Quotations

There's no real theme to these quotes. Just stuff I've written down at some point, for some reason often lost to me.

With us, positive knowledge so greatly overflows our imaginative powers that our imagination, unable to apprehend the world that is revealed to it, has no other alternative than to run to myth again.

Levi-Strauss, The Story of Lynx

 

Every world must be won by interpretation, of which common sense, science, and religion are all variants.

Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds

All money, false or true, depends on a confidence trick.

Mary Douglas , Purity and Danger

 

Truth is what you make it.

Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light

 

It has not been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditating upon the fact that he is better off than others.

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

You know, I like to think that I am general enough and common enough so that I have some empathetic approach to nearly every human emotion and feeling and thought. Of course it is only that I like to think this. It does not make it true but if it were true I would be a better writer for it. There is one field of feeling, however, in which either I am different from most people or they do not tell the truth—perhaps not knowing it or not daring to face it or perhaps feeling that it is a monstrous thing which should not be brought to light. I don’t know that this is so. I simply offer these as reasons why people do not seem to feel as I do. I refer to the will to live. I have very little of it. This must not be confused with a death wish. I have no will to die but I can remember no time from earliest childhood until this morning when I would not have preferred never to have existed. No moment of joy or excitement or sharp experience of pain or sorrow has even made me want to be alive if the opposite were possible. You see it is no longing for death but a kind of hunger never to have lived. The few times I have stated this I have been attacked with everything from straight disbelief to a kind of hatred as though I were a traitor to life. And perhaps I am.

John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel

I remember the lies, but the truth escapes me.

Paul McGarity

Can we talk about the Brothers Grimm for a minute?

I'm working my way through Ralph Manheim's translation of the Grimms' Tales for Young and Old. 32 stories in, just sitting there on the page, like everything's perfectly normal, is "Clever Hans." (Here's a full translation of it.).  I'll probably have a lot more to say about the Grimms' tales when I'm done with the whole thing. For now, let me tell you about Clever Hans.

It starts out pretty normal. Hans is going to see Gretel. She says he should have brought her something. Of course he replies that he didn't, so she should give him something instead. She gives him a needle. He sticks it in a hay wagon and walks home behind it. His mother asks him what he was doing, and he tells her about the needle. She says, "That was foolish, Hans. You should have stuck it in your sleeve."


The next day, he goes to see Gretel, again without a gift. She gives him a knife, which he sticks in his sleeve, thinking that's the best thing to do based on what his mother told him. But when he gets home, she says this was foolish; he should have put it in his pocket.

by Arthur Rackham

You see the structure starting to take shape already. The days play out the same way. Gretel gives him a goat, which of course he puts in his pocket. Mothers says he should have put a rope around its neck and led it home. Gretel gives him some bacon, which he ties to a rope, but should have put on his head. Puts a calf on his head, should have roped it and led it to trough.

by John D. Gruelle

When he goes to visit Gretel the next day, she says she'll just come home with him. So he ties a rope around her neck and takes her to the feed rack and ties her up there. His mother, in response to this, tells him he should have "cast sheep's eyes at her." Now, I'm presuming that "sheeps' eyes" refers to something romantical. But, you can imagine what happens next. If you can't, I'll quote it directly from Manheim:

Hans goes to the barn, cuts the eyes out of all the sheep, and throws them in Gretel's face. At that Gretel gets angry, tears herself loose, and runs away. She's not engaged to Hans anymore.

Some day I'm going to put together a collection of the greatest short stories humanity has ever produced. Somewhere in the middle, between Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," I'll put "Clever Hans."

Different Perspectives

Quitely and Grant

Since I've posted quite a bit about All-Star Superman in the past, I thought I'd do so again.

Here's a link to a long article about the ray bradbury reference in the first issue.

 The writers at Hooded Utilitarian didn't buy into the general praise of the series, and they offer a series of insightful articles about why. This first one by Noah Berlatsky discusses how All-Star feels decadent, a retread of the silver age stories that never quite captures their true feeling. Here's another he wrote on the same subject.

I borrowed Berlatsky's scan of the sea dragon, art by Marley for the Korean comic Dokebi Bride. Looks amazing.

This next one by Berlatsky is a comparison of two images, one of Superman and the other of a big dragon. Here's a follow-up. I wanted to post these stories in part to give an alternate perspective on All-Star Superman, and the art of Frank Quitely. The writer shows the images in part to point out how the superhero image suffers by comparison. There's something worth quoting here:

The point here is that super-hero comics very rarely have a strong sense of wonder. With all the spectacular feats, you’d think they would—but somehow they all end up as tricks; they’re fun and goofy, or I guess more recently bloody, but they don’t actually inspire awe. And I think it’s because of something Tom said, “Superman keeps the universe our size.” Super-heroes are there to make things more manageable. Awe—a sense of vastness, of human insignificance or vulnerability—is antagonistic to everything they stand for. If Superman saw that dragon, he wouldn’t be scared or impressed—he’d just punch it in the snout. (As Wonder Woman did in a similar situation..) There’d be big explosions! There’d be excitement! There’d be action! But there wouldn’t be a moment where you said, “oh my god,” and felt rooted to one particular spot, and overwhelmed.

The point here is that super-hero comics very rarely have a strong sense of wonder. With all the spectacular feats, you’d think they would — but somehow they all end up as tricks; they’re fun and goofy, or I guess more recently bloody, but they don’t actually inspire awe. And I think it’s because of something Tom said, “Superman keeps the universe our size.” Super-heroes are there to make things more manageable. Awe — a sense of vastness, of human insignificance or vulnerability — is antagonistic to everything they stand for. If Superman saw that dragon, he wouldn’t be scared or impressed — he’d just punch it in the snout. (As Wonder Woman did in a similar situation..) There’d be big explosions! There’d be excitement! There’d be action! But there wouldn’t be a moment where you said, “oh my god,” and felt rooted to one particular spot, and overwhelmed. - See more at: http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2009/04/nowhere-man-somewhere-dragon/#sthash.OQBMq6hq.dpuf

The point here is that super-hero comics very rarely have a strong sense of wonder. With all the spectacular feats, you’d think they would — but somehow they all end up as tricks; they’re fun and goofy, or I guess more recently bloody, but they don’t actually inspire awe. And I think it’s because of something Tom said, “Superman keeps the universe our size.” Super-heroes are there to make things more manageable. Awe — a sense of vastness, of human insignificance or vulnerability — is antagonistic to everything they stand for. If Superman saw that dragon, he wouldn’t be scared or impressed — he’d just punch it in the snout. (As Wonder Woman did in a similar situation..) There’d be big explosions! There’d be excitement! There’d be action! But there wouldn’t be a moment where you said, “oh my god,” and felt rooted to one particular spot, and overwhelmed. - See more at: http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2009/04/nowhere-man-somewhere-dragon/#sthash.OQBMq6hq.dpuf

The point here is that super-hero comics very rarely have a strong sense of wonder. With all the spectacular feats, you’d think they would — but somehow they all end up as tricks; they’re fun and goofy, or I guess more recently bloody, but they don’t actually inspire awe. And I think it’s because of something Tom said, “Superman keeps the universe our size.” Super-heroes are there to make things more manageable. Awe — a sense of vastness, of human insignificance or vulnerability — is antagonistic to everything they stand for. If Superman saw that dragon, he wouldn’t be scared or impressed — he’d just punch it in the snout. (As Wonder Woman did in a similar situation..) There’d be big explosions! There’d be excitement! There’d be action! But there wouldn’t be a moment where you said, “oh my god,” and felt rooted to one particular spot, and overwhelmed. - See more at: http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2009/04/nowhere-man-somewhere-dragon/#sthash.OQBMq6hq.dpuf

The point here is that super-hero comics very rarely have a strong sense of wonder. With all the spectacular feats, you’d think they would — but somehow they all end up as tricks; they’re fun and goofy, or I guess more recently bloody, but they don’t actually inspire awe. And I think it’s because of something Tom said, “Superman keeps the universe our size.” Super-heroes are there to make things more manageable. Awe — a sense of vastness, of human insignificance or vulnerability — is antagonistic to everything they stand for. If Superman saw that dragon, he wouldn’t be scared or impressed — he’d just punch it in the snout. (As Wonder Woman did in a similar situation..) There’d be big explosions! There’d be excitement! There’d be action! But there wouldn’t be a moment where you said, “oh my god,” and felt rooted to one particular spot, and overwhelmed. - See more at: http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2009/04/nowhere-man-somewhere-dragon/#sthash.OQBMq6hq.dpuf

It's certainly an interesting perspective on superhero comics. On the same website, Tom Crippen discusses Superman at length. He warns that it's a idiosyncratic perspective, and everything I've found in my own study of what people do with the character sort of works differently. Crippen wonders about the religious connections, the mythical nature of Superman, and I deal with that a lot (though not exhaustively--I pulled everything about Superman and the hero myth out of my book, though that seems really weird; it may be an article some day, if I can pare it down from the 70 pages it currently takes up). Anyway, here's a key point of Crippen's article:


There’s my Superman. He’s modernity. It’s what he stands for, and he grows directly out of it. He’s the odd doodle our collective mind drew when the second-by-second experience of modern existence, the way modernity feels, became impossible to ignore. “Super,” the category he embodies, represents the new dimension added to existence by technological development. The most extreme transformations in our physical environment are now produced by means we find unreal and abstract, that feel like they have nothing to do with us; he’s there to bridge the gap.

He also writes: When I was reading Superman, I was getting ready for a lifetime of user manuals and tax forms. All right, I'm bitter.

This is all interesting stuff, and worth thinking about. For Crippen, Superman is all about modernity. For both these writers, Superman isn't enough. He doesn't work in a beneficial way. For Berlatsky, there's no inspiration, no sense of wonder. One result of my own research, which involved interviewing people about what they do with Superman, is that I found Superman to be the inspiration these writers don't find. That's an awkward sentence, but the point is that plenty of people work to make the world a better place, modeled on their interpretation of Superman. The scholar Ben Saunders, in his book Do the Gods Wear Capes?, finds in Superman an evolving meditation on the nature of virtue, something that everyone I interviewed also indicated in one way or another. What Superman does is much less important than what we do with Superman in mind.

Cover by Mike Allred

Now, I talked to Superman fans, so they are predisposed to find useful things in Superman stories. When Berlatsky discusses the sense of awe, he's really getting at something religious, Rudolph Otto's sense of the numinous. That's not what Superman does. He's secular. I'm not saying that this makes Quitely's image of Superman in the sun any more valuable (in fact, nobody I talked to mentioned this image as being particularly meaningful to them); what I'm saying is that these writers don't find Superman valuable in the way that other people do. And that's fine. Personally, I like reading all the different perspectives, and both Berlatsky and Crippen make some really interesting points. Well worth reading.

While we're on the subject of Morrison's Superman, here are a few articles on his Action Comics run from a little while a go. From the Mindless Ones. And more. And on Morrison.

And while we're on the subject of awe-inducing images of sea monsters, I've always like this one, from the World's End volume of Sandman, by penciller Michael Zulli, inker Dick Giordano, and colorist Daniel Vozzo:

Better than the Book: The Black Stallion

I've put a few of these posts up before, in which I extoll the virtues of cinema by pointing out that books aren't always better than the movies based on them. Let's see, there was Wonder Boys, Psycho, The Wizard of Oz, Fight Club, Get Shorty, Lord of the Rings, and History of Violence. I've got a good sized list of these for future posts, but today's story came up recently.

I read this book to my son not too long ago. It's a good book, well worth reading. I'm such a fan of the movie that I couldn't believe I'd never read it before.

This was Walter Farley's first novel, and it shows. The prose isn't all that smooth--but to be fair I should note that I haven't read the subsequent volumes, and maybe he improves with experience. After all, he started writing it when he was in high school. The prose really isn't an issue, though. It's a kids' book, and the prose does its job. Regardless, the story's great.

This is a pretty great book.

So what makes the movie better? Showing us the horse. It's as simple as that. One thing implicit in all of these "Better than the Book" entries is that prose style is the equivalent of cinematography. We get to see lots of shots of the horse running and jumping and just being a horse on a beach. It's great, especially if you're a kid who already loves horses. It would take a tremendous talent to capture in prose what the camera can capture in images. Here, the medium makes the film better.

The movie has a couple of other things going for it. One is Hoyt Axton, who plays the father. He does a great job with the small amount of material he has. In the movie he tells a version of the story of Alexander the Great's horse, Bucephalus. He wins a tiny bronze figurine of Bucephalus in a card game, gives it to Alec, his son. Alec keeps it with him while stranded on the island after the boat sinks. I guess I could get into variations of the Bucephalus story (the version I know has the horse being afraid of its shadow, so the young Alexander merely turns the horse so it's facing away from the shadow, and it calms down enough so he can ride--that's not mentioned in the movie), but it's not entirely relevant.

I think what the movie does, and the book doesn't, is equate riding a horse with flying. Riding can give you that feeling. It's a feeling of endless possibility. Of strength and freedom. The book didn't really attempt to do this at all. It was purely a product of cinematography--of director Carroll Ballard and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel.

I want a bronze statue like that sooo very much.

Farley had a huge impact on my childhood. My grandfather was a horse trader, and lived just a mile from my parents' house. So I got to ride horses pretty much whenever I wanted. I named my horse Little Black, after Farley's picture book of the same name.

The Mystery Horse

So, the long and the short of it is that the film made me love this story, and the book is great, too. As I kid, I wanted to be Alec Ramsey. Reading it as an adult, I kinda still do. So maybe the movie's only better because I didn't read the book until I was an adult.