And she’s dealing with the guilt of that.
She’s using him-she mentions how she didn’t want to go there alone, and she’s manipulated him so that she’ll feel comfortable enough to go. They’re in a kind of limbo state emotionally, and this was maybe a last trip. The main character is having a relationship issue, maybe it’s the end of something. I had just been in Croatia, and they have that kind of mix there. There are semi-Arabic shapes, so in my mind it’s set somewhere around the Mediterranean, but I left it open, so it could be a European country that has an Islamic history, or somewhere off the coast, maybe Morocco.
I thought maybe I’d figure it out along the way.ĭid one of those places serve as the setting for for “Heavenly Seas”? My book Field Studies documented 2012, when I lived in a different room in a different city every month, just because I didn’t know what to do with myself. I went to Spain and Turkey, then I was in Scandinavia and around Europe. I left Portland in 2011 to travel and just didn’t stop. I’ve been traveling constantly for the last three or four years. That’s something I’d been considering, since it’s a big part of my life. He also thought about people’s attitudes in different countries and in confronting different cultures. I’d read a couple of Paul Bowles books, and I liked how well he captured the mindset of how foreign places can seem to the traveler and how that’s seductive but also scary. I’d been trying to think about how to utilize the idea of traveling. Where did the story for “Heavenly Seas” come from? Last month, I met Koch at her studio, in the basement of a tatty mansion she shares with eight other artists and a corn snake named Cleopatra, in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Her narratives are elliptical, fragmentary, and open-ended it seemed appropriate to include “Heavenly Seas” in an issue that is largely about translation. She also makes sculptures, ceramics, and textiles that reinterpret the classical motifs that appear in many of her comics. Koch, a native of Olympia, Washington, is the author of three book-length comics-The Whale, The Blonde Woman, and, most recently, Impressions. The difference between “Heavenly Seas” and the cover sequence is like the difference between Lydia Davis’s long short stories and her very short ones.
It is twenty-eight pages long and contains just over a hundred words of dialogue and no narration. The issue also features Koch’s comic “Heavenly Seas,” the story of a woman who travels to a tropical location with a man she doesn’t love. Each panel exists both as a discrete event-here, she looks at her book here, she shades her eyes-and as one sentence in a paragraph about the woman’s day at the beach. On Aidan Koch’s cover for our Summer issue, six panels depict a woman lounging and reading and ruminating at the shore.
0 kommentar(er)
