I finally went to see Bodyworlds at the Science Center. It was pretty cool, but I started getting bored with it toward the end. I had heard that it was really hard to get through, that it was intensely graphic- but I didn’t think so. The bodies were preserved in a way that trumped the graphic nature of the exhibit. The bodies kind of looked dried and shrunken, not what you typically think of when it comes to corpses. It was hard to identify them as once being living beings. I found myself wanting to know their names, wanting pictures of what they looked like when they were living (I’m sure this would be more upsetting to the general public). If you looked really closely at some of them, you could see bits of hair on their skin, little sprouts of what they once were. You could still see the color of their eyes, little shrunken balls placed strategically in the sockets. One body had the most stunning green eyes ever, and I thought about how you almost never see a person in real life with eyes that green. I tried smelling them, but my boyfriend kept telling me to stop, that I was embarrassing him (they didn’t have a smell anyway, they had a distinct lack of smell).
Marjane Satrapi Reading April 2, 2008
I haven’t read Persepolis yet, but I am going to soon. I went tonight to Marjane Satrapi’s reading with my Experimental Forms class and loved her. What an intelligent, funny woman. She is very human and straightforward. I love smart, artistic woman who are comfortable being themselves, woman who don’t try to be intensely intellectual. Her ideas about culture and war are realistic. She talked about anger and revenge, saying “I’ve learned that you can’t wash blood with blood. If the smart people do the same thing that the so called stupid people are doing, how does that make them the smart ones?” (I feel bad putting that into quotes because she probably didn’t say it exactly like that). She also talked about the Bush administration’s labeling Iran as part of the axis of evil. She stated, very evenly, that when someone in power labels something as evil, and people believe him, without investigating for themselves, then that becomes fascism. I was traveling in London and Amsterdam in 2005, and I was offended that so many people were trying to engage in a conversation about how fascist the United States government comes off. One very priveledged British man asked me “Haven’t you ever thought it was weird that school children pray to the flag every morning.” I was like “You’re British. How do you have room to talk? The British colonized the whole world.” Anyway, my interest in politics is small, but it was nice for me to hear someone speak about fascism with such simplicity. I can almost understand what the Europeans were trying to get at while I was traveling a few years ago (although I really still resent that pompous British man to this day). Perhaps he was allowing the media and it’s portrayal of America be in a way, fascist as well.
