“The 13 ½ Lives of Captain Bluebear” by Walter Moers

I have had this book on my reading list for so long and I sure am glad that I eventually got around to it! This was such a fun romp of a read to get through. Moers is a writer and a cartoonist and the story is surrounded by his delightful drawings of the zany characters.

The book is the autobiography of Captain Bluebear as he looks back on his 13 ½ lives so far. The lives don’t end in death or anything, it more so means that he has had 13 ½ different chapters to his life. Bluebear lives in Zamonia which is where all of the mystical creatures have gone to leave the rest of the world to the humans. There still are humans in the book as characters, but they are known to be idiots and they aren’t allowed in the capital city of Atlantis. Anyways, Bluebear travels around the world learning many things for his lives.

To try and summarize very briefly, his first life was with the mini-pirates. Second life was on an island with the Hobgoblins. Then he meets the Babbling Billows that teach him to talk. He then ends up on an island surrounded by food that is then revealed to be a sort of carnivorous plant fattening him up, but he is saved at the last second by Deus X. Machina, or “Mac.” He spends his fifth life navigating for Mac as Mac goes around saving people at the last second. Mac drops him off at Nightingale’s Academy where Bluebear learns everything about everything and meets Qwerty, a prince from another dimension and Fredda the Alpine Imp. Nightingale then sets Bluebear free through a labyrinth and his seventh life is spent wandering around the Great Forest he exits out into. In the Forest he is almost caught by a spider whose goo makes you hallucinate, but he outruns the spider and falls through a dimensional hiatus. Life 8 he pops out into Qwerty’s dimension and accidentally pushes his friend into a hiatus, which he falls through as well, and he comes back out in his own dimension. He then treks across a desert with the Muggs, and he then ends up in a city in the middle of a tornado. Finally he makes it to Atlantis and enjoys great success as a congladiator, or a professional liar. His twelfth life ends with him fleeing the city as its about to take off for space and ending up on the ship the Moloch. The penultimate life is defeating the sentient element Zamonium that is in charge of the Moloch (which is actually a slave ship) and freeing the animals on board. He then settles down with the other bears on board in the Great Forest.

Alright well first of all the book is so amazingly clever and funny. I was most amused by the appearance of Mac probably, a flying dinosaur that saves you at the last moment named Deus X. Machina? So ridiculous and clever. Nightingale is also delightfully amusing, he is the most clever being on the planet with several brains and the ability to literally infect you with intelligence. I wish that Qwerty was involved more, I quite enjoyed his appearances. Overall, super fun, but I did sometimes wish that my favorite characters were more present.

The ending with Atlantis taking off did seem to hint at something important, I wonder if Moers has more books that get into it more. The idea is that the mystical creatures can’t be on Earth any longer and have to leave to head to another planet. They don’t all go, clearly, but a lot of them were in the city and left. It seems to be the set up for “this is why magical creatures aren’t here” sort of a story that could be more of the focus later.

The book is thick, but it ends up being a fast read since it is so easy to get through. The illustrations are fun, the characters are memorable, and I had a blast getting through it. I can’t recommend it enough, and hopefully I can find other books with Bluebear later on.

This Is Beautiful: Working From Home

 I kinda gave up on my goal of heading into lab a few days a week this week. I just felt so overwhelmed and knew that I'd be more productive at home. And it was successful, I did get more done and that helped to feel less overwhelmed. I think working from home also encourages me to take more breaks which has been needed. I'm still overwhelmed, but I hope that this will help with recovery a little bit.

“Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal” by Heather Widdows

This book has been on my reading list for a very long time. It is a philosophical work, but it is immensely readable without a ton of references that are hard to understand. The extent of the difficulty is more in that she is writing in a very specific way to craft an argument, which I think also at times makes it easier to see what she is trying to argue than anything else.

There is a lot covered in this work, but to be brief, Widdows starts by examining beauty and arguing that the pressures are increasing and that there is an ethical ideal to be beautiful for many people. The ethical aspect of the beauty ideal is what distinguishes it from previous beauty ideals, as it is globalized and solidified. The needs of the beauty ideal are also slowly rising incrementally, it is easy to move from one form of a routine to another as the beauty ideal is normalized. She also has an interesting section on the benefits of the beauty ideal, in that it allows for socially acceptable forms of touch and intimacy between individuals. There are multiple chapters on the self and objectification, which she complicates as with beauty work we are both subject and object. Then she discusses consent under the beauty model and argues that information is not enough as we are increasingly pressured to conform to the beauty ideal or else. And finally, she examines gender and how men are also subject to a beauty ideal, but in key ways that differ from women that have the potential to harm women more.

First of all, I think it is really fascinating to see an academic work look at beauty and take it seriously. The idea that there is “pretty privilege” and that there are key differences in how we treat people that we think of as pretty vs ugly has always been around, but I haven’t had the resources to really examine it. I hope that she expands on this work as when I was going through it I was constantly thinking about myself as a dancer and a transgender individual. How does this resonate with how I feel about my body and what it can do? Increasingly I am harder on myself and how I look as I age. Additionally it talks about surgery for beautification, and I was thinking about my decision to have top surgery. I don’t think that it made me beautiful, but there was an ideal in my mind that I wanted to use the surgery to reach. Some very key similarities and differences that I hope she’ll explore further.

Now a lot of what she was saying resonated with me, but there was one point that I think I disagreed on within the chapter on consent. Widdows was first arguing that information isn’t enough for consent, and then talks about false consciousness and consciousness raising and how that model fails here because women aren’t being duped. There are real benefits of beauty, even if they are overstated sometimes. And these feel at odds to me, if you are saying that information is not enough, then there is a misconception or incorrect information somewhere. And especially if we are acknowledging that the benefits of beauty aren’t always what they are cracked up to me, that feels to me as though people are in need of information. I do agree that consciousness raising might not be the solution, but I do think that false consciousness, where we think we know everything but don’t, might be part of the problem. Separating the two doesn’t seem that hard and might even lead to part of the solution.

This book was published in 2018, and I suspect that things have only gotten worse since the pandemic. I don’t know stats and studies, but I have heard of and read more about young girls spiraling into eating disorders since lockdown, and even adults being impacted then. Widdows repeatedly mentions that we are in a “visual and virtual culture” and that has only increased since then. I really hope that she continues this work and we can get an update, because I haven’t seen others articulate what she is picking up on in the zeitgeist.

This Is Beautiful: Hobby Felt Good

 I'm sort of slowly realizing that I have to do a lot of work when it comes to my perception of my body. It's always been there, but I feel like something about getting top surgery 2 years ago changing my body type and hitting 30 and having more things change is triggering it all up again. All that to say, I have some complicated feelings about exercise because what I like to do to exercise tends to involve looking in a mirror at myself (dance, circus, etc stuff that people perform).

I think though that I'm starting to feel better about getting into aerial circus. I at first was low-key terrified, and just forcing myself to do it because I knew I would come away alright. And as I felt better I ended up in this weird position where my body doesn't like being upside down, spinning, or using upper body strength and everyone else seemed to be moving faster than me. But the most recent class I felt good, and I think it's an upswing from previous struggles. 

I think it has to do with a few things. I am finally developing some confidence where I don't have a last second "maybe I can't even get up there" knee jerk reaction. And the people moving really fast just moved up so I'm not constantly comparing myself. And I'm trying to film myself practicing more so that I can like the way I look. It's a journey and I'm sure it'll have down swings again, but for now I feel pretty good.

“Radical Empathy”

There’s a theater group in my area that exclusively puts on new plays by emerging (and frequently local) playwrights and they recently performed one called “Radical Empathy.” This happens to be from a local playwright who has now done multiple plays with this group (I think it is his third). And I was so struck by this play that I wanted to write a full post on it, not just a This Is Beautiful quick thought, because it felt so timely and powerful, but there were also some serious flaws that I wanted to bring up.

The play starts with a sociology professor giving a TED Talk on empathy and highlighting how Americans should have empathy for citizens of Iraq. Rather than terrorists, he advocates for putting yourself in their shoes and viewing them as people. He goes viral and one Iraqi man ends up reaching out to him, the two develop a friendship as the professor gets the Iraqi man to speak as part of his class. Then tragedy strikes, the Iraqi man’s house is bombed by the US who thinks that he is part of ISIS, he is the only one to survive as his brother, niece, nephew, daughter, and wife are all killed. While the Iraqi man wrestles with survivor’s guilt and how to feel about the situation, the American tries to get him in touch with someone at the embassy who can say that this is a mistake. Eventually the Iraqi man speaks again at the professor’s class about his acceptance of the situation and the students persuade their professor to bring him to the US. The play ends with them taking a selfie together, and the picture of the real life friends is shown behind them.

First thing I want to critique, and this is major, is that the play has four characters. There are the two men and their wives. The wives, while acted out really well and very funny at times, really only serve as vehicles for the men and their friendship. The professor and the Iraqi man both use their wives to bounce ideas around and talk through things, but the wives don’t have a journey of their own. And that bothers me a lot, that they would be half of the cast but not nearly as present as characters.

Beyond that though, the staging did a really good job with using technology. Most of the communication between the men is either through Skype or a phone call. You get to see their reactions to each other while they direct their speech at a laptop or phone. I was a little nervous about this, but I think it worked really well in that you could see things that the characters couldn’t. It was a neat perspective.

I also wasn’t really sure what the ending signified. There’s a fight between the professor and his wife where the wife wants him to do more with his empathy, and that ends up taking the form of the professor talking about his fear of losing his wife with his friend. And bringing him to the US to speak, which is a more tangible form of friendship for sure, but I thought that also didn’t go nearly far enough. The Iraqi man has a line about how he cannot change the situation, and he isn’t mad at the Americans because he knows that they cannot do anything either. Which is a hell of a thing to tell an audience, that they cannot do anything, because I think we can and should be doing so much. Calling representatives, participating in civil disobedience, calling out Islamophobia, so much. And we were just told that best we can do is hope an Iraqi guy emails us to start a friendship. Just sits wrong with me.

Just wanted to briefly touch on the acting as well, it’s sad to say but the guy playing the professor blew everyone else out of the water. The Iraqi man was really stiff most of the show, he did not come off looking great next to an actor who had himself in tears at a key moment and knew how to command the whole space. The female actors were doing the best with what they had, but it was really his show. Such an excellent performance.

And then finally I want to end with how timely this all felt. We are in the middle of a genocide of Palestinian people that is being financed and carried out by American money and bombs. They are not terrorists, but are simply folks trying to live their lives in the shadow of Israel. It would be so cool if we took the great parts of the play to heart and started having empathy for them, and then did something with it.

This Is Beautiful: Settling Into Semester

 We are now a few weeks into the semester, I finally feel like I'm finding my rhythm. I can figure out what to do in class pretty easily, and I've finally got a regular exercise schedule which is so nice. Hoping to keep up with my work in a way that feels satisfying to me, and also find time to relax, while working on job apps. It'll be a lot but it'll be managable!

“The Tangled Lands” by Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias Buckell

This book has been on my list for ages, I don’t remember how it initially came up. It’s an interesting format, the authors go back and forth writing these sections that each focus on different characters and different situations. The sections will reference previous events occasionally but they don’t revisit previous protagonists or anything like that.

The book takes place in Khaim, a city essentially on the verge of collapse. The people used magic in the past and that brought the brambles, a plant that feeds on magic and is brought into existence through its use and then chokes the life out of the ground. The people that touch it get poisoned and if you have too much you fall into an endless sleep. Our first story is about an alchemist that invents a machine to kill bramble. He brings it to the mayor and the chief magician and they are delighted. They then figure out how to repurpose the machine to track down magic users. They can make them glow blue now, and the streets are red with blood of the executed people performing small magics they think they can get away with. The alchemist is locked up to continue working on it, but he eventually escapes with his family.

Khaim is referred to as the Blue City afterwards, and interestingly it’s the ability to completely shut down magic use from fear that gets credited with the city still standing. The next section is about a woman whose father used to be an executioner, and she substitutes for him as he lays dying. While she’s out raiders come, they set her house on fire and kill her husband and father. She goes after them but is defeated by the raiders. However, she’s found by these traders and then joins their caravan. They teach her to fight, she inspires them to recruit women to fight the raiders, and they take the raiders city. However, she is too late to save her kids, who have been indoctrinated into the raiders Way (which is basically that magic is bad because it destroys other people and those that use magic have to be killed or converted) and they have already left on a pilgrimage.

Third story was the hardest for me. It tells the story of Mop and Rain, two kids that are refugees from a city that fell to bramble. They get jobs pulling bramble seeds out of the ground but Rain tragically gets pricked and falls into bramble sleep. Mop doesn’t want to have to kill her but no one is letting him keep her safe so he plans to return for her body that night. He is too late though, so he heads to the brothel to see if she was taken there. She isn’t, so he does a spell and enchants her comb to find her. He’s nearly found by the city, then nearly taken by bramble himself, but a fuss is being made at their overseers house. Turns out that he took her body to do what he wanted with her, but the comb stabbed him in the back killing him. The people then rally together to all take care of Rain, having heard the legend of the girl who protected herself.

Final story is about a blacksmith’s daughter, her family is hired to make armor for the Duke’s son but they aren’t paid enough. They do their best but he isn’t happy. They try to run but are caught up with and the Duke brings in the chief magician who then uses magic to dig a pit, send her parents in there, and cover it with bramble and dirt. The Duke tells the daughter to finish the armor and he’ll free her parents. She instead makes a suit to wear to dig them out but is found out, ends up killing the Duke’s son, and then heading there with the suit. She’s too late, her parents committed suicide when their food ran out, and she goes to bury them. After fighting off guards, she leaves to find a new life.

Alright so the most interesting part of this for me is the use of magic and bramble as an allegory for climate change. The whole idea is that people think that their use is justified and small, but brambles appear randomly in their neighbor’s house or something like that. And as it goes on it’s clear that the upper classes get to do it whenever they want and the lower classes pay for it. The first two sections have more to do with this idea than the latter half, the first story with the fact that those in power are more interested in punishing music users than clearing the bramble really speaks to this. It reflects how people today don’t want to clean up the CO2 and would rather put the blame on someone else. The second story with the raiders and their cult is also really interesting as it’s revealed that their violence is a response to brambles. Same violence, different side of the coin where they want to kill the magic users to stop the bramble from impacting them.

The other major theme that comes through from all of the sections is this class warfare, how the upper classes profit and the lower classes suffer. There are small victories, but all of the stories are just so sad. These people are being constantly taken advantage of because the upper classes know that they can do that. Does it ever get better? Is it worth it? I’m not sure, there are endings to the sections that are vaguely hopeful but it’s hard to say. That’s partially why I felt the third section so strongly, the community coming together at the end feels much more hopeful to me than anything else.

My main issue is that the bramble sleep in some ways is essentially a plot device. The protagonist in the second section falls into bramble when the raiders beat her and she wakes up after a few weeks. Yet Rain is doomed pretty quickly in the third section. It isn’t the most consistent, which is maybe realistic, but it feels as though people wake up when we decide we want them to and don’t if we don’t.

So this is not the most light hearted read, but I think sections are very thought provoking. I do wish that there was a little more discussion relating magic to climate change, that essentially disappears after the first half of the book, but it’s the main interesting point to me. But there are ideas that emerge from these stories that are very applicable to life right now.

This Is Beautiful: New Pointe Shoes

 Alright so I rebought pointe shoes about a year and a half ago, and I knew my shoes were dead for a bit. But I have this thing where I hate shopping and spending money and all that, so I kept going for as long as I could. And it got to the point(e) where I couldn't do anything with the shoes and it was a struggle to hold myself up. I knew the shoes were dead, but I kept thinking about how bad of a dancer I am and that I'm getting worse, not better, etc etc.

All that to say, I bought new shoes about a week ago and it's SO much easier! I actually do not totally suck, if anything the dead shoes probably made me stronger and I can tell that I've improved now. It's really delightful, even though the hit to the bank account was a little rough. But I'm so excited to dance in them, it's a joy again.