The Moon Looks Beautiful Tonight
Within the Moon's celestial bones resides the Heart.
I enjoyed the previous version of The Moon Looks Beautiful Tonight and so was pleased to learn that a spruced-up 'Definitive Edition' had come out--on itch.io and Steam, free in both cases.
This's a short, heartfelt, and slickly crafted visual novel. Perhaps it occasionally strays into overwriting, but my house stops me throwing stones on that score. The temperature gauges make up a particularly fun corner in the presentation.
A bad time to fly
I re-read Winged Victory by V. M. Yeates, who wrote just this one semi-autbiographical novel about World War I flying and then died of consumption. Some passages lean overwritten, and I think the novel has sort of made its point by about two-thirds in. But I'll take that over Hemingway.
On the few occasions the pilots speculate about the war's causes, anti-semitic conspiracies about Jewish finance crop up. Is this true to the state of an officers' mess near the war's end, or does it reflect the time of the novel's own writing, in the early 1930s?
Reformations
I listened again to Alec Ryrie's Gresham lectures on the English reformations.
Doing so made me think that the reformations and the wars of the three kingdoms form the two master keys for explaining England which suffer from the greatest gap between importance and general knowledge. That is, other master keys exist, but these two receive especially little thought today. The issues at stake in England 1517–1688 have faded enough to make both topics much less legible.
This doesn't just matter in England. If you live anywhere else in the archipelago, it's the reformations and the wars of the three kingdoms that framed the English question, which in turn determines a lot of other stuff for you. And if you live anywhere, the English reformations go a surprisingly long way towards explaining the deep history and starting premises of the USA.
Plot is foxfire
I enjoyed Z-Note's remarks on the distraction of plot.
I think that if anything this understates its case. Plot must be less essential to animation than image, because you can have animation without plot but you can't have animation without image. In the same way, plot must be less essential to literature than words, because you can have literature without plot but you can't have literature without words.
Many have adopted 'story' as a way to discuss everything—with their horizons for everything narrowing to exclude anything without a story. Everything is 'media', and all instances of media have a story, which we can apparently assess for its characterisation and its pacing. Heaven forbid we might ever wonder whether a brushstroke is well-placed or a metaphor well-chosen.
Bollocks to that! Mediums have essences that make them differ from each other, differ fundamentally. We only have something shared to discuss with one another when we engage with those essences.
Persian passages
I read a couple of books related to Iran:
- Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Fall of the Shah and the Revolution That Forged Modern Iran
- Pierre Razoux, The Iran–Iraq War, translated by Nicholas Elliott (2015)
Anderson's book gives a narrow but informative popular-historical narrative of events. He interviewed some interesting key figures while writing it. The book presents little about the shifting state and mood of the Iranian street: it tells us a triadic story, about Ruhollah Khomeini, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and Jimmy Carter.
Razoux offers a fairly straightforward course-of-the-war account. All wars are miserable, but the Iran–Iraq war seems particularly grim even by the low standards set in other conflicts. Still, it does a lot to explain present-day diplomatic geography, and also shows the underpinnings of Iran's current deep institutional strength.
Razoux's very well-informed on French dealings in the region, on which he offers some eye-opening and cynical comment. The English translation contains a surprisingly high number of errors for book from a university press--I swear I saw an instance of ensures for assures--which may not be the translator's fault so much as the fault of deadlines and inadequate editorial oversight.
In his conclusion, Razoux writes that
A confrontation with Iranian power must by no means be taken lightly and entered upon impulsively or as a gamble. (471)
Surfacing the Bubblegum Crisis
Some friends and I have been (re)watching the back half of Bubblegum Crisis, which is also--if you ask me--the more successful half of Bubblegum Crisis.
The OVA's a thing of dazzling surfaces, and the surfaces get more dazzling as it goes on. Its strongest episodes are 5 and 7; 6 is (I think, at least!) plagued by a baggy script. The robot fight in 5 and the spider tank in 7 come across very well, and while 7 isn't the first Patlabor film, it rises to some rather fine meditative shots of futuristic architecture.
Selaco
Pulling the trigger on Selaco's shotgun is an event, possibly the kind of event you diarise weeks in advance.
Things done
In March, I
- wrote up the notes for Deep-Step and Twice-Mortal
- did a final editing pass on DSTM
- prepared PDF and epub versions of DSTM
- got the other poem (title to be revealed later) much nearer a full first draft