This Is Beautiful: Ballet

 I recently went out and made the questionable decision to buy pointe shoes again. It's been nine years since I've done pointe work, I'm essentially starting from scratch, but it's been interesting getting back into ballet a little more. It definitely makes me remember why I stopped, this stuff hurts so much, but you get to look so graceful and actually imitate professional dancers. And maybe it's a little unhealthy, but the calluses I'm starting to get feel like a badge of honor. Both that I'm doing this, and that I'm somehow doing this while in grad school. And I think progressing on my own has allowed me to go at my own pace so I don't feel like this is a chore so much and more that it's something I want to do. Dancing, it's so fun and it sure beats your body up. But it's really cool to see the progress over time.

“A Wizard Alone” by Diane Duane

When it came to the New Millenium Editions of the Young Wizards series, I was probably the most curious about this one. (You can see posts on previous books in the series: first, second, third, fourth, and fifth.) The book has to do a lot with grief, and also with autism. So, you can imagine that it would need an update from its original publication in 2002, we now know a lot more about neurodivergence than previously.

The book alternates between Kit and Nita’s narration. Kit’s house has been having a “wizardly leakage” of sorts where the TV and the remote yell at each other in Japanese and Ponch is still coming into his powers. He’s worried about Nita, who is grieving her mother, but doesn’t want to press. He gets contacted by the Senior wizards, there’s a new wizard who has been on his Ordeal for several months. Kit goes to find the new wizard, Darryl, and finds out that he’s an African-American autistic boy. He was diagnosed young, but began to have a much harder time coping with his environment a few months ago. Kit is surprised by this, but as the Senior wizard reminds him, wizardry isn’t reserved for the neurotypical. Kit goes home and researches autism, including reading about what autistic people have written about it. He starts using Ponch’s abilities to jump between worlds to enter Darryl’s mind. Shortly after this though, Kit starts to take on some of Darryl’s characteristics including being withdrawn, and he shortly goes back into Darryl’s mind against the counsel of the senior wizards.

Nita meanwhile has been having a hard time grieving her mother. She’s frustrated with the other students that treat her as fragile, and even more annoyed with those that pretend nothing happened. Thankfully she has a pretty good counselor at school, but feeling like she has to take care of her dad and sister is leaving her drained. She starts having dreams, first it’s a clown going in circles, then a giant robot. She thinks it’s for Dairine at first, but then realizes that it’s Darryl! After doing some research, she learns that Darryl is an Abdal, or a Pillar, he’s essentially a saint or a direct conduit for the One Power that created life. She realizes that Darryl has been prolonging his Ordeal to try and trap a fragment of the Lone Power that created death at his own expense. She then realizes that Kit has disappeared to go back in there and will get stuck as well so she goes in after him.

Once in there Nita finds Darryl’s kernel, the instructions for his internal world that she learned about in the last book to save her mom, and tweaks it so she has an easier time. She joins the others and smashes a mirror that represents the trap that Darryl has set. The Lone Power leaves, with the agreement that Darryl will stay and trap him further. (The Long Power knows that Darryl is a Pillar so the extra investment in him makes sense. But also Darryl now knows he can be in multiple places at once from interacting with Nita and Kit separately so this trap isn’t an issue for him.) Nita offers that Darryl use the kernel to tweak his brain, and Darryl explicitly refuses to do so. He wants to keep his autism, to keep playing the hand he has been dealt. They all head home, and end up meeting up with Darryl on the moon. Darryl is clearly still autistic, he has a harder time with some aspects of conversation. But he’s gotten much better at dealing with his environment.

Alright so there were a lot of changes made here. I couldn’t remember the full details of the original, so I did do some digging and found both a review from an autistic individual and a post from the author that talks about this a little. The original version didn’t have the caveat that wizardry isn’t just for neurotypical individuals, and the autism is portrayed as a symptom of how Darryl has been keeping the Lone Power trapped in his inner universe. So when you get to the end of the book, Darryl gets “cured” of the autism and emerges as a neurotypical person. And that’s been criticized, of course. Having said that, before that point the portrayal of autism is fairly representative and respectful. But the ending certainly needed to be changed. My favorite inclusion though was of Kit researching autism and reading about autism from autistic people which you so rarely see. Plus his mom, who’s a nurse, talks about how autism can look so different between different people and this is just one person’s experience which is good. So the new editions are a major step up, and I’m honestly so impressed that an author went back and did so many edits in response to feedback from readers! Really nice to see.

Of course the other part of this book that I appreciate is the discussion of grief. This is largely Nita’s side of the plot, where she’s dealing with her mother’s recent death. At the beginning of the book, she doesn’t feel well enough to help Kit with this because she doesn’t want to let him down. She also has her own conversation with the Senior wizards about how she’s obsessively been looking up vocabulary after her interactions with the clown and robot. And they tell her to take her time, grief is on its own time and she shouldn’t do anything until she’s ready. By the end of the book though, she is pissed off, and ready to use that anger to save Kit. She’s annoyed at herself for taking so long when her wizardry partner clearly needed her. And at the end of the book she’s ready to tell the counselor that she’s done, she certainly isn’t over her mother’s death, but she’s ready to be a part of life more actively now. I don’t think it’s a perfect representation, maybe if she also went to normal therapy and not just grief counseling I’d feel better, but I do like the caveat that she isn’t totally unaffected by her mom’s death anymore. Grief is really weird where you’ll feel fine, and then suddenly it’ll hit you all over again. Or you’ll be openly experiencing it and be like “ok good I’m supposed to feel this so I’m feeling it and also this SUCKS.” There’s so many contradictions to it. So this is a good start to showing that in fiction, and since all of the other representations are so bad this really stands out.

So that’s this book! Moving onwards to the next one.

This Is Beautiful: Giving Talks

 Honestly, I'm real proud of myself for getting at the place where I can even enjoy public speaking. If you take a step back, there's a lot of work that goes into getting data and into presenting it in a way that people can understand. So it's really cool to be giving a presentation and communicating something that you're passionate about!

Anyways, this is brought to you by me doing my annual presentation to the department updating them on my progress and it going well. I was super anxious beforehand, but it all came together! Good stuff.

“A Wizard’s Dilemma” by Diane Duane

This book has been the hardest for me to read, even from the beginning. And that’s saying something for this series where I feel emotionally wrung out after most of them (you can read about the first book, second, third, and fourth that I read previously).

The fifth installation begins with Nita and Kit trying to fix some pollution in the water. Nita is frustrated with Kit and they end up getting into a fight. Kit then becomes preoccupied with his dog, Ponch, finding some area where he can practically invent new universes. Nita meanwhile has to deal with her mom getting a brain cancer diagnosis. To try and combat it she starts to learn about universe kernels, a sort of core that contain all of the laws of the universe. Once found, you can start to manipulate them, and her plan is to find her mother’s and create a world inhospitable for the cancer.

Along the way Nita meets other wizards also learning about kernels, including Prayala, a sort of otter-like alien with many more legs. The Lone Power (inventor of death) ends up inhibiting Prayala and offering Nita a deal: lose her wizardry and he will save her mother. Nita runs out of time and heads into her mother during surgery with Prayala. She tries to leave Kit to spare him, but Ponch takes him through one of his universes and to Nita anyways. Nita faces off against the Lone Power, who kills Prayala his host, and is about to give up when Kit appears with Ponch. Nita mom also manifests in her own body and tells the Lone Power to scram. She realizes his plan though, to act beaten and then force Nita’s mom to constantly be worrying about her health. To effectively stop living and start only avoiding death. So while they get rid of a lot of the cancer, not all of it. Nita gets ready to spend some time with her mom before she inevitably deteriorates.

The biggest thing about this book is that it is such a good book about grief, and coming to terms with death. What would you give up for your loved ones? What is a life worth? And how can you decide when this is in no way a rational choice? Nita makes up her mind to give up her wizardry for her mother, and it’s only with Kit’s help that she can move on from that. The book doesn’t actually get to the point where Nita’s mom dies, but way before then Nita realizes what the alternative is and what she has to do. The book ends with Nita dreaming about her and her mom in Timeheart together, talking about what happens after her mom dies. I can’t imagine what this is like to read if you have actually lost a parent, but I know it rings so authentically for me and I complain a LOT about books and how they tackle grief. This doesn’t shy away from grief and its messiness and that is such a strength of the work.

The side plot with Kit and Ponch is also really cute. It doesn’t say much about like emotions and things, but it’s really neat to get more of a look into Ponch’s mind and his relationship with Kit. Right before the end Kit gets taken to a world that is exactly like his home but perfect. For a minute he thinks about staying there and getting everything right and maybe even convincing himself that this is the place he’s from. But that doesn’t change that it wouldn’t be real and it wouldn’t be his universe. I have some mixed feelings about this, as I don’t think we can prove that the world we are living in is “the real one,” but he says something interesting about wizardry. Which is that it’s for engaging more with the real world and not for hiding it. Which is a neat idea, the things you do should get you closer to the reality of the world. Again, may not be totally sound, but a cool idea that melds with the rest of the book.

Final thing I want to comment on is minor but resonates with me. Nita’s mother used to be a ballet dancer, heavily implied that she was a principal or something as she has a poster of herself dressed as a swan princess. With the context of her illness it talks about how her body used to be under total control and now isn’t, or about how she knows about pain through dance. And that you shouldn’t mess with swans, they are fierce. All of that isn’t super expanded on, but I sure wish people didn’t think of dancers as weak and feminine and more so as a strong, fierce, swan. It’s another detail that brings this story to life.

I’m chugging through these pretty quickly, but I’m eager to get to some beloved characters and see how the world expands from here! From what I remember, all of the books are pretty emotionally challenging, but I think this one is probably the most brutal in the series. So at least there’s that to look forward to.

This Is Beautiful: Mitski

 Over the break I really wanted to expose myself to new music, so I figured I would pick one artist and just binge their stuff. For better or worse I chose Mitski and then realized that she has a whopping like six albums out so I had my work cut out for me.

It was a good time though, it was definitely interesting only being able to listen to each album a few times and then moving onto the next one. And I got to hear how her sound changed over time and figure out which ones I liked the best. I think next time I'll pick a more manageable artist, but still had a good time with this experiment.

“A Wizard Abroad” by Diane Duane

Moving right along, this is the fourth book in the Young Wizards series (you know the drill, there’s the first book, second book, third book, and this is my post on the fourth). This one always felt like a break from the earlier three to me, even when I was younger. It’s Nita’s first time on her own, in a different country, and it’s now openly dealing with romance. Not even I could have missed that when I was younger.

The book starts with Nita’s parents sending her to Ireland to stay with her aunt, arguing that she needs some time away from Kit to be a kid and things like that. Nita’s annoyed, but leaves. Once she gets to Ireland, strange things start happening, things like mythological creatures from the past coming back to the present. The source of this is that magic is hanging around longer than it should, ideally magical energy dissipates in a few days, but here is has been sticking around forever. She goes to find other wizards and see what information they have for her. In the process, she learns that Ronan, a boy in town she met and found attractive, is a wizard as well. He introduces her to the rest of the community, and Nita learns that her aunt (Aunt Annie) is a wizard too! They get everyone together and decide that they have to reenact a battle from ancient Ireland in order to reset the magical overlays.

To do this, they need four weapons, the cup (water), stone (earth), sword (air), and spear (fire). Not the exact weapons from ancient history, but weapons imbued with the spirit of the originals. They find the first three relatively easily, but Nita has to call Dairine in to get molten metal from the heart of a star for the final one. To smelt it, Nita and Kit (Kit started sneaking over to Ireland pretty early on) learn that the town blacksmith is a Power who couldn’t bear to leave (it’s implied she’s a vulture later on). So she smelts it into a spear, and Ronan, who has some of the spirit of the Power that used to be in Peach from the last book, begins to carry it. They cross over into another plane for the battle, and almost immediately there are attacks and deaths. The wizards make it down, and just when all seems lost, Ronan throws the spear into the Lone Power’s eye and they all go home.

Alright so even rereading this, there is so much to keep track of. There’s whole segments of Irish history in here, and even now I mostly skimmed those and didn’t think about it too hard. You get the details that you need anyways. I bet that I could go through and actually learn a lot about Irish history and mythology if I actually dove into it, it’s that detailed.

There’s also the romance, which I skipped over in the plot summary. Essentially, Nita and Ronan kiss and that’s how Nita realizes that he has part of a Power in him. It doesn’t lead to much, so I don’t find it super necessary, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It doesn’t take over the plot, and it does add to Nita’s experience being on her own and meeting someone. Just the right balance for me, personally.

We also get introduced to a cat bard in this book. I haven’t read the cat wizard series from Duane, but I bet that she follows up on these characters. Which is great because they are very cute, and since the series is already pretty non-human-centric, might as well!

Having said that, so much of the book is about how you can be surrounded by members of your own species and feel the most alone you’ve ever felt. I think it really hits something key to traveling, or even just growing up. You feel out of place and alone and uncomfortable when you are somewhere that you don’t have roots or a connection to. Similarly to Nita, I spent a semester abroad in Scotland. So I could still understand the language (mostly) but I felt so lonely while I was there. Don’t get me wrong, I had a blast, but the profound sense of detachment I sure still remember.

It really does feel like the books get more mature at this point. Plenty of characters die here (all unnamed, but still) and after this the series for sure gets a little more dark. I am excited to keep going though!

This Is Beautiful: Scott Pilgrim vs the World

 Now I haven't read the graphic novel, and I'm about to watch the Netflix animated show, but I really love the movie starring Michael Cera. My partner hadn't watched it yet so we watched it together the other night and I forgot just how much I adore this movie. It has such a unique and evocative blend of comic book aesthetic and video game noises and mechanics. You wouldn't think that all three (movie, comic book, and video game) would work well together, but it's so distinctive and merges together so well!

And then there's the fact that the casting is incredible! Everyone in it has so much talent. And the plot I think is still different from any other movie. It takes a really critical look at relationships and how everyone gets hurt, and you can't fully escape that past, regardless of if you hurt others or were hurt yourself. The final battle with Scott using self-respect to defeat the villain, coming clean to Knives and Ramona, is something that you still don't see in media frequently. I wish more would take the self-respect route rather than "love" or something.

With the new show, maybe I'll finally pick up the graphic novel. I haven't been avoiding it, I just haven't had the need since I like the movie so much. But this could be a really cool comparison of the different formats for the same story.

“High Wizardry” by Diane Duane

This is the third installment of the Young Wizards series! (I wrote about the first and second books previously.) Interestingly, this is the first one where we are not getting Nita’s point of view the entire time.

The book starts out with Nita and Kit going to a space museum to get out of the house while Nita’s family gets a new computer up and running. Dairine is caught messing with it and gets sent along with them. While at the museum, Nita and Kit realize that Dairine is both a wizard and that she has absconded to Mars. This leads them to break the news to their parents, and head off after Dairine on her Ordeal. Dairine meanwhile is off sightseeing the solar system, gets chased by some aliens, and then ends up on an unfamiliar planet that functions like a giant computer chip. She starts teaching the chip (called the motherboard) and ends up creating a race of little computer guys. The computer guys start arguing about the problem of entropy and they want to stop time in the universe while they reprogram it. Turns out that this is the Lone Power (the Power that invented entropy and death) tempting them, but Dairine dissuades them by sharing her memories and becoming part computer as well. Nita, Kit, and the talking parrot Peach catch up to her. Peach gets killed for talking smack to the Lone Power, and Dairine ends up defeating the Lone Power by holding him to the planet and recreating the first lights after the Big Bang. It’s then revealed that Peach is actually another Power, who takes the Lone Power home to recover. The rest of the kiddo all head home alright.

This is a really inventive book for a number of reasons. Dairine’s manual is a laptop, and it is hinted that this is a beta version of a new manual aimed at more experienced wizards to help cast spells faster and such. But it’s a sign of a larger theme of the book which is the potential of technology with magic. Dairine uses her laptop to cast spells, and creates a lifeform that isn’t biological, it’s entirely technology. So far we have seen Nita deal with life forms and Kit with inanimate objects, but no computers or artificial intelligence yet.

We also get an interesting insight into the Powers with this book, from seeing the Lone One be defeated right from the beginning and the transformation of Peach. I remember being fascinated by the Peach plot twist because Peach has been a really endearing character from the beginning, so to have her change into an all-powerful being sure is something. I wonder if Duane planned that from the start or just came up with it for this book.

We also finally get to see more of space, and of more life forms. There’s a really big transit station that Dairine goes through, and Nita and Kit eventually follow. It is like something out of Star Wars, the beings are incredibly diverse and rarely do you see a hominid. I really love how this universe is so non-Earth and non-human centric, it’s great to see.

Speaking of Star Wars, I am amused that the pop culture references when it comes to Dairine have clearly been updated in the more recent edition. (In Deep Wizardry Dairine is reading Percy Jackson, for instance.) But the Star Wars and Darth Vader references have not changed at all! Reading this has also made me think that maybe the relationship edits are more me misremembering than changing the books that much, Nita and Kit have another conversation about their relationship and I definitely remember that in the original. Other than that, I don’t think this book changed too much.

And finally on a superficial note I always liked this book as I super identify with Nita here. As the oldest sibling as well, it is hard to have your “thing” and then see a sibling start to do it as well. And potentially do it better. So I loved all of the little exchanges where Nita calls Dairine a brat and things like that, it’s very accurate to my sibling dynamics.

I’m blazing through these, but I’m having such a good time! Onwards to the next in the series!

This Is Beautiful: Back Home

Holidays and vacations are nice, but there's nothing like being home and being in your own space! Got back over the weekend from spending the holiday in Florida and I'm looking forward to another week of a little staycation before classes start up again. Of course I have projects that I'm working on, but other than that it's rest time!