Surrounded by Books

I saw this picture this morning on Tumblr, thought, Wouldn't it be nice to spend my days surrounded by that many books? And lo, I proceeded to spend the day perched on my bed, surrounded by about that many library books. It's thesis bibliography day!


Although my back is now stiff from bending over so many books, it's been a lovely three-and-a-half hours of flipping through pages, skimming the fine print to find out exactly when each book was originally published and where.

I also noticed (really noticed, that is), how lovely it is that books are printed in all different shapes and sizes and with different weights of paper, cut in different ways. DVDs and CDs and especially computer screens are so horribly uniform and cold - they've got no smell, no texture, no weight. I think even more than reading books, I like handling them and learning to recognize them by their covers and their unique shape.

I just don't understand Kindle.

Now I need to go put all my books back on my bookshelf.


Photo: http://scarlettshaney.tumblr.com/post/11584628886

Slightly Disappointed Expectations

I just watched The Corpse Bride last night - one of the many many films I want to see as background to my thesis - and once again my expectations about Tim Burton were set a bit too high.


I didn't grow up on Burton, haven't ever seen The Nightmare Before Christmas (which most people seem to be intimately familiar with since childhood), but I've always thought his films would resonate with my interest in animation, weird/dark/fantasy worlds, etc. Alice in Wonderland was the first of his films that I actually saw, and I was disappointed. The film was OK in and of itself, but it most certainly did not provide the crazy visuals, dark atmospherics, and general inventiveness I had been led to expect.

I wanted to give Burton a second chance, but I feel the same way about The Corpse Bride. First of all, the animation was pretty uninteresting. The characters were different shapes and sizes and had various cartoonish deformities, but they all moved with the same unreal, unweighted, ungrounded glide. I get that they weren't supposed to look human, of course, but I feel like the animators had their priorities all wrong when they sorted out the human qualities and the puppet- or doll-like qualities. You can make your characters very surreal and weird, but they should maintain some kind of relation to gravity and they should be blessed with some richness in their tics and movements. Hayao Miyazaki is a good example of this - I remember hearing that his animation team visited a dog shelter in order to study the way that Haku's snout should be drawn when he becomes a dragon in Spirited Away. They were creating a creature of fantasy, but it was grounded in the reality of a common dog, so that the viewers can recognize it and believe it.

In terms of animation/design, I also really didn't like the characters' eyes - eyes are SO important, windows to the soul, all that, but these were just white spheres with a black dot. There was no shading, no rough edges, no way that I could see these characters as anything but the products of a computer.

My second qualm with the film is the demystification of the underworld. The more I see, the more I read, and the more I myself write, the more I learn that, simply put, less is more. For example, in Doctor Who, my favorite aliens are the Weeping Angels, and I think a lot of people share that preference - why? Because it's when you can't see them that they can attack you. You can never see them in their true terrifying form. Cue imagination to run wild. In this movie, Burton created one single moment of mystery - when we saw the Bride's hand as both a dead tree branch and a hand at the same time. But even then it was pretty darn clear that it was a hand. And after that, she rose up out of her grave, we saw her head-to-toe, and all the enigma went out of the film. This isn't to say that artists shouldn't try their hand at depicting something like the underworld or the dead. But you can do it in such a way that every revelation creates more mystery. This is especially true of animation, because you can create such amazing atmosphere and such complexity in the imagery. Think about the kitchen in Ratatouille. So much detail! And yet you felt like you'd barely scratched the surface of the place. But Burton definitely did not succeed in capturing any of that richness in the story or the visuals.

Being a kind person, though, I'm going to give him a third chance and watch Edward Scissorhands.

The Art of Foolproofing

I was looking through some old Cook's magazines and noticed the preponderance of the word 'Foolproof' in the names of their recipes. Foolproof Peach Shortbread, for example (which by the way sounds delicious). It got me to imagining a foolish person who could inadvertently do everything they can to ruin the peach shortbread but would always be foiled by the recipe's excellent foolproofing. But does a foolproof recipe lower itself to the mental level of the foolish cook in order to accommodate him or her? Or must it be super-intelligent, to make up for the lack of a cooking knack in the fool?

It's a bit depressing to think that recipes feel the need to protect themselves against human incompetence, especially recipes in a magazine like Cooks, which is the most elite cooking magazine I've ever encountered. It's equally sad to think that we don't use the word 'Fool' anymore. It's a nice word, because it conjures a kind of harmless, lumbering stupidity and, at the same time, the wise fooling of Feste and his Shakespearean compatriots, who masquerade as fools in order to show others, usually kings, that they are the real fools. I think we should bring both foolproofing and Shakespearean fooling back into style. Luckily, we don't need to worry about the fools themselves, because there are just as many of them as there ever were.

What I'm Reading Right Now

some quotes

A couple of quotes I liked - cited in a book I'm reading about the Quay Brothers' films. The book is a little too theoretical for my liking, but the sources are interesting.

"...theorizing is what one does in the barren intervals between good films: once one's enthusiasm for the last work has died down, one finds oneself stranded in an imageless wilderness, and, left with nothing to think about, one begins to think abstractly."
- Paul Coates

"The writer is not tied to the physical concreteness of a given setting; therefore, he is free to connect one object with another even though in actuality the two may not be neighbours either in time or in space. And since he uses as his material not the actual percept but its conceptual name, he can compose his images of elements that are taken from disparate sensory sources. He does not have to worry whether the combinations he creates are possible or even imaginable in the physical world. . . . The writer operates on what I called the second or higher level, at which the visual and auditory arts also discover their kinship. We understand now why the writer can fuse the rustling of the wind, the sailing of the clouds, the odour of rotting leaves, and the touch of raindrops on the skin into one genuine unity."
- Rudolf Arnheim

Books are cool....but why?

I've been reading books a lot this weekend, which in and of itself is unusual and blog-worthy. Most of my reading when I'm at school is confined to scholarly articles and a couple of newspaper pieces. However, I've spent the last few weeks checking quite a few books out of the library. In fact, I'm in the process of transferring every book about anything related to my thesis from the library to my room. I'm starting to run out of space on my book shelf.

Until now, I've been content to admire the books accumulating. This weekend, though, I started reading them. And they are so good. Thus far, I've been reading about some filmmakers whose work relates to my thesis topic - or at least, I hoped it would relate. So I've been elated to discover that it doesn't just relate. It's sparking ideas, pointing to connections, clarifying concepts, and offering leads. And it's so fun to see the idea of my thesis (the biggest idea I've had to come up with during my college education) being confirmed by professional writers and filmmakers. The main thought in my head when I'm reading the analysis of these films is a giant YES!

Aside from assuring me that my thesis actually might work out, these books are just plain interesting. The main topic is the influence of fairy tales in film, but the wider scatter of ideas I'm exploring includes the manifestations of archetype, the role of national culture in a filmmaker's approach to an internationally known story, and the variations on imagery that pervades a certain tradition and even appears across multiple traditions. Things like the use of mirrors to represent split identities, fractured social orders, distorted perceptions, or prescient, omniscient vision. This is just so interesting to me.

At a certain point, though, as I was reveling in all this wonderful literary/cinematic theory, I started to ask myself whether I was appreciating it as a fiction writer or as a critical reader. Do I love this kind of analysis because it inspires me to write a story that plays with mirror imagery, or do I just relish the intellectual thrill of gaining a different perspective on a text or a film or even an entire cultural tradition? And are those two things even separable for me? Because writing - critical writing but also fiction writing - is how I express and explore both the inspiration and the thrill. I think that for me they're intertwined. I could have the desire to write stories without concerning myself with cultural observation and criticism, and I could appreciate literary theory or the academic interpretation of a film without wanting to then create my own stories. But instead, in typical fashion, I want both.

Anyway, enough speculation. Back to my reading. Trust me to start questioning my intellectual standpoint and creative identity while I'm supposed to be working on my thesis.

Body Issmues

Body image issues, that is. As I'm a student at an women's college, you'd expect this to be a topic I would hear a lot about. In reality, it doesn't get talked about that much, not in the public sphere and not in the private sphere, either (at least, not the sphere I run in). But on one of the YouTube channels I subscribe to, the sarcaschicks, the five girls who run the channel have been addressing the topic in their videos this week. So it got me thinking about the subject of body image, about its role at my college and its role in my life.

The sarcaschicks' videos have been quite gutsy as far as YouTube videos go. The topics they're discussing are important to bring into the public sphere, because young women in western society are not only encouraged to obsess about personal appearance, but also to obsess about it privately. It's all very well to spend hours in front of your full-length mirror in the privacy of your own room, but glancing in mirrors or other reflective surfaces as you go about your life outside just makes you look vain. Which is not to say that people don't do it - you wouldn't believe how many reflective shop windows I found on my commute to work this summer. Or maybe you would because you do the same thing. But we certainly shouldn't talk about it aloud.

On the flip side of this is the kind of treacly, self-pitying over-sharing that some girls practice but that does nothing to advance the discussion or change attitudes. This is when girls admit to feeling ugly and everyone assures them that they have nice hair. As Sonya says in Uncle Vanya, everyone compliments plain girls on their hair. These kinds of conversations don't make anyone feel better, and besides, they usually take place in dorm rooms late at night - so much for public discussion.

So far, the sarcaschicks' have narrowly avoided this kind of nonsense. Instead, they're being realistic about their feelings, recognizing that a lot of girls sometimes feel shitty about their bodies and that it shouldn't be so common, but that girls also shouldn't feel worse just because every so often they succumb to the enormous pressure that society puts on young women to be beautiful all the time. So, good going for getting it out in a public space like YouTube, and here's hoping this won't devolve into a girls' therapy session.

What I'd really like to see, of course, is some of YouTube's sizable male vlogger population getting in on the chat. So far, there've been some video responses from girls, and a nod to the issue by WOTO, but they never broke their persona of funny guys. I'm glad that the women of the vlogosphere are taking charge and attacking body image issues head-on without waiting for the go-ahead from their male counterparts, but I also wish there was more of a conversation so that we could get away once and for all from the cycle of women wiping the mascara off each other's cheeks and sending each other back out into the world with a painted smile on their faces.

So much for my critical analysis of gender dynamics on YouTube. In my own life, I've noticed the same problems. For example, the gym at my college is a so-called "Fat-Talk-Free Zone." What I guess this means is that no one is supposed to be complaining about how fat they feel or reveling in how thin they are or making any related commentary about each other. So, this is a laudable effort, but it also compounds the problem I mentioned earlier, which is of the world encouraging women to keep quiet about the way they feel about their bodies. Which could have the positive effect of making people think about other, more important stuff or could just make those feelings fester.

When I say 'more important stuff,' I'm fully cognizant of the fact that personal appearance is actually extremely important. It's important in our social interactions, it's important in our inner psychology, and it's important in our basic instincts. The point of life, after all, is to find a suitable mate and keep life going, and there are a few key ways of judging who's best: their skill in fighting, their resistance to disease, their parenting instincts, their loyalty, their longevity. Of course, we don't usually go up to someone in a bar and start asking them how their immune system's been doing lately. No, instead, we look them up and down and decide then and there whether they're worth a shot or not. Facial symmetry, body shape, height, the straightness of someone's teeth....I think people aren't even necessarily aware of their mental check-list, but it's certainly a factor in both sexual relationships and just plain old friendships. Because being attractive is an asset in social circles as well.

I happen to be very conscious of how I judge people's appearance. Partly because I love and adore looking at people's clothes and partly because I think people in general - their body language, facial tics, gait, etc. - are just fascinating. I sometimes have trouble in class or in a conversation keeping my mind focused on the topic at hand because all I really want to do is stare at the way that scarf sits on someone's shoulder or the way their shirt fits. It's not creepy, it just looks creepy when you're caught staring at a part of a person's body that's not their face.

Thing is, I don't just notice people's appearance, I also judge them on it. But I think, or I hope, that what I judge them on is not something that they were born with, like the structure of their face, but rather the things they purposefully designed about their appearance. And it's not that I divide the world into the people I like and the people I hate based on what they chose to wear or whether or not their hair is dyed. What I do enjoy guessing is what each person was thinking that morning when they decided what to wear. I'm aware of the signals I'm sending with the way I dress and the way I carry myself, and I assume other people are also trying to send signals. I like decoding them.

So. I don't have a conclusion to this outrageously long post. Except that it's dinner time. Thanks for listening.