Picture books

Graphic novels are picture books for adults. Many are, anyway (if they're for adults). There's a hint of trouble already, but it isn't that they're picture books. The trouble is assuming this must be contemptible or atavistic in an adult because it's associated with childhood.

I know many people don't think that way, but enough do.

A movie is based on a storyboard, which is a specialized graphic novel. When you read the storyboard rather than watch a screen, your imagination is asked to produce lots of sound and emotion and logic and action to connect and fill in the frames.

Some see movies with contempt, because they aren't novels. But novels were once seen with contempt. Even writing itself was once seen with contempt.

All of these forms can be challenging.

Some people will completely follow and understand movies like The Thin Man, The Departed, Gosford Park, and Mission Impossible the first time through. But most won't, whatever they tell you. I didn't. It's ok: these were not meant to be easy. And films like Mulholland Drive and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie were not meant to be definite. All are challenging, each in its own way.

Your mind doesn't have to fill in as much with a live play. Are plays easy or difficult, then? Don't believe a friend who watches a Shakespeare play for the first time and claims to have understood everything. They're probably just happy they could follow the outline of the plot and guess at the meanings of old words. Or they're bluffing entirely. The Bard's plays were supposed to be comprehensible to Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences, but all the same they were quite challenging then. They almost immediately fell out of fashion for a century or two because they were considered too dark and too difficult. Yet some plays are simple. "Stage play" does not specify a level of challenge or a genre of story.

The first comics ("graphic novels" is mostly a pretentious relabeling) I got into were the Sandman collections. Since I'd never read this way outside of a few strips in the paper, it was actually quite difficult at first to know which order to trace the panels in and how, exactly. Um, do you look at the picture first, or any text in it? Do you read the text mainly and let the pictures work around the edges, unconsciously? Do you go through it the way an art museum goes through you, gazing at the drawings for minutes on end? What do you do with the words in caps? Is this person yelling? Are they being sarcastic? Are you meant to intentionally alter the sound in your fabricated scene? Or let the caps work unconsciously? It it important to hear it in your head? Should every character have a different voice?

I could go on for a while. The point is there aren't strictly right answers to any of these, including the order of the panels. The flow might seem obvious, but it is certainly taken seriously by the artist. And sometimes that's even used for effects like, well, direct ambiguity about the path. That does not exist in film or novels. If it does, I haven't seen it, anyway.

Ok, I've seen similar. In a classic like The Rules of the Game or one of the Hobbit movies presented in stereoscopic at high frame rate (HFR 3D), there absolutely is ambiguity about where to put your eyes. In regular film you'll notice this also: you can miss things in the foreground because you were checking out the background, and vice versa. But typical filmgoers (I think) watch mostly unaware of how their eyes are focusing. Intellectually we may know that our eyes saccade over a scene, tactically mining choice spots to smelt an impression quickly and accurately. But usually we are completely blind to those mechanisms. Seeing a film in HFR 3D, or one like The Rules of the Game which uses deep focus shots throughout—shots that are focused everywhere, leaving you all the choice as to where to focus—can feel overwhelming. Where do you look? You suddenly realize that you've been fed from someone's palm all along: you thought you were choosing where to look, and you were, sort of. But like a gambler at a casino, you face odds that are highly rigged. In some ways the outcome of your choosing is all but inevitable.

Isn't it wonderful for artwork to show you this without a word? Without it even being the main point? Reinforcing but not defining the theme? To me, that's incredible.

It may be tempting to see comic books as stupid, but they can easily be more challenging to read than a film is challenging to watch. And if you aren't used to them, you might find yourself reading a graphic novel more awkwardly and gradually than a novel, in terms of time per page. Per text, that's a bigger slowdown.

So Sandman is a series of picture books for adults. But it will challenge many readers who wouldn't be challenged by a series of picture books for children.

Lately I've been rereading it. The first time, I thought the writing wasn't that good. It was... well, all right, it worked in this format. The stories? Fantastic! But it felt as if the writer couldn't write well in a more traditional setting.

On rereading, I no longer see that. My concept of writing has changed over the years. This dialogue—it's almost all dialogue—is not meant to be lyrical. This is not poetry. People don't speak in poetry. And for sure it isn't realistic. We're talking about the eldritch king of dream-land influencing "the real world," contending with other spirits like him. It doesn't take a literature professor to notice the parallel between that dream king and any writer. Neatly, though, Sandman doesn't fixate on metafiction in a distracting way. A spell must be allowed room to work.

What humor are U in

We owe Carl Jung a giant thank you for discovering introversion versus extraversion and beginning the study of personality as a science. Advances make society better over time.

You can certainly poke holes in his vision of personality. For one thing, it's based on a theory of 4 bodily humors that traces back at least to Plato. You know the one—if you're angry that's yellow bile acting up (hence "bilious"); if you're depressed that's your black bile (hence "melancholy"); if you're anxiously careful that's mucous (hence "phlegmatic"); if you're impassioned and impulsive that's blood (hence "sanguine"). Spotting all the threads tying the Myers-Briggs Temperament Index derived a few years later by a mother-daughter team (who still get lambasted in an overly sexist way) to the 4 humors is fun, but I'll leave that to you if you're curious.

What I'll say is that although the bodily fluids idea turned out to be rubbish, the personalities pinned to different bodily fluids still make a good dab of sense. This wasn't half-bad for a first try 2400 years ago. No doubt that's what attracted Jung. Fortunately, he threw out the fluids hypothesis. Aside from "we notice these patterns" and "we hypothesize they arise from these bodily fluids"—before real science existed, I don't think anyone even put it forward as properly as that—there was nothing scientific about Plato's model of personality. It was just some good, informal observation tied to a baseless, untested, and unadmitted hypothesis as to the mechanism. (Actually, I don't think Plato brought in the fluids at all. If I remember correctly, that was Empedocles. So you could say Jung went all the way back to Plato's sketch of personality types, skipping Empedocles and all the medieval and wrong ideas about nutrition and medicine that followed.)

Carl Jung made it a little better. He was a trained experimental and observational scientist. Admittedly I haven't read a single one of his numerous books detailing the baroque framework he devised (personality is indeed complicated), but as a researcher and clinician who took copious notes, he based his ideas on some kind of empirical trail. This is so often forgotten, because it seems also very clear that he had a mild form of psychosis, which contributed to his themes of spiritualism and superstition and his love of mythology.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, though. It's how he was. We can still credit him with discoveries he made.

Actually, there's something good about it. He influenced the study of folklore and religion and storytelling tremendously. We can thank him, in part, for popularizing some of the most effective techniques in today's books, tv shows, story-based games, and movies.

My reason for saying this is just that I was standing by the microwave waiting for some chocolate milk to heat up, musing about humans as social creatures. Introversion/extraversion clears up a bit of confusion and helps us get along. There's really a ton more to it—that duality is only square one. But it is a first step to really understanding human socialization: conflict, empathy, cooperation, etc.

In fact, Jung came up with the idea while trying to explain to himself why he had such a big falling out with his mentor, Sigmund Freud. The eventual solution, in his mind, was to see this big divide between their two personality styles: Freud was something Jung decided to call "extraverted" (there are stories about how Freud made endless numbers of friends by memorizing everyone's name and details about their lives, so he could ask good questions if he ever met them in the future) while Jung was "introverted" (at one point in grade school, he was so shy he couldn't even go to class and had to be taught at home for a while). Today we wouldn't see that as a reason two people can't get along. But imagine a world before "introvert" and "extravert" existed as words. How would you understand what Jung struggled to understand about this big clash with someone he loved?

Maybe you wouldn't, and maybe people get along better today because of that fight, and the ideas that grew from it.

Front for a frown

I like things to be neat and tidy in print, but there's a wall. There's a limit. When I'm reading anything but a logo or heading, I want the font invisible. The best font most of the time is the one I'll never notice. That's how I choose fonts 99% of the time: what do I not even see? Good. That's what I want.

I will go through things I've written and replace dashes - like these two - with proper long em dashes, which look a lot better to me. Back in the day, I'd always double the hyphens--like this--and then at a specific moment in my life I switched to space, hyphen, space. But ultimately it all looks wrong to me unless it's an em dash.

I've put down ebooks before (permanently) after noticing a typo and a poorly placed comma or two. It feels like I can't trust the text anymore. (My reading of I, Robot was sunk by sloppy text. One day...)

While I am evidently picky about punctuation, I still have trouble understanding people who get upset about seeing straight quotation marks and apostrophes instead of the curled, slanted ones. That seems like a very high-maintenance preoccupation for very little return. There is no easy way to type oriented quotes and apostrophes. And if you aren't looking, and you are most people, you aren't going to see the difference. I'd really prefer not to see the difference; I wouldn't consider it an improvement if the difference started jumping out at me.

It's already bad enough that when I copy and paste, momentarily paying closer attention to atomic symbols, I often replace any curly quotes with the straight, lower-maintenance, "less correct" ones. Consistency does matter.

See, I'm as bad as people who bitch about the uncurled ones being wrong :p

But I do recognize it's a useless preoccupation (I'm being mean) unless you're typesetting for publication. For my aims, I entirely refuse to go hunting the snark of quotation marks everywhere to curl them so they'll look marginally more proper—unless someone is set on doing that for me—in which case I won't stop them, as long as it's consistent. Entirely refuse, I say!

The curled ones look a little nicer, I admit. But I also don't want to notice. Magic happens when you stop noticing font and every other surface.

As long as both quotation marks are included, nobody spends time wondering whether a particular mark is the start or end of a quotation. I see the potential use, but in practice it's almost never needed. Even where it could help slightly, the amount it helps is negligible. (For some readers, say with dyslexia, this may be different, though. I'm not sure, but I apologize for being inconsiderate.)

The joke's on me, of course, for spending the time and energy to actually put these thoughts in print.

The fractured monarch

The King of Limbs is so experimental it's a fractured album. I even believe shattering is a hidden meaning in the name—"limbs"—but I can't confirm this. A couple years before it came out, Radiohead said they'd never release another album, just singles.

I remember their website saying it. What they eventually did was break parts off the album and release them as connected singles. The art on these non-overlapping fragments plainly shows that they're all part of The King of Limbs. Indeed, they're from the same sessions. The band's recording technique was also intentionally out of order. Staccato. TKOL is one of their least appreciated albums because the weirdness lost even Radiohead fans, haha.

The author of a Stereogum article diving into this ("In Defense Of The King of Limbs") says he's made an uber-playlist of all the associated songs. A reintegrated album that works fantastically, but he doesn't give the ordering. Then someone in the comments offers one up. So a while back I made Ass-Kicked89's list a Spotify playlist. It's pretty good—yeah, yeah to say the least! My guess is that Radiohead wanted to encourage us to make our own playlists... a jigsaw puzzle album.

It would be seriously remiss to talk about The King of Limbs without sharing that many consider the filmed live performance (The King of Limbs: Live from the Basement) better than the original, "better" as in "so much better that these fans see it as the album itself." Definitely check that out, but I say give the complete playlist a try as well! Personally, I love it.

I used to think I'm a good writer. It's taken a lot of practice to realize I'm not.

Not being a good writer is as constructive as not being a mathematician. When you aren't a good writer, nothing is ever good just because you wrote it. When you aren't a mathematician, nothing makes sense just because someone says it's logic.

The only thing that makes a difference when you aren't any good is your willingness to keep at it.

Generators

Making a music generation engine that could learn different styles from music scores and recordings was my senior tech project in high school. The thought was to get started on something like LucasArts' iMUSE engine or Sid Meier's Bach generator, only shooting for what unites all music. I... didn't get very far. At all. Tried to learn Lisp, studied fractals and neural networks, dipped into papers on other music generators, outlined code that never got to the point of compiling. Getting nowhere was an issue at graduation time. There was even a question about whether I would, and it meant I didn't get a fancy emblem on my diploma.

It was a great excuse to learn music, though. As the year began, I signed up for the available semester-long theory class and convinced my dad to buy me a cheap guitar, which I gradually taught myself to play. And I've been fascinated ever since. Besides failing, which can be a healthy thing—it's better to take on an interesting challenge and fail than not challenge yourself—I realized that I like improvising my own melodies way too much to want a computer to do that for me. Sour grapes? Maybe. Maybe—but I really think they're sweet. Anyway, neural network research keeps closing in on what I over-ambitiously tried to do in 1999-2000. Eerie stuff!

Rules of democracy

While trying to piece together my memories of the places I lived when I was really little (it's a jumble!), I found myself going down the rabbit hole of Czech political history. Czechoslovakia was a communist state the entire time my mom lived there, from 1951 to sometime in the early 70s when she gave up her only citizenship to get out of there, even though it meant she could never go back.

The first time I went to the country was (I had somehow forgotten this) during the Velvet Revolution of 1989. It was still underway, but the president had resigned. Though I don't remember seeing any protests, I had a faint idea at the time. Change was afoot. After all, we were suddenly able to visit.

We'd watched the Berlin Wall fall not 6 weeks before on television, and Vaclav Havel, the man about to become the last president of Czechoslovakia (later the first president of the Czech Republic) had been arrested only 5 weeks before our arrival, during the first big protest in Wenceslas Square. He became president about 3 days after we flew back.

From my perspective, we went to see family for Christmas, which was wonderful for multiple reasons, not least of which was that it was so different. Everything was utterly grey, though. The Czech capital, Prague, looked nothing like how it looks now; it was a shock a few years later to visit again and discover that it's a gorgeous city. (Digression: history in the making again, take a look at Prague during COVID-19 lockdown in the short film The Silence of Prague. In the second to last shot, just as the title gets to the top of the screen, there's an old city square with a clock tower on the left. My mom was just telling me that she lived right around the corner of that clock tower in college, meters from what you can see in the frame.) My parents had mentioned protests and communism ending in the country, but it was all pretty distant to me, even though technically we were there.

The moment in history is called the Velvet Revolution (or the Gentle Revolution) because it wasn't violent, in general, and this was no mistake. Hundreds of different pamphlets had been circulating in the capital, and the sentiment on the street was to keep a premium on peaceful protest and maintain "humanness" under all circumstances. Of the two most famous flyers going around at the time, one was called "The Eight Rules of Dialogue." My mom has mentioned it to me before and read it out loud, translating it for me, but that was much later and I didn't put it in context until now. The Eight Rules set the stage for a new democracy.

More than 100 years before, Marx and Engels had called for a "violent revolution" as the only way to get communism up and running. But once Marx could see the consequences of those words in persistent brutality and dysfunction, he admitted that the statement had been a grievous mistake. Which brings us back to Czech communism: mistakenly brought in with violence, peacefully dismissed with protest when it simply didn't work anymore.

Vaclav Havel, the new president, had long been a popular playwright, poet, revolutionary, and essayist—since the 60s. Here's a quotation I like:

"I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions."

To me, that's a reminder of what democracy is about and why it works. We use words.

Here are the Eight Rules from that famous flyer, courtesy of the book Revolution with a Human Face by James Krapfl:

"The Eight Rules of Dialogue"

1. Your opponent is not an enemy but a partner in search of truth. The goal of our discussion is truth, in no case intellectual competition. Participation in dialogue assumes a triple respect: toward truth, toward the other, and toward the self.

2. Try to understand each other. If you do not correctly understand the opinion of your opponent, you can neither refute his claims nor accept them. Formulate for yourself the objections of your partner, so that it may be clear how you understand him.

3. Don't present insistence without objective reasons as an argument. In such a case it is just a matter of your opinion and your partner need not concede the weight of the argument.

4. Don't skirt the issue. Do not avoid unpleasant questions or arguments by directing the issue elsewhere.

5. Don't try to have the last word at all costs. No quantity of words can make up for a missing argument. Silencing a partner does not mean refutation of his argument or disavowal of his ideas.

6. Don't undercut the personal dignity of your opponent. Whoever attacks the person of his opponent, rather than his thought, loses the right to participate in dialogue.

7. Don't forget that dialogue requires discipline. In the end it is with reason, never with emotion, that we form our claims and judgments. He who is unable intelligibly and calmly to express his opinion cannot conduct a worthwhile conversation with others.

8. Don't confuse dialogue with monologue. Everyone has the same right to express himself. Don't get lost in minor details. Consideration toward everyone else can be expressed by your ability to save time.

I must say that's a truly awesome way to have a revolution.