This Is Beautiful: A timeline???

 Happy over 1,000 posts on this blog!

Anyways last week I met with my mentor and we actually laid out a timeline to get my manuscript out and published and out the door. I'm AMAZED I have been wanting that for so long. It feels like this will actually be happening now! I hope we're able to stick to it and get it out there, it's been so frustrating feeling like the momentum just isn't there, or that we'll say one timeline and keep pushing it back. But there's progress and movement! This might actually happen!

“I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons” by Peter S. Beagle

It’s another installment of “I picked this book up because it has a dragon on the cover.” And honestly, this method works scarily well, it nearly always gives me exactly what I want out of a fantasy series, which is primarily dragons. I didn’t realize the author wrote The Last Unicorn as well, not that I’ve read that book, but I remember the movie being scarring when I was growing up. I don’t remember it in great detail, but the vibe here is rather similar where it is both a whimsical fantasy story and there are real life consequences to actions that the characters grapple with.

The book opens with Robert, a dragon exterminator who loves dragons. He has a few a helpful pets, but he is hired to exterminate the castle of its dragons when Princess Cerise wants them gone to impress a Prince (she’d been batting them away until Prince Reginald arrives, who looks like the Platonic ideal of a Prince but doesn’t quite act like it). Robert is then accidentally hired to help Prince Reginald slay a dragon, to make him more Prince-ly in the eyes of his father so that he can marry the Princess. They get a little more than they bargain for, there’s a group of huge dragons terrorizing part of the kingdom and something like over half of the retinue dies as Cerise didn’t want to send them home.

From there, they realize that a wizard sent the dragons, and that it’s the wizard Dahl who was supposedly killed by Reginald’s father. Now that he’s back, they head to Reginald’s kingdom but get there too late, Reginald is captured and then his father is turned into a throne. On the way back Dahl tries to stop them since he recognizes Robert’s connection with the dragons and wants his power, but Robert works with the dragon sent after them to burn Dahl into ash. In the process, Robert and Cerise realize that they’re in love, and when they head back Robert tries to hide in his room but is eventually coaxed out to see Cerise. The book ends with them going to talk to Cerise’s parents and Reginald and Robert resolving to eventually free Reginald’s father.

Overall, the book is quite fun to read. I love the dragons, and the characters are a delightful mix of believable and comical. They all start out as stereotypes, and through the story become more and more humanized so you can’t help but care for them and their antics. I do wish Robert’s friends that help with his extermination got more screen time, but that’s alright.

My biggest complaint has to do with the writing style. There are points, especially towards the end where the action gets going, where aspects of the action will just be skipped over in the text and can make it hard to follow. This happens when the King is turned into a throne, there’s a part where Cerise and Robert must move in order for it to make sense, but that isn’t written anywhere. You have to pause to make sense of it all which really takes you out of it. I’m not sure if it is an error, but it happened multiple times so I suspect that it’s part of Beagle’s style. It’s quite hard to describe in advance of reading the situation, so it isn’t really a reason to not read the book, but I found it rather irritating.

The ending with Robert and Cerise getting together is also equal parts annoying and just simply expected. It’s visible from a mile away that they’re going to get together and that annoyed the shit out of me since it was just so trope-y. We could just let the dragon nerd be a dragon nerd and not marry the princess but I guess not. Again, not a reason to not read it, it was pulled off perfectly fine, but I was hoping that a fantasy story that messes with some tropes related to dragons and all might not have that ending.

I’m hoping that there’ll be a sequel eventually since one was teased with the ending, I do like the characters enough to keep going with them. And there’s some intriguing world building with Robert’s powers. So despite all of the complaints above, I would still recommend this book and will keep going with the series myself.

This Is Beautiful: New Semester

 This semester is going to be weird. Hopefully all in a good way but we'll see. I am kinda excited as this all gets up and going. I'm not teaching so my main goals are to just graduate, and I'm in a pretty good position to be graduating. Hopefully this is relaxing and primarily rejuvenating as far as semesters go. I do feel as though I oscillate wildly between "This is going to be so much" and "This will be nothing." But either way, I will be graduating and I'm looking forward to the last semester of things like my dance group and progressing more with aerial circus. It'll be a good one!

“Water Moon” by Samantha Sotto Yambao

I found this book when it was featured at a bookstore as an exciting new fantasy story. And I’ll be so honest here, this book is super not for me. I didn’t like the story, found the conflict to be contrived, and the plot didn’t make integrated sense. I do think part of this is that it should be advertised differently, it’s much more of a romance than fantasy, and maybe that would help. But I’m also very confused why this was so hyped up when it doesn’t technically hold together very well.

The story starts with Hana, she’s the daughter of a pawnshop owner who pawns people’s regrets. The customers come in, trade out their choices for tea, and go on their way. The day Hana takes over the shop, her father steals a choice and disappears. Meanwhile Kei walks in and offers to help her, and the two of them go on a journey through Hana’s world to try and find her father. They fall in love, learn about the darker aspects of Hana’s world and life, and then are eventually reunited in Kei’s world.

Where to start with this book. First of all, the main advertisement seems false to me. This has a lot more romance, not in terms of steaminess or anything, but in terms of coherence. The romance is a much bigger driving factor in the story than the world building. In fact the world building feels like there isn’t a real coherence to the world we explore, it’s more “we go here and then here and then here” and each place has it’s own logic and rules. There isn’t anything linking it together other than maybe the author wanting to create these disparate places. Versus Hana and Kei are constantly whining about how they shouldn’t be together and yet are anyways. I’m not a big romance person, but I got so sick of the same talking points again and again with them.

The conflicts between them were also very contrived. They have a couple fights, the first is when Kei learns that Hana pawns choices to get a piece of someone’s soul to instill in babies in Hana’s world. And this comes out of freaking nowhere, plus Kei is a physicist. As a scientist I would think he would be more bothered by the existence of souls and all that, before getting mad about Hana taking them. Potentially this is a cultural difference, but to go from 0-60 like that felt like we just needed a fight here.

I think that’s enough of me dunking on this book. If it was accurately advertised as a romance rather than a trip through a fantasy world, I probably wouldn’t have picked this up as I would have known that it would piss me off. There’s minimal references to the romance on the back of the book and that feels absurd to me.

This Is Beautiful: The Blues Brothers

 I don't think I've written about it on here, which surprises me, but one of my favorite films is The Blues Brothers. I saw it initially in high school and just fell in love, I'm not sure why. I haven't seen it much since then, but I read a book on the movie (to be featured in a main post soon) and rewatched the film (also will be included in that) and it just reminded me how much I adored it. Revisiting things is so nice, I should do it more often.

“The Starless Sea” by Erin Morgenstern

This is yet another book where I have no idea how it ended up on my to read list but I am so glad that it did! I truly feel as though this book was able to capture something specific and essential to my current existence, and I really treasure those opportunities when they come along.

The book starts with a story about a pirate and a girl. Then it changes to an acolyte pledging herself to a place that seems like a library. Then it changes again. Zachary is a graduate student studying video games when he checks a book out of a library that appears to have a chapter about him as a child. He does some digging, and thinks he’ll get more information from a literary party in NYC so he heads down and meets Dorian. Dorian promises him more information in return for help stealing a book from a secret society he used to belong to. Around here the interspersed separate chapters change from the library book Zachary found to the book he stole for Dorian. Zachary gets the book but they’re found out and have to make a quick getaway. They start to go through a painted door down to the library-like place, but Dorian is stopped and only Zachary makes it. There Zachary finds the Keeper, an old man who keeps watch. He also meets Mirabel, the person painting the doors.

Mirabel and Zachary go to save Dorian and bring him back down. Once back, Zachary is still trying to find answers to his questions. Now the interspersed separate stories change to The Ballad of Simon and Eleanor, a book that Zachary finds. Zachary hunts down Dorian once he’s recovered and they start to go through the information together. It becomes clear that these stories are about all of them, there’s a chapter on Dorian as a kid, and Mirabel/the Keeper are Fate/Time trapped in a doomed romance. Simon and Eleanor are also Mirabel’s parents. Zachary and Dorian also are flirting with each other. They head back to the Keeper and find the leader of the secret society Zachary stole from, who threatens Dorian. A rift opens in the floor, Dorian and the leader fall through, leaving the Keeper and Zachary behind. The Keeper reveals that the leader was an acolyte once who saw that this place was going to be destroyed and wanted to stop it by removing every way to get to it. Mirabel and Zachary then descend even farther to try and find Dorian.

The interspersed chapters are now Zachary’s friend from school, Kat’s, diary as she tries to find Zachary. Dorian falls into a honey sea and is pulled out by Eleanor. He travels with her for a bit and then separates to find an inn. From there he heads into a demon-infested world to try and find Zachary. Meanwhile Zachary is separated from Mirabel, but he finds his way separately through the depths, locates Simon, and then finds the honey sea. He then turns around to find Dorian, but Dorian stabs him through the heart. Now dead, Zachary brings the key to the end of the story to the bees, and the honey sea starts to rise. Meanwhile, Dorian has found a heart left by Fate and uses that to revive Zachary as the Keeper and Mirabel locate a new Harbor to start some new stories.

I am honestly unsure that my summary makes much sense, I had to leave many things out. There’s also an Owl King and the bees are everywhere and cats. There’s more interspersed chapters revealing the mythology of the place, and probably hundreds of things I didn’t pick up on. If you want everything to be wrapped up in a neat bow, this is not the tale for you. There’s symbols and questions, and characters that are metaphors and some that are not. You have to work for it and be ok with a few loose threads. Myself, I was thrilled. I loved the detective work and how elaborate the world was in that you could read books from the universe!

Primarily though, this is a book about telling stories. Zachary is doing graduate research on how video games tell stories. The underground library place is a repository of stories that the acolytes write down, the Keeper keeps record of, and the secret society was originally supposed to protect. Once the characters get below everything, that sea of honey is described as a place where stories can manifest objects, depending on what story you tell yourself. It’s the power of humans to create narratives made physical. There’s discussions about “the story” of the book as though it is its own separate force, such as bringing Simon back into “the story” when he’s found by Zachary, and how Zachary brings the story everywhere he goes. At the end, he tells Mirabel a story to get the key to end it. And of course the last 50 pages when I was desperately hoping to delay the ending, it is all a wonderful musing on what it means for a story to end. I felt like the author really anticipated what I would be feeling there and I feel a little called out as a result.

This hit so many notes that are just important to me personally. All of the references to other media and Zachary feeling as though all his life is are these references, that got me (as a fan of postmodern writing and someone who only has like 3 jokes that I tell over and over, that sure got me). There’s the fact that Zachary is a graduate student trying to figure his life out when all he wants to do is read books, that’s me for sure. The video games as stories is something I’ve been trying to engage with more and having that as a subplot as something that Zachary and his friend from university are both into was really fun. I think I would have loved this book even if I wasn’t in graduate school, but having that extra touch really heightened the experience and probably made it so that this was the perfect moment for me to pick up this book. And it just made me love reading and stories and wish that I had in fact more time to spend on consuming them all. What a wonderful book.

“Ways of Seeing” by John Berger

This book is a collection of seven essays actually by a group of folks: John Berger, Sven Blomberg, Chris Gox, Michael Dibb, and Richard Hollis. It’s based on a BBS television series Berger did, but I haven’t watched that so I can’t comment on it too much. The idea is that this is a series of essays elaborating on the ideas from the series, and thinking about the format of the ideas as well. To this end, four of the essays have words and images and three are images only.

The first essay is about sight in general and how we portray and frame images, especially paintings. It is even noted in the text, it interacts with Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as it talks about photography and how that changes how we see art today. The next is a visual essay, and this one was clear to me, it’s about the male gaze. Essay three elaborates on this in words, how women are portrayed as objects for men to consume and such (none of the authors are female I will note).

The second half is where it gets a bit obscure for me. The fourth essay is pictorial and I assume it is about the contradictions in oil painting as that is how it’s described in the brief intro, but I am not sure what those are. Especially since all of the paintings are small and black and white, I like the idea but I am lost here folks. The next essay does discuss oil paintings, primarily about possession. To own a painting is to own what it portrays, that sort of thing. The next visual essay is similar, I’m not totally sure what it’s getting at, and the final essay talks about art in advertisements and publicity and how that can contrast with the news at the time.

In general I thought this was a really interesting read. It has been a while since I read anything about art criticism and art history so I really enjoyed this short form of essays about different ideas. I even appreciate what the authors were going for with the visual essays! I think it’s a really interesting idea to present images with minimal text even identifying the images and let the viewer draw what they may. It kinda ends there for me though, on a practical sense if you are writing an essay you want the viewer to leave with the point of the essay. And I have no idea if I got that point. I don’t think I did, really, I noticed some themes but they were very surface level. Maybe if this wasn’t an essay and just a more loosely ended path it could make more sense. Or if there were just minimal words or arrows or something to communicate with the reader!

The essays with text though I really liked. I thought the initial essay you might want some familiarity with Benjamin, but that’s not necessary you can follow it just as is. The second if it wasn’t for the dudes writing about women I would probably really enjoy. There’s a very interesting discussion about how the Western form of art inherently objectifies women through tropes and just how we are used to them being portrayed. Which is so fascinating, especially because they expand to other cultures. Folks in the art world are so narrow in their view of art, you rarely see comparisons to other cultures. The oil painting and possessions one I think was my least favorite, there are a lot of ideas tossed together in that one that could have used more space. And the last essay almost completes the circle, it talks about advertisements which are reproduced images. In particular I think in the age of the Internet and Twitter, it is important to think about the images we see and what those mean, whether it’s news or an ad. None of it was super groundbreaking, I’ve seen discussions of photos and photojournalism before, but I hadn’t seen ads directly contrasted with photojournalism previously. And that might be over, we rarely see physical newspapers that will directly have an ad opposite a story. So I quite liked that one as well.

This was a short book, but quite interesting. I’m glad that I had the opportunity to pick it up, it was under high demand at the local library (I’m not quite sure why but cool). I will probably try to check out that BBC series and see how it intersects with this work.