#i left out the bit where he talks for several paragraphs about the first italian horror film: 'il mostro di frankenstein'
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Sara Reads an Infuriating Book, part 2
Chapter 2 of W Scott Poole's Wasteland is entitled "Waxworks". This is where I got angry enough to start taking notes in earnest rather than just annotating the ebook, so this is longer and has more actual quotes.
First, a disclaimer: I do not in any way disbelieve that WWI had a huge impact on early 20th century horror. Of course it did; how could it not? What I object to is Poole's assertion that it is the only thing that could possibly have had such an impact and that that impact always and only comes in the form of fear of bodily death and the corpse as an object of horror. Any time anyone gives you a Grand Unified Theory of Horror that claims to explain all of reasons that humans create scary or disturbing art, that theory is never going to be correct. People are more complex than that. And now, bullet points!
Okay, first off, I do have to apologize for ranting about Poole talking about Machen's "The Bowmen" without actually talking about it last chapter, because he talks about the story explicitly in this chapter. This is a structural thing he does repeatedly: he'll mention a writer/director/etc and hint at a work he's going to discuss later without actually naming it. (In this chapter, he does this with Fritz Lang and Metropolis.) This structural choice is not well-signposted and I don't care for it, but at least now I know that's what he's doing.
He also touches on Lovecraft again here, so I apologize as well for accusing him of skipping ol' Howie. Here, we talk briefly about "Herbert West: Re-animator", as it's the only Lovecraft story to a) actually feature WWI explicitly and b) deal much with corpses. There's also this quote about Cthulhu which is...a big fucking stretch: "He raised great Cthulhu, a monster that has haunted the century, a new death’s head spreading wide his black wings of apocalypse, which was clearly recognizable as the Great War and its meaning continued to menace the world."
Like, there is absolutely an argument to be made that WWI was a major influence on the invention of cosmic horror at the beginning of the 20th century. Again, how could it not be? WWI was proof for a lot of people that the universe fundamentally didn't care about them. But that's the thing that I don't think Poole gets - cosmic horror is not about the fear that you are going to die. Cosmic horror doesn't care about your corpse because it doesn't care about you. Cosmic horror is about the fear that no one cares that you exist at all. That is a huge and important difference.
As the chapter title implies, there is a lot of repeated discussion this chapter of waxworks, dolls, puppets, poppets, etc. Poole insists over and over again that a) all of these simulacra can be collapsed symbolically into a single image and that image is of a corpse and b) these objects became horrific after WWI because of the corpse thing. But then he'll go through the history of the fascination with creepy wax figures stretching back to wax images of saints through Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, or he'll talk about dolls and reference E T A Hoffman's The Sandman (from 1817), which, to my mind, totally undercuts his point. You don't need the Great War to make waxworks creepy, my dude.
(Somewhat relatedly - there is a really interesting book to be written about the prevalence of hypnotism/mind control/sleepwalking in early horror film, but it is not going to be this book because Poole thinks all that's happening there is more corpses.)
Which leads us to the discussion of The Cabinet of Caligari! Poole spends a lot of time rehashing a widely accepted interpretation of the film proposed by Siegfried Kracauer in his 1947 book From Caligari to Hitler: Kracauer reads the film as a warning about the dangers of authoritarianism, with the somnambulist Cesare standing in for the people of Europe who unconsciously do the evil bidding of their authoritarian masters. Not saying that's the only possible reading of the film - I don't believe there's only one possible reading of any film - but it's an interesting and persuasive one. 'Nope!' says Poole. See, his theory is that the filmmakers wanted to get artist Alfred Kubin to design the look of the film (he did not end up working on the film), Kubin's work has a lot of doll-like figures in it, dolls are always corpses, and therefore Caligari is, once again, only about how all those people died in the war. This is the only thing the filmmakers could have meant.
(On the positive side, this did lead me to look up the art of Alfred Kubin, which I was previously unfamiliar with. It's pretty rad.)
"There’s not enough evidence, for example, that the world understood that their somnambulistic obedience helped produce the outrages of the Great War." I don't see that the world as a whole has to see that in order for the film to attempt to convey that meaning - surely what matters is that the filmmaker saw it and made a film about it. It's not necessary for the world to understand the meaning behind a work of art for a person to make that work of art.
(Somewhat ironically, Poole complains that Kracauer is only capable of interpreting German film in the 1920s through the lens of his pet theory. Who does that remind me of? Couldn't say.)
Oh my god this is already so long, I haven't even talked about J'accuse. Poole thinks J'accuse is a zombie movie which I won't argue because I've only read about it and haven't seen it yet - that could be a valid interpretation for all I know. But then he compares it unfavorably to Romero zombie films and complains that the director of J'accuse "did not really know what to do with [his zombies]", just because they rise from their graves, make their point, and then return to their graves. The entire point of the film is to make the viewer bear witness to the dead. Poole even says this: "The film’s theme of marital infidelity, that inescapable trope in the cinema of the Great War, became a symbol for the larger question of whether the nation had been faithful to the cause of its soldiers. The dead came back to make sure they had." What else did you want the zombies to do???
God, the whole section about Vampyr made me crazy. Poole is all, "Carl Theodore Dreyer had little connection to the war and I’m not going to show any actual evidence that the war had an impact on his work but he made Vampyr in 1932 and it’s weird and scary and full of shadows and creepy imagery, so obviously it’s about WWI." (nb not at all an actual quote.) There's just no acknowledgement that a person might make a horror film that was inspired by something that happened to them that wasn't WWI. Hell, there's no acknowledgement that a person might make a horror film because they like making spooky stuff. I was a monster kid basically from birth - I suffered no trauma to make me that way. I certainly didn't participate in WWI. Explain that, W Scott Poole.
Lastly, he's just factually wrong about The Phantom of the Opera, in that he claims that the 1925 film presents no explanation for Erik's deformity, unlike the novel. This is not correct - there is no reason for his deformity in the novel either. Later films added that. The lack of explanation in the 1925 film is not a response to mutilated war veterans; it's just an accurate adaptation. Poole says, "No one in the Western world could have looked at the visage of Lon Chaney and not thought of what the French called the gueules cassées…" and maybe that's true, but he's just stating a theory based on a mistake and presenting no evidence.
On the plus side, I'm making a very cool list of books I want to read from the works cited, and also some films that I haven't gotten around to seeing yet.
#i left out the bit where he talks for several paragraphs about the first italian horror film: 'il mostro di frankenstein'#before revealing that this is a completely lost film#to the point that what remains of it is some promotional materials a photo one still and a single contemporary review#but he's sure that it supports his thesis#and also the bit where i'm sad every day that i don't have a time machine that would allow me to attend performances at the grand guignol#sara reads an infuriating book
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Homestuck - Heart and Mind
Inner self and outer self
Content/trigger warnings:
Heart: blood, decapitated heads, flashing colors, eye strain
Mind: flashing lights, repetitive looped gif
Very veeeery long thread!
Heart
I’m going to be honest, this is the more head-scratching (ha!) symbol of the 12, in my opinion. While the others immediately (or take a moment to) make sense, this one confuse me. Sure, it’s a cartoonish representation of a pink human heart.
The problem isn’t the main shape, but the right side of it. Beside the fact that it’s more original and eye-catching than a filled heart, why this gap, this wiggling line? But let’s proceed in order and take a more general approach first.
It’s a pink heart on a darker purple/pink background. The left side is filled, while the right side looks like a tail that coming in or out the shape. We’ll get into it a bit down below.
In pop and universal culture, people has always been show this embodiment of the heart. While many theorise about when and where it came from, a stable origin was registered during the Middle Age, as a pear.
Here’s an exempt of the theory:
“Historically speaking, the first known depiction of a heart shape, which can be vaguely considered as a symbol of love, was made in the 1250s. It appeared in a decoration of a capital letter “S” in a manuscript of a French romance called “Roman de la Poire” (Romance of the Pear).
This miniature depicts a kneeling lover who offers his heart to a lady. This heart shape is similar to a pine cone, and it is held upside down (not in the usual position of the heart shape that we know today). Researchers only assume that the pine cone-shaped object is a heart because its part held by the lover is hidden. The name of this novel is “Romance of the Pear,” so the object may also be a pear.”
The earliest depiction of a heart symbol as a symbol of love in a manuscript of the “Roman de la Poire.”
[Mio’s note: Roman actually means novel in french, and isn’t necessarily romantic. Though I guess it is in this context.]
It is interesting, in this paragraph the heart is both referred as pine cone-shaped and pear-shaped.
The latter is extremely funny, has it reminds me of a famous fanon HS meme “Well this has gone completely fucking pear-shaped”, attributed to Dirk and the decapitation joke. He, in fact, never really said it in Canon.
If we indulge this banter, the pear-shaped heart would symbolise things that took a disastrous turn, and so negative and stressful elements such as anxiety, adrenaline (negative in this case, positive in others), heart pounding, leaving a weird and unpleasant sandy taste on your tongue.
But I digress.
What we actually need to focus on is that:
A fruit, the pear, has been associated to a love gesture, like a gift to express romantic affection to someone.
The pear is upside-down, as the text point out. Which is curious and worth mentioning.
“the pine cone-shaped object is a heart because its part held by the lover is hidden”. So what is important it’s what is inside it, and so inside your heart. Which perfectly echoes with my subhead: Inner self.
The article continues, with Guido whom also depicted his version of a heart:
“Guido da Vigevano, a 14th-century Italian physicist, made some anatomical drawings of a heart that are very similar to the descriptions made by Aristotle. These depictions, along with the presumption that the human heart is connected with emotion and pleasure, transformed the heart shape into a symbol of medieval love.”
After this, a picture shows Charity incarnated as a woman, giving her heart to Jesus. While I won’t dwell on the religious implications, it is a metaphor of showing care and compassion to someone. Giving them a bit of your time, patience, and heart. In an extreme case, being completely devoted to someone in a strong way.
Heart-bound fellows, despite the fact that they are concerned about themselves, are very people-oriented. They deeply want others to feel well and happy. Hence the expression being ‘kind-hearted/big-hearted’, and ‘work you heart out’. They put a lot of themselves into their hobbies, which they are passionate about.
After this, the article introduce the playing cards, implying that Guido had an influence on the decision to show a heart among the symbols:
The playing cards are even more relevant to this analysis, as their modern symbol are present in Troll romance. Here, the ‘clover’ is an acorn, the ‘spade’ a leaf, perhaps ivy, the heart is even more like the one we know nowadays, and the ‘diamond’ surprisingly is a small metallic bell. This set is dated from ~1540.
[Sources: this site about the origins of the red heart]
That was a (very) quick look at the evolution of the heart symbol.
I could go on and talk about Valentine’s Day, but it would be paraphrasing the site, and we have much more content to focus on. I invite you to take a look at said site and do some research of your own if you are interested about this peculiar bit.
Let’s go into more direct Homestuck content.
During the adventure, we are introduced to three Heart-players. Nepeta Leijon, Dirk Strider, and Meulin Leijon, in appearance order.
They all have interests related to feelings and love.
Nepeta has a shipping grid of her own friends on her cave’s walls and seems to be proficient in moirallegiance, a quadrant that require to be invested and devoted to their partner feelings. She had a crush on Karkat that she never confessed. Karkat knew but never worked the nerve to do something about it.
Dirk is engrossed by romance and smut, unashamedly draw his friends getting frisky (in a borderline-obscene way), is passionate about the projects he works on (work his heart out, sometimes literally). He was (and still is) madly in love with Jake. But by being overbearing and socially inept their relationship crumbled (while not being the only reason it didn’t work out).
[I love talking about Dirk, but I’ll do my best in this analysis to properly and equally split the content between Nepeta, Meulin and him]
Meulin not only love shipping, she also gives directly advises to her friends, and acted as a matchmaker. She shipped several of the alpha trolls but according to Aranea, she focused on how cute a couple would be, instead on how and if their dynamic would work out. Her matespritship with Kurloz was cut short when he yelled in his sleep, deafening Meulin in the process.
Meulin talking about shipping the human teens, transcript from the Openbound game, part 2
The most obvious element they share is that they are zealous and unlucky in love. One would say it depends on the class, personality or aspect. They seem all correct assumptions to me.
Nepeta was the first to be presented as a Heart-bound character, the Rogue of Heart. So, logically, the design of the Heart symbol could be inspired by her.
How, you ask. Let’s take a look to Nepeta’s sign.
The ‘Leo’ sign, in human culture represents the constellation of the lion, with the circle as their head, and the loop as the body and tail.
Now looking back and forth to Leo and Heart: Heeeey! It’s quite similar. Can you see it?
Alright, that’s a good start. So the right side is like a tail. Let’s dig and look around Heart/heart. Heart is synonym of soul. Its symbol is a pink blood pusher. For humans it represent romantic love, our only ‘official’ quadrant. A red lover for trolls is called a matesprit. Sprit comes from esprit, which is the french word for spirit. So matesprit is a soul mate. But this term is used for another concept in Homestuck. A spiritual guide during the player journey: a sprite.
The link between the Leo and Heart sign is getting stronger. The circle as the head, the wiggling line as the body and tail. The sprite is a living spirit, a floating soul present in the physical plane. So the right side, the tail, is bound to the left side, the head. Meaning the soul is bound to the body.
Oh. But what if it was detached from it? Yeeep, you know, I know, they know. This is why and how decapitation come into the picture.
Beheaded Dirk and Roxy hit in the stomach, from the [S] Dirk: synchronize
Jasperosesprite^2 prototyping Nepeta’s decapitated head in Jake’s kernelsprite
A kiss on the lips, which is seen often as a romantic gesture, is one of the resurrecting mechanism within SBURB/SGRUB. It transfers the soul from the ‘original’ body to the dream self, turning the latter into the main body. Separating the head from the rest of the body amounts to take away the soul, while throwing the head back (or any part of the corpse) into a kernelsprite recreate the link between the two.
A kernel is:
“ a computer program at the core of a computer's operation system with complete control over everything in the system. It is an integral part of any operating system. It is the "portion of the operating system code that is always resident in memory". It facilitates interactions between hardware and software components.””
Source: Wikipedia
It’s a brain that bound the soul to the body, and is the core of the system, controlling it. So basically, the digital mind made in SBURB. One display among the several ones of the Heart/Mind duality.
So wait, if the head in this case is the soul, and looking back at medieval picture at the beginning (dude kneeling in front of a lady offering a heart) then Dirk sendificating his head in [S] Dirk Synchronize/Unite is really a romantic overture toward Jake (sacrificing a part of his self then Hal prompting him to kiss Dirk’s lips). Same for Jasperose resurrecting Nepeta by using her head. Damn. You two are smooth operators in the most disturbing way.
Another personal theory in my mind, is that pink ‘tail’ could represent how a person use and interact with their aspect.
Nepeta, as a Rogue, remove or give personality, passion and feelings to someone.
For example she could appease a friend by removing their frustration. In contrary she could also give passionate feelings to someone who needs them. Such as in Ni no Kuni! In which the protagonist Oliver takes a piece of somebody’s soul (what is called emotion or virtue) to give it to someone who needs it. Those people are referred to “brokenhearted”.
So the wiggling tail would be something introduced or take away from the soul.
Dirk, as a Prince, has shown having the power to completely remove someone’s soul from their body.
And for that, he doesn’t like his abilities, exhibiting him as a ‘cartoonish villain’ like Voldemort (splintering his soul into horcruxes) or Xehanort (putting part of himself in the Organization members). Though he could remove and grab one of his friend’s soul to save them from a close death. See the fan comic Double Death of the Author by The Lifetime Channel on MSPFA, and the fan fiction Defragmentation by Katreal on Ao3.
In this case, the tail would represent the soul being slowly removed.
Meulin, as a Mage, have an understanding of people’s strong feelings, especially romantic ones.
Her ability is to read, feel and use her knowledge to help her friends figure out who is better suited for them. Meulin’s powers are similar to a diviner, allowing to form or break a couple. Perhaps with practice and reaching the God Tiers, she could even perceive red threads of fate which bound two lovers regardless of the location and time. The manga Bound Beauty (sorry, no english Wikipedia page) features a young lady with the ability to see those strings, usually invisible to the eye. She uses it at her advantage to coach her classmates, in exchange of money.
In this case, the tail would represent the red/pink thread of fate, coming not from the pinkie, but directly from the soul.
Heart-bound recommended Lyricstuck: What do you want from me by Pink Floyd
Mind
Watch as I make as much Mind puns as possible :p
This one is easier to read, which is also why it will be difficult for me to write a substantial section about it. Let’s start with the obvious.
It’s a vivid teal on a bit darker green background. Same as the Heart aspect, it’s more likely that the palette has been inspired by the first revealed character related to Mind: Terezi Pyrope, from the Teal caste. The shape is composed of an orb surrounded by three hook-like tails connected to the center. What effortlessly come to mind (ha!) is an organic cell, from the brain.
Picture source: https://www.pinterest.fr/pin/784048616363923971/
Neurons allow and facilitate informations to navigate in the brain.
It’s:
an electrically excitable cell that communicates with other cells via specialized connections called synapses.
Source: Wikipedia
Information goes from a neuron, through a synapse to another neuron. An idea leads to another, connecting bits that turns into the big picture.
The Mind aspect seems to share the concept of data with the Light aspect. The differences are that Light focuses on the most fructuous parts, ones that lead them to victory, while the Mind-bound works with choices and a mindset, in a more wide range, then narrowing the paths.
Terezi using her vision to s33 what action leads to which outcome, searching for the most fitting one.
Rose insisting that Kanaya come along the 3 years ride, while explaining and guiding Kanaya to make her narrowing her vision of “victory”.
So both Seer treat information, just not in the same way.
The outcome still remains ”I want to advance toward a certain reality and I help others to reach it as long as they follow my instructions”. The inconvenient blind spot (sorry for the involuntary pun) is that they hardly can use those abilities for themselves. Either we don’t witness it on-screen, or they barely do it in the first place (a good example is the retroactive continuity during the GO timeline).
But let’s end the Seer detour here. Back to the Mind aspect itself.
We have a whole system going on in our own head. When I try to look for something, if I don’t find it directly, then I turn to something related to said information. Like an indirect research on the internet. If we don’t pay attention and don’t try to understanding our mind, as well as others’, we just end up being frustrated and lost.
The thing is you make your own world, with every action, decision, it creates a new path full of possibilities. The words you say or keep to yourself, acting or staying put, it all matter. Grasping and managing to own it, and you’ll have a better grip on your reality. It’s not my Aspect, I do have trouble making decisions and take responsibilities, however everybody needs to go through it.
The within interacts with the without, the mind to the outside word. We are always worried about how others perceive us, what kind of depiction of the self we convey. So we desperately put filters to the point of exhibiting falsehood of a personality. While introspection is observing ourselves, extraspection is perceiving things that are outside our mind. Hence the outer self, complementary to the inner self.
Terezi perfectly get how people work, and can manipulate them with ease, in contrary to Vriska whom doesn’t want to and go for mind-controlling them. Joke’s on her, her ‘mind’-control is proof that she fails in this peculiar category, since Terezi doesn’t need any psychic powers to convince someone to do and give the info she desires.
The big contrast contrast between Vriska and her, is that Terezi looks and determine what matters or not, while Vriska force the odds to be in her favor, shamelessly stealing fortune from others. She doesn’t even want to understand or try, she is a cheater and proud of it.
That was the link and differences between Mind and Light.
Let’s take a look at the Heart/Mind duality again. Both seem to share a connection with electricity.
Terezi gazing at the sky of her planet, the Land of Thought and Flow
It’s no secret that the connection between neurons are often compared to electronic chips. Cables canalize and facilitate electricity’s flow, to power devices, to link ideas and data. Or just used as raw energy.
Brain-not-so-ghost-anymore Dirk trying to rip Aranea’s soul
Lightning seen from a building roof on Dirk’s land
While the electricity for the Mind symbol refer to synapses, for the Heart/heart, also called blood pusher, would allude to cardiac nerves.
Bec Noir preparing the Red Miles to be thrown at the Genesis Frog
Instead of thoughts, it’s blood that navigates in the ‘roads’.
For the Heart-bound, the lightning represents the chaos that are emotions and sensitive intuition. While for the Mind-bound the lightning is order, reasoning and cold logic that strikes to bring justice, whether said justice is deem fair or not.
Let’s talk about a famous movies series in which among the core themes resolve around the Mind/Heart duality: The Matrix
Each building, tree, person are made with an inimaginable amount of lines of code
The Matrix spoilers ahead!!
If you’re not familiar with this trilogy (or haven’t watch it in a while), here’s the plot:
//Thomas A. Anderson is a programmer for a big software company, and in parallel is Neo, a hacker that illegally provides contraband programming.
Agents in black suits caught up with his activities, but in truth approached Neo because a renowned hacker, Morpheus, enemy number one according to Agent Smith, contacted the programmer.
After offering to clean his criminal record in exchange of helping catching Morpheus, which Neo refuses, the agents violently implant a snitch in our protagonist.
Neo wake up in his bed, believing it was all but an awful nightmare. Appearances are deceiving, as ‘dream sequences’ are layers on layers on reality. The resistance group calls him again, setting a rendez-vous under a bridge to help him and answer his questions, if he is willing to cooperate.
After a lot of hesitation, snitch removal, and the insistence of one of the member, Trinity, he finally accept and follow the group to go meet Morpheus.
There, Neo is given a choice, The Choice if we’re going with Homestuck comparisons:
"This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."
Morpheus, Matrix (1st movie)
By choosing the take the red pill, Neo accepts to unplug himself (literally) from his ‘reality’ and see the truth: the world he lives in is all but an illusion, a huge program that is the Matrix, blinding humans to a make-believe 1999 year, used as living batteries, harvested and enslaved by the machines. Humanity is in ruins, and a war between people and machines has gone for a whole century.
Morpheus tells him that they believe he’s ‘The One’ and he has the power to stop the war. From the real world, Neo will train to reinforce his mind, going back into the Matrix and fight different enemy programs. While constantly being undergo introspection, looking for what to believe, who he is, questioning his values and acts.\\
From there I’ll go back and worth to Homestuck and the movies to point out the similarities and support my choice.
I’ll begin with the Mind aspect first:
Millions of human beings are plugged, treated as programs that have a function, along with providing a great amount of energy to the machines. Stuck and having their body atrophied, their brain is connected to the Matrix. The program control everything of their life and vision, from their status in society, to their physical sensations.
"What is real? How do you define real?" asks Morpheus to Neo. “If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain." As I quote farther above, reality is something that isn’t there, but rather something you make. With Morpheus’ quote, my interpretation of the Mind symbol being neutrons and synapses is consolidated.
After being blinded by Vriska, Terezi way of ‘seeing’ shifted. Slowly, her perception of things changed and she grasped on a new light her reality.
She didn’t need eyes, but expanding her mind and freeing herself from the vision that clouded her. Navigating inward and outward, understanding what she felt, her inner self and outer self, back and forth. But it wasn’t perfect, no, she had and still is working on it, as she can be blinded by either cold logic or passionate feelings.
Neo and her have the same weakness, they both are in love and it obstructs their mission. The dilemma is exhibited in [S]: Flip, where she has to choose between letting Vriska go, exposing the whole team to Jack, or killing her to protect her friends.
Terezi, on the path she let Vriska go
Vriska in her ancestor outfit, fitting Jack in one reality
A painful sacrifice is needed to be able to go forward, a reality in which most of them survive and has a chance of winning the game. A necessarily path that she regretted.
Neo with the Architect in the secret room, the screens displaying the different paths his reactions could take (Matrix: Reloaded, second movie)
In Matrix, Neo has to reach the source of all the program to reinstall the previous version of the code. The first time, he has a small range of opportunity, only a few minutes gap to access a secret room that would allow him to reach the source, among the city of machines. There, he encounters the Architect, a program whom function and personality is based on the creator of the Matrix, and have a chat with him.
Six others chosen ones preceded him, and all failed to accomplished this mission.
Why? “Choice. The problem is choice” answers Neo.
Because unlike the Architect, Neo is a flawed human being. He can’t just brush off his feelings, he’s in love with Trinity. The latter despite asked not to join him plugged herself back into the Matrix allowing him to get safely into the secret room. With that, she exposed herself to an inevitable death. And so Neo took the door that lead to his lover, enabling within him a miracle that resurrected Trinity.
Here was a couple of paragraphs about the dance between duty and love, cold logic and passion.
I’ll continue with the Heart aspect:
I talked about love and romance until now, but let’s take a look at another side of the Heart. The identity.
After taking the red pill- Neo turns his head and gaze at a mirror.
It’s shattered. The symbolism here shows that he’s lacking a part of himself, something that scratch him without being able to put his finger on it. Soon, right before his eyes, the mirror mends itself. Because he chosen the truth, the path that would lead him to understand and find himself.
The mirror is of course, a reference and call back to Alice, mentioned shortly before by Morpheus. No no, please forget about any cartoon, especially Disney’s version of the story. And focus about the sequel book: “Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There”. It’s a curious, deep and tricky book. I would know, I read it twice and I’m still confused.
But I’m sure of one thing, the adventures of Alice has always been about introspection. First in chapter 1, Alice imagines for fun that the mirror in the living room lead to a parallel world. Like Neo, she touches the mirror and engages into a journey. In chapter 3, in order to cross a giant life-sized chess board (UH HMMMM UNCANNY!) she takes a train.
“There she forgets all nouns, including her own name. With the help of a fawn who has also forgotten his identity, she makes it to the other side, where they both remember everything. Realizing that he is a fawn, she is a human, and that fawns are afraid of humans, it runs off (to Alice's frustration).”
Source: Through the Looking-glass (wikipedia)
[going through the book itself would have been too long]
The train might symbolize the course of life, or a part of it, in which an identity crisis occurs for Alice and question what is and what does it means. I’ll even say that this temporary memory loss put aside all differences and precedences, perhaps reflecting a class hierarchy, between Alice the human and the fawn, or the rich lady and the poor.
Back to Matrix.
Later in the movie, our programmer encounters a woman called the Oracle. She can see some events according to her grasp on human psychology, but never beyond a choice that she cannot understand, not even hers. The Oracle isn’t here to predict the future (even if she can), but to assist and guide those who picked the red pill.
She does sound like a Seer of Mind :]
Upon meeting her, she asks him “do you think you are the one?” to what he respond “honestly I don’t know”. She then point behind him, toward a mantra hanged above the threshold: Temet nosce, which means “know thyself”.
The introspection will continue through all three movies, a wild tango between certitude and doubts, self that leads to a choice, from a choice which leads to who he is, the two are intertwined and indivisible.
In Matrix: Revolution (third movie), the final battle between our protagonist and his alter ego take place. Rain is pouring, thousand and thousand of copies looking down at him, the sky is dark, and Agent Smith step away from the crowd, so the fight begins.
Remember the paragraph about the lightning? The sky in this scene is quite reminiscent to Terezi Land’s electric atmosphere, and even more Dirk’s, has his planet is covered be countless empty green buildings in ruins.
The scene portraits perfectly the confrontation between order and chaos, good and evil, selfless and selfish.
I could go on and on but I think y’all got the concept, and I nicely fill an even bigger word quota, with the two aspects balanced.
Source for the screenshots: Fancaps.net, here and here
Mind-bound recommended Lyricstuck: Dog days are over by Florence and the Machine
#Homestuck Universe#HS theory#SBURB aspects#heart aspect#mind aspect#analysis#nepeta leijon#dirk strider#meulin leijon#matrix series#movies#through the looking glass#and what alice found there#book#neo#morpheus#trinity#the oracle
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2020 Books Read So Far
Note: Most of these are audiobooks (listening to books counts as reading books and if you disagree I’d ask you to consider why you believe that), books I started and didn’t finish will be listed but not reviewed, and all my opinions are extremely subjective. I’m putting this on this blog because I want to and I think it’ll help me keep track of what I’ve read if I write it down in a couple places.
Some notes:
I’m surprised that most of these are nonfiction! I don’t usually think of myself as a nonfiction reader.
Having audiobooks has made me way more productive as a reader, since I can read while I’m doing repetitive tasks at work, when I have to stand on the bus, when I’m running, etc.
Naked, by David Sedaris
3/5, the audiobook was “unabridged selections” which means “we didn’t edit the individual essays but you’re only getting half the book”– it would probably have been a 4/5 if it was a whole book. I liked that Amy Sedaris was reading parts of it, but that’s because I like her more than I like her brother. This is sort of an example of the difference between “comedic” and “humorous,” because it’s definitely the latter.
Read it if: you want to read something pretty fucking weird.
Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, by Sarah Vowell
4/5, I saw this recommended a lot when Hamilton first came out so it’s been in the back of my mind for a good while. The book had a great cast, and having different people reading the historical quotes was an excellent touch!
However, I think Vowell’s conversational style is a little jarring here sometimes. It’s like “wait, why are you talking about Bruce Springsteen, I’m not that familiar with his work but he definitely isn’t from Revolutionary War times.” I got her book Assassination Vacation at a used bookshop recently as well, and both books suffer from post-2016 hindsight, where she’ll say something about how incompetent and foolish the politicians of her time are, and I just have to snort to myself and say “Sarah, you’re going to lose your goddamn mind soon.” That’s a bit of an unfair reaction, but it’s hard to avoid having it.
I was also, maybe unfairly, expecting to learn more than I did. The problem is that I know a Lot about the Revolutionary War, and from the introduction I thought we’d hear more about Lafayette’s later life (my knowledge drops sharply after about 1810). The book basically ends after the Battle of Yorktown, though.
Read it if: you have not seen/listened to both Hamilton and 1776, or if you want to read a summary of the Revolutionary War with a focus on one French captain.
Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell
3/5, honestly maybe a 2.5/5. Okay, so. Either I know a lot more about American History than I felt like I did or this is again a very surface level thing. Part of it is because she spends 123 pages on Abe Lincoln. There are 255 pages total. 2/3 of the states I’ve lived in are Indiana and Illinois, two states that fight about claiming Lincoln as their own, and I’ve been to D.C. 4 or 5 times, so I feel like I know enough about Lincoln. I know about John Wilkes Booth, and his brother Edwin who saved Lincoln’s son’s life, and the death train that took Lincoln’s body around the country. I did enjoy learning about the doctor who was probably conspiring with Booth and how he ended up saving tons of lives in prison when there was a yellow fever outbreak (also to be briefly unbearably nitpicky: I think she might have mixed up dengue and yellow fever? She calls yellow fever “breakbone” but I can only find instances online of people calling dengue fever that. Maybe they called them all breakbone in the late 1800s. If anyone reading this is an epidemiologist, let me know).
It was interesting to hear that Charles Guiteau, killer of President Garfield, was part of the Oneida cult. I’m trying to think of anything notable she said about Leon Czolgosz, killer of President McKinley. I guess she talks about how people assumed he was a foreigner because of his name, but I already listened to “The Ballad of Czolgosz” in Assassins, so I knew “Czolgosz, angry man, born in the middle of Michigan.”
This one is from 2005 so the politics stuff is a little more interesting, since at the time I was busy learning multiplication and spending one entire baseball season learning about baseball and following my team (they won the world series, I have excellent timing). I will say that in 2005 we did have Google, so I am again annoyed with some of her asides and personal anecdotes. Look, if you go to the Hemingway house and you don’t know there will be cats there, that’s on you if you don’t bring your Claritin. Hemingway is associated with only two good things, six-toed cats and Daiquiris.
She also does not acknowledge that the parties basically switched platforms? Lincoln’s Republican party is not today’s Republican party, in fact kind of the opposite, so it’s weird that she starts the book with a dedication that’s like “to my lifelong Democrat grandpa, he’d be pissed I dedicated a book about 3 Republicans to him.” I guess she does sometimes say stuff like “how did Lincoln’s party become Reagan’s” (paraphrase), but she doesn’t actually get into it.
Speaking of Democrats, she literally spends more time talking about Pablo Picasso than she spends talking about JFK. She doesn’t explain why she didn’t talk about JFK, but it seems bizarre to me to write a book about American assassinations and to leave out John Fucking Kennedy. Literally I’ve talked more about JFK in this section than she did in her assassin book. It’s not until page 253 that JFK gets a full paragraph. There are 255 pages total. Truly, if she’d taken a paragraph to be like “I’m focusing on the presidents who were elected before 1900″ or “the presidents whose immediate families aren’t still alive” or even “I didn’t want to travel to Dallas for research” or SOMETHING to explain why she left out JFK, I would have understood it more instead of flipping through the pages wondering what was going on.
Read it if: You do not listen to too many history podcasts and you didn’t read the Wikipedia page for the musical Assassins. And I guess if you don’t want to acknowledge that JFK did also get assassinated and that was kind of a big deal. Actually just listen to Assassins instead.
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
5/5 as a mystery, 0/5 for its original title (not gonna say it here but if you’ve ever googled the name of HP Lovecraft’s cat, it’s along those lines). Less than 6 hours, narrated by Dan Stevens from Downton Abbey, fairly ideal as an audiobook. I am 95% sure I’ve already read this, because I spent the summer before I started high school reading every Agatha Christie book in the library (I do not have a list of all the Agatha Christie books in my library the summer of 2010, so there is some question).
Read if: you want to hear the guy from Downton Abbey deliver the line “I’m not a complete fool!” in a tone that makes it sound like “I’m not a fucking moron!” Sidenote: Can anyone tell me if Brits say “solder” by pronouncing the L that I’ve always heard as a silent L? Or if Dan Stevens just fucked up that one word?
Over The Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love, by Jonathan Van Ness
4.5/5
This was a super enjoyable audiobook! It’s a testament to JVN’s considerable charisma that this book is full of him giving people in his past who would rather be anonymous Russian names, and it doesn’t get grating (as a Marina, however, I was shocked to not hear my name at any point; most of the other Marina’s I’ve met in my life are Russian). JVN has had a wild ride in life, and it’s a really raw, honest story of how he became who he is. I will say that if you are interested in reading this, please look up the trigger warnings; there are a lot of things that could be triggering to people.
I feel a little bad at how much more I liked this one compared to Tan France’s memoir, but I also feel like whoever was ghostwriting that one did a bad job at making Tan seem... not extremely defensive, cocky, and prickly (it seems that JVN did not use a ghostwriter; Tan’s on the other hand, let the phrase “I’m proud to be a petty bitch” make it into the final proof several times). Also JVN advocates going to therapy in his book, while Tan kind of says that you should only go to therapy if you have no friends or family or life partner to talk to, which I fundamentally disagree with. I don’t know. I also feel like, if I were to get a makeover from the Fab 5, Jonathan would love my hair (I have great hair) while Tan would say that I’m dressing too old for a 24 year old and then take me to fucking Lane Bryant or Torrid (I wear a size 16 US so IRL options are limited).
Read if: You like Queer Eye or Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness
Medallion Status, by John Hodgman
4.5/5
I really like John Hodgman’s podcast, and I got to ask him a question at an event he did at the Field Museum and he was very nice, so I went into this inclined to enjoy it.
And I did! I had a good time reading it. I read it the first week of January and now it’s the second week of February so I have already erased much of the book’s content from my mind, but he somehow made the perspective of being a formerly kinda famous person really interesting. I would also recommend Vacationland, particularly if anyone wants to write an au where Nursey, as a New Yorker, has a vacation home in Dex’s town in Maine. That’s right, I brought it back around to the topic of this blog. And that would be a fucking fantastic au.
Read it if: you like memoirs! it’s a good one.
Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie
Gonna give this one a 3/5 for performance, because Dan Stevens (again, because I liked his narration in the other one) does a really annoying American accent for a few characters, and an extremely bad Italian accent for another. I’m starting this review only a few hours in, so if it turns out that the Italian man is not Italian, I’ll revoke my criticism. Still a 5/5 mystery, though. I did have to stop many times when they were talking about Istanbul to go over to Spotify and play “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” by They Might Be Giants.
Books abandoned in 2020 (so far) (no real spoilers, I didn’t get more than a few chapters into any of them):
The Unhoneymooners, Christina Lauren
I got to a point where the main character was telling a lie that would put her newly accepted job into jeopardy, and it stressed me out so much as a relatively new hire that I stopped listening for the day and started another one, and then the week had passed and then the library took it back. I think I’d enjoy it more if I was reading it physically and I could control how fast I got through awkward parts (I am practically allergic to secondhand embarrassment). The performance was good and I did get a hankering for cheese curds.
Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
I had like three audiobooks checked out at the same time, and even though this was again an abridged version, I just didn’t have time for all of them. My mom has a physical copy, I’ll borrow that at some point.
The Witch Elm, Tana French
This is one I may revisit someday. The main character is kind of an asshole, which is the point of his character I think, but it made it hard to get into the story. It’s also a 22 hour audiobook, which is kind of insanely long. Additionally, the narrator has a very slow way of talking, but if I tried to speed up the rate of playback I had trouble understanding his accent (I think I just have trouble processing really fast speech in general as well, but I would’ve had an easier time understanding someone with the same accent as me). Anyways, someone put a hold on it at the library and then I didn’t check it out again.
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The Big Apple! 17-19 July
17 July
New York, New York! Just love it. Been here a couple of times before and three days now and leaving early tomorrow, but would love to have an extended stay here - 6 to 12 months! There is so much to see, so many places to visit, so much to do. It is full of in-your-face energy and I love it. Definitely want to come back again. We said that about Paris too, but after our visit there last year, the lustre had gone, but not from the Big Apple! As shiny as ever.
We started with a New York Greeter: a great concept where they provide a free ‘guide’ to introduce you to the city and we had booked one from home. Our greeting was a bit truncated because we had also booked a Food Cart tour for late morning, but our guide took us to the Union Square Market where they had fresh food from farm gate to the Square, every imaginable type of produce, maybe a hundred stalls or more and every one of them busy with customers.
We then went to a village area a bit further east and talked about the historical and architectural factors that resulted in several dramatic population shifts over the years. I love the explanations about how and why things happened and why they are as they are. They are very thought-provoking and often quite surprising. Maybe the first time I really thought about this was on our first visit to the sewers in Paris in 1995 where we learned how the availability of potable water and adequate sanitation literally governed the growth and development of the city over the past 2500 years. This trip, we learned how fire and earthquakes dictated many regulations in San Francisco and Chicago- and now, how the lessons learned there have influenced developments in New York too. I found the discussion fascinating.
Our guide then took us to Soho (South of Houston) and thence down to Wall Street where we linked up with our Food Cart tour guide. The greeter took us on three subway trips along the way and we found that public transport is not cheap here. No matter who you are, child, adult or senior, disabled or not, travelling one stop or 50 miles upstate, the fare is $2.75 each. If you change from train to bus or otherwise, a new fare is payable - so just our basic movements getting around for the past 3 days have cost well over $50 US or about $80 Oz!
Our greeter was fine, if not mind-blastingly inspiring: on the other hand, our Food Card tour was a real hit.
Our guide, Brian is a full-time food guide and part-time actor and food blogger and we seemed to hit it off with him a bit. We had another 11 young women (Aussies, Kiwis, a Pom and a Yank) who joined the tour as part of a Kontiki tour they have been on and we visited 6 Food carts and sampled street food and drinks at each, all part of the tour. Brian was a great raconteur and got us thinking and talking about the issues of conflicting laws and public opinions about street vendors and how their operations provided a valuable service, but perhaps some unfair competition for local cafes and restaurants. The food and drink was excellent and Brian found places out of the extreme heat for us to sit at most stops – so we had food for thought as well as food for our over-extended bellies.
The last food stop was quite close to the East River so we wandered around a couple of piers looking for a place to sit over a coldie, but found only one place just as it was closing for the day. Too bad.
(Note specifically for one potential reader who will recognise my post. Right on the edge of the pier, pretty much in plain view, we spied a svelte young Asian nymph sunbathing starkers – but I elected not to exercise my camera.)
It was really too hot to do much walking so we took the subway to Times Square and it was at its flashiest best with gigantic HD electronic billboards glaring down at us, in fact surrounding us on all sides. The crowd was rally dense – and it was interesting to see a number of ‘Flow Zones’: designated areas where you weren’t allowed to stop or stand to take photos – you had to keep moving or risk a substantial fine. We were only a few blocks from our hotel at that point so after fighting the crowd for half an hour, we retreated homeward to find a Walmart to buy some food and drinks to take back with us – and we enjoyed them much more in the cool of our room! I reckon we walked at least 10 km on the day.
We channel-surfed for a while, having not turned a TV on since we left home, but gave up after 10 minutes and 50 channels – US TV seems just as inspired as Aussie rubbish. At least that provided another opportunity to sort more photos and white a few more paragraphs while a big thunder- and rain-storm lit up the sky outside the window.
18 July
We ate some of last night’s leftovers for breakfast and finished them for lunch and spent the morning on our photos and blogs.
We then took the subway and a bus to the Chelsea Piers in the West Side to the Hudson River to circumnavigate Manhattan on an architectural cruise. (The bus ride was a freebie! They have just changed the arrangements for bus travel where you have to buy a paper ticket at a machine using your electronic pass – but we didn’t know and there was no machine where we boarded anyway so when I tried to use my electronic pass on the bus, the driver just smiled and waved us through!) We seem to have been on an architectural and historical binge since arriving in the US, but it has been very stimulation - surprisingly so! We arrived a bit early for the cruise so I cruised the nearby gardens looking for birds. Didn’t see a lot, but added two to our US list anyway.
The cruise was great. The guide was an architect and he was brilliant. He was loaded with information and eager to impart it to us all. There was a group (a workmate excursion I think) with us who had no interest in the commentary and laughed and chatted raucously between themselves throughout, spoiling it a bit for everyone else. I really don’t know why people do this. We have encountered it quite often lately at home as well as here. Ignorant people who think their own empty chatter is more important to everyone than the person or event that we all paid to enjoy.
Anyway, our guide made a few partially successful attempts to quieten them and focussed more on those in the front of the boat where we were. We heard stories about hundreds of different buildings we passed and many of the dozens of bridges we cruised under, including a lot of historical context and I thought it was really interesting and educational. It was a pleasant air-conditioned 3 hours with a drink and nibbles – when it was well into the mid-30s outside.
The Highline was nearby so we went there and walked a kilometre or two along it. The Highline was originally an elevated railway that is now disused and they recently developed it into a wonderful linear park. It is probably 6 or 7 metres wide on average and at least 2-3 km long, planted on both sides of a meandering walkway with colourful flowers and shrubs. Only trouble is that 8 million people walked the Highline last year and most of them seemed to be doing it again with their families and friends when we were there. Maybe not quite that bad, but a lot of people in what would otherwise be a wonderfully tranquil retreat from the bustle of the city downstairs.
We found our way home on the subway, changing routes a couple of times and then found our way home again – definitely need a compass and GPS to find your way around in New York, despite the grid system. We decided to go to a pub on the corner for dinner, but hardly got through the door before the noise blasted us back into the street – it was happy hour and the place was hopping with hundreds of young goers trying to out-shout each other. I am so glad I am not young!
We went to a quiet Italian restaurant diagonally opposite and sat outside, getting a few very welcome spots of cooling rain blowing in from time to time – but very little. Would have been nice to get a bit more actually because it was still over 30 at 8 o’clock.
19 July
Unfortunately, our last day in the Big Apple – already yearning to return.
We had a tour booked of the Flatiron District so subway-ed down to Union Square where once again, we were a little early so were entertained by the playful antics of at least 11 squirrels. They are such fun, chasing each other, climbing and jumping from ground to tree and vice versa, rolling over and doing somersaults, just having VERY exuberant and energetic fun. I love watching them even if a lot of people reckon they are pests.
The tour again had a food and architectural flavour with stops at 4 very different food places, mostly buy your own, but a couple of them had inclusions. My favourite was a 90 year old traditional diner where we were given a Rueben – very tasty it was too! We visited an Eatily (really fascinating up-market international food chain that has just opened or is about to open an outlet in Melbourne) and a Beecher’s Cheese factory and restaurant and a few other places with stops en route to discuss the architecture and history of the Flatiron District – the only district where the entire precinct is designated of heritage value rather than individual buildings. I love the Flatiron Building and we had a very moody print of it on the wall at home for quite a few years. It is a really narrow triangular building and has an interesting aetiology and subsequent history.
There are so many things to see and do in New York and it is impossible to incorporate 7 or 8 hours cruising the city and listening to the stories in a blog. You have to be here to really get a feel for the place – and I need a lot more time to get a lot more feel of the place.
I needed a new watch battery – my watch died as we were leaving San Fran and I got tired of asking Heather the time as we went along – but Heather’s feet were giving her grief so I parked her where she could sit and wait and went off to where our guide had told me the closest place was – about 8 blocks away. When I got there, the so-called jewellers was a café and nobody could help me. I called in at several places asking for suggestions and a bank teller finally said the best bet was a further 8 blocks away. I set off on my quest, but came across a locksmith and they often do watch batteries so called in there. Can’t help but there is a barber-shop just around the corner who does them – immediately across the road from the bank and two doors from the café!!! All set, I went back and collected Heather and we walked the few blocks to the Rockefeller Centre/Center. Definitely worth a visit – an amazingly expensive series of shopping colonnades with brilliant huge murals on all the walls and ceiling. Just outside is a sunken restaurant with a big gold artwork surrounded by flags of all nations – except we couldn’t fin an Australian one. We went back in to enquire and the concierge eventually discovered that there was one one, but it was over the road and not that obvious – but at least it was there.
We than walked down to the Public Library – a truly magnificent edifice with collections to match. Monumental to say the least. We watched a 25 minute video about their collections and they really are incredible. Amazing place!
We were looking at our map to figure out where we had to go to catch the subway when an old guy stopped to help. Turns out he is also a greeter and we had a great yarn. He had lots of questions about Australia – had been to New Zealand but never made it to Oz – a pity!
Anyway we got home safely and cooled off before going around the corner to the only BYO pace I have seen here. We took a bottle and went to this Thai place and had a really good meal for under $50 Oz. Eating out here is about twice as expensive as in Australia (we were told about one place yesterday where the booking fee for a table several months out is $US300!) so it is hard to get a meal under $A100 here – so our Thai place was a clear exception.
Back in our room we did our final packing before leaving for Canada tomorrow. Very much looking forward to the rest of the trip, but it is a little bittersweet to be leaving New York.
Photos to come when I have a better internet connection!
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A LIFE WITHOUT STAN LEE? -- Part Two
Ever wonder what it must have been like to BE Stan Lee over the past decade or two as the Marvel movies soared to prominence?
At 90 years old, he was still vibrant and funny and in good health, and he seemed to be having the time of his life just BEING Stan Lee. His final couple of years, with his wife Joan’s passing and so much behind-the-scenes wrangling to control his assets and access, were an embarrassment of greed from so many.
His detractors spoke of karma, of freelancers who worked with him and did not fare as well as he did as Marvel's editor-in-chief and icon/corporate spokesman, either in credit or financially. His biggest mistakes and, perhaps, regrets were there for the world to see.
And he had to sue Marvel for the $10 million in movie merchandise royalties he was contractually guaranteed. Wait, what?
Yup, even Smilin’ Stan had some bumpy rides.
Remember when I mentioned first meeting him in '78? Stan reviewed my friend Scott's artwork, dated and autographed the backs of his pages and paintings "to prove I saw these," and recommended that Scott submit his work to Marvel. Scott did so. Marvel's editor at the time rejected the submission outright with a terse note, "Stan has no power here."
That was a bit sobering. I stumbled over that sour sentiment a number of times across the decades.
Probably the oddest example? One day in the ‘90s, Stan Lee called me to say that Marvel asked him to write The Hulk vs. Superman cross-over one-shot, and he wanted to work on it with artist Mike Deodato, Jr. "Can Mike draw from a loose outline? You know how I like to work." I explained to him that the Brazil-based Deodato -- who was still learning English at the time -- didn't see himself as a writer and preferred to work from a page-by-page, panel by panel plot, if not a full script. "What if you and I talk out the idea, Stan?" I suggested. "I can then develop it into the full plot that Mike can work from, you review it, and he draws it from there?" "That'd be great, Dave! We've been talking about working together for awhile now. Let me give you the editor's name and number at Marvel. Tell him Mike's available to start, and we can get to work."
I called the editor and left a message. Then another. Nothing....although Stan and I had several quick conversations about it over the next few weeks. Finally, Stan called me again to ask if I've heard anything from the editor. "Nothing yet, Stan," I told him. "Fortunately, Mike Deodato has other work keeping him busy, but I don't want him to lose this opportunity." "O.K.," Stan replied. "Call them again today and let me know as soon as you hear anything."
Five more messages, an Email or two, and I forget how many days later, the editor finally called me back. "You must've misunderstood," the editor said, condescension in his voice. "Stan didn't mean to say he wanted Mike Deodato for The Hulk vs. Superman. He meant, in general, that he'd like to work with Deodato some day on something like that. You must've misunderstood." So I explained that I couldn't have misunderstood and, grabbing my notes, I began to quote Stan's exact words. The editor interrupted, "No, you must've misunderstood." And he hung up.
So I called Stan's office, and his assistant gave me Stan's cell number. Stan was in his car when I recounted that conversation with the editor. "What? I didn't 'misunderstand,'" said Stan, in a voice that went cold. "I'm going to Marvel in two days, and we are going to talk about a lot of things." He sounded sick of this. "Call me at Marvel's offices in the afternoon."
So I did. The gal who answered at Marvel told me, "Stan is still in his meeting. I can hear him yelling. I'll tell him you called like he asked." A few days later, Stan called me back, sorry that Deodato and I had been treated that way by Marvel. I sighed and said, "Well, I'm surprised and sorry they treated you that way, Stan." "Ahh, don't worry," he answered. "I'm fine." I later heard that this may have been the same visit to Marvel where Stan's contract got re-negotiated for a million bucks a year, an assistant and driver and he would only be responsible to Marvel for one day per week and could launch his own ventures. Soon he launched Stan Lee Media and, later, POW! Entertainment; Mike Deodato moved to DC and Dark Horse and Chaos! before spending the next decade back exclusively at Marvel, and The Hulk vs. Superman was eventually published with a very talented, very different creative team.
For Christmas that year, Mike Deodato created a drawing of The Hulk vs. Superman, and we gave the original art to Stan to commemorate the book that almost happened.
Stan has always put on a great face for the comics biz, endlessly energetic and upbeat about its potential. He's even been its apologist at times, such as when a comic book store owner, writing in CBG, demanded that Marvel apologize for destroying the direct sales market with its '90s era machinations and hurting his business -- and Stan called that store to apologize.
I remember walking down a Convention aisle at normal speed, and Stan and Max Anderson cut around me, one on each side, walking at twice my speed and out of sight before I knew it -- Stan being 88 at the time. I mentioned my surprised to Max the next day, and Max told me, "Stan saw me drinking a Red Bull, asked me what it was, and I told him it was to boost my energy. Stan said he ought to drink a few, and I said, 'NO! I drink these to keep up with you!'" We both chuckled over that.
So a few years later, I was certainly pleased to greet Stan at New York Comic Con so soon after his pacemaker was put in, walking and talking as fast as ever. It was amazing to see people crowding the aisles just to get a glimpse of him.
HIs life had certainly become meta, with a Fake Stan Lee on the payroll (I think) running around Conventions doing a riff on the '80s version of Stan. It certainly was fun for me to pose with the fake Stan Lee while holding a picture I'd just taken with the real Stan Lee.
Because of my decades of working with artists and teaching Creating Comics Seminars all over the world, Stan was happy that I accepted the assignment to write Stan Lee's How to Draw Comics based on those Seminars.
I wrote, assigned new art, and produced the entire 228-page book over a three-week span in the Philippines over Christmas. Stan reviewed the chapters, writing back comments like, "This is grrreeeeat!" and taking time at the end to send me a note about how well he thought it turned out.
He seemed quite pleased with what I did with it. And to his credit, even on a late-night talk show interview, he never claimed that he wrote it.
Tina Francisco, Katrina Mae Hao, and I came up with a whole pile of Stan caricatures for that book that didn't get used! I hope to put them to good use someday.
Oddly, nobody told Stan how well the Stan Lee's How to Draw Comics book was selling. He wrote me --
I had to admit nobody told me how it was selling, either. (I later picked up copies of the book in Italian, so that was interesting!)
When Stan remembered that I was in the process of writing a How To Create Comics book under my own name, he wrote me a terse --
So I have his intro in my files. I need to finish that book, and you know who I'll dedicate it.
Later on, I ghosted some introductions for Stan, on such books as JAPAN NEEDS HEROES.
I found it funny -- the editor of the JAPAN NEEDS HEROES book inserted two paragraphs of his own text into my introduction; not knowing someone else had penned them, Stan deleted those paragraphs entirely because they seemed unnecessary and simply didn't sound like him. Stan ended up changing just one word of mine, "harried" to "hassled," and the intro ran otherwise as I wrote it. I later found that editor claiming, to anyone who would listen, that HE wrote that intro.
Just experiencing him BEING Stan Lee could be an inspiration, a learning experience.
Most telling might be a several years back when my sister-in-law's baby died in the hospital at only a month old, and Stan Lee was the FIRST person to contribute to a fund launched to help her with expenses. What’s more, he wrote her about how he and his wife had lost a child in childbirth, so they both understood her pain.
Or how about this one? It’s a Saturday in 2009 at Pittsburgh ComiCon, and something had gone wrong. Since we’d worked with Stan Lee on Who Wants To Be a Superhero? for his POW! Entertainment and we were about to start work on Stan Lee's How To Draw Comics, Stan suggested that I ask the Con to schedule us together for a few minutes, since he was booked wall-to-wall. The scheduled Friday night meet-up I’d arranged with the Con's owner for some reason didn’t happen. And by Saturday afternoon, it appeared as though Stan would finish his meet-and-greets upstairs in the Green Room, wrap his autograph session, and be whisked away two hours later for the airport without me saying so much as “Hello.”
Then: From our Glass House Graphics booth on the convention floor, my wife saw the Green Room door open at the top of the stairs, and she nudged me in its direction. “Go there!” she said. I did so, and she followed with our daughter Jasmine in tow and my photographer friend Paul Brittain right behind. Down came a couple of Security, then Stan, then the Con people. As Stan hit the bottom stairs, I stepped out, extending my hand. “Stan! David Campiti, Glass House Graphics!”
He looked up and, in true Stan Lee fashion, his face lit up while shaking my hand firmly. “Dave! Glad you made it! I was hoping to see you!”
The security guard stepped in to push me away. “Ya gotta go, keep moving.”
Throwing his arms wide, Stan said, “Wait — Dave’s a friend!” The guard glared at me, looked at Stan, back at me, then waved. “C’mon, then.”
Stan put his arm around my shoulder as we walked — briskly — toward his signing area in the next room. “Sorry it’s so crazy. How ya been?” he asked.
“We’re doing well. Glad you could spare me a moment, Stan,” I replied. “My artist Fabio Laguna and I did this up to give you, a nod to Disney buying Marvel.” The yellow package contained a 13” x 19” color print, a cartoon depicting Walt Disney wearing a Thor hat and costume and Stan Lee wearing a Mickey Mouse hat and costume, with a Disney logo emblazoned atop Marvel’s own logo. “This is CUTE!” he said. “Can I have this?”
“Of course!” I said. “There’s two of them. One signed by Fabio and me, and a smaller one unsigned. Hey, can we get a picture?”
“SURE!” Stan said. As we stopped in our tracks so Paul could take a shot, Stan turned to my wife. “Jinky! How ya doin'?” he asked, shaking her hand. Then he bent down to my daughter. “Jasmine! Nice to meet you. Are you four now?”
"Uh-huh. Are you Stan Lee?"
He beamed a high-wattage small at her, posed for the pic, then the guard pulled him away.
Carrying off the package, he said, “Thanks to much for this! Sorry we don’t have more time!” He waved, then he was off to sign for another line full of autograph seekers before racing to the airport.
Think about it: Despite a hectic schedule, Stan “The Man” Lee not only made me feel welcome, he had even recalled my wife’s name, my daughter’s name, and how old she was. (This from the guy people say has no memory!)
When I’m at a Con and flustered or crazy busy and someone wants to talk, this gave me something to aspire to. I'm much more concerned these days about giving each fan, each artist, his/her moment and my full attention.
Oh -- and that Walt Disney/Stan Lee piece we gave him that day?
Stan kept it displayed in his office.
So let me wrap this up by saying: Everything in life builds on everything else. I ran into Al Williamson in a Boston bar back in 1982, struck up a conversation, and he suggested that I submit scripts to David Scroggy at Pacific Comics. That led to my first professional comics script sales.
When something as simple as a chance conversation in a bar with can affect one's life, you can only imagine how decades of Stan Lee affected my life without him ever knowing.
Without Stan Lee's "You're in the club" Mighty Marvel Manner version of Marvel Comics, I'd never have become such a comics fan. I never would have had the goal to work with him in comics and would likely have ended up a pharmacist like my Dad wanted.
I wouldn't have been inspired to read so much, get a communications degree in college, sell my first comics scripts, write for magazines and books, create multiple comics series, work in animation, become an editor and publisher, or become an international comics agent and meet thousands of wonderful creative people all over the world, many of who have become my friends.
That also means I wouldn't have gone to the Philippines to teach Creating Comics Seminars and wouldn't have met budding artist Meryl Calanog. So we never would've gotten married and had Jasmine.
Without the inspiration of Stan Lee, my life would be completely different and certainly not one filled with such joy.
Thank you, Stan Lee.
For everything.
-- David Campiti
GLASS HOUSE GRAPHICS
12/28/18
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“I eat an apple”
Catalan- Jo menjo una poma.
French- Je mange une pomme.
Spanish- Yo como una manzana.
Portuguese- Eu como uma maçã.
“I sleep in my bed”
Catalan- Jo dormo dins del meu llit or Jo dormo dins mon llit (can also say Jo dormo al meu llit).
French - Je dors dans mon lit.
Spanish- Yo duermo dentro de mi cama (can also say Yo duermo en mi cama).
Portuguese- Eu durmo dentro da minha cama (can also say Eu durmo na minha cama).
“I want to talk”
Catalan- Jo vull parlar.
French- Je veux parler.
Spanish- Yo quiero hablar.
Portuguese- Eu quero falar.
As you can see, in these examples, Catalan greatly resembles French.
But let’s take a look at an article published in La Vanguardia last year:
Spanish
Por amplísima mayoría, los rectores españoles ratificaron ayer no ofrecer grados de tres años para el próximo curso 2016-2017 de formaciones universitarias ya existentes y mantener el modelo actual de formación de cuatro años de duración. El acuerdo aprobado ayer por la asamblea general de la Conferencia de rectores de las universidades españolas (CRUE), por 64 votos a favor, cinco abstenciones y dos votos en contra es vinculante a las 76 instituciones asociadas, que representan la casi totalidad del sistema universitario español.
Catalan
Per amplíssima majoria, els rectors espanyols van ratificar ahir no oferir per al curs 2016-2017 graus de tres anys de formacions universitàries ja existents i mantenir el model actual de formació de quatre anys de durada. L’acord aprovat ahir per l’assemblea general de la Conferència de rectors de les universitats espanyoles ( CRUE), per 64 vots a favor, cinc abstencions i dos vots en contra, és vinculant a les 76 institucions associades, que representen la gairebé tot el sistema universitari espanyol.
As you can see, despite having words that clearly resemble French, it does also look like Spanish. And if you pay further attention, you’ll also see a certain resemblance with Italian.
I actually looked online for further opinions and stumbled upon a Catalan speaking forum, which conducted this poll a few years back.
The poll’s title was, “What language do you think resembles Catalan the most?”
The person who posted this poll left Occitan out, as he stated that it was quite obvious that Occitan and Catalan are twin languages. The poll is also missing Aragonès and Aranès.
So, according to some native Catalan speakers on the internet, the language they feel that resembles Catalan the most is Italian. One person comments though, that a Japanese friend had told him/her that it resembled French the most.
But what does an actual linguistic source say about it?
According to Ethnologue[1], the language closest to Catalan (lexically) is none other than… Italian.
Lexical similarity: 87% with Italian [ita], 85% with Portuguese [por] and Spanish [spa], 76% with Ladin [lld], 75% with Sardinian [src], 73% with Romanian [ron].
Ethnologue does not talk about French, unfortunately. But I’d say that its lexical proximity to Catalan would be around that of Portuguese and Spanish.
I found this actual document [2]which exemplifies some lexical contrasts between Catalan, Spanish and Italian. If you can read in Spanish, you may find this an interesting and well thought read.
Phonetically, I think it resembles Italian and Spanish more, as well. I find French more “closed” than Catalan, and I also think that it (French) sounds more like Portuguese than Catalan, although I can’t deny that Catalan does share some phonetic aspects with French given its proximity.
In an answer of mine[3], I read the exact same text (Article 10 from UN Declaration of Human Rights) in English, French, Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese. I’m leaving here a couple audios of it. Take in mind that while I don’t consider myself to have a native accent in French, I do have a native accent in Spanish and Catalan.
In the first one I read in English, French and Spanish.
And in the second, I read the same but in Catalan.
(Sorry for the awful audio quality, by the way).
Overall, I’d say it’s more like a 50/50 between Spanish and French. Many times I feel like it resembles Spanish the most, but then I find myself reading texts in French and understanding words I had never seen before (in French) because they’re identical or nearly identical in Catalan.
As Adrià Cereto i Massagué has also pointed out in his super informative and extremely well thought answer[4], Catalan does resemble a lot of Romance languages, not only the ones I’ve mentioned.
Thanks for the A2A!
Footnotes
[1] Catalan
[2] Contrastes léxicos en catalán, español e italiano
[3] Mariana Ferreira Albuquerque's answer to Polyglot Challenge: Can you read and record a paragraph in these various languages that use Roman script?
[4] Adrià Cereto i Massagué's answer to Does Catalan share more similar linguistic features with Spanish or French?
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Is Catalan more closely related to Spanish or French linguistically?
Catalan is more similar to Spanish than to French but, paradoxically, is more closely related to French than to Spanish.
The reason for this strange statement is that, since Catalan is spoken predominantly in Spain, it has been heavily influenced - and some would even say corrupted - by Castilian Spanish. Catalan speakers frequently use Spanish words, imitate Spanish idioms (frequently to the despair of teachers of Catalan and Catalan purists) and conversations can often switch between Catalan and Castilian several times in the space of a few minutes.
However, although they are both Romance languages, Catalan and Spanish actually belong to different “sub-families” of the Romance group of languages. Spanish, along with Portuguese and Galician, belongs to the Ibero-Romance sub-group, whilst Catalan belongs to the Gallo-Italic language subfamily- along with French, Italian, and Occitan, and has a number of features in its grammar in common with French and Italian which are not present in Spanish.
Examples:
English: I’m going away:
French: je m’en vais:
Italian: (Io) me ne vado:
Catalan: (jo) me’n vaig
but
Spanish: Me voy (i.e. Spanish has no equivalent of the French/Italian/Catalan pronoun “en”/ ne/ en.
I’m going there
French: J’y vais
Italian: (Io) ci vado
Catalan: (jo) hi vaig
but
Spanish: voy allá. Spanish has no equivalent of the French/Italian/Catalan pronoun y/ci/hi.
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I’ll show an example sentence:
Son pare, mai no l’hi he vist interessat. Sa cosina, no la hi he vista gaire sovint.
Son père, je ne l’y ai jamais vu interessé. Sa cousine, je ne l’y ai vue guère souvent.
A su padre, nunca lo he visto interesado en ello. A su prima no la he visto por allí muy a menudo.
As you can see, some words in Catalan are closer to Spanish than to French (e.g., vist - visto - vu), although sometimes it’s just a spelling artifact (he - he - ai, Spanish and Catalan are spelled the same, but Catalan and French are pronounced the same, depending also on dialect/accent), but overall there’s much more everyday lexicon (pronouns, adverbs, etc.) in common with French than with Spanish. And many features of the grammar in the above sentence are just completely alien to Spanish or Ibero-Romance languages (the hi/y pronoun, the past participle gender and number agreement with the direct object, etc.). Actually, There’s even more lexicon in common with Italian than with Spanish or French, which is understandable since both Spanish and French have had more non-Romance influence than Catalan or Italian, so the latter two share more cognates without actually being more closely related.
The closest language to Catalan is Occitan, and together they form the Occitano-Romance subgroup of Romance languages. Some authors want to classify them under Ibero-Romance (With Portuguese, Spanish, Galician, etc.), but they are quite different from the rest of Ibero-Romance in many obvious ways; some others classify them under Gallo-Romance (with French, Arpitan, Romantsh, Lombard, Piedmontese, etc.), where Occitan fits perfectly but Catalan stands out as the only member with certain features and without certain other ones. Some others just give up and put Occitano-Romance at the same level as Ibero-Romance and Gallo-Romance, as a transition branch between those two.
As it stands, Catalan is flexible enough that it can be made to pass for almost any other major Romance language:
Cada professor meu pensa bons números
(Each of my teachers thinks good numbers. This may also be Portuguese, same meaning.)
El pescador busca una casa
(The fisherman looks for a house. This could be Spanish, same meaning)
Tu parles d’un petit restaurant
(You speak of a small restaurant. This could be French, same meaning. Also notice that the word restaurant in Catalan is not a French loanword, although its modern meaning as a place where people go to eat, is.)
La vostra gallina morta passa per la nostra finestra
(Your dead hen fits/goes through our window. This could be Italian, same meaning. It is also the case where the pronunciation in both languages is potentially closest, only differing in the “ll” of gallina).
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Catalan shares more features with Spanish, although sound arguments can be made for French and Italian lexical and grammatical similarities as well. Catalan’s lexicon possesses unique items, such as in:
“El gos l’ha mossegat la cama al noi”
“The dog bit the boy on the leg.”
Gos = dog
Mossegar = bite
Cama = leg
Noi = boy
Catalan’s pronominal system is the most complex of all the Romance languages.
Catalan personal pronouns - Wikipedia
As can be seen in the above Wikipedia article, they're bewilderingly complex.
The basic vocabulary of Catalan shares many lexical items with Spanish (with several major exceptions). If you know the Spanish word, you can pretty accurately predict the Catalan word: E.g., if you know the Spanish word for “bridge” (“puente”) and are aware of Catalan’s apocopy and lack of diphthongization rules for stressed O, you can successfully predict the Catalan word “pont.”
Catalan’s verbal system is very similar to that of Spanish, although the simple past is used only in literature.
Catalan phonology is most complex in the northern portion of Catalunya (including Barcelona). In Valencia, the vowels have pretty much the same value as in Spanish, although they do differentiate between open and closed “e” and “o,” as in Italian. In Catalunya proper, unstressed vowels are reduced: a and e > ə, o > u, hence “Barcelona” /bərcə’lonə/ and “Olot” (a village north of Barcelona) > /u’lot/.
Catalan possesses neither of French’s rounded vowels (ö and ü) nor nazalized vowels.
It's interesting to note that Catalan shares the liaison feature of French: “Has parlat amb ella?” (“Have you spoken with her?”) is realized as /as pər’lat əm ‘bεljə/, where the normally silent “b” surfaces.
Adrià Cereto i Massagué’s examples of French loans into Catalan do not hold up under closer scrutiny (no offense, Adrià!): “Son pare . . .” and “sa cosina” are no longed used in spoken Catalan, being replaced instead by “seu pare” and “(la) seva cosina.” Furthermore, the adverb “sovint” is a cognate in Italian, namely “sovente.” I'd wager that “gaire” and “guère” have counterparts in Italian dialects as well.
Catalan also possesses the personal “a” used when referring to animate creatures, such as in “Al Pere l’has vist avui?” (“Have you seen Peter today?”) /əl perə ləs bis təβwi/. Additionally — Has vist a la Clara avui? /az bis tə lə klar əβwi/
Only Spanish shares that feature.
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