#something tells me this man is built on japanese literature

[bleuflowerfields]

AND all of the text from the first screenshot of words is from/refers to I Am A Cat by Natsume Soseki??

"(wagahai), an archaic personal pronoun rarely used in real life, but popularized in fiction by the book,"

-> "Sōseki's title, Wagahai wa Neko de Aru (I Am A Cat), uses a very high-register phrasing more appropriate to a nobleman, conveying grandiloquence and self-importance. This is somewhat ironic, since the speaker, an anthropomorphized domestic cat, is a regular house cat of a teacher, and not of a high-ranking noble as the manner of speech suggests." from I Am A Cat's wiki page/

"so-called human beings, one and all, conduct themselves with the most arrogant audacity, taking undue pride on their superior strength. there is no knowing how far they will carry on their arrogance, if some stronger creatures do not appear in the world that suppress them. such an instance of selfishness, however, may be conveniently regarded. i have been informed of a much more ??mentable proof of human wickedness."

"i am a cat a dog whatever "

[thepersonperson]

I don’t think you can isolate the kanji 夫 the way you can with 厨 in mizushi. In English, it would be as if we were to interpret the word “salesman” to carry a secondary meaning of “sales husband” or “sales lover” because the word “man” in English can also mean husband or lover in isolation, per Merriam Webster. Like that’s just not how a native speaker would interpret those words or construct a pun. I think Gege uses bonpu because it’s a specific Buddhist term, like Sukuna’s not only calling Gojo mid in a general sense, but also specifically a person who has not achieved spiritual awakening.

Prev Related Ask

Oho! But why not anon? Why shouldn’t I isolate the 夫 in 凡夫? Wordplay is a very flexible thing across all languages.

In English you give me the example of “salesman” -> “salelover”. And I don’t think that’s quite right. What’s going on here is much more like “red rum”=“murder” from The Shining.

(Spoilers below the cut.)

A native English speaker coming across "red rum" in isolation would not think to combine the two words and read it backwards. The context of The Shining is what makes us realize there’s more to it than “red” and “rum”. Upon reflection (in the mirror) the “red rum” becomes “murder”.

This doesn’t mean the “red rum” is only “murder”. The clever thing about this wordplay is that both readings represent something in the story.

The Shining is about an alcoholic man, Jack, losing his mind while isolated at a decaying hotel for work and trying to kill his family. It's his son that starts saying "red rum" early on in the story. (The hotel is also haunted because it’s built over the graves of murdered indigenous people and there's other supernatural stuff going on. I think that’s important to know too.)

Rum, a type of alcoholic drink, is a nod to the root cause of Jack’s problem, the alcoholism. Red is a recourring color in both the book and the movie that seems to represent a lot of things within the narrative. The red on cheeks flushed in drunkness or anger, the blood of those spilled within the hotel’s grounds, a warning sign of danger… “Being in the red” is also a problem for both Jack and the hotel’s finacial state. (And Jack’s mental state too.)

Murder is the danger Jack poses and the reason the hotel exists in the first place.

It’s also noteworthy that a child (Jack's son), who is probably too young to fully grasp concepts like death at the hands of a caretaker, is trying to communicate this danger in 3-letter words that aren’t understood by the adults around him. He’s also copying or mirroring what something else is telling him.

It’s a warning of what’s to come and why it is happening while reiterating narrative themes, but that requires both readings. There’s not one reading or the other, both are happening at the same time. And the only way we can conclude this is by considering the rest of the story.

And if you want to see really abominable wordplay that just breaks all the rules in Japanese, please read Umineko. It’s spoilers to discuss how insane and niche it is, but it make sense for the story because the characters are unhinged weirdos that enjoy screwing with people in esoteric ways that drive you and the people they’re tormenting crazy. (Those who have read know Exactly what I’m talking about.)

(Very mild Umineko spoilers.) Being able to solve the ridiculous wordplay riddle in Umineko requires that you understand the particular neurosis of the character that created it. This character loves both Japanese and English word games and literature. Even though the riddle is written in Japanese, you use that knowledge of this character’s westaboo tendencies to recognize that some of the kanji are secretly representing English letters. And those kanji have to be isolated and read a different way using hints contained within the riddle. (Aka no native speaker would think this way normally. There’s a good reason this thing didn’t get solved for YEARS. Massive Spoilers for proof of this. Shout out to the one person who managed to do it before the solution was released, well sort of.)

I’m using all these weird examples because this is the particular kind of freak Sukuna is. If it were any other character, it would be reaching. But because he is a literature nerd that bends and breaks the rules as he wants, his Dismantle and its kanji doubling as cutting to understand/solve, and the fight being framed as a date, there is a very real chance he meant the mid husband on top of the ordinary/unenlightened readings (religious connotations too). All these readings are to be taken at the same time because Sukuna truly is [redacted] Umineko.

[hamliet]

Unless a Grain of Wheat Falls and It Dies...

Or, why I am pretty optimistic about the fates of Jean, Connie, Gabi, and all titanized people this chapter, which is also an excuse for me to talk about SnK’s allusions to Russian literature. 

There are strikingly parallel ideas The Brothers Karamazov and Attack on Titan, as well as parallel plot points and imagery to the point where if it isn’t deliberate, it’s uncanny. (NB: before people yell at me about comparing a Japanese and Russian work, Isayama has used Russian names since the start of SnK--Shiganshina is a Russian name.) In particular, there are narrative allusions to a portion of the novel known as “The Grand Inquisitor,” which is a short story within a novel. The central thesis of “The Grand Inquisitor” is as follows: 

nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. 

This parable is told within the story by Ivan Karamazov, a character whose intellectuality is his gift and his curse. He tells his brother Alyosha that the motivation for creating this parable is precisely the evils done to children (oh look, a major SnK theme) and specifically cites an example which was unfortunately taken from real life in Russia and which Isayama has an uncanny parallel:

I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when every one suddenly understands what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are built on this longing, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, and what am I to do about them? That's a question I can't answer... If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? ... if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old...

... How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? ... What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? ... I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don't want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. ... too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it... It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”

The actual parable of “The Grand Inquisitor” is Ivan’s answer to Alyosha’s question about Ivan’s lines above. Ivan tells a story about how freedom is actually what dooms humanity: it is the curse. (Alyosha does not believe this.) Jesus comes back to earth and is promptly arrested, because his existence and return threaten the wellbeing of society. To be happy, one cannot be free, but one or two strong people in society should be free and bear the burden for everyone else (you can see the parallels to King Fritz/the Reisses). 

Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering... all his life he loved humanity, and suddenly his eyes were opened, and he saw that it is no great moral blessedness to attain perfection and freedom, if at the same time one gains the conviction that millions of God's creatures have been created as a mockery, that they will never be capable of using their freedom...

This is SnK’s thesis: to be free, there will be suffering. It is part of human nature, and yet to not have it is to be lost. But SnK, despite its explorations of human darkness and monstrosity, has a higher view of humanity than does Ivan. SnK’s view is more alongside Alyosha’s, who says what is honestly the truth about not just the Reisses, but Eren now:

"Who are these keepers of the mystery who have taken some curse upon themselves for the happiness of mankind? .... It's simple lust of power, of filthy earthly gain, of domination—something like a universal serfdom with them as masters—that's all they stand for.”

Mikasa is akin to the Christ figure in the story, akin to Alyosha: Christ is constantly asked to speak, asked to act, and he does not until the very last moment, when he kisses the Grand Inquisitor on the lips. After the story is over, Alyosha then does likewise to Ivan. 

Not to mention when Alyosha worries about Ivan’s mental state, he then answers with this:

“Listen, Alyosha,” Ivan began in a resolute voice, “if I am really able to care for the sticky little leaves I shall only love them, remembering you. It's enough for me that you are somewhere here, and I shan't lose my desire for life yet.”

A simple leaf can save a life. A leaf can save the world. A leaf, grown from a tree that started as a seed falling to the ground, dead, only to grow life from that death. Alyosha himself notes SnK’s central thesis of chapter 137 in the (very long) novel’s final pages:

...some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.

There’s a lot more to this, but this is the epigraph to The Brothers Karamazov, the central thesis of the entire novel:

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." -John 12:24

Suffering can grow great fruit in an individual life, and by giving something up, by even death, something beautiful can come. Through cruelty, you can find life. 

This is not just a long-running theme in SnK, but a pattern in its plot. Often those who surrender then receive exactly what they had surrendered (but admittedly, not always, like Erwin). 

Mikasa accepted Eren’s loss, and got him back.

Mikasa let Armin go, and got him back.

Falco gave up hope of survival, and got another chance: 

Hange was going to die alone, feeling guilty for having failed her comrades, but saw everyone again, and they told her well done: 

Historia gave up being free, but now we know she will be.

Levi gave up on his revenge, and then got it. Annie thought she would never see her dad again, but she did. For Mikasa, accepting that she has to kill the boy she loves coincides not just with her acceptance of her love, but with the acceptance and knowledge that he loves her:

It always comes with sacrifice, increasingly hard sacrifice, but usually the seeds that are dropped grow and bloom. 

This chapter, everyone surrendered their hearts. They let their dreams fall to the ground, and I honestly think the story will allow it to plant life. Yes, the world as a whole is saved and that is enough to make thematic sense, but it works even better if the very people who were titanized this chapter also bloom again. They chose to trust Mikasa, Levi, Falco, and Pieck to finish the task.

The characters giving up their lives only to get them back make sense, and give Mikasa’s sacrifice of Eren. For Mikasa, Eren was her world, and she gave it up when she had lost everyone else. She had nothing left, and she still did it. I would hope she’d be narratively rewarded beyond just the world being saved, because Mikasa has always been motivated by her personal relationships.

Moving on from Mikasa: Connie’s mom has been kept alive and the concept of turning mindless titans back to humans was already brought up specifically in relation to her:

Connie giving up on his mother a dozenish chapters ago only to get her back now--not through sacrificing a child, but through saving the entire world--would fit the themes and patterns of SnK.

Thirdly, Gabi should not die. She’s Eren with positive development, and cannot meet the same end. Even people who are skeptical of every titan being saved seem to agree that she’ll be fine. It’s possible she’s the only one saved, but imo, not likely. 

See, the only shifter characters who are going to have the option of self-sacrifice are Falco and maaaaaybe Armin. The others look like they’re about to die right here and now, never mind choosing someone to save: the mindless titans are ripping at their napes. Armin also looks to be in bad shape. 

Yet Armin cannot narratively commit suicide; two chapters ago he was still screaming at himself for being useless and thinking he would be better off dead. He’s already tried the heroic sacrifice, too, so why would it work this time around? It does not work for his arc. Falco dying for Gabi was the plan without any freedom from the titan curse; it’s more powerful if ending the curse changes things, rather than forcing him to make the same choice that Reiner has always been trying to make: a heroic suicide. It could happen; it’s just not as narratively strong.

As for whether the worldbuilding rules, we know that mindless titans are not truly dead nor entirely mindless; they just don’t have freedom. Ymir’s case of getting herself back after decades shows that they aren’t quite dead or absorbed. They still have consciousness that can be awoken; Ymir described it as being in a long “nightmare.” Dina still went looking for Grisha. Connie’s mom remembered and recognized Connie, telling him “welcome home.” There is plenty of evidence that there are parts of these people that are still in there even if they are forced to become monsters (oh hey, it’s an Eren parallel; he was conscious of it and had choices while mindless titans do not, but the parallel remains).

[dajaregambler]

HeliosR - Victor Valentine Card story ‘‘Seeking for what’s frightening’’

Translation of Victor Valentine’s 4* ‘’Gothic Halloween’’ card story from ‘Helios Rising Heroes’.

Gray: Uwah, amazing… Did you make this, Victor-san…?

Victor: Yes, this robot was built by me. I’m occupied with pouring all my time into producing these for the upcoming Halloween League.

Gray:  I had assumed you were leaning more towards biochemistry… But to be able to build robots too, that’s seriously amazing...

Victor: As you thought my area of expertise is chemistry, however if I had to be honest, I barely have the confidence to manufacture these… 

Victor: And on top of it, I had been also struggling with the design itself...

Gray: Eh… Wondering if it has enough punch to it, you mean… I already think it’s scary enough as is though....

Victor: Adding that pinch of “scary” has been considerably difficult. I’ve been making these as requested by Marion, but as far as the details go, I’ve only received how it should be thematically based on “evil spirits of Halloween”.

Victor: Naturally I have referred to literature to form a general outline on the matter, but what traits resemble an “evil spirit”, about it having a factor of “spookiness” to it...  No matter how far I go with investigating the matter, I simply cannot draw the line where it’d be most suitable.

Gray: Like evil spirits… spookiness….

Victor: What is your impression of it, Gray? Do you think it’s able to represent those traits of an “evil spirit”?

Gray: Eh? Eeeh… uh, um…

Victor: Please do not hold yourself back, and be as candid as you can.

Gray: Be as candid as I can… Right, right...

Gray: Whether or not it looks like one, I can say that it’s absolutely close but… Um… on the contrary, it might actually be a bit too scary... 

Gray: H-how do I say this… It’s like originally you were going for CERO A but ended up heading towards CERO D instead…?

Victor: CERO……? What may that be?

Gray: Ah… awawah, sorry…. I used a game rating system for scale… a Japanese one too…

Gray: The Halloween League is an event that children will attend, in terms of gaming that would be for an event for all ages...

Gray: But, as of now it feels more that it’s heading towards a more mature audience… So I was thinking all like, how about aiming for a younger one instead~... but please don’t mind it too much...

Victor: Hmm, I see…That is very interesting, or I should rather say an intriguing point of view.

Victor: I will do as you said and make an attempt to aim for a younger demographic, however with how it has been currently going, I don’t quite have the grasp on what I should do to change it.

Victor: If you don’t mind, could you tell me more about video games for all ages to use as a reference point going forward?

Gray: !! O-ofcourse…!

-

Victor: Hooh.... Even though it’s shortly summed up as for all ages, there seems to be quite a variety of video games.

Gray: For now I kept it limited and looked up horror games that came to mind… You’d come across even more games if you were to look it up

Gray: Uuum… if you’re looking for a game that has enemies that are “evil spirit”-like, then maybe this one…?

Victor: Yes, that kind of caricature is good. It gives an impression closely resembling the ones in animation for children. 

Gray: P-personally I think it’s good if it’s as scary as these enemy characters here but… That is for you to decide...

Victor: Hmm…. If I were to judge from your perspective, would this be more scarier?

Gray: Eh? Yes… it, would be….?

Gray: I feel, that the difference is pretty obvious but… you don’t seem to think so, Victor-san?

Victor: Indeed. Even though we’re going in a different direction, I don’t feel that any of them are frightening, thus making it difficult to judge.

Gray: R-right…

Gray: Uh… I’m just asking this out of curiosity but… Is there, something that you’re scared of, Victor-san…?

Victor: Something that I’m scared of?

Gray: Ah, aaah, uuum, it’s just… it’s okay if it’s too hard to answer, or if you don’t want to! I suddenly asked something weird anyway, I’m sorry….

Victor: Fufu, what are you apologizing for? I don’t believe it was odd by any means.

Victor: Something I’m scared of… you ask? I haven’t played any video games before so on that matter I have nothing to say, and in regards to horror movies I don’t recall being frightened once. 

Gray: Eh… so you’re like, totally fine with ghosts and demons and all that…?

Victor: More that I don’t believe in such things due to my point of view as a scientist, rather than being fine with it.

Victor: Well, realistically speaking “Ghosts believing scientists” such as Nova are not too uncommon out there.

Victor: I do want to believe in the possibility of it… Unfortunately, I have yet to see a theory that justifies it to begin with. 

Gray: Wah… you’re amazing, Victor-san…. Makes me a bit embarrassed given how I accidentally believe in anything...

Victor: No, I wouldn’t say that I am. I do occasionally envy those who are able to simply enjoy horror movies as is.

Gray: Is that so…?

Victor: Do you have any issues when it comes to horror and occult, Gray?

Gray: Aah, no… I’ve built up a tolerance for it because of games that are full of it...

Gray: Besides, I think… humans are scarier than any ghost or demon, 100 times more scarier even….

Victor: Human themselves…. For example, such as Asch Albright?

Gray: !! Eh, eeeeh…. yes… His name alone makes me sweat bullets, weirdly enough...

Gray: But, not just A….sch, but I’m scared of coming in contact with other people in general...

Gray: Even before talking to them actually, like what if they hate me…. what if they think I’m weird… that’s all I end up thinking about

Victor: Which means that you are currently feeling the same sense of dread when talking to me this moment?

Gray: T-that’s right… Aaah, but, you’re not scary Victor-san… Um, it’s just...

Victor: Yes, I understand. I’ve mentioned it before, but I don’t believe there’s anything odd about you, Gray. 

Gray: V-Victor-san….!

Victor: My apologies for getting us sidetracked. Could you lend me your wisdom for a little longer? 

Gray: Ah, yes… yes of course!

--

Nova: Oooh, looks like you made a lotta progress~ Making ghouls and all♪

Victor: I was able to because of the advice I had received from Gray, and so I was finally able to see the light.

Nova: Good pals with Gray-kun now, eh? Well with Ren-kun too but, lately more people have been dropping by your lab. Lookit this celebrity here~♪

Victor: ...You’re surprisingly in a good mood today, aren’t you now?

Nova: Mmh, haven’t slept so I’m feeling somewhat all over the place

Nova: I’ve been absorbed into making these robots too, and before I knew it three whole days had passed~ That scared me real good, yanno

Nova: Wait a second, nobody came to see me in these three days….!? I wanna be a celeb tooooo~!

Victor: How about resting your mind and body, rather than dawdling around here?

Nova: Naaw~ The adrenaline’s coursing through my veins, not feeling tired in the slightest~ 

Nova: Whatever you say, making these robots is right where I belong. Had lotsa fun doing it too

Nova: Obviously I’m paying enough attention to safety and all that, but there’s more space to feel at ease compared to what I usually do for work….

Nova: Not that I’m forgetting substance research by any means, it’s just pretty nerve-racking when combined with making assets and tools for the heroes to fight with 

Nova: Didn’t mean to pay that much mind to it, still it’s a heavy responsibility to have one’s life in your hands... 

Nova: Makes me go all like, damn, this fear of failure and what to do about it sure is always growing ain’t it now!~ like some kinda realisation each time, yanno

Victor: ….., fear….

Nova: You’re always doing such a fantastic job, me~

Nova: A Summerfieldtastic job~....

Victor: …….

Nova: Eh, no response!? Here I was putting all my energy into being an idiot, and instead of straight manning me, you straight up ignore me!?

Victor: Aah, my apologies… There was something on my mind.

Victor: What did you say?

Nova: I-I didn’t say a word! Vic’s a dummy! I’m gonna go to my room and sleep! Good-NIGHT!!!

Victor: …..?

-

Fun trivia corner:

The Japanese game rating goes from CERO A to D, and Z. All ages would be CERO A, for 12 years old and above CERO B, for 15 years old and above CERO C, for 17 years old and above CERO D, and at last CERO Z for 18 and above. The European one is PEGI with age specific ratings (PEGI-3, or PEGI-18) and the American one is ESRB, with letter codes such as T for teen, M for mature, and so on. Helios is rated as 12+ on the Apple app store, that would be CERO A, PEGI-12 or ESRB T.

[depressedoverdrawings]

Can you hear the tumult of our youth?

KazeKi is the first romance I’ve ever enjoyed, or rather, that I emotionally connected with, as “enjoy” is a funny word choice for a work that made me feel so miserable. Personally, I’ve never enjoyed media that focuses on relationships and love, were they movies, TV, or literature.

But after I discovered KazeKi, I found myself drawn to it, almost involuntarily so. It was as if a spell had been cast. I suppose what superficially drew me in, at first, was the art. It had the charm of retro manga (I absolutely love retro manga/anime looks, IMO they have so much more character than most modern anime and manga), the nostalgic elegance of the idealized upper-class XIX century, and the unrelenting beauty and cuteness of all the boys.

It was mildly surreal and highly entertaining to witness the seed of so many shounen-ai visual tropes: The flower motifs, the flowery poetry, the impossibly pretty boys in dramatic embraces and breathy kisses, the aggressive frenchness of it all. Even it was shocking to me how these elements, instead of striking me as the tired, sappy tropes I saw them as, were now all genuine and beautiful, somehow. Even those silly sparkles around pretty boys seemed fitting. I realized these weren’t tropes back then, but elements of a sincere artistc vision. However, while the art was mesmerizing to me, I came to realize that what drew me in deeper, and kept me anchored to KazeKi, were the themes explored, and the character-based drama, the very stuff I had always avoided.

Without getting far too personal about it, Kaze to Ki no Uta was the first romance that struck something within me, somewhere personal. Now, I certainly have never faced trauma and pain anywhere near to what poor Gilbert and Serge face in their absurdly depressing story, but I definitely wouldn’t call myself emotionally and sexually resolved and healthy, and once upon a time I was a closeted boy in a catholic school, so I guess there’s space for a little bit of self-identification. My coping mechanism to my personal woes had always been to just bottle them up and distract myself with entertainment and art. And that was exactly what I was doing, browsing music on YouTube, when I stumbled upon the KazeKi OVA’s soundtrack.

I found myself listening to this gorgeous arrangement of a Chopin piece, and thought to myself, staring at the angelic figure looking back at me, across the screen: “Gee whilikers, that’s sure is a pretty drawing of a pretty girl”. Then, after reading the comments, I found out that was a boy. As much as the “draw a girl, call it a boy” school of drawing pretty boys makes me groan, I could still feel it, that first hook of interest, stabbing me. As the slideshow enticed me with pictures of Keiko Takemiya’s gorgeous art, I found myself enamoured by it. It was a particular drawing that made KazeKi finally snatch me: that same boy, lounging angelically on some sort of abstract architectural design; in the background, a neoclassical vase flanked by two neoclassical girls, and, above and below, this stunningly beautiful vegetation. So much care, skill, and good taste, concentrated in just one image! I’d have it as a poster, if I could. So, I googled “Kaze to Ki no Uta”, unwittingly throwing myself in a rabbit hole I could not have prepared myself for. Trying to read it was in itself a journey, but, to sum it up: I managed to read it about as well as one can, if they don’t speak japanese and have no access to the spanish and italian translations.

It had been years since I had started feeling emotionally numb. My most extreme displays of emotion came in the form of quiet, teary eyes, reserved for those rare, impactful pieces of art, and those rarer moments of despair-inducing introspection that I couldn’t manage to suppress, but even those lasted little, as I fought to recover my composure. By the end of Kaze to Ki no Uta, I was a sobbing wreck, doing my best (and failing) to contain my ugly crying. Ugly crying, for god’s sake. I was ugly crying, actually sobbing like a kid, because of an yaoi manga. Crying in the shower, even! What kind of weeb had I degenerated into? It hurt. It deeply hurt, in a way I hadn’t been made to hurt in a long, long while. KazeKi had impacted me to the point that I wasn’t just sad, I was scared too, as the waterfall of emotion opened the path for that deeper, personal darkness to come out. And it did.

Now, I admit I’d been a little bit more emotionally fragile than usual right before I read it, due to the effects of the quarantine and the previous consumption of a highly depressing piece of media: Les Amitiés Particulières, which is probably even more depressing than KazeKi as it deals with a much more grounded homophobia-induced tragedy based in real life. Somehow, it didn’t impact me as much as KazeKi, however. Also, it was definitely what influenced my personal YouTube algorithm to recommend me the KazeKi soundtrack, so I wouldn’t know of KazeKi if it weren’t for Amitiés. But even then, it felt unnatural to, well, feel so much. I hadn’t felt this invested in and attached to fictional characters ever since I was a little kid, too young to realize those people in the TV weren’t real. In the following couple of weeks, I was crying over these boys, spending whole days feeling like trash, feeling mild anxiety spikes whenever I remembered about KazeKi, having (even more) difficulty falling asleep, and utterly failing to avoid thinking about my deep-seated intimate issues, all because of these dumb, pretty anime boys. Not even my trusty prayer of “they’re not real people, stop being stupid” worked. In an attempt to stop wallowing in this shounen-ai hell, I decided to consume a whole lot of escapist media while I deliberately avoided any activity related to KazeKi, be it reading the manga, listening to the OVA’s soundtrack, looking at fanart, or even just thinking about it. It “worked” for a month or so, but now I’m back here, wallowing in KazeKi’s painful beauty again, stalking the other seven people in the western world that seem to care about KazeKi, and distilling my thoughts in this bizarre textwall, in an attempt to work it out. If you’re one of those seven people, please don’t refrain from talking to me, if you feel like it! I’ve had just one opportunity to have a conversation about KazeKi, and it was in YouTube comments, for heaven’s sake. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m this afflicted by KazeKi due to its unrelenting, merciless, cruel beauty. Everything about it is presented in this assembly of pure beauty and lost perfection, this painful nostalgia that is present in its aesthetics of an idealized Europe which lives only in its surviving art, that is present in the story which ultimately tells us of the loss of love, and is present in the fact that the whole story is a broken man’s reverie about the past. Tragedy might make me sad, but tragedy with beauty will destroy me. Bittersweetness is just so more cruel than bitterness. And it was this masterpiece of sadistic bittersweetness that permanently broke something in how I deal with my emotions. Kaze to Ki no Uta touched me deeply, to the point of leaving a permanent impression, I’m afraid. I can count in one hand the pieces of art that have punched my soul in the face like KazeKi did. I am honestly flabbergasted over the effect it had over me. At first I felt embarrassed over being emotionally obliterated by a freaking shounen-ai, but I’ve since come to the conclusion that KazeKi is a work of art, a genuine, sincere work of art, deserving of the title. Now I just hope I’m not alone in being emotionally obliterated by this freaking shounen-ai. After everything they went through, the personal fights, the shaky development of their relationship, the undeserved ostracism at Lacombrade, Auguste’s demonic persecution, the escape; how could it be that Gilbert’s life would end in such a horrible way, and that Serge would be left alone to face the full, unbearable weight of his grief! Why?! Keiko Takemiya, you’re a vile sadist. You’re a genius, too, of course. But you’re a vile sadist.

I knew that a happy ending wasn’t going to happen. The horrible ending was a pretty early spoiler, really. Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t stop myself from reading on anyway, and I couldn’t stop myself from having an inkling of illogical hope. Even if my logical self knew a happy ending wasn’t gonna happen, it couldn’t prepare me for just how tragically their love would end, and how awful it all would feel, once I knew their full story.

It’s all the more bitter because of how close Serge came to saving him, too. Having escaped together to a place where they could’ve built the nearest thing to a normal life a gay couple could have, back then. But in the end, not even Serge’s love could mend Gilbert’s mutilated soul. Those boys deserved so much better, especially Serge. Serge, you sweet angel! You were created to suffer.

KazeKi really is a masterpiece in how it explores its extremely heavy themes and the minds of its characters, and how it flawlessly meshes that with perfect art. There are many moments in KazeKi that haunt me: Serge letting that bird go, Serge’s vision of Gilbert at the Lacombrade grounds, Gilbert running into the carriage, angel wings behind him; Serge laying alone on the bed in Room 17. I cannot look at those pages without tearing up and feeling this horrible feeling in my heart, and this feeling is literal: My heart actually feels heavy and constricted when I think about it, it can’t be healthy. Up until now, I thought “cri evrytiem” was just a meme. KazeKi has woken me up to the fact that bottling up one’s own personal issues will inevitably end with them exploding out, leading to something much, much worse. I am scared by the prospect of facing my personal issues. To me, they are horribly strong, and seem incredibly hard to solve, if they’re even solvable at all. I’m horrified by the prospect of facing them, working to solve them. I’m so scared, that simply thinking about it, right now, gives me this awful weight in my chest, and makes me want to cry, again. But I know now that I have no choice in this matter, as the only alternative is that abyss I dare not speak of, and one cannot return from. Melodramatic? Yes. But I did just read Kaze to Ki no Uta.

Thank you for getting this far, whoever you are.

I’m forever haunted by Serge’s words to his long-gone Gilbert, right at the beginning:

“Gilbert Cocteau, you were the greatest flower to ever bloom in my life. In the faraway dreams of youth, you were a bright red flame, blazing so fiercely… You were the wind that stirred my branches. Can you hear the poem of the wind and trees? Can you hear the tumult of our youth? Oh, there must be others who so remember their own days of youth…”

[myktchp]

Top 6 Episodes of One Piece

If there's a series that attempts to test the diminishing return hypothesis, it's One Piece. The monstrous epic of Eiichiro Oda is the highest selling manga of all time, but its ridiculous duration still prohibits many people from checking it out, and that hill will only get steeper as we barrel towards its end (eventually).

The One Piece anime, which is a much greater commitment to time and does not boast the brilliant artwork of Oda as a selling point, is even more of a conundrum. Yet, for the first time, so many fans perceive the story this way and fall in love regardless... Over the course of many long binges, there is something special about cuddling up in front of a screen and getting lost in a world, and the powerful spirit that burns just below the surface, even during the not-so-hot days of the anime, still keeps us building up to a new "best" chapter. Everyone has their favorite shows, the ones they feel emotionally attached to, and we would love to share yours in the forums with you. Here are my own 6 best One Piece episodes, in chronological order (but not superlative):

Episode 19 - The Three-Sword Style's Past! Zoro and Kuina's Vow!

In the modern age, where the manga is so informative and comprehensive, it's hard to believe that there was once a period when the anime really successfully expanded on the plot. The anime version of Zoro's flashback is so amazing that it is the "true" version of the story in my heart, which comes a little later than it did in the manga. What once was a fast and blunt page is turned into a wonderful piece of sound, letting us live for an episode in the Japanese countryside as we hear the story of a young Roronoa Zoro and his original opponent, Kuina.

In its obsession with gender, this episode also ends up being easily the most empathic the show has ever gotten. It portrays Kuina, the prodigal swordsman, dissatisfied with the awareness that the gap in intensity between her and Zoro will increase drastically as they become adults. This is a moment for a young Zoro to take seriously his female rival, and in the present day, Tashigi finally takes up whatever thematic baggage is left behind by her death. This is One Piece's tender side at its finest.

Episode 119 - Secret of Powerful Swordplay! Ability to Cut Steel and the Rhythm Things Have!

This is another fantastic episode of Zoro that places us in the middle of the Straw Hats and Baroque Works' climate war. The adversary of Zoro is Mr. 1, who really isn't a swordsman, but a man who can turn his entire body into a weapon. Not only does Dice-Dice Fruit from Mr. 1 allow for some of the anime's imagination, but this episode manages to offer one of the coolest battles in the entire series. It's bloody, it's raw, and Zoro throws a guy into a building.

Towards the end, the episode is at its best, when everything gets quiet and builds up to the final blow. It sells the show with so much conviction that I believe it's cool. I believe this is one of the series's most driven episodes, and a great example of the show's cinematic narrative eye.

Episode 278 - Say You Want to Live! We Are Your Friends!

If 151 was the episode that made me a fan, the episode that made me a lifetime fan is 278. This episode and the one before it are older examples of "one-hour specials" from the series, which are gradually split into two episodes until released on home video and streaming sites. This episode is jam-packed even as just the second half of a special, as we conclude the tragic backstory of Robin and transition into the present where the Straw Hats make their greatest gesture yet to save their friend from the greedy World Government.

One Piece can become astonishingly sad for being such a vibrant and enjoyable series, to the point that it almost competes with itself to see how unhappy it can get. If the highs were not so gosh darn consistent, these lows would become tiresome, and Straw Hats' assault on the government flag, followed by Robin's major "I want to live!" One of the most cathartic moments you'll ever find in literature is the scene. At this point in the plot, the Straw Hats are still underdogs, so their bold "never give up" attitude in the face of their greatest enemy hits particularly hard. This episode illustrates the chasms that One Piece can jump to be the saddest and happiest tale it can be, from baby Robin surviving the genocide of everyone she's ever loved to adult Robin pleading for another chance at life.

Episode 396 - The Fist Explodes! Destroy the Auction!

In One Piece, Luffy punches a Celestial Dragon so hard that he knocks the color off the screen, still one of the most frequently referenced and applauded moments. If there is one thing that One Piece is unbelievably good at, it's payoffs. It sets the pins up so that in the most bombastic way possible it can knock them down. To this day, the Celestial Dragons are the most heinous villains we've seen in One Piece, and the repercussions of (again) defying the World Government are obvious, but Luffy still has to do his thing with Luffy.

The emphasis that the show places on Luffy's pledge to Hatchan not to intervene, no matter what, is what really captures me about this moment. You get the feeling that Luffy is the kind to keep an earnest promise, but watching a hero get pushed beyond that stage is always fascinating.

Episode 574 - Back to the Present! Hordy Makes a Move!

The general opinion, as far as I can tell, is that Fishman Island is the series' worst arc. With this sentiment, I don't agree. I think it's one of the heaviest, most three-dimensional instances I've ever seen of fantasy-world-racism-as-metaphor-for-real-world-racism. Basically, the mid-arc flashback covering the plights of Fisher Tiger and Queen Otohime is a film-length drama, and it's one of the series' best flashbacks, for which there's fierce competition. It's very underestimated.

Aside from being an exceptionally pretty episode, both halves of it are extremely strong, one at the tail end of the flashback and one coming out of it. Neptune mourning the death of his wife, distraught that the difficulty of race relations implies that he can not convey his frustration, is a great scene, as is the forgiveness of Jimbei by Nami for his connection to the pirates of Arlong. The push and pull between hope, cynicism, remorse, rage, and love is what makes this arc perfect. You just ever feel like you're halfway through everything life's going to bring you through, even at its worst. As for its place in the big picture plot, this episode is a significant step in the relationship of Jimbei with the pirates of the Straw Hat, and it establishes the purpose of the Ryugu Kingdom to join the World Government and attend the Reverie, a heavily built-up political event that is due in the manga any day now.

Episode 616 - A Surprising Outcome! White Chase vs. Vergo!

This is a particular stand-out episode in the series for fighting animation, since it's so much more physical than normal. Even with the powers of Smoker and Vergo flying every way, the effect goes down to their good ole fists. The personal investment between two marines duking it out is already very intense, but it's put over the edge by the great choreography and style, and that alone would put such an episode on my radar.

That said, once Smoker vs. Vergo turns over to Vergo vs. Rule, there is a cherry on top, with the real villain of the arc, Doflamingo, listening in from a distance. The rest of the series gives too much consequence to the law defeating Vergo in such an over-the-top manner.

So those are the episodes I feel are worth revisiting the most! Obviously, I'm expected to have skipped a few or omitted incredibly significant episodes in this top six list, with a series that long. If you enjoyed this top list of mine don’t forget to leave a like and share it with your friends. If you have any suggestions for my next top list just mail it to me at ramos.rf.bsmt@gmail.com and i will feature you for my next article. Stay tuned and stay safe everyone!

[loretranscripts]

Lore Episode 21: Adrift (Transcript) - 16th November 2015

tw: death, drowning, ghosts Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice! 

I have a confession to make. Keep in mind, I write about frightening things for a living. I haven’t read a horror novel yet that’s managed to freak me out, and yet, I’m deathly afraid of open water. There, I said it – I hate being on boats. I’m not even sure why, to be honest, I just… am. Perhaps it’s the idea that thousands of feet of cold darkness wait right beneath my feet. Maybe it’s the mystery of it all, of what creatures (both known and unknown) might be waiting for me, just beyond the reach of what little sunlight passes through the surface of the waves. Now, I live near the coast, and I’ve been on boats before, so my fear comes from experience, but it’s not the cold, deep darkness beneath the ship that worries me the most. No, what really makes my skin crawl is the thought that, at any moment, the ship could sink. Maybe we can blame movies like Titanic or The Poseidon Adventure for showing us how horrific a shipwreck can be, but there are far more true stories of tragedy at sea than there are fictional ones, and it’s in these real life experiences, these maritime disasters that dot the map of history like an ocean full of macabre buoys, that we come face to face with the real dangers that await us in open water. The ocean takes much from us, but in rare moments, scattered across the pages of history, we’ve heard darker stories: stories of ships that come back, of sailors returned from the dead, and of loved ones who never stop searching the land. Sometimes our greatest fears refuse to stay beneath the waves. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

Shipwrecks aren’t a modern notion – as far back as we can go, there are records of ships lost at sea. In The Odyssey by Homer, one of the oldest and most widely read stories ever told, we meet Odysseus shortly before he experiences a shipwreck at the hands of Poseidon, God of the Sea. Even further back in time, we have the Egyptian tale of the shipwrecked sailor, dating to at least the 18th century BC. The truth is, though, for as long as humans have been building sea-faring vessels and setting sail into unknown waters, there have been shipwrecks. It’s a universal motif in the literatures of the world, and that’s most likely because of the raw, basic risk that a shipwreck poses to the sailors on the ships, but it’s not just the personal risk. Shipwrecks have been a threat to culture itself for thousands of years. The loss of a sailing vessel could mean the end to an expedition to discover new territory or turn the tide of a naval battle. Imagine the result if Admiral Nelson had failed in his mission off the coast of Spain in 1805, or how differently Russia’s history might have played out had Tsar Nicholas II’s fleet actually defeated the Japanese in the Battle of Tsushima. The advancement of cultures has hinged for thousands of years, in part, on whether or not their ships could return to port safely, but in those instances where ancient cultures have faded into the background of history, it is often through their shipwrecks that we get information about who they were. Just last year, an ancient Phoenician shipwreck was discovered in the Mediterranean Sea near the island of Malta. It’s thought to be at least 2700 years old and contains some of the oldest Phoenician artefacts ever uncovered. For archaeologists and historians who study these ancient people, the shipwreck has offered new information and ideas. The ocean takes much from us, and upon occasion, it also gives back. Sometimes, though, what it gives us is something less inspiring. Sometimes, it literally gives us back our dead.

One such example comes from 1775. The legend speaks of a whaling vessel, discovered off the western coast of Greenland in October of that year. Now, this is a story with tricky provenance, so the details will vary depending on where you read about it. The ship’s name might have been the Octavius, or possibly the Gloriana, and from what I can tell, the earliest telling of this tale can be traced back to a newspaper article in 1828. The story tells of how one Captain Warren discovered the whaler drifting through a narrow passage in the ice off the coast of Greenland. After hailing the vessel and receiving no reply, their own ship was brought near, and the crew boarded the mysterious vessel. Inside, though, they discovered a horrible sight. Throughout the ship, the entire crew was frozen to death where they sat. When they explored further and found the captain’s quarters, the scene inside was even more eerie. There in the cabin were more bodies: a frozen woman, holding a dead infant in her arms; a sailor holding a tinder box, as if trying to manufacture some source of warmth; and there, at the desk, sat the ship’s captain. One account tells of how his face and eyes were covered in a green, wet mould. In one hand, the man held a fountain pen, and the ship’s log was open in front of him. Captain Warren leaned over and read the final entry, dated November 11th, 1762, 13 years prior to the ship’s discovery. “We have been enclosed in the ice 70 days”, it said. “The fire went out yesterday and our master has been trying ever since to kindle it again, but without success. His wife died this morning. There is no relief”. Captain Warren and his crew were so frightened by the encounter that they grabbed the ship’s log and retreated as fast as they could back to their own ship. The Octavius, if indeed that was the ship’s name, was never seen again.

The mid-1800s saw the rise of the steel industry in America. It was the beginning of an empire that would rule the economy for over a century, and like all empires, there were capitals: St. Louis, Baltimore, Buffalo, Philadelphia. All of these cities played host to some of the largest steel works in the country, and for those that were close to the ocean, this created the opportunity for the perfect partnership – the shipyard. Steel could be manufactured and delivered locally and then used to construct the ocean-going steamers that were the lifeblood of late-19th century life. The flood of immigration through Ellis Island, for example, wouldn’t have been possible without these steamers. My own family made that journey. One such steamer to roll out of Philadelphia in 1885 was the S. S. Valencia. She was 252ft long and weighed in at nearly 1600 tonnes. The Valencia was built before complex bulkheads and hull compartments, and she wasn’t the fastest ship on the water, but she was dependable. She spent the first decade and a half running passengers between New York City and Karakas, Venezuela. In 1897, while in the waters near Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Valencia was attacked by a Spanish cruiser. The next year, she was sold and moved to the west coast, where she served in the Spanish-American war as a troop ship between the US and the Philippines. After the war, the Valencia was sold to a company that used the ship to sail between California and Alaska, but in 1906, she filled in for another ship that was under repair, and her new route became San Francisco to Seattle. They gave the ship a check-up in January of that year, and everything checked out good. For a 24-year-old vessel, the Valencia was in perfect working order.

She set sail on the 20th of January 1906, leaving sunny California and heading north. The ship was crewed by nine officers, 56 crew members and played host to over 100 passengers. Somewhere near Cape Mendocino off the coast of northern California, though, the weather turned sour. Visibility dropped, and the winds kicked up. When you’re on a ship at night, even a slow one, losing the ability to see is a very bad thing. Typically, without visual navigation a captain might fall back on the celestial method, using the stars in the same way sailors did centuries ago, but even that option was off the table for Captain Oscar Johnson, and so he used the only tool he had left: dead reckoning. The name alone should hint at the efficacy of the method. Using last known navigational points as a reference, Captain Johnson essentially guessed at the Valencia’s current location. But guessing can be deadly, and so instead of pointing the ship at the Strait of Juan de Fuca, between Vancouver Island and Washington State, he unknowingly aimed it at the island itself. Blinded by the weather and faulty guesswork, the Valencia struck a reef just 50ft from the shore near Pachena Point on the south-west side of Vancouver Island. They say the sound of the metal ripping apart on the rocks sounded like the screams of dozens of people. It came without warning, and the crew did what they could to react by immediately reversing the engines, backing off the rocks. Damage control reported the hull had been torn wide open, water was pouring in at a rapid pace, and there was no hope of repairing the ship. It lacked the hull compartments that later ships would include for just such occasions, and the captain knew that all hope was lost, so he reversed the engines again and drove the ship back onto the rocks. He wasn’t trying to destroy the Valencia completely, but to ground her, hoping that would keep her from sinking as rapidly as she might at sea. That’s when all hell broke loose. Before Captain Johnson could organise an evacuation, six of the seven life boats were lowered over the side. Three of those flipped over on the way down, dumping out the people inside. Two more capsized after hitting the water, and the sixth boat simply vanished. In the end, only one boat made it safely away.

Frank Lehn was one of the few survivors of the shipwreck. He later described the scene in all its horrific detail: “Screams of women and children mingled in an awful chorus with the shrieking of the wind, the dash of rain, and the roar of the breakers. As the passengers rushed on deck they were carried away in bunches by the huge waves that seemed as high as the ship's mastheads. The ship began to break up almost at once and the women and children were lashed to the rigging above the reach of the sea. It was a pitiful sight to see frail women, wearing only night dresses, with bare feet on the freezing ratlines, trying to shield children in their arms from the icy wind and rain”. About that same time, the last life boat made it safely away under the control of the ship’s boatswain, Officer Timothy McCarthy. According to him, the last thing he saw after leaving the ship was, and I quote, “the brave faces looking at us over the broken rail of a wreck, and of the echo of a great hymn sung by the women through the fog and mist and flying spray”. The situation was desperate. Attempts were made by the ship’s remaining crew to fire a rescue line from the lyle gun into the trees at the top of the nearby cliff. If someone could simply reach the line and anchor it, the rest of the passengers would be saved. The first line they fired became tangled and snapped clean, but the second successfully reached the cliff above. A small group of men even managed to make it to shore. There were nine of them, led by a school teacher named Frank Bunker, but when they reached the top of the cliff, they discovered the path forked to the left and the right; Bunker picked the left. Had he instead turned right, the men would have come across the second lyle line within minutes and possibly saved all the remaining passengers. Instead, he led the men along a telegraph line path for over two hours before finally managing to get a message out to authorities about the accident, making a desperate plea for help - and help was sent, but even though the three separate ships that raced to the site of the wreck tried to offer assistance, the rough weather and choppy seas prevented them from getting close enough to do any good. Even still, the sight of the ships nearby gave a false sense of hope to those remaining on the wreckage, so when the few survivors onshore offered help, they declined. There were no more lifeboats, no more lifelines to throw, and no ships brave enough to get closer. The women and children stranded on the ship clung to the riggings and rails against the cold Pacific waters, but when a large wave washed the wounded ship off the rocks and into deep water, everyone was lost. All told, 137 of the 165 lives aboard the ship were lost that cold, early January morning. If that area of the coastline had yet to earn its modern nickname of “the graveyard of the Pacific”, this was the moment that cemented it.

The wreck of the Valencia was clearly the result of a series of unfortunate accidents, but officials still went looking for someone to blame. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the Canadian government took steps to ensure lifesaving measures along the coast that could help with future shipwrecks. A lighthouse was constructed near Pachena Point and a coastal trail was laid out that would eventually become known as the West Coast Trail, but the story of Valencia was far from over. Keep in mind there have been scores of shipwrecks, tragedies that span centuries, in that very same region of water, and like most areas with a concentrated number of tragic deaths, unusual activity has been reported by those who visit. Just five months after the Valencia sank, a local fisherman reported an amazing discovery. While exploring seaside caves on the south-western coast of Vancouver Island, he described how he stumbled upon one of the lifeboats within the cave. In the boat, he claimed, were eight human skeletons. The cave was said to be blocked by a large rock, and the interior was at least 200ft deep. Experts found it hard to explain how the boat could have made it from the water outside into the space within, but theories speculated that an unusually high tide could possibly have lifted the boat up and over. A search party was sent out to investigate the rumour, but it was found that the boat was unrecoverable, due to the depth of the cave and the rocks blocking the entrance. In 1910, the Seattle Times ran a story with reports of unusual sightings in the area of the wreck. According to a number of sailors, a ship resembling the Valencia had been witnessed off the coast. The mystery ship could have been any local steamer, except for one small detail: the ship was already floundering on the rocks, half submerged. Clinging to the wreckage, they say, were human figures, holding on against the wind and the waves.

Humans have had a love affair with the ocean for thousands of years. Across those dark and mysterious waters lay all manner of possibility: new lands, new riches, new cultures to meet and trade with. Setting sail has always been something akin to the start of an adventure, whether that destination was the northern passage or just up the coast, but an adventure at sea always comes with great risk; we understand this in our core. It makes us cautious, it turns our stomachs, it fills us with equal parts dread and hope, because there on the waves of the ocean, everything can go according to plan, or it can all fail tragically. Maybe this is why the ocean is so often used as a metaphor for the fleeting, temporary nature of life. Time, like waves, eventually wear us all down. Our lives can be washed away in an instant, no matter how strong or high we build them. Time takes much from us, just like the ocean. Waters off the coast of Vancouver Island are a perfect example of that cruelty and risk. They can be harsh, even brutal, toward vessels that pass through them. The cold winters and sharp rocks leave ships with little chance of survival, and with over 70 shipwrecks to date, the graveyard of the Pacific certainly lives up to its reputation. For years after the tragedy of 1906, fishermen and locals on the island told stories of a ghostly ship that patrolled the waters just off the coast. It’s said it was crewed by skeletons of the Valencia sailors who lost their lives there. It would float into view and then disappear, like a spirit, before anyone could reach it. In 1933, in the waters just north of the 27-year-old wreck of the Valencia, a shape floated out of the fog. When a local approached it, the shape became recognisable; it was a lifeboat. It looked as if it had just been launched moments before and yet there, on the side of the boat, were pale letters that spelled out a single word: Valencia.

[Closing statements]

[moodboardinthecloud]

Transcript: Richard Flanagan in Conversation with Ramona Koval

Transcript: Richard Flanagan in Conversation with Ramona Koval

Watch the interview here.

RAMONA KOVAL: Richard Flanagan, it’s a pleasure to have you here. Welcome to the Monthly Book.

RICHARD FLANAGAN: It’s lovely to be here with you, Ramona.

RK: Richard, even though it is about lots of things, including war, sacrifice and courage, this book started with a love story. I wanted you to talk about the kernel of this book, the thing that got you thinking.

RF: Well, my parents used to tell this story of a Latvian man who lived in the town I was born in, Longford in Tasmania. He’d immigrated to Australia in the wake of the war. But at war’s end he’d gone back to his Latvian village, which had been utterly destroyed and with it, he was told, his wife. Everyone said she was dead and he searched for her there; he searched that hellish wasteland that was Europe, in the immediate postwar period, for two years – the refugee camps with the various organisations that were set up for displaced people. And in the end he had to accept that she was dead. He came Australia. After some years, he married a woman here and had children to her. And then in 1957 he went to Sydney; he was walking down the street there and saw his Latvian wife walking towards him with a child on either hand. He had a few moments when he had to make the most momentous of decisions: whether he would acknowledge her, halt and speak to her, and thus set both their lives perhaps on an irrevocably different path, or just walk on by and ignore her. He had to weigh up his love for her then, his love for her now, what that meant – a most extraordinary, I would imagine, avalanche of feelings – and come to a decision. I thought this was the most beautiful of stories because it spoke about love in so many ways. It was very much an image and a story that I built the whole book around. I always saw the couple walking towards each other on Sydney Harbour Bridge because when I’m in Sydney, I like walking across there. It is the most beautiful way to appreciate Sydney. There’s something beautiful, particularly in the afternoon, the way light and shadows fall across those vast ribs. That was the image: a man seeing a woman he thought was dead approaching him, with a child on either hand, and his realising his whole life comes to that point.

RK: So, many of the decisions people make, including those made by characters in the book, are those momentous decisions. Suddenly you’re faced with something: which way do you move? How do you summon up the courage or the strength to go one way or another, and these things can haunt people for the rest of their lives.

RF: Well, I think life’s like that, don’t you, Ramona? It proceeds glacially. Then there are sudden moments and we realise we’ve lived only for those moments, and in those moments everything in our lives is happening and we’re faced with choices. I think this is something not so uncommon to us. It’s just strange how the world proceeds, though, with the illusion of the tramline of progress, and we get off at all stations in equal time. It’s not like that; it’s like a glacier that suddenly carves an iceberg.

RK: In many ways, that scene could have taken place in many of your other books: the man, the villain, the past, the future, the present. What was it about this book that meant it was the nest for that scene?

RF: I really don’t know. I knew that these things were coming together in my mind over 12 years ago, that I wanted a love story. I knew it would be about prisoners of war, or it would have the prisoner of war experience at its centre, and I went up to Sydney and I spent a few days wandering around with Tom Uren, who was in the same camp as my father. I guess I had the whole feeling for novel in my head at that point; I just didn’t have the details, which would take me over a decade to assemble in a coherent fashion and led me through not drafts but really five different novels. There was a novel of linked haiku; there was a novel of haibun, which is a Japanese form, a nature journal written in prose with occasional haikus. I wrote a large Russian sort of war epic with a ridiculously large and impossible to remember cast. I wrote a family epic. I finished each one and then abandoned them because they didn’t work. But I had to write all them to write this final book. There are large elements, even of the linked haiku novel, in this one. So each one clearly had to be written in order for me to write this book, but I wish I could have written it far quicker.

RK: You grew up with some stories from your dad, who was on the Burma railway. What kind of stories did he tell? Of course, the book is dedicated to ... you say the prisoner number.

RF: Prisoner san byaku san ju go, which was number 335, which was my father’s number in the prisoner of war camps, which he taught us as children. We grew up very aware that he’d been a prisoner of war but he didn’t impose it on us; we sort of imbibed it. He didn’t talk about it all the time, by any means, but nor was he silent about it. He would tell these stories really in a querying way. They were gentle, often funny, stories, and there was about them a great humanity and pathos and love. He didn’t dwell on the suffering at all; he really disliked that. He would tell the stories and then think aloud about them, and I remember one time he said that he was very lucky, that they were the best thing that ever happened to him, to be in these camps, because they only had to suffer. He felt that to go to war as a soldier means for most people that you have to inflict suffering, and then, if you survive it, you have to live with the fact that you acted as an agent of evil. He felt they were in a situation where they would discover, not the worst of themselves, but the best. What’s that line of Whitman’s? “I contain multitudes”. I think he slowly came to feel that he contained multitudes, and it was that vast experience, that mad slave system that was this quarter of a million people working naked, or near naked, with tools that would have been used millennia ago to build this extraordinary folly, this railway through the unknown jungle.

RK: You talk of containing multitudes and that he was grateful he didn’t have to inflict punishment or pain on other people. You write in this book from the point of view of the Japanese guards as well because you are interested in the multitudes that were there at the time. Tell us about going to visit and meet some of these people who worked for the Japanese in the camp, which was part of your research for the book.

RF: I think that one of the things that was extraordinarily difficult for the Australian prisoners of war was that the violence in the camps was to them utterly arbitrary, without sense. There was no pattern they could discern, no reason why the violence would suddenly erupt. I think this is immensely spiritually and psychologically destructive for any human being. In fact, I remember years ago reading a study by a Salvadorian psychologists who were Jesuits, who were actually killed by a death squad in the end. They had done a big study on the uses of terror in Pinochet’s Chile. What they discovered was that initially Pinochet had used terror in a systematic way. That is, if you were an intellectual or someone whose politics differed from that of the regime, well, then, you would be picked up and tortured or killed. What Pinochet realised with the advice of psychologists, which was revealing, was that this sort of terror doesn’t frighten people, because they know that if they go silent, if they don’t stand up and oppose, they will be safe. Then they bide their time. It doesn’t mean that the whispering in their hearts ceased. Pinochet’s regime after a year or two, on the advice on psychologists instituted a regime of random terror. They would pick up an old woman, some children from a shopping centre, someone out of a car – utterly random – and their charred bodies might turn up in a gutter two weeks later. That terror, although statistically it was as unlikely to happen to you, really does terrify people because then you do not know when they might come for you. And that was one of the things that was terribly corrosive for the Australians in the prisoner of war camps because the violence seemed completely random. And yet it seemed to me that it would not have been that way to the Japanese, and I have a great love of Japanese literature, and I wanted to try to understand it from the Japanese perspective: why people would have done this. Near the end of writing the novel, I went to Japan to meet some of the former guards who’d worked on the death railway. To answer your question: how’d I meet them? Some Japanese women had come to my father’s house to say sorry to him some years before. They were part of a network in Japan that had campaigned hard to try to get the history curriculum in the schools changed to accurately reflect the reality of Japanese militarism. One of them was a journalist who had done very brave and extraordinary work exposing the horrors of Unit 731, I think it is, the Japanese small army in Manchuria, that did the most horrific biological experiments on Chinese civilians and prisoners. Through these quite extraordinary and brave women I was able to find these guards and make contact with them and go and meet them. I met one who had been the sort of Ivan the Terrible of my father’s camp, who the Australians knew as “the Lizard”. I hadn’t known until five minutes before I arrived at this taxi company in an outer suburb of Tokyo that this man I was meeting was actually the Lizard, and that rather undid me, I must say. He was hated by the Australians for his violence; he was sentenced to death for war crimes after the war; he had his sentenced commuted to life imprisonment, and he then was released in an amnesty in 1956. The man I met though was this courteous, kindly and generous old man. Bizarrely, an earthquake hit Tokyo as I was sitting in the room with him, and the whole room pitched around like a bobbling dinghy in a most wild sea, and I saw him frightened. I realised whatever evil is, it wasn’t in that room with us. I talked with him about his childhood, about the way he’d been press-ganged into becoming a prison guard at the age of 15, how he’d hated the training, which was incredibly violent, and wanted to run away back home. But he knew if he ran away, his father would be punished by the Japanese. He told me how he hated the way the Australians whistled and sang and seemed happy.

RK: Because he was unhappy?

RF: He didn’t say that. He said some quite extraordinary things. He said, I am not Korean; I am not Japanese; I am a man of a colony. That’s how he understood himself, and he saw that his fate was a fairly wretched one and he sort of understood that he’d never be forgiven, and that he had to live with those things. These people are despised by the Koreans, who see them as traitors, despised by the Japanese because they are Koreans. They don’t belong in Korea or Japan; they have a very hard place to live in. These same people often had sisters who ended up “comfort women” for the Japanese. They were inculcated into a culture of extreme violence, and it was understood that if they didn’t in turn inflict this violence onto the prisoners, who they were made to believe were less than human in any case, they would suffer terribly.

RK: But he did stand out for your father and your father’s friends.

RF: He was monstrous. But I wasn’t there to accuse him or judge him. I was there to hear his story, to try to understand what it must have felt like to be condemned to death, to try to feel what he felt about his parents. Really what happened to Japan from the turn of the century up until what we call World War Two, which they call the Great East Asian War, I think a perverse death cult took over the whole society. That death cult meant, for example, the Japanese commandant commanding a section of the line that had to be built, if he didn’t get it built, he would have felt he’d have to kill himself out of shame. Everyone suffered in that death cult. No one’s life had any value. The Australians’ lives had no value, but neither did the Koreans’ and neither did the commanders’. It was an utter perversion of humanity and everyone became trapped in it. I still find it hard to comprehend: more people died on that railway than there are words in that book. More people died on that railway than died at Hiroshima. And yet really outside of Australia, it’s been forgotten. It’s been forgotten by those who were there, such as the Malaysian Tamils, the Burmese, the Thais. It’s an inexplicable story from recent times.

RK: You went back to the railway with your brother, I guess the same way you went to Sydney with Tom Uren. You like to make these sorts of journeys, it seems, on which something might happen, or you might see something? What were your thoughts when you were in the place where the Burma railway was built? Is it all jungle now?

RF: I think it’s very different now. My understanding is that it was much more teak jungle then, and Thailand had a pretty small population. The population has since exploded, and there are a lot of people living in these places now. It really was a fairly remote wilderness even for the Thai and Burmese people. But nevertheless, you still get a strong sense there was a jungly sort of bush there. The railway is mostly overgrown except for those places that have been cleared for the tourists, essentially. But we were able to find my father’s camp and we were able to walk the track through to the railway. We were able to work out where the cholera compound was, where the creek that brought the cholera into the camp was. Once that exists in your head you begin to absorb... I didn’t go there for sensation or cathartic revelation, I went there to feel the humidity, to feel what it was like to move in that humidity, to grab hold of thorny bamboo, to look at the limestone-rock cliffs and the mud and to try to understand what it would be like to walk barefoot through that. To look at the embankments and the cuttings and work out how you would use hand tools to create such things. I carried rocks just to feel what that was like in the heat. I realised the more I opened myself up to that sensory world, then I would have something to draw on when it came to write the book. I think it’s wrong to try to pretend that you can relive that experience or to know that experience. But you can open yourself up to the physical world of it. That for me is a very important tool because you’re writing truths about human beings but they always have to be embedded in that very real, concrete detail.

RK: I wanted to talk about the writing of this book because if I remember parts of the book, of the camp, or some of the engagement of war beforehand, I think of death and heat and hunger and suppurating wounds and filth and shit and sweat. As I read it, I can see that you’re right in there; I’m right in there as a reader, and I notice there are some repetitions of language, of words: death. But I’m not bored by it, I’m going along with you. It’s almost like they rhyme in some way; it’s a kind of poetry. You’ve got me bound, as long as those guys are down there. Tell me about writing that kind of scene and the language that you need to use. I suppose there’s a sort of limitation when it comes to the kind of language you can use.

RF: Well, I’m always interested in trying to make things more readable, and it won’t be news to the followers of your book club that repetition is regarded as very poor writing in modern literature. Modern literature frowns upon it, and editors are trained to strike it out. Modern word-processing programs make it so easy to – well, “global” is the term – global a word to make sure it’s not repeated. But really the great literature always uses repetition to build up rhythms and patterns – essentially the music – and I think we are very tuned in to those musical patterns, and it is those more than even characters or the progress of plot that allow a reader to enter the world of a novel and open up to it. Specifically, that means you might repeat an adverb three times in a paragraph but hopefully artfully enough that the repetition doesn’t strike people but it gives it a tone which is much closer to conversation, where we do repeat words and yet we don’t notice it. You were talking about “death”, and there’s a passage I know you were interested in where the words “death” and “dead” build up a drum-like marshal beat. In one way, it’s a little like the Molly Bloom soliloquy in reverse, but I was also very taken by the power of Paul Celan’s poetry and the way he creates rhythms with language, with his most harrowing of poems about his experience of the holocaust.

RK: He repeats: “Your hair, Margaret, your hair.”

RF: Yeah, that’s the poem. That very famous poem. It repeats the same three or four lines over and over, doesn’t it, with a slightly different patterning of the words, and slowly this universe of horror opens up to you because he manages to convey the sense of a marshal evil, drumming. Within is the doom of you and everything you love. And the drumming grows and grows. I think there is an idea of high modernist prose particularly common with people out of American creative writing schools that actually has lost the importance of those poetic cadences and tropes in the writing of prose.

RK: And you’ve quoted at the beginning Paul Celan’s “Mother”.

RF: Well, Celan was a German speaking and writing Romanian, who lost both his parents in the holocaust. He continued to write in German, and he wrote some of the greatest German poems of the century about the greatest evil the Germans had done. I felt, in a way, that spoke to the challenge I faced, which was to try to write about this great evil that the Japanese people were responsible for, but honouring all that is great and truly beautiful about their culture, and their literature truly is. And so that’s why I called the book, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”, which is of course the title of one of the most famous works of Japanese literature: A haibun by Basho, the great haiku poet.

RK: And of course the railway is the narrow road too.

RF: And throughout it, there’s a lot of very famous haikus reversed. So things like: “blow after blow, on the monster’s face, a monster’s mask”, which is Basho’s famous haiku: “Day after day / On the monkey’s face / A monkey’s mask”. There are many, many inversions of haikus, which those who know Japanese literature will see very clearly what’s being done there.

RK: Your father died earlier this year. What did he think about you writing this book. He knew you were writing it, you were asking him questions about his experience. He knew you went to Japan; he was worried about you going.

RF: I told him I was going to Japan and that I’d be meeting some guards. Because it was such a vast project, I didn’t think any of them would be people who’d been at his camp; I didn’t think that for a minute. When I got back, I was able to tell him I’d met several guards that had been at his camp, or the death railway or the slave-labour camp he ended up in Japan, south of Hiroshima, that I’d met the Lizard, and that I felt they’d all said sorry. That they’d all, I felt, carried regret and shame. That although they weren’t necessarily entirely honest and that although I wasn’t sure it was possible that they’d ever quite reconcile their souls with what had happened in a fully honest way, I still felt there was something genuine in all this. That there was regret. He suddenly stopped talking and said he had to go, which was unlike him. His mind was still very sharp and he was interested in these things. And later that day he lost all memory of the prisoner of war camps. Nothing else happened to him: his mind remained very sharp and alert in every other way. He knew he’d had this experience – like being in the womb – but he could recall no detail of it. It seemed as if he was finally free of it.

RK: How do that make you feel, as a son and as a writer?

RF: It’s hard for me to talk about. This is really a book about love, written in the shadow of my father dying. I literally finished the final draft on the day he died. In our last conversation, he asked how the book was going and I told him it was finished. I don’t feel the events are connected but nevertheless it is a strange thing to have happen to you – that you would finish such a book and then your father would pass away. In the manner of books, particularly large novels like this, there have been revisions, consequent on copyediting, to be made, and I worked on them thereafter. But the book was done, and then he died, and that’s it. A large part of my life came to a strange conclusion, I guess.

RK: Was it a struggle to have to deal with such – I mean, there are passages of love and sex and fun in this book so I don’t want people to think it’s all very depressing – but tell me about getting down into the dirt, getting down into the mud. How did you manage that each day when you were writing those passages? Was it something you could leave at the end of the day and live your normal life? Did you think, “Oh, I have to go back into that room with these terrible images”? Actually they were images, weren’t they? They were sketches of camp life and cruelty? And there’s a character there who does sketch in your book. How did you manage the emotions of writing those things and living as Richard Flanagan?

RF: Firstly, I should say, to me, the book is an affirmation, strangely, of joy in life. And although it passes through a dark place, I hope it’s uplifting. And people who’ve read it tell me that they do find it that. Because it is really about the beauty of human beings in the most extraordinary circumstances. How did I write it? In the end, after I got back from Japan – I have a shack on a place called Bruny Island, where no one much is – and I went there. And I pretty well lived by myself; my wife used to come down at weekends, and occasionally some friends would turn up, but I was more or less alone in this place by the sea in the bush for the best part of five months. I rewrote the book top to bottom. I’d get up at five and be working by six and work through till I went to bed at nine or ten. I’d go for a swim; I’d do a bit of snorkelling in between and then I’d go back to the book. I had to do that because I had nothing else in me: it all had to go in to the creation of this book. Balzac said he only had one hour of the day to give to life, the rest was for writing his novels, and I didn’t even have that one hour; it all had to be for the novel. These things for most writers are an extraordinary labour; there’s no getting away from it. There’s a very slow crafting of sentences that just takes an inordinate amount of time, and you just have to slowly hew away at it.

RK: The sentence crafting: was that separate from the emotional tenor of the material you were writing about?

RF: I think it’s searching for an accuracy not a description of feeling. And that means then you have to be very disciplined about avoiding emotion, really. I think it was Chekov who said, If you want people to feel sad, never let a tear be seen on the page. You just have to try to accurately describe what your characters are doing and saying and so on, and that’s the labour. I don’t think it’s a case of working yourself into a joyous state or an erotic state or a miserable state, and then writing from that. It’s both simpler and harder: you have to think, how would you describe that particular feeling and how would you write it accurately.

RK: There are some memoirs that have come out of these experiences, that have been written. Which were the memoirs that you found most useful?

RF: I’d grown up reading them. I think the most wonderful are Ray Parkin’s, the greatest war memoirs that Australia’s produced. But I tried not to lean on them too much. Really my biggest influence were just the stories I grew up with and heard from my father. Only my family would know, but the ways in which they are torn apart and reassembled in strange order and strange mismatching would hopefully tell something of my father’s story and yet was a completely different story. The lead character is utterly unlike my father.

RK: The lead character is a person kind of like Weary Dunlop, or who had Weary Dunlop’s job, I suppose.

RF: Weary Dunlop was one of many doctors up there. It was a strange thing but the doctors were the leaders in the camps, and they were idolised by the men. Weary Dunlop is the best known of them. But there were quite a few: Rowley Richards, Arthur Moon, Kevin Fagan, to name just some, and they were all held in equal high regard by the men and performed similarly extraordinary feats as Weary Dunlop. So I was interested in a character who wasn’t seen to be a leader who finds himself in that role and then has to do things, extraordinary things, but doubts his capacity to do them, who feels in a way like a sham and a fraud but who ultimately still does extraordinary things because in a way he was actually being led by the men to do them. It’s a necessary thing. In the same way that Australians talk about mateship as something very simple, but I think it’s a very complex form of human survival, where the mateship in the camps was a system of incredibly strong bonds and loyalties. I don’t think it necessarily meant you even liked someone; it meant you were locked into a pattern of obligation that ensured they would survive, and therefore you had a chance of surviving. An enormous sense of self-sacrifice existed within that, and it’s an extraordinary idea of human behaviour.

RK: It sounds a little bit like Malinowski writing about the Kula Ring or some of these arrangements you find in Polynesia or Melanesia, where tribes are dependent on each other and obligations are built up, and you may not like this person but you trust them. You owe them and they owe you.

RF: Yeah, I think there was a lot of that. I think there was also acts of great altruism as much as there were harrowing stories of betrayal, failings and weaknesses on the part of the prisoners.

RK: You used the word “evil” before. “If evil was here, it wasn’t in this room,” you said when you talked about meeting the guard. Do you believe that there is evil or are people acting because of colonialism or they’re being forced to do this or that, or a kind of mysterious death cult that arises through history? I mean, you were a historian.

RF: I do believe in evil, yeah. I believe in goodness and I believe in love. I think human beings and human history are the consequence of these hugely irrational forces. Much as we want to deny them and corral them, these are the things that propel us, and we carry all of these – the worst things and the best things – within ourselves. I think it was Clint Eastwood who said, “Violence has consequences.”

RK: That great poet!

RF: [Laughs] It has causes too. It’s always wrong to focus on the moment of violence, and think that tells you the whole story. You have to understand what led to it, and what leads to it – my very limited understanding of Japanese history – is that you have half a century of a culture slowly being poisoned by ideas of militarism, of nationalism, of race, and a poisonous religious aspect, which crept in from Zen Buddhism, in the same way that we know so well about Christianity and Europe in the 20th century. All the wickedness and the evil goes back to those people advocating these ideas, and slowly seducing, press-ganging, forcing and finally shaping society in the image of these very evil ideas. Any society can go down that path, and than we all become the agents of evil. So, I think it’s always very important that these things are resisted early on and resisted for what they are at the beginning, because you can do something about them then. By the time you’re building a railway through a wilderness with a quarter of a million slave labourers, it’s a little too late to expect the jailers to behave with any humanity. It’s gone beyond that. But you still have to seek to understand what led to it. I’m not a historian and this isn’t a historical book but it is a book about the truth of human beings, I hope.

RK: Well, it’s a wonderful book, Richard, and it’s always great to talk to you. Thank you for coming in and talking to us at the Monthly Book.

RF: Thank you very much, Ramona. Thank you for everything.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/transcript-richard-flanagan-conversation-ramona-koval

[heartsnatchertranslation]

Goodbye, Christopher Robin

This story comes from Genichiro Takahashi’s (高橋 源一郎) 2012 short story collection also titled Goodbye, Christopher Robin /さ���ならクリストファー・ロビン ( Sayonara kurisutofaa robin) , a collection of stories centered around the theme of losing one’s childhood imagination and innocence. This story, while initially filled with apparent non sequiturs, eventually focuses on that as well.

Takahashi is one of my favorite Japanese authors, and his only novel that has received an English translation, Sayonara, Gangsters/さようなら、ギャングたち (Sayonara, gyangutachi), stands as one of my favorite works of Japanese literature. He reminds me quite a bit of Richard Brautigan, deftly mixing black comedy, satire, and a sense of whimsy into his writing. It baffles me that his work has yet to see further translation into English. Consider this my attempt to help remedy that, even if only a little. There’s another story in the collection that I also adore and might take a stab at translating eventually, but it’s over 60 pages, so posting it on here seems like it might be a hassle... 

Anyway, here’s “Goodbye, Christopher Robin.”

                                                              ---

            Long ago, it was rumored that we lived in the pages of a story someone had written. We didn’t really exist, or so the story went. Such rumors spread quickly.

           “Well, what’s that to me!” said the old fisherman when he heard of this from some sea turtles he had saved from the children who were beating them with sticks. He was famous for being invited by the sea turtles to their castle under the sea, where they told him about the rumor. “Let’s suppose the rumor is true. I’m a man who takes pride in the things he’s done, so whether or not we live in a story, I can tell you, if I ever see some turtles getting beaten with sticks on the shore, I’ll help them. Same as I did before.”

           And so that weathered old fisherman, cane in hand, walked the wet, sandy shore every morning, on the lookout for sea turtles. However, the only things that ever washed up on the beach were plastic refuse and bottles with random labels printed on them. To say nothing of sea turtles, no trace of anyone could be seen, not even a single youngster, looking for turtles to torture.

           He turned towards the sky, and cried out, “When the smoke met the sky and turned into nothing, so too did my youth and home along with it, but I don’t have a single regret. I’ve only done exactly what I was supposed to do.” Not a soul was there to respond.

          He paused for a while, muttering to himself, the hems of his greasy clothing fluttering in the wind as he walked to and fro along the shore.

           Then one morning he suddenly disappeared. All that remained of him were two sets of prints in the sand, those of his long, messy stride and his walking stick, headed towards the sea.

           Some said that the old fisherman was fortunate enough to return to the castle below the sea that he held so dearly and reunite with the sea turtles. Others said that to be sure, the old fisherman had seen the sea turtles, and as it called to mind memories of that wonderful encounter when he was younger, so did he return to the sea. Others said that he was indeed a character living in a story that someone else had written after all, and he had vanished after playing his role. The people who spoke of this did so in hushed tones, reflecting the fact that they themselves were no exception to this rumor. Deep in their chests they felt something cold, and soon fell silent.

           Around the same time, deep in the forest not too far from the shore on which the fisherman had disappeared, a wolf was in the throes of anguish. Until that point, this wolf had never known suffering of any kind. Knocking on the door of the little goats while they were house-sitting and hearing their funny voices as they regarded him with suspicion, going around and blowing down the straw houses that the Three Little Pigs had built, it had all been great fun. Even that time he sought refuge on the night of a terrible storm and ended up befriending a goat with whom he subsequently went on travels with was great fun. He would frolic in a field without a care until he grew tired, then curl up into a ball under the shade of a small tree. But now, unfortunately, that rumor had reached the wolf’s ears.

           The one who told him was another wolf, one who loathed him. This wasn’t always the case. She had once held this wolf in high regard, but possibly due to her feelings not being returned, she came to resent him. In any event, she was successful in planting the seed of this rumor in his mind.

           “That fool,” the wolf thought to himself. “Saying I’m living stories someone else wrote…!”

           The wolf hunkered down and began sniffing around with all his might.

           “I, the one standing here, am me, and I’m the one controlling my actions, you hear me!”

           However, the sense of doubt gnawing at him did not disappear. The wolf felt like no matter what he ate, none of it had any flavor. It was beginning to seem as if he truly did not exist after all.

           One day, the wolf tricked a little girl. He arrived at her grandmother’s house before she did. It was supposed to be a bit of fun, but the cloud of doubt had not lifted from his heart, not even a little. In an instant, that black cloud began to rise within his heart, and he devoured the grandmother. He tore into her body with his razor-sharp fangs, and a terrible screaming could be heard. The stench of blood hung in the air as it spilled from his muzzle. Having lost his mind, the wolf devoured her flesh as she writhed in agony. He choked on her innards, which caught in his throat.

           I’ll never forget this stench, and this awful texture, not for as long as I live, the wolf thought. But why have I done such a thing? Because I want to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I exist? Nonsense!

           The girl arrived shortly thereafter. The wolf, lying in the grandmother’s bed, made conversation with her. Being quite foolish, she was easily deceived. He then ate her too. The first time was truly terrible, but this time, he felt no emotion whatsoever. He only felt something like a scream from deep in his throat, and delicate fingers and their nails clawing at him from the inside. A thought came to him, unbidden, as he was on the verge of vomiting: to be consumed like this was simply the fate of all living things.

           The hunter who opened the gate and was confronted by this ghastly scene felt his breath catch in his throat. The wolf stared at him, wearing a vacant expression, viscera scattered at his feet. Flies hung around him like a black cloud. The wolf tottered to his feet with no apparent regard for his blood-soaked visage.

           “What am I, I wonder? I don’t know. But one thing’s for sure. I’m becoming a monster. And I find this terrible. Why didn’t you leave me alone? I wish I had said how much I disliked eating honey and carrots back when I was eating such things, but that just isn’t in my nature. It was all an act. Now I’m playing the role of a wolf, and wolves need to eat. So I ate. This is the result!”

           The wolf took a wider stance and drew closer to the hunter.

           “Go ahead and kill me. My heart is right here. Even if you split my belly open, the girl and her grandmother won’t be coming back. I’ve already digested them. So what are you waiting for? If you don’t kill me, this will just become the story of how I ate you too.”

           So the hunter struck the wolf down. He stood over his corpse, looking at the filthy fur, stained with blood. He leaned in and lifted the wolf’s head.

           “What were you saying! What’s all this about! My hands…are stained with blood…”

           It was all the hunter could do just to speak these words.

           An astronomer once noticed that the number of stars was decreasing. Owing to the vast amount of stars in the sky, an accurate count had never been taken, as there had never been any such commendable fellow to enumerate them. That is, until this astronomer, with his incredible zeal, dedicated his whole life to this cause.

           Stars are a thing that are born, grow, and go on to die. As it is so, sometimes, their number increases, and at other times, their number decreases. The phenomenon the astronomer discovered, however, defied explanation. The number of stars was continuing to decrease at a fixed rate from a certain point. No matter how many calculations he tried, after counting the number of stars captured in the photos many times over, the number remained the same. The astronomer once more used every observational machine to reexamine it, then returned to his foundation in astrophysics, starting again from step one. He even went as far as to reconsider the hypothesis, and in earnest attributed the phenomenon to a lunar eclipse. He then once again, with an eye free from bias, made use of the finest, most thorough scientific observational devices in the world, and fixed his gaze upon the edges of the sky.

           The result did not change.                        

           “The sky is continuing to disappear from its very reaches! The universe was an absolute thing, yet its existence is now tenuous, being consumed by the void.”

           The astronomer figured he ought to tell the world of this astonishing truth, but even other astronomers disregarded the theory.

           “That’s impossible. The universe has always been a mixture of existence and the absence thereof. To say that existence is being consumed by this void is a nonsensical fallacy.”

           Even so, the astronomer continued. “If you make the observations, you’ll see. Just look into it. You’ll see just what’s going on.”

           Another astronomer soon bent his ear.

           “Let’s suppose your theory is true. What of it? What will become of us? You’ll merely plunge the world into a state of unprecedented chaos, and to what end? There’s nothing to worry about. Before this void consumes the universe, well, we’ll be swallowed up ourselves.”

           The astronomer, despondent, destroyed all of his equipment, and fled his lab. A while after, a rumor had spread that this astronomer was now frequenting a cemetery, and immersing himself in the research of disembodied souls.

           Apparently, after seeing nothing around save for beggars, the man said “The secret to producing something from nothing lies here, if my calculations are correct,” while brandishing a butterfly net, with which he made futile efforts to capture these “disembodied souls.” His disciples lent him a hand, splitting into groups and searching high and low through every nook and cranny of the cemetery. However, there were too many graves, and they were unable to find their master.

             Around the same time as the graveyard debacle, an elderly physicist found something strange during his pursuit of the fundamental truth governing matter: somewhere along the line, one particle of the group of which matter is comprised had disappeared. The physicist continued his research, employing various methods. That is to say, this group of particles, owing to their small size, were impossible to observe, but by dint of logical thinking and measurements, their existence had at long last been proven. Using every method at his disposal, the sole limit being human ingenuity, the physicist reached the same conclusion. It was the only conclusion that could be reached. One particle had indeed vanished. The physicist consulted the only friend he could count on, a biologist, for his opinion on the matter.

           “It’s vanished?”

           “Yes. That is to say, that which should be there, isn’t.”

           “Supposing that is the case, why aren’t people losing their minds?”

           “Because no one can feel it.”

           “What exactly would happen if one of the particles forming all matter in the known universe were to disappear?”

           “Hmm…I dare say that everything would shrink down just a tad, to compensate for the particle’s absence.”

           “Would everything shrink at the same rate?”

           “Precisely. And that’s not all. If I’m right, space should also shrink down at this same rate.”

           “Why?”

           “Because what we call ‘space’ isn’t exactly empty, but rather composed of the elementary particles and their corresponding antiparticles. These antiparticles are also vanishing at the exact same rate.”

           “If everything around us were to be vanishing at this rate, could we observe it?”

           “That would be impossible.”

           “So without so much as being able to observe it, you’re making this declaration.”

           “Yes. The proof is right here.”

           So saying, the physicist showed him a torn piece of notebook paper. There were three formulas scribbled on it.

           “These are numbers and symbols, aren’t they?”

           “They sure are.”

           “And they’re expressing how one of the building blocks of matter is suddenly disappearing, huh?”

           “You got it.”

           “So, if this building block, or particle, rather, were to expand, and instead of just one, two or three or more were to suddenly disappear, what would happen?”

           “It would be the same. After all, all matter and space are indeed going to shrink at the same rate.”

           “And no one is any the wiser, right?”

           “Yes.”

           “Then…”

           The biologist hesitated for a moment, then said, “What does it mean? Rather, what has this got to do with us?”

           The stunned physicist narrowed his eyes as if a brilliant light was shining, then said “I see...I hadn’t considered anything like that. What this may mean, how it relates to us…”

           The physicist sat heavily in his seat, and the biologist followed suit. He weakly fell onto his chair, then spoke.

           “Every day, living organisms go extinct.”

           “Even I know that much.”

           “That’s not it.”

           “What might you mean?”

           “What you’re referring to is, due to the destruction of their environment, species will continue to die out, until we cross a threshold from which there is no return.”

           “There’s more to it than that?”

           “There are species whose whole populations abruptly die out without any reason.”

           “Surely there’s a reason, it’s just that no one has noticed it yet.”

           “I thought the same thing, so I considered every possibility.”

           “And?”

           “No matter the approach, it simply defies explanation.”

           The two scholars sat there without uttering a word, lost in thought.

           “Hey,” the physicist said in a voice tinged with loneliness. “We’ve spent our lives believing that we were doing what needed to be done, have we not?”

           “Indeed.”

           “Not just us, but our predecessors probably thought so as well.”

           “Most likely.”

           “Thus, ultimately, what we have learned merely serves as a barrier. No one else would understand. Am I wrong?”

           But they did not yet know. The lonesome truth of the universe was already being discovered.

  For years, a music enthusiast who collected music from all over the world had found that there were no new melodies being produced. A certain neuroscientist suddenly noticed that an anomaly was beginning to form in the weak electronic current that gives rise to our consciousness. One day, in the same country as the one the neuroscientist inhabited, the head nurse of a large hospital noticed that of all the dozens of newborns born on a certain day, not a one uttered so much as a single noise. Not even their first sound, that primal scream from deep in their throat that so signifies life, rang forth. Free of any abnormalities, these silent infants laughed among themselves. In fact, they seemed to be enjoying themselves more than the other infants.

 Just in this manner, quietly but sure as anything, time passed. There should have been those people who feel the ominous presentiment of something, and should have been able to do something about it. However, they did nothing but cross their arms and wait for it to happen.

 It’s said that it happened in the span of an instant. There are those who said there was an incredibly loud sound, and a terrible light could be seen during this instant; these stories all smack of being created after the fact. Some said said that it sounded like the striking of a match, which is impressive, as it had been years since anyone had seen something that so much as resembled a match.

There were also those who said it sounded like the creaking of opening an old wooden door. The building, of course, had no wooden doors. It must have been the sound of one of the doors of the houses that were destroyed over 50 years ago to make room for the building being opened, only to reach us all this time later. Someone else said it sounded something like the thud of a child accidentally dropping the cup from which they drink milk. This was apparently accompanied by the quiet murmur of a child apologizing. It had been centuries since a child had been present in that house, however. 

The person who could have sworn that someone was setting off small fireworks in the garden reflected on how strange it was, what with it being winter and all, and besides, it was unthinkable that someone would be in the garden in the first place. Still, they had the definite impression that someone had been there until very recently. Of course, there was no proof whatsoever of there being anyone in the garden.

An abandoned kitten, put in a bag and tossed into a garbage bin, abruptly fixed its unseeing eyes on one spot in the sky—this happens all the time—mewed to itself, and the sweet sound of its purring could still be heard, or so someone else said of it.

A girl who had for years now been comatose in a hospital bed, dead to the world, suddenly opened her eyes. She looked at the doctors, nurses, and family gathered around her, confusion on her face. It was as if her pupils reflected nothing at all of her surroundings. She cried out “Welcome home!” in a delighted tone, and then ceased breathing. There are those who say that this girl opened her eyes at all is due to it happening.

Perhaps these incidents did occur in the moment that it happened. However, it’s more likely that these are little more than stories thought up by people trying to reconcile happenings that fly in the face of reality in an attempt to understand them.

                                                A girl, napping in a field, opens her eyes. She stifles a small yawn, and stretches her arms. She can’t find the wet nurse who had, until now, been reading her fairy tales. She sees a rabbit walking—and he’s wearing clothes! The girl wonders if such a thing really happens, or if she’s dreaming. She’s boldly pursuing the rabbit when she finds herself falling down a large, deep, and dark hole that seems to go on forever…

She’s completely lost now. No, that’s not quite right. She’s somewhere she should not have come. The girl doesn’t meet anyone, though she can’t shake the feeling that she could at any moment. There’s a massive table, with all the makings of a tea party arranged on it. The water in the pot is on a rolling boil, and sweets have been placed on every plate. The girl continues to wait for someone who will play with her to appear. Eventually she grows tired of waiting and excuses herself.

No matter where she goes it’s the same: a small hut by the sea, filled with fragments of oyster shells and the stench of fish. No one’s home. In the next place, there’s a pipe, and it seems that until moments ago someone had been there smoking but there’s no one to be seen here either. Only the smell of tobacco remains.

The girl gets uneasy. Maybe there’s no one anywhere. But that’s not what has her worried. No, it’s the fear that something’s wrong. That something unthinkable has happened. That she doesn’t know what to do.

Finally, she arrives at a magnificent but empty palace. She notices playing cards lying on the ground. Each one guides her into a direction that leads into the palace. She follows them, heading deeper and deeper inside.

She finds herself standing in front of a gate, located deep in the palace’s basement. All that’s left to do is open it, she thinks. She feels it’s the only way she’ll find out what’s going on. Truth is, she feels that if she opens the gate something even stranger might happen. She’ll definitely meet someone—that’s what she’s anticipating, her chest pounding. But there’s no one here other than her, and nothing save for the gate in front of which she’s loitering. Maybe I ought to turn back. Find the spot where I fell down here. But even if I were to go back, no way could I climb back up that hole…

She feels a cold wind blowing through the gaps in the fence. She has no choice. She places her hand on the knob and, mustering all of her courage, turns it…

                                                                *

I’m gazing out my window. It’s dark outside, and I can’t see a thing. To be sure, that isn’t because it’s nighttime. What to call what I see there…? It’s like a monster, pitch black, quiet, and it’s staring fixedly at us. Who was it that told me the monster was nothingness, and that the world was slowly being consumed by it? More important than who it was is that they aren’t around anymore.

Right, Christopher Robin?

Even so, we did our best, didn’t we? We didn’t despair even as we knew the world was ceasing to exist. That’s because we found a way to fight back. We were able to turn that rumor around and put it to use.

“If it’s true that we’re nothing more than characters in a story that someone wrote, well, all we have to do is write our own stories!” someone said.

So we wrote a story, and decided to go to bed. The next day went exactly according to what we had written. Wow! We were so full of hope and vigor then, even in the face of the encroaching darkness.

As soon as it got dark, everyone returned to their homes immediately, and wrote a story. The following morning was just terrible. The stories everyone had written spread to the roads, forest, lake, mountain, and caves. The problem was everyone wrote their own story, so there was no consistency. Plot holes piled up halfway through the forest road, and everyone got lost. It reached the point that before writing any stories, a meeting had to be held the night before where everyone discussed what they would write.

Still, writing stories was fun, as was living in stories we had written. When was it that we started getting tired of it?

That night, Piglet wore a defeated look.

“I’ve had enough, Pooh.”

“Why?”

“I can’t think of anything anymore. I want to go to bed without writing anything tonight.”

“Piglet, you mustn’t. If you don’t write anything, your tomorrow will never come.”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“We do at least know what happens if you go home and sleep without writing anything.”

           “Oh, hush! Leave me alone!”

           Piglet went home and was never seen again.

Do you remember, Christopher Robin? No, you’ve already forgotten, haven’t you. After you had a chat in front of the fireplace, Eeyore whispered this into my ear.

           “Pooh, thanks for everything.”

           “What are you saying, Eeyore?”

           “I’m a no-good depressed fool, aren’t I? And I’m not hard-working at all. Writing even this much has been no fun whatsoever. That’s why I’ve decided to not write anything more.”

           “Eeyore! You can’t go!”

           “Go? Where am I going? Everyone is talking about this “nothingness”, right?” Listen, Pooh. I’m already being consumed by this nothingness. Maybe all I want is to be embraced by it and go to sleep.”

           And so Eeyore went.

           Tigger was a bit different. He left me a letter.

           “Pooh, you’ve been a good friend to me. Thank you. I’ve decided I’m not going home. Going back, sitting at my desk, writing yet another story, that’s just not me! I still have a little bit of forest left. The Hundred Acre Wood is already gone, but I’ve got this patch that I wrote about in advance. I’m going to head as far into my forest as I can. That’s the only place I want to be. Sorry for leaving ahead of you, Pooh. Ah, that’s right, I almost forgot. There’s one thing I need to apologize for that’s been bugging me: I don’t like honey.”

           In the end, the only ones left are you and I, Christopher Robin.  That’s why I continued writing stories for just the two of us. Nearly everyone I had loved was gone but we took each other by the hand, barricaded ourselves in this small room, and fought against the nothingness that was at the door. But the day where even you, Christopher Robin, were defeated and disappeared came. We had a talk, and it was when we were about to go back to our rooms. You said this to me, Christopher Robin.

           “Hey, Pooh.”

           “What is it, Christopher Robin?”

           “I love you.”

           “I love you too, Christopher Robin.”

           “I’m awfully tired, Pooh.”

           “I bet. You’ve worked really hard.”

           “Pooh, I think I’ll go to bed without writing anything. Is that bad?”

           “If that’s what you want to do, Christopher Robin, then it’s better that you do it. Isn’t that how we’ve lived our lives?”

           “Thanks. I’m sorry we won’t be together forever.”

           “It’s okay, because until now, we’ve always been together.”

           “Goodbye, Pooh.”

           “Goodbye, Christopher Robin.”

           And so you returned to your room. Will you forgive the actions I took after that? I sat at my desk, and wrote about tomorrow. In it, you stopped writing, and I wrote about you instead. I couldn’t predict what would come of me. I could only write about you.

           The following day, Christopher Robin, I felt a happiness down to the bottom of my heart when you showed up. But the strange thing was, you seemed to have completely changed. You didn’t remember a thing, nor would you speak a word, and you had turned into an adorable young girl.

*

           Ah, I must have drifted off. I feel like I do that all the time these days. I’ve gotten old, Christopher Robin. Most of my fur has fallen out, and my whole body aches. I’ve done my best to write about you, but I might have forgotten about myself. It’s okay. Hey, Christopher Robin. It’s okay to say “I’m tired”, right? I’m very tired. In your world, there were those who said they didn’t know what kind of world it was because something unthinkable had happened. That’s why I think we have to write our own stories. If that’s the way it is, it’s fine with me.

           Are you looking outside, Christopher Robin, even though only the nothingness is there? Perhaps you’re seeing something else. I’m writing the final story tonight. Then I’ll have it all end; I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing. Still, I would be most grateful if you would think of me as a silly old bear who did his best.  

The last story is a story about the Hundred Acre Wood that we always went to. Chances are, everyone we’ve lost won’t come back, and we can’t go to the Wood. If that’s the case, I’m sorry, Christopher Robin. But I’ll do what I can.

If just once we could go to the Hundred Acre Wood, if we could go to the bottom of that big tree on the edge of the Wood, if we could enjoy watching a beautiful sunset together, I would be so delighted.

We might be the only ones left in this world. That’s a terribly lonely thing, isn’t it, Christopher Robin. But, if we think of it as fate, then we have no choice but to accept it.

It’s already time. I’m going back to my room. You’ll go back to your room. Perhaps we’ll never be able to meet again. Even so, I intend to write about you and me one last time.

Goodbye, Christopher Robin. Even now, I would love nothing more than to meet you under that tree…

[thatsnotcanonpodcasts]

Mandalorian, Wormholes & Two Shitties

Welcome back to another fun filled episode from those irascible Nerds we all look forward to each week. Oh, and what a show we have for you all, let me tell you. What, hurry up you say, well then. First up we have DJ giving us an update on the Marvel movies failing to impress and the arguments have continued. This week we have some delusional moron, believe me you will agree that they are a moron when you hear what they have done. Oh right, well this delusional moron says what has got to be the dumbest thing and the biggest lie in history. It sets Buck off like all the fireworks for New Year’s Eve in one go. My goodness, he really tears into this one like nothing before. If you listen in just to hear him rant about some misguided fool then you will love this one, plus you might learn a few new insults.

Next up, after he catches his breathe Buck tells us about how some scientists believe they have figured out how to identify the existence of Wormholes. That’s right we said Wormholes. Those supposed mythical sci-fi tunnels through time and space purportedly linking us to the farthest reaches of the universe? Multiverse? Dimensional gateways? Well who knows, the gravity is more then we can fathom at this time. But it is something to do with that….Ahh, almost had me there. You will have to listen in to hear what and how the physicists think they can determine whether or not a wormhole exists.

Then we move to a legendary tale for inspiration in what we have crappily dubbed “A Tale of Two Shitties!” Sorry, couldn’t resist the sloppy pun, messy though it is, haha, that just plopped out. Anyway, we look at two epically bad mistakes from two different games studios and have a laugh and cry at the stupidity and hubris involved. These tales of woe and calamity are similar but different, and for one we will cheer and hope. The other we will jeer and poke, fun of naturally. Now, since we have you so excited to know this tale of misfortune we invite ye to listen further to the tale in yonder episode.

Finishing off as always with the regular shout outs, remembrances, birthdays, and special events of interest. We also wish to invite you all to come join us at Supanova in Brisbane on Saturday 9th November. We do not have the faintest idea of which table we will be at, other than it is the TNC productions booth. So come along and say hi, join us in our game and meet the goofballs that are the Nerds. As always take care of yourselves, look out for each other and stay hydrated.

EPISODE NOTES:

Scorsese update and The Mandalorian details - https://collider.com/martin-scorsese-marvel-movies-theyre-a-new-art-form/

- https://boundingintocomics.com/2019/10/24/jon-favreau-on-star-wars-and-the-mandalorian-through-stories-we-express-our-values-to-the-next-generation/

How to find a wormhole

- https://www.technology.org/2019/10/28/how-to-spot-a-wormhole-if-they-exist/

- https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.083513

A Tale of Two Shitties

- https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-01-28-the-fall-of-swedish-game-wonder-starbreeze

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2019/10/24/fallout-76s-premium-private-servers-are-not-private-its-scrap-box-is-deleting-scrap/#4999a5257386

Games currently playing

Professor

– Call of Duty: WWII - https://store.steampowered.com/app/476600/Call_of_Duty_WWII/

Rating – 7/10

Buck

– Call of Duty: WWII - https://store.steampowered.com/app/476600/Call_of_Duty_WWII/

Rating – 8/10

DJ

- Warframe - https://www.warframe.com/landing

Rating - 3.5/5

Other topics discussed

Disney CEO Bob Iger responds to Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola’s comments

- https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2019/10/disney-ceo-bob-iger-response-scorsese-coppola-marvel-comments

Disney buys Marvel Entertainment for $4 Billion

- https://money.cnn.com/2009/08/31/news/companies/disney_marvel/

Pirate of the Caribbean (Disneyland tourist attraction)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_the_Caribbean_(attraction)

Game of Thrones directing duo David Benioff and Dan Weiss leave Star Wars for a $250 million Netflix deal

- https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/why-star-wars-didnt-work-game-thrones-duo-1250798

Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990 TV series)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Planet_and_the_Planeteers

Radio signals from Jupiter could aid in the search for extraterrestrial life

- https://scitechdaily.com/radio-signals-jupiter-aid-search-extraterrestrial-life-moon/

Speed of radio waves traveling through space

- http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/projects/vss/docs/Communications/2-why-does-it-take-so-long.html

Distance from Earth to Jupiter through Light or Radio

- https://pages.uoregon.edu/jimbrau/astr121/Notes/Jupiter/jupiterradio.html

Wormholes in relation to Time Travel

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole#Time_travel

Facts about Black Holes

- https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/seuforum/bh_whatare.htm

Bobby Vinton – Mr Lonely

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djU4Lq_5EaM

Starbreeze Studios (Swedish video game developer and publisher based in Stockholm.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbreeze_Studios

The Walking Dead (episodic, graphic adventure video game series developed and published by Telltale Games and Skybound Games, based on The Walking Dead comic book series.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walking_Dead_(video_game_series)

Death & Revival of Telltale Games

- https://au.ign.com/articles/2019/08/28/telltale-games-shut-down-and-revival-explained

The Saboteur (Playstation Game)

- https://www.playstation.com/en-au/games/the-saboteur-ps3/

WARSAW (PC Game)

- https://store.steampowered.com/app/1026420/WARSAW/

Heston Blumenthal’s rocket explosion

- https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/mar/05/heston-blumenthal-chef-cooks-astronaut-tim-peake

Shoutouts

27 Oct 1962 - Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov saved the world, the Russian naval officer who, refused to fire a nuclear torpedo at an American aircraft carrier, thus averting the probability of a third world war and thermo-nuclear destruction across the planet. The confrontation was part of the Cuban missile crisis that had the world holding its breath for nearly two weeks. - https://www.onthisday.com/articles/the-man-who-saved-the-world

27 Oct 2019 – League of legends turn 10 years old. Its launch on Oct 27, 2009 was just one memorable moment in Riot Game’s 10-year journey down a road punctuated by terror, wild leaps of faith, and powered by an army of interns and a lot of luck. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2019/10/27/league-legends-is-now-years-old-this-is-story-its-birth/

28 Oct 1726 - The novel Gulliver's Travels or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships is a prose satire was published. It satirises both human nature and the "travellers' tales" literary subgenre. It is Swift's best known full-length work, and a classic of English literature. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulliver%27s_Travels

28 Oct 1965 - Gateway Arch construction completed, it is the world's tallest arch, the tallest man-made monument in the Western Hemisphere, and Missouri's tallest accessible building. Built as a monument to the westward expansion of the United States, and officially dedicated to "the American people," the Arch, commonly referred to as "The Gateway to the West" is the centerpiece of Gateway Arch National Park and has become an internationally recognized symbol of St. Louis, as well as a popular tourist destination. It is located at the site of St. Louis's founding on the west bank of the Mississippi River. - https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/gateway-arch-completed

29 Oct 2019 – Shigeru Miyamoto is being awarded the Person of Cultural Merit by the Japanese government on November 3, which is recognized nationally as Culture Day in Japan. The award is the highest honour a person in a creative field can receive in Japan, and Miyamoto is the first person in the video game industry to receive the honour. - https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/29/tech/shigeru-miyamoto-nintendo-trnd/index.html

Remembrances

21 Oct 2019 - Josip Elic, American character actor. He was best known for his role as Bancini in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Despite having few lines in the film, his major scene came in the form of an improvisation by Jack Nicholson for the patient's basketball game. He later became more nationally recognized after two appearances on The Twilight Zone, including in "The Obsolete Man" with Burgess Meredith. He died from complications off a fall at the age of 98 in River Edge, New Jersey - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josip_Elic

28 Oct 1703 - John Wallis, English clergyman and mathematician who is given partial credit for the development of infinitesimal calculus. Between 1643 and 1689 he served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court. He is credited with introducing the symbol∞ to represent the concept of infinity. He similarly used 1/∞ for an infinitesimal. John Wallis was a contemporary of Newton and one of the greatest intellectuals of the early renaissance of mathematics. He died at the age of 86 in Oxford, Oxfordshire - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wallis

28 Oct 2005 - Richard Smalley, the Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry and a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University, in Houston, Texas. In 1996, along with Robert Curl, also a professor of chemistry at Rice, and Harold Kroto, a professor at the University of Sussex, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of a new form of carbon, buckminsterfullerene, also known as buckyballs. He was an advocate of nanotechnology and its applications. He is credited as the “Father of Nanotechnology”. He died from leukemia at the age of 62 in University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center , Houston - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Smalley

Famous Birthdays

28 Oct 1982 - Matt Smith, English actor. He is best known for his roles as the eleventh incarnation of the Doctor in the BBC series Doctor Who and Prince Philip in the Netflix series The Crown, earning a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for the latter. Smith's first television role came in 2006 as Jim Taylor in the BBC adaptations of Philip Pullman's The Ruby in the Smoke and The Shadow in the North, while his first major role in television came as Danny in the 2007 BBC series Party Animals. Smith, who was announced as the eleventh incarnation of the Doctor in January 2009, is the youngest person ever to play the character. He left the series at the end of the 2013 Christmas Day special, ‘The Time of the Doctor’. In film, he starred in Womb (2010) and portrayed the physical embodiment of Skynet in Terminator Genisys (2015). He was born in Northhampton - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Smith_(actor)

28 Oct 1967 – Julia Roberts, American actress and producer. She established herself as a leading lady in Hollywood after headlining the romantic comedy film Pretty Woman, which grossed $464 million worldwide. She has won three Golden Globe Awards, from eight nominations, and has been nominated for four Academy Awards for her film acting, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Erin Brockovich. Roberts was the highest-paid actress in the world throughout most of the 1990s and in the first half of the 2000s. Her fee for 1990's Pretty Woman was US$300,000; in 2003, she was paid an unprecedented $25 million for her role in Mona Lisa Smile (2003). As of 2017, Roberts's net worth was estimated to be $170 million. People magazine has named her the most beautiful woman in the world a record five times. She was born in Smyrna, Georgia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Roberts

28 Oct 1955 - William Henry Gates III also known as Bill Gates, American business magnate, investor, author, philanthropist, and humanitarian. He is best known as the pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, and the principal founder of Microsoft Corporation. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman,CEO and chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. He has been criticized for his business tactics, which have been considered anti-competitive. This opinion has been upheld by numerous court rulings. Later in his career and since leaving Microsoft, Gates pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors. He donated large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, reported to be the world's largest private charity. In 2009, Gates and Warren Buffett founded The Giving Pledge, whereby they and other billionaires pledge to give at least half of their wealth to philanthropy. The foundation works to save lives and improve global health, and is working with Rotary International to eliminate polio. He was born in Seattle,Washington - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

Events of Interest

28 Oct 1971 – Prospero becomes the only British satellite to be launched by a British rocket. It was designed to undertake a series of experiments to study the effects of space environment on communications satellites and remained operational until 1973, after which it was contacted annually for over 25 years. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospero_(satellite)

28 Oct 1994 - Stargate was first aired, the film is the first release in the Stargate franchise. The plot centers on the premise of a "Stargate", an ancient ring-shaped device that creates a wormhole enabling travel to a similar device elsewhere in the universe. The film's central plot explores the theory of extraterrestrial beings having an influence upon human civilization. - https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Stargate_(film)

28 Oct 2014 – A rocket carrying NASA's Cygnus CRS Orb-3 resupply mission to the International Space Station explodes seconds after taking off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia. This flight, which would have been its fourth to the International Space Station and the fifth of an Antares launch vehicle, resulted in the Antares rocket exploding seconds after liftoff. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_CRS_Orb-3

Intro

Artist – Goblins from Mars

Song Title – Super Mario - Overworld Theme (GFM Trap Remix)

Song Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNMe6kF0j0&index=4&list=PLHmTsVREU3Ar1AJWkimkl6Pux3R5PB-QJ

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[talltalestogo]

Los Angeles is a madman’s prayer wrapped inside a murderous dream.

It’s homeless on sidewalks and hustlers in the hills. It’s laborers and housekeepers, and billboards of lust, dystopia, apes, robots, Chewbaccas, Kim and Kanye, and Lady Gaga’s newest thing. It’s clear skies, no mosquitoes and laser-sculpted people with money, hedgerows and sins. A crime writer can make of it what he or she wants, like “Westworld” or a lover who gives you a kiss and a key, and one day changes the locks.

The city is the seething, sexy capital of noir. It is an illicit urge — a trick of possibility — slinking like a con -man’s ruse into a novelist’s imagination. Transgressions pile up and the skyline is newly pricked, rising above vintage bungalows that sell for a million-plus and are gutted and remade for the conceits and dark angels of a new century.

Raymond Chandler knew Los Angeles was both lie and delusion. A bitter candyland, where paradise betrays, and men talk tough and women know the score. The city is desire and the demons beneath, a metropolis where virtue is transactional and shifting façades, like so many Hollywood sets, mask cruelty and indifference. Not forever but long enough to make one wonder whether Michael Connelly’s reticent and resilient Det. Harry Bosch will in the end find peace in his creed: “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”

“Telling something new about this place is what defines a great L.A. crime novel,” said Connelly, whose new book, “The Night Fire,” which pairs Bosch with Det. Renee Ballard, will be published Tuesday. “Not imitating what has been done in the past but taking those influences and inspirations, putting it in a blender with your own experiences and ideas, mixing on purée and pouring out something unique about this unique place.”

Los Angeles is at once a stereotype and piercingly its own, a mountain lion caught in traffic, a cumbia gliding through a hymn. It is a surfer’s sunset, a Santa Ana gust, a wildfire, a canyon howl, a glittering mural, a whispered hate, a body in a street. Like the men and women in its crime novels, the city, a multicultural diary of splendor and hurt, is its own character: grisly, sinister, smooth, sly, urbane, verbose, sparse, fatalistic, celebratory, hopeful and occasionally as doomed as James Ellroy’s “Black Dahlia.”

“All books about Los Angeles have a little bit of noir in them. The city, after all, demands it,” said David L. Ulin, a former Times books editor, author and editor of “Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology.” “This is a place where many people come out of their aspiration — to get famous, to get rich, to get away. Noir is what happens when they don’t get what they’re looking for; noir is what happens in the aftermath ... when desperation sets in. That’s one of the central stories of Los Angeles.”

Writers and readers have many takes on what makes the definitive L.A. crime novel: “An L.A. noir book must unfold in the darkness of L.A,” said T. Jefferson Parker, whose latest book is “The Last Good Guy.” “It can be old or contemporary. It’s a mood, not a time.” Steph Cha, author of “Your House Will Pay,” a compelling new novel exploring the city’s racial tensions, is less particular: “I figure if it’s got crime in it, and it takes place in Los Angeles, it qualifies.”

The city’s noir is a puzzle of flawed heroes and devious interlopers: cops, private eyes, assassins, gamblers, schemers and femme fatales looking not so much for absolution as for a reckoning that will edge them through another day. Or not. From Philip Marlowe to Easy Rawlins, crime novel sleuths know that human nature, whether in Watts or Beverly Hills, is balanced between reward and tragedy, and that a soul — its tender wants, grievous yearnings and amoral fascinations — is a peculiar, hard-to-reconcile thing.

“I’ve always been drawn to the beautiful loser or the unwitting dupe,” said Tod Goldberg, author of “Gangster Nation.” “Characters like Roy Dillon in Jim Thompson’s ‘The Grifters’ or, of course, Tod Hackett in Nathanael West’s ‘The Day of the Locust,’ characters too smart by half to be wrapped up in the lives they’ve chosen. Issues of identity have always run through the best crime novels of our region, each of us ruled by who we think we are versus who reality has shown us to be, difficult circumstances in a world where seemingly half the people we encounter are employed in make-believe for their living.”

Chandler’s wry cynicism, tinged sadness and clever asides (“Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains”) infused his novels, including “The Big Sleep” and “The Long Goodbye,” with a hard-boiled sophistication that would influence crime writers and filmmakers for generations. The 1946 movie version of his Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart/“The Big Sleep”) was a near perfect union of book and film, one that showed how indivisible noir literature and cinema would become even as crime movies lost their suave double entendres to expletives and gratuitous gunplay.

“I don’t think there’s any other genre that is so intertwined as the crime genre with film and novel,” said Don Winslow, author of “The Border” and “The Cartel.” “You can’t separate them. They have been informed by each other from the time they started rolling the camera. Noir particularly. Look, I never sat in my office as a PI where a trumpet started and a long-legged blond walked into the room. It was my wife, and I was home with a jazz record on, but that soundtrack of noir informs me when I sit down to write.”

In more recent decades, voices from diverse communities have articulated the texture and resonance of the city’s multiethnic landscape. What defines Los Angeles is being shot through different prisms. Hector Tobar’s “The Tattooed Soldier” brings the enmities of the Guatemalan civil war to the L.A. Riots. Japanese American novelist Joe Ide has sketched a wonderfully clever thinking-man’s sleuth in his “IQ” series. Cha has delivered Juniper Song, an edgy and inventive Korean American private investigator. Walter Mosley’s proud and enduring Rawlins — a World War II vet with a taste for real estate and temptation — journeys into racism and social inequities faced by African Americans.

The Rawlins books “present a side of L.A. so real that I have no doubt it exists,” said writer Bette Ross. “In my mind, I see streets of modest houses, some with rusted cars in the yard, some yards well-kept with flowers, hints about the people who live there. Personal expectations are built from different parameters. ... Justice is tempered by implacable, sometimes vicious reality.”

“For so many decades,” said Daniel Olivas, author and editor of the anthology “Latinos in Lotusland,” “people of color in Los Angeles really were nothing more than props and ugly stereotypes in ‘classic’ noir fiction.” He praised Yxta Maya Murray’s novel “Locas” for capturing the lives of Chicanas “living in the gang-ravaged Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park. ... But in this novel, women of color are at its center rather than being relegated to mere plot points, sexual conquests or incidental appearances.”

Reality here is a tease with a bullet, a come-on for a setup. In his 1981 novel, “A Savage Place,” Robert B. Parker called Los Angeles “the last hallucination, the dwindled fragment of — what had Fitzgerald called it? — ‘the last and greatest of all human dreams.’ It was where we’d run out of room, where the dream had run up against the ocean, and human voices woke us. Los Angeles was the butt end, where we’d spat it out with our mouths tasting of ashes, but a genial failure of a place for all that.”

It is the lonely heart beating inside the wreckage, where characters confront history and themselves, such as Jackie Ishida, a Japanese American woman in Nina Revoyr’s “Southland,” who examines the life of her grandfather in a story that is an intimate and sweeping look at Los Angeles’ diversity and danger. Like a smart dame — a derringer in her sequined clutch — outwitting a patsy, the story of the city is a protagonist’s search for answers no matter how unseemly.

“For me,” said Ide, “L.A. noir is about a lone, determined character, trying to find a way through a perilous, capricious, multilayered city. Sometimes to seek justice, sometimes just to survive.”

[orphicwrites]

A New Understanding of Philippine Diaspora

The new age of Filipino diaspora has given Filipinos a new identity through Philippine literature, both socially and economically. As globalization occurs, and with Filipinos needing financial security for sustenance, they turn to migration and globalization in order to gain employment. This gives Philippine literature the opportunity to be used as a vital instrument in telling stories that have the capability to change perceptions, and ultimately save lives in the process.

Philippine literature, provided that there is ample analyzation of the pieces, reconfigures our notion of Filipino Identity through changes in definition of bodies, the concepts of laws, sovereignty, territory, and citizenship in response to the largely capitalism driven globalized world. In fact, according to Kale Fajardo (qtd. in Shirley 99,100) where the author assesses Rodriguez piece “Migrants for Export:  How the Philippine  State  Brokers Labor to the World”, emphasizes that Filipinos and non-Filipinos openly acknowledge the large labor export of Filipino workers to other countries that extends to all parts of the world. Such a massive diaspora would have positive economic effects both in host countries, and on the Overseas Filipino Workers themselves, but would leave these workers extremely vulnerable to social structures, and political structures within the host country. (99, 100)

Close examination of Rey Ventura’s Underground In Japan and Jack Alvarez’s Autobiografiya ng Isang Lady Gaga shows these reconfigurations of concepts. In both pieces, the Filipino identity is reconstructed through their actions regarding the laws governing the host country, their reactions toward work, their personal sovereignty, their territory and their citizenship. First, it is clearly seen that both the standing man and Jack had a clear disregard for the laws governing them in their host countries. Tachimbos or the standing men on the corner of the streets were day laborers dependent on the causal system of hiring by the sachos or the employers, which is illegal given the fact that the persona as discussed in latter chapters were underground, without a working visa. It was stated on page 21 that, “I discovered later that this technique of spreading out was part of a strategy in case of raids,” and later “It was the second time I had been involved in an underground and it brought the same sense of paranoia,” which implies that the persona was working illegally in Japan, having a disregard for the rule of law for the sake of not starving to death (Ventura 20, 21, 53).

Jack Alvarez in his Autobiography has a similar theme, however framed in a different manner. His disregard of the law in the Middle East was primarily relationship driven than economic driven. It is given that Jack engages in homosexual relationships with Arab men while in the Middle East, which is largely illegal in that part of the world due to Islamic States following the laws of Islam. Jack admits this in several occasions throughout the book such as, “…ang tanong ng boyfriend kong Arabo…” “I will not eat. I will not sleep. Without you..” while talking to Yasser on the phone, and finally the love poem that mentions the word “halik” several times which ultimately result with a sexual encounter with Yasser (Ventura 65, 67, 68). Furthermore, it is written on page 71 that “When you have no money and you will see me, you think I am ATM. Are you sure you’re human? I think you’re an animal,” in response to Jack’s attempt to beg for Yasser to help financially as his mother was in the hospital in critical condition. It can be inferred that Jack did this in order to regain his human agency over his body, and for financial support for his own material lust and for his ailing mother back home.

The bodies in both pieces are used as means for upward economic mobility, with Ventura’s piece being closer to the traditional labor export theme and with Alvarez’s more retention of human agency through financially taking advantage of Arab men sexually. However, the concept of migration stays true to its roots, that the primary and manifest function of said migration is upward economic mobility.

Secondly, both persona in the piece have integrated themselves very well within their respective communities. We can see how their environment affected the method in which the two persona still aligns themselves with being Filipino, but acknowledges that their life is well in their host countries. For example, Ventura was well integrated with the underground colony that they built in Japan as stated in page 61, “I became fully initiated into a new underground, the colony we Filipinos are building in Japan.” Furthermore, he lives a very normal and menial life in Japan as stated in Chapter 10 entitled, “Filipino Sunday”.

In the first paragraph of the chapter, he outlines what kind of community they have, “Koto belongs to a series of overlapping groups. Korean-Japanese run small shops and bars and a few cheap inns. We Filipinos provide the illegal workforce, and although there may be a few individual Pakistanis or Latinos… The communists have a base here as well, with their labor unions…” and going to church as if they were in the Philippines – “I always walked to church, but some went by taxi. They liked to be spic and span and liked perhaps to give the impression that they weren’t illegals”. Ventura seemed very familiar with the type of community he was living in; the structures and the type of people was something he described in detail. Notice that he uses the pronoun “We” whenever he mentions himself with a group of Filipinos, as well as the usage of the word “community” despite them being different in race. Furthermore, notice that Ventura still attaches his ‘Filipinoness’ with him despite being comfortable with the foreign country he now calls home through going to church every Sunday. However, it is mentioned that the persona does not go to church for spiritual reasons, but for social reasons (64), which indicate that he deviates from the manifest function and intent of a church, but also indicates that he has successfully integrated himself into the community. Additionally, he also mentions that “the church going was center of our weekly social life, and the chief attractions was to see beautiful girls (65). This results in his confusion of his identity as he accepts the fact that he cannot go home due to his work visa being expired, and by extension his passport could possibly be compromised as well – leaving him no choice but to live in Koto, Japan.

On the other hand, Alvarez also exemplifies extreme knowledge and command of the places he went to in the Middle East, such as the Al-Rashid Mall in Al-Khobar, Jubail, and Damman to name a few (Alvarez, 66, 67, 77). Furthermore, Jack could understand the local language to an extent due to him spending a large amount of time in said country which is concrete evidence of his social integration into society. This is evident whenever he is talking to his numerous boyfriends in the book, using lines such as “Aiwa, habbi. And so are you,” (65). However, notice that he still expresses himself in the Filipino language as seen in page 68 of the book, where he reads his Filipino love poem to Yasser. It has been concluded by several researches that the language you use when you think is the language you associate yourself with, aside from being comfortable with said language (Asoulin, 1).  Furthermore, the whole book is written in Filipino as well. Alvarez still attaches his Filipino roots with himself, however it can be inferred that due to the large time he has spent in the Middle East that his Filipino identity can also be attached to his Overseas Filipino Worker Identity integrating cultures and practices of Islam in the process. One concrete example of this is their usage of the concept of Dua on page 79, where Salman brings Jack to a Mosque and tells him that “My dua will be here for you,” and on page 80, the celebration of Eid ul-Fitr and hilal is openly practiced by Alvarez.

The command of foreign language, the well-integration of both characters into society, and the familiarity with the territory ultimately gives us a notion of the Overseas Filipino Worker Identity that is unique to this particular sector. From the analyzed text above, it can be implied that their notion of Filipino identity is modified and is adaptive to where they are situated due to circumstance. Due to the long periods of time both personas spent in the foreign country, it seems that their concept of home might be changed as well due to their integration in said country. Without Philippine literature, we would not be able to understand these notions as there would be no medium to carry the experience of our workers aside from videos and photos. However, I would like to emphasize that writing is a much more personal and intimate method in relaying a story, a method in which other mediums cannot copy.

Philippine literature is also an instrument that captures the lives of the Overseas Filipino Workers and their bodies as walking traded commodities and resources, amplified by the culture of migration in the Philippines, supported by the labor brokerage firm that is the Philippine state without any regard for the human agency of our workers. The import and export of Filipino and Filipina bodies all around the world is normalized as the decades pass, normalizing any abuses that come with it. This affects how we understand Filipino identity through economic motivated actions and experiences that are encapsulated in Philippine literature. This can be shown perfectly in Philippine literature pieces such as Rey Ventura’s Underground In Japan and Jack Alvarez’s Autobiografiya ng Isang Lady Gaga as well.

In Ventura’s piece, several lines are emphasized where the human body is stretched and abused to its limits as economic capital. This is first seen in page 20 where several people of different ethnicities were competition to be hired by the Japanese sachos. In page 23, we see how commodified the Overseas Filipino Bodies are, where it was stated that “We worked in spaces between the ribs, shoveling out the granules that remained, deafened out the bulldozers,” (Ventura, 23). Additionally, their place of work was described as a concentration camp, “…but the movement itself was agony, and sometimes I found myself working with my eyes closed,” and “When the work was finally complete, at one in the morning, I could hardly climb the ladder for pain,” (Ventura, 24).

These lines indicate that there was a fear of being replaced in work. It can be inferred that they were extremely and dangerously close to the cranes and bulldozers while working, presenting a work-related hazard as they could be killed if the crane or bulldozer is maneuvered erroneously. It was also said that they did not receive any safety gear, and the only thing that as given to them were shovels. It was said in page 20 that laborers would have to work industriously in order to be hired again, thus a competition arises between the bodies of all migrant workers. Furthermore, it can be inferred that the persona and the other laborers were afraid that if they stopped working, they would not get paid the amount they were promised. Therefore, they pushed their bodies to the limit out of fear of starvation.

This shows how Philippine literature successfully captures the experience of being under a capitalist globalized system. Overseas Filipino Workers and migrant workers in general are treated as global capital by first the globalized system, the host country, and lastly our very own Philippine state. These bodies were treated as human capital that can be replenished and replaced, ignoring basic human rights, human agency, and a fair and equal workplace. It is very important to note that these migrant workers were all treated unfairly regardless of race. It implies that no matter where you are from, when the host country views your race as inferior to them, the migrant workers will suffer no matter what quality of work they churn out. Note that the Japanese had a liking to migrant workers when compared to their own workers due to migrant workers being cheaper, and subject to them as they had the power to give them their salary or withhold it. The migrant workers also did not stop working, even when it was past the agreed hours of work out of fear of not being paid – therefore pushing their bodies more against their will.

In fact, a study conducted by E. San Juan Jr., emphasizes that the Philippines remain as followers toward other countries both politically and culturally. He emphasized that Overseas Filipino Workers, specifically indicating Filipina Overseas Workers, are treated as “serfs” and “quasi-slaves” in the globalized world. His work outlines the effects of globalization on poor countries and the resistance that the current and emerging diaspora is characterized by.

Furthermore, my analysis is in line with Vicente Rafael’s Your Grief is Our Gossip. It was stated in his scholarly essay that Filipinos are standouts in the global economic migration due to their unique skill set and work ethic. It was said that Filipinos are the “elite, high end of the labor market” as these workers are very well educated and can speak English very well – eliminating language barriers and eases communication difficulties. Furthermore, he states that bodies are treated as symbols of nationalism where the suffering of people can ultimately be the spark point for change. For instance, he stated that the deaths of Ninoy and Flor allow for a speech that had once been repressed. Ninoy and Flor flourished in their death and awakened the citizens to abuses, almost as if their bodies were a second language to evoke the minds of Filipinos to the abuses. It is important to note that Ninoy’s body was displayed with blood stains on his clothing, while Flor had her body viewed from a closed casket. But regardless, their bodies were used as if it was necessary for them to suffer for a greater good (Rafael, 221).

Perhaps a different perspective from the subject, it was also said by Rafael that tertiary educated women are employed as maids in Tokyo and Hongkong, as exemplified in Villarama’s Sunday Beauty Queen, where the film follows various domestic helpers that are college graduates working in Hong Kong. Furthermore, it has been stated that Filipinos are all over parts of the world, engaging in domestic work, industrial work, as well as professional multinational business corporations in Southeast Asia. He states that Filipinos engage in migration due to insufficient wages in the Philippines. He highlights how ironic it is to have a great labor capital, but inefficiently used by the Philippine government in the time where global capitalism is on the rise.

From the point of view of the Los Angeles Times, they can be seen as both the product and producers of surplus: sheer labor power immediately translatable into a universally understood form of value. Overseas Filipino Workers also serve as direct foreign aid due to the large amount of remittances they send back home, helping the Philippine economy in the process. (Rafael, 205)

In fact, Robyn Magalit Rodriguez (qtd. by Shirley 99,100), the writer of the book Migrants for  Export:  How the  Philippine  State Brokers Labor to the World highlights that it is not only the globalized system that oppresses our Overseas Filipino Workers, but it is also our Philippine government itself that induces these practices due to a highly neoliberal economic system. She highlights how highly corporatized the Philippines was under Former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, where the former president states that she is directly responsible for 8 million Overseas Filipino Workers that generate billions of dollars in revenue and remittances (qtd. by Shirley 99,100). Fajardo also analyzes that the former president’s administration was neoliberal as it held Overseas Filipino Workers to send remittances that pay for foreign debt servicing and extended this practice from the Marcos Administration. Furthermore, Rodriguez states that “overseas employment markets also addresses Philippine citizens’ dire need for livable wages because the Philippines, overall, remains a poor country with  high domestic  unemployment,” therefore promoting a culture of migration in order to provide for the sustenance of the individual and the family. It was determined by Rafael that it was Marcos regime that developed this practice, through offering a wide variation of benefits such as  airfares, tax breaks, and other incentives.

As the labor  brokerage  Philippine state  uses Filipinos as  global capital for the economy of the Philippines, Rodriguez states that institutionalized  global overseas  migration must  simultaneously develop and extend  new kinds  of ‘rights’  and benefits  to  overseas citizens in order to battle the social and physical abuse Overseas Filipino Workers suffer on a daily basis. Government institutions must be strengthened in order to protect all workers, especially sectors that contribute largely to the Philippine economy. Some socioeconomic benefits that Rodriguez proposed were “technical training  before  departure or  upon  returning, access to  OFW  housing programs,  lower  interest  bank loans,  educational  scholarships for children of OFWs and special OFW awards, just to  name  some of  the  other newly  developed  benefits for  OFWs.” (Rodriguez, cited by Shirley and Fajardo).

Philippine literature plays a vital role in being able to show the world the experiences of our Overseas Filipino Workers, as well as to understand how Overseas Filipino Workers survive in harsh conditions presented by globalization and the host country. Globalization changes our perception of work and relationships due to its may it be gendered, classed, or racialized nature. In order to see these new definitions and perceptions, Philippine literature acts like a lens where we are offered a first-row seat in understanding how negotiations are formulated and struggled upon, as well as how these relationships are developed throughout the everchanging globalized landscape. Our traditional notions and motivations for intimate relationships and work change due to the circumstances presented in films and literature that is centered around Overseas Filipino Workers. Philippine literature executes this perfectly in the Autobiografia ng Isang Lady Gaga where are treated as a means to survive.

His piece outlines how bodies are sexually abused, as well as how bodies can be used in order to regain human agency and financial security. First, Jack was sexually abused several times. It was stated in page 25 that they were surrounded by the police, and several policemen raped her. “Hinarang kami sa check point ng pulis. At nangyari ang hindi inaasahan. Binaboy ako,” this indicates that he was helpless as they would rot in jail and even killed if his boyfriend tried to interfere as it is illegal to have homosexual relationships in Middle Eastern countries. It is important to note that he did not resist any more due to the fact that he needs to survive in said country. This was later affirmed saying that “Kung minsan, ang survival ay hindi paglaban o pakikipagsugal, minsan nangngahulugang pagtitimpi at pagpapaabuso.” Filipinos and Filipinas indeed go through the abuse willingly in order to survive.

Because of these restraints, Overseas Filipino Workers try to regain their agency and their body through the normal things they have control over, through the menial tasks they perform every day. Alvarez does this through having sexual relationships with Arab men, where he gets the sexual satisfaction he wants, and gains financial security in the process. As evidence, page 68 depicts a love poem, where he uses this to seduce his Arab partner. He did this because it was indeed pleasurable to him, and it also reveals that there was an emotional connection with several of his boyfriends, and that it was not all just physical attachment (Alvarez, 68). He is also materialistic, and uses his boyfriends to avail him his wants in life, such as the iPhone4 he was gifted by.

However, this is not an uncommon occurrence. Many Filipinos take pride in what they buy, especially when it comes from another country. This is evident in Ventura’s Underground In Japan, where it was said in page 67 that the church is where Filipinos go to flaunt their new shoes and clothes, “This connection is very strong in the Philippines. If you get a new pair of Levi’s or Reebok, or Adidas, you would want to ‘bless’ them first, which mean wearing them on special occasions”. Rafael also notes this occurrence in his scholarly essay where he states that the global migration phenomenon has levelled up our colonial mentality more, feeding ourselves with foreign products. He states that most of ‘us’ are foreigners in our own country, where balikbayans and his family flaunt their imported clothes simply because he knows the public will notice. He states that we pride ourselves with being nationalistic, but tragically we don’t practice it – with most Filipinos opting to go abroad than to stay in our mother land (Rafael, 209, 210).

In conclusion, Philippine literature encapsulate the experiences embedded in the lives of our Overseas Filipino Workers. This gives the audience a more personal account of the experience as some authors are Overseas Filipino Workers themselves or have conducted some form of research in order to accurately tell the experiences of these Filipinos. Ultimately, this has the capability to bridge the gap between those who have not experienced the same treatment. This also eliminates apathetic views and opinions toward Overseas Filipino Workers if studied and analyzed seriously regardless of nationality, class, and gender.

 CITED REFERENCES

 Alvarez, Jack. Ang Autobiografia Ng Isang Lady Gaga. VISPRINT, INC, 2015.

Asoulin, Eran. Language as an instrument of thought. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics. 2016.

Rafael, Vicente. Your Grief Is Our Gossip': Overseas Filipinos and Other Spectral Presences". Duke University Press, 2000.

San Juan, E. Overseas Filipino Workers: The Making of an Asian-Pacific Diaspora. 2010.

Silvey, Rachel. “Filipino Diaspora: Emergent Geographies of Labor and Love.” The AAG Review of Books, vol. 1, no. 2, 2013, pp. 98–112., doi:10.1080/2325548x.2013.827046.

Tamayo, Bernadette E. “Filipino Workers Treated like Slaves in Kuwait – Officials.” The Manila Times Online, 21 Feb. 2018, www.manilatimes.net/filipino-workers-treated-like-slaves-kuwait-officials/381833/.

Villarama, Baby Ruth, director. Sunday Beauty Queen . Solar Pictures, 25 Dec. 2016.

Ventura, Rey. Underground in Japan. Ateneo De Manila University Press, 2006.

[euroman1945-blog]

The Daily Tulip

The Daily Tulip – News From Around The World

Sunday 20th May 2018

Good Morning Gentle Reader….  Sunday, and the Lord rested, wish I had been one then I wouldn't have to get up at 3:30am but really it's no problem, at least I can get up.... Bella was eager to go out this morning, with a slight breeze she must have smelt something that appealed to her.. Coffee has the same effect on me..but I guess you know that by now...

JAPANESE CASTLE SEEKS LORD AND LADY FOR ONE NIGHT…. A guesthouse company in Japan is offering one couple a chance to experience a night as lord and lady of Hirado Castle, in an attempt to attract tourists to the area, The Mainichi website reports. Couples applying for the chance to do so have to comprise a man and woman and be at least 20 years old. The winners not only get to stay the night in the castle tower, they will be guarded by city officials dressed as ninjas and met by 30 volunteers dressed in full armour. They will also be served a dinner made from local ingredients, the website says. The current Hirado Castle in Nagasaki Prefecture was built in the 1960s. It currently houses a museum of artefacts from the local Matsura clan, who first built a fortress on the site in 1599 and ruled the area for two and a half centuries.

EGYPTIAN PROFESSOR INVESTIGATED OVER BELLYDANCE VIDEO…. An Egyptian professor fears she may lose her job after posting a video of herself bellydancing on Facebook. The video, as well as a photo of Mona Prince in a bikini, has been widely shared and has attracted online criticism. Now the professor, who teaches English literature at Suez University, is being investigated over them, Ahram Online reports. While some have defended her, many on social media said they expected a university professor to act within the norms and traditions of Egypt's mostly conservative society, and to be a role model. Ms Prince's faculty dean, Mona Saba, told the BBC that she "did not respect traditions and the university values". She also said that Ms Prince was being investigated for other issues relating to discipline, attendance and academic material, as well as the results of her students. In a post on her Facebook page, Ms Prince rejected the accusations saying some of the issues were "purely administrative" and that, in relation to her students' results "you have the examination papers, you decide". She said she feared she might be expelled from the university but would consider all the measures open to her in regard to the issue, and thanked those supporting her. "I will never stop laughing, dancing, singing and writing," she said in a Facebook post.

INDIAN BANK STAFF PRAISED FOR FENDING OFF ROBBERS…. Two Indian women are being hailed for their bravery in fighting off robbers at the State Bank of India branch where they work near New Delhi. The Hindustan Times reports how Vimla Devi and Poonam were confronted by two men who entered the bank in Gurgaon pretending to be customers. The suspects are alleged to have drawn guns on them, while attempting to hit them and take money from the counter. The two women fought back, however, and managed to snatch one of the guns from one of the attackers and raise the alarm. Several people came to their aid, and the two men were apprehended. The Times of India quoted a Gurgaon police commissioner saying the women would be honoured for showing "exemplary courage".

RUSSIAN TANK MAKER PUBLISHES 'PATRIOTIC' CHILDREN'S BOOK…. One of Russia's largest defence companies has published a book about its tanks for children of pre-school age. The illustrated story, Adventures of the Little Tank, follows a toy that's been accidentally left behind overnight in the museum of defence manufacturer Uralvagonzavod. The forgotten little tank spends the night meeting the facility's full-size machines and hearing all about their "adventures" in foreign lands, the company says.

REWARD FOR SIGHTINGS OF 'POSSIBLY EXTINCT' NEW ZEALAND BIRD…. A cash reward is on offer in New Zealand for any sightings of a native bird that was until recently thought to be extinct. The South Island kokako - sometimes called the "grey ghost" - was declared extinct in 2007, but then reclassified as "data deficient" in 2013 following a number of reported sightings. Despite the change, there's been no definitive proof that any of the birds are still alive - and that's what the South Island Kokako Charitable Trust wants to find. "If South Island kokako still exist, there will be very few left," chairman Euan Kennedy tells Stuff.co.nz. "We need to locate them very soon so that conservation has a higher prospect of success." The trust is offering 5,000 New Zealand dollars (US$3,600; £2,900) for "definitive evidence of survival" - preferably a photograph - and is asking everyone to keep their eyes and ears open in the country's southern forests. The reward will be paid out once a panel of ornithologists has reviewed any evidence and concluded that the bird does still exist. The South Island kokako was once common but, as with so many of New Zealand's native birds, suffered greatly from the spread of introduced predators in the 19th Century. Anyone who thinks they've spotted or heard one can log the encounter online. Smaller than a pigeon, it looks similar to the North Island kokako but has an orange wattle rather than a blue one. Its flute-like call could be confused with some other species, so the Trust would prefer visual evidence, although it adds one important point: "Please do not shoot a bird to satisfy our requirements!"

Well Gentle Reader I hope you enjoyed our look at the news from around the world this, Sunday morning… …

Our Tulips today are growing in Holland ... but the Windmills gave it away...

A Sincere Thank You for your company and Thank You for your likes and comments I love them and always try to reply, so please keep them coming, it's always good fun, As is my custom, I will go and get myself another mug of "Colombian" Coffee and wish you a safe Sunday 20th May 2018 from my home on the southern coast of Spain, where the blue waters of the Alboran Sea washes the coast of Africa and Europe and the smell of the night blooming Jasmine and Honeysuckle fills the air…and a crazy old guy and his dog Bella go out for a walk at 4:00 am…on the streets of Estepona…

All good stuff....But remember it’s a dangerous world we live in

Be safe out there…

Robert McAngus #robertmcangus

[reddirtramblings]

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about love and late-summer flowers. I’m not sure what brought on these musings, but I think it may have something to do with turning the big double nickel last week.

I’m a late-summer flower myself.

I’m also helping my mother sell her home and move into independent living, letting my children grow up and turning my mothering to Monarch caterpillars. I’ve watched the devastation of two hurricanes in the news with alarm, resignation and then love and admiration for those who helped. Plus, I finished listening to the S-Town podcast and read Y is for Yesterday (A Kinsey Millhone Novel), by Sue Grafton, on my birthday.

Whew! I have a lot going on. Please bear with me as I sort out my thoughts. It’s good this blog is called Red Dirt Ramblings, especially today. Grab a cup of coffee or tea and wander with me, okay?

Monarch caterpillar on butterfly weed.

Honestly, I was feeling kind of dismal about the state of the world last week until I steeped myself in prayer and cut more milkweed for my baby Monarchs.

The hurricane coverage and overall media misery were starting to get to me, and S-Town and Y is for Yesterday didn’t help either. As I listened to S-Town, I began to feel like a voyeur. The series took an especially dark turn in the last chapter which made me want to cry for John B. McElmore. I think this opinion piece by Jessica Goudeau in The Atlantic sums my dilemma up pretty well. It does contain spoilers so keep that in mind if you read it. One sentence from the poetry and letters she discussed stood out for me “Probe your own life and past if you must, but you cannot use another person’s trauma without permission for your aesthetic gain.” At the end of the podcast, only ashes remained, along with an icky feeling of crawling through one man’s private angst.

As for Y is for Yesterday, I bought and saved it for my birthday. For me, it’s a kind of ritual because I’ve read all of her books from the beginning. I met Grafton, and I admire her greatly. After all, I’ve only written one book that’s been published. I don’t want to give anything away in the 25th installment of my favorite detective series, but the ending wasn’t the least bit redemptive. Grafton wrote another book in the series with a similar ending, and it wasn’t my favorite either. While life is messy, novels, especially detective novels, are all about setting the universe back to rights after something throws it into chaos. It’s why people read detective novels. Some of you might argue that things in fictional Santa Teresa, CA, were set right, but I didn’t think so. I did enjoy much of the novel and laughed out loud at Kinsey Millhone, who I’ve grown to love as an old friend.

With dismay, I began to wonder if we’d forgotten how to tell redemptive stories. In our society’s effort to become ever more secular, we have forgotten how to read anything that challenges us, including the Bible. Whether you believe in God or not, the Bible is a great piece of literature with extremely good advice. I would also argue we’ve forgotten how to immerse ourselves in Nature, another great teacher.

Not a Monarch, but instead, a mimic, the Viceroy butterfly, Limenitis archippus. The Viceroy has a smile on its lower wings that the Monarch doesn’t have. I think this is the first year I’ve seen a Viceroy in my garden.

After much prayer, I began to see my care for my Monarch caterpillars as a metaphor for God’s love for us. The caterpillars have no idea I’m watching over them. They just eat and poop and do their thing. They’re rather helpless. They can also be quite hard on each other so I sometimes separate them when they crawl too close. When I pick them up–after making sure my hands are clean–immediately, they curl into a C of defensiveness. It’s all they know. I gently place them near some milkweed, leave them alone, and soon they’re back doing their thing. I watch over these creatures as if each one is precious cargo because it is. Monarchs are basically endangered even if it isn’t official yet.

I’m not saying people are like caterpillars. Obviously, not, but being a woman of faith, I see God’s unconditional love to be similar to my care for these small insects that will eventually change into something much more glorious than when they first began. (Click on pictures in the galleries to make them larger.)

Monarch chrysalides in the screened habitat.

These chrysalides hanging off of milkweed branches don’t really show how beautiful a Monarch chrysalis is.

Monarchs love Salvia leucantha, Mexican bush sage. It’s a late-summer flower that will bloom in a couple of weeks.

There’s a good reason why caterpillars and butterflies are symbolic of metamorphosis and rebirth.

My children, by the way, are completely grossed out that I have cages all over the dining room with caterpillars in various stages and sizes. I keep telling them caterpillars are not gross. In fact, if you run your finger gently across one’s back, it is silky to the touch. Plus, their camouflage coloring is quite beautiful. They blend in with the milkweed. Not so for adult butterflies who live for such a short and glorious time.

Brilliant Gulf Fritillary butterfly resting on tropical milkweed in the garden.

Gulf Fritillary on ‘Oklahoma Salmon’ zinnias. I think I’ll grow these with Zinderella Peach zinnias next year. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Salvia x ‘Ember’s Wish’ is one of the most beautiful flowers I’ve grown this year. It looks so great with the ‘Oklahoma Salmon’ zinnias. I had to order this salvia so I’ll be taking it inside. The shipping was very expensive. No one that I know of sells it locally.

As for God’s love, I think butterflies and late-summer flowers are good points of reference. There are many more efficient pollinators out there than butterflies. I’m not sure Nature needs butterflies, but humans do.

Autumnal sneezeweed up close with a bumblebee.

Autumnal sneezeweed has a plethora of flowers that bloom when everything else is tired.

Next to this lime green coleus autumnal sneezeweed really shines.

When the news, the podcast and my reading became too much for me, I wandered outside into my messy late-summer garden. My favorite flower of the moment is Autumn sneezeweed, Helenium autumnale. I planted smallish plants last fall, and they are glorious this summer. They, along with the still-blooming Phlox paniculata ‘Bright Eyes,’ are much favored by pollinators, and the late-summer bloom is all about feeding the pollinators before winter sets in. I’m still waiting for the asters to bloom in a blue haze, but this year, I’m actually enjoying wild ageratum, Eupatorium coelestinum, a/k/a mistflower, for the first time. I used to hate it because it is so prolific, but it’s a favorite nectar plant of adult Monarchs so I’ve learned to pull as much as I can in spring and enjoy the rest. The same is true for garlic chives, Allium tuberosum, and obedient plant, Physostegia virginiana, which I can’t seem to eradicate. Don’t plant them if you don’t want them until the end of your days. Since I didn’t deadhead much in July, these plants are carrying the garden through early September.

Eupatorium coelestinum, mistflower or wild ageratum is another thug, but doesn’t it look grand against Panicum virgatum, Virginia switchgrass?

A closeup of Eupatorium coelestinum, mistflower or wild ageratum much belowed by butterflies.

Physostegia virginiana, obedient plant, is a pollinator favorite. It is also an aggressive thug so keep on it or your whole garden will be this one plant.

Physostegia virginiana, obedient plant, is not obedient. I think some gardener was having a joke on all of us.

Painted Lady butterfly on stonecrop sedum. I don’t which variety. It’s shorter than ‘Autumn Joy’ and not as bright as ‘Neon.’ Who knows? It’s probably one I bought at the end of the season last year.

Pretty soon, asters and garden mums will join the other flowers, and the garden will have a kind of rebirth before it dies in late autumn after a killing freeze.

The late-summer garden beckons like a lover in late summer and fall.

One of my favorite spots in the garden right now is this border next to the garage and sidewalk. It’s looked great all summer.

Another view of the back garden and this favorite border filled with coleus and native plants, along with daylilies. I’ll be digging up the daylilies which were host plants for the tour.

Callicarpa japonica, Japanese beautyberry blooming for all its worth.

The garage border is still looking good.

We had a party last weekend, and several of my friends wanted to see the gardens. We walked and talked, and I pointed out butterflies and moths flitting amongst the blooms. My friends were amazed at the beauty of these small creatures like the Hemaris thysbe, hummingbird clearwing moth. These moths dart in and out of the phlox like hummingbirds hence the name. They are one of the best reasons to grow phlox. Need more good reasons? How about the Painted Lady butterflies, Vanessa cardui, which are so abundant this year. Painted Lady butterflies also adore stonecrop sedum, Sedum spectabile, so plant it too.

Hemaris thysbe, Hummingbird Clearwing moth on P. paniculata ‘Bright Eyes’ phlox.

Speaking of hummingbirds, I have a couple of males that check me out every time I go out to get more milkweed. They love the zinnia patch this year and protect it fiercely. They are so cute but so naughty keeping all of the other creatures except wasps on the wing. Bill caught sight of them of them the other day and was charmed by their antics.

Butterflies and late-summer flowers both speak to me of God’s love and also the quick passage of time. Much was made of horology, the study of time, in S-town. It was the best part of the podcast. John B. was a genius who built and repaired beautiful timepieces throughout much of his life. Check out this sundial he built for his friend, teacher, and mentor, Tom Moore. I think McLemore loved people fiercely, but couldn’t accept their love in return.

Like the caterpillars and the late-summer flowers, we bloom and eventually fade away. I just hope we all experience metamorphosis and winged flight before our time is done. The late-summer garden beckons like a lover in the cool evening. Don’t forget to go outside and enjoy it before it too is

[contact-form]

gone.

Of love and late-summer flowers Lately, I've been thinking a lot about love and late-summer flowers. I'm not sure what brought on these musings, but I think it may have something to do with turning the big double nickel last week.