What Sarah Read

April Roundup: A boring but necessary post

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:52:00 -0400

Fairest Issues 12 & 13, Bill Willingham, Matthew Sturges, Lauren Beukes & Sean E. Williams (Vertigo)

This is where I lost all respect for this series and cancelled my subscription.

The Sandman: Endless Nights, Neil Gaiman (Vertigo)

This I LOVED, but it’s really been too long since I read the other Sandmans to do it any justice in terms of analysis. When I re-read them all I might get into the exact reasons why I love them, but now is not the time.

Saga Chapter Twelve, Brian K Vaughan

SO GOOD ACK ACK

Saga Chapter Eleven

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 07:19:08 -0400

This series just gets better and better.

This issue was great. We’re provided with further insight into the characters of Alana and Marko. I think these two frames, which come one after the other here as in the comic book, creating direct juxtaposition, pretty much sum it up:

Obviously for our purposes, Alana and Marko’s child is a symbol. For one thing, despite the fact that she narrates the story, we haven’t actually seen her as anything other than an infant as yet. She’s a really obvious symbol of the coming together of the two worlds. But in practical terms, for Alana and Marko she’s not a symbol. She’s a child. Their difference of opinion on this betrays their difference in character: Alana is far more practical than romantic, impulsive Marko who wants a child for its symbolism.

Secondly: Midori -- The Future.

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 07:07:58 -0400

Midori, a girl who goes to University with Watanabe and shares one of his classes, is very different from Naoko and indeed from all the girls Watanabe knows. She doesn’t do a lot of the things Watanabe expects girls to do. For one thing, she has short hair:

Even Midori’s smoking habits are unladylike, according to Watanabe:

Watanabe has fewer problems of communication with Midori than with Naoko. Midori is unforgivingly honest, even when it causes her to say inappropriate things. She tells Watanabe:

He feels, too, that they share a deep understanding:

Towards the end of the novel, they find the ability to discuss everything, showing a greater understanding:

Midori feels that people have problems understanding her:

This being said, the fact that she tries so hard to ensure that Watanabe understands her must indicate that she truly cares about him. He certainly understands her better than he understands Naoko, which implies they are a better fit. However, the understanding is not always there. When Midori leaves her boyfriend, Watanabe fails to understand that it is because she is in love with him:

As Naoko ties Watanabe to the past, Midori pulls him into the future. For this reason he has to choose between them. He finds it difficult to let go of Naoko and the past:

Naoko’s death is symbolic of this dichotomy between the past and the future, the dead and the living:

Even now that the final link to the past has gone, Watanabe struggles to move into the future. Midori tells him:

Towards the end of the novel, it seems as though Watanabe has made his mind up: he will choose the future and Midori. Before Naoko dies, he recognises that the past is gone and he writes to her saying so:

However, after her death he withdraws into himself, leaves to go travelling alone and attempts to shut out the world. Even at the very end of the novel, when he phones Midori and tells her that he wants to begin again, we never find out the final outcome.

Firstly: Naoko -- Understanding, Misunderstanding and the Idealisation of the past.

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 06:42:27 -0400

Brief backstory: The protagonist of the novel, Toru Watanabe, finds himself essentially torn between two women, Midori and Naoko.

In the novel understanding is a concept very much associated with love. This is best illustrated by a conversation between Nagasawa, a university friend of the protagonist’s, and his girlfriend Hatsumi:

Nagasawa says that most people would call a longing to understand another person love. It’s therefore significant when Watanabe and Naoko have problems communicating.

Naoko was the girlfriend of Watanabe’s best friend, Kizuki, who killed himself. She lives in a sanatorium and Watanabe visits her occasionally. Watanabe and Naoko are tied together by their loss of Kizuki. They are the only ones who understand this loss and this understanding is what attracts them to one another. Unfortunately there are many things they don’t understand about each other. Naoko experiences increasing inability to express herself, which she endeavours to explain to Watanabe:

Naoko is disappointed because this person she feels should have understood her fails to. Watanabe has similar feelings about her:

Naoko’s condition deteriorates and she finds it difficult to converse with anyone:

All of this is symptomatic of their incompatibility. Naoko and Watanabe can’t be together because they have too many problems communicating. This is due to Naoko’s relationship with Kizuki:

Unlike Watanabe, Kizuki truly understood Naoko. Because she has known such understanding, she cannot love without it, so her relationship with Watanabe is doomed. Naoko still belongs to Kizuki:

and this means that Watanabe can never truly reach her.

Reiko, Naoko’s roommate at the sanatorium, exerts a great influence over both Naoko and later Watanabe, and she advises him of this need for understanding:

Unfortunately this is impossible. Watanabe is left in love with a memory, a girl he cannot have. Because of their shared experiences, Naoko ties him to the past and to death:

For this reason she becomes an ideal for him, an unattainable ‘golden girl’ so much like Daisy Buchanan of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby which Watanabe admires so much. Naoko is more a dream than a reality, and he loses sight of what she really is. Reiko reminds him:

This idealisation causes Watanabe to grow nostalgic and to dwell in the past. The novel is, he says, his final effort to remember her as she was, and he knows that his memory is imperfect:

This fear of misremembering is the fear of losing the girl Naoko really was, which of course he does as even when she was alive Watanabe believed her to be more than she was. His memories of her are unrealistic:

He does not remember this scene as one from his own life, but as one from a film. This is due to the imperfection of memory and his tendency to inflate Naoko’s status: she is more than just a girl to him, so the scene was more than just an event in his life. His memories of Naoko are so revered that he can barely believe she is real:

Watanabe himself draws attention to his similarity with Jay Gatsby:

For Watanabe as for Gatsby, the light belonging to the woman of his dreams is symbolic of his desire for her and for the unreachable past.

Murakami also uses the metaphor of a firefly to illustrate this longing for the past:

Watanabe’s belief in a golden era in the past is so entrenched that even fireflies were better then. The trail of light left behind by the firefly is the trail of light left behind by the past. This final paragraph is inarguably Fitzgerald-esque: like Gatsby, Watanabe stretches out his hands to a light symbolising the past; like Gatsby, he is trying to touch what was no longer tangible; like Gatsby, what he seeks is just beyond his grasp, as though if we could only run faster, stretch out our arms further, we would attain this lost past. The recurring allusions to Gatsby are hugely significant: as Gatsby is taunted by a past he can no longer reach, so too is Watanabe. We are allowed to understand how Watanabe feels about Naoko through the comparison to Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan.

Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 16:02:00 -0400

W O W

There will be more coherent thoughts later.

And FINALLY: Free will.

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:10:00 -0400

Because Unamuno is Augusto’s creator, he sees himself as the God of Augusto’s story:

“While Augusto and Victor were having this nivollic conversation, I, the author of this nivola, that you have, reader, in your had, and which you are reading, was smiling to myself enigmatically on seeing that my nivollic characters were pleading with me and justifying my actions, and I said to myself: “How far are these unhappy people from thinking that they are doing nothing but trying to justify what I am doing with them! When one looks for reasons to justify oneself one really does nothing but justify God. And I am the God of these two poor nivollic devils.”

Because of this, Augusto finds himself unable to do anything that contradicts Unamuno’s wishes:

He tried to get up, perhaps to escape from me; he could not.

When Unamuno tells Augusto that he will die when he gets home, Augusto is still unable to keep himself from returning to his house:

“The poor thing, remembering my sentence, tried to draw out his return home as long as he could; but a mysterious attraction, an intimate impulse, dragged him to it.”

Here Unamuno addresses the idea of free will. As Augusto becomes aware of his creator, he realises that his actions are not his own choice and so loses the control he believed he had over them.

Linked to this is the idea of predetermination. Unamuno tells Augusto that his fate is inevitable because it is already written:

“Don Miguel, by God, I want to live, I want to be me!”

“It cannot be, poor Augusto,” I said to him, taking him by a hand and pulling him up, “It cannot be! I have it already written and it is irrevocable; you cannot live any longer. I do not know what to do with you now. God, when he does not know what to do with us, kills us. And I have not forgotten that the idea of killing me passed through your mind…”

“But if I, don Miguel…”

“It does not matter… I am afraid that, in effect, if I do not kill you soon you will end up killing me.”

“But can we not stay…?”

“It cannot be, Augusto, it cannot be. Your hour has come. It is already written and I cannot go back. You will die…”

Predetermination is something that really bugs people. We don’t like the idea that everything is already set in stone and all we can do is follow the plan through.

Personally, I find it a hard issue to decide upon. On the one hand, I don’t believe in a creator, so I don’t think there’s anyone to “write” our story as such. But on the other hand I find it hard to believe that there are infinite parallel universes in which we make the opposite decisions from the ones we make in this universe. I think that once something is done there isn’t really any such thing as “What if…” The other option didn’t happen, so it doesn’t exist. There aren’t any consequences of it because it never came to pass. And I guess all of that adds up to there only being one true course for our lives to take. Which isn’t that different from predetermination.

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Seventhly: Fiction vs reality

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:24:00 -0400

Warning: this is where the madness begins.

The nivola comes to a climax when Augusto decides to visit Miguel de Unamuno, an author whose work he has read. He’s (understandably) shocked to discover that he himself is in fact a product of Unamuno’s imagination.

“Well then. The truth is, dear Augusto,” I said to him with the sweetest of my voices, “that you cannot kill yourself because you are not alive, and that you are not alive, nor dead, because you do not exist…”

“How do I not exist?” he exclaimed.

“No, you do not exist as more than a fictional entity; you are not, poor Augusto, more than a product of my fantasy and the fantasies of those of my readers who read the story that I have written of your fortunes and misfortunes; you are no more than a character in a novel, or a nivola, or however you want to call it. Now you know, then, your secret.”

For obvious reasons this revelation causes Augusto to have a bit of an existential crisis. He retaliates, telling Unamuno that perhaps he is the fictional one:

“Could it not be, my dear don Miguel,” he added, “that it is you and not I who is the fictional entity, the one who does not really exist, neither alive nor dead… could it not be that you are only a pretext for my story to reach the world…”

“It could be. But I say to you and I repeat that you do not exist outside of me…”

“And I will again insinuate to you the idea that it is you who do not exist outside of me and the other characters whom you claim to have invented.”

So this can either be seen as a fairly feeble attempt to pass the buck (along the lines of the childish comeback I know you are but what am I?) but arguably it does raise an interesting counterargument. The point of this whole conversation is to raise the question: what is real? What does it mean to be real? It’s not a new question but it’s one to which we still don’t really have an answer. So it’s fair enough for Augusto, who certainly feels as if he is real, to try to flip it the other way.

Back to the “neither alive nor dead” concept. Unamuno repeatedly tells Augusto that since he is not alive, he cannot kill himself:

“No, don’t move!” I commanded him.

“It’s… it’s…” he babbled.

“It’s that you can’t commit suicide, although you want to… For someone to be able to kill himself, what is necessary?” I asked him.

“That he is brave enough to do it,” he answered me.

“No,” I said to him. “That he is alive!”

“Of course!”

“And you are not alive!”

“How am I not alive? Is it that I have died?” and he began, without realising what he was doing, to touch himself.

“No, man, no!” I replied. “I told you before that you were neither awake nor asleep, and now I tell you that you are neither dead nor alive.”

This is interesting. Do people have to be real to die? Fictional characters die all the time. But do they? With a character in a novel, you can go back and read the novel from the start and find them alive once more, which is not the same as just recalling the memory of the deceased because it’s the same print, the same paper, as when you read it the first time. They are not yet dead because you have not yet read their death. So in a sense, even though you know what is coming, you can truly relive the experience of them being alive again. And given that characters in books only exist in the minds of their readers, it is truly as though they live once again. Perhaps Augusto recommences his life every time someone opens Niebla and dies again each time they read his death scene.

Augusto’s own thought process is very similar. He decides that if it is true that his life is only a story created by Unamuno, then he can continue living in the manner that he does in the minds of others, of readers:

“And why do I have to not exist?” he said to himself. “Why? Let’s suppose that it’s true that that man has made me up, has dreamed me, has produced me in his imagination; but do I not live already in those of the others, in the imaginations of those who read the story of my life? And if I live this way in the fantasies of several, is it not perhaps real that which is of many and not of only one?”

Here Augusto brings up the idea of the common belief becoming reality. It’s commonly said that two people never dream the same dream. When we are unsure of what we experience, we turn to another for verification that we have not been mistaken. Augusto says that what several people believe must be true for this reason:

“One single person’s dream is illusion, appearance; the dream of two people is reality. What is the real world if not the dream that we all dream together, the common dream?”

There’s a lot to be said for this thought. Let’s imagine for a second that everyone in the world had the same dream tonight, the kind of dream from which you wake up unsure whether you have been dreaming. In that situation, the obvious method of verification is to ask those around you. If they all dreamed the same thing, there would be nobody to tell you that it had only been a dream and you would believe it to be true. Given this, what’s the difference between what really happens and what is believed to have happened, if there is nobody to contradict it? Our whole world could be a dream that we dream together.

“Where has Eugenia sprung from? Is she a creation of mine or am I a creation of hers? Or are we both mutual creations, she of me, I of her? Is everything not perhaps the creation of each thing and each thing the creation of everything? And what is creation? What are you, Orfeo? What am I?”

Augusto considers that we are all the creation of one another, which sounds odd at first but when you think about it it makes perfect sense. We all exist in one another’s imaginations: we all have perceptions of each other, and the person someone perceives you to be is the person you are to them.

“Nonsense?” added the doctor … “Who knows if this is or is not nonsense? Who knows if he existed or not, and least of all he himself…? Oneself is the one who knows least of his existence… we do not exist except for others…”

And it’s true. Existence is perception. Does a tree make a sound in the forest if there’s nobody around to hear it? Does the table stay in the room when you’re not there to watch it? The point is that it doesn’t matter, because what happens while nobody’s looking might as well not have happened at all. To exist is to be perceived by others.

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Sixthly: One final thought on love in the nivola.

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:16:00 -0400

It’s my belief that Augusto actually stumbles upon the true meaning of love by mistake and doesn’t realise it, although I doubt that Unamuno would share my opinion.

“She looked at you, isn’t that it? And you believed in God?”

“No, it’s not that she looked at me, it’s that she enveloped me in her gaze; and it is not that I believed in God, but that I believed myself to be a god.”

I think this is really sweet and interesting because, although I’m not really sure that Augusto can be truly in love with Eugenia, I think this sums up how love should be. Without getting too soppy, I think it’s important that people in love do not build their happiness upon each other. People should find happiness within themselves rather than trying to gain it from the outside world, or as Augusto puts it, love should make people believe themselves to be gods rather than believing in God. Believing in God — resting on external happiness — may or may not be beneficial, but believing oneself a god — having faith in oneself and finding happiness within — is far more important.

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Fifthly: Love that grows over the tomb of another.

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:10:00 -0400

Antonio, an acquaintance of Augusto’s, presents his wife’s ideas on love:

“Other times she said that the verb amar is no longer used except in the theatre and in books, and if I had written to her: I love you! she would have said goodbye to me at once.”

This requires a certain amount of explaining. Spanish has more than one verb for to love, and amar is one of them. This verb is less commonly used nowadays, and is usually seen as being a deeper, more dramatic word than the generally preferred querer. Antonio’s wife draws attention to the difference: she finds amar so objectionable that she claims she would leave her husband if he were to use it. Perhaps this shows a mentality similar to that of Eugenia’s aunt, the idea that love is not theatrical.

But Antonio’s story is more than just another point in the love/infatuation debate. Yes, maybe his wife is just coming down on the practical side of this argument, but it seems to me that given the end result her reasons for objecting to amar are more personal.

She does not truly love Antonio, or at least cannot commit to him, which we see when she leaves him for another man. This explains her objection to the idea of this deeper love implied by the word amar.

Antonio’s story is really here to teach us something completely different. He moves in with the wife of his former wife’s lover, and of this love he says:

“And sadder is a love that is born and grows over the tomb of another and like a plant that feeds, like mulch, on the rot of another plant.”

Antonio attempts to get over his wife by trying to love another woman, but discovers that this new love is disappointing. Loss of love cannot be overcome by new love, he argues; this is not a healthy way to move on, contrary to popular opinion and the maxim The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else. We learn from Antonio’s mistake: love is not transferable from one party to another.

(Perhaps this indicates a flaw in the whole “women have a shared soul” thing, too, because if it were true that he who knows one woman knows them all then Antonio would get on fine with the new woman because, after all, she’d be the same. But I already decided not to bother rebutting that argument so I’ll leave this thought here.)

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Fourthly: The difference between love and infatuation.

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 11:53:00 -0400

“This of love… Who knows what it is to love?”

Because Augusto spends so much time looking for a woman, Unamuno presents a lot of different ideas about love.

When Augusto falls in love with Eugenia, whom he sees walking in the street, he begins to ponder this same question.

“What is the difference between being in love and believing that one is? Am I or am I not in love with Eugenia? When I see her does my heart not beat in my chest and my blood catch fire?”

Essentially, what Augusto asks here is whether infatuation differs from “true love”. This is really a question the answer to which one has to decide for oneself, but it recurs throughout the nivola.

One of Augusto’s concerns is whether or not he can love a girl he does not know:

“…tell me: is she blonde or brunette?”

“Well, truly, I don’t know.” …

“Is she tall or short?”

“Neither do I remember this well.”

“Love precedes knowing someone, and this kills that. First love, then knowing.”

Augusto decides that love comes before acquaintance. Eugenia’s aunt disgrees:

“But if I don’t love him, how can I have to marry him?”

“How? Get married! Did I not marry your uncle?”

“But, aunt…”

“Yes, now I think I do, it seems that I do; but when I got married I don’t know whether I loved him. Look, this love is a thing of books, something that has been invented just to speak and write about it. Poets’ stupidity. What is definite is marriage. The civil code does not speak of love but of marriage. All this of love is nothing more than music…”

“And you, what do you know of what it is to love? You lack experience. You know what is a demisemiquaver or a quaver, but what it is to love…”

Eugenia’s aunt takes a more utilitarian view of love and marriage. She says that romantic love is something made up by poets and musicians. And she says that before she married her husband, she did not know whether she loved him; now that they are married she knows that she does. She argues that knowing a person comes first and leads to love, in direct contrast with Augusto’s concept of a love that precedes acquaintance because she thinks that love is not the infatuation Augusto feels but something less poetic. The “music” she refers to is all that she sees as soppy, childish infatuation. When she says that Eugenia knows about musical notes but not love, she makes the distinction between Eugenia’s concept of love and her own.

In conversation, Augusto learns about the poet Campoamor. Here these two conflicting ideas of love are reconciled:

“Well he said that when one gets married, if he does it truly in love, at the beginning he cannot touch his wife’s body without getting excited and flaring up in carnal desire, but time passes, he gets used to it, and there comes a day when it is the same to him to touch his wife’s naked thigh with his hand as it is to touch his own thigh, but also then, if he has to cut off his wife’s thigh it would hurt him as much as cutting off his own.”

Campoamor combines the two loves, or rather says that one leads to another. The young and newly married are infatuated, filled with carnal desire, while those who have been married for a long time feel a quieter but a deeper love.

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Thirdly: Women.

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 08:49:00 -0400

In Niebla women feature in a lot of different ways, and Augusto spends a lot of time pondering their role. I’m not sure whether Unamuno totally misunderstands women. In any case his characters certainly do. Excuse me some rampant feminism here but seriously. This stuff is just blatantly untrue.

“Is not woman perhaps another domestic animal? If not for women, would men be men?”

A domestic animal? Woman? Putting aside how insulting that statement is, it’s simply hilarious. Has the guy ever met a woman? We’re not exactly domesticatable.

“He who knows one, just one well, knows all of them, knows Woman.”

“I would have to start by posing a first question, and that is whether Woman has a soul.”

“This writer says, and he says it in Latin, that while each man has his soul, women do not but have one single and same soul, a collective soul… distributed among them all. And he adds that the differences that are seen in each woman’s way of feeling, thinking and loving are no more than the differences of the body, due to race, climate, feeding, etc., and that because of this they are so insignificant. Women, says this writer, resemble one another far more than men, and it is because they are all one and the same woman…”

“Woman has much more individuality, but much less personality than Man; each one of them feels more herself, more individual than each man, but with less content.”

Girls, take note: we all share a soul. Take this not as an insult though: that basically makes you Beyoncé, Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy all rolled into one. Whereas men can only ever have the qualities they individually hold, we can now crowdsource. (Seriously though, does this even need rebutted?)

“Believe me, sir, there are no Othellas.”

And the footnote: “Othellas: women as jealous as Othello, Shakespeare’s tragic character.”

What this is arguing is that women are not consumed by jealousy, that no woman would ever find herself in such situations as poor Othello did. This actually stunned me a little. I think if I’d had to pick a more jealous sex, it would be women. We have traditionally more reason to be: when polygamy is prevalent in a society, it’s almost never polyandry (wherein women have more than one husband); men are generally portrayed — whether true or not — as being less interested in monogamy than women, and therefore would surely have less cause for jealousy. Based on a stereotype of men and women, which obviously this type of claim must be, it would surely be more reasonable to claim that women were more jealous than men. At least, that’s what I would have thought.

And finally:

“She is a woman of her word, I believe. But… is it that women have a word? Does woman, Woman, like that, with a capital letter, the only one, she who is distributed among millions of feminine and more or less beautiful bodies… is Woman obligated to keep her word? This concept of keeping one’s word, is it not perhaps masculine?”

This is actually quite interesting. It’s the idea of honour with regards to women. Traditionally — and to be fair, this book was written in 1907, so I’ll cut it some slack — the concepts of “honour” and “keeping one’s word” would have been masculine. So it is interesting that Unamuno takes the time to consider whether women have the same obligations. To answer his question: I think it really depends on expectations. I don’t think honour is as big of a deal in modern Western society as it once was, but there are many places where this is not the case, and even here it isn’t a totally lost concept. I’d probably still say, too, that it’s something men are more required to uphold, but I don’t think it’s a concept totally dissociated with women any more either.

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Secondly: Augusto and his lack of direction.

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 05:35:00 -0400

It’s apparent from the beginning that although Augusto is the main character of Niebla, he pretty much doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Augusto is a massive mummy’s boy. His mother used to do everything for him. When she died he was left to fend for himself.

“And then came death, that slow death, grievous and sweet, painless, that entered on tiptoe and noiselessly…She died with her hand in her son’s hand, with her eyes on his eyes. Augusto felt her hand grow cold, he felt her eyes stop moving. He let go her hand after having left on its coldness a warm kiss and he closed her eyes. He knelt next to the bed and the story of those uniform years passed over him.”

Even at death, Augusto’s mother is still watching him, still holding his hand. He is forced to let go when she dies. This marks the end of those years they spent together — uniform is not the right word exactly, but I can’t think of one that fits better. Basically the years they spent together were all spent the same way: Augusto’s mother brought him routine. With her death comes the death of this, of having someone to tell him what he should do, and Augusto is lost.

Augusto was not a walker, but a stroller of life. “I hope a dog passes,” he said to himself, “and I will go in the direction he goes.”

Clearly anyone who depends upon a dog to decide where to go isn’t really big on thinking for himself. Augusto doesn’t know where he’s going in life. He describes life as a fog, una niebla, in which he can’t find his way. As my Spanish teacher succinctly put it in his notes:

Augusto does eventually find a dog, whom he names Orfeo. Orfeo becomes Augusto’s confidante and most trusted friend, because of the identification Augusto feels with him:

The little animal was looking for its mother’s chest.

Just as Augusto has lost his mother, so too has the dog, and Augusto takes pity on it because he feels the same way.

Augusto isn’t very self-aware. Other people are more analytical of his actions than he is himself:

“I knew already, without you having to tell me, that you were in love or, more accurately, infatuated. I knew it better than you yourself.”

Augusto needs other people to tell him his feelings. He can’t even work out that he’s in love, let alone his direction in life. It’s little wonder that he sets out looking for a wife, a replacement for his mother, somebody new to dictate what he should do. Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately, depending on your position — for Augusto, he has his eyes opened to life for the first time.

“Come here, come. You will say that Mr Augusto has gone mad, is it not so? Well no, it’s not that, no! It is that he has been until now, or better put, it is that he has been until now a fool, a fool of everything, lost in a fog, blind… not long ago my eyes opened. Now you see, as many times as you have come into this house and I have looked at you and I had not seen you. It is, Rosarito, as if I had not been alive, exactly as if I had not been alive…”

“This woman you say is bad, without knowing her, has made me blind on giving me sight. I was not alive, now I live; but now that I live is when I feel what it is to die.”

“What was I going to do when on seeing you I learned to love?”

Contrary to Augusto’s wishes, falling in love doesn’t solve anything. It just brings him a lot of angst. He learns that there isn’t an easy way to live life: getting married doesn’t let you off the hook. He can’t resurrect his mother by gaining a wife. As his friend Avito tells him:

“Yes, Augusto, yes,” continued Avito, “life is the only mistress of life; there is no education of value. You only learn to live by living, and every man has to recommence the learning of life anew…”

Life isn’t simple. There isn’t a formula for living it. Nobody’s there to give you a manual. We, like Augusto, have to learn to make our own way in our lives, rather than hoping that wives and dogs will make our decisions for us.

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Firstly: a brief homage to my country.

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 04:40:00 -0400

The only mention of Scotland in the entire book was pretty much just to make fun of us:

“To Paris with a woman? That’s like going to Scotland with a codfish!”

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Niebla, Miguel de Unamuno

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 15:42:00 -0400

So I just finished reading this hot pile of cray:

Niebla, or Mist as the English edition is titled (even though Niebla directly translates as “fog”) was lent to me by my Spanish teacher/academic mentor a few months ago and I finally got round to reading it over the past couple of weeks. Tomorrow I’ll be posting my thoughts on this nivola.

Este post está disponible en castellano aquí.

March Roundup: Other things I read this month

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 09:02:26 -0400

These are just a couple of things my comic book seller gave me for free to get me hooked on something new.

Lady Mechanika, Joe Benitez (Aspen Comics)

My first foray into steampunk. Benitez both draws and writes this series as far as I can make out and you have to admire that. Not much to say about this first issue other than that it’s SUPER PRETTY.

Planetary #19 Mystery in Space, Warren Ellis and John Cassaday (Wildstorm)

I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t especially grabbed by Planetary. The plot was interesting but for me a comic is — perhaps not primarily, but hugely dependant upon — its artwork. I’d say I’m more likely to read a badly written comic with good artwork than a moderately well-written comic with okay artwork. Cassaday’s style didn’t really appeal to me personally.

Before Watchmen: Minutemen 6/6, Darwyn Cooke (DC Comics)

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 06:05:00 -0500

This issue was actually way more interesting than I expected. It brings up a lot of questions about identity.

The Minutemen were obviously masked crusaders, but the identities of most were known. Not so Hooded Justice (shown on the cover). The secrecy surrounding his identity is key to his story. The man he was is obliterated by the character he adopts. Hollis even says:

Even those who knew him well did not know the man he had been, but they did not think to: he became his alter ego character. This is really reminiscent of another Moore character, V of V for Vendetta, whom Evey Hammond never unmasks. In his last words, V reminds Evey that “ideas are bulletproof”. The man V was has died, but the persona of V lives on as Evey is able to don his identity by wearing his costume. In a similar vein, Daniel Dreiberg assumes Hollis Mason’s persona Nite Owl once Hollis retires.

This is a slightly different circumstance — it’s never a secret that there is a new Nite Owl — but it begs the question: do characters like these become truly separate from the people who play them? When Dreiberg “carries on the Nite Owl name” does he continue the character Hollis played? Does he become him? Does V die and get replaced or does Evey become him?

When we watch actors portray characters in films we understand that the life of the character is totally apart from the life of the actor. If somebody dons a persona in real life, do they become another person? I think most people would say no if asked this question. It’s interesting therefore that Hollis never thinks to unmask Hooded Justice. Without thinking about it, he accepts that Justice has become his character. Even when he writes his memoirs of the Minutemen, which he notably titles Under the Hood, he never knows Justice’s former identity.

Maybe it’s because the man Justice was has truly gone. Then again, Justice doesn’t manage to escape his identity. If you look at his affair with Captain Metropolis you see a scared and repressed man who can’t accept who he is, nor ever escape it.

Interview with Scarlett Johansson, Elle February 2013

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:06:50 -0500

(interview Alex Bilmes; fashion Anne-Marie Curtis; photographs RANKIN)

I include this interview for two reasons.

(1) She PRETTY.

You have to love a woman who is both beautiful and intelligent.

And (2) I thought this was interesting:

because it’s increasingly how I feel about life.

Before Watchmen: Dr Manhattan 4/4, J Michael Straczynski & Adam Hughes (DC Comics)

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 11:09:00 -0500

This issue was the last of a prequel mini-series to Watchmen. I’ve been taking both Minutemen and Dr Manhattan, and I’ve definitely preferred the latter. Although we got most of his backstory in Watchmen already, I just find his by far the most interesting character in the graphic novel. So I’m gonna take this opportunity to present my thoughts on him as a character as well as this particular comic book.

Dr Manhattan is intriguing as a character because he allows us to see the human condition from a new perspective: from the outside looking in. Jon Osterman was a man, but Dr Manhattan has the unique position of being able to communicate with and live among humans but truly see another side of existence. Something I always found fascinating was that despite being able to “see the big picture” — in the sense that he is essentially outside the insane vanity of believing humanity to be at the centre of existence which we undoubtedly hold — Osterman still feels love. For me this kind of epitomises Jon/Dr Manhattan’s struggle: through his love for Laurie we see the vestiges of humanity that remain within him, but in most other aspects of his existence we see his otherness. His relationship with Laurie makes him accessible enough for us to understand him, allowing us to see his point of view. As a result of this we sympathise more with him when he observes humanity: because he is not totally alien, it’s easier to treat him as a character, so we’re able to look upon our condition as he does.

For other (completely different and really interesting) thoughts on Dr Manhattan, see this Hank Green video:

As for this issue in particular, the main thing I thought was really cool was the whole upside-down thing. There’s a scene with Dr Manhattan and Ozymandias, and to portray the opposite points of view the artists drew Ozymandias’ upside-down. You have to physically turn the comic book. I love stuff like this. I really like it when comic book artists/graphic novellists use physical features like this. It’s so cool. (Awkward when reading in public though. People think you’re weird.)

Saga Chapter Ten

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:15:00 -0500

Just read the tenth instalment of Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga (Image Comics).

BEST ONGOING SERIES. I love it. Yes, it’s Romeo and Juliet in space, but HOW COOL IS THAT?! Staples’ artwork is beautiful — the best I’ve seen in ages. I just love this series.

When it comes to this issue in particular — it was fairly typical. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary for the series. Nice to have a little of Alana and Marko’s backstory. I thought this issue seemed a little filler-y but that’s perfectly fine from time to time and it’s still far and ahead the best comic I’ve read this month.

One thing I did find noteworthy was an interesting point made by Hazel in the narration — although bizarrely I’m gonna come down on the opposite side from hers.

When I studied Romeo and Juliet last year it struck me that although here was a play defined as a tragedy, there is actually a happy ending: the families reconcile. It’s an often overlooked but hugely important feature of the text. To me it seems apparent that the sacrifice of the eponymous characters is what effects this conclusion. What you have to consider is exactly the question Hazel poses in her narration here:

Now this is a question that was very relevant to me when I read R&J, and I think it’s relevant for similar reasons here. Although I’m sure this question is intended to be a rhetorical one, I can’t help but disagree with Hazel: obviously Saga hasn’t reached its conclusion yet so I can’t make a judgement, but when it comes to Romeo and Juliet — yes of course it matters, but in the end I think that was what had to happen, the only way to reconcile feuding families. Sometimes you have to think big picture.

So I’m sorry, Hazel, but I think you’ve drawn the short straw. If in some way your family’s pain is necessary to end the war between Landfall and Wreath, then I’ll accept that as an unfortunate means to a beneficial end.

And finally: a universal truth.

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 11:50:00 -0500

This reminded me of a John Green quotation: “The truth resists simplicity.” I find that in all situations, it is important to remember this.