Kungfunurse

I'm reminded of the time we read Kafka's The Metamorphosis in school and the teacher asked us to raise our hands if we actually thought it was about a man transforming into a bug, and....I raised my hand. Because yes??? That is literally what happens! However, I also understood and knew it was acting as a metaphor too! But just because it is a metaphoric commentary on mental illness / disability and the way people around you change their treatment of you, doesn't mean the actual story is not literally about a dude who turns into a bug!

In-universe? Elsa has ice powers. Magic that creates ice and snow comes out of her hands, which can bury a whole kingdom without her even realizing it, which can stab you with ice shards or even conjure up a snow-monster to chase you away if she choses, and which will slowly transform you into ice if a blast of it hits you in the heart. This magic is linked to her emotions and becomes hard to control when she's upset, but can be controlled by love.

Book club book (and I am NOT happy with the person who picked this one...). In The Glass Bead Game, a biographer recounts the life of Joseph Knecht, who rose to prominence in the isolated intellectual sect of the Castalians. But even as Knecht ascends to the abstract heights of the Glass Bead Game, he begins to question the very purpose of the Castalians...

It feels a bit strange to log on to goodreads dot com and write up a review for the 1946 winner of the entire Nobel Prize, but we stay silly! Particularly since I disagreed strongly with the central premise. In the misty future, Castalians are an elite, educated sect who are originally elevated as children from the lower schools. They are exclusively boys, and they study a neutered curriculum composed of only philosophy, mathematics, philology, and music. Biology is functionally taboo, as is history, engineering, and anything else that reeks of the practical. I was surprised something as tangible as music was permitted, but of course, the Castalians are proscribed from actually composing. We spend six hundred pages agonizingly pondering if the Castalian life is sustainable, when the answer seems obvious from about page five. How can any scholarship thrive when it is predicated on the idea that more abstraction directly correlates with more value? Also, needless to say, it's blazingly sexist. The only women who merit half-line mentions are somebody's wife, or somebody's mother. Women are entirely excluded from not only Castalia, but apparently all intellectual life, although I couldn't swear to this since Hesse is so profoundly disinterested in addressing the subject. And this is NOT just "the attitudes of his time." Glass Bead Game was published in 1943, post-dating Sayers' Gaudy Night (prominently centering women in academia) by nearly a decade. I think the cherry on top of the whole "Castalia question" is when I looked up Hesse's biography and discovered that he had refused to denounce the Nazis, as his scholarly ethics proscribed commenting on worldly affairs. Or something. Talk about being on the wrong side of history.

Meanwhile, I think I can decisively state that this book did not win a Nobel for the prose. Hesse tends to a heavy stolidity that becomes tiresome after just a few paragraphs, let alone six hundred pages:

For them, and especially for the writers of those days who had a distinct taste for biography, the essence of a personality seems to have been deviance, abnormality, uniqueness, in fact all too often the pathological. We moderns, on the other hand, do not even speak of major personalities until we encounter men who have gone beyond all original and idiosyncratic qualities to achieve the greatest possible integration into the generality, the greatest possible service to the suprapersonal.

Perhaps if we are feeling generous, we can fault the grim hand of the translator here... I do think that we are not meant to take the biographer's pompousness seriously, nor trust him entirely as a narrator. After all, he writes as a Castalian burnishing the record of a great, if ultimately flawed, luminary. There's a tantalizing implication at the beginning of the novel that the saintly Knecht burned down his secondary school to conceal his disciplinary record, but the bare hints are not enough for me to pry up the biographer's facade. Although I will say the only examples of Knecht's own writing we get—the self-insert historical lives he wrote as a student—are remarkably conceited. Despite the narrator's protestations, I don't see much evidence of humility there.

Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't take a shot at Hesse's depiction of "the Orient"—and it's definitely "the Orient" here. In his student years, Knecht develops a fascination with Eastern philosophies, which are depicted with at best, ignorance, and at worst, outright contempt. Unlike the sexism, the racism here is of Hesse's time, but I don't think that justifies it. We can quibble whether Knecht's/the narrator's opinions are truly Hesse's opinions, but stop telling me with an air of great authority that in China everybody addresses others as "Elder Brother", regardless of rank. I'd like to see you try that one.

sam: turns page to an illustration of thorin, with his dark hair and blue eyes

there’s sixteen Colorado counties that their most searched was “wolf furry”, plus thirty-odd counties (not counting either Arapahoe or any of the ones marked here as “Insufficient Data”) which may well have had plenty of searches for “wolf furry”, just fewer than for whatever they’re labeled here

and “skunk furry” searches in Arapahoe County outnumbered “wolf furry” searches in the entire state of Colorado

ok the fact you haven't watched it makes this reply really really funny

because jack DOES mend/remake his fashion.

between nearly every episode.

every episode starts with him in fresh clothes! he doesn't have sexy battle damage because he just goes around in ragged clothes. he just gets his clothing torn over

and over

and over

and over

and over

all of these are from different episodes.

every one of them is from season 1.

one of them is from a fairy tale a bunch of children invent about Jack's adventures. He's infamous for getting his clothing shredded within the show itself.

the showrunners really, really, really liked seeing Jack topless. and sometimes bottomless.

has come to my attention that not all ppl know abt the samurai jack season 5 production crew wrap up party cake

And then there's a bit right at the end of the story as the wife and the husband are walking out of court:

Jill turned abruptly. "What is your name? Your real name."

The man's gray eyes flickered. He smiled a little, kind, gentle smile. "I'm afraid you would not be able to pronounce it. The sounds cannot be formed..."

Jill was silent as they walked along, deep in thought. The city lights were coming on all around them. Bright yellow spots in the gloom. "What are you thinking?" the man asked.

"I was thinking perhaps I will still call you Lester," Jill said. "If you don't mind."

"I don't mind," the man said. He put his arm around her, drawing her close to him. He gazed down tenderly as they walked through the thickening darkness, between the yellow candles of light that marked the way. "Anything you wish. Whatever will make you happy."

And I. God. There's something there. A soupcon of monsterfuckery. To tell your partner in a moment of intimacy that yes, you're something so inhuman that the lips you're stealing can't speak your actual name. You're a parasite that not only had the ability to burrow under this man's skin and take over his life, but you were so desperate to escape a dead, dry, blasted planet that you did.

And I was like “I’m flattered you think so! No, he’s not intended to be autistic, but I’m glad you can see yourself in him.”