Black Sea

 

Black Sea

Dispatches and Recipes Through Darkness and Light

by Caroline Eden

photographs by Ola Smit and Theodore Kaye
Quadrille

2018

 

 

Black Sea is a book that seems to deliberately defy classification. First and foremost, it's travel writing, cataloging author Caroline Eden's trip around the Black Sea coast, starting in Odessa, Ukraine, passing through Romania and Bulgaria, then crossing Turkey, from Istanbul in the west to Trabzon in the east.

Admittedly, travel writing is always an eclectic genre, mixing narration of the author's voyage with tidbits of local history and current events, and it's often combined with food writing, as in this case, where Eden seemingly describes every meal as she travels the coast. But Eden's emphasis on food goes beyond a secondary focus - you could also think of this as food writing that happens to describe travel. She even includes recipes between each stop, usually 2-4 from each place she visits, adding up to dozens over the course of the book. So this is also kind of a cook book.

It's also also kind of a photo book. There aren't images on every page, and the book itself is novel-sized, not coffee table, but there are a lot of photos, usually getting a full page or two-page spread each. In a lot of travel books you get none, or else a few pages of color plates in the center. I don't usually talk about the physical qualities of the book I'm reading, but Black Sea is gorgeous. The hardcover has silver foil and an embossed surface making the wave pattern. The pages are edged in ink so that the closed book is a solid block of black. The paper is heavy, and the photography crisp and attractive.

And the thing is, this genre hybrid, this eclectic mix, it works. Eden marches on her stomach, and you follow along, eating your way from Odessa to Trabzon. There are local variations, but the recipes often involve garlic, rice pilaf or bulgar wheat, yogurt or cheese, honey, leafy greens, hazelnuts or chestnuts, and lots of fish, especially sardines and anchovies, which are beloved across the region. She buses between cities and has local guides and drivers in each one, eating at a mix of restaurants and hospitable family homes. Like me, she's curious about the famous 'mad honey' made from rhododendron pollen, said to be intoxicating in small doses, toxic in large, but she doesn't manage to try any.

Besides food, Eden's other big interest is immigrant communities. She writes about the Jewish and Italian communities in Odessa, Swiss farmers in Romania, Russians loyal to the tsar fleeing Lenin in Istanbul, and Turks who came back to Trabzon after generations in Russia. She's arguably more interested in these smaller communities, their culture and food, than she is with the majority population anywhere she goes. Eden gives special attention to writers, mostly but not only Russian authors exiled by the Soviets, so it would be easy to compile a reading list from books she mentions along the way.

Eden is not, for the most part, interested making any overt comments about politics. There's an obvious reason her journey doesn't start in Crimea or make it out of Turkey into Georgia or Russia - but she never mentions it. Ceausescu only comes up to explain why so few Anglophone travel writers have visited Romania. The Russian seizure of Crimea and territories in East Ukraine, the attempted Turkish coup and Erdogan's authoritarian crackdown afterward - Eden mentions them only in passing, and only when absolutely necessary.

I say this not to cast judgment, just as a description of what she wrote. There's a new edition of the book coming out this year with some supplemental writing about Putin's full invasion of Ukraine. It's hard for me to imagine this won't feel tacked on and dissonant with what's already there. Another writer, or perhaps even Eden herself, could write all about the historical and present-day conflicts and injustices in the countries surrounding the Black Sea, but I feel like that would belong to a different book, a different way of experiencing the region than what we get here.

One Hundred Aspects of the Moon

 
 

One Hundred Aspects of the Moon

art by Yoshitoshi

edited by Bas Verberk

Walther Konig

1885-1895, reprinted 2022

 

 

The two most famous Japanese woodcut artists, Hokusai and Hiroshige lived during the Edo period - roughly coinciding with the early modern period in Europe. They made prints depicting contemporary city life. In fact, the Japanese name for these images, ukiyo-e, isn't based on the medium, but the content. The -e suffix means 'pictures of' and ukiyo is 'the Floating World,' the name for the demimonde, the urban lifestyle of art, leisure, theater, and legal prostitution that arose in Tokyo and other cities at that time. So ukiyo-e are literally 'pictures of the Floating World,' but they're also all woodblock prints.

 

Yoshitoshi lived at the end of Edo and the start of the Meiji period - around the same time as the Industrial Revolution. He is apparently considered the third master of ukiyo-e after Hiroshige and Hokusai. Rather than representing the world he lived in though, Yoshitoshi's prints mostly depict Japanese history, legends, and folktales. One Hundred Views of the Moon is Yoshitoshi's most famous series of prints. The specific collection of that series I read was collected by the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, Germany, and edited by their curator of Japanese art, Bas Verberk. The quality of the photos the book is based on (and the quality of the book itself I guess) is high enough that you can actually see the wood grain of the printing block in many of the prints, whenever there's a wide enough expanse of a single color. Alongside each print is a page-length museum label where Verberk explains what the image depicts.

 

The Meiji period was a time when Japan was forcibly re-opened to commerce and diplomacy with Europe after something like 200 years of isolation. I don't know exactly what Yoshitoshi's intellectual or artistic agenda was, but I think it's fairly common in periods of great change and disruption for people to hearken back to stories from the past to try to reconstruct a new way forward. On a much smaller and less significant scale, I think you see the same thing in American superhero comics in the 2000s. Lots of independent creators have series that self-consciously recreate the style of the Silver Age comics of the 1960s, like Black Hammer and Astro City, as their creators try to figure out how to get from 'there' to 'here,' where here is hopefully a new way of writing superheroes that makes sense for the 21st century. Anyway, as I said, I don't know if that was Yoshitoshi's goal, and Verberk doesn't say either, but I imagine that the reason he picked such a wide array of old stories as his subject matter was that he was trying to figure out a new vision for Japanese culture, maybe even a new way to still be Japanese, while navigating a newly expanded world of European interference.

 

A lot of Yoshitoshi's prints, possibly even a majority in this collection, depict samurai and generals and other figures from the long Warring States period between the peace of the Heien and Edo, when there was no one central government, and the leaders of the regional governments competed for territory and control. As the title of the series suggests, the moon is present in nearly every image, and the few where you can't see it are understood to be taking place under the moonlight. Other pictures show scenes from the Buddhist tradition, characters from the Tale of Genji and especially the Tale of Heike, folktales and legends about people who traveled to the moon, animals with supernatural powers associated with the moon, and scenes from noh theater, which predates Edo-era kabuki. Yoshitoshi had several different name stamps for signing his work, and seems to have kind of used different stamped signatures for different themes within the series.

 

My favorite was 'Mount Yoshino Midnight Moon,' which shows a woman meeting a supernatural creature beneath either a new moon or lunar eclipse. I think if I seek out more ukiyo-e art, I might try to find someone who depicted the changes Japan was going through during the Meiji period. Or perhaps I might go backward myself, and actually look through a complete series of Hokusai or Hiroshige's prints, because I think I've only seen a few of their images, out of order and out of context. 

 

'Mount Yoshino Midnight Moon'
image source

 

I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew

 

I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew

by Dr Seuss

Random House

1965

 

 

When I read The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, it reminded me vaguely of Dr Seuss's I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, which was one of my favorites of his as a kid, so I decided to reread it. I have no idea if Suess ever read Lovecraft, but even if he did, I doubt this was any sort of direct homage or inspiration. There are similarities because both tell stories about journeys, and both contain a few common elements - a distant city, cats, a vast underground - but Solla Sollew is its own story, not a retlling of Kadath.
 
The unnamed narrator of Solla Sollew is a young man who feels beset by troubles. He makes rules for himself, to try to prevent the same things happening again, but there's always something new. And so, he is tempted when a traveler promises to take him along to a golden city where he'll be troubled no more.
 
But along the way, he meets other people who have troubles of their own that they're running away from. The traveler hooks the boy with his promise, then makes him do all the work. An old man moves from home to escape the rain. A general conscripts the boy into his army, then runs off and leaves him alone at the first sign of danger.
 
When he gets to the fabled city, they have problems too, and the first person he meets wants to run off to a new city that'll surely be better. So at last the boy stops to consider, and goes home, and instead of trying to avoid every possible form of trouble, plans to confront and overcome them.
 
Parts of this remind me of very old style D&D. First the boy trips on a rock, so then he always looks down as he walks. Then he gets bitten by a bird from behind, so he teaches himself to be wall-eyed. Then he gets attacked from above and below... It's just like descriptions of the oldest D&D games, where the players developed elaborate lists of routine instructions for each time their characters entered a new room, trying to avoid every single bad thing that'd ever befallen them from surprising them again, and the Dungeon Master constantly innovating new and more obscure punishments for failing to say the magic words "...and I also look at X." There's even a tiny monster who lives in a keyhole and pushes your key out of the lock!
 
Most of my favorite Seuss books were like children's bestiaries - If I Ran the Circus, If I Ran the Zoo, On Beyond Zebra, McElligot's Pool. Several of those are out of print now, because the conceit of each relied on fantastic exoticism that sometimes incorporated real-world orientalism and racism. A little boy dream of greatness, because he alone will go out and come home with animals from other parts of the world, imaginary animals from imaginary places, that he's able to believe might be real partly just because he's young, and partly because these places are in parts of the world he knows little about, so the imaginary spots seem no more unreal than what's actually there. It's no coincidence he dreams of animals from made-up parts of Asia and Africa, not a fantastic unmapped bit of the American Midwest.
 
Solla Sollew and another one I liked, The Butter Battle Book, are different, because they're ultimately warnings about the dangers of choosing fantasy over reality, of imagining that you can be rid of your problems without solving them, just one town over or one new toy away. Both are, in a way, more mature works, because they still star a dreamer, but they show that his dreams don't work out simply because he hopes they will, and who ultimately decides to stop dreaming and take action, to do something real. That's one last similarity to Dream-Quest, I suppose, because in that Randolph Carter finally chooses to wake up and to live, rather than dying in his sleep trying to capture a dream.

The Carpet Makers

 
 

The Carpet Makers

by Andreas Eschbach

translated by Doryl Jensen

Tor

1995, reprinted 2005

 

 

The Carpet Makers is a German scifi novel from the 1990s that was translated into English a decade later. The structure of the book, and Eschbach's way of slowly expanding out and building up his narrative is unlike anything else I've read. It's kind of a masterpiece.
 

The title characters, the carpet makers, are artisans who create 'hair carpets,' an art form that is both central to the story and acts as a kind of metaphor or synecdoche for the power of the emperor.
 

A hair carpet is an elaborately patterned textile, about as long as a person is tall, and half as wide as it is long, intricately knotted, made entirely of human hair. It represents so much human labor that each maker weaves only a single carpet in his lifetime, starting when he is young, finishing when he is old, using solely the hair of his wives and daughters. He weaves for the glory of the emperor, who lives on another world. At the end of his life, he will sell the carpet for a large sum of money, so much that it will last his son his entire life, so that he can devote himself to the same work. Makers have many wives and daughters, and only one son who is permitted to survive infancy. This has been the tradition for longer than anyone can remember.

 

You learn this much in the first chapter, and if you're like me, you're already thinking about what kind of society is so stable that this practice can become a tradition for many generations, with prices that change so little that a single payment can reliably be spent over a lifetime. You're wondering about the power of an emperor who can compel this labor as an act of religious devotion. You're perhaps thinking that hair carpets seem both grotesque but also beautiful, and wondering about what it would mean to spend your entire life working meticulously on a single task. You're thinking about the technological inequality between the people who perform traditional handicrafts, and the emperor who rules multiple planets. Eschbach will spend the rest of the book slowly revealing the answers.

 
Each chapter is like a short story. They're all told in close third person, each following a new viewpoint character. Events or people from one story sometimes are heard about or have some influence on a later one. There is sort of an overarching plot, but also, the characters in each story are mostly concerned with their own lives and own problems. The bigger picture emerges at the margins.

 
There is a logic to the order of the stories, although it's more obvious in retrospect. We follow the route that hair carpets take, from the house of the makers, to being bought by a trader, transported overland to the port city, to being shipped off-world. At the same time, we follow the progress of a rumor, that the emperor has abdicated, that the empire is dissolved, that there's no one to make hair carpets for anymore. Tradition on this world is harsh, and strictly enforced. To disobey, even to doubt, means death. And so we also follow a trail of ruined dreams, human sacrifices to a draconian social order. The price of empire is payed in lives.
 

Once off-world, we eventually learn the origin of the hair carpet tradition, and what the carpets are ultimately used for by the immortal emperor. I don't want to say too much here. Learning more and more, and repeatedly revising what you think you know, is one of the pleasures of this book. Eschbach has crafted a tale that grows by the accumulation of clues and references. This is a thoughtfully told tale, and it inspires you to think as you read it, to work through the implications of everything you learn, and especially to attend to the human costs.
 

This is one of the most masterful and most unusual science fiction novels I've read. There's almost no action. The characters are all ordinary people, trying to live the best lives they can in a system that would grind them to dust for any act of heresy or defiance. But the scale and the scope of it all is nonetheless humbling. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes sociological science fiction.

The New Champion of Shazam!

 

The New Champion of Shazam!

by Josie Campbell

art by Doc Shaner
DC Comics

2023

 

 

The New Champion of Shazam! collects a 4-issue miniseries of comics that reintroduces the character of Mary Marvel as (briefly) the sole wielder of the power of Shazam. This might've made a good start to a new ongoing series, but instead, the 5th comic in here, a single issue from another DC crossover event (Planet Lazarus) undoes the premise by bringing back Billy Batson as the original and primary Shazam.

For awhile, I tried keeping up with DC Comics' main continuity, but I've stopped checking in as much, and basically lost track over the past couple years. In some ways that makes New Champion ideal for someone like me, since it's a fresh start for a character who apparently has been out of circulation for awhile. On the other hand, the set-up to get the series started presumes events I had no knowledge of. Billy Batson is vanished and missing, his foster siblings are no longer able to transform into superheroes, and this state of affairs has prevailed for long enough that they've all moved on creating new civilian lives.

Mary has gotten into Vassar, and wants to figure out who she is now - not as a superhero or sister, but as an independent young woman. She gets very little time to find out, unfortunately, since on move-in day, her roommate's pet rabbit reveals that he's a messenger from the absent Billy, and he bestows her with the magic of Shazam. (In fact, since no one else is sharing it, she's many times more powerful than usual, although since I'm not really clear on her previous strength, that's not a particularly useful distinction!)

Mary defeats the Disaster Master, then returns to her dorm to find police waiting. Her foster parents never made it home from dropping her off at the bus station, so as the only adult foster sibling, she has to leave Vassar, return to Philadelphia, and take over as de facto parent. Understandably, she's both worried and resentful. She enrolls at the local community college, meets a sympathetic teacher, gets in a bunch of arguments with her siblings, then fights a giant flying crocodile and three mysterious jet black figures.

She also slightly embarrasses herself when she's approached by a news crew right after barely surviving the crocodile, getting stagefright, and flying away. Jokes and memes about her blow up on social media, setting up the best fight of the series, with another magic villain named Babel who psychically assaults her with her own negative self-messages, which at the moment are mostly made up of all the hurtful online comments.

The whole online infamy angle is one of the two really good bits of social commentary in here. The other is the fun the comic pokes at the ridiculously self-aggrandizing community college president, who keeps trying to oversell the quality of the school.

Anyway, eventually Mary figures out who's been creating the magical monsters, and kidnapping people (including her foster parents!,) and she's able to save the day all around. Mary embraces being Shazam, her family is reunited and no longer all arguing with each other, the press begins stops making fun of her, presumably she can restart college next semester on better footing, etc.

I sort of wish the volume stopped there, because the miniseries tells a complete story, and you could imagine Mary going off to have other adventures, in the style of Ms Marvel or Squirrel Girl, who also balance superheroics, attending school, and managing relationships. My favorite version of Mary Marvel is the one from DC Bombshells, where she's reimagined as a pious Jewish girl who draws strength from famous biblical women (still spelling out Shazam in acrostic, of course,) and stands alone without a male counterpart. As I mentioned at the beginning, the last issue collected here is from a crossover event, and brings back Billy Batson as the primary hero, thus replacing Mary and undermining what the miniseries had tried to build up.

The Undressed Art

 

The Undressed Art

Why We Draw

by Peter Steinhart

Knopf

2005 

 

 

The Undressed Art is both a defense and a description of the process of drawing figures from life, written at a time (the early 2000s) when Steinhart believed that traditional drawing skills were being devalued both in art schools and the art world more generally, in favor of photography, conceptual art and installations, and using computer graphics in commercial design. Steinhart argues that we should value drawing as a process and a practice, rather than for the product it produces.

 
Steinhart lays out his case in miniature in the first chapter, then works back through it over the course of the book, though in a way that's patient and conversational, rather than regimented or forceful. He starts with a discussion of children's drawings, and how so many of us stop drawing (and thus stop improving) around 9 or 10. He talks about sketching and learning to draw from observation. He talks about drawing nude models and about the experience of modeling. He discusses factors, like the rise of abstract expressionism, that have led drawing to fall out of favor in art schools. And he talks about producing finished works, and distributing them.

 
At a number of points he incorporates findings from neuroscience, to talk about what happens inside our brains when we look at a person, when we draw, when we look at a drawing. In brief, other people are the most interesting things in the world to us, their faces are the key to understanding them, reciprocal looking is the basis for connection and rapport, and drawing from life captures some fraction of those emotions and preserves them on paper.

 
'Drawing is seeing,' Steinhart says over and over again, by which he means that the act of drawing from nature, from observation, is a way of looking closely and carefully at something, and trying to recreate it. In the same way that you can't explain an idea to someone else unless you understand it yourself, you can't draw something well unless you've really seen it. He argues that this is an innate human faculty, like language or music. Most of the time, we don't draw to make art. We draw to draw; we draw to see.

 
Steinhart views drawing as perhaps the most humble form of artistry. He doesn't try to aggrandize it, only to ennoble it. He's writing for an audience of fellow enthusiastic amateurs. Even among people who make art professionally, it's a minority who can make a living, even fewer who'll be famous. So his defense of drawing doesn't rest on the idea that it's a pathway to fame. Only that it's worth doing, worth practicing, worth trying to do well, even if your only audience is just yourself. If drawing is a profoundly human activity, then we draw to feel connected with our common humanity, and the great number of other drawers throughout history, whose works are not seen, whose names are not known.

 
Drawing from live nude models has always been controversial, sometimes scandalous. There are always people who think it's improper, others who find it unnecessary. And there are always people who believe in it so much that they'll meet regularly and pay fees to hire models to draw. In cities with enough artists, some people can make a living as models, but it's physically strenuous work, and precarious. I modeled once for an art class in grad school - because I was curious, because I wanted to feel a connection to the art world, because I wanted the students to learn to draw a transgender body. But the opportunity's never come up again. Steinhart says there's always a moment of desire and embarrassment when the model disrobes, before the drawing starts. But the work of observation and recreation crowds out any sexual meaning and replaces it with discipline, and art.

 

There are illustrations throughout the book, drawings of life models by some of the artists Steinhart talks to. Among other things, these drawings help contextualize what he's talking about when he describes the differences between sketching and finished work, or how artistic poses differ from the way we're used to seeing nudity in pornography or advertising.

 
Steinhart's observations about kids' art matches what Georges-Henri Luquet says in Children's Drawings, and though he talks to far fewer art models than sociologist Sarah Phillips, but he makes some of the same points she does in her book Modeling Life. Between reading this and watching so much Portrait Artist of the Year lately, I feel a bit tempted to try to start up drawing again, which I haven't done seriously since high school. It does take a lot of time to do well. There's also a certain irony to Steinhart's motivation, from my perspective. Figurative art and the skill of drawing may be out of favor at our most elite art schools, but I read so many comics, so many books with illustrations, and it's all drawing (whether on paper or a digital tablet) that produces the type of art I see and seek out most.

The Wolf's Secret

 
 

The Wolf's Secret

by Myriam Dahman and Nicolas Digard

art by Julia Sarda

Orchard Books

2020

 

 

The Wolf's Secret is another children's picture book I picked up for the chance to see Julia Sarda's art. Once again, authors Myriam Dahman and Nicolas Digard remix elements of folk lore and fable to tell a new story that feels like it could be from long ago.

In the woods lives the biggest wolf. Every day he hunts, and every other creature in the forest fears him. The wolf likes to go to the edge of a clearing and listen to a human woman sing. She lives in a cabin in the clearing, and sings for her father, who is sick.

One day the singing stops. The wolf keeps returning to the clearing, but the woman doesn't start up again. He doesn't know what to do. Then, the wolf catches a rabbit, who promises to do him a favor if he'll let it go. He does, and the rabbit turns into a wizard. He sets the wolf on a path that will lead him back to the woman.

The wolf follows the path, and ends up with a magic bell he can wear around his neck. It allows him to speak the human language. He goes back to the cabin in the clearing and speaks to the woman while standing behind her. She says she can't sing because she's sad since her father died. The wolf offers to be her companion and keep her company, if she'll sing for him, and if she'll promise to never turn around to see him...

You might guess what happened, but Dahman and Digard find a way to give us a happy ending. The rabbit who becomes a wizard reminds me of one of Aesop's fables. The larger structure of the book resembles Japanese and European legends about shapeshifting animal and fairy spouses, what we might call 'selkie stories,' (following Sophia Samatar,) even when they're not about seal-women specifically. But in those stories, the price of curiosity is abandonment. This tale is much gentler.

This is an earlier example of Sarda's art than I've seen before. Her style is perfectly consistent, but I think in some of the later books, her compositions are livelier, and she finds more opportunities for embellishment. Here the pictures themselves are a bit simpler, even if each figure or background is no less detailed. The wizard with his beard of autumn leaves is a standout, and the other forest creatures reacting with surprise when the wolf puts on the bell is excellent.

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

 
 
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

by Jane Ward

NYU Press

2020

 

 

The straights are not okay. Or at least, so says Jane Ward, only half in jest, in The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. Ward's writing mixes academic prolixity, Jezebelian snark, and Twitter-style hot takes in an unstable blend to diagnose the paradoxes of straight culture, empathize in feminist solidarity with straight women, and give heterosexuality a taste of the same medicine queerness is so often served in the form of deliberately patronizing hand-wringing and concern-trolling.
 
How well all that works depends on whether you think those goals are compatible or at odds. I'm not straight, so I didn't feel defensive or personally attacked by any part of this book - but my guess is that if you did get your hackles up in response to some of what Ward says, you'd be less receptive to any of the rest of it. If what seems to me like gentle teasing strikes you as an existential threat, or even just mean-spirited, then you're going to see this book very differently than I did, and like it an awful lot less.
 
In brief, Ward diagnoses the key problem with heterosexuality today as what she calls the 'misogyny paradox' - that straight men desire women's bodies and services, but collectively don't seem to respect or even particularly like women. Some heterosexual couples have good relationships on an individual basis, but dissatisfaction is widespread. It's also asymmetric. In the public square, straight women lament that men mistreat them, neglect them, leave the too much of what should be shared work, sometimes abuse and rape them, and generally fail to acknowledge their full personhood. Straight men's public grievances are that women complain too much and don't offer condition-free sex-on-demand as often or as easily as they'd like.
 
I myself have noticed how often straight women will say something to the effect of 'I wish I could be a lesbian,' a sentiment I've literally never heard reciprocated. There are essentially no straight men who wish they were gay, as far as I can tell. That imbalance in dissatisfaction is at the heart of Ward's critique. The problem with heterosexuality is that it's much worse for women than for men; the problem with heterosexuality is a problem with masculinity, a problem with straight men.
 
Ward presents us with three social scientific projects - two sound bits of research, and one methodologically suspect poll of her internet friends.

 
First she content analyzes texts from what she calls the 'heterosexual repair industry,' ranging from eugenics texts at the start of the 20th century to self-help books today. Modern straightness emerges, at least among White Americans, as an alternative to the previous system where fathers and husbands essentially owned 'their' women. The challenge these books address is that straight men and women mostly socialize with same-gender peers, and end up with few interests in common with their potential spouses. The solution is usually for straight women to change (men are almost never the target audience here) - to be more empathetic and accommodating, to try harder to bridge the gap, and be more willing to accept overwork and neglect as the price of remaining in a relationship.

Reading this chapter, I thought of the latest batch of pro-marriage scolds, who started their current round of hectoring after Ward finished her book, and who seem weirdly uninterested in even trying to make heterosexual marriage sound pleasurable, only profitable. Just get married, the latest sales pitch argues, so you can have more money to raise your children. Never mind whether you like it, do it anyway, make the sacrifice, society demands it. (The modern scolds may not be explicit eugenicists, but their fear of White population decline and minority electoral power within a democratic system seem to me to be only barely, and poorly, concealed.)

For the next chapter, Ward attended pick-up artist classes for sexually frustrated men. Some are lonely and genuinely romantically unsuccessful; others are uninterested in the sort of women who want to sleep with them, and want to learn how to 'upgrade' to their ideal - young, White, blonde, thin. In Ward's view, these courses are the masculine counterpart to the women's self-help books. One thing the classes teach is simply a different repertoire of pick-up lines and techniques than whatever the conventional wisdom is at the time, thus setting these men apart simply by making them different from most of their peers in the bars and nightclubs. But the other thing they teach is how men can make themselves attractive to women simply by not acting like misogynists, to empathize with straight women's viewpoint and perspective, or at least convincingly fake it.

Next, Ward solicits anonymous responses to her own thesis from her friends on social media, then analyses these qualitative data points to extract themes. I don't know if I can take this part seriously as research; it feels more like eavesdropping on a trash-talking session at an entertaining queer dinner party. Besides calling out straight culture as boring, Ward's respondents most often report a kind of sadness at seeing so many of the straight women they know get treated so badly by their boyfriends and husbands.

Finally, Ward offers her suggestion for a solution. She contrasts herself to other feminist scholars who've encouraged straight people to try becoming queer, or to give up on long-term romantic relationships and rely on the camaraderie and support of same-gender friendships to help raise one's children and otherwise help carry one through the difficulties of life. Instead, Ward proposes a kind of leaning in to heterosexuality. She calls on straight men to 'like women so much that they actually like women,' and to desire women's full personhood, not only their (idealized) bodies and the benefits of their unpaid labor.

Witch Hat Atelier 4

 
 

Witch Hat Atelier 4

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2019 

 

 

In the last couple volumes of Witch Hat Atelier, we've gotten to meet Coco's three classmates, especially Agott, but Coco has remained the focus of the plot. In volume 4, we step away from Coco to follow Agott and Richeh as they take the qualifying exam to be allowed to perform magic in public. (In this world, the biggest secret of magic is that it's drawn, and anyone with the right ink and the right pattern could use it, if they knew...)
 
Richeh has hipster bangs and the heart of an artist. Agott wants to be the best to impress her family. Richeh rejects conventional success, and only wants to create and cast her own spells, not study and practice other people's. It seems her teacher before Qifrey was very strict about rote memorization; Richeh feels a bit betrayed by Qifrey for signing her up for the test.
 
The exam is a practical, a task that requires the students to use magic by drawing without looking with their hands hidden by their cloaks. Instead of human civilians though, they'll be casting in front of another master witch, and some adorable fantasy animals - tiny adorable penguin griffins! The students are wearing illusion cloaks to disguise themselves, and their test is to lead the penguins along their migration route through a site ruined by forbidden magic without the animals realizing they're being shepherded.
 
Joining Agott and Richeh is a student from another atelier, Euini, who has a cruel teacher and like, negative self confidence. Getting through the dangerous magical site will require the girls to use their own magic intelligently. Richeh also tries to interrupt Euini's self-hatred and convince him to trust himself. She also starts to realize there may be a limit to her philosophy of magic as self-expression, with no 'right' use, and that by not learning other people's spells, she's limited herself more than she knew.
 
So far, so heartwarming! But then one of the witches who use forbidden magic shows up. This one has no physical body, just a cloak and hat that he's possessed. He causes the teacher to vanish, turns Euini into an animal, and Agott and Richeh are only barely able to escape him. Then they're forced to split up. Richeh will continue leading the migration - witches have an obligation to this species, since this site was their route before it was twisted and polluted with magic. Agott, who knows more spells and thus has a broader range of abilities, will try to rescue Euini.
 
Outside the testing site, the disembodied witch has caused a giant statue to attack Qifrey and his two younger students - Coco and Tetia. His goal isn't just to use forbidden magic himself, it's also to tempt others to use it too ... such as by creating an emergency so severe they feel like they have no choice but to reach for the power he's promising them.
 
With everyone in peril and nothing resolved, the volume ends on quite a cliffhanger!