Hallie McManus
4/3/2018 07:25:37 pm
Alison begins to write in her diary during her "obsessive compulsive spell". The diary was at first a calendar, then she "switched to a date book from an insurance agency". The fact that she is writing all these entries on paper that makes it so clear when the events occurred, stands out considering the jumps in time we experience during the book. When she begins writing, she inserts "I think" before almost every sentence, suggesting she is questioning, or untrustworthy of her experiences or her own narrative. She goes on to develop a symbol for "I think" and eventually begins to draw the symbol over all her entries. The first entry she draws the symbol over is the one about her camping trip with her father and Bill. She not only puts the symbol over the whole entry, but on other words too such as "Dad", "Bull", "pen", "Bill", "We", "falling", "star". It seems as if she is uncertain not only of the people in her life, but the things she is experiences. Later on her "mother took diction" from her (149), by writing her diary entries for her. As time passes her entries become more and more unreliable. On page 162, ellipses enter her diary. She creates a code to write about her period in her diary, and describes both her period and her father's legal situation with the same exclamation "How horrid!" Eventually, her "narration...became altogether unreliable" (184). By the end, when she tells her mother about her period she neglects to enter certain events at all "I'm only estimating this episode took place in December. There's no mention of it in my diary." (186). The way she talks about her diary entries, suggests that the written word can be unreliable, since there are many things left out and not said.
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Andrea Hernandez
4/3/2018 07:40:35 pm
Alison’s annotations in her diary begin with a reflection of the progressive compulsive behavior she was exhibiting in her youth. Allison begins by simply retelling and reflecting on her experiences, when she begins to go through what she recalls as an “epistemological crisis” regarding whether things she was documenting were "absolutely objectively true." As a byproduct of this crisis, she begins to annotate her diary entries with the phrase “I think” which degrades down to scribbles and incoherent marks on her entries. At the same time, this crisis creates a conflict of whether the actual autobiography is an objectively true biography of her life. In some of her diary entries she begins to leave out certain moments, such as the start of her menstruation, which begs the question of whether she decided not to include other events into her autobiography as a whole? Alison utilizes her diary as a record of past events but realizes that its contents may not be reliable after all. She begins to code some of her words in order to cover up certain moments in the past and writes accounts that are utter falsehoods. The progression of her diary parallels the progression of much of her life and family. A common theme throughout the text is Alison’s kinship with the written word which she uses as a memoir of her life. Moments like her choice to reveal her sexuality to her parents through the choice of a written letter, or her fondness of comparing her life and parents to literary characters and novels, shows the profound appreciation she has for the written word. However the written word, like the diary, may be unreliable and deceptive, paralleling Alison's feelings towards much of her life being a deception.
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Luca
4/3/2018 09:32:11 pm
Allison begins to describe her compulsive behaviors developed as child while writing in her diary. She tells the story of how she developed it and how it progressively got worse. Soon, she begins to create her own symbol to ease her mind when it came to the word "I think". On top of having nervous tics and behaviors, Allison also describes how her life was filled with constant anxiety. If things were not a certain way then she would have an extremely hard time. This is yet again another example of how Allison's behaviors parallel with her dad's behaviors. In the beginning of the book she explains how her father had to have things in the house a certain way and could not stop working on them to the point his furniture seemed more important to him then his children. Just like her father, she develops behaviors that contract her from having a normal life until her mom helps her and she is slowly able to improve.
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Yvie Lock
4/3/2018 09:47:22 pm
Alison starts to write in her diary as a means to describe her obsessive, compulsive behaviors as a child. She begins to write " I think " after every sentence in her diary. This shows that she cannot decide whether what she is saying in her diary is actually factual and the truth or simply her perception of reality. Even though, she is not providing an opinion or analysis in any of her diary entries, it is still unclear to her if her writing is biased. This is furthered when we review chapter 6. She is so embarrassed by the starting of her menstrual cycle she nicknames it "Ning". She is sarcastic and completely falsifies the event. She cannot truly express her real attitude with just words. It is clear from when she starts writing her diary, that words are not enough for Alison. They do not give a strong portrayal on what is occurring and words cannot be used to describe feeling effectively. Therefore, images need to be used. This is reflected when we look at the autobiography as a whole. Images and other texts have been used to support Alison's work.
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Raya Mahony
4/4/2018 01:25:45 am
Alison spends a great deal of time reflecting on ages 13-14. I think she spends so much time on this part of her life because this is a transformational part of her life. This is where she really begins to talk about herself and focus less on her family and father. Her compulsive tendencies that she develops at this age lead to some interesting diary annotations. First, she adds little "I think" before all the things that she says because she is unsure of whether they are actually true and she wants the diary to be 100% accurate. I think she makes this correction because she throughout her life struggles with not knowing the truth of the situations and wants to indicate that she is unsure. Later she uses a symbol to represent the "I think", until she eventually scribbles it across the whole page. Then she writes it over nouns. I think she does this partially because it becomes a nervous habit and one of her "ticks." The way that she represents the written word in this chapter in particular, I think indicates how she uses writing as her form of expression and shows a self awakening of wanting to understand what is happening to herself.
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Frank Ye
4/4/2018 02:43:13 am
The last ten pages or so of chapter 5 is the delves a lot deeper into the mind of the young Alison. Given the opportunity to start writing diary, she records her every day experience of the things she does, yet she grew to question her own experience, for what she calls an "epistemological crisis" (141). Because of that, she blames it on her writing, as she think they aren't the objective views of the events, sometimes even lies, thus starting to add "I think" in front of her sentences. For why she started writing "I think" at the time, one evidence is her intention to relate fictional characters, events, landscapes, to her real life experience, where she would always look for the similarities. She also brought up her hobby of coloring/drawing in this chapter, which we could relate back to the theme of the class -- image vs. text. For Alison, words almost always generate a certain subjective feeling when being read by others, or even by yourself. And objectivity can seem to be achieved only by images, though not always. By crossing out pronouns, Alison can try to convince herself that the event described followed by the pronoun was not being experienced by anyone in particular, thus pushing for the sense of objectivity.
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Kamryn Lanier
4/4/2018 06:52:44 am
Alison’s dad gives her her first diary and writes the first three words in the book. This is important because I️ feel like it further shows connection to Alison and her father. They both identify with stories and novels they have read, and now they are linked in a sense of writing. I️ think this highlights the few but important similarities between her and her father. Alison uses her diary to start writing about her obsessive, compulsive behaviors. Alison’s growing use of the word “i think” and beginning to use a symbol shows she is unsure of herself. She questions everything, even things that are simple and matter of fact. Alison writing the symbol for I think over all of the nouns on page 143 shows that her relationship, belonging, and her status in the world are all being questioned. For example “we” had the i think sign over it and that could show that the author feels lonely. This could be due to the fact she cannot connect with others when she is not true with herself - referencing going a quarter of her life not realizing she is lesbian. Writing is important to Allison as she keeps a diary, revealed her sexuality in a letter and is now writing and autobiography, but also writing can only give one side that is very subjective.
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Fatema Yasini
4/4/2018 08:39:23 am
The annotations in Alison’s diary change over time. At first it starts with “I think” scribbled in between each incident that she writes down. Then, it changes to a new symbol that she creates to represent “I think.” This symbol appears in between each sentence. Then, she starts using symbol on top of the words, which acts like crossing the words out. Her mother starts diction practice with Alison, in order to make her writing clearer and neater. These symbols seem to disappear in a moment of her diary-writing, and she begins using ellipsis “to indicate not so much omission as hesitation” (162). I think she begins making these annotations because she is never one-hundred percent sure that these actions took place. At this point in her life, her family (i.e. her parents) are not what she thought of them to be. She is questionable about every being “absolutely objectively true” (141). In later diaries, she leaves out important and crucial information, like starting her menstrual cycle.This shows how some things that she doesn’t want to be established as true, she leaves out. This is ironic due to the fact that she started annotating her diary to avoid bias, yet she is refusing to mention certain moments.
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Erica Clay
4/4/2018 09:29:49 am
Alison's diary entries evolve over time as she develops symbols for expressing her thoughts and as her obsessive tendencies progress. She becomes obsessed with the idea of keeping perfect accuracy, even though in a diary, entries rely on her personal thoughts and feelings. As a result, every time she means to say "I think" she uses a symbol. She even uses the symbol on top of words, which almost seems to cross them out, suggesting that she cannot trust her own writing. This not only undermines her diary entries, but the book itself; if Bechdel is describing her own writing as riddled with omissions and hesitations to be completely honest, the entire novel itself can be questioned as to whether or not it is the complete truth. Bechdel's obsession with the truth and objectivity shapes her writing and illustration styles.
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Evan Lane
4/4/2018 10:53:41 am
Alison's diary's annotations exhibit a few evolutions over time. To express her feeling that everything has to be perfectly accurate due to her obsessive behaviors she writes "I think" after each entry. This soon evolved into a symbol that would denote her uncertainty. This evolved to cover the subjects of the sentences, which soon grew into a giant mark of this symbol over the entire entry paragraph. This uncertainty in her writing destroys much of its credibility to both herself and anyone who would read it. These excisions from her writing truly make the reader question whether the events recorded are in fact simply fictional. This compulsive behavior carried into her daily life where she started writing goals to abandon specific "compulsions" by a certain date in order to recover from her self imposed disorder. This obsessive behavior and need to be absolutely objective shaped her writing career and possibly even influenced her release of this graphic novel.
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Kerry Xu
4/4/2018 11:08:50 am
In these two chapters, we see a lot more of Alison describing herself and the things that were going on in her adolescence. She describes her diary and how from a very young age, she tried so hard to make sure everything she wrote down was true, factual, and a hundred percent accurate. This, as she explains, stems from the fact that she developed a compulsive disorder at the age of ten, where she obsessed over minor details that resulted in simple tasks become long processes. Her declarative sentences soon began to include the phrase “I think” which later became a circumflex symbol she would draw throughout her diary entries to signify that the things she states are not “absolutely, objectively true” (141). Her obsession of perfection ended up with her need to question everything she writes, and thus ellipses begin to appear in her diary entries. These ellipses would often be followed by a short question to emphasize that she is not sure it is 100% factual. As Alison reflects on herself, she notes the difference between her at 10 years old and her when she ages as “when I was ten, I was obsessed with making sure my diary entries bore no false witness. But as I aged, hard facts gave way to vagaries of emotion and opinion” (169). As she gets her period and she starts to go through a metamorphosis that can be paralleled with the growing cycle of the locusts, she continues to write for a time, but trades in her need for factual accuracy with her subjective opinions and her habit of leaving out the complex stuff. This suggests that Alison thinks that the written word is unreliable, and no matter how accurate the information inside presented can be, there is bound to be a level of subjectivity and central parts that are left out. Also, as I was reading I noticed that the majority of the annotations in her diary were written in very simple language. And although she was young when she entered these journal entries, it goes further to show that the written word could be deceptive, often times hiding so much. A simple sentence of “I think we saw a snake” has so much concealed context and emotions that aren't covered at all by the words itself.
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Sai Kapuluru
4/4/2018 11:22:11 am
Alison's diary entry annotations end up changing over the course of the chapter, but do not really change the meaning of the written word for her. The annotations seem to represent how she does not want to remember her family and what she experienced at the time she was writing the diary. This again relates to how in chapter three Alison describes her parents through the means of fictional characters rather than by mom and dad. This again relates to a lot of pictures in this passage. In many instances Alison seems to be doing other work, but she is still able to recollect what her parents were arguing about all the time. Her annotations are the way that she wants to ignore her family, instead of directly facing the situation head on. She did the same as a child, and eventually does the same later, through the annotations. The written word can hide true feelings and the reality of what is occurring at a certain moment in one's life, as shown by these pictures in the book.
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4/4/2018 11:38:36 am
Alison begins to write in a diary during. She introduces this diary when she is in her“obsessive compulsive spell.” I think that starting this diary was a way for her to deal with the stresses that she was experiencing in her family, by outlining the daily events in her life. By writing her daily events down, I think she was hoping to organize everything that would happen in one day and reflect on it. Additionally, as she continues to write, she gets new diaries to write in more detail because of the amount of space allocated between each day. The amount of space that was given to her in a way restricted her thought process because she followed the space limitations. Furthermore, in these short diary entries we see her writing, but it appears to be more of a laundry list of her different tasks. We then see Alison move onto a different stage where she questions if what she was really writing was true. She states, “how did I know that the things I was writing were absolutely, objectively true?” I think by her questioning what she is writing, although she just often write about her daily tasks, it relates to her being out of touch with her emotions and her inability to comprehend her feelings in situations, such as her dad’s death.
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Daniel Frise
4/4/2018 12:01:02 pm
Alison's annotations in her diary vary greatly with her age. For example, when she begins writing, she inserts the phrase "I think" in between all of her sentences, which describes the uncertainty of what she observed and did throughout the day — that is, much like "The Rings of Saturn", Alison was questioning objectivity versus subjectivity. She eventually began drawing her v-like symbol over everything as an abridged form of "I think". There was the time in which her mother wrote for her while Alison improved her penmanship and handwriting. And finally, she began filling her diary with ellipses, which represents her hesitations, as well as hiding what she writes with Ning.
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Cameron
4/4/2018 12:06:55 pm
Allison's annotations are are fairly blunt and to the point. I think it is interesting that at no point does she say anything about her own thoughts or feelings on any particular day; she only wants to document what actually happened. Perhaps she writes like this because she is only interested in being able to recall the events that transpire in her life. Maybe she doesn't want to think about her feelings, or she simply wants to forget about them.
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Isaac Merritt
4/9/2018 09:02:57 am
The annotations seem to be her way of communicating with herself when she reads her journal in the future. She feels as though some things she writes about are too real or uncomfortable to explicitly mention, so she leaves little annotations as a way of indicating that there's supposed to be something there that isn't. They start out as small words, but evolve into almost incoherent symbols that obstruct the real words. This says a lot about the written word, in that it isn't always enough to be able to convey an entire idea or concept. The writing itself may not be sufficient and may require other methods of communication.
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