution. But maybe we're not ready to give up everything yet.

Certainly not coin operated slot machines, in my humble opinion.

Do you have a something you like to do in its analog form as opposed to digital?

Reply to this email-- I'd love to hear from you!

In the past month from me...

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

A chapbook of poems
An article about Our Flag Means Death fans at the WGA strike line

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Six the Musical

A LIST OF THINGS I'VE LOST
is now available for purchase
O rder from publisher
Order from Bookshop.org
Order from Barnes and Noble
Order from Amazon

It was warm, and now it is cold again.
Hopefully, we'll get some summer weather soon.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
06.15.23

Putting it Together: Letter 39

We lost Gracie last week, which was hard. Not only because it's always hard to lose a dog, but also because it all happened so quickly. From when she first started struggling to when we had to say goodbye to her was only two weeks, and for most of that time, we didn't think the issue was fatal.

In her final few days, I found myself disconnecting from what was really happening. In a way, I was treating her as if she was already gone. It's a strange thing, when you're waiting for someone to die. It's a weird in-between moment, when you're sad and waiting for something even more devastating, but time still keeps passing day by day, hour by hour. It's a long time to feel sad, and it's easy to just slip into compartmentalization.

Then, the movie Marcel the Shell with Shoes On went on streaming. Now I first watched Marcel the Shell only days after my grandmother died earlier this year. It was almost too much, especially with the central relationship between Marcel and his grandmother, but it also gave some sort of direction in my grief. So the day before we had to say goodbye to Grace, I watched the movie again.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the film, Marcel the Shell begins with Marcel and his grandmother (also a shell) having been separated from their community of shells. Because they're only a family of two now, they've had to adapt to survive, and they rely on only each other for survival and for emotional belonging. This past, and another experience, affects Marcel, making him afraid of change, of risk, lest he lose more than he's already lost.

The movie is about the enjoyment of the small parts of life, it's about grief and about living. Because the movie treats all of it, the tragedy and joy, as an integral part of living life, it helped me slip back into feeling what I was feeling, instead of holding all those emotions at arm's length.

I have no urge to analyze the film yet. Right now it holds a bit of a mysterious magic space for me. It has helped me, twice now, to remember that joy and pain can come hand in hand and that loss, while painful, is also a part of love. And for that I'm grateful.

Instead of leaving you with any big crystalizing thought about the film, I wanted to share a poem that's read in the movie, Phillip Larkin's The Trees, as it really speaks to me in this moment.

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Has any work of art or movie impacted you the way that Marcel the Shell impacted me?

Reply to this email-- I'd love to hear from you!

In the past month from me...

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An article about painting miniatures as a beginner
A poem about dogs

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Ghosts (tv show)
Turning Japanese by MariNaomi

A LIST OF THINGS I'VE LOST
is now available for purchase
O rder from publisher
Order from Bookshop.org
Order from Barnes and Noble
Order from Amazon

It's finally getting to be a bit warmer.
That's nice, right?

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
04.25.23

Putting it Together: Letter 38

In two tone artwork, the two chosen colors can used in many different ways. While one might assume that in black and white art, white stands for the background and black stands for the line art, it becomes much more complicated when you dive into the logic of the page.

"The Road to Tarascon" by Vincent Van Gogh

Line art, 2D art, as some might say, can never be a direct depiction of the way we see the world. Instead, it is a translation. A mechanical pencil tracing of a photograph will rarely capture the tone or feel of the image. You rarely see a drawing of a tree outline every single leaf, in fact that might look strange in a line drawing. But an artist might translate a shadow into a heavier line value, a larger exposed area for the bright sunlight.

As with all acts of translations, what appears on the completed page is full of the artist’s choice. What is not there is also by choice.

Here's an interesting exercise-- take a look at a work of line art (maybe the comic below) and try to think through the process the artist took to get to the image on the page. What is there? What is not there? (Is there a background? Does the body have hands? A nose?) What does that tell us about the work, about what the artist is trying to show?

When you start looking at art this way, you'll start to realize that art isn't just drawing pictures, it's making decisions about how to best communicate intention.

Pretty interesting, huh?

Do you have a favorite artist who works with lines only?

Reply to this email-- I'd love to hear from you!

In the past month from me...

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An interview with the founder of the Graphix imprint.
An article about book banning

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright, Bradley Hope
The Moth Keeper by K. O'Neill

We're finally past Groundhog Day.
Nice to see a little more sun every day.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
02.06.23

Putting it Together: Letter 37

Is Twitter a work of art? Well, that's debatable, but it’s had an enormous cultural impact, and I find it quite interesting, so I’ve chosen it as my topic this month.

I’ve been on Twitter since my sophomore year of high school— September 2009, to be exact (or at least that’s what my profile says). In that faraway day of yesteryear, I did have twitter on my phone, though it wasn’t the app. Instead, we would text our tweets in. That’s how long ago it was.

However, even just my saying that I’ve been on Twitter for nearly fifteen years (yikes) makes it sound like Twitter has been one thing this entire time, which is definitely not true. Anyone who has been on Twitter lately could list handfuls of differences between Twitter today and Twitter as it was last year. And over the course of a decade? Well, tweets used to be limited to 140 characters, remember?

When I started Twitter, it seemed mostly like a platform for people to talk to celebrities and for celebrities to talk back. But over the years, it’s shifted to become central to news reporting, collaborating, organizing, and even bullying and the spread of mass disinformation. It’s been a way to share and find art, to meet people, or just to share pictures of the meal you cooked for lunch.

Even with all its flaws (and it has many), I’ve always loved being on Twitter. It’s easy to use, easy to read, and it makes it easy to reach out and make contact with people, especially people you don’t know (yet), in a way that popular social media platforms are fast moving away from.

As a writer, Twitter has been a way for me to follow people whose work I admire and maintain relationships with them. In many cases, I've met some of my best friends first on Twitter. I recently said on David Harper’s podcast Off Panel that I also owe Twitter (or the use of Twitter) my writing career. It was on Twitter where I learned how to get articles published, how I learned about new writers and editors, how I met people, how people found my work. It’s also how I met my current boss.

But it’s imploding, for many reasons, the biggest of which is (unsurprisingly) its new CEO. This implosion of a space that has been so central to my life, social and professional, has gotten me thinking about a lot of things: How it might be good to have online public spaces that are not owned by private companies, how difficult it is to keep something that works well working well, let alone figuring out a way to monetize it, or even (when all that fails) to replicate it.

But mostly I've been thinking about how cool it has been to have Twitter and how disappointing it will be if (or at this point, it makes more sense to say when) it becomes unusable.

If Twitter does disappear or end up losing enough value for even me to skulk off into the shadows, it will be sad, as I don’t think there is another place that is ready to replace it online. It's become clear that as people have tried (and failed) in the past few months to create an alternative, there’s no going back to the world that Twitter once was.

Perhaps we’ve moved past that era of the internet, as we move away from centralized spaces and towards different types of algorithms and formats where other types of content (as opposed to simple, short bursts of language) are prioritized. Even though I'm very much looking at it all through rose colored glasses, I do believe that Twitter was a simple and valuable way to connect, and I'll be sad to see it go.

Were you ever on Twitter?
If you left, why'd you leave?
If you stayed, why'd you stay?

Reply to this email-- I'd love to hear from you!

In the past month from me...

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An interview with Dave Chisolm
Some poems

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

The Pigeon Tunnel by John Le Carre (on Le Carre's life, research, and relationships)
How to be Happy by Eleanor Davis (not actually about how to be happy)

It's a new year, if you can believe it.
Here's to a wonderful 2023 for everyone.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
01.03.23

Putting it Together: Letter 36

I watched the Orson Welles movie The Trial the other night, and something interesting happened. I kept getting distracted by Anthony Perkins.

You know, I normally really enjoy Anthony Perkins, I think he’s an interesting actor. But earlier this year, I watched the documentary Tab Hunter Confessional, which dove into the life of the actor Tab Hunter, probably best known for starring in Damn Yankees. Tab Hunter and Perkins were in a relationship, and the way the documentary portrayed it, it looked like Anthony Perkins was a pretty bad boyfriend.

Now, I obviously wasn’t there, and so I know very little about what actually happened in that relationship, beyond what Tab Hunter shared after Perkins’ death. But it struck me, while watching The Trial, how I kept thinking about something that had nothing to do with the movie at all. It got me thinking about all of the stuff that we bring into a reading of an artwork, even the stuff that is completely irrelevant.

Of course, there’s the good background we bring. Our life experiences might help us connect to a book more, or a movie we’ve seen in the past might make our understanding of a current movie richer. Often knowing historical context can be vital to understanding a work of art (The Crucible being written during the Red Scare is pretty important to know), or can even change how we feel about something (James Dean films land differently because we know he dies young).

Sometimes, I think it would interesting to watch something without that outside information. But that would be impossible. We always understand art through what we’ve experienced, what we've seen, what we've learned. That’s what makes one work resonate more at one time and not at another. It’s why people have different understandings of how something works well or not (though some of that is simply taste too). It's also what makes art exciting and malleable and alive.

We can’t control whether or not we’re thinking about Anthony Perkins potentially being a bad boyfriend or the fact that we're having a terrible day or that the person crinkling their coffee wrappers in the row ahead of us is making it very difficult to hear the movie. Yet all these things may shape how we read a work of art.

And because we can never be “objective” about it, we might as well be honest about it. Our understanding of art, our interaction with it is colored by a million different variables. We should recognize that's simply part of the experience.

--
Have you ever brought something outside of a work of art into your understanding of it?

Reply to this email-- I'd love to hear from you!

In the past month from me...

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An interview with Ronald Wimberly
An article on movies

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

White Lotus season 2 (I have yet to see season 1)
Abbott Elementary

Hoping you and yours are doing well going into the holidays.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
12.07.22

Putting it Together: Letter 35

I'm usually good for a quick take on my way out of the theater, but sometimes a play leaves me stumped. This happened last week when I saw Tom Stoppard's new play Leopoldstadt, which seems to be inspired by Stoppard's own family, many of whom perished in the concentration camps during the second World War. Unlike Paula Vogel's topically similar Indecent which also featured a uniquely haunting ending, the crushing aspect of Leopoldstadt felt unresolved as I walked out of the theater and into the street.

Why? Well, my first thoughts are that while Indecent is a powerful story about an unimaginable tragedy, it is also a somewhat small story. Though the tragedy is unimaginable, we have enough time to understand each of the characters and who they are and their wants. We see each character's beginning and their end. In contrast, Leopoldstadt is an epic with an extraordinarily large cast of characters, and an unwieldy one at that. We don't have time to learn all the characters' names, let alone who they are. All we have, which is not a surprise considering the play is about an Austrian-Jewish family in the early 1900s, is what happens to them.

The rest of it, the individual realities of each life, you're still untangling (like the cats cradle motif in the play) throughout the applause and as the curtain comes down.

But I don't think it's a bad thing for a work of art to remain unresolved. While there's something enjoyable about a neat ending, there's also something powerful about a work that wrestles with a subject in a way that cannot be contained within its own boundaries.

Life is rarely neat, as satisfying as neatness is, and sometimes, to grapple with a horror, you must actually grapple with it instead of feeling that it is over once the lights come up. The unresolved aspect of Leopoldstadt seems to force you to live with the story, to continue to unravel it, to carry it with you out of the theater. The truth itself, the reality itself, is too unwieldy to comprehend, so maybe presenting that truth in a way that is difficult to untangle, to resolve, is the most faithful way to tell it.

--
Is there a work of art, a movie, a play that you're still figuring out, long after you've stepped away from it?

Reply to this email-- I'd love to hear from you!

In the past month or so from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

Some thoughts on Andor
Some thoughts on adaptations

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

The new seasons of Derry Girls
Into the Woods on Broadway
Interview with the Vampire

I'm happy to be back home-- at least for the next few months!
Hope you're happy at home too.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
10.23.2022

Putting it Together: Letter 34

When people ask me for movie recommendations, I tend to turn to a pretty simplified list, which includes some of my favorite movies, but not all of them. This is because the movies that I like the most and the movies that I’d recommend to others don’t always overlap.

There’s a sort of unspoken promise when it comes to movie recommendations (at least I feel like there is) that the movie should be enjoyable for a general audience. A regular movie watcher wants a full experience, a movie that feels like it has “worked” or succeeded at doing what it’s tried to do.

To someone who watches several movies a week, I’d feel fine recommending a movie that’s completely unbalanced, frustrating even, if I could add the caveat that they should watch it for the cinematography, an actor’s performance, or even one particular scene. Someone who often watches a lot of movies often searches for something new, something interesting, even if it doesn’t quite work.

But that’s not what people are usually asking for when they’re asking for a movie recommendation. I find this contrast interesting. Obviously, people turn to art to fulfil different purposes, and most people, when asking for a movie recommendation, want something that’s going to feel like its worth their time. In other worlds, something that feels more or less done “well.” But not all things done “well” are particularly interesting, and not all interesting things are done “well.” The reason why I have been thinking about this lately is because of the recent Cyrano adaptation directed by Joe Wright and starring Peter Dinklage.

This is a movie that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend if someone asked me for a good romance to watch, but it is a movie that I’ve recommended to film fans a couple of times, particularly because it's really hard to recommend a movie that you think doesn’t stick the landing, and for me, Cyrano’s ending is the movie’s weakest aspect.

But that doesn’t mean that Cyrano isn’t worth watching. Not only are the performances really interesting (Haley Bennett is particularly magnificent as Roxanne), the strange and sometimes brilliant choices in music (this is a musical, by the way), the absolutely gorgeous choreography, and the stunning war scene makes Cyrano a movie that I’ve been consistently thinking about, months and months after watching it. But it still doesn’t fall under what I’d consider a “recommendable” movie (this is also why I list “interesting works” in my newsletter as opposed to recommendations).

I think that there’s something to be said about approaching more art through a less comprehensive way, looking for something interesting instead of “great,” even as a novice. I know very little about sculpture, so if I were really going to go out of my way to see a sculpture, I’d want it to be a good one. But what if I let that aspect of “good” go for a bit, and focused on a technique that is interesting? What if I focused on the use of the material? The subject? What if instead of sometimes looking for something that feels “worth our time,” we change the idea of what is worth our time?

Of course, that doesn’t mean that we should all be watching experimental films when we’re in the mood for a romantic comedy, but the more art I interact with over the years, the more I start to think that we don’t always have to search for the great or even the complete. Sometimes interesting is enough.

--
Thank you for your patience as I get back into the swing of things after a few months of a LOT of convention travelling.
Do you have a favorite movie that you don't recommend to people?
Reply to this email-- I'd love to hear from you!

In the past month or so from me…

Gotta catch 'em all!—Tim Allison is on a mission to collect every C2E2 badge

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

Some vegetable based poetry
An essay on Blues Clues

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

The Collectors by Phillip Pullman
Sandman on Netflix

It's been a hot minute (both literally and figuratively) since my last newsletter.
Lots of travel with work, but I'm glad to be back!

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
9.4.2022

Putting it Together: Letter 33

War scenes in film, as a whole, are pretty terrible.

Which makes coming across a great one, like the one in Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight all the more visceral. Welles focuses on faces, not the drop of an anonymous body that might as well be falling luggage, but a pluck of a taut bowstring, a launched arrow, and the light dissipating from a pair of eyes, making it impossible to turn away from the raw brutality of warfare, forcing you to look at it.

Welles had to lie to get the film funded, convincing a producer that he was adapting Treasure Island and building sets that looked like they could be used to film it. They ran out of money, and performances had to be redubbed because of stray noises on set and the heavy accents of the European actors, who were cheaper. Jeanne Moreau could only film for five days. John Gielgud, ten.

And at the center of it all, Welles as Falstaff— large, gregarious, heartbreaking. The forever boy with a greying beard, so easy to love, but impossible, impossible to defend. Because the realities of life sneak in, no matter how hard you try to make merry, and war is not the same thing as playing at war.

Welles loved playing Falstaff, and why wouldn’t he? He too, was an ambitious liar, always laughing always smiling, clowning for the young prince, dancing for the young prince. But the prince isn’t a young prince anymore. He does not look at Falstaff when he rejects him. He looks only forward, refusing even a glance towards the one he deserts.

It’s hard to cut ties with what made you, but we do it anyway. Yes, growth is turning away from what you once loved, but what is a greater betrayal than to look away when you do it? Welles turned his back on his father, and felt forever guilty about it after his father died. Later, Welles’ own daughter Chris would cut ties with him.

Packed suitcase.

Taut bowstring.

Pierced armor.

Don’t look now.

--
Thanks for hanging around as I play around with style!
Are you an Orson Welles fan?
If so, what do you like about his filmmaking?
If not, what don't you like?

Reply to this email-- I'd love to hear from you!

A LIST OF THINGS I'VE LOST
is now available for purchase
O rder from publisher
Order from Bookshop.org
Order from Barnes and Noble
Order from Amazon

In the past month from me…

Why banned books are the books your children should be reading for Popverse
The hokey joys of Michelle Pfeiffer in Grease 2 for Popverse
No, Taika Waititi will not save us for Popverse
Andi Watson on The Book Tour, Kerry and the Knight of the Forest, and comics for kids vs. adults for Popverse
Four new diary comics

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

A list essay
An essay revisiting The Amazing Spider-Man

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Fire Island dir. Andrew Ahn (streaming on Hulu)
Down With Love dir. Peyton Reed (streaming on HBO Max)

After a day of no power in Ohio (where I am right now),
I have never been more grateful for air conditioning (and electric lights)!
Hope you're staying cool wherever you are.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
6.15.2022

Putting it Together: Letter 32

Every year or so, there comes a new book that every young adult should read. Squire by Nadia Shammas and Sara Algafeeh is this year’s book. Squire tells the story of a young girl named Aiza who is a member of a marginalized group in an ever-growing empire, but she has dreams of a better life, for herself and for her family. To get that, she decides to join the military and become a squire. This hefty graphic novel (it’s over 300 pages!) deals with Aiza’s goals, her hopes and dreams, and the history behind the history she’s been taught. The book hits you with such nuance and fun (did I mention the book is also fun?), that I just couldn’t put it down.

Squire is full of adventure and exciting fight scenes, but it also depicts a world that feels a lot more real than most of other stories that are filled with adventure and dreams of becoming a knight. For one, it depicts the impact of violence with honesty. There’s weight to the combat (and the depiction of who the combat is directed towards) and role of the military in Squire. There are no easy montages that help Aiza become the best fighter in her trainee group. There are no easy fixes for the problems the kids face. Instead, they have to figure it out together, and slowly. Just like real life. Just like a real adventure would be.

I grew up loving stories about knights. The Arthurian legends fit at the center of those stories, promising a way of life that followed a code of defending people who needed to be defended and stopping people who need to be stopped. But this same narrative has been used in deceitful and manipulative ways ever since there has been history. Since the people in power write history, they will always cast themselves in the most romantic role, with the most romantic justifications of violence, whether or not that was how said violence was truly being used. Squire questions the history that has been passed down and why it has been passed down.

I recently interviewed the writer and artist of Squire, Nadia Shammas and Sara Alfageeh (hopefully, it’ll be published in a few weeks), and Shammas mentioned that their graphic novel isn’t meant to provide answers. Instead, it’s meant to get people to ask questions, to really think about the world of the book and how it might apply to their own worlds. This move towards inspiration, in my opinion, is the hallmark of an excellent book for young readers and older readers alike-- a book that wakes the reader up, that inspires their imagination and excitement, but also makes them think about the world a little differently.

--
Has a book for young readers changed how you see the world?
Reply to this email and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you.

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An outline of a book
A script for a romance webcomic
An article on the reality of ornithopters in Dune

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

She is Haunted by Paige Clark
Our Flag Means Death streaming on HBOMax
"Rumble Strip" podcast episode on town meetings at 99% Invisible

The world is a-changing! The flowers are out (in California)!
Spring is definitely here!

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
4.19.2022

Putting it Together: Letter 31

You're sorry-grateful, regretful-happy
Why look for answers where none occur?
You'll always be what you always were
Which has nothing to do with, all to do with her

“Sorry-Grateful” was the first Sondheim song that really lodged itself into my brain, and it hasn’t left since. As a teenager, I had gone to see a college production of Company, and while I adored the whole show, “Sorry-Grateful” was the song that I played and replayed for weeks and months after. The song felt like a puzzle, something that only real adults would understand, and I tried my hardest to put together, piece by piece, what the song really meant. More than a decade later, I still don’t know what it really means, but I realize now that the inscrutability is the point.

Within the show, “Sorry-Grateful” serves as a response to Company’s unmarried protagonist, Bobby, when he asks a married friend, “Are you ever sorry you got married?” His friend responds, “You’re always sorry. You’re always grateful,” and soon others join in with similar contradictory statements. Whenever a moment of certainty is introduced in the song, it is immediately undone in the following line.

If you were to plot the song’s verse structure on a graph, it would seem fairly simple. A statement is made, and it is followed by one that proposes an opposite meaning. But because this seemingly simple structure is built on contradiction, it is able to express the ambiguity of relating human experience. Though Bobby is searching for an easy, straightforward answer that might resolve his malaise regarding relationships, he is given no easy answers. Or he’s told that if there are easy answers, they don’t stand firm. Each answer is constantly being uprooted and overturned. Each lyric rings of truth, but of a truth that unsettles itself in the succeeding line.

Though Sondheim feints at resolution throughout the song, he never really moves towards a real solution, keeping Bobby and the audience in a prolonged state of equivocation. By the chorus of the song, the full statements have broken down into hybrid words like “sorry-grateful” and “regretful-happy,” transforming the previous contradictory sentence style into even briefer fragmented statements. This lyrical break, or stutter, if you will, rejects even the sentence as a whole truth. Now, the word too must contain multitudes.

So “Sorry-Grateful” carries many different meanings, most of them contradictory, but what it argues, in its form, is that something like marriage can rarely can be boiled down into straightforward answers, because it is experienced daily. It grows and changes, it is not stagnant, it is not still, it cannot be solidified. Any answers that might be provided, any definitions or descriptions, must always be in the plural to maintain a grain of truth. Sondheim’s ability to express this complexity, his refusal to land on a simple answer even at the end of the song, makes “Sorry-Grateful” read as if it contains all truth about marriage and relationships and, simultaneously, none of them at all.

--
What is a complex/contradictory song that you love?
Reply to this email and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you.

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

A short comics script
A book (!) proposal
An article on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Chimes at Midnight dir. Orson Welles (streaming on HBO Max)
American Girl dir. Feng-I Fiona Roan (streaming on Netflix)
Enter the Blue by Dave Chisolm

A daffodil just bloomed in the garden.
Spring is (kind of) here!

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
3.15.2022

Putting it Together: Letter 30

As a critic, I’m often asked how I choose what to write about. It’s an interesting question and one that I don’t consider very often. I usually just write about what I think is interesting (or about something that an editor needs covered). But, when considering the question more, I realized that there are works of art that move me deeply that I’m not at all interested in writing about, like Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. I could probably write ten essays on Stephen Sondheim’s Company before I could ever write satisfyingly about Sunday in the Park with George, the same way that I could write plenty about Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11 or Magic Mike, but I don’t feel the same way about his No Sudden Move, which I enjoyed just as much, if not more.

Usually, my interest in writing criticism starts when I interact with a work of art and it reminds me of something. I don’t mean that the work is necessarily derivative, but that I can see it as part of a pattern. That pattern allows me to see the work within a wider context and position it within some sort of larger cultural conversation, which in most cases, is what criticism is about.

Now the cultural conversation isn’t always something purposefully dictated by an artist. Conversations pop up in the most unlikely of places and depend on the audience and what they see in the work, not the creators. As pointed out in a recent academic symposium, the Dreamworks film Boss Baby inspires questions about child development, Dreamworks’ patterns of animated intertextuality, and Satre’s writings on authenticity, though I am certain that the filmmakers had no particular goal to cater to such readings.

Now there is definitely a way to write about everything, as reviewers will tell you, but I think that there’s a reason that I have failed (though I’ve tried) to write complexly about Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece Sunday in the Park with George. A large part of my failure is that, to me, the work feels complete unto itself. It answers all the questions that it poses, or at least it provides satisfying ambiguities.

Whenever I write a piece of cultural criticism, it’s usually because I am not satisfied. I don't mean that I'm dissatisfied with the work or that the work is missing anything, but that I want to consider it more deeply, that I want to work with it instead of solely experiencing it. Writing about the work allows me to spend more time in it, to dig deeper into the questions it poses or the arguments it might be making (or even arguments one might make with it), to focus on the details and see what I can find, and then to articulate what I find interesting about the work to others.

Of course, what may seem like a closed work to me may not read the same way to other writers or audience members. But that’s why criticism is such a personal craft. It’s dictated by the critic’s viewpoint, history, interests, tastes, and abilities. I can only relate things the way that I have seen them. For that matter, I can only see things the way that I have seen them. That is, until I get to read someone else’s particularly astute piece of criticism.

And that is, after all, what writing and reading cultural criticism is about. As Sondheim writes in Sunday in the Park with George, an artist’s role is to “give us more to see.” Criticism is, to me, about taking something that’s already there and pointing out what else might be there (or what could be there, with a new reading), about putting into words something that I have noticed that others might not have seen.

What kinds of art get stuck in your brain?
--
Reply to this email and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you.

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An article on an old comic strip
A book (!) proposal
An article on Woman of the Year

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

No Sudden Move (dir. Steven Soderbergh, on HBOMax)
Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts (by Alex Langlands)

I'm not sure about what Phil the groundhog said,
but I'm ready for winter to be over.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
2.15.2022

Putting it Together: Letter 29

As long as I’ve had a way to play music, I’ve listened to the incredible 1961 soundtrack of West Side Story and yet, watching the new Spielberg adaptation of the film, I felt like I was hearing some of the music for the very first time. In particular, “The Dance at the Gym: Blues,” which had always seemed stilted and dated to me (an immediate “skip” on my CD player/iPod), felt completely fresh and alive.

The soundtrack of West Side Story (2021) was adapted from Leonard Bernstein’s original score by composer David Newman, and the music was played by the New York Philharmonic and conducted by the great Gustavo Dudamel. The notes are the same in the 1961 film soundtrack, but the experience is completely different. The music sounds looser, more open and dramatic and fun. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the original version was lesser. It just means that contemporary ears are different than ears in the sixties. Music has changed, and we understand the language of it differently, in the same way that the word “Daddy-o” sounds dated in the old film, but feels different when performed with a contemporary actor (shoutout to the wonderful Mike Faist for making some very stylized lyrics feel realistic).

There are a lot of people who don’t like adaptations, or, if they do, they don’t like any modernization of the “original” material. However, I think that approach is flawed in two ways. First of all, it’s ignoring the fact that the original material is still there. Why remake something exactly, when that thing already exists? The second is the assumption that the old material still speaks to a contemporary audience, which is often not true.

As much as I loved this adaptation of West Side Story, many critics have brought up the question of whether or not this is still a relevant story to tell in 2021, and that’s a fair criticism. Our ideas about race and fairness and forgiveness don’t quite match up with what happens in the film, even with all its modernizations. Though I know that Maria is going to forgive Tony for killing her brother because I’ve seen the old film, that doesn’t mean that it makes sense for her to do so. And the idea that we’re still supposed to feel any sympathy for the Jets after they attempt to rape Anita feels like a stretch at best. But that doesn’t mean that West Side Story is a bad movie and should be thrown out with the garbage. Nor does it mean that any criticism of the film should be ignored.

I loved this new West Side Story, but hearing people come to the story for the first time, I started to see a lot of flaws that I hadn’t clocked because I was introduced to the story as a kid. And that’s a good thing. There’s a stereotype that critics are always looking or bad things to say, but I don’t think negative criticism of what I consider to be a good film is necessarily coming from a bad place. The reason we need more people talking about art seriously is because art can influence the world, for good or for bad. While a work of art can have a lot of amazing things in it (as I believe West Side Story does), it can also have harmful things in it too. That doesn’t mean “throw it all away,” but it does mean, “talk about it” and “think about it.”

In the case of art, there's no reason to try to boil everything down into one perspective. That's the beauty of art-- that it can mean many things to many people. And the more we hear about different people's perspectives, the richer and more nuanced our own thoughts can be. That's part of why I love writing and reading cultural criticism. Hearing about other people's perspectives, especially when they differ from my own, can give me a completely fresh understanding of something that I thought I knew like the back of my hand.

Did you watch the new West Side Story?
What did you think about it?
--
Reply to this email and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you.

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An article on an old comic strip
An essay on The Good Asian
An interview with the owner of a great comic shop!

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Dear Ex (Dir. Mag Hsu and Hsu Chih-yen) on Netflix
Little Big Women (Dir. Joseph Hsu) on Netflix
The Secret Pilgrim by John Le Carre

A new year is here. Bizarrely enough.
I'm glad you're still here.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
1.11.2022

Putting it Together: Letter 28

This month, in celebration of my book launch, I am skipping my short essay. Instead, I’m sending you a sneak peek of my book A List of Things I’ve Lost, which is out in exactly one week through Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. For those of you who haven’t heard my spiel, A List of Things I’ve Lost is a collection of poems about memory, loss, and fading recollections of childhood.

Pre-order from publisher
Pre-Order from Barnes and Noble
Pre-Order from Amazon
This is my very first book, and I am so excited to see it out in the world soon. Here are the first four poems of the collection.

--

Each season steals a part of me away

There might be something left
of me somewhere;
here.

The streets, at least, remain
familiar.
I retread
the path I took
as a child.

-

The favored remnant of summer

The smell of concrete dampened
by a hose, dust sloughing
off its surface, running
through the cracks.
Tiny rivulets
cause changes so small
you’d never notice
unless your cheek was pressed
up against the sidewalk,
your ear against
the grass.
-

Growing Up

I cannot count the summers spent
nursing the few moments of freedom from school,
sitting on prickly grass, picking at weeds,
the gnarled bark of a pomegranate tree.

Above me, birds swirl, trying to mimic
the weightlessness of the clouds,
though I give them no notice.

Instead, I long for a friend,
certain that I will be alone forever.

As the sunlight fades and shadows grow long,
I place my hands on my head and watch
my silhouette transform into a large, unblinking eye.

-

The Forest in the Lake

to run among the trees,
to see the sky fractured
through their branches,
bare feet firm
on glassy water.

I could find peace
from the gnawing feeling.

Free
to revel in
aloneness,
to race after
danger,

and then
to find someone
to share this mirror
to another world.

Who are your favorite poets?
--
Reply to this email and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you.

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An article on an old comic strip
An essay on The Bishop's Wife
Book promotion stuff

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

The Power of the Dog (dir. Jane Campion) on Netflix
West Side Story (dir. Stephen Spielberg)
Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell

It's the end of the year.
What are your hopes and dreams for 2022?

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
12.14.2021

Putting it Together: Letter 27

CW Pencil Enterprise was one of the first places I dragged my family to when I moved to New York. I remember spending at least an hour on determining which three or four pencils to buy. I left the shop with a smile on my face, my wallet ten dollars lighter, and an envelope wrapped up nicely with yellow ribbon.

Of course, I lived quite a ways away from CW Pencils, all the way up on 111th Street and on the wrong side of the island. It was a long unwieldy trek from Harlem (and later Inwood) down to Chinatown, but it felt like a holy one. I would climb out of the sticky, smelly Grand Street station (I only really seem to remember Chinatown in the summer) and buy an egg tart or meat bun to snack on as I walked to the neat little pencil store on Forsyth Street that was mecca for stationery lovers.

What really stood out about CW Pencils was the sense of love and care that went into every single decision, from the meticulous displays to the brightly colored ribbon they’d tie your package with (even if that package held only a single pencil). You could tell that the store’s owner—Caroline Weaver “CW” loved pencils as much as anybody could. But the store wasn’t meant only for afficionados. At the end of summer, you’d see professional artists shop side by side with children preparing for the school year, and sometimes, they’d even buy the same pencils. And that made perfect sense because CW Pencil Enterprise was one of the only places in Manhattan where one could walk in, spend no more than five dollars, enjoy a beautifully designed shop, and leave with multiple new high-quality products to try out at home.

Last month, far away from CW Pencils (now on Orchard Street), I placed my final online order before the beloved shop closed. I scrolled and scrolled, looking at beautifully photographed pictures of pencils nestled in their respective boxes, and as I hovered my cursor over each picture, I found that most of them were already out of stock. That’s when it really hit me how sad CW Pencil Enterprise’s closing really is. Nowhere else in the world is there as welcoming of a place to purchase pencils, and soon this perfect little strange endeavor would be gone too.

I would have loved to say goodbye to the store in person—to take one last look, to snap photographs and commemorate this impossible little shop, but instead I had to say goodbye through an online purchasing system. As I finished my shopping, it occurred to me that saying goodbye to CW Pencils was similar to how I had said goodbye to New York.

When I left my apartment in Inwood in March 2020, I didn’t know it would be permanent. I had a carry-on bag and a vague idea of someone to whom I might sublet my apartment for a month or two. But I never went back. I’m happy to be able to safely spend time with my family, but because of the slipshod nature of my leaving New York, I never felt like I got any real closure. All my farewells were in hindsight, flipping through pictures of my apartment on my phone and keeping up with friends through video chats. It was only recently that I realized I wouldn’t be moving back in the foreseeable future. And now, I feel so separated from my life in New York that it feels too long gone for its loss to be acknowledged in any meaningful way.

Then again, most important things in our lives slip away without us noticing them at the time. Usually, we realize only in hindsight how special certain people were to us, certain places and moments. And having the chance to actually take the time to say goodbye to something before it’s gone— even if that just means ordering one last box of stationery goodies through a website, is still a gift.

What's a place that you loved that isn't around anymore?
What's your fondest memory of that place?

Reply to this email and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you.
--

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

Some editing work
New art poems!
A short comic script

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (on Amazon Prime)
Tick... Tick... Boom! (in theaters)
High Five for Glenn Burke by Phil Bildner

We're nearing the end of the year, if you can believe it.
What do you want to do with the next two months?

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
11.16.2021

Putting it Together: Letter 26

Artist Olivia Jaimes began drawing Nancy Comics in 2018, and since then, the strip has been one of my regular daily joys. Jaimes is funny, leaning more towards the meta gags (which I like), but most of all, she really gets why Nancy is so lovable. Nancy isn’t just a little kid full of one liners—she’s a stubborn, brilliant, lazy, precocious girl who is so self-centered that the world around her does actually seem to bend her way when needed.

In Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik’s seminal essay “How to Read Nancy,” they write that Nancy’s original artist and creator Ernie Bushmiller’s “formulaic approach to humor beautifully revealed the essence of what a gag is all about – balance, symmetry, and economy.” While Jaimes and Bushmiller differ in many ways, I do believe that Jaimes also achieves balance, symmetry, and economy, both in her art style and in her storytelling prowess. Her gags are simple but regularly funny, grounded in the modern world and aesthetics while paying clear tribute to the recognizable rhythm of Bushmiller’s original strips.

Consider the above strip. The joke is both incredibly modern and, at the same time, as old as jokes get. In the first panel, an old man looks at Sluggo and Nancy walking down a sidewalk, as he grumbles, “Kids these days don’t know how to mail letters or write checks.” Then, in the second panel, we see Nancy and Sluggo next to a mailbox, Nancy cooly raising an envelope to the slot. The grumble continues, “Except with an air of ironic detachment.” Which would serve just fine as a punchline, except that we get a third panel, where the old man shakes his fist, shouting, “You hooligans! Be earnest, darn it.” Nancy, in the distance and now reduced (alongside Sluggo) to a few wavering “unfinished” lines, replies, “NAH.” It’s a fun laugh, driven home by the fact that the loose awkward art of the kids in the last panel reads like an “F*** you” and the fact that Nancy is from a time of mailing letters (sans ironic detachment) and ice cream cones and circuses and bankers in old timey suits.

When Jaimes first began working on Nancy, there was a bit of hubbub amongst Nancy fans. A certain group of people didn’t like that Nancy now sometimes wore shorts and pants (though she had, occasionally, before). They didn’t like Jaimes’ distinctly simplified line that lacked the clear inky quality that her predecessors used. They didn’t like that Nancy and Sluggo had cell phones. But there’s something Nancy-like to the way Jaimes’ has brazenly worked against what people don’t like about her work (including her iconic Labor Day strip with the famous “Sluggo is Lit” panel). Jaimes understands not just how to tell a joke but also how to tell a Nancy joke in a way that provides modern readers with an extra chuckle. Because it isn’t just Nancy who is precocious. Jaimes, as an artist, is just as precocious as Nancy is. And she’s created an entire new fan base for the character.

In a way, the response to Jaimes’ Nancy, both wildly positive and wildly negative, speaks to how we treat cultural icons and how we expect bits of our history to be treated. Do we preserve iconic characters and stories behind glass, exploring them only through their classic treatment? Or do we continue to play with these symbols? Re-creating them for new readers and new readings? In my humble opinion, Nancy was never meant to fit into a box, and the fist shaking at Nancy breaking out of her 40s world just goes to remind us how little she cares about what’s expected of her. Nancy makes her own rules.

What's your favorite newspaper comic strip?

Reply to this email and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you.
--

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An article on an old Batman comic
A short comic script

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney
The Silver Arrow by Lev Grossman

The days are getting darker,
so let's do our best to look for some light.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
10.12.2021

Putting it Together: Letter 25

I’ve long been of the opinion that it’s always worth sacrificing a technically perfect vocal performance for an emotional one, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the combination of both won’t knock you off your feet.

I first saw Jessie Mueller perform as the lead in the musical based on Adrienne Shelly’s 2007 film Waitress. Mueller’s character Jenna is a waitress stuck in an abusive marriage who learns that she’s pregnant and is now beginning to feel like she’ll never find a way out. At work, she finds peace baking incredible pies, but at home she’s faced with nothing but fear and helplessness. By the point in the show that we get to her big number “She Used to Be Mine,” Jenna’s on her last legs. She sees nothing but a terrifying future for herself and for her baby. All she can do is wonder how she got from being who she used to be to being who she is now.

And she begins to sing.

Jessie Mueller’s voice is like butter. So soft (yet strangely powerful) that its nearly painful to listen when she’s singing with deep emotion. There’s a complexity in her voice that forces you to think of her as a person who is really feeling something as opposed to a character just facing a challenge.

People often say that, in musicals, characters start singing when their emotions get so big they can’t be contained in regular speech. I’ve never found that to be quite true.

Plenty of musicals have very intense emotional moments portrayed completely through unsung dialogue (consider the ending of Follies, when the music finally stops, and all the characters simply have to face the brokenness of their lives) or they have their characters sing about fairly mundane situations (consider the opening number to In the Heights, which speaks much more to the character of a neighborhood than deep or large emotions). Instead, I think of the songs in a musical as a tool that allows the audience to get a peek into the characters’ minds, to reveal something about them that one would never really say aloud outside of a song.

“She Used to be Mine” is a song like that. For most of the play, Jenna is busy interacting with the people around her. Every moment she has on her own seems to focus more on her mother and her love of baking than the very awful situation she’s in. But in “She Used to be Mine,” she can’t escape it anymore. She has to feel the weight of it, she has to see it. And, in the beautiful art form of the musical, we get to see and feel it with her.
--

What's your favorite emotional performance in a musical?

Reply to this email and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you.
--

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

A short story about a screenwriter
A short comic script

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Justine by Lawrence Durrell
Plan B dir. Natalie Morales (streaming on Hulu)

The corn I planted last week is beginning to sprout.
It's very exciting.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
9.14.2021

Putting it Together: Letter 24

Last month, I wrote an article about queerness and revolution in one of my all-time favorite TV shows—Black Sails. For those who haven’t seen the show, it’s like a much better Game of Thrones, with a stellar last season and lots of gorgeous on-location shots of very intense people sailing on pirate ships.

The show functions as a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and features his famous characters Captain Flint, Long John Silver, and Billy Bones alongside real-life pirates like Blackbeard, Calico Jack, and Anne Bonny. As England considers clamping down on piracy and retaking their previous colony of Nassau, the pirates are all woven into a web of simultaneous interdependence and a quest for power.

Each pirate has their own reasons for being “on the account,” and they each have their own goals. But what makes the show particularly interesting (and successful, in my opinion) is the depiction of friendship and close relationships within these power dynamics and struggles. In a show that centers violence, it’s love and friendship that spawns the show’s most powerful and interesting moments.

Of course, Black Sails isn’t a show about just friendship. It’s about violent people doing awful things to each other and to strangers. But there could have been a much lesser version of Black Sails that focused only on the violence, intelligence, and ruthlessness of the pirates that it follows. Sure, there are one or two truly terrible, completely heartless characters in Black Sails, but they don’t merit much screen time or any real interest because Black Sails is not a show about empty, power-hungry people, it’s a show about ambition and how it intersects with human feeling.

What captures our attention (and hearts) are the human aspects— knowing that these deep, complex characters must make decisions between ambition and love and seeing how the consequences of those decisions impact the characters so that they choose similarly or differently in the future.

In Black Sails, we see how leaning into friendship and trust can help or hinder a character's personal goals. We see drama and tragedy and pain, and it’s all beautifully, wonderfully affecting, because we know what lies behind the betrayals and tough decisions. And the knowledge that there is a person who we understand and empathize with behind those betrayals and tough choices, is what makes the show so compelling and so gut wrenching.

What's your favorite tv show about people doing bad things?
Reply to this email and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you.
--

In the past (very busy) month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An essay about LilNasX's music videos
Fall teaching syllabus
Article on an old horror comic

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling by Phillip Pullman
The Passing Playbook by Isaac Fitzsimmons
One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

The fall is almost here, and things aren't really slowing down.
But, I just saw a pin-tailed whydah outside my window.
What luck!

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
8.17.2021

Putting it Together: Letter 23

Towards the end of John Huston’s The African Queen, Humphrey Bogart’s rough Charlie Allnut and Katherine Hepburn’s uptight Rose Sayer get stuck in a mass of reeds. They can’t see a way out and are resigned to starve to death where they are. That’s how the majority of the movie felt. Dead in the water, nowhere to go.

This is a short introduction to a review I wrote in a fiery passion after sitting through what many people call a classic. I wasn’t planning on publishing the review, as most places don’t publish reviews for movies that came out decades ago. but as you can probably tell, I just couldn’t stand the movie and my thoughts started pouring out. I found The African Queen boring and the performances wooden (though I usually love both Bogart and Hepburn). I thought the story was trite and the obstacles were silly. And yet, my opinion of the movie is in the minority, so why not defer to the knowledge that I might just not “get” the movie, and that it's really a masterpiece?

Well, it all comes down to a matter of taste, doesn't it? Taste is a funny thing. It obviously changes over time. There are plenty of works of art that I adored as a younger person (the Aida musical, for one) that I can’t quite justify giving a gold star now. Similarly, there are films that I had watched and not understood or even disliked that I really enjoy now (Spotlight has only gotten better over time, though I found it paint-by-numbers when I first saw it). There’s no shame in changing your opinion on things. When you’re a kid, everything is new, and so most things seem pretty original. It’s only when you’ve seen a few hundred movies or read a few hundred books that you start to be able to see who is deriving what from whom, who is relying too much on Shakespeare or Hitchcock or Kael. It’d be easy to say that taste continually gets better over time, but I think everyone has seen critics go off the other end of ending up liking nothing at all, which is equally useless. So what is the point of cultural criticism?

Over the past year, I’ve been writing monthly comics reviews for The AV Club. I hadn’t really written many reviews before. When I did, it was usually because I had adored the book and felt like it needed more attention. But that practice was different from what I was meant to be doing-- I wasn’t just meant to be writing about comics I liked. Plus, I had to give a letter rating, which I don't enjoy and tend to shy away from. It seems to flatten the conversation. What if a story is ideal for children, but won’t do well with adults? What if it’s terrible, but I wholly enjoyed it? What if it’s a masterpiece, but it bored me?

Of course, in the end, the job was writing about a comic in a way that would hopefully be most useful to the audience. Luckily, I wasn’t constrained to giving only a letter grade, but I also had space to write with more nuance about what the work was trying to do and whether or not it succeeded or failed. But this time of writing regular reviews changed the way I considered taste.

I’ve begun to think of taste as being confidence backed up with analysis. Confidence is essential, because if you lack confidence, you stop trusting your gut and simply follow what everyone else is saying, which is the death of this type of writing. Then, of course, there needs to be justification for why something did or didn’t work for you, or else you risk losing your audience's understanding.

Of course, confidence takes some ego, but too much spoils the writing because it doesn’t leave a whole lot of space for experiencing the art itself and you might miss something. You must be open to the art first. But after, in the thinking and rethinking and considering, that’s when ego comes in and does its job. That’s when we begin to sketch out what we really feel about something and place it in a wider context.

And who knows? Sometimes you’re just wrong. Even the great Ebert and Siskel said that they regretted giving Slap Shot a thumbs down (a recommendation from me, for those Paul Newman fans). But criticism isn’t meant to be right all the time. It’s meant to direct attention to where places where there aren’t a lot of attention. It’s meant to create new contexts to see things with, to provide new alleyways to walk down. It’s about widening the scope of the discussion, not ending it. And that practice, above all other types of writing, I find immensely rewarding.

Is there a movie that everyone else adores but that you hate?
Reply to this email and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you.
--

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

A comic script
An essay on Captain America: The First Avenger

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Scales & Scoundrels comic from TKO Studios
The music of Penelope Scott

We're halfway through summer (if you can believe it).
So go an have a barbeque or something, I definitely will!

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
7.13.2021

Putting it Together: Letter 22

It's been a busy month for me. Probably the busiest in a while. All good things, but fairly exhausting. So no short essay about a work of art this month. Instead, I wanted to share a piece of writing I did as a short-lived lead magnet for this newsletter.

So, without any further ado...

Here are eight ways to engage more deeply with art.
--

“The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.

(There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)”

- C.S. Lewis

Art is meant to be interpreted and talked about. But before any thinking can happen, the art must first be experienced.

Below, I have listed eight different techniques that you can use to engage with a work of art (whether that’s a movie, sculpture, book, song, or anything else that might delight you) more deeply.

I highly recommend trying all of these techniques, but I don’t think they should get in the way of what C.S. Lewis calls “surrender” in the above quote. If you’re on your guard when you’re taking something in, you’re always at risk of missing something beautiful.

Read/Watch/Look at it again

It’s impossible to notice everything about a work of art at first glance. Take your time to explore. Re-watch that movie. Reread that book. Come back to the sculpture a week later. The way the light falls will draw your attention to something new.

Just like a song that was important during a relationship can feel different after a breakup. A single work of art can mean something different to you at different times of your life.

Choose one small aspect of the work and pay extra attention to it

Find one thing—a corner of a painting, a piece of dialogue, a stanza of a song. Study it intently. What do you see? What makes this part different from the rest of the piece? How does it interact with what’s next to it? Does it add or subtract from the overall effect?

Do it with a friend

Turn to your partner and say: Tell me what you see.

Having a conversation about a work of art is one of the most fun and fulfilling ways to engage with that work on a deeper and more thoughtful level. You’ll learn how your observations and tastes differ from others, and you’ll develop a broader understanding of how a single work can mean different things to different people.

Think of an aspect of the work that moves you (or bores you), and consider why it moves (or bores) you.

Do you feel an emotion bubbling up when you get to that part of a song? Don’t ignore that feeling! That’s a sign that the art is doing something for you. Return to that moment, to that thought. What are you feeling? Can you isolate what caused this reaction in you? Does it still work the second time?

Learn about when the art was made

If you’re in a museum, read the wall label or talk to a docent. Go on a tour or check out the artwork’s Wikipedia page. This information is usually pretty accessible, and knowing what was happening in the world when a work of art was being made can add to your understanding of it.

Learn something about the artist

This is similar to learning about when the art was made. Though you can definitely have a complete experience with a work of art without knowing anything about its artist, learning about an artist can give you more insight into how and why something was made.

Emily Dickinson’s shut-in life certainly informs how we understand her poetry. Phillip Guston’s mid-career change in painting style and subject tells us about what his art is reacting to.

Trust your instincts, but then dig deeper

Your first reaction to a work of art is important. But that shouldn’t be your last word on it. Look a little closer. What exactly is this work of art doing that pleases you or annoys you or disgusts you? Have you seen another work like this one? How do they compare?

And of course, don’t forget to enjoy yourself.

Nothing is more boring than a person who doesn’t let themselves be moved and is blasé or cynical about everything all the time.

Analysis is wonderful, but don’t let that keep you from surrendering to the work and feeling something.

Museums are starting to open up again.
Do you have plans to check out some art soon?
I'd love to hear about your adventures!
--

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

A comic script
A review of Tillie Walden's newest comic

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

The City of the Plague God by Sarwat Chadda
Bo Burnham's Inside on Netflix

It's very hot and getting hotter (at least in LA).
Make sure you're drinking enough water.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
6.15.2021

Putting it Together: Letter 21

- Announcement-
Uncanny Valley Archive 001 Anthology Kickstarter ends in 14 days!!!
(will feature an essay by me about Ex Machina and Pygmalion)
We're $3000 away from our goal!

SpongeBob SquarePants: the Broadway Musical is a brilliant show. It’s gorgeous and full of spectacle, great sound design, inventive costumes, and warm-hearted humor. But it’s also a show with some weight at its cheery center-- though some dismiss that weight because of its protagonist’s sheer optimism. The musical begins with SpongeBob waking up in his pineapple house and declaring to all around that this day could be the Best. Day. Ever. Unfortunately, this mood doesn’t last for long, as we soon learn that a volcano is going to erupt and wipe out all of Bikini Bottom and its inhabitants. Unsurprisingly, this leads to widespread hysteria and the alienation of SpongeBob’s friend Sandy who is blamed for causing the volcanic disaster because she is an outsider (re: squirrel).

Sandy, who also happens to be a scientist, invents a doodad that may help save the town, but she isn’t even sure she should help the citizens of Bikini Bottom, as they've been chasing her with literal pitchforks. But, she’s a hero, and she and SpongeBob and Patrick get her doodad into the volcano with only about ten minutes to spare. When they return to Bikini Bottom, the citizens are rioting and literally tearing the town apart, blaming each other for the disaster. There are only six minutes left before the possible eruption of the volcano. SpongeBob takes the hand of his friend and sings, “Just six more minutes left… We’ve done all we can do. And whatever happens next, I’m glad I’m here with you.”

The great thing about SpongeBob is that he isn’t, as he might seem, unfailingly optimistic. He struggles and falls into panic like everyone else does, but he still gets back up off the floor, he still supports his friends, and he shows everyone in Bikini Bottom that while you cannot control whether or not you are afraid, you can control how you behave when you’re afraid.

The first time I saw the musical, I was a little unnerved by the darkness of the story. I was moved by it, but the story seemed really bleak for a show that was catering to children. But the more I thought about it, the more that I realized that this is exactly the kind of story that children should have access to. Not only does it touch upon the possible darkness of the world, it also gives children (and us) a script, a way to react when the unimaginable happens. It tells its audience that fear should not be faced by ignoring it or by finding someone random to blame, but by doing what you can to stop the tragedy (and prevent future tragedies-- there is someone actually responsible for the volcano eruption) and then spending time with the people you love.

As a Broadway fan, I love a spectacle as much as anyone else. But it's rare to see a spectacle that both has something to say and says it well. Spongebob the Musical changed my own expectations about what it means to fight against injustice and also to be kind and care about community. It reminded me that even when things are bleak, we still control the way we behave. We can help people, and we can hurt people, and that choice is in our hands.

Spongebob the Musical's cast recording is streaming on Spotify, and you can buy a digital copy of the pro-shot on Amazon Prime.

What's a piece of children's media that has changed the way you think about things?

Respond to this email, and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you
--

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An article on Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s graphic novel Skim
An article on Ex Machina and Pygmalion

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Ball of Fire dir. Howard Hawks
The Year That Was by Tom Lehrer

Keep your eye out for cool wildlife.
Spring is here.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
5.18.21

Putting it Together: Letter 20

Sometimes it’s time for a little change, especially at the (hopefully) tail-end of a pandemic. I love books and comics and watching movies and television, but a couple weeks ago, I couldn’t really focus on any of them. Starting a movie or picking up a book seemed exhausting. So, in my free time, I turned to one of my favorite podcasts listened to about twenty hours of 99% Invisible.

99pi is an incredible podcast about design hosted by Roman Mars. It can seem like a strange concept, a fully auditory show about the very visually focused medium of design, but that’s kind of the fun of it. It’s totally a fresh way of "looking" at the world around us. Some objects described are easily recognizable (like road signs). Some, though, remain a little mysterious after their description, leaving the listener to wonder and imagine and then turn to the internet to find a supplemental picture.

Photograph of a "Trig Point" used to triangulate locations when mapmaking.
Photo by Jza84

Each episode of 99pi dives deep into the invisible thoughts, reasoning, and history behind stuff that, on the surface, just doesn’t seem very interesting. Of course, there are certain topics (like baseball sign stealing) that have drama already built in, but topics like the kidney shape of California swimming pools or the history of curb cuts can seem pretty mundane, that is, until the 99% Invisible team get a crack at it.

Not only do the reporters at 99pi dig up the weirdest and most interesting parts of their topics’ history (listening to the show, it’s easy to imagine that everything has a weird chapter in its making), but they also format the story to catch you off-guard, challenging your assumptions every step of the way. While there are dangers in saying that there are two sides to everything (there are certainly issues that do not have two valid sides), 99pi reminds us that what seems simple can be unbelievably complicated and complex.

Whether the topic is seemingly straightforward, like removing oil well platforms from the coast of Santa Barbara (there are surprisingly environmental reasons to keep those specific ones), or clearly mired in sticky ethical complications, like using old Enron emails to build artificial intelligence—99pi draws our attention to the individual steps and histories and decisions that have shaped our world.

99pi is always interesting and always informative, but more importantly it gets you to look at things and realize that actual people were behind them. Our society has become so distanced from the production of pretty much everything that we interact with on a day-to-day basis. 99pi reminds us how human nature and choices have shaped our world and that our own lives and the decisions that we make may have lasting influence, whether we plan for it or not.

Is there a seemingly mundane object that fascinates you?

Respond to this email, and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you
--

-- Exciting News --

A review of ALL ABOUT ME by Cabbage Comics on Youtube!!

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

A personal essay on Archie Comics and Americana
An article on quests and what happens when they end

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Puppet History on Youtube's Watcher Entertainment
The Lady Vanishes dir. Alfred Hitchcock

It's a good time of year to reach out to a friend
who you haven't heard from in a while.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
4.13.21

Putting it Together is a monthly newsletter about art, how it’s made, and how we interact with it. If you enjoy these letters, please consider forwarding
this one to a friend who might like it.
--
Subscribe here.
Read all earlier issues here.
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Header art by Adrian Nyehart
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I’m so glad you’re here.

Putting it Together: Letter 19

--
A couple months ago, I came across a great sketch online called “Word Play Hotel.” It was a pun-filled type thing, built on expectation and immediate punchline, and I thought it was hilarious and incredibly smart. I shared it with a couple of friends and moved on. A few weeks later, the video came up again on my various social media feeds, and so I clicked on their Youtube channel and rewatched the sketch. Then I watched another, and another.

The comedy group Foil Arms & Hog consists of three Irishmen that go by—you guessed it, Foil, Arms, and Hog. Foil, because he’s often relegated to playing the comedy foil, Arms, because he’s all arms and legs, and Hog, because he hogs the limelight. They perform live and also have tons of really funny videos online.

Some comedy works simply because it’s clever and well-constructed (I’d put Word Play Hotel in that category), but I think the most interesting kind of comedy is insightful. The comedian notices something that we may already know but never quite think about and puts into language that makes it fresh. It’s more than a reminder of a shared experience— it’s an acknowledgment of it. And there’s nothing that resonates more than being seen.

Many of Foil Arms & Hog’s sketches focus on bits of regular life. Their best sketches are personal, ones that play into shared cultural experiences, weird family dynamics, and the awkward moments that come along with dating or going to parties or having a roommate. They poke fun at the trials and tribulations of teaching a parent how to use a computer and what it feels like when your brand-new cell phone is moments away from dying a terrible death. Life is full of big dramas, but it has it's fair share of small dramas too, and Foil Arms & Hog’s attention to those little dramas makes their work resonate.

As someone who is obsessed with the structure of art, I sometimes let myself try to boil comedy down to patterns and the breaking of said patterns, but it’s never just that. There’s a sort of magic involved in getting someone to laugh, and there’s more space for surprise, and even connection, I think, in comedy than in other types of writing. Comedy is about the shared, about how we connect.

In that way, I think comedy is one of the most personal forms of art, as it's always a conversation, always making use of the space and of the connections between the comedian and the audience. It's about creating a shared experience and, for the audience, there's nothing quite like seeing pieces of our own lives, with all their little idiosyncrasies, reflected back to us in a new light. -- What's the last thing that made you laugh?
Respond to this email, and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you
--
My diary comic is for sale until the end of the month!
Buy it here!--Check out "Word Play Hotel" below, and check out Foil Arms & Hog's Patreon if you're interested in supporting their endeavors.

Foil Arms & Hog's "Word Play Hotel"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8vzTo70izI&ab_channel=FoilArmsandHog

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An article on Archie Comics and Americana
An article on quests and their endings

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Supermutant Magic Academy by Jillian Tamaki
Beginners dir. Mike Mills

The signs of spring are beginning to appear.
What's your favorite sign of spring?

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
3.9.2021

Putting it Together: Letter 18

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is one of the most poignant shows about relationships, loneliness, and mental health that I’ve ever watched. For those who are not familiar with the show, it follows Rebecca Bunch as she throws away her “perfect” life as a high-powered lawyer in New York to move to West Covina, California and chase after her summer camp ex-boyfriend, Josh Chan. But Josh is already in a long-term relationship, and that’s where the drama of our story lies.

Still, as good as it is, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is kind of difficult to watch. Rebecca Bunch spends the majority of the series making bad choice after bad choice, sliding far too easily from slightly creepy behavior to outright stalking. I remember having to leave the room while watching sometimes, just because the cringe factor seemed too high for me to handle at the moment. But I would always come back, because I needed to know what happened to the characters next.

The cool thing about a television show is that you get a lot of time to live with the characters. You really get to see how decisions and consequences play out in someone’s life, how they can stumble, and how they can grow. There were characters I really just didn’t care for at the beginning of the series, but over time, I became more and more invested in their journeys. The show nudged me to step away from my initial judgment, and I began to empathize with people, even ones who had seemed silly or just downright toxic. The show doesn't excuse bad behavior, but it doesn't shy away from likable characters doing bad things or making bad decisions either.

It’s pretty impressive that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was able to tell an entire cohesive story about the messiness of life within its four seasons. From beginning to end, everything that happens in the show leads Rebecca Bunch and her friends to where they need to end up in that last episode. It’s kind of magical to realize that however small some storylines may have seemed, somehow all of those epiphanies and realizations along the way added up to something— and that something ends up reframing the way you understand the entirety of the show you’ve just finished watching.

Not a lot of shows are able to (or allowed to) land an ending, and it’s always great to see one that does. Especially one that reminds us that what we think we need in life may not be the thing that eventually makes us happy.

Plus, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a musical tv show, which adds quite a lot of points in my book.

Here’s a clip from the show of Josh Groban singing about how life doesn’t make narrative sense.

"The End of the Movie" feat. Josh Groban

Have you changed your mind about a character while watching a TV show?
What charcter and what show?

Reply to this email and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you.

--
New Newsletter Art! This beautiful new banner was created by artist Adrian Nyeheart Check out their work here.

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An article on The Birdcage
Revisions of a graphic novel script

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

A Touch of Pink (2004); A strange gay romcom in the style of Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet, but Kyle Machlachlan also happens plays the spirit of Cary Grant/guardian angel of the protagonist
Edge of Seventeen (1998); Very personal, realistic take on a young person's coming of age story
The Book Tour by Andi Watson; a strange and delightful graphic novel about a very very bad book tour
Real Life by Brandon Taylor; a gorgeous novel about a grad student trying to find his way back into real life

Let's enjoy the fun parts of winter while we can.
We're making our way to spring.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
2.9.2021

Putting it Together: Letter 17

John le Carré (born David Cornwall) died last month at age 89. Le Carré was not only the master of the spy novel (and one of my all-time favorite writers), but he was also a writer who had the extraordinary ability to capture the world in all of its murky complexity. He refused to make things simple, avoiding clear-cut characters and ethical lines that start and end at borders (the way that a lot of other spy fiction does), but that didn’t keep him from acknowledging evil when and where it happens.

Le Carré was famously a spy before he became a novelist, and unlike Ian Fleming, his work reflected his actual experiences with the slow and dangerous work of being in that world. His insistence on leading the reader through the excruciating uncertainty of being a spy and his matchless story construction (he always seemed to convince you that there was a way out, even when there wasn’t) were central to the engrossing stories that he told.

But what I think drove Le Carré’s best work is that he refused to look away from the ugly parts of life. His writing would face the darkest, most horrible truths without flinching. In fact, it was always clear that his characters lived in worlds of horrible truths, where the worst people could get away scot free because it would keep power with the people in power (an ongoing theme in Le Carré’s work). But his writing bore witness to the crimes orchestrated against innocent people and why.

When it comes to difficult topics in art, there’s often a conversation around whether or not it’s “nice” to talk about subjects like injustice, corruption, poverty, and all the other terrible things people have to live through. And while I do believe that it’s important to not spend one’s life obsessing over the bad, I also believe that looking away from those truths to preserve “positivity” minimizes and invalidates experiences real people have to face. Yes, we shouldn’t only focus on the bad in life, but ignoring it or denying it to preserve how we think the world “should be” can lead to further cruelty.

Without any knowledge of history, without an understanding how the world works, we can easily become perpetuators of damage ourselves, simply by being ignorant to the damage that has already happened. And, as we have seen recently, if a story is spun a certain way, it can seem, from certain angles and to certain audiences, that the oppressors are the victims.

I believe we have a duty to try our best to understand the world, to look when injustice happens and to act when we can. We may not always have the opportunity to act on a global scale, but we change the lives of those around us with our words and with our actions and with our support. To do so responsibly means understanding how the world works, the bad alongside the good. Armed with this knowledge, the world may seem murkier and a little darker, but our role in it is empowered, and we may, from our new position, be able to dream and create a future that is better than what we have.

-- When was the last time your opinion on a real-life subject
was changed by a work of art?

Reply to this email and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you.

--
Exciting news! My diary comic just got its very first review from critic Avery Kaplan at The Comics Beat. Read it here.

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An article on the graphic novel Snapdragon
Revisions of a graphic novel script

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Psych 2: Lassie Come Home on Peacock
Staged (starring Michael Sheen and David Tennant) on Hulu
Funny Weather by Olivia Laing

Things are getting kind of tough out there.
It's a good time to reach out and help someone who might need it.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
1.12.2021

Putting it Together: Letter 16

To me, the one trait that distinguishes the best childrens stories from everything else is a sense of wonder. Wonder, and the loss of it, is at the very center of the new Netflix Christmas movie Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, which begins with a sweeping musical number in the wonderful Jangles and Things (the most magical toy store in the world). But something tragic happens to toymaker Jeronicus Jangle, and the magic begins to fade, both from the toy shop and from Jeronicus’ life.

As time passes, Jeronicus turns further and further into himself, pushing away first, his daughter, and then the rest of the world. Even when his granddaughter (a young inventor herself) comes into his life, he can’t quite connect with her. At the height of his loneliness, Jeronicus sings, “Over and over and over again, I think on my life and what might have been.”

At this point in the movie, you kind of want to shake Jeronicus by the shoulders and tell him that everything he needs to have a life of happiness is right around him. But then he gets to the line, “Oh when did I leave the me who used to believe?” and it all makes sense. On the surface level, Jeronicus is singing about losing the magic that he once used to create. But that magic isn’t just about invention. By losing his ability to believe, he has also lost the ability to see the wonder of life, of human connection.

Creating toys is all well and good, but what Jeronicus really needs is a friend. Luckily, he ends up making a few. But the funny thing here is that the people who will become important in his life (minus one) were already a part of it. So much of what has kept Jeronicus alone for all these years has been himself and the way that he lost faith in what the world could offer.

Belief, like wonder, can be a risky thing. It places you into a position to be let down. It takes vulnerability and courage find joy and excitement in the world and the people around us. When life is hard, it can feel natural to close off from those around you, to turn inwards. It can certainly feel safer in a lot of ways. But closing off from the world also closes us off from all the magic that’s out there to experience too. And the longer we close off, the harder it is to reach out and to believe in the wonder of the world again.

In the end, what changes Jeronicus isn't some dramatic righting of the wrongs, it's his coming to care about the people around him. That's when the magic comes back into his life. That's when he's able to believe again.

I think it’s more important than ever to recognize that, even during a time of hardship, it's still important (possibly even more so) to search out that sense of wonder, to find exciting things and to share them with our friends and loved ones. No matter how unexpected life may be, no matter how far our lives have shifted from what we had expected or hoped, this need for wonder does not change. Because wonder isn't just a response to magic, it's a sort of magic in itself.

--What is the last work of art that instilled
a sense of wonder in you?

Reply to this email and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you.

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An article on the 1950 movie Harvey
An article on Nocenti and Aja's comic Seeds
Prep work for a comics fair(!)

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Dav Pilkey's book Cat Kid Comics Club
Ang Lee's film The Wedding Banquet
Rachel Bloom's TV Show Crazy Ex Girlfriend
Sidney Lumet's film Fail Safe

It's the end of the year.
Reach out to someone you haven't talked to in a while.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
12.08.2020

Putting it Together: Letter 15

"I've hated sports ever since I was a little kid.
Especially basketball."

This is how Gene Luen Yang’s graphic memoir Dragon Hoops begins. It’s not a particularly auspicious beginning for a graphic memoir about basketball, but people change over time. And that’s exactly what happens throughout the course of Dragon Hoops.

At the beginning of the comic, Yang is working as a teacher at Bishop O’Dowd High School. He’s just finished his graphic novel Boxers & Saints when he’s struck with the looming question “What if I'm all out of stories?” This haunts him (as it would probably haunt most of us), until he overhears a couple of students talking about the basketball season and how it’s “the biggest story on campus this year.”

Yang’s curiosity is piqued, and he goes to have a chat with the basketball coach Lou Richie. One interview later, and he knows what his next book is going to be. But he still has to deal with the problem that he doesn’t really care about basketball. He doesn’t even understand why anyone would care about basketball. He likes superhero comics, stories that have sure endings. And basketball doesn’t have sure endings.

It doesn’t take long for Yang to get more involved with the team. He does some research, both into the history of the game and also into Bishop O’Dowd’s history and the histories of the players. He begins to travel with the team, learning a little bit more about the stakes of each game, and miraculously, he begins to care about their outcomes. It’s kind of amazing how this shift happens. That it only takes learning about the story behind something to begin to care about it.

We like to think that the things that we care about truly matter, and that the things we don’t care about don’t. But any good artist can direct our attention to any one thing and make us care about it. Before reading Dragon Hoops, I had no idea that Bishop O’Dowd High School even existed, let alone had a competitive basketball team. But by the end of the book, it felt very important that Bishop O'Dowd should win their game. I cared about the characters. I rooted for them to win, to triumph over their little struggles and their big ones.

It’s no secret that Gene Luen Yang is a great cartoonist, but I think it’s sometimes easy to forget that he’s also a wonderful storyteller. Not necessarily because the stories that he chooses to tell are interesting, but because he makes the stories interesting. He tells each story in a way that gets us invested in something we couldn’t care less about before we had begun to read.

That’s the potential of any piece of writing or art or really any experience-- it changes your relationship with the world around you. Bishop O’Dowd’s basketball team changed how Gene Luen Yang thought about sports. Dragon Hoops changed how I thought about how we learn to care about different things. Maybe this newsletter will make you think about something in a new light too.
--Have you ever fallen in love with something you used to hate?

Reply to this email and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you.

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

A comedy piece on holiday movies
An article on duality in Gene Luen Yang’s comics work

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Land of the Sons by Gipi (Fantagraphics translation)
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

It's November and a good time to look at our history, the good and the bad.
What do you think we can learn from our pasts?

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
11.10.2020

Putting it Together: Letter 14

One thing that excites me most about art is how a work can change meaning depending on its context. In her book This is Shakespeare, Emma Smith describes Shakespeare’s plays as “unstable texts” that have shifting meanings depending on a variety of factors including where they’re performed, when they’re performed, and who they’re performed for and by.

Context and interpretation are often heavily considered when producing a play, mostly because of the well-understood role of actors and directors as interpreters. An actor can have a “take” on a role that is wildly different from someone else’s. A director can have a vision that changes the meaning or focus of the play, even while staying loyal to the text.

Of course, even our understanding of a play's meaning changes over time because our language changes over time, as does our culture and society. James Shapiro writes in The Year of Lear about the charged use of the word “equivocation” in Macbeth (due to tensions regarding Catholic rebels finding loopholes that allowed them to lie under oath) and the highly relevant political themes of separating kingdoms in King Lear (due to England’s new Scottish king’s goal of uniting England and Scotland).

When we read Macbeth or King Lear now, we aren’t particularly struck by how modern of the use of “equivocate” is or the “hot topic” feel of the united kingdom. In fact, unless we have access to that history, it doesn't factor into our understanding of the plays at all.

While we probably most often talk about context when it comes to plays (or sometimes, reboots of films), context matters in all forms of art. The tapestry depicting Picasso’s Guernica took on a different meaning when it was covered up for a televised speech at the UN. A statue can change meaning depending on where it’s placed, and a book changes meaning depending on when it’s read and what’s happening in the life of the person who is reading it. It’s not only actors who interpret the meaning of a text— we do it too.

To ignore context is to ignore the most central aspect of art— the fact that a work of art was made by someone in a specific time and place and that the same work of art is interpreted by people in other times and places. In this way, all works of art and literature are “unstable texts,” shifting with the times and with the lives of their interpreters.

While some people find this lack of stability frustrating, I find it exciting. It means that art is an ongoing conversation and that it's a conversation in which we have a voice. It means that we can reframe works of art again and again to find new meaning. It means that art is alive, and that we're the ones keeping it alive. And isn't that something?

--Have you ever learned something that made you think
about a work of art differently?

Reply to this email and let me know.
I'd love to hear from you.
--
Speaking of the theater,
I'm participating in the New York Theatre Workshop's 5k
and would love your support for this great cause.
Here's the link to my fundraising page.
I'm asking for donations of $5 and $10.

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An article on My Favorite Thing is Monsters
An article on duality in Gene Luen Yang’s comics work

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

"Apartheid and Othello" by John Kani
Holiday dir. George Cukor, starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn
Palm Springs dir. Max Barbakow, staring Andy Samberg and Cristi Milioti (streaming on Hulu)
Contradictions, a graphic novel by Sophie Yanow

It's October. Do you have a plan to vote?
If not, now's the time.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
10.13.2020

—

Putting it Together: Letter 13

Some people might argue that Window Swap isn’t a work of art, but I’d disagree. For those uninitiated (as I was before my friend Rachel sent me a link), Window Swap is a new website that features ten minute long views out of windows all around the world. In a time when there considerably fewer places to safely go, Window Swap reminds us that while our lives have shrunk a little, the world out there is still big.

What interests me the most about Window Swap isn't really the global-ness of it, but the fact that the focus of each video is on everyday existence. We don’t see fireworks or the pyramids or the Eiffel Tower. We see clouds and window plants and regular people on their way to the store. We’re asked to stay in the moment, even if the moment is recorded and somewhere far away.

A window in Bed-Stuy looks out onto an empty rooftop, as a dog steps onto the window sill and then lies down. A video in Cairo features a block of yellow apartment buildings and an empty construction site. In the corner of the screen, a pink polo shirt that’s been hung out to dry swings in the breeze. A video in Kuala Lumpur peers through a layer of shiny foliage to the city's skyline. In Mombasa, a cargo boat chugs slowly down a river.

After watching a probably unhealthy number of Window Swaps, I ended up looking out of my own window at the boring old sights that I see every day, and they suddenly seemed a little less boring. Even in the stillness, there are always changes to note. The leaves are beginning to pale. Different sorts of weeds have sprung up through the mulch. It's funny that watching videos of strangers' windows has encouraged me to spend more time looking through my own. I'm reminded that life is not just happening in other places around the world. It's happening here too.

--
What places are you missing?
Reply to this email and let me know.
--
Window Swap was created by
Sonali Ranjit and Vaishnav Balasubramaniam.

Check it out here.

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An article on Superman Smashes the Klan
An article on Judge Dredd

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

The Children's Hour (with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine)
This is Shakespeare by Emma Smith

Like a flood, September is now upon us.
What do you want to do with this Fall?

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
9.8.2020

Putting it Together: Letter 12

I first read Edwidge Danticat’s book Create Dangerously in college, and it has inspired and haunted me ever since. One of the book’s most memorable stories is one that Danticat’s father told her of young Haitian men and women organizing secret performances of Caligula after the traumatic public execution of two young dissenters of the country’s dictatorship. Even in the most oppressive times, people gathered in the backyards of churches and inside of people’s homes, performing plays and reciting poetry that could get them killed if they were caught.

Danticat writes about the bravery that it takes to even open a book when being found with that book could mean the end of your life. She then urges writers to “Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously… Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.”

When I first read Danticat’s book, I took this passage to mean that a writer should only write about important things, or why bother? Hearing this story, it could seem incredible that there would ever be any book worth dying for. But I now think that she's saying that regardless of our intentions, words can have an impact, and anything we write can matter to someone. So we must take our work seriously.

When we write (or speak), we usually have no idea where our audience is coming from, who they are, or what might be happening in their lives. We don’t know what our words could mean, for good or for ill, to those who find them. And so we need to be rigorous and precise in what we choose to say. We have to be brave and cannot write afraid, because there are readers who will read without fear, and we owe them our best.

This issue marks a full year of this newsletter, and I am incredibly grateful for your continued support of my writing. These past months have been strange and terrible for many people for many reasons, and I am happy that I have this outlet to connect with people, some who I have met and some who I have not.

I’d love to hear from you, so reply to this email with a hello, an update of what’s been happening in your life, or an interesting work on art you’ve stumbled across recently.

Thank you, as always, for being here.

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

An article on Superman Smashes the Klan
An article on Journey Into Mystery and revolution

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

Dark Waters (Mark Ruffalo against Big Chemical Company)
The Umbrella Academy Season 2
Felix Ever After (great summer YA read by Kacen Callender)

Summer is coming to an end,
what will you be bringing into the fall?

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
8.11.2020

Putting it Together: Letter 11

When Hamilton first appeared on the scene five or so years ago, it felt like a breath of hope, a call for a brighter future. Here was an expertly written work of musical theater made for actors of color to show their stuff while reclaiming America’s creation myth for a new generation. But the world has changed since Hamilton first became a phenomenon, and in light of the recent conversations about the history of structural racism in America, the idea of celebrating America’s creation myth in any way feels bittersweet.

The truth is that while Hamilton is an amazing work of art that I really reallylove, it also glorifies a group of men who stole land, actively enslaved people, and built a system that has continued to violently and systemically destroy and oppress people to this day. It takes these men’s stories (which have already long been at the center of how we understand America), glosses over their bad decisions and harmful actions, and paints them as heroes.

It can be uncomfortable to look at something that inspires us and brings us joy as something that can also cause harm, but the alternative is to ignore the harm that these works of art can cause. A similar conversation has been happening around Harry Potter and JK Rowling’s recent transphobic statements. I’ve been seeing readers call to ignore Rowling while holding tight to the books that she wrote. But to ignore Rowling’s authorship is to ignore the context of the books and the understanding that books can do good and bad.

A book can simultaneously teach children about kindness and also have racist undertones. A book can change your life but also take on a different cultural symbolism due to the creator’s behavior. Similarly, a musical can be great and have done a lot of good in some ways, while also doing a lot of harm elsewhere.

I think at the center of all of these conversations must be questions that we ask ourselves. Am I avoiding being critical of something just because I like it? Who is getting hurt here? Am I listening to what they have to say about the situation? Is my continued interaction with these works continuing to harm those people? Does the harm that this art causes outweigh my love for it?

As we slowly move to adjust our relationship with the darker parts of our history, we will continue to lose the “safe” feeling of loving things without questioning them. It will feel strange and uncomfortable. But that uncomfortable feeling shouldn’t keep us from questioning the things that we love. I think the instinct in these situations is usually to demand simple answers, to either continue to love something or pretend that it never existed at all. But there are no easy answers. And trying to find an easy answer so we can feel better about a situation can erase and worsen the pain that others are feeling.

I’m still a fan of Hamilton. It means a lot to me for a lot of different reasons, but I am definitely more uneasy with what it is trying to say than I was when it first came out. And I think it’s important to live in that uneasiness, to be aware of those feelings, and to let those feelings influence how I understand this work of art.

P.S. For those interested in reading more about the recent conversation around Hamilton, this article covers a lot of the finer nuances.

In the past month from me…

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…

Early notes on a book about detective tropes vs. romantic tropes
A review of a middle grade graphic novel
An essay about sexual harassment and assault in the comics industry

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…

This Was Our Pact by Ryan Andrews (a GREAT Middle Grade graphic novel)
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Normal People (both the TV show and the book!)
Animal Crossing New Horizons!!!

Growth can be painful and awkward.
Listen, adjust, and try again.
It's worth it.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
7.14.2020

Putting it Together: Letter 10

A Note: This newsletter is coming out a week later than it usually does. I thought it best to make space for other voices last week, and my topic seemed a little lighthearted for the moment. But just to be clear on where I stand— we have long been living in a system designed to benefit certain groups while keeping others out of power. Many of us have profited off of this system (whether we noticed it or not), and so it is our responsibility to change it.

Black lives matter, and they have been treated again and again as if they don’t. Doing the work to make ourselves and our society more anti-racist may be uncomfortable, but it is a much lighter burden than the ones that are placed on the shoulders of black people, especially black women and black queer and transgender folx. The work is hard and it will take time, but the alternative— living with and ignoring the constant cycle of injustice, can no longer be our future.

Legends of Tomorrow is a ridiculous show. It’s goofy and fun and cleverly uses its time travel premise to switch genres from episode to episode. But throughout all its chaotic excitement, it always maintains its central theme that friendship and found family matters.

Western media tends to treat friendship as somewhat disposable while treating romantic relationships as the only thing that really matters. In a lot of media, it's totally normal to cry over a heartbreak, but it's just not as acceptable to cry over losing a friend. Legends challenges that trend in a recent episode titled "Romeo v. Juliet: Dawn of Justness."

Nate and Ray are the best of friends. They time travel together, they train together, they fight bad guys together. But Ray has recently gotten married, and he and his wife Nora want a life outside of the Time Ship. While Ray has no trouble telling most of the team that he's leaving, he’s hesitant to break the news to Nate. So, when they’re assigned a new mission, Ray decides that he’s going to make it the best mission ever to soften the blow.

Of course, during the mission, Nate ends up overhearing Ray talking about his plans. Furious that his best friend kept such important information from him, he storms off without telling Ray goodbye. So Ray and Nora prepare to leave while Nate and the rest of the team save history by putting on Romeo and Juliet (I know, it's silly/amazing). But halfway through the show, Nate's friend Zari urges him to leave and say a proper goodbye to Ray.

Luckily, Nate catches Ray just in time, and both they get to apologize for their behavior. They say "I love you," they cry together, and they acknowledge that the situation really sucks. The delightful and surprising thing about this scene though, is that it's interspersed with the team's still ongoing production of Romeo and Juliet.

While might seem strange to compare a mostly happy relationship to a tragic one, the scene that Ray and Nate's goodbye is overlaid with isn't a sad one. Instead, it's the balcony scene, full of excitement and celebration of love.

It's a seemingly odd choice to draw a parallel between the love and heartbreak of a friendship to one of the most famous romantic scenes of all time, but it's powerful and gets the point across well. Nate and Ray's friendship is important, and the way that Legends handles their goodbye shows the audience that their relationship is valuable, that losing part of it hurts, and that what they have is definitely worth crying over.

What is your favorite story about friendship?
Reply to this email and let me know. I’d love to hear from you.

In the past month from me…
An article on journaling in Lucy Knisley’s Stepping Stones in PXP 35

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…
Mystery/Romance graphic novel script revisions
Five indie comics reviews
An article about The Visions
A query letter

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…
Troop Zero on Hulu. [Really charming underdog movie]
Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster books. From your local library.
A Sun on Netflix. [Tense film with great performances from Taiwan]

The world is overwhelming. But change is possible.
If you need support, let people know.
If you don't, keep an eye out for those who do.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
6.16.2020

Putting it Together: Letter 9

--
I used to never cry during movies. It didn’t matter how sad a story got, who fell off a cliff, or whose heart got broken, I refused to shed a single tear. My heart was cold cold piece of steel, and any time I felt tears coming, I pushed them down.

Over the past few years, things have changed pretty dramatically. Now, I cry at the sad parts of movies and at the happy parts. Mostly though, I cry what I like to call "art tears," which is what happens when every aspect of a work of art comes together and overwhelms you with its sheer power. Like at the end of the training montage in Creed.

The scene starts with Donnie jogging down a street. Some guys ask if he's going to visit Rocky, and Creed waves for them to join him. With motorbikes behind him, Donnie's jog turns into a sprint. He lets out a shout. The music swells and then changes.

When he makes it to his destination, he doesn't stop. He jumps from foot to foot, shadowboxing in place, his fists moving impossibly fast. The camera pans up to Rocky, leaning out of a window, weak from chemo treatments. Donnie shouts out, leaping with his arms in the air, though you can’t hear what he’s saying. You can only hear the music.

That’s when the tears come. Because Creed is my go-to plane movie, I’ve had multiple confused flight attendants glance from my tear streaked face to a movie about boxing. But I stand by those tears. I think what I have learned over time is that it’s a gift to be moved. That it’s extraordinary for someone (or many someones) to put a piece of art together and for their work to change the way that I feel.

Just this past month, I cried during Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine and at the part of Sunday in the Park with George when the actors organize themselves into the Seurat painting. This past year, I cried during Little Women and Moonlight and The Irishman, not because the movies were all sad, but because of the emotional heights that they reached.

When engaging with art, it can be easy to hold back on feeling, to try to first figure out whether something is “good” or to get at what the creator is trying to do. I’m all for that kind of analysis, but too much of it can get in the way sometimes.

You can always return to a work of art to think through things later, but feeling is precious and elusive. It's at the heart of why we turn to art in the first place. So why turn away from tears?

What was the last movie that made you cry?
Reply to this email and let me know.

In the past month from me…
“City and I” a new poem in Ekphrastic Review
"All Before It" a new poem in Rust+Moth
An interview with a comics librarian for The Comics Journal
Article on three of Mark Waid’s first issues in the new issue of PanelxPanel

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…
NOT my graduate thesis (It’s done!)
An article on the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island
An article on Lucy Knisley’s graphic novel Stepping Stones

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…
PBS's Poetry in America episode on Sondheim's "Finishing the Hat"
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

It's easy to get restless during this time of year, especially now.
But spring is coming and fast. How would you like to grow?

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
5.12.2020

Putting it Together: Letter 8

“After one long season of waiting
After one long season of wanting
I am breaking open”

Like many people, I turn to different art when I’m feeling overwhelmed. Sometimes this means reading a book that brings me comfort (shoutout to E.B. White), sometimes this means listening to a song that speaks directly to what I’m feeling.

This Mountain Goats song is called “Absolute Lithops Effect” after those tiny little cacti that look like two butter beans facing each other. According to songwriter John Darnielle, the song is about “sitting alone in a room waiting for something to happen.” There’s a lot of waiting happening in the world right now, and it’s easy to get lost in the uncertainty about the future.

But my gut says that when the world feels big, we should think small. We can take note of the little things that bring us joy, find actionable ways to shift resources to where they are needed most, and find peace where we can. Because if you can allow yourself a moment of peace-- that matters. If you can make someone’s day easier-- that matters. If you can show yourself or someone else some mercy-- that matters.

“I will bloom, here in my room,
with a little water and a little bit of sunlight
and a little bit of tender mercy”

Mercy is a word that gets loaded with a lot of baggage, but that doesn't make it any less crucial to our daily lives. At the very heart of it is an understanding that life can be difficult and that everyone could use a break now and then. Times are hard, and so we must show mercy to those around us, to those who are most vulnerable right now, and to ourselves.

As "Absolute Lithops Effect" points out, time doesn’t stop while we're waiting. We can grow while we’re waiting. That doesn't mean that we all have to develop new hobbies or write the next great novel. Though those activities hold merit, they are only representative of one kind of growth.

While we wait, we can give ourselves the space and time we might need to heal. We can pay more attention to the world in which we live, taking note of what is out of our control and what is in our control. And then we can approach what we can control with a mindset of mercy, so that someday, when we emerge from our homes, the world that we face might be a little closer to the world we want to see.

How have you been doing in all of this?
Send me an email-- I'd love to hear from you.

In the past month from me…
I recorded a some songs I wrote! It's pay what you want. Including $0!
I spoke with Matt Lune on Shelfdust's Podcast about Bitch Planet #1
My very first humor piece at The Belladonna
An article about kid's problems in Judd Winick's HiLo series for PanelxPanel

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…
An interview with a comics librarian
Graduate thesis (almost done!)
Monograph
An essay about writing letters

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…
This essay about essays
Zefrank's videos, but specifically this one
Gene Luen Yang's new graphic memoir Dragon Hoops

It’s going to get harder before it gets easier.
But it will be easier if we do this together.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
4.14.2020

Putting it Together: Letter 7

Archives Book Shop is the platonic ideal of little bookshops. It boasts dusty and cramped bookshelves, the scent of aging paper, and the general feeling that if you speak too loudly, someone might glare at you. It’s the kind of place where you never find anything you’re looking for, but also a place you’d rarely leave empty handed.

My recent visit to Michigan State University and its local used book shop was rewarded with a collection of essays by E.B. White, who I mostly knew as the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. The collection began with the statement, “The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest,” so I was pretty much sold on the spot. I have been cheerfully devouring his essays since.

The thing about E.B. White (and any good essayist) is that he gets you to care deeply about the stuff that would never really catch your attention otherwise. He writes at length about a raccoon who lives in a tree outside his bedroom, about the coming and going of a storm, about the death of a pig, but he’s never trite or presumptuous. He doesn’t make huge sweeping proclamations about nature and life. Instead, he simply treats each subject with respect and, in doing so, deems them important.

In his essays, White upsets our general understanding that certain things matter and that others don’t. You could argue that feeding yourself is more important than the livelihood of the raccoon that lives outside your house, but maybe it isn’t. Though the local racoon never fails to steal the sweet corn that White dutifully plants each year, he refuses to shoot it, as “I am sure of one thing: I like the taste of corn, but I like the nearness of coon even better.”

This little shift in value from corn to racoon is poignant, partially because the value of both sweet corn and racoon could, in other contexts, seem pretty inconsequential. In Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a character famously asks, “What is more important, Shakespeare or a pair of boots?” Of course, the answer depends on whether you really need a pair of boots or not.

A boot is important and it isn’t. A racoon is important and it isn’t. Shakespeare is important and he isn’t. The indicators of value that we manage in our minds may seem certain, but they are neither certain nor are they accurate. The world and its many varied contexts are constantly changing, so it can be helpful to have someone like E.B. White remind us that it is often our experience with something that makes it valuable and that we should continue to make relationships to the things around us, lest we lose sight of what has the potential to become truly important in our lives.

What is something simple that you learned to value over time? As for me, I am a big fan of the person who practices the trumpet in the apartment below mine.

In the past month from me…
“Pandora” flash fiction piece on the Anti-Heroin Chic website
Five poems and a digital reading at Moon Mic
An article about grief in the fantastical horror genre in PanelxPanel Issue 32

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…
My graduate thesis!
An article about Judd Winick's HiLo series
Edits to the monograph about superhero storytelling

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…
Soupy Leaves Home by Cecil Castelluci and Jose Pimenta (a sweet graphic novel about what it means to run away from one's problems)
Smoke Gets in your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty (about working in a crematory and our society’s relationship with death!)
Mack and Mabel cast recording (just plain amazing!)

Upcoming Events - NEW -
3/29 - NY Feminist Zine fest @ Barnard College
4/9 - Interview with Check, Please! creator Ngozi Ukazu @ Books are Magic, Brooklyn, NY

The daffodils are starting to show their colors.

Though it's felt like forever,
spring is finally coming.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
3.10.2019

Putting it Together: Letter 6

“It seems to me that we are no longer part of this world.
We don’t belong to it. We are not connected.”

Cardinal Bergolio
The Two Popes

When I sat down to watch The Two Popes, I had been expecting a somewhat dry, conventional drama (which I probably would have enjoyed). Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by two hours of delightfully thoughtful, gorgeously-shot verbal sparring between two men who are at complete odds.

Because Pope Benedict (a.k.a. Ratzinger) and Cardinal Bergolio (a.k.a. Pope Francis) differ so much in their beliefs, some might argue that this film is about listening to opposing opinions, but I believe that The Two Popes is a film about the leap of faith that it takes to change.

The central conversation between Ratzinger and Bergolio is structured around how the church should interact with the world. Ratzinger believes that the church’s mandate is to hold to tradition-- to stand apart from the world as a shining example, while Bergolio argues that an organization that ignores what is happening in the world cannot serve its people. Where Ratzinger wants a church that stands firm, Bergolio wants a church that would move.

But beyond just talking about change, The Two Popes also shows how change happens-- first, through flashbacks into Bergolio’s experience during Argentina’s Dirty War and his subsequent exile. Before these experiences, Bergolio was closer to Ratzinger in his conservatism. But after connecting with people on a more personal level during his exile, Bergolio began to shift the focuses in his religious practice, something that Ratzinger considers a negative.

The second main change of the film happens over the course of the two men’s conversation, because it is through speaking and listening to Bergolio that Ratzinger himself begins to shift. This idea that it is through connecting with people that we change is a powerful one.

While Ratzinger’s values aren’t turned upside down by the end of the film, he does have a looser grip on the universality of their merits. He may still not agree with Bergolio on how the church should be run, but after speaking with Bergolio, he can see a future where Bergolio could be the right leader for the church.

In a way, The Two Popes frames the act of Ratzinger choosing to retire from the role of pope (knowing that Bergolio will succeed him) as an act of faith. Though he isn’t completely sold on Bergolio’s point of view, he is willing to believe that his own past choices may have been wrong.

Change happens when we allow ourselves to be unsure, when we open ourselves up to be moved by others. It is an act of trust, an act of vulnerability, and yes, an act of faith.

It can be dangerous to just open oneself up completely and without thought, but it is equally dangerous to close ourselves off and hide away. Luckily, life is a series of events and not just one, and we have more than one shot to change when we need to. In the words of Ratzinger's electronic watch (which urges him to meet his step count goal throughout the film):

Don't stop now. Keep moving. Keep moving.

--
What is your favorite movie that is mostly just people talking to each other? Reply to this email and tell me all about it!

In the past month from me…
An interview with Ngozi Ukazu about Check, Please! in the special webcomics issue of PanelxPanel

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…
Long-form comics analysis project
Book of poetry (revisions)
Article about grief and monsters in Something is Killing the Children
My graduate thesis!

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…
The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse by Charlie Mackesy
This cut song from Stephen Sondheim’s Company

I don't know how, but it’s already been six months of this newsletter.
The months seem to be getting shorter and longer all at once.

Thank you, as always, for your time and attention.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
2.11.2020

Putting it Together: Letter 5

I don’t know about you, but for me New Years is a time for writing lists.

So this month, I thought that instead of writing one longer essay, I’d write four shorter essays on what stood out to me this year. This is in no way comprehensive and is in many ways completely dominated by recency bias. But such is the way of the partial list.

So let's get started.

1.
In my favorite moment of Mark Doty’s essay “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon,” Doty writes that “what we want is to be brought into relation, to be inside, within.” This “bringing into relation” is exactly what John Green does with his podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed.

The Anthropocene Reviewed takes topics that seem so simple and straightforward that they might not seem worth talking about at all and then complicates them in a way that makes you think that maybe everything might be worth a second thought.

The reviews vary from funny (Diet Dr. Pepper) to heartbreaking (the seed potatoes of Leningrad), but each essay places us (as a species and a society) into context with something that we may not have ever thought about before.

It’s well-researched, beautifully written, and never fails to get me to think differently about the world around me. The best episodes of this year are "QWERTY keyboard layout and the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō" and "Gray Aliens and Rock Paper Scissors."

2.
The Lehman Trilogy is a play that tells the story of the 164-year history of the Lehman Brothers, from the moment the first brother set foot on American soil to the day the bank folded. By covering so much in such a pared down manner (the play is takes place on a single revolving set and features only three actors with zero costume changes), The Lehman Trilogy puts into perspective the way a dream can change from generation to generation as men make decisions that affect the world and the world shifts around them.

In a lot of ways, the play functions as a parable, as a larger than life telling of a story that, while true, kind of feels far away. It's a lens through which we can see the complex relationship between ambition and greed and how they intersect in the American experience. The National Theatre filmed the London production, so you may be able to find the filmed version at your local movie theater. Watch it if you can. There’s nothing quite like it.

3.
The Mandalorian was my annual reminder that there are a great many ways to tell a story. What excites me most about this show is that it takes its time. In contemporary mainstream media, there’s a certain expectation for speed and efficiency that is threaded throughout, and while speed can be good for telling certain kinds of stories (see The Lehman Trilogy above), it has become rare to see a story that treads slowly.

In that way and in many others, The Mandalorian refuses to be anything more than what it is. It doesn’t attempt to be one long movie or squash itself into the expected format of "premium television." Instead, it demands patience from its viewers, as it doles out the world it has built in tiny packets, all on its own time.

4.
A Temperance Meeting is not a new painting, but it is new to me. What stood out to me the most about this work was its use of light. At first glance, the painting seems to feature so much dimension, but when you spend a little more time with it, you begin to notice how flat it is in places. This flatness heightens the effect of the sunlight cast across the front of the milk maid (and the shadow that shades the farm boy) and places the two figures into direct opposition, into a sort of contrast.

The relationship between these central figures, how they stand, how they reflect and repel light, tells a story. A Temperance Meeting isn’t meant to show just a prototypical milk maid and farm boy. It features this specific milk maid and this specific farm boy and this specific moment that they share. It’s my favorite kind of scene, the kind of happening that is so easily forgotten or brushed aside, something that really could take place any old day. But through Winslow Homer’s capturing of the slight cant of the farm boy’s hips, the heavy set of the milk maid’s shoulders, and (of course) the light, this imagined ordinary moment becomes eternal.

--
What did you watch/read/experience this past year that has stuck in your mind? Shoot me an email and let me know.

In the past month from me…
“Edinburgh” published in the Winter 2020 issue of Third Wednesday
This twitter thread I wrote about Horvath’s Judgment Day at The Armory
This twitter thread lists my favorite things I published this year

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…
The plot section of the long-form comics analysis project (cont’d)
Two sets of interview questions about Edward Gorey
A poem about a chipmunk
A poem about A Temperance Meeting

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…
Milk on Netflix [just chugging my way through Important Gay Movies]
"The Palace" by Kaveh Akbar in the New Yorker [a re-read, but a necessary one, I think]
Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer
Knives Out [a good old whodunit in a theater near you]

It’s a new year, and though time is a human construct,
it’s a good time to start those things you want to start.
So start them.

Thank you for your time and for your attention.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
1.7.2019

Putting it Together: Letter 4

A couple weeks ago, I got to spend an hour on the seventy-two steps in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a.k.a. “The Rocky Steps.” It was freezing that day, but there were still dozens of people milling about, taking photos, running up the steps and holding their fists up to the sky as they jumped up and down.

It was fun to watch groups of friends do their best not to trip as they made their way to the top of the (admittedly very long) stairs. It seemed wild that there were children reenacting a scene from a movie made forty years ago. However, instead of thinking about Rocky, my mind was instead drifting to Ryan Coogler’s 2016 revival of the franchise, Creed.

I have always admired how Creed calls back to the past without trying to live in it or crystallize it. And it does so by anchoring the emotional beats of the movie in the relationship between Rocky, as the old famous boxer who is long out of the game (representing the past), and Donnie Creed, as the young upstart wanting to make his own name (representing the future).

Unlike Rocky's steps scene, which celebrates the peak of his personal physical achievements, Creed's steps scene celebrates their combined efforts. It takes place at the end of the movie, after all the training and the fighting has passed. As a stripped-down version of the Rocky theme plays in the background, Donnie helps an aging Rocky struggle up the stairs that he once bounded up triumphantly.

The scene is simple, but it is electric. It’s charged by our understanding of the past, of knowing what it means for Rocky to struggle up those stairs. When the pair finally makes it to the top, Rocky says to Donnie, “You know if you look hard enough, you can see your whole life from up here.” Though they are looking at the same view, we can tell that Rocky is looking out at his past and that Donnie is looking at his future.

I’ve always loved how, in this scene, neither the past nor the future is deemed more important than the other. Not only do Donnie and Rocky's lives reflect each other (Donnie’s future is Rocky’s past; Rocky’s past is Donnie’s future) —neither of them could have gotten this far without help from the other. There's never any ego between Rocky and Donnie, no jostling over fame and legacy. Instead, they support each other and are able to extend their legacy because they support each other. They give each other hope and a reason to keep going.

It's easy to imagine a similar story in which Donnie never came looking for Rocky, and the two ended up leading separate lives, Donnie never quite becoming the boxer he could be, and Rocky completely alone. But instead, they meet and, through Rocky's help, Donnie becomes the sort of boxer who can carry on Rocky's legacy and the kind of man who will sacrifice training time before the biggest fight of his life to take care of his sick mentor.

This scene reminds us that Rocky can’t be eternal, but his story can be, as long as new boxers come by and convince him to get back into the game, as long as new storytellers return to what came before and build upon it —and as long as kids keep running up those stairs in Philadelphia, arms raised high above their heads.

Watch the steps scene from Creed here.

What is your favorite reimagining of a classic?
Hit reply to this email and let me know—
I’d love to hear from you.

In the past month from me…
An interview with Melanie Gillman about reclaiming trans history in The Middle Spaces
An article about visual-emotional storytelling in YA sports comic Fence for The MNT
An article about fragments and repetition in noir storytelling in PanelxPanel
A poem titled “The impossibility of imaging spring” in Dunes Review

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…
The PLOT section of the long-form comics analysis project (cont’d)
A picture book manuscript about chronic illness
Early research for an article about Edward Gorey
A song written to a section of the Odyssey

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…
All the President’s Men (a rewatch, but a timely one. And oh, that Redford hair)
Hell or High Water (spectacular modern Western on Netflix, rich and deep in every way that you like)
Steeple by John Allison (monthly comic about priests battling supernatural forces)
The Irishman (De Niro at his best, also on Netflix)
--

It is almost the new year.
You’ve made it, and that’s enough.

Thank you for your time and for your attention.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
12.10.2019

Putting it Together: Letter 3

Road Show (a.k.a. Bounce, a.k.a. Gold!, a.k.a. Wise Guys) is probably best known as the show that Sondheim and Weidman reworked for over a decade just to get critically panned again and again.

I watched the musical a few months ago at the New York City Center, and while I liked it, it lacked the cohesive vision and punch of Sondheim and Weidman’s other work. Still, the show has been rattling at the back of my mind ever since, and seeing it and its mixed reviews has gotten me thinking about how we treat art that we don’t deem as “great.”

When a work of with a lot of potential is imperfect, we often have a habit of discounting the value of the entire work (i.e. the recent reaction to Game of Thrones). I think being critical is an important aspect of engaging with art (also an important part of not falling prey to propaganda), but I also think that we have gotten a little lost in the instinct to poke holes.

While skepticism can be a great tool, it can keep us from truly engaging with something. As C.S. Lewis points out in his book An Experiment in Criticism, “You cannot be armed to the teeth and surrendered at the same moment.”

Luckily, because I’m such a big Sondheim fan, I was very much still open to Road Show when Raúl Esparza began sing the song “The Game.”

Here's Michael Ceveris singing the song in the Off-Broadway production:

“It’s more than just the money that’s at stake. That’s nice, but it’s just icing on the cake. It’s your life, every pot. Who you are, not what you’ve got. The thing that really matters is the game.”

Sondheim is a master of many things, but there’s something uniquely powerful about the way he dissects the psyche of a character in his short, seminal character songs.

Where “Finishing the Hat” is about an artist who can never quite look away from his work, and “Marry Me a Little” is about someone who isn’t ready to be truly vulnerable to love, “The Game” is about a man who lives for the gamble and who can’t see anything beyond it. It’s a song about destructive ambition, but it’s also a song about jumping into something simply for the love of the act of jumping into something.

I was bowled over both by Esparza’s performance and by the song itself. I couldn’t believe that I had never heard it before. After the show, I immediately looked up the song to see if it was a new addition (which would explain why no one ever talked about it). To my surprise, the song had been included in every version of the musical, including the original workshop in the nineties.

This made me realize that there’s a version of my experience in which halfway through the show, I had decided that it wasn’t worth my time and mentally checked out. If that had happened, I don’t think I could have really heard the song as it is meant to be heard.

Being truly open to a work of art is an act of trust. That movie you’ve just started could actually be awful. That book you got for Christmas could be a total waste of time. But trust between an artist and an audience is crucial when it comes to true discovery.

If we're not open to listening, we wont ever be surprised. The world in which we’re never invested in anything that can disappoint us is also a world in which we miss moments of true genius.

As C.S. Lewis writes, “The armed and suspicious approach which may save you from being bamboozled by a bad author may also blind and deafen you to the shy and elusive merits—especially if they are unfashionable—of a good one.”

Have you ever had a work of art surprise you?
Reply to this email, and tell me about it.

In the past month from me…
An article about She-Hulk and showcasing the whole life (even the messy bits) of a superhero
An article on politics as a narrative force in sci-fi AND an interview with Sergio Aragonés(!) in the newest issue of PanelxPanel

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…
An article about sparsity and repetition in noir storytelling
The plot section of the long-form comics analysis project
A poem about rain
A creative work about eccentric wheels like the Pixar Pal-A-Round and the Wonder Wheel

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…
Silicon Valley a brilliantly written tech culture satire on HBO
Mooncop a delightful short graphic novel by Tom Gauld
Sondheim and Weidman talking about Road Show
Suncatcher a graphic novel about music and magic by Jose Pimienta
--

It’s a great time of year to be thinking about what you’re thankful for.
It’s also a great time of year to be thinking about
dismantling oppressive structures.

Thank you for your time and for your attention.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
11.12.2019

Putting it Together: Letter 2

Last month, my friend Paul pointed out that I should have probably added a content warning when I mentioned Fleabag in my recommendations. So fair warning. Fleabag has a lot of sex, a lot of cursing (this newsletter will have a teensy bit of that), and a lot of truly horrendous people.

“You know, either everyone feels like this a little bit and they're just not talking about it, or I'm completely fucking alone.”

There are a million reasons to watch Fleabag. The writing is phenomenal, the performances stunning, and the story structure seamless. But what I think is at the heart of the show is the way that it chooses to portray people.

Fleabag is a short show (six hours total) and covers a lot of ground, so things move pretty quickly. Over the course of the first couple episodes, we are fully immersed in the life of our protagonist (Fleabag) and introduced to the weird awful assholes she has to deal with. These characters are selfish and self-serving. They do awful things to the people they love. But the genius of Fleabagis that the show doesn’t stay there.

The characters who surround Fleabag, like most comedic characters, begin as archetypes. They’re flat and funny and mostly serve the purpose of being flat and funny. But as the show continues, each character makes the startling transition from punchline to actual human person.

In life, we so often allow those we meet to become representative of that one thing we know them for. People (especially the ones we dislike) are frozen in time, like bugs stuck in amber, unable to move or change beyond what we’ve deemed is their defining trait. Fleabag refuses to do this.

No matter how awful a person is, they never stay in their box. They continue on with their lives, they feel, they act, they persist in their strange, sharp humanness. Characters who seem like one-offs appear again and again. We get to know their weird habits, their wants and fears. Fleabag refuses to let people out of its orbit until we see them. And by that point, it’s hard not to love them, at least a little.

In life, we’re so afraid of being shunned, of being declared unlovable, that it can seem impossible to show our true selves, to reveal the parts of us that we feel no one could ever accept. That’s why it’s so powerful that the characters in Fleabag are kind of awful. Because their flaws (even the big ones) never deem them unlovable, and through following these characters during their most vulnerable, horrible, and brilliant moments, we learn that their lives are beautiful.

Which means that maybe our lives are beautiful too.

On that note, go tell a trusted friend something you’re nervous about sharing. It’ll probably turn out better than you think.

And if it doesn’t, well, what’s the point of being afraid of who we are?

In the past month from me…
An article on genre and repetition in the newest issue of PanelxPanel (Issue 27)
A new poem titled “Roost” in the fall issue of Third Wednesday (Vol XII, No. 4)

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…
An article about politics as plot device in science fiction
Long-form comics analysis project
Edits to poetry manuscript

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…
Poetics of Music by Igor Stravinsky
Letterkenny on Hulu
Lucky Penny a graphic novel by Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota
Cast recording of the London revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company

It’s getting dark out there.
Stay safe and stay warm.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
10.8.2019

Putting it Together: Letter 1

For anyone who remembers the middle school phenomenon that was Bend it Like Beckham, director Gurinder Chadha has a new movie, and it’s really good.

Based on one of the screenwriters (Sarfraz Manzoor)’s high school experiences, Blinded by the Light is a movie about Javed, a teenager who discovers the music of Bruce Springsteen in the small town England in the late eighties.

There’s a lot going on in Blinded by the Light. It’s a love letter to Bruce Springsteen, a snapshot of Pakistani immigrant life in Luton, a drama about a son and his father, and a coming of age narrative. But the thread of the film that stood out to me the most was story of a young artist struggling to find himself when everything in his world is going wrong.

We are often presented with an image of the lonely writer sitting at their desk, separated from the rest of the world.

How simple it all must be for that guy.

But Javed isn’t separated from the rest of the world. He gets in a fight with his best friend. His family is affected by factory layoffs. His town is plagued by Neo Nazi rallies. He has to justify pursuing writing as a career when his family needs his financial support.

It can be easy to idealize the recent past, to wonder what it’d be like to create or to live in a time that felt more neutral. What Blinded by the Light reminded me was that there are no neutral times.

No work of art has ever been created in a vacuum, nor has it been consumed in a vacuum. Art is not separate from life. In a way, that makes it all the more beautiful. There’s something special about the fact that people with lives just as complex and complicated as ours decided to take time away from all the other stuff to make their art and send it out into the world so they might be able to connect with people.

Which is part of why I’ve decided to start this newsletter. I think it’s time to deepen my relationships with my friends, family, and readers. To think, to share, and to listen. So respond to this email. Let me know how (and what) you’ve been doing. Life is exciting and scary and ever changing, and it should be something that is shared.

Each month, I’ll be sharing my response to a piece of media I’ve been thinking about lately. I’ll also be linking out to my recent publications, teasing stuff I’m working on, and recommending some interesting art.

In the past month from me…
An article on Spider-Man: Life Story and self-referential storytelling as well as a four-page comic titled “The Suitcase” in the newest issue of PanelxPanel.
“Favored remnant of summer” in The Cardiff Review
“Super Sons and Growing Pains” the newest article in my series “Run Amok” at The MNT.
“What’s in my bag?” an illustration in Plumbago Issue 6

Things that have been rattling around my writing desk…
A book-length poetry manuscript
A four-page horror comic script
An article about She-Hulk
Long-form comics analysis project

Interesting stuff I’ve consumed lately…
Fleabag created by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge [Television in its most personal form. Will make you laugh. Will also break your heart.]
Check Please by Ngozi [Gay hockey webcomic. Need I say more?]
Mix Plate by Emily Forster [Sweet and a little bit sad love story]

That’s it for this month. Thank you for your time and for your attention.
Reach out to someone you miss today.

Gratefully,
Tiffany Babb
9.10.2019