Dear Rietveld,
Love, Studium Generale

Daddy Issues: Romance, Fantasy, Other Patriarchal Fallout, and Movements Towards the Planetary
Reading group with Jay Tan

21 & 28 January, 4 & 11 February, 4 & 11 March, Rietveld & Sandberg Library, 5:00-7:00 PM

If the TV show Lost teaches us anything, it’s that being a Dad is hard, but having a Dad isharder. The co-producing feedback between the Father and patriarchal society is a minefieldof pressure to provide, tough love, emotional absence, discipline, depression, repression,longing, vicarious living, role modelling, caretaking, and earning as value.

Upon the realisation that the dialogue and relationships of Lost were a site where the mostlymale writers’ room could work through and re-imagine the emotional disappointments in their relationships with their dads, I started thinking about how these fatherly absences or actions appear, are processed, or patched over in other reflections of these familial relationships.

We will start with the often-celebrated family values of the Addams family and move through a reverse-engineered Orc Romantasy, a 19th-century Scottish shapeshifting ballad, poems and essays about dads and their relationships to love and work, before our last stop towards Planetary love.

Session 1
Romance scenes between Morticia and Gomez Addams. Extracts from "The Addams Family" and "Addams Family Values" screenplays
Larry Wilson and Caroline Thompson
"Feminist Afterlives of the Witch: Popular Culture, Memory, Activism"
Re-reading "Bewitched" and "The Addams Family" to reconcile the sexual deviancy of the Witch and the nuclear family.
"The Parody Within: The Employment of the Parodic Mode in The Addams Family" (1991)
Anne I. Bertram
https://www.aspeers.com/sites/default/files/pdf/bertram.pdf

Session 2
"Tusk Love"
Thea Guanzon
"The Ballad of Tam Lin" 1882-1898 by Francis James Child
cites: Johnson’s Museum, 1792, communicated by Burns
https://tam-lin.org/versions/39A.html#:~:text=I%20am%20your%20bairn’s%20father,ill%20de
ath%20may%20she%20die%2C
"Red Shift"
Alan Garner

Session 3
"Being a Boy"
bell hooks
"A Father’s Work Is Never Done"
Nathan Hoks
"Work: What’s Love Got to Do with It?"
bell hooks

Session 4
"Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be"
Ross Gay
"Father"
Edgar Albert Guest
"Roman Poem Number Six"
June Jordan
"Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood"
June Jordan

Session 5
"Father figures in the Broken Earth Trilogy"
Shaffer and Nassun; Jija and Nassun
N.K. Jemisin
"But which is the Way the World Ends?: The Dual Nature of Anger and Power of Brotherly Love" in N.K. Jemisin’s "Broken Earth Trilogy"
Aihua Chen &Yujie Lei

Session 6
"Meta-Rhetoric"
June Jordan
"Shortsong From My Heart"
June Jordan
"Love’s Multiplicity: Jeong and Spivak’s Notes toward Planetary Love"
W. Anne Joh