The Forever People (Jack Kirby)

 

The Forever People is the last part of Jack Kirby’s quadrivium of his original Fourth World. The Forever People, whose appellation is never adequately explained, are the classic team of four guys and a girl. Mark Moonrider is the leader, and most normal, save for his “megaton touch”; Serifan is cowboy-themed, armed with “cosmic cartridges”; Big Bear is the driver and predictably the strong one; Vykin the Black is the token black-skinned character who does nothing that would scream “black (human)”; and Beautiful Dreamer is the chick with long-range rather than melee powers. When the Forever People use the Mother Box, they can summon the Infinity Man in their place, much like Rick Jones could switch places with the Kree Captain Marvel. At this point, Infinity Man has no ties to any Fourth World characters other than the Forever People.

The Forever People are a reminder that even among the New Gods of New Genesis there are degrees of power, and that not all of them are royalty like Orion and Mister Miracle or elite warriors like Big Barda. The defiance of these three is lessened without the portrayal of others who find resistance more intimidating. The Forever People’s adventures illustrate the external manifestation of human inner conflicts such as the darkness exploited by Glorious Godfrey (for Amazing Grace is not a Kirby creation) or the illusion of happiness promoted by Desaad’s Happyland. A team of heroes against a more potent evil is where Kirby’s genius sometimes shines. In the grand scheme of the Fourth World, the Forever People are the balance to the Female Furies.

The Forever People lack the driving character narrative which both Orion and Scott Free possess. Although Beautiful Dreamer is believed to possess a portion of the Anti-Life Equation, Sunny Sumo eventually usurps that role. Sunny Sumo is an example of a character whose external manifestation of the human spirit is diminished by Kirby’s onomastic habits wandering into accidental racism. Heroes and superheroes are not subtle in their virtues or their physical traits, but this explicitness can clash with the real world of the audience (note the current refusal of Sima Liu to autograph Seventies issues of his Marvel character). Even if this issue is set aside, the Forever People suffer from the lack of characterization which Orion and Mister Miracle (and certainly Big Barda) do not; although here it must be conceded that the human companions of Orion are even more one-dimensional than the New Gods, who are personifications of ideas important to the Fourth World mythos. The reader has a sense of who Big Bear and Serifan are, but not so much Beautiful Dreamer, Vykin the Black, and Moonrider. It is not surprising that Orion and Mister Miracle became important in the post-Crisis universe, while the Forever People did not.

The Forever People, whatever their flaws might be, do have an advantage over their nobler fellow heroes: they receive a definite ending within the Jack Kirby run; Its later overwriting is not the fault of the King. This conclusion, a concept denied many times to Kirby’s world-building endeavors, is a poor consolation prize for the lack of a Kirby Ragnarok or epic overthrow of the father by the son. Fragmentation and incompletion are features of the epic tradition, as is work thwarted by the powers that be, so in one light at least, Kirby stands proud among those creators more honored among the academic world.

Notes on an Easter Sunday

 Christ is risen! My recent immersion into meters other than epic has triggered a certain sensitivity, so the portion of the introit that caught my eye was the meter. On the surface, it was four lines of iambic trimeter, hardly unusual for a hymn in English. The ictus of the measure, however, corresponded to the first long rather than the short first syllable. This inverted the iambs (short-long) into trochees (long-short), creating three lines, of which the first was acephalous - which, contrary to intuition, here indicates an extra syllable at the beginning of the line. This short syllable was “stolen” from the final iamb. The lines, therefore, viewed from this perspective, were an acephalous trochaic trimeter, followed by three lines of trochaic trimeter, and then a cretic (long-short-long). This made it a lyric meter in stress and measure, which is suitable for a hymn, but also a reminder of how much of what we use today derives from a tradition at least twenty-six centuries old.

The Sea of Stars, Volume One (Jason Aaron)

 The Sea of Stars, by Jason Aaron and Dennis Hallum is a graphic novel based on the metaphor of space as a hostile and alien sea. It is a story of father and son, since the vastness and strangeness of the cosmos must be balanced by more familiar intimacy. Space whales are always welcome fauna. Some of the imagery could be considered problematic and appropriative, but it is difficult to gauge an appropriate response without reading subsequent volumes: sometimes the noxious elements must be established before the narrative can refute them. The plot appears to be a mix of the return of Quetzalcoatl with the colonization and Christianization of Mexico. The small boy beaming with light is definitely a Chist child figure, even if one in the mold of an apocalyptic Gospel, the kind you don't bring home to Mama Church. The space shaman raised my eyebrows, as well as an eldritch space squid, which presumably will play the part of the devil. There is a strong father-son dynamic which may redeem the problematic aspects in the eyes of some people, In the eyes of others, however, having a literally white savior may be unforgivable.

Edit: I did read Volume Two, but I did not feel the content merited a review here.

There Are No Windows And I Must Scream

             A book which has haunted to me to this day is The World Inside, by Robert Silverberg. Written in the heyday of awareness of overpopulation and the illusory promise of urban high rises, it combines the two in a nightmarish future. In the future, everyone lives in Urbmons, gargantuan megabuildings that stretch from city to city of our time. The name Urbmon derives from “Urban Monad,’ indicating the intention of unity or conformity, but the second syllable is far too close to “monster” to be a coincidence. Within the Urbmons humanity breeds without constraint; birth control and chastity are sins. The fecund are valorized and those who fail to reproduce sufficiently are suspected of shirking their duty. Each Urbmon is encouraged to out-reproduce other Urbmons. None of this is due to a lack of population anywhere; the outsider in the story comes from Venus, where new Urbmons are being established. The origin of this book in the seventies is apparent through its addition of “night crawling” to the other dystopic elements. 

           Our protagonist is Siegmund Kluver, a character with a not-at-all conspicuous name and an age that would make Maplethorpe pull out his pencil. Siegmund’s prowess, at least that which gets him noticed, is distinctly heterosexual. The management of the Urbmon promote Siegmund, so he and his wife are going on up to a much better apartment in the sky. When he gets there, he is a hit with the ladies, especially the wife of Jason Quevedo, who has fallen short of her pupping potential. Jason is likely to be transferred to a newer Urbmon due to insufficient offspring; worse yet, his job is historian, this exposes him to how mad the world truly is. The elite of the Urbmon have no plan beyond maintaining the Urbmon out of self-interest; there is no coherent political ideology beyond accelerated reproduction. Nobody in the Urbmon starves, but not all prosper; intercourse (both literal and verbal) is limited between the forty-level “cities” of the Urbmon. This nightmare is the one in which you are trapped in a technically functioning society; the nightmare after is encapsulated in J G Ballard’s High-Rise.

The Tempest (Alan Moore)

 

Among the practitioners of constructed languages, there is a concept of “kitchen-sinking,” in which too many details are added to a project that is otherwise complicated but carefully balanced. This tendency is a stereotypical feature of novitiates, but (much like the blissful second childhood under the western waves of Kauai) it can manifest at the other end of life. The novice has not yet learned how to balance the elements; the elder has removed the restraints due to the new restraint of encroaching time.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series is predicated on continuity and reference, but The Tempest, the last entry in the series, suffers from a surfeit of those tragic flaws; the less said about Miss Upton’s creation and Moore’s “improvement” of him, the better. The anger displayed throughout this volume is nothing new for Moore, whose bitterness over Marvelman knows no bounds. The story involves multiple time periods, although a minimum of time travel. The League in this case is Mina, Orlando (currently a woman), and Emma Knight, fresh from saving the world from the 2010 apocalypse, while the new characters are various heroes from British comics, however minimal their original appearances were, as well as an actual advertising mascot. The primary antagonist is MI6, run by “Jimmy” and his clones. The passage of time has led to many of the league’s allies who do not have the advantage of immortality being replaced by their descendants. The violence reaches an atomic crescendo, which is surprisingly and slowly reversed by the true villain, who unleashes a worse catastrophe upon the mortal plane. There is a happy ending for some protagonists, but the Tempest suffers all at once from the self-loathing and negation of wonder of Albion, the apocalypticism of Promethea, and the misogynist violence of From Hell. The lesbian eroticism of Lost Girls and the cosmic contemplation of Swamp Thing do not contribute sufficiently to make up the loss. A complicated tale cannot accommodate every story. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series would have been better served if it had ended with the death of the pop culture Anti-Christ and the cosmic nanny, if not the retreat to the Blazing World in the second volume. The Tempest is a final volume which weakens the effect of the series.

Now For An Epenthetic Remark ...

 As much as I love terminology, there are times when I feel that perhaps, just perhaps, scholars have gone overboard with splitting hairs (that metaphor was a malaphor with intent). Such is the case of the terminology around epenthesis. When two consonants or vowels love each other very much, but it would not be appropriate for them to conjugate, they must make room for the holy spirit, and this process is called epenthesis. Epenthesis applies to the insertion of the consonant or vowel between the sounds, but there is the possibility of being more specific, or perhaps pedantic. If it is a vowel, it is anaptyxis (Gesundheit!); if it is a consonant, it is excrescence (gross!). 

If we set aside for now the minor sin of mixing Latin and Greek terminology, an examination of the etymology of each term reveals different conceptions of the process. Epenthesis is the insertion (note the -en- of epenthesis) of a sound, and therefore a letter (in this context). Anaptyxis is the opening of a space for that sound. Excrescence is the growth of a sound between the adjacent sounds. Thus the process as viewed from anaptyxis and epenthesis is a process of forcible opening and insertion, but process as seen from excrescence is a natural growth in a space which must be occupied. All three terms are useful, but in a practical context of finishing one's assigned reading for the week, epenthesis suffices.

Red One (Xavier Dorison and Terry Dodson)

 Red One, by Xavier Dorison and Terry Dodson, is a series of large size European graphic novels which answers an important question: what if there were a real Wonder Woman and she was a Communist creation? Unlike many of my fellow citizens, when I say Communist, I mean Communist. 

In the Seventies, the Soviets looked on America and saw naught but corruption. They did notice, however, that Americans loved their action heroes and their superheroe. They therefore created a perfect woman, a combination of Diana Prince, the Six Million Dollar Man, and Captain America (but not the Seventies television Captain America). They called her Red One. If they could persuade Americans to love Red One (nee Vera Yelnikov), then perhaps they could persuade Americans to love life, industrial progress, and the Soviet Way. As usual with such projects,  Yelnikov was considerably more idealistic than her handlers/ Her American handler was a diminutive horny Russian plant reminiscent of Doctor Sivana crossed with the more cynical and potentially abusive interpretation of Billy Batson's trip across America with Mentor. Red One's headquarters are naturally the nadir of American depravity, the place where dreams are made and fade, Hollywood. Her signature weapon was a device which can only be described as a cyber-sickle, farcical to Red One. Her handler, however, assured her that it was the ideal prop for the right propaganda.

Red One's primary opponent was a Puritan-themed serial killer called the Carpenter (because subtlety was lost long one). The Carpenter represented the fundamentalist basis of a portion of American society. 

The comparison of Red One to Wonder Woman is particularly strong in her initial misadventures in a New World, although I suspect theat the authors are exaggerating how sexually conservative Hollywood was behind the scenes - too much has been revealed since that decade.

If you like Yelena Belova in the MCU, this might be a book for you.

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz

             The journey in Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz is a reversal of the katabasis of the adventure of Princess Truella in the Ninth Surprise of The Magical Monarch of Mo, which now focuses on the redemption of the Wizard and mixes in elements of Duchess Breadenbutta’s adventures in Turvyland in the Tenth Surprise. But the Wizard still needs the aid of Princess Dorothy to escape (Ozma is a Princess, but she is primarily a Sorceress in this book).

            In the Ninth Surprise, the Wicked Wizard lives deep underground and can only depart via the summit of a mountain. He steals Princess Truella’s big toe using transformation magic. Princess Truella must seek the help of the sorceress Maetta and use her magic items to descend into the Wizard’s domain. The challenges Truella faces in her descent are similar to the challenges the Wizard and his party face while trying to travel to the surface.

            In Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, the Wizard is the character who undergoes character development, what is called these days a “redemption arc”.  In the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Wizard presents himself as a fraud who was merely taking advantage of a chaotic situation, but in the Marvelous Land of Oz, the Wizard conspired to hide the Rightful Heir after overthrowing Pastoria. This makes him a Wicked Wizard, like the Wicked Wizard of the mountains east of Mo. His redemption arc, therefore, fittingly starts deep underground and ascends – but this time the Princess is his ally and the Wizard is the principal. Since Dorothy and the Wizard have been to Oz, some other human must be the newcomer. This is Zeb’s role. This time around, each human receives an animal companion – Eureka for Dorothy, the Nine Tiny Piglets for the Wizard, and Jim for Zeb. Eureka may be an animal version of Princess Pattycake made sufficiently cute to be tolerable; she also serves as a contrast to the invisible people of the Valley of Voe (yet another valley, with one sound away from Mo). Since Dorothy and the Wizard are eager to get to Oz, Zeb and Jim must be ambivalent about Oz. And the end of Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz makes it clear that boys’ adventure stereotypes don’t belong in Oz if they can’t accept female leadership. This may also be a metajoke about Baum’s extant boys’ adventure series.

Take My Home, Take My An(a)-, Make It So I Cannot (Under)stand

Prepositional prefixes beyond the Attic pale often lose their final vowel. This causes the consonant to assimilate to the consonant of the verb root; thus anaphanen becomes amphanen once the nu makes contact with the phi. In the case of anamimnesko, however, the loss of the vowel can be catastrophic. The root here is mna with reduplication and suffix -sk- in the present tense alone. Neither reduplication nor the continuous suffix apply to the aorist, so anamnase becomes the unpronounceable anmnase. This is further reduced to amnase, which form now clashes with the alpha privative. If it were the alpha privative, it would have the opposite sense – both a catastrophe and an antistrophe. It is fortunate, therefore, that the preferred word for forgetfulness is lethe rather than amnesia!

Kino's Journey (manga), Volume One

             There is a limit to how much television is endurable, no matter what the quality; but that limit is more flexible for books. Manga has a reputation for interminable plot that can scare off readers unwilling to commit. Kino’s Journey is not such a manga and therefore features here. Kino’s Journey, written by Iruka Shiomiya and drawn by Kouhaku Kuraboshi, is derived from the light novel by Keiichi Sigsawa (that missing vowel is intriguing for a Japanese name).

            Volume One of the English translation features three episodes of Kino’s journey – an origin, a dystopia, and a parable. The first episode is in the Land of Adults and provides an origin for Kino and their talking motorbike Hermes. Too much information here would be spoilers for the other adaptations, but the Land of Adults is reminiscent of the world of “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” except that the Transformation is at an earlier age and the Carousel is much franker. Kino escapes on Hermes the talking motorcycle. The next land is the Land of Understanding Each Other’s Pain, a land which appears empty. The inhabitants of this land were once normal but they overdosed on an empathy drug to bring society closer together, with the result that now they are all even more isolated and their society will soon be extinct. The reaction of isolation to the negative thoughts revealed by the empathy drug is understandable but one would have thought that the society would have a plan for dealing with the negative thoughts they knew existed in humans. Perhaps this is overthinking, and one reason that Kino and Hermes remain only three days in each Land; but surely there must be a fiction where the sudden telepathy is addressed in a productive manner. The third episode is a parable in which there are only three men: an old man who is replacing the torn-up railway tracks; a middle-aged man who is tearing up the tracks, and a young man who is laying down the tracks. This is obviously a metaphor for stages of life.

            The strength of an episodic format is the minimization of consistent characters. The weakness, however, is that those few characters must be compelling enough to draw a return. Kino and Hermes are successful in this task.

Transformation with Dot and Tot: More Than Meets The Eye

             At first glance L. Frank Baum’s Dot and Tot of Merryland is the equivalent of that episode in a rewatch of a series that is rewatched for the sake of completeness but otherwise is reserved no spot in conscious memory. It is that bottle episode which justifies the argument for a shorter season – not quite organized enough to offset its blandness, nor whimsical enough to offset its lack of organization, nor clever enough to breathe life into its half-hearted mystery. It is a fifth magnitude star in the sky wherein shines the brilliant constellation of the Famous Fourteen. Nonetheless, Dot and Tot of Merryland contains structural features worth examining, if only as comparanda. Dot and Tot of Merryland is the work that follows the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, although its realm would not be incorporated into the Continent of Imagination for many years. Dot’s real name is not Dorothy, but she is a Little Princess, even before her adventure. Tot’s name is not Tot, but the resemblance of the name of the lead and her mascot to Dorothy and Toto is hardly accidental. Dot is the leader, in both age and social standing; her mother has perished from some delicacy in her nature, and her father has left her in the care of a governess in the Secret Garden of his estate, while Tot’s father is the head gardener, much like the Gaffer at Bag End. It is water rather than air that bears the duo to the land of adventure, the Merryland of the title, a method which Dorothy would not use until Ozma of Oz. The entrance to adventure is narrow and almost prohibitive to adults who are children at heart, a natural category of humanity in Baum’s perception.

            There is a guardian, human despite his designation as the Watch-Dog of Merryland, but he is a Baumian guardian, comic and ineffective. He is bought off by a sweet cake, suggesting Cerberus and a descent into Hell, which completely fails to deliver. Yet, as will be revealed, the presence of a Watch-Dog in a location before the Seven Valleys is a potential misdirect, encouraging the reader (or read-to, depending on age) to remember a more Classical or Medieval katabasis than Baum’s actual intent. After an exchange between Dot and the Watch-Dog which is the typical watered-down logic of which Caroll’s Wonderland is the adult version, the duo sail into the First Valley.

            The First Valley is the Valley of Clowns, and it may be well to remember that Dot and Tot’s adventures, such as they are, take place in that sweet intermediate period between the apotropaic clowns of archaic religion and the demonic clowns of contemporary horror. The Seven Valleys of Merryland are isolated and infrequently visited, even by their own Queen. There is more contact between some of the Valleys and our world than between the Valleys themselves. Dot and Tot’s inability to steer their boat effectively renders this journey more of a fairground ride than the deliberate travel of their silver-shod predecessor. Flippityflop, the Prince of Clowns, but not the Clown Prince, welcomes the children and tells them that Clowns are indigenous – and endemic – to this Valley. The most skilled Clowns are set upon the peak of the mountain that separates this Valley of Merryland and the mundane world. From there they tumble into the world. Descent from the mountain is a favorite method of travel in Baum’s works, although this may be the only instance of a non-evil character using it; the Cast-Iron Man of The Monarch of Mo and the Roly-Rogues of Queen Zixi of Ix are not friends to the protagonists of their tales. Once a Clown is in our world, he seeks a circus, the telos of a true Clown. For there are false Clowns in this fallen world, who can be identified because they do not make children laugh. The idea of Clowns as an ethnicity could be seen as an othering tactic, and maybe even a mockery of indigenous peoples, but it could also provide positive messages. The first of these messages is that a true Clown is true to his nature, as all people should be; this message is consonant with Baum’s valorization of Dorothy and condemnation (however slight) of the Wizard. The second message, which is more mature than the first but not nearly as dark as othering, is a warning to children that people – and Clowns – are not always who they say they are, but the results of their actions will reveal their true nature. In the Valley of the Clowns, Dot and Tot encounter no women, despite Flippityflop’s mention of his father and grandfather before him. In addition to displaying Baum’s preference for Princes to Kings, even when they are King or Queens in truth, the lack of women references the traditionally male-only profession of clowning. Fortunately for the true Clowns, Merryland has a mechanism in the Third Valley whereby new Clowns might be born.

            The Second Valley is the Valley of Bonbons. The inhabitants of this Valley, unlike those of the Beautiful Valley of Mo, are entirely made of candy, as is their environment. Even before the mandatory color palette of the Quadrants of Oz, the theme of each land is overwriting its original complexity. The Candy Man, the leader of the Valley and considerably less menacing than Tony Todd, welcomes the children. Candy People, unlike Clowns, have both sexes as well as children, and as a society closer to that of the familiar world, the Candy People have black servants, licorice dolls who take care of the children of other colors; no prize will be given for guessing what the licorice children are called. The primary difference between Candy society and our world is the lack of non-candy-based sustenance, which Dot recognizes as a potential problem for permanent residency, but Tot is too hungry to care. The Candy People have no teeth and therefore have no cavities. Tot’s consumption of several fingers belonging to their host does not result in arrest, as might be anticipated, because replacement parts are easy to find. They grow in the marshmallow fields, where the licorice folk collect them for the Candy families. With that distasteful acknowledgement done, this dismemberment and replacement is yet another theme found both in The Magical Monarch of Mo and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Candy People do not die of old age, but they do eventually break into pieces that cannot be repaired. This is reminiscent of the China Country in the south of Oz, although the Merryland method of disposal is not recommended for divided china. The good and beautiful people of the Valley of Bonbons honor their deceased not with broken hearts but respectful edification in an act of what might be called “candy-balism.” Our protagonist and her charge, as visitors from what Baum called “civilized” lands, are horrified, but the Candy Man points out that there is no other sustenance in the Valley and that it is an honor among his people. The child-like logic wins over the children. Whether Baum intends this cannibalism to serve as an indictment of barbarous habits or a plea for tolerance of differences greater than that of the class distinction between the families of Dot and Tot is difficult to determine. Perhaps this consumption of the dead is a reference to Theosophist interest in Tibetan burial customs. The children’s horror at this custom is particularly hypocritical given the near-universal habit of biting off the heads of gingerbread men, leaving each as a body for a John Dough mystery. At least the inhabitants of the Valley of Bonbons do not send forth their own to be eaten – the licorice laborers in the fields of white are in poor taste already! The children must move on, Dot because she recognizes that they need actual food, and Tot because his hunger is a clear and present danger to the local population.

            Unfortunately for Tot, the Third Valley is the Valley of Babies, and babies are not food, as we learn in Ozma of Oz. The babies in question are human babies, although some of the boys might be Clowns and resolve the absence of women in that coulrophilic land. The “adults” in the Third Valley are Storks, all female and all white, but servants nonetheless to the eponymous babies. The Storks collect the baby blossoms that fall in storms from the sky and no doubt disqualify Storks with allergies. This focus on the babies rather than the Storks is understandable from the perspective of two small children, but it also reveals a gender divide between men and women – the all-male Clowns who qualify leave their Valley, but the Storks send forth others. The tone of Dot and Tot’s journey is becoming slightly darker, since the Storks are always exporting babies to forestall some sort of infantile apocalypse should there be no more room in the Valley. Is Baum, a pioneer of modern media and franchising, also a predecessor of the sordid tale of the commercialization of Cabbage Patch Kids? Are the Storks some sort of nursery rhyme Amazons? At least Dot and Tot finally receive some nourishment from the milk fountains in the Valley.

            The Fourth Valley is the Valley of the Dolls, where Dot and Tot are arrested by the wooden soldier despite his gun lacking ammunition; for the Queen of Merryland is not fond of strangers. That she has never met a non-resident of Merryland indicates that this stance is one of ignorance rather than experience. Her instructions to keep out foreigners are comical and ineffective, as the inaction of the Watch-Dog of Merryland attests, as well as her Baumian fairytale army. The wall of the city is reminiscent of China Country, and the average age of the fairyland juvenile arrest record is dropping precipitously. When Dot and Tot are brought before the Queen of Merryland, she is almost as tall as Dot. This detail is more important meta-textually than one might expect, because Dot and Tot of Merryland was the last Baum book illustrated by W. W. Denslow before his falling out with Baum over the rights to the characters of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Baum’s prominence overshadowing him like Lee over Kirby. Denslow’s illustrations in the original show the inhabitants of Oz as possessing a similar height to Dorothy, and thus the Queen of Merryland should match the height of the protagonist. Had Dot and Tot of Merryland been a critical success, perhaps a similar dispute to that of the newspaper strips would have arisen.

            The Queen of Merryland, like other rulers of Baumian wonderlands, is isolationist, but she accepts Dot and Tot’s explanations of the Watch-Dog’s dereliction of duty; nonetheless, she intends to block up the entrance from which Dot and Tot entered – Narnia rules apply to her portals, but the Queen of Merryland is no Aslan. Since she cannot allow the children to leave and she cannot dispose of them, she adopts them as her heirs – even though she does not need any. This is the reason why the title is Dot and Tot of Merryland rather than Dot and Tot in Merryland. The adoption can seem abrupt, even for such an episodic text, until it is recalled that is an American fairytale. Naturalization is not only an American phenomenon, but it is also the explicit intention of Baum’s fairytale output, most prominently accomplished in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels. Dorothy, after all, becomes, a Princess of Oz, and several other humans from our world become citizens of Oz.

            From a narrative standpoint, this elevation both places Dot and Tot as equals in Merryland in contract to the regular world and gives them responsibility. The Queen of Merryland, as negligent a ruler as many in the Continent of Imagination, appoints Dot and Tot to be in charge of the Valley of the Dolls while she heads upstream to instruct the Watch-Dog on what to do if more potential visitors to Merryland decline to obey him. The Watch-Dog isn’t very bright, either because he is senile, or because nearly five centuries of isolation is probably not healthy for anyone’s mental state. Against her better judgment the Queen allows Dot and Tot to experience the dolls of the Valley of the Dolls at their most chaotic. One would think that the Valley of the Dolls would be alive with Doll society, but the Queen found them noisy and disruptive and therefore leaves them asleep most of the time. This could be commentary on controlling (but not eliminating) the imagination, but it also reflects, not entirely favorably, on the controlling nature of queens, princesses, and sorceresses in Baum’s writing. There are elements of Glinda and Ozma that are troubling to lovers of liberty.

            The awakened Dolls of course do not know who Princess Dot and Prince Tot are and therefore do not recognize their authority. The wand which roused the Dolls is an item of Baumian magic, very specific in its duration and operator. The rebellion of the Dolls does not end until the Return of the Queen. This brief period of authority offers Dot and Tot some perspective on what it is like to be an adult who is minding children. The next rebellion in the Baumian canon will be in the Emerald City and only slightly less absurd in its weaponry. The Queen of Merryland decides that she should complete her circuit by sailing downstream with Dot and Tot and perhaps figuring out what to do with them since the children do not really want to live in Merryland forever (take that, Peter!) nor can she feed them properly, a matter of great concern for Tot.

            The Fifth Valley is the Valley of the Pussy Cats, whose taste in what constitutes beautiful music is significantly different from that of the two children and the Queen. Mr. Felis, the leader of the Pussy Cats, welcomes the party and explains that the test of adulthood in this Valley is the ability to jump to the roof of the house where one grew up as a kitten. The loudest voices are the most beautiful ones and authorize their possessors to rule the valley. This is not a phenomenon exclusive to the internet. Yet the cats are still communal and gladly take the kittens of large litters into their own homes. Dot and Tot are much more enthusiastic about the invitation to the traditional nocturnal concert than the Queen, who has already experienced such passionate singing, and therefore the party moves on.

            The Sixth Valley is the chronically understaffed Valley of Wind-Up Toys, where both Mr. Splits, two halves of a man, just barely manages to keep the animal inhabitants of the Valley fully wound. The Queen is aware of this problem, but proposes no solution, perhaps because as a Doll she lacks her own imagination. At the very least, she could allow some of the wind-up animals to remain temporarily unwound. Mr. Split’s gimmick, other than being bifurcated like a Mangaboo, is an allegedly amusing vocal tic whereby one half starts words and the other finishes them; but the two halves are never in the same place at the same time, creating great difficulty of comprehension. Possibly the frenetic pace of Mr. Split, never able to complete a thought, represents the overwhelming busyness of adult life and its deleterious effect on concentration and community; there is no functional society in the Sixth Valley.

            The Seventh Valley, the Valley of Lost Things, is devoid of life, mundane or fantastical. It is full, however, of lost things, particularly young children’s jackets, and especially those which belonged to boys. This rings true to experience. Dot finds a doll she lost, which the Queen allows her to keep on the grounds that it is no longer lost. Dot and Tot, in contrast, are lost, because they do not know whether the last arch will take them back to our world. The Queen consents to them leaving, after which she will seal the exit from the Seventh Valley. If the Valleys beyond the Fourth represent increasing adulthood, the Seventh Valley as a particularly sanitary landfill is a stark condemnation.

            Dot and Tot exit the Seventh Valley but fall asleep before they enter our world. This event parallels the initial nap (at least on Tot’s part) before encountering the Watch-Dog. This equivalence of fairyland with a dream state, the first such instance in the Baumian canon, js supported by the deceptively half-hearted mystery of the Queen of Merryland’s name. The Queen deflects the question every time it is brought up. Why is knowing her name so important when her title is clear? For this point the doll which Dot lost and then found is critical. In the literal manner of young children, Dot had named her doll Dolly, which she ultimately decided was the name of the Queen of Merryland. If Dot was worried about her lost doll the entire journey, then the journey was not a series of episodic adventures, but rather a quest. It is the nature of a quest that the questor is changed in some way by the end, usually by being more mature than at the beginning; Dot cannot return to Narnia. It is no accident that an alternative pet name for Dorothy is Dolly, allowing Dot to find herself. This analysis is far beyond the capabilities of a small girl such a Dot. Thus Dot and Tot of Merryland is a quest narrative experienced by a questor unaware of her quest and not yet capable of the necessary abstract thinking. Baum insists on the truth of the experience by having Dot and Tot’s boat appear upstream from where it was originally moored – this should not be possible. This feature of the narrative cannot be casually dismissed because it is precisely this “over the rainbow” feature that has endeared the 1939 Wizard of Oz film to generations of Americans. Dot and Tot of Merryland is a far more substantial work than it seems at first glance.

 Final Version Composed and Performed In A Backyard June 4, 2021

Doubling Down: The Reduplication that Europeans Do Not See

Reduplication is a linguistic phenomenon so basic that it is found throughout the world, except in Europe. When, therefore, the Europeans spread across the world in conquest, encountering new languages which possessed this feature and triggering the creation of new languages which used this basic tool of communication, they scorned it; but this disdain required willful blindness on the part of the more educated Europeans to the existence of partial reduplication in one language that they elevated above all others: Greek. In some instances, where the ravages of time and the desperation of analogical repair had worn away the surface pattern, this blindness could be forgiven; in many cases, however, the reduplication was a clear and present feature. The history of the Indo-European languages in Europe was, in part, a process of systematically removing this reduplication, but in Greek, and to a lesser extent Latin, it still remained, and those were tongues which the elites of Europe held in reverence. In Latin reduplication remained only in the perfect tense as an increasingly archaic and non-productive feature; in Greek, however, reduplication was the principal method by which the perfect was created, while reduplication in the present was non-productive. Since the fact of reduplication indicates a primary segment from which the reduplicated segment is taken, the reduplicated segment is almost always simplified, although the details of that simplification varies according to the language. If the simplification of European languages had been a laudable quality, the European point of view might have been consistent, but it was the complexity of Latin and Greek that was admired. Thus, logically, the complexity of foreign tongues should have been admired instead of suffering disdain.

The more change-oriented among my readers may see a lesson in this; I merely offer it as an observation.

We Only Find Them When They're Dead (Al Ewing)

 We Only Find Them When They're Dead, by Al Ewing and Simone Di Meo, is a graphic novel about harvesting materials from dead space gods. The space gods in question are the size of Marvel's Celestials (recently featured in the mediocre film The Eternals), but in appearance they resemble the New Gods of DC. This scaling has precedent in DC; at one point New Genesis and Apokolips were cosmically large and the boom tubes used for transport adjusted the size of the New Gods to be commensurate with Terrestrial life. One of heroes flew through space to Apokolips and discovered how miniscule they were. The corpses drift into the galaxy like cosmic fish and are harvested for exotic substances. All these corpses appear to be coming from one direction, but the exotic material is so valuable that nobody in power is motivated to ask the questions they should ask, such as "Why are there so many dead space gods and who killed them?" With a title such as We Only Find Them When They're Dead, naturally some crew discovers one that is not quite as dead as the ones before. The plot is standard fare: a crew desperate enough to take chances flouts the law and is pursued by the space police with whom some of the ragtag band have personal connections. The crew of the pursuer also choose to break the law in pursuit, thus establishing the precedence of revenge. The fishermen of space have left the coast for deeper waters. 

The representation is moderate and is integrated well into the plot. It is difficult to guess where this storty might lead, partly because this is one of the areas involving space gods which is not frequently examined, and partly because volume one is dedicated to establishing the world and the relationship of the characters before they depart for parts bereft of other humans, or aliens other than giants, that much remains unexplained. It will be character driven by necessity, but the work of giants is the motivation for further reading. All the gods found by humanity within the galaxy have been dead, but is this due to some property of our galaxy or galaxies in general versus open space? Do the space gods come from some galaxy that might even be described as Promethean? What War in Heaven resulted in the death of the Gods? Or do the Gods date from a time before the galaxies? To paraphrase G'kar, humanity can stay out of the way or be stepped on.

Every Science Fiction Story is Someone's First

 

The Last Cuentista, by Donna Barba Higuera, is a middle grade book that serves as a gateway to heavier science fiction. The heroine, Petra Peña, is genetically flawed in a less obvious way than the protagonist of Gattaca, but closely enough that its disclosure would disqualify her for the exodus from Earth, whose lateness is definite and whose greatness is much disputed. This genetic deformity spares her the conditioning which she is intended to receive, but it is a cruel mercy, to the character if not the reader, to be awakened in a strange world. The plan for the ship has gone awry, since a smooth ride would be unsatisfactory in all but the best hands. Conformity is the watchword – the dangers of excessive originality have no place in the solipsistic world of YA novels – and our plucky heroine must struggle alone against them while feigning conformity using home ec chemistry. The world of the ship and that of the new planet are lightly sketched but it is sufficient to provide the feeling of a real place; the lacunae are due to irrelevancy or the logical ignorance of the heroine. The educator tapes, more like those of Cyteen than Hospital Station, explain away the otherwise implausible expertise of an adolescent girl. Many science fiction ideas are touched upon in the world building, but the primary drive of the book is action reminiscent of a Heinlein juvenile, based more on chemistry than engineering. Perhaps it seems a bit strange to pass over the story-telling component of a book called The Last Cuentista, but if it is remembered by the youth of today, it will not be because it is the deepest narrative, but because it has served as a preface to more detailed narratives.

Yaghan: Coincidences Do Come True

 The last speaker of Yaghan, the indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego, has sailed (or perhaps canoed) beyond the sunset. In the memorial article for the woman and the language, a curious fact emerges: the word for sun is lamp. To Anglophones or Francophones, this may seem remarkable. And the more romantically inclined may daydream of a latter-day Pythias or Hanno voyaging, leaving this word as an indication of early contact. Unfortunately for such bold thinking, the similarities are often due to mere coincidence. Lamp is merely a word in a recently moribund language, whose living light has been extinguished.

(If you nonetheless want to know more about the language, the Wikipedia article at the time of this writing is a good place to start)

Edge Lords of Universe: Valerian and Laureline, Volume 19

 At the Edge of the Great Void is the nineteenth volume of the Valerian and Laureline series, the midmost part of a trilogy of volumes. The change from an almost purely terrestrial view in the previous volume to an exclusively celestial and cosmic one in the current volume could come across as jarring. I suspect, however, that those who read this volume when it was new were already heavily invested in the peripatetic scene changes of the series. Valerian and Laureline, having wrapped up affairs as best they could on twentieth century Earth, are now making their way to the titular edge of the Great Void in search of their old headquarters, before they offended the false gods of Earth. Since their support system from before is gone, they must rely on overtly dubious means to survive (their former bosses were not above underhanded moves). The antagonists, of course, use even more dubious means and are far less concerned about the welfare of individuals. On an economically shattered planet, Laureline recruits an woman, Ky Lai, a human by all exterior signs, from space Indochina. Laureline is very much the lead in this volume. After a brief stop on a "cemetery planet" to interrogate filthy thieving space scavengers, Valerian and Laureline and Indochinese Mrs. Kato arrive at Roubanis, the planet at the edge of the Great Void. Valerian is then sidelined for the most of the rest of the story so that Laureline and Ky Lai can use their powers of persuasion, deception, and textile manufacture to overthrow an unjust regime, a common plot in the Valerian and Laureline universe. There is a comedic subplot about the ridiculously violent way the space pirate captain chooses her crew for the voyage into the Great Void. Valerian and Laureline join the crew, while Ky Lai remains behind with her space Indochina people to make textiles.

This volume has a strong "middle book" feeling to it. It can be read on its own, but all the components of the story are pieces that need to be setup for the following volume.  Valerian and Laureline, like many long-running series, developed increasingly longer narrative rather than one-off stories connected by the series' theme.  The scale became grander, which is saying something when the first volume started with an galactic agent traveling through space and time in medieval Earth. The real question is what happens when our heroes meet the Lords of All the Cosmos - what could possibly happen in the following volume!?

Looking Backward: A Tale of Tmesis

The delights of digital tools are manifold, but one area in which they fail is the phenomenon of tmesis, whereby a prefix normally attached to a verb is separated, sometimes at a considerable distance due to the non-configurational nature of Greek, and thus the unwary may be led to the wrong dictionary entry. This separation, this cutting off, is an illusion, not just in translation, but in origin. It was quite logical for the Greeks who first observed this feature to call it a cutting off, a lobotomy of an intact word, for they were looking backward and needed merely a descriptive term rather than an analytical one. The science of philology was millennia away.

The true nature of the phenomenon, however, was not one of cutting, but of grafting. In earlier days, the adverb or preposition could float, and only gradually became attached to the verb. This is why some verbs could be modified by prepositional phrases, while others, to which the prefix was appended, governed cases other than the expected case. Some barbarian tongues, such as German, left this process conspicously incomplete; thus this process should be called thesis, not tmesis, but the cruel mistress of convention had established a false analysis as the official term.

Saga #55 (and #56) Dramatis Personae

This year witnesses the return of several independent series, among which is Saga by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. The failure of the television adaptation of Y: The Last Man may allow Saga to arise to greater heights. I must confess that I did not read all issues of Staples' interim project about magic and sisterly betrayal.

 

Saga is the story of Hazel, the child of two races whose war has consumed the galaxy, enlisting the other races to whom this did not matter. Elsewhere I have compared this to the genesis of Peloponnesian War, and perhaps it will have a similarly devastating end; but this is unlikely to occur until our protagonist is older. The purpose of a first issue, especially after such a gap, is to reintroduce the themes and characters; as a wise man once since, every story is someone's first story. Thus Saga #55 reintroduces our protagonist Hazel, a blasphemy according to both races, a bit older and in denial of some of the trauma she carries (but with a sweet hat); Squire, the former heir of the Robot Kingdom (which is a kingdom of humanoids with televisions for heads), who has obvious trauma; Alana, Hazel's mother and provider, although she is not doing a particularly good job at it; and a newcomer, Bombazine, her employee who looks like a refugee from a stage play of Oz. The rocket tree which they call home also makes its return. The bounty hunters The Will (the article is mandatory), Gwendolyn, and fan favorite Lying Cat also appear.

Saga, as with many works focused on an underage protagonist, may lead the unwary or simple-minded to believe that this comic is "safe" for children. Although each child is different, this reintroduction goes out of its way to include suicide, police brutality, coition, adverse childhood experiences, a false accusation of child abuse by a child thief, as well as smuggling of adult "food". The greatest potential of preadolescent protagonists are adventures in the 'real' world, but that does not mean the audience is children.

Update:

Saga #66 is now out. This issue introduces new characters and a new setting. The dreams of the new crew are not what one would have expected. The colors are bright, but the content is fairly dark.

Manseed

Jack Williamson's Manseed is a story of human colonization of space predicated on the vastness and emptiness, and that we cannot outrun our own sins. The narrative alternates between the contemporary humans of the Raven Foundation on Earth and the far future Defenders of Mansphere (which is a terrible name for a planet). The primary connective tissue derives from the elements of personality which inevitably slipped in among the practical data in creating the Defenders, the half-machine supermen tasked with scouting and preparing new worlds for humaniry. The choice of siblings as genetic material seems particularly ill-advised and unlikely for a collection of otherwise scientifically literate participants. The genetic pool is shallow enough to be suitable for noting but a parable (much like the current series Raised by Wolves). The psychosexual adaptation of the myth of Adam and Eve, mixed with Cain and Abel, and the misogyny now known to be pervasive in science fiction circles of the seventies, is blatant.

Manseed was published in 1982 and was written by a man in his seventies. Even in the feminist science fiction of the time, such as that of Suzette Hayden Elgin and Sheri S Tepper, the gender dynamics was covert and aggressive. Williamson was a writer of an older generation and his characters' discomfort in adapting to the novel circumstances limits the power of the narrative. This book has not aged well.

James White: The Things Are Also People

 An author often overlooked except by authors fond of obscures references (such as Grant Morrison) is James White, whose space medicine series Sector General, a Star Trek: Doctor Space Nine or Lensmen with a pathology lab, was an analgesic to the militarism of science fiction. Such a view is not surprising from a Northern Irishman who grew up in the Troubles (which lasted even longer in the Star Trek universe, according to Data). White's team of Star Surgeons is a mix of different species, all of whom are dedicated to the treatment of patients, no matter their provenance. The specialized knowledge required to treat the patients could never be contained in any sapient brain, so the pre-surgery preparation involves "Educator tapes" created by the best medical minds of the patient's species - or whichever species is closest to J'onn Doe. The tapes, however, contain a partial psychology of the species, so the human who partakes may develop brief and exciting appetites. Actual appetites are limited to vegetarianism, due to potential trauma from observation of lunchmates. The species in the universe are organized by an alphabetical code, which is rendered in the Roman alphabet (for humans anyway). The team includes one spirited red-headed human woman, but there are alien women as well - especially Charge Nurse Naydrad, who is a giant caterpillar. The scandalous behavior of the methane-breathers is a running joke here, long before it appears on Babylon 5, and when I first saw Sikorsky of the Starjammers, I thought he might be a visual reference to the insectoid Dr. Prillicla.

When I read the ET ER comic one-shot, I had hoped it would be more like this rather than the Masquerade with ailing extraterrestrials, but the closest I have ever seen to a use of Sector General in modern media is its cameo in Grant Morrison's run of Green Lantern, in which Hal visits and later contributes to the destruction of the homage, complete with giant caterpillar nurse and empathic insect pathologist, while Hal continues on his way to death and eventual godhood. It would have been nice to see Sector General treated with more respect, but media portrayals of space hospital have generally not fared well in ratings. I am not sure whether this is due to the restriction of romantic plots or the necessity of television writers to eliminate the fiendishly clever puzzles in search of an audience less willing to face an intellectual challenge.

The Words We Leave Behind

 A feature of the Pindaric realm, the epinician genre, is the double use of grammatical components and its corollary, the absence of words that would not have been absent in a prosaic work. The complex meter demands such compromises. This absence works best when the audience is so familiar with the story presented that it perceives the new text as an alternate presentation rather than a novelty. A problem, arises, therefore, when the audience receiving is no longer the audience originally intended to receive; and even more so when the primary language of that audience is not the language of the work.

This phenomenon, however, is not unfamiliar to contemporary consumers of media. Movie adaptations of popular franchises often depend on the audience's knowledge of the book series and therefore feel at liberty to discard scenes that convey critical information to those who have not read the books and are merely accompanying their progeny or sweetheart to the cinema. The consumer intimately familiar with the work may not realize how deficient these lacunae can be to their companion, and perhaps even become angry when they fail to appreciate the genius of their literary god. From the perspective of the companion, however, this low esteem for the film is appropriate; the cinematographers have failed to create a coherent narrative in service of spectacle.

A Tale of Two Monkeys (and a Dog)

 Primordial by Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino is an alternate Cold War mini-series about two monkeys, Able and Mrs. Baker, and Laika, everyone's favorite space dog. A signal from space is discovered which deflects the Cold War from celestial posturing to more terrestrial endeavors. Before the end, however, two monkeys and a dog, who is of course Laika, have been launched into space. It is not clear what the space trio encounter, perhaps because they are animals and respond accordingly, or perhaps because it is alien and no terrestrial being could comprehend it. This is not a story, however, about an alternate history without the space program, or a story about the fallout from animal-alien contact, but rather a reflection of the strangeness of the universe, how wonderfully and terribly all things have been made.

Jake the Idiot, but no Finn

    The first few chapters of Andrew Moriarty's Trans-Galactic Insurance: Adventures of Jump Space Accountant reminds of nothing so much as the first three issues or episodes of a mini-series which I would drop and later, after the series was complete, revisit now that I understood the importance of the interminable exposition to a serviceable but hardly exciting mystery. The initial reference to Belters suggested a story that was Solar rather than Galactic. The characters were sufficiently fleshed out to serve the plot but scarcely more than that, as is common espionage plots. The implication of a plucky girl who aids the protagonist also being a minor in modern Western sensibilities, and therefore a nod to Heinleinian heroine, was well executed by a single line. The portrayal of the ideal spy as too boring to cause casual notice was a relief from the flashy action heroes of so much science fiction.

                My greatest annoyance at the plot-driven world-building is the use of the term ‘credit’ as a basic fiat unit of currency in a book starring an accountant investigating fraud! I realize that credit is a generic science-fictional unit of currency, but one would think that a story about financial fraud would be savvy to the specific financial meaning of credit and debit in balancing accounts. I am not saying that the author should have chosen some exotic name for the currency, such as ‘quatloos’, just something other than ‘credits’ when the fictional economy uses a double-entry system. I suppose this is the way that physicists and engineers feel about gross ‘errors’ in other science fiction novels. If you want to read a series that begins with a space-based human civilization cut off from its parent, you should go read John Scalzi’s latest trilogy instead.

Triangles! Triangles Everywhere!

Agsin and again I am drawn back to the aesthetic appeal of  Ditema tsa Dinoko, also known as Isbheqe Sohlamvu. A good aesthetic is an excellent tool for promotion and its overlay of the IPA chart on the indigenous symbols assures me that this is a result of international syncretism. The iconography is sufficiently simple to allow combinations of sounds and (where appropriate) to compose syllable clusters, which the eye and mind of native speakers can process as a word. The extensive system of prefixes and suffixes in Bantu languages no doubt facilitates this process. It would be fascinating to see a study on the relative speed of comprehension for Ditema tsa Dinoko versus Roman orthography.

There are, however, two questions that come to mind. The first is that of the order of the syllables in the visual medium. If the syllables fit more harmoniously in a non-concatenative order, it is sensible to order them in such a way; but there must be some sequences whoch could be reade in more than order, even if the noun class prefix is clear from the surrounding context. The second question is not so much a question as an observation. Direma tsa Dinoko, along with Mandombe and other African and indigenous scripts, depend on rotational symmetry. Although the reduction of shapes simplifies the number of design components needed to create the specialized font, quite a few persons have difficulty with rotation and reversal, especially when the orthography is so heavily dependent on these processes. Perhaps it is a challenge overcome by practice, but this challenge illustrates the conflict between simplicity of composition and simplicity of comprehension.

Not All Robots: Science Fiction Done Right

 Not All Robots, wirtten by Mark Russell and drawn by Mike Deodato Jr, is a mini-series in the classic tradition of science fiction: tackling modern problems through allegory. The world of Not All Robots is one in which humanity has retreated into bubble cities to escape the devastation of the world. The human unemployment rate is almost a hundred percent; a robot is assigned to each family to provide for them. The humans are bored and angry at their lack of agency and ungrateful: not the most flattering depiction of humanity, but a probable reaction to the circumstances. Hairdressers alone retain a profession, a reflection of the limited opportunities afforded to women throughout many eras. Even the robots, however, lack job security because the job of many robots is to build their own replacements. Under such conditions, it is no wonder that strife breaks out.

The simplicity of the scenario is its strength. Although the five-issue mini-series is divided in a chapter per issue, the brevity of the format allows just enough explicit detail while omitting or passing over other details that would distract from the basic questions of identity, mortality, and purpose. A short story does not have to explain the tax policies of the apocalypse.

Go, Gowachin, Go!

Now and in the immediate future Dune will be the Frank Herbert book most read (or claimed to be read), but as much as Dune stands out among science fiction novels, it is worth reading Herbert's other books such as The Whipping Star. The universe of The Whipping Star is one in which government has achieved such efficiency that it is necessary to inhibit it in some way. This efficiency is the least plausible part of the setting, but initial conditions in science fiction sometimes must be accepted. The organization in charged with disrupting the bureaucracy is the Bureau of Sabotage, or BuSab. The representative of BuSab is Jorj X. McKie. McKie uncovers a conspiracy that threatens virtually all life in the universe because aliens are, well, alien in thought and experience or lack thereof.

The sequel, The Dosadi Experiment, is the better of the two. The Dosadi Experiment is this: what happens if we put various alien species in the most vicious social pressure cooker ever evented? The chasm in which the Experiment takes place is the opposite of the paradise of Malacandra: crowded, competitive, and amoral. BuSab sends McKie to check on the Experiment, and it does not bode well for the rest of the universe, as one might expect from a perpetual gom jabbar.

These are shorter and less dense than Dune, a palate cleanser between Messiah, Children, and God Emperor.

A Sorrowful and Epitrite Heart

 The group has embarked upon reading Pindar Pythian 4 as a thematically appropriate work after reading Euripides' Medea. Pindar dwells on happier days, although there is an exile in the Ode. To say that the meter of Pindar is challenging would be an understatement, and scholars of previous generations had difficulty determining the lines. Their suffering, however, has brought wisdom to later generations.

Most classicists are trained on dactylic hexameter, iambic trimeter, and elegiac couplets, with the meter of the chorus often provided in the back of the text (assuming the text is not hopelessly corrupt). Other meters can be painful to learn and even passed over in the need to complete the lines assigned. Recitation is not as common as it once was.

The meter of Pythian 4 is dactylo-epitritic, which no doubt has a high morbidity rate. Dactyls are familiar to virtually all classicists, although in this case the dactyls are doubled and extended into a series long-short-short-long-short-short-long (a hemipes). Epitrite, which might also be a parasitic plant, is a specific kind of foot, but varies more than feet of two or three syllables. It is common for tetrasyllabic feet to vary in a specified way: once the foot is of this length, perhaps it is no longer productive (pace Latine loquentibus) to give individual names beyond the ordinal. The epitrite is a tetrasyllable in which one syllable must be short and the others long, much like desperate sailors at sea. The combination of this foot with the hemipes, along with variations, produce some long lines compared to epic or tragedy.

Let's Talk About Ptolitics

A challenge often faced by linguistic neophytes is the mastery of clusters not found in their native tongue. In the case of English-speakers learning Ancient Greek, one such cluster is πτ at the beginning of the word. The Greeks themselves were not thrilled with this combination, if the development of πτόλις to πόλις is any indication. Internally, this cluster did not present a problem. Exempla even developed from the juncture of π and the first-person suffix yo in verbs such as πίπτω and κλέπτω. The average Greek was not a linguist, even a poor one, for comparative linguistic had not yet been invented, so the root was reanalysed as πίπτ- and produced both future πεσοῦμαι and infinitive πίτνειν through another round of affixation and cluster reduction. One of the words which kept the πτ was πτῶσις, falling, from which the word for case, the best grammatical invention of man, derives its name.

Despite the potential difficulty of pronouncing πτ, the original pronunciation was even more challenging: τπ. If this looks improbable, let us remember that the Proto-Indo-European root for earth was *dhghom-, so someone at some point deemed such clusters pronounceable. In the later evolution of the language, it is a bit surprising that the t did not become an s: PIE loves its s almost as much as Greek likes to drop it intervocalically. The rule which developed in Greek was this: in a cluster of two different plosives the first could not be a dental; or in layman's terms, τ, d, and θ could not be first. Greek, therefore, has πτ and κτ and lacks τπ and τκ. The earth is χθών not θχών. 

Superman '78 Mini-Series Review and Analysis

 To me, Superman will always be Christopher Reeve. I was excited, therefore, to read the six-issue mini-series Superman '78. 

Robert Venditti is the writer. Wilfred Torres is the artist. The colorist is Jordie Bellaire, and Dave Lamphear of A Better World (DC's main earth, perhaps) is the letter. Torres does an excellent job rendering the characters to resemble the actors, and Venditti captures the dialogue admirably. I am, however, more interested in how the mini-series' themes allow it to serve as the third volume and conclusion to the first two movies. This is absolutely worth reading, but my analysis below includes spoilers, as an ending in a trilogy would, so be forewarned. Even better, buy it wherever you get your comics.

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The goal of the Superman movies can be summed up in Jor-El's words to Kal-El: "They can be a great people, they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you ... my only son." (Superman: The Movie) Jor-El's world is doomed, with an absence of hope, but he can share hope with another civilization. Superman in the first movie learns how to be human from his adoptive parents and about Kryptonian civilization from the Fortress of Solitude; unlike the Kryptonians, however, he learned about it without the sterility or Jor-El's despair. He learns that he can literally change the course of history. In the second movie, Superman faces off against Zod and his goons. Zod's goal is to exploit others, whether they be the doomed Kryptonians or humans under Kal-El's protection. Superman learns that the capacity for evil is as present in Kryptonians as it is in humans, and that this nature must be incorporated and overcome because it cannot be eliminated.

Since the first movie had Luthor as a villain and the second had Zod, the mini-series uses Brainiac. The movie universe has a simple mythology, so Brainiac is doing what he always does: bottling cities and destroyed civilizations. This obsession, of course, makes Superman a rare prize. This Brainiac is not the organic one of the Silver Age, not the mechanical skull of the Post-Crisis era, but a more movie-suitable transitional one - appropriate for the period in which Brainiac was moving from organic to artificial. Brainiac himself is the sole survivor of his civilization, but lacks the empathy of Superman and Jor-El. It is not clear whether this is the result of eons of loneliness or a defect in his species' psychology. Brainiac doesn't even have a '70s space monkey for company. His "solution" to his loneliness is not to settle somewhere for a time, or even communicate extensively with various civilizations, but rather to preserve each in his bottles. This preservation leads to resignation at best, and despair at worst for the cities in flight; thus Brainiac is spreading despair rather than hope. 

Superman is willing to sacrifice himself to save the Earth, but Metropolis is bottled anyway. The existence of Kandor is a surprise for Superman, but not to anyone who knows the Brainiac mythos. The bigger surprise is that Jor-El and Lara are in Kandor. They are delighted to see their son, but Jor-El, whose words were so inspiring to young Clark Kent, has given into despair and seeks only to ensure the continued existence of Kandor, the last remnant of Krypton. Superman does not accept this and wins Jor-El over with his optimism borne of sources unavailable on Krypton. The sterility of Brainiac's ship is fundamentally no different from the sterility of Krypton. Superman fights Brainiac, but the fight also includes a discussion of how one reacts to the destruction and other terrors of the universe, whether the hope of action or the despair of inaction is the appropriate response. Brainiac choses to die rather than live among lesser mortals; he also choses death for all the bottled cities and the lesser mortals who live therein. Even if suicide is a legitimate choice for Brainiac, he not only has no right to choose for others, but he is also making the opposite choice of the citizens of the two cities featured in the mini-series. The look on his last uploaded body suggests that Brainiac realized his error after he could no longer avoid the consequences. 

Superman saves Kandor and Metropolis, the latter of which has apparently not set to permanent miniaturization, but the bigger surprise is that he saves most or all of the other cities as well. Perhaps this is as close to the Cosmic Zoo as the movie universe can come, but the more likely reason is that the victory over despair would ring hollow if only the cities of the hero and his loved ones survived. Although Brainiac's technology is lost, the cities and their inhabitants are safe, protected by a guardian who wants to restore them rather than a specimen collector who wants to preserve them. Hope triumphs over despair.

Stopping At Slowyear: Willoughby Among the Stars

 For a book about which I only occasionally remember details, Stopping At Slowyear certainly sticks in my mind; at yet this patchy memory is thematically appropriate. Stopping At Slowyear is a book Fred Pohl wrote late in life, and this too ties into the theme, which unfortunately is also the twist. It is no accident that the outdated cargo ship is called the Nordvik, a Viking name reminiscent of Pohl's early work, nor that the main character is named Mercy. The setting is spare and basic: an old ship, a planet of long and bitter seasons, and a romance between a spacer and a grounder. There is, of course, a secret which the locals are loath to reveal.

It's a good story, but don't read this at a low point in your life. Or perhaps you should: consolation has been found in stranger places.

The Curious Case of the Removable Nu

 There are many dialects of Ancient Greek, and individual dialects are often assigned to different genres, presumably due to some founder effect. This literary dialect then is smoothed and standardized and thus acquires some forms not found in the original dialect. Many literary dialects mix features from more than one dialect. Tragedy generally separates the Ionic speech of the majority of the play from the stage Doric of the Chorus, but even this relatively clear separation does not prohibit the occasional intrusion of a Doric verb into the Ionic sentence. The proper dialect of an Ode is Doric and Aeolic combined. This presents a challenge to the modern student of Ancient Greek, who has trained on Attic Greek, itself not as standard as the Athenians would have you believe. And thus we come to the removable ν.

Calling this ν 'removable' is somewhat misleading, for although it disappears, it does not do so without leaving a trace. The nature of that trace is the reason for such variation among the Greek dialects in critical grammatical forms such a participles. Greek loves participles; if one wields them correctly, they increase the subtlety of Greek to a degree that would make Cato uncomfortable. The present and aorist active particles have an affix -ντ- to which the case endings are appended; but the σ of the nominative singular triggers changes which differentiate it from the oblique cases. These changes are not the same in every dialect. In general, the change involves lengthening the preceding vowel. Such is the case in Attic. In the dialect of Pindar's Odes, however, lengthening is replaced by diphthongization; thus -ανς from -αντς becomes -αις rather than Attic -ας. This phenomenon can be confusing for a student at their first encounter because it is similar to the feminine dative -αις (which is -αισι here, for reasons best dealt with elsewhere and never had a ν). These changes create a brief uphill battle for the neophyte, until they see the horror of even more radical non-configurationality.

Where Have All the Flores Gone?

 The recent cancellation of Wonder Girl, the Wonder Woman Family title starring Yara Flor, the first Wonder Girl of indigenous Amazonian descent, was disappointing. Although Flor's demotion from Wonder Woman in the Future State timeline was inevitable, given the large number of Amazons with a prior claim, a series featuring an Amazonian Amazon was an opportunity to expand the corpus of mythologies available to the Wonder Woman franchise beyond the Tetrarchy of Greek, Norse, Celtic, and Egyptian. Unfortunately, the financial reward for even the headlining Amazon has often been tenuous. If American comics companies will not support stories of Amazons of the Amazon, perhaps there is an opportunity for some Brazilian company to do so.

It is satisfying to see that at least the cancellation happened at the end of story arc, but it exposes a problem with the big two in general: the money made from events prevents characters from having isolated adventures which build up their voice.

A Singular Story

I have finished the Singular book When Men Become Gods about the FLDS communities on the borders of Arizona and Utah. The only time I was near those towns was back in grad school, when I went on an Episcopal mission trip to the northern edge of the Navajo Nation. That was an interesting trip, but it had nothing to do with polygamy. Polygamy is a fundamentally unbalanced social mechanism; the assignment of many women to one man excludes the other potential husbands from marriage unless you swap women around like oxen and she-asses. The assignment, and especially reassignment, of women, eviscerates any pretense of a system of family values; but there are politicians to the left of the FLDS who are equally hypocritical, if not on such a grand scale. Polygamy especially does not mix well with the founder effect, but perhaps a polygamist society could overcome this with overbreeding, the Eleventh Commandment as it were. In the backstory of the FLDS and its steady reduction to monarchy or tyranny, I was surprised that nobody brought up Samuel's denunciation of the concept of kingship.

To Euripides, She Was Always The Woman

Medea is a play that has never been out of style, but directorial choices have varied, and on occasion playwrights have adapted the material to the current circumstances. A proletarian perspective on Medea is possible, but such an adaptation would be to Euripides as Anouilh to Sophocles; even less so, because Anouilh did not need to shift the focus from Antigone. The Nurse delivers the first speech on the subject of the foolish drama of the aristocrats; the Pedagogue advocates on the behalf of the children; and the Messenger, despite his fancy speech (which may be due as much to his job in addressing the melodrama of the those who rule as much as his own personality), has a rather common view of the world. 

Meanwhile the aristocrats put on a poor show. Aegeus is on the lower end of the IQ scale. Jason is not much smarter and does not learn from experience than angering a woman who would murder her own brother is a bad idea even if there is now an opportunity for gain. Creon and Glauce are generic placeholders for king and Corinthian progeny - Creon literally means 'one who has strength' and Glauce or Glaucus is a generic name for a princess, especially a Corinthian one such as Bellerophon. Anyone named Glaucus in Greek mythology either dies or is ultimately ruined and broken. Medea, meanwhile, seems trapped between two genres, the tragic and the epic, and rejects the possibility of breaking the cycle of abuse from which she has suffered. The only physical affection between two related aristocratic individuals results in the painful death of both. Medea's advice to Aegeus sets in motion the birth of Theseus, which ultimately leads to her later flight from Attica and the eventual death of Aegeus due to the black sails of Theseus' return.

In the current media environment, I would expect a book from the perspective of the Nurse and the Pedagogue; but mostly the Nurse, since women narrators seem to sell better.

Mike Carey's Unwritten (Some Spoilers)

 Mike Carey is a favorite author of mine, whose works include both the Vertigo series Lucifer (original run) and the book The Girl With All the Gifts. Carey's series Unwritten, however, does not have the same impact on me, and I think I now know why. I thought my lack of response might have been a surfeit of meta-commentary in series of the time period, but this turned out to be false.

Unwritten stars Tommy Taylor, an expository character for Harry Potter, whose fictionality is substantially greater than that of many media celebrities. An unpleasant experience with an obsessed fan leads to a plot that threatens all reality and breaks the tenuous barrier between fiction and reality. The conclusion of the series involves the abolition of fiction - all fiction. I should have expected this ending, given the title of the series and the Flood motif, but it had little emotional impact on me, save for vague disappointment. I am a student of myth and legend, and therefore a conclusion that the old stories must be swept away and utterly forgotten is the antithesis of what I hold dear. I do not regret reading the series, but its conclusion is more palatable to a younger, less traditional generation.

Old Man's War

I recently finished reading Old Man's War by John Scalzi. Scalzi is one of those writers whom I get confused with another quite easily, like Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis. In this case, I often passed up reading Old Man's War because I confused it with Joe Haldeman's Forever War. Perhaps there is something to editor's fears of using too-similar titles! The premise of Old Man's War is intriguing - it is seldom that a scene about military recruiting is mysterious. Once our hero has signed up, the training sequences are pure Heinlein, the right mixture of jingoism (to fire up the troops) and pragmatism (to aid in the troops' survival). The aliens are lightly sketched, but distinct enough to qualify as separate species. The anthropophagous deer and bellicose Lilliputians are particularly striking choices.

I highly recommend.

What Do You Want, Your Modesty?

 One of the peculiarities of life is that you can go years or decades without examining patterns that you know are peculiar. Such was the case recently with the constant switch in Ancient Greek between singular and plural. This fluidity is particularly noticeable in the Chorus, and to a lesser degree in the protagonist, deuteragonist, and (if there is one) tritagonist of Greek tragedy. This environment, however, partially normalizes this movement, especially if you know the history of Greek drama. The Chorus was the primordial performer at the Dionysia, with the occasional Choregos as the equivalent of the modern soloist. The Choregos could stand out, but he was still ultimately part of the Chorus. The Protagonist emerged as a performer who could act independent of the Chorus and engage in dialogue with it. The Deuteragonist came next, although a bit too early to be a cat of any kind, and then, much later the Tritagonist. The Chorus was singular and plural from the beginning, and the Choregos could move between the numbers as necessary, but the permeability of grammatical number for the Protagonist and his kin I had assumed was the result of the elevated style of Greek drama. This was partially true, but not necessary for the reasons I had assumed.

Before I go any further, I would like to clarify that in almost all case the explanation of metric convenience is a facile explanation and diminishes the skill of the tragedians.

An investigation into Smythe's Greek Grammar, a tome of wisdom compiled by a greater intellect than mine, revealed much. There is a Plural of Majesty (S1005) in Greek, but it applies to the noun rather than the verb, as an Anglophone might anticipate. These plural nouns do impart an air of majesty to tragedy, but it is the number of the verb which is more relevant here. The verb, specifically in the first person, when plural with a singular noun, is termed a Plural of Modesty (S1008), a concept rather alien to English-speakers, except perhaps in a cynical and manipulative way. This Plural of Modesty is meant to diminish the individual and place her in the greater crowd of whichever category is currently applicable. The evidence that some individuality remains lies in the retention of the feminine. When a feminine speaker uses the Plural of Modesty in verbalization, the modifying participles remain feminine if singular (S1009). If the participles change their number to plural, the gender becomes masculine, because masculine is the default in Greek. The construction of participles render this condition especially visible. 

The permeability of singular and plural, however, is still far more common than the above would suggest. Tragic dialogue flows between the specific circumstances of the tragedy and general statements which are applicable to the circumstances (S1012), between individual disaster and cosmic horror. This fluidity renders most of the shifts of number comprehensible, with the remainder a matter of consistency of style.

The core of Greek is its facility with grammar, but even something as simple as grammatical number cannot escape (lanthanein) the pathological philosophizing of the greatest dramatists.

He May Be Invincible, But My Wallet Isn't

 At great personal cost, I have caught up to what I believe is the appropriate point in Robert Kirkman's Invincible. I cannot be certain, however, due to the reshuffling of plot elements in adapting it to a different medium. Consecutive reading renders the sense of time quite differently, but the events in-universe do occur faster than I had imagined. When Invincible first came out, I read some issues, but I was more enthusiastic about Dynamo 5 than anything else in the Kirkman universe. The events of Volumes 3 and 4 move quickly because the comic-reading audience would already be familiar with the scenarios from other franchises. Ottley's style is not my favorite, but it is neither off-putting nor fundamentally unreadable (if colors can be said to be read). I have a bad habit, driven by the impulse to cut the chaff from my pull list, of dropping series before the surprise reveal which rewards the patient reader; on the other hand, the risk of continuing a series beyond literary and financial justification would make me a sucker rather than a good and loyal fan.

    Kirkman's dialogue is reflective of the era in which it was written; for some this may be an unforgiveable sin. I do not deem it as such. Although I would not use such language now, the slur in question was used casually then, and even now there are worse and more malevolent curses. Active homophobia seems not to be a concern in a universe full of Martian invaders. The other issue, the strange relation that Robot and Monster Girl have to aging, is not problematic as much as fascinating and a problem that could only be explored using fiction. I may write more about this later. For now, I recommend Invincible, but perhaps a more graduated approach to financial acquisition.

Foundation's Fruit: Seeds

 My review of Foundation, Season One, was the last, best hope for taking this blog in a certain direction. It failed. But an autopsy is still in order. For those who hold the delusion that the original book is filmable as is, I can do nothing. Film must fill the visual voids that a well-honed story leaves to the imagination of those that have them. Foundation also faces the John Carter dilemma of appearing derivative because others have borrowed from them in another medium.

The first season of Foundation accomplishes several things. Firstly, it establishes a framework of a season-long mystery. Mystery is a fundamentally Asimovian narrative structure. Psychohistory may be based on probability, but the initial conditions are specific. Secondly, it fills in the universe; the original stories assumed that readers at the time would fill in the context from the blatant historical references. The elements which trickled in must appear more quickly in a visual medium. Thirdly, the casting corrects (perhaps overcorrects) the blandness forced upon the original trilogy by John W Campbell's preference for only white heroes.

If any franchise is going to play the long game, it is Foundation. I do not believe I can assess it properly without watching a second season.

Miracleman (Miracleman, Does Whatever A Miracle Can ...)

Marvel is incorporating Alan Moore's Miracleman, or a version thereof, into its main universe. The true miracle is that the rights situation was resolved. Given Miracleman's transformation from Captain Marvel to Marvelman to Miracleman, perhaps this version should team up with Angela, a fellow company-crossing character. Both have been written by Neil Gaiman, after all. I cannot imagine, however, that Marvel can deliver on the mood of Miracleman's world.

Made in Abyss, Season 1: Katabasis Japanese-style

 

I’ll admit, I binge watched Made in Abyss, Season 1. I’d been wanting to watch it for a while, because I like YA protagonists experiencing and overcoming horrifying scenarios, but I was put off by the rumor of Japanese images not conducive to the online reputation of American males. Thus, the opportunity to binge it without extra cost was welcome. You know things are going to become dark when the default idyllic hometown from which the plucky girl protagonist leaves has lax child-labor laws, especially for orphans. The duo of plucky yet emotional child who should not be embarking on life-endangering quests and her ridiculously human robot boy (with plot-convenient amnesia, of course) is as wholesome as animation comes. The animation itself, both of places and bizarre creatures, is Ghibli-esque. The price paid for the descent into the Netherworld (and especially any ascent) is just as excessive as it should be. Facilis descensus Averni indeed.

I am looking forward to Season 2 in 2022. But why are the Japanese so obsessed with still-birth? And why is nobody in this world concerned about the specific timing of the layer with all the skeletons?

Dustborn: Fury Road for Fifth Graders

 

Dustborn by Erin Bowman is an easy YA read set in a place that is only slightly less doomed than N K Jemisin’s geomancer trilogy. That the map at the front is critical to the plot was refreshing. The contingencies of modern book format out of universe and the awkward yet necessary placement of the map in-universe allows forgiveness for a lack of consistent absolute scale. The characters are appropriately ignorant or startled by Old World technology, as they call it. The setting appears post-apocalyptic (which is technically correct), and the astronomy is wonky, but the sheer ignorance of the locals about anything outside of survival, and sometimes even then, is an effective screen for the actual truth. When the truth is revealed, the rather shallow world building makes sense. Sometimes with YA books it is hard to tell whether a book is the first of a trilogy.

 

The names of the characters are a bit on the nose. The protagonist, Delta of Dead River, is the predictable adolescent girl point-of-view, while Asher of Alkali Lake is the mandatory love interest/antagonist. The baby doesn’t get a name until later, and Delta’s creativity does not extend to names. Nobody is particularly likeable in the harsh environment, but some people are more awful than others. The distribution of skills and knowledge makes The Masterpiece Society’s utopia look well-planned.  The plot is stolen, but no more so than many science fiction juveniles. The linguistics is shoddy, as it nearly always is, but serviceable. The thematic swearing is mildly irritating because the thematic appropriateness is not enough to distract from the awkward prosody reminiscent of “translationese.”

There is nothing revolutionary about the setting, plot, or characterization in Dustborn; it is, nonetheless, a pleasant diversion, and a wholly acceptable juvenile for those parents who find the classics a bit too patriarchal – or do not want their kids watching the Mad Max franchise. If Bowman set another story in the future (or past) of this setting, it would be welcome.