Absolutely gripping story of a runaway. Helen Potter using storybooks, circumstance, and resilience to overcome the psychological fallout of abuse- toAbsolutely gripping story of a runaway. Helen Potter using storybooks, circumstance, and resilience to overcome the psychological fallout of abuse- to try to lead a happy life. A girl and her rat.
This story is three things. Something loved, something fascinating, something meaningful. Talbot wanted to tell a tale of the Lake Country, using the miserable youth and liberated adulthood of Beatrix Potter and its relation to the North as a means to linger on Hill Top, told by a sexually abused homeless girl whose obsession with Potter drove her to follow their parallels. The abuse Helen underwent caused her to become a vagrant, gave her unreal visions the reader gets to share, left her socially destroyed, disgusted by touch, guilty, confused. Lost in a world- in a universe- where she didn't matter.
A Tale of One Bad Rat follows Helen and her once-real-then-imaginary pet Ratface from city squats to country paths. She deals with her past, her feelings of uselessness, the life she has to lead, and it is breathtaking. Meticulously researched in all aspects (abuse, the North country, Beatrix Potter's life). Painful. Vindicating. A damned amazing work....more
The style of these folktales is a kind of Aesop's Fables meet Lord Dunsany vibe. Princes, paupers, wise men, and parents go on journeys to elevate theThe style of these folktales is a kind of Aesop's Fables meet Lord Dunsany vibe. Princes, paupers, wise men, and parents go on journeys to elevate their station or better understand the mysteries of the world. Thing is, pass high enough into the mountains or deep enough into the woods and you're still likely to find demons, magic items, magic animals, giants and blind magicians, storytelling corpses. The descriptions are vividly unique and always hiding between the words, a deep understanding of the Way makes each page pulse with life. Delightful. More delightful still is there is no one type of story. You get the adventures that tell a tale of moral balance, but you also get open-ended stories with no discernible meaning, and stories of mixed morals the narrator prompts the reader to puzzle out themselves. Surprisingly pre-20th century in its style for something originally compiled in 1975 (except for an odd reference here and there), but timelessly approachable. Humor, depth, lust, the surreal, the mundane, the beauty of skies and mountains and the voices of the trees....more
I truly believe scientific study needs stuff like this to make it make sense. Scholarly papers are important, but data needs context to generate underI truly believe scientific study needs stuff like this to make it make sense. Scholarly papers are important, but data needs context to generate understanding. Making it funny also helps. This book hit on a lot of points for me, both in my personal interest in positive psychology, making choices and being happy, and in my personal life. Reading this book whilst freshly dumped and trying to navigate "phone world" and "real world" was not the best choice for my self-esteem. Now at the end I am glad I did. It is the long, sensible chat that no one is having with me, with someone whose life is similar to mine- but someone who has their shit considerably more figured out than I do (and for some reason is still interested in my concerns).
So why read this if you aren't interested in relationships? Modern Romance is about dating because it is about how passion works and the politics of communication. The way we commingle is different now and examining it when the stakes are the highest- LOVE- is an insightful way to examine how we think about how we talk all the time....more
Breathtaking. Gets the Walker Bean award for comic I want to give to the most people. I spent the entire last chapter with my heart in my throat. FantBreathtaking. Gets the Walker Bean award for comic I want to give to the most people. I spent the entire last chapter with my heart in my throat. Fantastic read....more
The narrative style of Tales from 1,001 Nights is an endlessly turning wheel of metaphorically related tangents, often imitated but never duplicated. The narrative style of Tales from 1,001 Nights is an endlessly turning wheel of metaphorically related tangents, often imitated but never duplicated. Being able to behold the many facets of a jewel is one of my favorite adages for describing the power of the written story. But this jewel moves on its own, each facet getting a moment of focus whether you are ready to inspect it or not, until the circle is completed and the primary story returns.
Actually, it kind of beggars belief to tell stories the way it does. The world of the Nights is one where story is the richest commodity, greater than gold or jewels or rukh’s egg. You can gain other riches by listening to a story. A sultan may pardon your life if your story is good enough. Telling a tall tale is an instant way to end physical conflict with demons: when you are in mortal peril, the smartest move is to ask you assailant if they’ve heard a particular related story about so-and-so and such-and-such and they invariably haven’t and will keep the peace to hear you out. The enduring mystery to me is that, not only does this work, but in a society built on telling each other stories, nobody has ever interrupted to say that as a matter of fact they have heard to the one about Alexander the Great and the Poor King and then get back to the smiting. No matter how many stories are out there, there’s always a new one to hear.
Which speaks to my experience, I suppose. 1,001 Nights is the collection of and inspiration for thousands of stories, but the only ones I knew diving in were those of Ali Baba and Aladdin- which, as it turns out, are both French apocrypha and not truly stories of Sheherezade. Her tales are randy, insightful bouts of high fantasy shot through with romantic verse and long passages of self-summary. The poetics found in the Nights is the saucy stuff I imagine inspired the naughty, great poets of the turn of the century (if not before). I get the same kick from it I got from reading Raspe’s Baron Munchausen knowing my heroes had read it long before I was born. I like to ape my idols. Plus, c’mon, look at this:
The door opened and, as its leaves parted, the porter looked at the person who had opened it. He saw a lady of medium height, with jutting breasts, beautiful, comely, resplendent, with a perfect and well-proportioned figure, a radiant brow, red cheeks and eyes rivaling those of a wild cow or a gazelle. Her eyebrows were like the crescent moon of the month of Sha`ban; she had cheeks like red anemones. A mouth like the seal of Solomon, coral red lips, teeth like camomile blossoms or pearls on a string, and a gazelle-like neck. Her bosom was like an ornate fountain, with breasts like twin pomegranates; she had an elegant belly and a navel that could contain an ounce of unguent, She was as the poet described:
Look at the sun and moon of the palaces, At the jewel in her nose and at her flowery splendour. Your eye has not seen white on black United in beauty as in her face and in her hair. She is rosy-cheeked; beauty proclaims her name, Even if you are not fortunate enough to know of her. She swayed and I laughed in wonder at her haunches, But her waist prompted my tears.
Baron Munchausen is a fair comparison, as is Don Quixote and echoes heard in both directions, reflecting the Analects of Confucius and reflected in the Ocarina of Time. However, the old stories are where you really feel it. The body humor. Sex without stigma. The primary gift given by the powerful are snappy outfits, because being poor more often than not meant not even being able to afford clothes. The fact that a good quarter of the people in this book are walking around naked is one of those things you just don’t think about without a little prompting, like how in the age when the horse was king, there was shit everywhere.
Sheherezade is telling poor folks’ stories to the mad king. I enjoy teasing the folkloric, pagan roots out of Arthurian Romance as much as the next guy (possibly more), but to read the stories in the raw is a true delight. I don’t like the snobs who read the Classics exclusively and look down their noses at modern lit but every time I close one of these hard read books that are a couple hundred years old, I understand them....more
“Haydn. Mozart. Beethoven. Kondo.” Andrew Schartmann’s entry in the 33 1/3 series is a bit controversial.
Some call into question Super Mario’s placeme“Haydn. Mozart. Beethoven. Kondo.” Andrew Schartmann’s entry in the 33 1/3 series is a bit controversial.
Some call into question Super Mario’s placement amongst the most noteworthy albums of all time, or “The Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack” being called an album at all. Schartmann acknowledges the unorthodox position he is writing from, sure, he says, it’s not an album like at the record shop. And sure, a big piece of why we are still enamored with NES music 30 years later is nostalgia. But, says the book, there’s that and more. It’s not just nostalgia. It is an album. Let’s dig deeper and talk about it. Nintendo inarguably holds a place in music history. “How did Kondo add to it,” asks Schartmann, “rather than simply lean on it?”
The first half of the book (Worlds 1-1 through 1-4) are on the world Super Mario Bros. was released into.
The book opens with the infamous E.T. mass grave. This crazy, literal burial of a drastically sub-par game wasn’t some random act. Nintendo swept the American market after the wheels on the home video game market fell off. There was no one left to compete. Atari’s downward trajectory ends with dumping games and being dumped by the parent company, but the E.T. incident came about because the end was nigh and they weren’t doing anything about it. Atari, Colecovision, Magnavox Odyssey et al. folded because they flooded the market with ugly games that were no fun to play. Disenthused gamers gave up, no one wants to be stuck with a system with a crappy little pool of crappy little games, so no one bought any of them and everyone failed. A decade of making money had turned the revolution that captured the whole of America’s attention into an industry that bored them all to death.
In 1985, Nintendo’s goal was simple: revolutionize everything. Nintendo wanted to be the Lumières to Atari’s Edison. Take the black box of the golden age arcade screen and turn it into a dynamic, seemingly endless world of color. Hide extra things everywhere so the player has reason to explore as well as advance. The playadigm shifted, and the point of a video game was not just to rack up the highest score but to do something.
Rewriting the book meant bringing an actual composer in to write music that matched the brightness of the Mushroom Kingdom. Kondo’s job was to compose music that engaged the listener to the gameplay. The success of playing a video game (or sport of any type) hinges on being able to get into the zone. To align your rhythm to the pace of the game. Kondo wrote from and for the zone.
The musician’s discretion is what makes D-G-A into punk rock. Kondo had no player to infuse expression into his compositions, so he had to program in the illusion of a musician.
The second half (2-1 through 2-4) is the world inside Super Mario Bros. World 1 was Contexts and World 2 is Music.
Kondo had to make something simple sophisticated. Rustic cooking in the video game world. Under three minutes of music. Three mono channels and a white noise channel. “Sparse,” according to Neil Baldwin, not simple. “Robust,” according to Kondo. And, as Schartmann points out, constraint fosters innovation. Kondo filled things out by writing in counterpoint as well as harmony. Syncopated rhythm. Not using a three note chord but three parts of a five note chord to create the illusion of greater space. Kondo tied his pieces together thematically, struck a balance between variety and self-reference. So, fun, fresh, but it holds together.
In a way, early NES music was similar to early recordings of folk music- the Smithsonian/Alan Lomax field recording period. Just a voice and a single instrument, maybe the tapping of a foot to keep time... but all the power of a full orchestra. Maximum resonance with minimum pieces. The flaw in this comparison is the life in folk music comes from playing it as it feels, while it is impossible for a loop to improvise on timing. But, by micro-managing arrangements down to each bar, Kondo gets the sound card to swing.
That syncopated gap is what Kondo found in the zone. Kondo’s melodies and rhythms outpace themselves and catch up again. That sweet hang time of the jazz drummer hitting it just enough behind the beat is the perfect analog for the state of titilated grace that the player has to be in for Mario or Luigi to run the obstacle course successfully.
8-bit jazz drums are only one of the aspects of Kondo’s surgical micro-composing that keeps the music on point. Kondo gets around the limitation of looped music by writing arrangements where the parts themselves can be resequenced. Structures that can be broken into pieces, rearranged, reconnected and still flow together. Loops without repetition. Kondo would reserve parts of these micro-loops for specific situations- variety to keep things fresh or make important moments more important. Or he would repeat structures in different Themes to create just that- themes. The Overworld theme, the level victory theme and the castle victory all share a little something, and that something is absent from the Underworld theme. Overworld and Underworld, two worlds, two styles. Kondo wrote music that emotionally fit what was happening onscreen. It was written to hang together as a soundtrack and not a sound track.
Though Kondo played a part in that, too. Not just busting bricks. Kondo made coins sound bright, 1-Ups sound like something gained, applied his skill as a creator of music to make the sound of jumping into something fun and pleasant that also brings about a feeling of physical movement. Beside innovation stood a respect for tradition. The BOOP sound of Mario throwing a fireball doesn’t correspond to a real world noise or create a spacial analogy like rising-sound-rising-motion, it is a straight up callback to the fact that, when a video game character shoots a pellet at their foes, it makes a BOOP sound.
All in all, quite a book. The first half felt a bit eerie to read, as I can see reflections of the video game industry’s 80s mistakes in a number of modern nerdly ventures who also depend on the sure seller instead of innovation. I couldn’t help but give franchise films the side-eye several times while reading about what happened to Colecovision. To say we geeks sit on another precipice similar to the one that birthed Mario is a jump, but it’s also quite optimistic, so I think I can get away with it. So any documentary that gives me food for thought outside of the subject it covers in my mind is well reported. Unfortunately, Schartmann’s writing throughout is awkwardly academic. Overly apologetic for spending half an essay on music discussing pop culture history, and also highly technical regarding both music theory and engineering. But you bear with it and it explains everything. Some of getting through the book was definitely slogging but it was more than justified by the wealth of ephemera. A book where I said “huh” aloud while reading with some frequency. You get the history side of the game, and the theory side of the game, and how Nintendo came to execute their ideas, but you also get relevant tangents like the history of the waltz and a broad take on embodied cognition. It’s not A Fistful of Quarters.
But that does not mean it is unapproachable. It just means you might learn some things that aren’t easy to understand. The book closes talking about how Kondo dealt with the sophomore slump- by succumbing to it- driving home yet again that the success of Super Mario Bros. truly was something special, “the hard fought result of a common vision between two giants- [Koji Kondo and Shigeru Miyamoto]- who would not settle for anything less than a revolution in gaming.” Though I did not know his name until very recently, Koji Kondo’s work has had a meteoric and lasting impact on my aesthetics- and my life. Mario Bros. is my Mickey Mouse. I am grateful to understand it a little more....more
Something happened to me while reading this that happens frequently with the million-details-at-once stories of good episodic television (Game of ThroSomething happened to me while reading this that happens frequently with the million-details-at-once stories of good episodic television (Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad etc) but hasn't happened with reading a comic in several years. I missed something the first time through.
Doctor Mirage is dense, packed with ideas. It is a kind of Indiana Jones adventure- replete with magic artifacts and Nazi cultists- but the journey is into a totally foreign, exotic and bizarre fantasy spirit realm to rescue a lost love. In five issues. Not only would it make an excellent game of Call of Cthulhu, it takes time to flesh out the story of who Shan Fong-Mirage is and actually rewards you with the stuff you learned about her mattering later in the story. It’s all told in an explain-as-you-go style so the plot can move forward through the myriad details. So, you’re thrown into the deep end from the first issue, but it’s not hard to follow. There’s just a lot going on.
At the same time, this book has the look of a tights comic. Doctor Mirage is outfitted like an X-Man. It is does straight up Books of Blood horror like Jeff Lemire’s Animal Man, the paranormal professional bravado found in Hellboy or even Ghostbusters, an anything goes afterworld as broad and fantastic as Bill Willingham’s Fables or Neil Gaiman.
So what I missed on the first read was some subtle foreshadowing, a little piece of backstory that tied into a big reveal late in the series. Not “getting it” did not mean the reveal was less powerful, I just didn’t think of it because the twists and turns of the plot pack enough of a punch to stand on their own. But on the reread, the foreshadowing is (obviously) clearer, the moment is bigger and it makes that later reveal into something huge. That oh wow moment when you’re exposed to another layer of the writing. Deep, subtle, fine stuff....more
Baby on a bayonet. This book will horrify and enrage in equal measure. Weird to say, but thrillingly written with a surprisingly satisfying last two cBaby on a bayonet. This book will horrify and enrage in equal measure. Weird to say, but thrillingly written with a surprisingly satisfying last two chapters. Truth can be stranger than fiction. I am glib and curt because you have to distance yourself from the reality of this book. Everything in it happened. And everything in it is utterly heartbreaking....more
This is for people who like to punish themselves with the dark side of history. Kind of like A People's History if everything bad was secretly mastermThis is for people who like to punish themselves with the dark side of history. Kind of like A People's History if everything bad was secretly masterminded by Nazis. The depth of the psychological warfare Argentina used on its own people is just mind-boggling, pulling communities up by their roots and turning into nightmare versions of themselves. More Orwellian than Orwell, the worst nightmare of the tinfoil hat people and true. This is a remarkable book that I am never reading ever again....more
The Dark Ages brought about by the buried giant are real and unreal. The island Rome left behind long ago, where Saxons and Britons live side by side.The Dark Ages brought about by the buried giant are real and unreal. The island Rome left behind long ago, where Saxons and Britons live side by side. The characters feel appropriate to the time. Peasants. Pagans. Hags and highwaymen and knights. At first I thought that this was going to be a swordless sword and sorcery book: its two main characters, Axl and Princess Beatrice, are an elderly couple. But the world is how-it-might-be, a dragon’s breath of amnesia mist makes one day bleed into the next. Ogres sometimes take children from the villages. The hags are witches and soothsayers.
But then Ishiguro regularly defies expectations. Carrying out a quest is no easy thing when you’re old, or when you forget what you are doing while you are doing it, where the goals get garbled as the characters fill in the blanks the amnesia leaves. Axl and Beatrice are the story’s anchor, but the additions to their adventuring party get their chance to steer the narrative as well. The wild child gets his own chapters. The Arthurian knight who actually remembers the past gets his asides- Gawain’s Reveries. The truth is revealed to the reader by examining the jewel’s many facets from as many angles.
Love plays a part in The Buried Giant. Axl and Beatrice set out on their journey to find their son. That’s love. And they are old, but together they can rely on one another to overcome the hard road, the foreign languages, the pixies and the monsters that tread the fens. That’s love, too. War plays a part in The Buried Giant. Great sword fighters rarely need more than one stroke, and time slows to notice how they stand, how they place their hands, their weight. There are gloriously wicked siege tactics- the monastery- there are Romantic fighters and there are modern men who are more forward about displaying their cunning. There are great men who make great decisions. War.
You don’t really need amnesia mist. It is human nature to forget. Some things linger, and some can be brought back with a trigger. Some things just get lost. Not just the locks that correspond to all the keys you keep, people disappear. Passions fade, but so do wounds. That is the upside to the dragon’s breath: even when you can’t forgive and forget, eventually you do forget.
So yes. Ishiguro sneaks in some heavy stuff while distracting you with a dark fairy tale. The urgency to finish the book mounted the closer to the end I got. You see the cornerstone of the story coming from a million miles away, but so many other things from throughout the book come back with such meaning that the end sent me reeling, my brain screaming YES YES YES and NO NO NO at the same time. I closed the book feeling bent, tingling, happy to be alive but more so happy for my life....more
It is strange to me that one can drink in so much history in a single sitting. How many years went into the writing of these poems? You can read them It is strange to me that one can drink in so much history in a single sitting. How many years went into the writing of these poems? You can read them all in an hour. It's got to be weird, right, to put so much into something's creation that is used up in the relative blink of an eye? Half and half. I am not normally one to hunt down torture poetry. But I respect it and some of it I felt. That person-to-person poetry connection. One couplet stuck with me: "If it is dark shall we cease to praise / the rising sun?" I think that answers all my questions. ...more
The scope of this quick read is broad and structured well, its familiarity with the book and film suits me fine, it does a nice job of balancing the tThe scope of this quick read is broad and structured well, its familiarity with the book and film suits me fine, it does a nice job of balancing the technical and the esoteric. Its best combines it all: think of the Wendy Carlos Williams buzzing frequencies as the hornets' nest that is important to the book but absent from the film. Stephen King's Shining was vertical travel, the monster in the basement, and Kubrick's movement was the horizontal steadicam slide through the labyrinth. Did you know that the designer of the steadicam worked on the film with Kubrick? All this and a lot of context, a lot of great observations, substantive food for thought- I like to read about the stuff I like, and this was a very that....more
Can you discuss Baron Munchausen without bringing up Don Quixote? I read Quixote last year and was delighted, enchanted, throughly engrossed in a wartCan you discuss Baron Munchausen without bringing up Don Quixote? I read Quixote last year and was delighted, enchanted, throughly engrossed in a wartime missive that acted both as a time capsule for all literature that had come before it and as a scathing send-up of the sadism of the upper class. Instead of going in with a vague notion of what I was going to get (mad fantasy?), I went in wondering how it would compare in the shadow of the colossus. It is not Quixote, though that famous knight of La Mancha does make an appearance- Munchausen reads like Lord Dunsany or Winsor McCay, reads like watching George Melies. The real world merged with the hilariously improbable. For example, have you heard of the brave Lord such-and-such who fired the world's largest piece of artillery? Well, the Baron tucked the giant gun under his arm, swam to the other side of the sea and missed his footing throwing it back, which is why it is halfway across on the seafloor. It should also be noted that Lord such-and-such's mother was Italy's most famous oyster seller and his father was the Pope, who was passing through town that day. From here to the moon and beyond, improbability turns to utter topsy-turvy, replete with monsters, marvels, and more than a little satire. I am happy to finally have read this, as I feel many older authors I enjoy probably did at some point in their youths, and aping the experience of the greats is pleasing to me....more
A fairy tale world aesthetically akin to that of Tove Jansson's Moomin or Wil Huygen's Gnome stories is merely a mask for an exploration of the childiA fairy tale world aesthetically akin to that of Tove Jansson's Moomin or Wil Huygen's Gnome stories is merely a mask for an exploration of the childish, brutal and greedy dark side of human nature. It delves deep into where innocence and cruelty overlap, self-serving indifference without remorse, and how the empathetic suffer while trying to hold it all together. A truly stunning amount of death, even for something with "Darkness" in its title. I closed this book feeling the stamp of great literature: both gutted and elevated....more
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