Battlestar, we will miss you

I'm glad Battlestar Galactica concluded, but sad that it's over.  Or, more accurately, I'm sad that there's nothing else on TV that even approaches its caliber that I can watch now.  

BSG is, I think, on the short list for best TV show ever.  It is a serious attempt at a narrative that takes advantage of the television format to create a vast narrative scope.  It has a movie's focus on a singe coherent narrative, but the long format creates a story that could never be told within the time limits of a movie.  

It is definitely the best Science Fiction TV show ever made, and possibly the best visual SF narrative as well, right up there vying with Blade Runner and such.  Unlike most science fictional narratives it:

• Has real characters, with real flaws.  They obsess, fail, get drunk, get depressed, act irrationally, marry, divorce, break down, etc.  In most SF television shows characters only have superficial flaws (i.e., Worf is antisocial, Rodney McKay is arrogant), and only do anything seriously wrong when under the influence of an alien virus/transporter accident/mind control or when replaced by an evil version of themselves from another dimension.
• Has a plot.  As mentioned above, it has a single coherent plot that progresses from the first episode to the last.  Although there are couple of episodes that focus more on character exposition than plot development, for the most part BSG avoids the planet-of-the-week trap that most SF shows fall in to.  And because it is a TV narrative it can tell a more in-depth narrative than any short movie, no matter how brilliantly executed.
• Rides the Science Fictional knife edge perfectly.  There are two ways to go wrong with the science fictional element of a SF narrative.  The first is to essentially ignore it, fiat that some technology exists that lets us do all of this stuff in space, and not try to engage with it.  This is what happens in most SF anime; the science fictional element doesn't add anything to the narrative, and the war that is being fought in space might as well be fought as a naval war in Earth's oceans, except that giant robots probably wouldn't float so well.  The second way to go wrong is overemphasis of the science fictional element, at the expense of the plot and characters.  This happens mostly in SF novels, where an author is more excited about explaining his fictional technological development than creating a narrative.  It also hurts shows like Star Trek, which use technological wizardry to solve any problem and save the characters from having to make any hard choices.  BSG, however, has just enough science fiction.  The science fictional elements are crucial to the plot and add significantly to the narrative (cylons, resurrection, the nature of FTL travel, etc), but the technology doesn't take center stage, and it doesn't save the characters from having to fight a bloody defensive war that engenders great loss.

Of course, the big thing that sets BSG apart is that it is just well written.  It tackles big issues, and its themes are both timely and timeless.  It investigates the morality of torture right alongside the nature of humanity.  Characters are believable and mutable.  The plot mysteries are layered, so that the mysteries presented at the beginning of the show are peeled back to reveal more mysteries underneath.

It is, overall, one amazing narrative, and it will be missed.

Most men internally refer to themselves as "ore"

That from a discussion of the revisions to the list of Jōyō kanji over at No-sword. "Ore," the more aggressive, self-elevating male first person pronoun, is apparently in the official list of commonly used kanji this year.

I've always wondered about that. Although there are some hints in interior monologues in literature, often personal pronouns are left out altogether, making it difficult to pin down what pronoun characters would refer to themselves with in the absence of social considerations.

Some photos of architecture

Here are a few photos of a new addition to the University of Virginia's Campbell Hall (appropriately, the architecture building). It really has a great modernist aesthetic, showing off the austere beauty of unadorned concrete, metal and glass. I really like it! It's especially nice in Charlottesville, where, for some reason, everything must pretend to be built with brick, even buildings that no one would ever really build with brick.

At the right is the old building it attaches to (brick, of course).

For some reason they felt the need to fill the framing holes with these plastic things. It just looks kind of cheap. Is this normal? I can't be sure, but I think in buildings I've seen before they've just been left open.

It's Intentional

Great post from Acephalous on convincing people that comic imagery is worth analyzing:

As anyone who teaches funny books or films knows, the task of convincing students that the scene before them is anything other than incidental would try Job's patience....

I've designed an introduction to visual rhetoric assignment that forces students to understand that all comic and film images are obscenely overdetermined. On the first day of class, I'll present them with Alan Moore's script for the eighth panel on the first page of The Killing Joke:

NOW WE ARE LOOKING AT THE POLICE CAR SIDE-ON SO THAT WE SEE THE UNIFORMED OFFICER STANDING FACE-ON TO US OVER ON THE LEFT AS HE STANDS WITH HIS BACK TO THE CAR AND COMMISSIONER GORDON FACE-ON OVER TO THE RIGHT, LEANING AGAINST THE CAR AND DRINKING HIS STEAMING COFFEE, MAYBE LOOKING UP WITH A QUIZZICAL AND CONCERNED LOOK OVER THE RIM OF HIS CUP TOWARDS THE EXTREME LEFT OF THE FOREGROUND, WHERE WE CAN SEE THE BATMAN ENTERING THE PICTURE FROM THE LEFT, IN PROFILE. SINCE BATMAN IS (a) CLOSER TO US AND (b) TALLER THAN EITHER THE COMMISSIONER OR THE PATROLMAN IN THE BACKGROUND WE CANNOT SEE THE TOP OF HIS HEAD HERE ABOVE THE BOTTOM OF THE NOSE AS THE FRONT OF HIM ENTERS THE PANEL ON THE LEFT. HIS EYES AND UPPER HEAD ARE INVISIBLE BEYOND THE TOP PANEL BORDER AND ALL WE CAN REALLY SEE IS HIS MOUTH, WITH THE BIG AND DETERMINED SQUARE JAW AND THE GRIM AND DISAPPROVING SCOWL OF THE LIPS. THE BATMAN DOES NOT APPEAR FROM HIS POSTURE TO SO MUCH AS GLANCE AT EITHER GORDON OR THE PATROLMAN AS HE WALKS PAST THEM EVEN THOUGH BOTH OF THEM STEAL GLANCES AT HIM WITH DIFFERING LOOKS OF UNEASE. THE PATROLMAN LOOKS UNEASY JUST TO BE IN THE BATMAN'S PRESENCE, WHILE GORDON LOOKS MORE CONCERNED ABOUT THE BATMAN'S POSSIBLE STATE OF MIND. RAIN DRIPS FROM EVERYTHING, INCLUDING THE BATMAN'S JUTTING AND GRIZZLED CHIN. GORDON GIVES THE LARGELY-OFF-PANEL VIGILANTE A PENETRATING LOOK OVER HIS COFFEE CUP, AND THE BLUE LIGHT ATOP THE CAR WASHES OVER ALL OF THEM AS IT CIRCLES.

No Dialogue.

Then I'll ask them to draw it. After assuring them that I did indeed say draw it, I'll let them have about ten minutes to transform Moore's prose into stick-figure theater before showing them how Brian Bolland interpreted it.

Discussion will ensue. I'll show them the scripts to other panels—ask them why, for example, Moore insisted the receptionist at Arkham Asylum be reading Graham Greene's The Comedians—and if all goes well, I won't spend the next few months reading essays about how in this panel Alan Moore wanted Batman to punch someone in the face so he told Brian Bolland to draw a picture of Batman punching someone in the face.

Unlike photography or film, where things can enter a frame because they just happened to be behind the subject, everything in a comic frame is placed there intentionally.  And since every additional element added to a frame increases the work required (and therefore the cost) to produce it, you can bet that authors/artists aren't chucking stuff in randomly.  A comic panel is quite deliberate, and should be analyzed as part of the narrative.  We have no compunction about picking apart, parsing and analyzing the minutiae of sentences in literature, and there's no reason narrative art shouldn't be subject to the same analysis.

The new I-novel?

The New Yorker has a great article on cell phone novels (keitai shousetsu) (via Meta no Tame):

The cell-phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age. For a new form, it is remarkably robust. Maho i-Land, which is the largest cell-phone-novel site, carries more than a million titles, most of them by amateurs writing under screen handles, and all available for free. According to the figures provided by the company, the site, which also offers templates for blogs and home pages, is visited three and a half billion times a month.

In the classic iteration, the novels, written by and for young women, purport to be autobiographical and revolve around true love, or, rather, the obstacles to it that have always stood at the core of romantic fiction: pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, rape, rivals and triangles, incurable disease. The novels are set in the provinces—the undifferentiated swaths of rice fields, chain stores, and fast-food restaurants that are everywhere Tokyo is not—and the characters tend to be middle and lower middle class.

Read the whole thing. What's interesting to me is that keitai shousetsu seem to be a modern iteration of the I-Novel, (Watakushi-shousestu or Shi-shousetsu) a literary genre popular in Japan around the Taisho period. The I-novel is characterized by narratives that are both confessional and fictional. Part of the appeal of the I-novel was that authors would "confess" dark secrets from their own lives, but the novels were not autobiographical, and freely mixed in fictional characters or settings or events with the confessional elements of the story.

In the Taiso era these novels were mostly written by men, often confessing their affairs. The keitai shousetsu, however, seems to be a kind of new I-novel that is primarily produced by women. Like the I-novels of old, they freely mix fiction with the author's own true-life confessions.

However, the Taisho I-novels were written by famous novelists, and part of their attraction was learning about the sordid details of the lives of these famous cultural elites. Keitai shousetsu, on the other hand, are written by amateur authors, pecking away at their cell phones anonymously.* What's the appeal to consumers? Do they feel they can relate to the narratives? Does the amateur nature feel more honest? Is it refreshing to read literature in a format and language they are more comfortable with? I'd be very interested to find out.

I also like the interaction of media here. Authors publish theirs stories on websites, the best of which bubble up and are seized by print publishers. But simply printing the story isn't enough:

Printed, the books announce themselves as untraditional, with horizontal lines that read left to right, as on the phone. ... Other conventions established on the screen are faithfully replicated in print. Often, the ink is colored or gray; black text is thought to be too imposing. “Some publishers removed the returns, but those books don’t sell well,” a representative of Goma Books said. “You need to keep that flow.”

Does the horizontality, colored text and excessive line spacing create a feeling of intimacy between the reader and author? Does removing these conventions destroy the sense of amateur honesty, making it seem like a "professional" media production? This little interaction between different types of media is pretty fascinating.


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*Inputting Japanese on cell phones is easier than inputting English, but even so I can't imagine writing a whole novel on one! My poor thumbs!

Manga from the US Military

Via Japan Probe, the U.S. Navy has created a manga to help foster cultural understanding on the eve of the arrival of the USS George Washington in Japan. There has been a spate of highly publicized crimes by US servicemen recently, as well as some local protests against having a nuclear vessel permanently stationed in Yokosuka. I guess the Navy felt something was necessary to ease tensions with its host country.

The manga, available in English as a PDF, follows a half Japanese sailor on his first assignment to the George Washington, and his first trip to Japan. It's well done, using humor and depictions of everyday life on board the carrier to humanize sailors. The characters have a deep respect for Japanese culture, and take classes to learn more about Japan. Towards the end the protagonist visits his Japanese grandparents for the first time, emphasizing the close cultural ties between the US and Japan.

I think it's a brilliant move. Not only does it embrace one of Japan's cultural institutions, but the manga format can convey a lot of information yet still be quickly consumed. And it's entertaining as well!

The run-on sentences of Suzumiya Haruhi

As I was going through some boxes the other day, I came across my copy of the first 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 book (Suzimya Haruhi no Yuuutsu, or The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi). Most people probably know the very popular anime of the same name best.

Leafing through it, I was reminded how I love the book's narration style, especially the artful use of run-on sentences. The very first sentence of the books is:

サンタクロースをいつまで信じていたかなんてことはたわいもない世間話にもならないくらいのどうでもいいような話だが、それでも俺がいつまでサンタなどという想像上の赤服じーさんを信じていたかと言うとこれは確信を持って言えるが最初から信じてなどいながった。

A translation without adding any punctuation would be something like:

“How long did you believe in Santa Clause” is a trivial subject not even worthy of being the topic of idle chatter, but even so if I were to say how long I believed in an imaginary old man in red clothes like Santa I can say with confidence that I didn't believe in him from the beginning.

Whew! At least the author gives us one comma to take a breath. Because of word order differences this kind of narration is hard to translate into English. This wiki translation breaks that sentence up into three sentences. That's probably more natural for English speakers, but I think it looses some of the flavor of the original.