Haibane.info

I decided to start Ranma over. I hadn’t been taking the first disc seriously, and then I really only got into it around the second disc, so I felt like I had missed out. On rewatch it all hangs together much more, you can actually see that the long term arc of Ranma and Akane is fairly well planned even if the episodic rhythm verges on manic. For example, we needed the absurd martial arts competitions to establish the pair’s emotional bond, which fully culminated in Ranma’s declaration taking “ownership” of Akane’s honor (during the skating championship). Only then could Shampoo’s arrival cause such emotional havoc (physical destruction notwithstanding).

I’m up to the review episode after the Shampoo arc, and in the flashbacks involving Kuno, was struck by something about the rhythm of his strange poetry that he uses when making an entrance. The first time around i just thought it was just his own arcane poetry, full of sounds but meaning very little. But on second watch, the words suddenly felt like they meant something. So I googled them, and in hindsight I should not be surprised at all that these words Kuno speaks are the opening lines to Heike monogatari, the Tale of the Heike, an ancient epic from the Japanese medeival period. These opening lines are:

The sound of the bell of the Gion Temple tolls the impermanence of all things, and the hue of the Sala tree’s blossoms reveals the truth that those who flourish must fade. The proud ones do not last forever, but are like the dream of a spring night. Even the mighty will perish, just like the dust before the wind.

I do not lay claim to being even a fraction of a connoisseur on Japanese history and culture, but it occurs to me that for Kuno to speak these lines, given his character, is supremely ironic.

UPDATE: Japanese Culture by H. Paul Varley, apparently a well-respected text, is online at Google Book Search and discusses the Heike in much more detail. I just might have to buy this book.

A giant, a visionary, a prophet has passed.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke has passed away today at the age of 90. It’s impossible for me to express how formative this great man’s writings have been upon my personality, my interests, even my career. Along with Isaac Asimov, who passed away when I was a freshman in college, Sir Arthur was my gateway into science fiction and a lifetime of intellectual curiosity and simple appreciation for the fruits of the mind.

On my recent trip to Colombo, the idea of meeting him crossed my mind, but was rejected immediately as an impossibility. But at least I came close.

Courtesy of the Book Quiz at Blue Pyramid:

You’re A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

Despite humble and perhaps literally small beginnings, you inspire faith in almost everyone you know. You are an agent of higher powers, and you manifest this fact in mysterious and loud ways. A sense of destiny pervades your every waking moment, and you prepare with great detail for destiny fulfilled. When you speak, IT
SOUNDS LIKE THIS!

Had I answered the last question with “rabbits” instead of “armadillos” I’d have been Watership Down:

Though many think of you as a bit young, even childish, you’re actually incredibly deep and complex. You show people the need to rethink their assumptions, and confront them on everything from how they think to where they build their houses. You might be one of the greatest people of all time. You’d be recognized as such if you weren’t always talking about talking rabbits.

For the record, I don’t always talk about rabbits.

I remember reading Bridge to Terabithia at that age where I too could immerse myself in my own worlds, where imagination and reality could still overlap, and adolescence was close enough to be almost here but not quite here yet. In other words, I was the age that Jess and Leslie were, and that was why it cut so deep. It was probably the first book I had ever read that really and truly made me feel so deeply, so much so that I almost threw the book away, it as it almost overwhelmed the me of then. Maybe reading that book was a trial on the path to being an adult, which is a trifle ironic given that the book is about the essence of childhood.

Around twenty years later, I saw the movie, and it does the book justice indeed. I’m afraid that the rest of this post won’t make much sense. Fair warning.

It’s odd to think how when we are that age, we take ourselves for granted. Much later in life we look back at our mid-twenties as our “youth” and dismiss our adolescent preteen selves as mere children, but there is a magic about us then, and the luckiest of us never fully extinguish that magic despite decades that follow of responsibility and toil. There’s such a deep current of love in this story, one that runs concurrently with a current of pain, and both are so essential. In many ways the creek beyond which lies Terabithia is the physical embodiment of love and pain - a gateway to a different world, but also a dangerous barrier. The bridge only comes later, something we are only capable of building once we have fully learnt the lesson, and then every time we cross it, so much more easily and without risk, we gradually forget the price we have paid.

There’s the otaku dreamgirl aspect of this story too, but the special quality of that friendship is such that is only works in the context of being young. Leslie isn’t an ordinary girl and you are meant to fall for her, to appreciate the way she looks at the world and makes it new, at the sheer force of will. But Jess is not ordinary either - a working class family on the edge of bankruptcy, no advantages or privileges or luxuries, forced to wear his sisters’ hand-me-down sneakers, he still somehow has a Talent that thrives and grows. The two of them are perfect, as they are and more so together, and it is fitting that they create Terabithia between them.

What is Terabithia? Is it childhood? Is it dreams, hope? Whatever it is, it is something that can only be reached by tapping into that something essential from our childhood. The Narnia stories put children front and center as heroes, but were never about childhood - Terabithia is much more honest and raw in that regard. What is the bridge?

There is probably no point in trying to describe how Terabithia makes you feel. It probably suffices to say that it makes you feel. It’s a movie that every adult should watch, every child should read, and every father should be inspired from to hope that their children are in some way like Leslie and Jess, and if so, to live vicariously through them for it.

The Japanese have taken to composing novels on their cell phones.

Keitai shousetsu are novels composed for and on mobile phones, and they’re big in Japan right now. I mean, really big. Of the 10 best selling novels in Japan over the first half of 2007, 5 were originally composed on cellular phones and they sold an average of 400,000 copies each. One of the best selling was “Koizora” (Love Sky), by a woman whose nom-de-plume is Mika. Koizora follows the rather twisted story of a high school girl who is raped and becomes pregnant, has sold 1.2 million copies in the past 14 months, and was recently made into a movie.

To put that in perspective, US Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani’s book “Leadership,” for which he received a $3 million advance, has sold just 836,000 copies since 2002.

the topic material is predictably teen-oriented, but the general idea is one that I find quite compelling, to be honest. It occurred to me that Twitter was the perfect vehicle to try something like this out - and sure enough, behold Twittories. The first one, called “A Darkness Inside” suffers from arbitrarily collaborative rules, but there’s nothing stopping someone from using the personal Twitter account in much the same way for a solo opus.

And in fact, I’m gonna give it a whirl. I have no plot, no character, and no theme. But I’m getting started anyway. Feel free to follow along (and ignore my occasional Starbucks post)!

He passed away today at the age of 84. I’ve never read a single book of his, surprisingly. Anyone have any suggestions?

But turns out that Dumbledore played for the other team.

He certainly isn’t the first all-powerful wizard to have ambiguous sexual identity. Voldemort doesn’t have much interest in Bellatrix, after all. Gandalf was overly obsessed with his pipe. Raistlin may have had a daughter, but he faked affection for his own twin, so who knows? For that matter, look at Slartibartfast… I mean, fjords? come on.

Also, The Onion has its own take. incloseto putbacko!

A childhood favorite author, Madeleine L’engle, most known to the likes of us for her “Wrinkle in Time” series, died–or as she might put it, Xed–last month at the human age of 88. I only know this because I started re-reading the series last month–for the first time since Aziz reminded me of it almost ten years ago–and looked her up out of curiosity. A more incredulous person would attribute it not to mere coincidence.

To anyone who’s never read this series, I urge you to do so. Yes, they are children’s books, but like many, they are packed with timeless scientific, philosophical, and humanistic principles. Space, time, creation, destruction, love, loathing, existence, perception, consciousness, identity, communication, interconnectedness, personal significance in an infinite cosmos…it’s all there, the intangible made tangible in these stories and characters.

The entire Quintet (I only thought there were three books!) was re-released this past May, so there’s no excuse. They include:

A Wrinkle in Time

A Wind in the Door

A Swiftly Tilting Planet

Many Waters

An Acceptable Time

A friend of mine sent me her copy, I received yesterday afternoon and finished it this morning. I can finally surf the internet again without fear!

some mega-spoileresque commentary below the fold.

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I only have to stay spoiler-free until September, which is when this comes out:

That’s the complete Harry Potter, books 1-7 in hardcover. It’s actually cheaper than buying the books individually on Amazon (which aside from WalMart has the best prices). This is going to be a collectible and hand me down for my daughters’ benefit as much as mine (5yrs old and 3mon old).