Shuna's Journey

 
 

Shuna's Journey

by Hayao Miyazaki

translated by Alex De Wit

First Second

2022

 

 

Shuna's Journey is one of Miyazaki's earliest works, only recently translated into English. He drew it before he had an animation studio, before his famous manga Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. And yet, I see echoes of many of his other works in this one, or rather, I see now that there are echoes of Shuna in much of what he made later. This book is quietly excellent.
 
The style here isn't a traditional manga; the translator calls it an emonogatari, which almost literally translates as graphic novel. There are no word bubbles and only a little dialogue. Most of the text is narration, and it's all printed directly over still places in the art. Rather than crisp black and white drawings divided into panels, Miyazaki gives us what look like pencil sketches painted with watercolor. I don't mean to make it sound unskilled - it feels warm and humane, it's just that none of the edges are crisp or sharp, none of the colors fully saturated.
 

Shuna is based on a Tibetian folktale, about how barley first came to their country, but transposed into a distant, post-apocalyptic future. Shuna is a teen boy, the prince of a small community living with their antelope-like 'yakuls' in a deep mountain valley. Their seeds grow only small grains, and hunger is ever-present. One day Shuna meets a dying traveler. He claims to be the ruler of a kingdom to the east, on a journey to the west to find a place where golden seeds grow into large, filling grains. He has some of the seeds, but they've hulled and will never grow.
 
Shuna takes a yakul, his sword and rifle, and sets off to find the golden seeds for himself. Along the way, he sees ruins of civilizations past ... and slave traders with caged wagons full of captives. He makes his way to a trading city. There are merchants selling hulled grain, but no seeds, and everywhere there are captives. Shuna learns that none of these people grow their own grain. It's grown by the 'god-folk' in the west, who trade it for slaves.
 
Shuna meets a pair of enslaved sisters; older sister Thea is around his own age. He wants to free them. First he offers to buy them, but Thea refuses. He tries to continue his journey, but he's troubled by what he's seen. Eventually he mounts a rescue of the girls, and all three escape together. They reach the border of the strange land where the god-folk dwell. Shuna gives Thea his Yakul. She and her little sister ride away to find a village.
 
Shuna enters the land of the god-folk, sees what becomes of the slaves that are brought in, steals some seeds, and escapes, but loses his memory and his possessions in the process. Somehow he wanders to the village where Thea has settled. In secret, she cares for him, nurses him back to health, grows the seeds into crops, harvests more seeds. In the end Shuna is restored, and there are enough seeds for Shuna and Thea and her sister to leave and return to his homeland.
 
The tale is relatively simple, but told well. There's a moral complexity to Shuna's encounter with slavery for example. He has no part in the system of trading human lives for grain, he is nearly powerless to do much about it, but his conscience also won't let him do nothing. And Thea is no damsel. She is strong from the start, and eventually saves Shuna as much as he saves her.
 
And Miyazaki's art is excellent throughout. Shuna's clothes resemble traditional Tibetan garb. The city and its dwellers have more colorful, outlandish outfits. The most compelling images come from the ruins of the old world and the bizarre land of the god-folks, which combines the new, the alien, the deeply ancient. The strange and magical landscapes and creatures that eventually made Miyazaki famous are visible in their early form here.

Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells

 
 

Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells

The Best of Early Vanity Fair

edited by Graydon Carter

Penguin

2014 

 

 

It's been kind of an eventful month, right? I've probably spent more time reading the news than reading any of the books I have started. Plus I took a trip, and spent almost the whole time visiting and chatting. But in typical booklover's hubris, I packed my bags with the answers to the questions 'what if I finish my book?' and 'what if I finish my backup book?' and, embarrassingly, 'what if I finish my BACKUP backup book?' Well, I didn't finish anything, and carried a lot of extra weight for nothing, but I was glad that my main read was a collection of short essays, just the thing for times when there are too many competing demands on one's attention.
 

Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells is a collection of articles published in Vanity Fair in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. Of the 400 or so pages, the 1910s and 30s each get about a hundred pages, and the 20s fill half the book with the other two.
 
Compared to An Editor's Burial, which was a tightly focused collection of New Yorker articles meant to show off certain authors and specific subjects, BBFS is clearly intended to show off Vanity Fair's range, and I suspect, to flaunt as many famous names as possible, even if it's hard to believe that what they wrote was in any sense 'the best' of anything. (I'm thinking especially of AA Milne's dull account of publishers thinking his author bio was too boring...) These pieces are all much shorter than the New Yorker reprints too, usually only 3 or 5 book pages long. I bet most of these would've fit on a single magazine page, maybe two if they had to share space with advertising or illustrations.
 
Most of the articles are nonfiction essays, although there are a handful of short stories and a smattering of poetry by the likes of Dorothy Parker, Edna St Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, and TS Eliot. The best of these, I think, was ee cumming's "When Calvin Coolidge Laughed," which blurs the line between story and prose poem and depicts nationwide rioting and disorder in a sing-song tall-tale voice in response to the shock of hearing Coolidge sound happy. Colette's story "The Woman Behind the Mask," which shows a husband's jealous shock at spotting his wife having an awfully good time at an Eyes Wide Shut style masked orgy, which he'd snuck out to after telling her he'd never go to such a thing, was also pretty good.
 
The nonfiction pieces are a blend of trend reporting and profiles of famous people, and depending on how you look at it, those might not even count as two different kinds of things. My favorites were the satirical trend pieces, which rather than straight reporting, subjected whatever fad or style to some gentle fun. I loved PG Wodehouse's "The Physical Culture Peril" about the danger that fitness and exercise will make you a boring conversationalist; Hyman Strunsky's "Are Odd Women Really Odd?" in defense of women's suffrage, employment, and sexual freedom; and F Scott Fitzgerald's metafictional "This is a Magazine," which is a script for a short play where all the characters are different types of magazine articles.
 
Much of the regular reporting lacks flair by contrast, even when the subject should be intrinsically interesting, like Samuel Chotzinoff's condensed (and kind of racist) history of jazz or Bertrand Russell's explanation of behaviorism. There were a few that stood out to me, both for their quality and foresight. Robert Sherwood's "The Higher Education on the Screen" fears what kids are learning about the world from the movies. Walter Lippman's "Blazing Publicity," which depicts newspaper and other media coverage as a spotlight that subjects certain people and events to intense scrutiny, one at a time, before moving on to the next thing, and leaving whatever happens outside that spotlight comparatively 'in the dark,' which still sounds more or less like how it's done today. Walter Winchell's "A Primer of Broadway Slang" surprised me, because I knew almost every term he mentioned, a few from watching so much Looney Tunes growing up, but mostly because they left the backstage, entered the common tongue, and are still in circulation now.
 
While women's rights are mostly referred to positively, especially earlier in the book, Aldous Huxley got an essay to complain that sex outside of marriage shouldn't be considered 'modern' (or by implication, 'good'); DH Lawrence warns that while women seem to enjoy having sex for pleasure, they're sure to soon regret jettisoning romance and marriage; and Clarence Darrow totally beclowns himself by waxing nostalgic about the great discursive community that used to be found in barbershops before men could easily shave at home, and then concludes that it's women voting and getting short haircuts that's really ruining things, and that men are now an oppressed minority. Yes, even a hundred years ago, there were men whining that any little advance for women meant that men were being persecuted and we'd better turn back whatever gains we'd made toward equality before it was too late. It's sometimes hard to tell if these guys are sincerely panicking or making a cynical bad faith argument in the hope that it's more persuasive than raw misogyny would be, but it hardly matters because they're always wrong. They always think any step toward equality is 'too far' because what they really want is more in-equality, specifically the kind that favors themselves. (There's a similar sort of White reaction to any advancement for people of color that's just as awful.)
 
The celebrity profiles again mostly seem like editor Graydon Carter simply wanted to show off all the people who wrote for Vanity Fair and all the people they wrote about. We get so-so stories about Picasso, James Joyce, Cole Porter, Harpo Marx. The best one, I think, was Janet Flanner's "The Grand Guillotiner of Paris" about how even in the 1930s, being a French executioner was a hereditary position endowed by the state, and the family privately owned the only working guillotines in the country. Darwin Teilhet also has an interesting piece about the then-ubiquitous Tarzan and the many, many licensing opportunities Edgar Rice Burroughs used to get the character into books, magazines, the movies and Sunday newspaper comic strips, and working as an ad spokesman for countless products. Unlike a lot of the others pieces, those seem to be here due to sheer quality, rather than because they talk about something modern readers are likely to strongly associate with the time period.

Original essay - I flew from Ohio to Georgia Sunday night

I flew from Ohio to Georgia Sunday night, while the world and the airline industry were still recovering from Friday's mass computer failure. My flight was delayed by about 3 hours. It was the last flight of the evening, and only the second Delta departure on Sunday. They'd managed only one plane Friday and another on Saturday. The Dayton airport was nearly empty when I got there.
 
When I arrived in Atlanta, the airport looked like a refuge camp, or a Circle of Hell. We'd been delayed taking off and rerouted to different gates twice after landing, nearly doubling the length of an otherwise short flight. Every seat in the gate area was full, and most of the floorspace. People reclined, laid down, slept, or tried to stay awake. They looked like they'd been there too long already, and there was no end in sight.
 
I passed a queue of people twenty gates long, stretching from C10 to C30. I don't know what they were lined up for - no one plane could hold them all. Most of the shops had their lights off and security gates locked. Starbucks was closed temporarily while they waited for an emergency resupply. One cart had just arrived, and I passed two more, stacked my height with boxes, as I walked to the end of the concourse. The arrival and departure boards were a sea of red, every flight delayed or canceled. Every gate was full of people, waiting, waiting. A few people ran, to catch connecting flights perhaps, but it looked almost insane to hurry in this place where so few moved at all.
 

departure screens showing flight delays, image by me

 
The plane train was out of order. There was no sign, no announcement, but I gathered from the way no one else stopped to wait for it, and I let myself become part of the crowd, the tide flowing toward the baggage claims and exits. From the moving walkways I saw people lying against the walls. Between the C and B concourses there are museum-like displays, tables covered in text. Each of those prime spots was claimed by a large White man using it as a shelter. One use the plug point to power his CPAP machine while he slept, the mask just visible beneath a baseball cap worn over his face.
 
The next plane train station was completely full. I realized that half the loop was closed, so instead of its usual continuous operation, it was now bussing back and forth along a single piece of track. The train arrived, going our way, the doors opened. Some squeezed in, but there wasn't enough room, not nearly enough room for everyone. I kept walking. Between B and A the lights are dimmed, the decor a mock forest. No one could lay down on these floors because there were simply too many people. People with no gate, no flight, no hotel, nowhere to go, nothing to do but wait. So they sat and hugged their knees, tried to keep their bags close, read their phones or tried to sleep. On the moving walkway, I coasted past them, a fortunate spectator, with nothing but luck and chance to thank for the improvement of my condition over theirs.
 
Past the A concourse an overflowing crowd blocked the exit. The walkway, insensate and mechanical, conveyed us forward at a steady speed, the world's weakest unstoppable force, propelling us into an immovable mass of our fellows. The regular path ahead was closed, everyone was being routed onto an escalator. I saw a man lose his balance and begin to topple backwards, but those in front of me caught him and set him right. Again, the machine worked at its prescribed pace, and dumped us at the top into another too close crowd. I nearly fell, and tried, even as I regained myself, to hurry out of the way, to avoid bumping anyone behind me like a domino.
 
We took an irregular route to the ticketing counters, the baggage claims, the exits. Half the hallway was coned off for cleaning, funneling us more narrowly, claustrophobically than the space itself might allow. Atlanta's security was closed and caged off. No one else was getting in tonight, and the only ones leaving were those of us with somewhere to go. I passed through revolving doors I've never seen or used before, and arrived in the main lobby. A few people waited by nearly empty luggage carousels. Between them, hundreds of suitcases were lined up and cordonded off. The luggage office was full and overflowed, more suitcases standing, waiting, in front of the glass doors.
 
Finally, finally, I took the last escalator down to the shuttle that would take me to my parking lot. I was out.
 
 
Note: I don't know how often I'll write original essays to post here, but this experience was strange enough, and noteworthy enough, that I felt I had to write something down about it.

Part of Your World

 

Part of Your World

by Stephanie Strohm

art by Kelly Matthews and Nichole Matthews

adapted from the novel by Liz Braswell

Disney Hyperion

2018, adapted 2023

 

 

Starting about ten years ago, Disney has begun putting out a series of YA novels called Twisted Tales that are basically like Marvel What If? stories, except for Disney movies. That series is still ongoing, but this year they've also started publishing graphic novel adaptations of the earlier books. Part of Your World is the first of these YA comics. In Marvel style, we might ask "What if ... Prince Eric married Ursula the sea witch instead of Ariel the little mermaid?"
 
So this is like, kind of a fanfic sequel, with the original publisher's approval. I wasn't really sure what kind of quality to expect here. I was initially unaware that Disney's been selling these books for a decade now, but the premise seemed interesting enough, and I was intrigued by the cover art of an adult Ariel decked out as the queen of the oceans, with a crown, breast plate, a spiny conch shell pauldron on one shoulder, the trident, the whole bit.
 
When Ursula won, she transformed King Triton into one of her gross little sea polyp captives, and sent the mute Ariel home in disgrace. Ariel's sisters decided they liked being princesses and party girls, so they made her take on the responsibilities of leadership as penance. Without her voice, Ariel learned sign language, but became isolated outside of her official responsibilities. Back on land, Ursula remained disguised as 'Vanessa,' married Eric, and became princess of his kingdom. With Eric and many of the palace servants beset with a magical confusion that prevents them from clearly remembering what's happened, Ursula takes the reigns and immediately starts the kingdom on vanity projects and wars with their neighbors.
 
Sometimes I think that, contrary to what Tolstoy said about unhappy families, that all bad leaders are bad in pretty much the same ways. They may look different, but that's mostly window dressing. Inevitably, they collect sycophants, punish critics, take in too much of the community's resources and use them to enrich themselves, reward their friends, and build monuments to themselves. They try to crush any way people might form groups that could give them strength in numbers, they drain the trust from society by encouraging spying and snitching. The rules apply only to the ruled. And sooner or later they'll want to send you and your children to die in a land war that is essentially a personal conflict between themselves and some other leader (good or also bad) who wouldn't accede to their demands. All of this is inevitable, even if the statues and slogans look a little different each time. For awhile, maybe this seems okay if you're one of the sycophants or friends, if you don't mind everything being wrecked and ruined around you, but ultimately it's still like having a comfortable seat to watch the house you're inside get burned down.
 
Anyway, Ursula is a bad ruler, Ariel is seemingly a good one, a servant to her people, and Eric is befuddled and spends his time writing operas. As the story opens, he's just written one that accurately recounts the events of Disney's The Little Mermaid, suggesting that he may be regaining his senses. A seagull brings the news to Ariel, who decides to return, although initially not for Eric, but to rescue her dad.
 
With the power of her trident, Ariel can temporarily turn herself into a human without needing extra help, so she does, and goes to sneak into the royal palace. She meets a couple servants, who recognize her and thus regain their memories, and steals back her voice, which Ursula was keeping in a locket. This tips Ursula off, since she immediately realizes what it means when she gets her own real voice back.
 
The next part of the book is structurally repetitive, but the conversations the characters have change enough to keep things interesting. Ariel sneaks onto shore, she doesn't find Triton but does talk to Eric, they achieve some degree of reconciliation, Ariel returns home and talks to one of her sisters, Eric learns more about how Ursula's been ruling while he wasn't paying attention, and confronts her some about it. Ursula keeps threatening to execute various people if Ariel or Eric cross some red line, but never actually stops them.
 
This is the part of the book that felt the most like fanfic to me, partly because of the episodic format, but mostly because it had so much embedded meta-commentary about the original story. Ariel gets to scold Eric for not being able to tell her and 'Vanessa' apart, and Eric gets to offer a possible defense. They debate why mermaids are sexy but octopus women are gross. Eric realizes that Ursula's dependency on contracts makes their marriage vows much more binding for her than they would be for a human wife. It's the kind of thing readers talk about afterward, but coming out of the mouths of the characters.
 
The culmination of all this is that Eric and Ariel come up with a plan to expose Ursula to the public. Meanwhile, she plans a mass human sacrifice of that same public to 'a great old one' whom she invokes by chanting a text she got when she invaded Carcosa, a text that includes "ia ia!" and "phtagan" ... yes that's right, Ursula the sea witch is summoning Cthulhu! There's a great page where the whole crowd grasps their heads in pain as the madness starts to take them.
 
But fortunately, of the two dueling plans, it's Ariel's that succeeds. Triton is freed, Ursula dies, and Eric and Ariel start dating again, both as grown adults, this time on a far more equal basis.
 
I'm definitely not going to read all of these, but as a proof-of-concept, Part of Your World shows that one of these stories can be pretty good, so I might read another if one interests me.

Fantastic Planet

 

Fantastic Planet

by Stefan Wul

translated by Anthony Georges Whyte

Creation Oneiros

1957, reprinted 2010

 

 

Fantastic Planet is a 2010 English translation of French scifi author Stefan Wul's 1957 novel Oms en serie. Avid followers of the blog might remember that I read the graphic novel adaptation of Wul's book Trapped on Zarkass awhile back.
 

Fantastic Planet is also the English language title of La planete sauvage, the 1973 animated film adaptation of Oms en serie, which has kind of attained cult movie status in the US. That film is the first way I encountered the story, and after reading the book it was based on, I think the cartoon might be the best version of the story.
 
I missed my chance to buy my own copy of this book when it first came out, and now it's basically not available for sale at any price. Fortunately the ILL office at my library was able to borrow a copy for me! The book itself seems surprisingly cheaply made, considering. The author's name is misspelled on the cover. The aliens who are called 'Draags' in the original, the film, and the back cover, are for some reason called 'Traags' in the text. And there are maybe a dozen places where the space between two words is missing, combining them intoone.
 

Fantastic Planet follows the life of a human named Terr on the alien planet of Ygam. Terr is short for 'terror,' but also obviously a pun on the French word for earth, terre. Ygam is the home of the giant Draags, compared to whom humans are tiny, probably the size of a GI Joe or Barbie. The Draags call humans 'Oms' - again, a pun; the French word for humans is hommes - and they keep us as pets. Pet Oms are believed to be unintelligent, although most can learn a bit of the Draag language. Terr inadvertently listens to a lot of his owner's daughter's audio school lessons and learns much more than usual.
 
Terr flees his owner's home and starts living in a giant tree in the city park with a colony of wild and feral Oms. His ability to read immediately helps the colony's scavenging efforts, and soon he sees a sign announcing the 'deomization' of the park, allowing them to flee to safety in time. Terr eventually becomes the leader. The Oms move into an abandoned Draag city, commandeer a trio of boats, and sail to an uninhabited continent, where they build a new city.
 
All the while, the Draag government slowly becomes aware of the growing size and intelligence of the wild Om population. They're aware of where we came from, and fear us becoming a rival, or even the new dominant species of their planet. Terr and the others repeatedly outmaneuver the Draags, repurposing their own technology to use against them. After achieving military detente, Terr asks for equality (and freedom for any remaining pet Oms), not dominance.
 
I mentioned that compared to humans, the Draags are giants. They also live their lives on a different scale. One Ygam day is equivalent to 45 earth days. Thus, each hour for the Draags is like two days for their pets. From the Draags' perspective, they live at the same pace that humans live on Earth, in terms of their lifespan and how much they do in a day. And so from their perspective, the Oms aren't just tiny, but quick, napping and waking constantly throughout each day, maturing quickly, and living for only a fraction of the Draag lifespan, usually only a year, at most two. The Oms succeed in part because they're far more intelligent than the Draags believe (even though they've lost their language, culture, history to enslavement), but also because they simply do everything much more quickly. Whenever the Draags decide at the end of the workday to do something tomorrow morning, the Oms have two or three weeks to run away in time.
 
There are two things I like about the way Wul approaches this. The first is that he establishes the basic difference in scale but doesn't get bogged down in details or realistic consequences. I associate this way of doing things with European scifi, and American literary authors dabbling in speculative fiction. Sometimes the looseness of this approach annoys me, but it really works here. Someone like Greg Egan would surely have spent several chapters explaining the imaginary physics and its implications, and any number of authors influenced by hard scifi, or like, Brandon Sanderson's systematic approach to writing about magic, would've felt honor bound to pantomime rigor. But Wul's more fantastical style works in this case.
 
The other thing I like is that although we're following human characters, the book is organized around Draag time. Journeys and other projects are described as taking hours or days or weeks - when what's unspoken is that this represents days, months, or years of human time. But the Oms think in the same terms and units as their captors. They themselves think of having children as 'breeding,' and when hundreds or thousands die in a single moment, the survivors act as though their own lives have no more significance than ants crushed underfoot. It's a little hard to explain how Wul does this, but when you're reading, it feels like the events are happening really quickly, even though we follow Terr from birth to old age. I would argue that it's this aspect of his storytelling, more than anything else, that distinguishes Fantastic Planet from any other 'aliens conquer humans' stories.
 
Considering the difficulty, verging on impossibility, of finding a copy of this to read, alongside the very faithful weirdness of the animated adaptation, I recommend just watching the film.

The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth

 
 

The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth

Understanding Our World and Its Ecosystems

by Rachel Ignotofsky

Ten Speed Books

2018 

 

 

The Wonderous Workings of Planet Earth is a graphic nonfiction book by artist Rachel Ignotofsky that functions as an introduction to ecology for young readers. Parts of the book are fully accessible to kids, other parts seem designed to supplement what teenagers might be learning in high school biology. Ignotofsky's art is charming, and has a clarity that often resembles an infographic or instructional poster. You could just about use this as a textbook, certainly it could serve as a starting point for other reading to learn more about the topics it introduces.

The heart of Ignotofsky's book, taking up well over half its pages, is a tour through some of the unique, distinctive ecosystems on each continent. In North America, we see the redwood forest, mangrove swamps, and Midwestern prairie. Globally, we take in sights like the Andes, Alps, and Himalayas; the Amazon, Sahara, and savanna; and several that might not've made the shortlist in other books, like the Siberian Taiga, Mongolian Steppes, the Horn of Africa, Great Barrier Reef, and Arctic Circle.

Each system gets a two-page spread with a full-page illustration paired with a page of text. Each illustration depicts the biome inside a terrarium, a motif that's both pretty and emphasizes the way each system is somewhat self-contained. We see terrain, common plants and animals, and diagrams showing how energy moves through the system from the primary producers, though all the consumers, and up to the apex predators. Ignotofsky also discusses the threats that human activity pose to each environment.
 
There are a few more ecosystems too, that fall outside the continental framework - a pond and fallen log, a drop of water, the open ocean and sea floor.
 
Before her tour of these ecosystems, Ignotofsky takes us on a brief tour of introductory biology and ecology, with an emphasis on understanding how each system is made up of multiple populations of plants and animals that fit together in particular ways. After the tour, we learn about the carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, and water cycles. We also learn more about how humans have affected the environment, especially through climate change, and the many consequences of a warming planet. Ignotofsky also talks about steps we can take to help, which includes predictable individual actions, but also advocacy to your legislature, and poverty reduction as climate action.