Saturday Night at the Speedway

The final paper for Reading Popular Culture is something of a magna opus for me. I wrote this, and the following two final papers for my other English course over the span of about nine hours (fairly continuous span with breaks for a bit of food, more coffee, and less-than-healthy amount of breaks for stretches and peeing; such is the life I signed up for in doing this— I've been in the real world, this stuff is easy).

I'm still waiting to do my paper on musical hijacking of popular culture circa 1990-92, but like that one, the idea for this one has long been germinating.

The date it was due was precisely the fortieth anniversary of the concert.


~•~


ENG 384
December 6, 2009
Final Essay

Saturday Night at the Speedway

Exposing Altamont in a Textural Analysis of
the Grateful Dead's "New Speedway Boogie"

"Some things aren't true even if they did happen,"
Ken Kesey once said.
Altamont is like that.

―Ralph J. Gleason

"New Speedway Boogie" was written and recorded by the Grateful Dead two months after the Altamont Free Concert, and appeared in June 1970 on the album Workingman's Dead. Robert Hunter, lyricist and non-performing member of the band, penned the song in in direct response to a series of articles that had been written over the course of the previous summer by the music critic Ralph J. Gleason in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was in the column "On the Town" where Gleason first challenged the Rolling Stones to perform a free concert in the Bay Area of California and months later, after they did so, condemned most everyone involved with the event (never acknowledging his own role in antagonizing the Rolling Stones to stage the concert). In this context, "New Speedway Boogie" offers unflinching yet cryptic views of Altamont and—more importantly—the blameful aftermath of it.

Please don't dominate the rap Jack,
if you've got nothing new to say
If you please don't back up the track
this train has got to run today.

In the opening lines, Robert Hunter directly addresses us as listeners, using a proper name in a generic sense, calling us "Jack" just as if we might be called "son" or "friend." But with this use of Jack, Hunter cites Ralph J. Gleason by name, even if it is not his commonly used moniker, and suggests he not continue to use his words to fuel any more fires, unless he has something more useful to impart.

I spent a little time on the mountain,
I spent a little time on the hill
Like some say you better run away,
others say you better stand still.

The mountain, in this case, can be equated with the source of wisdom and understanding, a mythic place of retreat where one can rest a while to accumulate balance and objectivity. But just as quickly as we have ascended that mountain, we are sitting on a hillside, showing that our narrative guide isn't claiming superiority for having been to that mountain where wisdom may be found. In the lore of rock lyric analysis, the Marxist and/or Freudian baseline of measurement can be equated to the Beatles and Bob Dylan, it is difficult to make references to a hill and not come around to Lennon and McCartney's "Fool on the Hill." In this case, Altamont was a hill seated with 300,000 fools.

Now I don't know, but I been told
it's hard to run with the weight of gold
On the other hand I heard it said
it's just as hard with the weight of lead.

Once more—in a recurring theme not only to this song, but in much of Robert Hunter's repertoire—our story-teller assures us that they are not the authoritative voice on the subject, but they might know a thing or two nonetheless. The narrator has never done so, but has heard that being burdened with gold (ill-gotten or freely acquired) makes it difficult to move very quickly. However, a burden carried is still a burden no matter what the substance may be.
With Altamont, there was plenty of blame to go around and yet no one seemed to step forward and pick up any share of it. While it may be true that no one involved toted away sacks of money from Altamont, what weighed on the conscience of anyone who had been there was, in some respects, far heavier than lead.

Who can deny, who can deny,
it's not just a change in style?
One step gone and another's begun
and I wonder how many miles?

These lines offer a pair of rhetorical questions and express uncertainty about purpose and distance to reach what is needed or intended. Both of these factors—viewed with the benefit of hindsight—are easily placed upon the era in which Altamont took place. Following the success of the Woodstock Festival, the counter-culture of the late sixties felt they had achieved what few other cultures had in history, that of staging a libertarian ideal society—albeit, for only a few days in a relatively small location. Altamont would prove to be the undoing of any naïve considerations that such a congregation could be staged at will.

During the summer of 1969, Gleason used his column in the San Francisco Chronicle to harangue the Rolling Stones about exorbitant ticket prices and accused them of having contempt for their audience. Since they had given a free concert in London's Hyde Park in early July, Gleason antagonistically baited the band into offering a free concert in San Francisco. The band responded with plans to perform in Golden Gate Park at the end of their tour.

Logistics and city ordinances prevented Golden Gate Park from being the site of their planned show, and, after a location at the Sears Point Raceway fell through, a last-minute—literally two days before the event was scheduled—the Altamont Speedway was offered as a suitable site for the concert. Even amidst the planning of the concert, Gleason kept his antagonistic attitude in print, "Are the Rolling Stones seriously going to appear next weekend? Your guess is as good as mine" (Gleason, "A Few Guesses").

I spent a little time on the mountain,
I spent a little time on the hill
I saw things getting out of hand,
I guess they always will.

At some point in the process, the Hells Angels were hired to act as security at the concert. The decision to use the Hells Angels remains a source of contention among all parties involved. The Angels had often been present at Grateful Dead concerts around the Bay Area, and having been involved with Ken Kesey's Acid Tests, were considered to be the "noble savages" of the counter-culture movement in California. But Altamont was no Grateful Dead concert, and Ken Kesey's workingman's charisma was far closer to the Angels disposition than the androgyne prancing and preening of Mick Jagger. In the Maysles' film Gimme Shelter, Angel Sonny Barger can be seen glaring at Jagger with an unstoned look that would make contempt and disgust seem serenely pleasant.

In a diatribe heard the day after Altamont on KSAN radio station, Barger claimed that the Angels were asked to sit on the edge of the stage and keep people away from equipment and performers. But Barger also claimed that at one point in the evening he held a gun to Keith Richards' head and told him to keep playing or he'd be killed—a claim that has no corroborating witnesses. Various other stories hold that the Angels were given $500 in beer to police the event, or, as Gleason reported afterwards, a "truckload." Whatever specific arrangements were made between organizers and the Hells Angels, as the day progressed, and beer and other substances were consumed, the Angels seemed less like a security force and more like domineering vigilantes; like outlaw bikers. The pool cues they wielded—as ubiquitously seen in the film Gimme Shelter—were pre-loaded with lead weights, brought along with obvious intention on using them.

In a brief essay written for the Criterion Films release of Gimme Shelter, Stanley Booth shares a first hand opinion of the day. "The violence at Altamont, being completely unexpected, came afterward to seem inevitable." That sentiment is shared by many, regardless of their proximity to the event itself. Forty years later Robert Hughes quotes, "'It was a day that was oppressive and dark,' recalls Chris Hillman, whose Flying Burrito Brothers shared the bill, 'and the ending was the worst scenario you could imagine.'"

Even before mid-afternoon, there was something menacing in the air. "The Stones arrived by helicopter and walked, flanked by their mysterious New York musicians guards, through the crowd, when a long-haired youth ran at Jagger screaming, 'I'm gonna kill you! I hate you!' He slugged Jagger in the face. Jagger wasn't hurt, only bruised; but it was an ill omen for the day" (Gleason, "Aquarius Wept").

During the Jefferson Airplane's performance, singer Marty Balin jumped off the stage into a melee of Angels and audience members in an attempt to break up the fight. As Gleason recounts, "One of the Angels decked Balin and when Thompson [the Airplane's manager] asked, 'What did you do that for?' replied, 'He spoke disrespectful to a brother Angel.' Paul Kantner, still onstage, asked, 'What's going on? They're beating up on my lead singer!'" (Gleason, "Aquarius Wept"). Upon their arrival, Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead were told about the Hells Angels beating up Marty Balin and that the scene was rapidly deteriorating—had gone from terrible to horrid. The Grateful Dead elected not to perform and quickly departed. But they would not remain silent about the event for long.

Now I don't know, but I been told
in the heat of the sun a man died of cold
Do we keep on coming or just stand and wait
with the sun so dark and the hour so late?

Once again citing an unauthoritative stance, our narrative guide offers up another paradox, this time in almost strictly folklore terms, of someone freezing to death as they feel the warmth of sunshine. It calls to mind a line in "Oh Susannah"—"the sun's so hot I froze to death, Susannah don't you cry."

We are also given another question, and even if it is rhetorical, it is asked with a sense of urgency as to what might happen if the question isn't at least addressed, if not answered outright.

Altamont is often cited as being the death of the sixties—the expiration of the ideal that seemed to have reached its epoch with the Woodstock Festival a few months earlier. In this light, the question asked by our nameless story-teller in "New Speedway Boogie" could be just that. Was Altamont the end of an era? Or was it just as likely that it exposed an era for what it really was—stripping away the Day-Glo paint and psychedelic visions for something cold and festering that lurks in the shadows the places sometimes better left unseen? Ethan A. Russell wrote, "Mick Taylor [of the Rolling Stones] responded when asked if he thought Altamont was the end of the '60s, 'Well, it was the end of the sixties, wasn't it? It was December 1969.'"

If, as Wavy Gravy stated numerous times about Woodstock, for a few days a cow pasture became a little piece of heaven (and Jimi Hendrix became the Celestial Gypsy at the summit of the psychedelic era), then for a few hours one dark evening, Altamont became a smoldering pit of hell (with Mick Jagger cast as Lucifer in brimstone).

You can't overlook the lack Jack,
of any other highway you ride
It's got no signs, no dividing lines,
and there's very few rules to guide.
I spent a little time on the mountain,
I spent a little time on the hill
Things went down we don't understand
but I think in time we will.

Regardless of medium—film, essay, radio rant, song—Altamont seemed doomed from the moment it was pressured into conception. It would be easy to formulate the situation as being one of a rape victim giving birth. Ralph Gleason, in this scenario, would be the rapist, the Rolling Stones a willing, if slightly reluctant, accomplice, and Altamont the unwanted child born. The victim would be not only Meredith Hunter, but also everyone who participated, even with the best of intentions. But, since we are discuss myth and folklore, it is fitting to cite the proverb about those intentions—that this road with no signs nor lines to guide, is smoothly paved en route to some infernal place up ahead in the unknown darkness, The experience at Altamont scarred the psyche of people who were there, the era which spawned it, and the history and mythology of rock and roll itself. What "went down we don't understand" and even forty years later, we struggle with the questions it has left us.

"Perhaps Ralph J. Gleason was responsible for Altamont," Norma Coates wrote in an lengthy essay about the event. She doesn't shy away from indicting numerous participants: "Or Mick Jagger? Sonny Barger? Woodstock? All or none of the above? After all, one could, based on the evidence, argue that it was the venerable San Francisco Chronicle music critic [...] who goaded the Rolling Stones into performing a free concert at the Altamont Speedway..." From these cutting remarks, Coates lapses into the dialogue of folklore, and strays from the evidence she so recently cited. "As the story goes, the Stones danced a little too close to the devil, in the form of the Hells Angels, that fateful day. The Angels beat up a lot of people and then killed a young black man, while Mick Jagger callously sang and danced along to 'Sympathy for the Devil'. Thus, the 1960s ended, along with the utopian promise of that decade and the youth counterculture."

Coates condemns Gleason, Jagger, and the Angels, but misses the tiny fact that Meredith Hunter came to the foot of the stage armed with a pistol, which he fired shortly before his grotesque demise. Perhaps that day was fated to be the taint of an era? As was previous quoted, "The violence ... seem[ed] inevitable" (Stanley Booth); "A day ... oppressive and dark" (Chris Hillman); and from Gleason himself: "Jagger wasn't hurt, only bruised; but it was an ill omen for the day."

Now I don't know, but I been told
if the horse don't pull you got to carry that load
I don't know whose back's that strong
but we'll maybe find out before too long...

If a pack animal—or, in modern terms, a motorized vehicle—ceases to haul what it should, the only immediate option is to pick up what is needed and move forward as best as is able. Concerning Altamont, the load to be shouldered is that of responsibility. But as Russell considers, "No one ever really took responsibility for what happened at Altamont. Not the Angels, not the people in the crowd, not the Rolling Stones. Each person involved seemed to conclude, each with their own reason, that somehow what happened had nothing [...] to do with them."

But even as no one wants the responsibility for the collision of cultural history with musical folklore at the foot of the stage in the Altamont Speedway the night of December 6, 1969, more than a few would like to offer their opinions on how it all went wrong and who should take the blame.

In a July 1972 Newsday article, Robert Christgau famously wrote, "Writers focus on Altamont not because it brought on the end of an era but because it provided such a complex metaphor for the way an era ended." But a paragraph later, Christgau gives us more than an apt summation of our interest in the complex metaphor of Altamont, instead of genuine facts in the transpiring of events, he lays a powerful cornerstone in musical folklore—that apocryphal rock and roll history that perhaps should have been but wasn't. "Denouement:" Christgau tells us, "An Afro-American bohemian is murdered by a lower-class white Hells Angel while the Englishmen do a song called 'Sympathy for the Devil.'"

Not that actuality survives long in the midst of rock and roll mythology, but fact of the matter was, when Meredith Hunter was murdered, the Rolling Stones were playing "Under My Thumb." But doesn't the story sounds better—more gruesome and grim; more dire and bleak—if the song being performed was "Sympathy for the Devil"?

When Stanley Booth commented that the violence at Altamont later seemed inevitable, we can place in the confluence of events up to Altamont—and the lingering bitterness of its blameful aftermath—something else that seems more metaphoric than real. In February 1969 the Rolling Stones recorded the song "Gimme Shelter" in which Jagger sings—

Rape, murder, it's just a shot away‚ it's just a shot away . . .

—it's seems only appropriately poetic a year later to hear the Grateful Dead reply in the last lines of "New Speedway Boogie":

One way or another
One way or another
One way or another, this darkness has got to give.

Which brings us back to Ralph Gleason's quote of Ken Kesey. "Some things aren't true even if they did happen."

Even a cursory glance at the matter shows that Altamont was just that.

It happened. But it can't possibly be true.

Bibliography

Altamont Free Concert. By Mick Jagger, Keith Richards,

The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club,
Ralph J. Gleason, Meredith Hunter.

Altamont Speedway, California.
6 Dec. 1969. Performance.

"Altamont Free Concert."

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

1 Dec 2009, 17:51 UTC. 2 Dec 2009.

Bangs, Lester, and etc. al.

"The Rolling Stones Disaster at Altamont: Let It Bleed."
Rolling Stone 21 Jan. 1970. Print.

Booth, Stanley. "The True Adventures of Altamont."

Gimme Shelter

Criterion Collection 99 (2000). Print.

Burks, John. "Rock & Rolls' Worst Day:

The Aftermath of Altamont."

Rolling Stone 7 Feb. 1970. Print.

Christgau, Robert. "The Rolling Stones:

Can't Get No Satisfaction."

Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics.
Robert Christgau. Web.

Coates, Norma. "Chapter 6: If anything,

blame Woodstock - The Rolling Stones:
Altamont, December 6, 1969."
Performance And Popular Music:
History, Place And Time.
Ashgate, 2006. Print.

Dodd, David. "The Annotated "New Speedway Boogie"

The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics.
Univ. of Calif. at Santa Cruz,

6 Oct. 2003. Web. 1 Dec. 2009.

Gimme Shelter. Dir. Albert Maysles, David Maysles,

and Charlotte Zwerin.
Perf. The Rolling Stones.
Maysles Films, Cinema 5,
20th Century Fox, 1970. DVD.

"Gimme Shelter (documentary)."

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

5 Nov 2009, 04:40 UTC. 2 Dec 2009.

Gleason, Ralph J. "Aquarius Wept."

Esquire Aug. 1970. Print.

—. "Bad Vibes for the Rolling Stones."

San Francisco Chronicle 5 Dec. 1969. Print.

—. "A Few Guesses on Rolling Stones."

San Francisco Chronicle 28 Nov. 1969. Print.

—. "More Questions for the Rolling Stones."

San Francisco Chronicle 12 Dec. 1969. Print.

—. "The Rolling Stones Are Right On."

San Francisco Chronicle 5 Dec. 1969. Print.

—. "Stones’ Plans for Free S.F. Concert."

San Francisco Chronicle 24 Nov. 1969. Print.

—. "Who's Responsible for the Murder."

San Francisco Chronicle 19 Dec. 1969. Print.

Hughes, Robert. "Gimme Shelter and The Rolling Stones'

nightmare at Altamont."
The Times Online. The Times,
13 Sept. 2009. Web. 6 Dec. 2009.

Hunter, Robert, and Jerry Garcia.

"New Speedway Boogie." Rec. Feb. 1970.
Workingman's Dead. The Grateful Dead.
The Grateful Dead, Betty Cantor,
Bob Matthews, 1970. Vinyl recording.

Jagger, Mick, and Keith Richards.

"Gimme Shelter." Rec. Feb. and Nov. 1970.
Let It Bleed. The Rolling Stones.
Jimmy Miller, 1969. Vinyl recording.

Lydon, Michael. "The Decade That Spawned Altamont."

Gimme Shelter

Criterion Collection 99 (2000). Print.

Russell, Ethan Adam. Let It Bleed:

The Rolling Stones, Altamont,

and the End of the Sixties.
Springboard, 2009. Print.

Taubin, Amy. "Rock and Roll Zapruder."

Gimme Shelter
Criterion Collection 99 (2000). Print.

Wood, John "Hell's Angels and the Illusion

of the Counterculture."

Journal of Popular Culture 37.2 (2003):
336-351. Academic Search Premier.
EBSCO. Web. 1 Dec. 2009.

· • ·

Meta-Maus

Like the Essay and Response paper for Writing About Film, this was an essay and response assignment on either Octavia Bulter's Kindred or Art Speilgelman's Maus. I wanted to write about Kindred, but that would have been a more difficult effort, and with the work load I had, I wasn't ashamed about taking the easy way out with Maus.

Like Speilgelman is light reading or something...

In assessing my own work, this is mediocre.


~•~
(very 1st draft! almost ashamedly so)


ENG 384
November 10, 2009
Essay & Response: Maus

Meta-Maus

Upon turning onto page 102 of (The Complete) Maus, a curious event occurs; along with the narrative, the style, artwork, and even genre suddenly changes. In effect, the storyteller has suddenly changed the rules in the reader's contract. We slip from one level of storytelling into something deeper. Not merely self-referential and self-aware (although Maus is certainly that), but cognitive of its own self-awareness. This is akin to the subtle difference between sentience and sapience; knowledge and wisdom. In being aware of itself, Maus almost becomes a recursive loop, becoming wise to its own graphic form, as connects to another scene on the palindromic page umber from our first, 201. Through these two scenes, Art Spiegelman tells us of the same personal tragedy twice, in two different methods, each seemingly aware of it other despite a decade separating their creation.

Most obviously, the border on this page has changed from white to black. In the first frame, we are treated to a title header in the gregarious style only comix could have—Prisoner on the HELL Planet: A Case History—with a photograph next to it being clutched by a gnarly hand. From this frame—due perhaps to the overly dark nature of the entire page—the eye is suddenly drawn to the lower left corner, the outer edge, where a more simplistic hand holds a comic book that happens to be the very page we've just turned to in Maus. It isn't unlikely that our own hand rests eerily close to one or the other of the hands drawn on the page. This presents us with a self-awareness we find in meta-fiction; that is, a story in which the storytelling or story being told becomes a part of the shared narrative, most easily exampled by having the author appear as himself in the work. Which is obviously the point in Maus, the difference being this would then have become a meta-biographical memoir in the structural form of a graphic novel.

Here, Spiegelman appears as himself—as a human and not a mouse—dressed as a concentration camp prisoner, telling us how his mother committed suicide in 1968, when he was 20. His father found her when he came home from work. In the final long horizontal panel on the page, Spiegelman stands (dressed as a prisoner) at the periphery of a crowd outside an apartment building. "I'd just spent the weekend with my girlfriend, Isabella. (My parents didn't like her.) I was late getting home … I suppose that if I'd gotten home when expected, I would have found her body…" (Spiegelman 102).

The suicide of Spiegelman's mother is dealt with again in the second part of Maus. Again Spiegelman appears as a human, but in this instance he wears a mouse mask. In the first panel on the page, he sits at his drawing desk where two flies buzz around him. Above the line of the panel are the words "Time flies…" (201). In each of the first three panels on the page, Spiegelman makes two statements referring to two different timelines in each, and in doing so, brings the self-awareness of metafiction once again to be a central issue in considering the story he tells.

In the first panel Spiegelman refers to the death of his father Vladek in 1982, commenting that he and his wife stayed with his father in 1979. In the next panel Spiegelman states that his father started work as a "tinman" in Auschwitz in 1944, and that he himself began working on the current page of Maus in February 1987. It's in the third panel that this dichotomy of timelines draws to its most contrasting points: "In May 1987 François and I are expecting a baby… Between May 16, 1944, and May 24, 1944 over 100,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed in Auschwitz…" (201). In the fourth panel, Spiegelman turns to address the reader face-to-face (albeit, his is covered by the mouse mask). He speaks of Maus first being published. The presence of flies is increasing.

In the last panel on the page—one that takes up an equal amount of space as the four previous combined—Spiegelman slumps over his drawing table, a heap of bodies seeming to be on the floor of his studio while outside the window of the room is a barbed wire fence and prison guard tower. Spiegelman complains that he's had several offers to sell the rights to Maus so a movie could be made from the graphic memoir, but he laments that he just doesn't want to. He then mentions again the death of his mother, "In May 1968 my mother killed herself. (She left no note.) Lately, I've been feeling depressed." A voice sounds from outside the panel—somewhere off the page—and the words are meant as a double entendre: "Alright Mr. Spiegelman… We're ready to shoot!…" (201). Given the context, this could be as much a reference to a director shooting film as to soldiers shooting Jewish prisoners. The heap of bodies remains the focus of both.

Response to "Meta-Maus"

The two scenes discussed in "Meta-Maus" share the connections of metafictional self-awareness, feeling imprisoned, and the suicide of Spiegelman's mother. In the first, what are we to make of this abrupt change in story-telling method? We've gone from an Animal Farm-like tale involving Jewish mice, German dogs, and Polish pigs to the lurid-stylings of 1960s comix involving directly autobiographical human characters set in a recursive metafictional narrative.

Spiegelman wants us as readers to be aware that we are not part of his story, that we are pushed to be outsiders to what he reveals to us. But more than that, he himself is an outsider to his own story, evidenced by the fact that he places himself within the narrative as a human prisoner (from "Hell Planet") because what he tells us about himself is too painful for him to be directly included. This is why he imprisons himself in the scene, and via the title, literally places the event out-of-this-world (on the aforementioned "Hell Planet"). The recursion of illustrated hands holding the book we are reading further emphasizes the removal of direct reader-involvement as well as distances us and himself from the trauma-within-trauma he describes. Surviving a Nazi concentration camp requires one level of distance (which Spiegelman invokes with anthropomorphic characters of mice and dogs) but his mother committing suicide years after that forces Spiegelman to further distance himself from the very thing he wishes to share.

When he mentions his mother's suicide later in a scene titled "Time Flies…" it is with far simpler and less descriptive language (showing the small healing graces of passing time) and amidst a plethora of seeming inconsequential information. This information all suggests that Spiegelman conceals as much as he shows, even if that concealment is superficial.

When Spiegelman tells us that his father worked as a tinman in Auschwitz, it could easily be passed over as insignificant. But nothing in Maus can be taken as inconsequential. Being a tinman involved constructing roofs and walls that would ordinarily be used for protection and security (against the elements and to create a dwelling place), but in context, the skill was used to contain and conceal (minimal prisoner housing and to ensure any sense of "home" would be rife with death and uncertainty).

Spiegelman mentioning the birth of his child alongside detailing the numbers of Hungarian Jews killed in a specific period shows that he is still equating any life as being paid for by the death of others. There can be no small amount of guilt associated with this observation. And again, the recursive, self-aware meta-narrative comes to the fore when Spiegelman sits at his drawing table and his studio alters itself around him to show a pile of bodies that resemble the infamous Belsen heaps with the exterior world transforms into the confines of a concentration camp. Spiegelman still feels trapped by his family's past even forty years later.

Even as he is publicly dealing with his grief and confusion about the Holocaust, Spiegelman struggles with himself as to why and how he does so. It is this internal conflict which drives the themes and structure of Maus to be a story that simply cannot be told in a direct, unadorned manner. In Spiegelman's case, however, that adornment comes not in the form of stylish language and heroic plot, but in self-consciously anthropomorphized animals, animal-masks on humans, and altered identities to reveal the facts of some events. This is a story that could not exist without the structure of metafiction, self-aware narrative, and the deliberate distance imposed upon the reader.

We can never be a part of this story, but we as readers can take the opportunity Spiegelman offers us to take a peek behind his many masks and layers to understand not only the story he tells us, but how he has brought himself to do so and, perhaps most importantly, why he does so.

•

Bibliography

"Bergen-Belsen concentration camp."

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
Retrieved 00:39, November 7, 2009.

Green, Archie. Tin Men (Folklore and Society).

Champaign, IL:

University of Illinois, 2002. Print.

Rothberg, Michael. "'We Were Talking Jewish':

Art Spiegelman's Maus
as 'Holocaust' Production."
Contemporary Literature 35.4 (1994).
JSTOR. Web.

Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus.

New York: Pantheon, 1991. Print.

· • ·