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rushthatspeaksI know William Weaver primarily for his translations from the Italian; he's done both Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino. Thrud had a fellowship for some time at the Villa I Tatti, and it turns out that Weaver wrote a history of the house, so I read it mostly out of curiosity about where Thrud had been living. A Legacy of Excellence: The Story of Villa I Tatti is I think a vanity project, honestly; it's a factual account of the house, its various refurbishings and renovations and contents, but it does not make an argument as to why the house is so important except that Bernard Berenson bought it, Edith Wharton stayed there a lot, and Harvard owns it now. There are a great many photos, and honestly that is what was important to me, but I cannot recommend this to anyone who is neither passionately interested in the architecture of Italian villas nor doing research on one of the relevant historical figures, especially as the last chunk of the book essentially reads as one long apologia for Harvard's tenancy and a lot of assurances that they are Maintaining The Place's Historical Value, which, I mean, it's Harvard, I was not going to assume that they aren't. Personal interest barely got me through this, though Weaver's prose is perfectly competent. I wonder why he wrote the thing?
And then the next night I read Paul Kozelka's The Theatre Student: Directing, because I have never been in a play and have always been curious about the directing process-- there is a lot of mystique surrounding it. Unfortunately, while vaguely informative, the Kozelka was also fairly dire. It seemed to be aimed at persons wishing to direct community theatre for an audience of children and operates on the assumption that such persons are by definition more cultured than the people around them and must bring this culture to the unenlightened masses; it also worships Stanislavsky, which does not seem entirely compatible with the previous. And the included play may be by Betty Smith, but I am sorry, a novelist does not always a playwright make. I learned some details about ways directors could organize their lives into a notebook and that is really all the help this gave me. Can anyone recommend anything better on the philosophy and technique of stage directing and acting? There must be more than this.
Fortunately after that I came to Osamu Tezuka's Swallowing the Earth.
I have an odd relationship with the God of Manga. Honestly, I don't enjoy Tezuka ninety percent of the time. I find Phoenix too unbearably depressing to be manageable, I tend to summarize Princess Knight to people as 'a comedy where all the wrong people die', and I find Urasawa's Pluto far more readable than the chunk of Astro Boy from which it is adapted. However, I keep reading and watching Tezuka, because every so often something happens like his nineteen-fifties theatrical version of Saiyuki (the English dub stars Frankie Avalon, I will never get over this), or the first ten pages of Apollo no Uta, or the Tezuka studio's gorgeously weird Kanashimi no Belladonna, one of the strangest films ever made (it's a film based on the 1860s book about witchcraft La Sorcière, and almost all of the animation consists of still pans over paintings-- I love this movie, but I totally understand why it was an utter commercial failure).
So I tend to go into Tezuka with a certain hesitancy. I refuse to become attached to his characters, and honestly I am usually waiting with trepidation for the book to do something I hate.
Swallowing the Earth I do not hate. It is in fact very interesting and I liked it a lot. It came out in 1968 and was the first of his works aimed at an audience who could be expected to handle eroticism and explicit sexuality; Fred Schodt says in the foreword that it reminds him of a Bond film and I see the comparison, though of course it is more serious.
As with many Tezuka series, it sets up a basic premise and plot and veers from the main plot occasionally to do nearly self-contained short stories exploiting the premise, and one of the ones in here is a story I would cheerfully hold up to the best of Bradbury or Vonnegut. The world is in the process of degenerating into anarchy because a perfectly natural-appearing artificial skin has been developed, so that anyone can switch faces at any time, and crimes have become essentially untraceable. In the middle of nowhere, a seemingly perfect middle-American family maintain their sanity in the face of rising madness. Eventually we discover that every one of them is an impostor wearing the face of a member of the original family: they are criminals, gender outlaws, people of different and at that time much more segregated races, hiding behind the masks and prescribed familial roles so they can have a means of caring about one another and living together in a socially acceptable fashion. The real family, racked with hatred and boredom, ran off to join the general chaos long ago. It's a satire played both for vicious bite and for a gentle melancholy. It calls the entire concept of the fifties-style nuclear family into question as a social mechanic that never existed in the first place and suggests at the same time that the reasons people come up with this sort of fiction are entirely understandable. It was some of the best science fiction I have read in a long while.
The rest of the book, and the overarching plot, are less vicious and less plausible now-- I don't think you could overthrow the world financial system nowadays by devaluing gold, though I suppose I am prepared to provisionally believe it for 1968. The gender roles are fascinating in that half the time they're totally aggravating and yet the book explicitly outright states that patriarchy is one of the most significant problems with human civilization. The racial implications of being able to change your face in 1968 actually get looked at, and yet this is one of the Tezuka things that comes with a disclaimer in the front explaining that he always drew black people in the way he saw them drawn in the newspaper comics of his youth and that he never understood that this comes off as horribly racist caricature. There's a bit set on an island inhabited by cannibals-- who are both explicitly the utopian society from one of Diderot's thought experiments, and the only human society who will survive the book's titular apocalypse, and whose appearance is exactly that of every terrible cannibal caricature ever.
In short, this is a complex book, it contains multitudes, and it is thought-provoking, aggravating, massively failing and massively succeeding by turns, but never remotely dull, and with the extremely entertaining nature of a really good action movie. I highly recommend it, and it might well make a good introduction to Tezuka, for those who haven't read him, as it contains many of his major themes. It inclines me to be mildly less cautious, which probably means that the next thing I read of his will lead me directly to throwing it across the room and screaming. But I have more hope now that it might not. Maybe.
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And then the next night I read Paul Kozelka's The Theatre Student: Directing, because I have never been in a play and have always been curious about the directing process-- there is a lot of mystique surrounding it. Unfortunately, while vaguely informative, the Kozelka was also fairly dire. It seemed to be aimed at persons wishing to direct community theatre for an audience of children and operates on the assumption that such persons are by definition more cultured than the people around them and must bring this culture to the unenlightened masses; it also worships Stanislavsky, which does not seem entirely compatible with the previous. And the included play may be by Betty Smith, but I am sorry, a novelist does not always a playwright make. I learned some details about ways directors could organize their lives into a notebook and that is really all the help this gave me. Can anyone recommend anything better on the philosophy and technique of stage directing and acting? There must be more than this.
Fortunately after that I came to Osamu Tezuka's Swallowing the Earth.
I have an odd relationship with the God of Manga. Honestly, I don't enjoy Tezuka ninety percent of the time. I find Phoenix too unbearably depressing to be manageable, I tend to summarize Princess Knight to people as 'a comedy where all the wrong people die', and I find Urasawa's Pluto far more readable than the chunk of Astro Boy from which it is adapted. However, I keep reading and watching Tezuka, because every so often something happens like his nineteen-fifties theatrical version of Saiyuki (the English dub stars Frankie Avalon, I will never get over this), or the first ten pages of Apollo no Uta, or the Tezuka studio's gorgeously weird Kanashimi no Belladonna, one of the strangest films ever made (it's a film based on the 1860s book about witchcraft La Sorcière, and almost all of the animation consists of still pans over paintings-- I love this movie, but I totally understand why it was an utter commercial failure).
So I tend to go into Tezuka with a certain hesitancy. I refuse to become attached to his characters, and honestly I am usually waiting with trepidation for the book to do something I hate.
Swallowing the Earth I do not hate. It is in fact very interesting and I liked it a lot. It came out in 1968 and was the first of his works aimed at an audience who could be expected to handle eroticism and explicit sexuality; Fred Schodt says in the foreword that it reminds him of a Bond film and I see the comparison, though of course it is more serious.
As with many Tezuka series, it sets up a basic premise and plot and veers from the main plot occasionally to do nearly self-contained short stories exploiting the premise, and one of the ones in here is a story I would cheerfully hold up to the best of Bradbury or Vonnegut. The world is in the process of degenerating into anarchy because a perfectly natural-appearing artificial skin has been developed, so that anyone can switch faces at any time, and crimes have become essentially untraceable. In the middle of nowhere, a seemingly perfect middle-American family maintain their sanity in the face of rising madness. Eventually we discover that every one of them is an impostor wearing the face of a member of the original family: they are criminals, gender outlaws, people of different and at that time much more segregated races, hiding behind the masks and prescribed familial roles so they can have a means of caring about one another and living together in a socially acceptable fashion. The real family, racked with hatred and boredom, ran off to join the general chaos long ago. It's a satire played both for vicious bite and for a gentle melancholy. It calls the entire concept of the fifties-style nuclear family into question as a social mechanic that never existed in the first place and suggests at the same time that the reasons people come up with this sort of fiction are entirely understandable. It was some of the best science fiction I have read in a long while.
The rest of the book, and the overarching plot, are less vicious and less plausible now-- I don't think you could overthrow the world financial system nowadays by devaluing gold, though I suppose I am prepared to provisionally believe it for 1968. The gender roles are fascinating in that half the time they're totally aggravating and yet the book explicitly outright states that patriarchy is one of the most significant problems with human civilization. The racial implications of being able to change your face in 1968 actually get looked at, and yet this is one of the Tezuka things that comes with a disclaimer in the front explaining that he always drew black people in the way he saw them drawn in the newspaper comics of his youth and that he never understood that this comes off as horribly racist caricature. There's a bit set on an island inhabited by cannibals-- who are both explicitly the utopian society from one of Diderot's thought experiments, and the only human society who will survive the book's titular apocalypse, and whose appearance is exactly that of every terrible cannibal caricature ever.
In short, this is a complex book, it contains multitudes, and it is thought-provoking, aggravating, massively failing and massively succeeding by turns, but never remotely dull, and with the extremely entertaining nature of a really good action movie. I highly recommend it, and it might well make a good introduction to Tezuka, for those who haven't read him, as it contains many of his major themes. It inclines me to be mildly less cautious, which probably means that the next thing I read of his will lead me directly to throwing it across the room and screaming. But I have more hope now that it might not. Maybe.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
