Julie Maroh’s Body Music includes an argument between friends. As the argument starts, they’re sitting in a modern-day Montreal park. The words stay modern as the friends get angrier, but the art shifts—from beer bottles and rumpled button-up t-shirts to Roman orators in the senate, medieval swordsmen bashing each other’s shields, and on through history. Since reading those pages, I keep thinking about the way I see myself when I’m talking. When I’m “defending” a point. When I’m arguing. Maroh writes what these characters are saying, but they draw how these characters are seeing themselves—the imagined poses they’re taking up.
                Earlier today I had a long conversation with my brother, a conversation that sometimes drifted toward an argument. With Maroh next to me, I found myself noticing what he was saying, what I was saying, what I wanted to be saying—and the flavor that went along with all of those. There are listens like chili mangoes and listens like cool spring water and listens as metallic as a spoon. Maroh reminds me: what are the tastes of these words? What are the scenes I’m shaping this moment into?