Shirley Powell
REMEMBERING
MARGOT DE SILVA
Margot de Silva died in 1984, at age 81. I had
known her for about 13 years. Part of that time 1
lived in the East Village, on 12th Street, and she
on East 4". She didn't move during those years
as I did, several times, ending up on the Lower
East Side before leaving Manhattan in 1981 for
the Catskills.
For the first several years after leaving NYC,
Micky and I went back frequently, often visiting
with Margot and other friends. She was one of
the few who actually wrote us letters between
times. And she came to visit, as well.
The Village poetry scene was important to her
and she was a classy and active part of it. She
came late to readings, except for those she
hosted. Whenever she arrived, the evening
began, or began over again.
You can't think about Margot for long without
thinking about men. She had a theory that men
were the most important beings. Therefore, you
established yourself, if female, by your
relationships with interesting men. The
Women's Movement was of no interest to her.
During the years I knew her, she had a number
one boy friend about 30 years younger than she.
It was an open relationship: to her, he was
Number One.
She had little fear and frequently traveled
about on her own at night. One night, several of
us gathered in Bier House, across from the
General Seminary on West 20"' Street for a
reading series she led. She was late; then we got
word she was in a hospital because she'd been
mugged on the way to the reading.
She looked to be a grand dame, but alone and
fragile, she \vas vulnerable, too.
Her past life was subject to change without
notice; her mother was a writer, and had such
friends as George Bernard Shaw. Her father was
a diplomat, seldom home. Sometimes she had
had a son. killed in an airplane accident. Other
times the lost child was a daughter. She'd been
born in Sierra Leone, she said, but at her death,
relatives arrived and said she was born in the
Sierra Nevada area.
She was heroine of all her short stories, which
dealt with love and sex, in a light-hearted way.
Her poems were often more serious, usually
romantic as well. She was a hit with the below
14"' Street poets, because, tough every inch a
lady, her fiction was fun, light and tended to be
bawdy. One protagonist, surprised during a sexy
interlude, quickly hid her visiting lover upside
down in a Murphy bed.
In another story, a Sunday radio preacher
admonished listeners to find a cause instead of
living aimlessly. A lady listener at a bar later
that day talked with a gay man who was
complaining about the quality of falsies he
found, and the heroine decided she'd something
to devote her life to: the making of life-like
falsies.
Not everyone was amused. To a few she was
just "that old hippy." Could they have been a
little jealous?
Her husband or former husband was in his
nineties and living in France, she told me. He
sent her money although she had run away from
him while they were in South America, fact or
fiction, I don't know.
In one of her last poems, she encountered
Death, who came to take her with him. She
thought of the peacocks in a lovely Spanish
garden, of herself, a young woman, making a
grand entrance down a wide staircase, and into a
party.
And she said to Death she thought she would
like to stay where she was, "a little longer."
She stays with those who knew and loved her
to this day.
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Jenny Tango
WHAT IS A GRAPHIC NOVEL?
I am currently working on Shifting Normal, a
graphic novel about three women: Jenny, a
sixty-seven-year old cartoonist, her second-
cousin, Carol, 44, a single mother and real-estate
saleswoman, whose daughter, Denyse, 26, a
promising pre-medieval historian, has a serious
psychological disorder. Telling a story in
pictures is not new—it has traveled a long
distance from its beginning in caves to churches
and now to cyberspace. And although 1 have
done a pictorial history of the Jewish community
in Staten island, an artist's book, and a
comicstrip, it is new for me.
A graphic novel sounds tonier than a comic
book but let's face it, it is an offspring of that
genre. Most American graphic novels present
glorified superheroes of both sexes, although
mostly male. The subject matter may be fantasy,
adventure, science-fiction, history, comedy,
mystery, horror, gore, sexuality, among others.
Its audience is composed mainly of male
teenagers. This is also true for manga, those
Japanese graphic novels whose concentration on
teenage life and an easily recognisable style
have contributed to its success here. In Japan,
manga graphic novels with varied contents are
read by people of all ages.
The art in most commercial graphic novels
follows the standard comic book production of
writers, pencillers, inkers, and colorists. While
there is tremendous skill in each of these
professions, there is a tendency for these
products to look alike to anyone not an
aficionado. The graphic novels that 1 like best,
are the ones where the artists, like Sarah
Glidens, Lynda Barry, and Kirn Deitch, do it all.
Their books are generally more individualistic
and identifiable. Spiderman may have made it to
Hollywood and Broadway, but so did Harvey
Pekar's American Splendor. Dick Tracy had to
be painted by Roy Lichtenstein to get to the
Museum of Modern Art but Art Spiegelman did
it with Maw. Graphic novels are now reviewed
in the NY Times. Graphic novels are for adults.
Text in graphic novels varies from titles, stage
directions, comments, data, as well as
conversations and thought balloons but don't
look for Charles Dickens there. Personally, I'm a
great lover of the Dickens who painted portraits,
urban and country landscapes, interiors and
exteriors, in fact, an entire multi-taceted world.
with words. Thirty years ago, a high school
English teacher told me that she hated Dickens
because he was so "wordy." She was not
unusual. At the same time. college students were
notorious for selecting books with the least
pages for their book reports. I wonder, with all
the Kindles, I Pads, graphic novels, on-line
downloads, what is considered acceptable today
for a book report. Short is good; long is bad in
the world of Twitter and some high school
English teachers.
Because of the popularity of graphic novels
among teenagers, there has been a ubiquitous
drive by educatrs to win over this population by
transforming the Classics into easy-to-read
graphic novels. I recently read Dante's Divine
Comedy in this form. The artist kept the basic
characters and storyline but the language and
poetry was replaced by short simplistic prose.
The graphics, as a result, were equally
uninspired. Poor Dante! Poor us!
So what is a graphic novel? It's not a comic
book, a novel, a script, an essay, a poem. It is
what it is. <>
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Rudy Schrrreiks
NOTES FROM ABROAD
Chinese impressions:
Monuments to the
industrious Chinese
workers, their emperors and
dictators.
To actually visit China never
occurred to me until I got the
opportunity last August 2010
to participate in a geological
congress in Sichuan. As
geologists, of course, we were
brought to the sites of the
2008 Sichuan earthquake. We
were ama/ed to see what was
accomplished in rebuilding the
cities and villages that were
destroyed during the
earthquake which had killed at
least 70,000 people, injured
50,000 and made over a
million people homeless.
Destroyed buildings, bridges
and roads can still be seen, but
in the short time of two years
since the earthquake, cities,
villages, roads, bridges and
tunnels have been rebuilt,
including homes for a million
people. At one of the
earthquake sites, I spoke to the
Chinese leading geologist of
our visiting group. Professor
Jingeng Sha of Nanjing
Institute of Geology, and I told
him of my admiration of what
had been accomplished. He
said with some pathos, "China
has many people and they
work day and night." The
mobility and efficiency of a
totalitarian regime
undoubtedly has advantages; it
is a tragedy, in contrast, to see
what little has been
accomplished in Haiti by
combined efforts of American
and European organisations. I
thanked Professor Sha for his
explanations. In the light of
what 1 had seen, I did not
wish to criticise the miserable
Chinese working conditions
and I did not ask how many
workers died during the
reconstructions.
1000 kilometers east of
Sichuan, after flying over
apparently unpopulated,
rugged, forested mountains
and dammed-up rivers,
producing hydroelectricity,
our next stop was Beijing and
the Forbidden City of the
Emperors of China. One enters
the city from the south, the
heavenly direction for the
Chinese, and with one's back
to Mao Tse-tung's Mausoleum
and the infamous city square
called Heaven's Pacification
one walks north through the
Forbidden City's main gate.
Maneuvering through hordes
of visitors, we saw the
architecture that signalled we
were in the China of refined
culture and the artisans. We
were told that some emperors
spent their entire lives in this
walled city, never setting foot
outside. 1 his is quite
believable because the city, in
spite of its strict bilateral
symmetry is highly intricate
and the thousands of details of
the facades, fountains,
sculptures and courtyards, and
the theatres, courtesans and
eunuchs were enough to
entertain any old-time
emperor. The city kept my
mind spinning and I often
asked myself in the course of
the day's visit, am I on the
east side or the west side of
the city. We learned that the
city burned down and was
rebuilt about three times.
Today it is a monument of
ancient Chinese architecture,
craftsmanship and the
industrious Chinese worker.
The last "object" we visited
on our two weeks sojourn in
China of course had to be the
Great Wall, to be seen
conveniently for tourists near
Badaling, about 70 kilometers
north of Beijing in extremely
rugged mountain terrain. 1 can
hardly think that these
mountains would ever have
been considered an invasion
route for any army with or
without a wall. Perhaps the
wall was useful in other areas,
I do not know. In any case the
construction of this Great
Wall, built of granite blocks
quarried from the mountains
over which it winds up and
down, and up and down again
is a monument of toil and
slavery, and of paranoia which
still seems to be an affliction
of the present totalitarian
Chinese regime.
<>
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