There is certainly a… comment dit-on… eau de racisme…? about people acting as if it’s completely and utterly ridiculous to say Toni Morrison wrote books that are challenging to read. But that’s not what I’m here to complain about. I am here to complain about different problem, which I would put like so: some books are challenging to read. That is not a flaw. It is often on purpose. Some books are both formally complicated and verbally dense in ways that require reading and rereading before you feel like you are competent to discuss what they contain. They are written that way. A person who openly struggles with Beloved gets this fact, because… why else would they even be trying to read it?

There’s a certain kind of readerly person who really hates admitting that some books are hard to read. If I were to armchair speculate about this kind of person’s psychology—and I am doing that—I’d say that at some formative time they became defensive about their tastes, in particular over being accused of being pretentious and not really enjoying what they said they enjoyed. This defensiveness calcified over time into a feeling that reading modernist literature or watching art films can’t be difficult—rather than what I think is the more productive position of “I enjoy doing difficult things.”

This is ancient news in internet terms, but back when Pete Buttigieg was running for president he said his favorite book was Ulysses and this statement was, impossibly, an entire discourse cycle, to the point where declarations were being made that nobody would ever read Ulysses for fun. Of course, that’s a stupid claim. People do lots of things for fun, many of which I find harder to imagine than reading James Joyce. (There are people out there who run marathons.) You can be having a blast inching through Ulysses at ten pages a sitting, which might not be “fun” in the sense of “easy” but is “pleasurable” in the sense of “you enjoy doing this.” Saying your favorite book is Ulysses might come off as “try hard” but at BDM Industries we are fans of try hards.

What I would not say, though, is “Ulysses is not hard to read.” Some parts of Ulysses are not hard to read once you catch the rhythm and some parts remain hard to read even once you know what’s going on. And that’s fine. Being easy to read is not the only virtue a book must possess to be enjoyable. If something is not easy to read, that is not a sign that the reader is stupid. Sometimes it is the knowledge that you will need to return to a text over and over that forms the basis of your enjoyment. You are encountering something that cannot be grasped in a single experience.

Now ideally, this is true of any book—that is, that you will continue to encounter something new whenever you read it again. Books that are not “difficult” in the sense that some parts of Ulysses are “difficult” will also change on rereading. There was a lot of hay made recently about students not being able to follow the opening of Bleak House, and Dickens is certainly the kind of writer where what is difficult (thanks to unfamiliarity) should eventually become natural for somebody who keeps reading.4

However, in my experience, there is a specific kind of first reading experience where you are in deep over your head and you know it and all you can do is move forward. And a contention I make here from time to time is that people enjoy that feeling, actually. People like stuff that is difficult. They like to be challenged. But there’s a kind of gap, between whatever you’re doing right now and something a little harder, and right now the route to satisfying and worthwhile challenges is unclear. And the response to somebody trying to find a way across the gap between where they are and where they want to be cannot be: haha, you’re so stupid.

I guess my point here is that somebody who logs on to say they’re struggling with Toni Morrison is billion times more valuable, to me, as a reader than somebody who is more sophisticated but cannot do the work of understanding the source of their own pleasure, instead pretending that reading Beloved is just another thing one can do that is no more demanding than any other thing. If you don’t want to be stuck having 101-level conversations about texts with newcomers, that’s your prerogative. (Neither do I.) What I see online, however, are conversations that are not even 101-level; they’re just talking shit in the hallway.

The “Toni Morrison isn’t difficult” thing has been irking me, in addition to all the other reasons, because I reread Joanna Russ’s The Female Man over the weekend. The Female Man is an enormously fun book. It’s also bewildering to read at first, with the point of view represented by “I” shifting among multiple characters. The first time I read the book I was completely enthralled and also completely lost. I never knew what was going on.

This confusion is on purpose. Russ’s signature prose style “move” is to open her stories in a quick-moving and disorienting way, which means that reading any work of hers the first time is a process of getting your sea legs. We Who Are About To…., which is usually the book I recommend to people as a place to start with her, opens like this:

About to die. And so on.

We’re all going to die.

The Sahara is your back yard, so’s the Pacific trench; die there and you won’t be lonely. On Earth you are never more than 13,000 miles from anywhere, which as the man said is a tough commute, but the rays of light from the scene of your death take little more than a tenth of a second to go … anywhere!

We’re nowhere.

We’ll die alone.

You don’t know what’s going on here and you won’t know for a minute. Once you think you do know what’s going on, Russ will kick your legs out from under you. She will do this over and over. It is a deliberate technique. She is also, as I think that excerpt makes plain, extremely fun to read. She treats you like you’re smart. She thinks you can rise to the occasion. Many of Russ’s books involve a moment a protagonist character crosses a clear line. That provokes you ask whether or not what just happened is really necessary, an attitude she mocks in The Female Man but also takes seriously. You need to argue with her books. They’re not passive experiences.

People can be bowled over and moved by things they don’t even slightly understand. If you say that something needs to be worked at to be truly appreciated, you are not denying that. Russ is a fun author who I read for fun and she is also a difficult author. There’s no need to choose.

Anyway I get, what. One of these posts where I complain like this a year? This is this year’s. Everybody had better behave for the rest of the year.

An admission before we get started: films that are made of a procession of surreal images are opaque to me. I haven’t done the kind of work that would let me appreciate them, and something about me is too verbal to get into them without some education. I’m always going: what is that? what is that? what is that?

Angel’s Egg is certainly composed of surreal images, and so I think in many ways I am a poorly suited critic for it, but here we are. Threaded through its imagery is a narrative, however, which I’ll summarize this: a nameless girl carrying an egg wanders a mostly deserted landscape and town, encounters a man with a sword, runs away from him, encounters some fishermen who try and fail to capture shadow fish, is reunited with the man, and listens to him tell the story of Noah’s Ark. She falls asleep and he takes the egg and breaks it. When she wakes up she kills herself. In the process of dying she produces more eggs.

As a series of images, Angel’s Egg is both beautiful and authentically weird. The animation often conveys the sense of being “a moving illustration,” as distinct from “an animated movie.” When the girl runs in an early scene, her hair and her clothes move as if they’re the same weight and she’s also underwater—that’s what I mean. The character designs are done by Yoshitaka Amano, who is probably best known for his Final Fantasy work. However, what one could call “technical limitations” mean that the designs in (for instance) Final Fantasy VI1 are stripped of their strangeness. In Angel’s Egg, however, Amano’s strange, elongated, and detailed figures are preserved.

The movie spends a lot of time on things that don’t seem like they matter—like the girl filling up endless water bottles—but which build to communicate a sense of purpose in this strange world. There’s a lot of stillness and unclear amounts of time going by. The sequence in which the fishermen, who are like the compulsive ghosts of past fishermen, hunt the shadow fish is spectacular. One touch that I particularly liked is that they might even catch one, but since it is not a real fish, their victory is meaningless. But there’s also an idea instilled through this scene that the girl is also trapped in a compulsion to carry her egg that will never hatch. So is the man, who is determined to find out what is in the egg.

All of this works. The problem is the narrative. Since his film is largely abstract and free of dialogue, Oshii has to lean heavily on what we already bring to his images—that is, he has to work in cliches. Angel’s Egg is a story about a young girl who is seduced into trusting a man, is betrayed by him, and then dies in the sense of being a young girl (she becomes an adult woman, who then also dies) and whose agony brings forth some kind of new life. There is a lot of very loaded imagery and even some dialogue that drives this home. The girl tries to get the man to promise not to break her egg; he’s silent. Walking around with the egg makes her look pregnant. When it is broken and she becomes an adult she reaches for her stomach, feels her adult body, and screams. The sequence in which the girl wakes to discover her egg is broken, and of her subsequent devastated cries, is obviously, obviously evoking rape.

Since, however, this violation brings forth something new, since eggs are made to be broken, since children are meant to become adults, this violence was necessary—or that’s the suggestion. I know this story, you know this story; it is a stupid story, particularly since even in this symbolic reading, it’s all really standing for something else, like “creation.” There’s no emotional reality to what happens to these people. And the story is certainly unworthy of the moments of real beauty in the film, like when the girl sees her reflection for perhaps the first time and talks to it as if it is another girl, or the startlingly and almost creepily clear water, or the ambiguously organic machines the man rides into town, or the giant chick sleeping in a transparent egg.

Is this kind of triteness the cost art like Angel’s Egg has to pay, to be as weird as it is in other areas? It’s certainly not the first piece of art I’ve encountered where extreme aesthetic complexities are put at the service of material that feels like it might not be worthy of adults. But I do resist the idea that there’s some sort of set amount of complexity available in narrative art, though I might accept it elsewhere.2

Angel’s Egg is a movie worth watching once, because it is beautiful. Whether or not it’s worth watching twice is a harder call. I did watch it twice, and enjoyed it much more the second time, because I no longer cared about understanding what was happening and just enjoyed the imagery, and I can imagine it becoming sort of a favorite movie to rewatch because there’s something sort of soothing about it. But when I read what I said above, I also still agree with it—there’s something troublesomely shallow about the movie’s use of the girl as the dreamer and the boy as her rude but necessary awakening. Hers is the hand that reaches out in the movie’s opening moments and his is the hand that crushes; I know what this stuff means and I reject it.

A postscript.… Angel’s Egg came to America via New World Pictures, a production company owned by Roger Corman. If you do not know who Corman is, he was a budget movie director and producer who occupied the niche of the genius hack that seems specific to Hollywood.3 New World Pictures did not set out to acquire Oshii’s movie—it came as a package deal—but once they had it they were going to use it somehow.4 That is the Roger Corman thrift principle. So the director, Carl Colpaert, edited the animated footage from Angel’s Egg together with live action footage of some guys in gas masks wandering around what is meant to be a blighted hellscape but is clearly California. The result is a movie called In the Aftermath.

In the first minute or so of In the Aftermath, it feels like you’re watching Oshii’s movie get edited into something with more of an American sense of timing, and hey, it might actually work—but then people start talking, and you’re like well that’s not so good. Then the live action bits start. This movie also has a long musical interlude, during which I will confess my attention began to drift. It might have drifted prior to the musical interlude but it was definitely drifting during and afterward. In the Aftermath really resembles the experience of watching a bunch of video game cut scenes spliced together. In that limited sense, I guess you could call it “ahead of its time.”

• People in anime are always ominously quoting the Bible.… Somebody should do an anime where people ominously quote from The Tale of Genji.

• At last, my under-eye shadows have been represented in anime:

  

• Angel’s Egg started as a Lupin III movie, according to Oshii: “The girl in Lupin lives in a strange tower which appeared in the middle of 20th century Tokyo. The one who created the tower was an old architect who surpassed Moses and Gaudi and the girl is his granddaughter. The old architect once had 12 disciples and she is served by the remaining four. It seems she spends her life in a wheelchair, without taking one step out of her room. A murder takes place in this tower and photographic evidence shows ‘the white hands of a young girl’. Lupin decides to tackle this mystery and sneaks into the tower. As he advances towards the interior, he discovers white feathers scattered on the ground and the corpses of small animals. According to Fujiko’s investigation, it turns out the girl wasn’t the old architect’s granddaughter. Then who in the world was she? She was actually an ‘angel’, who mocked humans and killed them. In my mind, the tower itself was based on Dante’s Inferno, while the strange girl was Beatrice.”

• Lots to say about that Lupin III concept, among them: Oshii, did you think Beatrice killed people? (She does definitely make fun of Dante.) (We love her.)
  

• Angel’s Egg almost destroyed Oshii’s career but he remains fond of it: “This work is like a pitiful daughter that I couldn’t properly introduce to the world. If this opportunity allows even one more person to see it, there is no greater happiness for me as a director. I would like to express my gratitude once again to the staff who endured the painstakingly detailed work.” Perhaps you can only truly love your failchildren.

3

See:

movies, regrettably

On 'Wicked: For Good' and the enduring cultural legacy of Cecil B. DeMille

Halfway through Wicked: For Good, the thrilling cinematic conclusion to Wicked: Part One, a lesbian and a gay guy have sex offscreen in a treehouse. When this tryst takes place, Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) has just defected from his post as the Captain of the Wizard’s Guard, just as he was about to wed Glinda the Good Witch (Ariana Grande-Butera) in an act…

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5 months ago · 25 likes · 4 comments · Ben Empey

I’d like to say, in response to Darrell Schweitzer’s plea to the “older famous writers in the field” to set an example, that I have never allowed and will never allow the franchising of my works/worlds/characters/universes, or the use of any of the above in any kind of electronic or other game; and that I don’t do readings or any kind of PR appearance at Borders or the other commoditybook chains. For anybody who gets decent advances, and so has the luxury of such choices, this seems to me a minimal commitment to literary values and writerly solidarity.1

Now… the specifics of what Le Guin won’t do are not really useful to anybody working in 2026.2 They are directed to the media ecosystem and publishing world of 1995. If Le Guin were still alive and giving readings I think she’d be happy to support any Amazon competitor, because that would be the situation in which she was now applying the underlying principle. Similarly, I read “franchising” as more about the kind of thing Marion Zimmer Bradley did with her Darkover books, where she had (for instance) anthologies of stories set in “the world of Darkover” that were written by other people.3 It’s not about the possibility of a TV show of The Dispossessed.4

Nevertheless, the quote has stuck with me because it clarified some things for me. Put bluntly, there’s an anti-commercial quality many people have that I don’t share. I have often joked to people that if some little demon or something appeared to me and said that the way to ensure Weird Sisters will sell hundred of thousands of copies is to partner with Funko Pops, there would not even be a dilemma. In this scenario I suppose I’m assuming I can write the book exactly as I please and am merely assured many sales because of Funko Pops, which is maybe not how it would work.5 Perhaps my idea of commercialism is itself strangely romantic and detached from reality.6

However, at some point, you know, a few books down the line, it would behoove me to say: it’s time to drop the Funko Pops. We have achieved cruising altitude. (Ignore the image this conjures up of a plane dropping Funko Pops onto a helpless populace below.) Or, in brief, I read this letter as an expression of the following principle:

• Up to a certain point, we all gotta hustle. “No blame,” as the I Ching says.

• Past that point, we have a responsibility not to hustle. “Blame,” as the I Ching must say sometimes though I’m always getting “no blame” myself, presumably because I’m a perfect innocent baby lamb.7

Le Guin’s term for this is “solidarity,” but another change that has taken place between now and 1995 is the way “solidarity” has become a frequently and vaguely invoked ethical and political imperative, such that I’m rarely sure what somebody means by it.8 For this reason, I would like to propose a different term for this attitude of understanding that “if you’ve reached a certain level of success responsibilities have accrued as well as privileges,” a term which has the advantage of appealing to people’s vanity: noblesse oblige.9

There are drawbacks here. The first thing you have to say about “noblesse oblige” is that it is an inherently condescending attitude. As the line goes, whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had. What “noblesse oblige” emphatically cannot be is a relationship that exists between equal people, and thus in certain situations it is really an evil way to regard others. The second thing you have to say about “noblesse oblige” is that some people absolutely do not want to say they are noblesse. The idea of being across some winning line is absolutely existentially terrifying to them. Finally, the world of 2026 being what it is, there are many markers of status one can accrue, particularly in the realm of “online,” that do not translate into material security. There are people you might think of as noblesse who are not really doing so hot.

On the other hand, I think some acts of oblige10 are available to people at basically any level. If for instance an editor contacts me about a piece I don’t have time to write, I usually recommend one to three other people, with their contact information if I have it.11 Sometimes the editors follow up with these people and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I have recommended other people and the editors have come back with a sweet talkin’ but we really want yooooooooou which I may simply not resist. (I like being flattered.) (Who doesn’t?) Recommending other people is an easy task; I imagine a lot of writers do this.12 It doesn’t add to the editor’s workload since they are under no obligation to investigate your recommendations. The only cost is the five minutes or so it takes to type a paragraph and link to an example.

As stated above, a primary selling point of noblesse oblige is the appeal to vanity: it feels nice to be helpful. It feels nice to do something gratuitously thoughtful. Ideally, such actions do not come with the score-keeping mindset of keeping track of everybody you’ve ever done something nice for to make sure they are properly grateful.

Still, it would be nice to have a way of thinking about this stuff—by which I mean first of all money and at a distant second status—that is not “getting paid is a radical act” or “here’s my ten paragraph explanation as to why this money doesn’t contaminate me actually” or “here’s why everybody else is a neoliberal puppet sellout.”13 And ultimately the big problem with most of our public ethical and political stances, lines drawn or crossed in the sand, etc., is that they are driven by anxiety rather than trying to work out what you feel is your actual responsibility. Anxiety does not encourage generosity of spirit, doing favors, or even simple fairness; it is the affective state that causes people to freak out over the idea of being successful.

A final objection to noblesse oblige is simply that it’s about the individual, as opposed to solidarity, which is about the group. As with the other objections, I think this one is true, but, if we’re just talking about writers of articles and books, I am not sure how much it matters. Ultimately the calls made on people are individual, and so are the consequences. There is no community support on call for the person who burns a professional bridge for principled reasons. Shaming by strangers is unpleasant, but pleasing those strangers won’t do anything for you (and they won’t even really be pleased). So in this rather limited context I think appealing to the individual and the individual’s public spiritedness and magnanimity is simply what you have. And you gotta work with what you have.

Fumerie is a perfume store in Portland that, despite my various travels to Oregon, I have yet to visit in person. I did place an order with them last month though because I wanted a sample of the new Eris scent, “Mother’s Milk.” (More on that later.…)1 Seeking to pad out the order, I ended up adding this sampler. I always appreciate the opportunity to try scents I wouldn’t think of trying.

The write-ups are below but the short takeaway is that I had a lot of fun and I’ll probably get Fumerie’s summer sampler. I didn’t rank them but I really liked three, liked one that didn’t suit me, and hated the fifth. Usually I link to the perfumer’s website, but in this case I have linked back to Fumerie.

Doliphor (Marlou)
(Fragrantica / Parfumo / Basenotes)

carrot seed, costus, cumin, musk

Marlou’s thing is making animalic perfumes (or, as the brand puts it, “a perfume created by Marlou joins itself to the body’s own olfactory signaling”). I have tried one of their perfumes (“Poudrextase”), which is a very pleasant rose perfume. But, despite having samples of some of the others, their reputation unnerves me enough that when I pick a sample to try I’m always like… is today the day for “Carnicure”… and somehow, it never is. On the other hand, maybe when I try “Carnicure” I’ll think “actually this doesn’t smell all that dirty to me.”

Like “Poudrextase,” “Doliphor” is a very pleasant perfume, though in its case what it really reminds of more than anything is smelling a dandelion. It stays close to the skin and I guess this is Marlou’s version of the “your skin but better” type of perfume. I’d say, it’s sort of how you feel unshowered people smell in the movies.

I don’t know if I’d buy a full bottle of “Doliphor,” but I liked it a lot. Definitely a smell that puts you in mind of spring. I might buy a decant if I keep wearing the sample.

Silver Saffron (Une Nuite Nomade)
(Fragrantica / Parfumo / Basenotes)

iris, myrrh, papyrus, raspberry, saffron

What does saffron smell like? Honestly I don’t know. If I really search my soul I’m not even exactly sure what saffron tastes like. I know that it is the key ingredient in various delicious foods, but I’m completely unclear on what it tastes like or what its contribution is. The main thing I know about saffron is that it is expensive.

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Anyway, aside from my initial hospitalization in New York, I’ve been very fortunate to work, mostly, with the same doctor at the same hospital at the University of Michigan. (Parts of my medical team have come and gone, as is normal.) These days, I am very stable. There are aspects of life I’m still trying to improve, but it’s been over a year since I’ve done anything that seriously upset my pancreas. The primary condition that I’m left with day to day is called “exocrine pancreatic insufficiency”: that is, I take pancreatic enzymes with food because my pancreas is damaged and can no longer produce them in the quantities I need to receive nutrients.

Ending up at the University of Michigan was lucky; it is what the National Pancreas Foundation calls a “Center of Excellence.” I like my doctor, who is such a kind person I almost cried once sitting in his office. The last time I saw him we worked out a good way of continuing to monitor the situation. I have been grateful to have a doctor I like and trust through this process.

However, my insurer has decided that it’s time to play chicken with my medical providers. Which means it’s possible that after June I will lose access to my “Center of Excellence,” my doctor, and the rest of it.

It goes against my nature, but let’s try to be fair for a moment to health insurance companies. It is hard for any conflict to exist in which they do not appear to be the bad guy. BCBSM knows that, which is why they announced their side of the story first. Part of that is that when we deal with doctors we are dealing with people, whereas when we deal with insurance we are dealing with systems and forms. I know my doctor but I do not know “Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.” I would like my doctor to get paid what he deserves but since “Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan” is not a person I have no such feelings for it.

So I’ve tried to resist my initial reaction of blaming BCBSM for everything and have looked for further reporting on this situation. There are two sets of competing claims: BCBSM states that Michigan Medicine is demanding a 44% increase in what the insurer pays the hospital. Michigan Medicine’s response is: that is false, that they’ve only asked for single-digit increases in payment, and that BCBSM actually wants to cut their current payments by 30%. Can they both be telling the truth in some technical sense? Yes, I think so, but I will put my speculation in a footnote because my math could be wrong or it could be right in theory but one of them could actually just be lying after all.1

But, to be blunt, it’s just hard to find an explanation here that makes BCBSM look good. They control a huge chunk of Michigan’s health insurance market. Their explanation requires you to believe that Michigan Medical would cut itself off from much of the state’s population out of sheer greed. There is no reciprocal resource which BCBSM risks losing. Right now, thanks to BCBSM’s brinkmanship, hundreds of thousands of patients are being thrown into limbo, and some of them are in crisis situations. At Michigan Advance,2 Andrew Bashi, who has a critically ill baby, writes:

The team at the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital detected his condition before [Jibran, his son] was born, kept his mother hospitalized, and had a team ready when he arrived. At ten days old, his heart the size of a walnut, they successfully performed his first of several heart surgeries. During his three-month stay, their nutrition team guided him through prematurity without developing necrotizing enterocolitis, a life-threatening condition for which Jibran scored at the highest possible risk.…

The surgeries still ahead of Jibran, including one that requires stopping his heart entirely, chilling his body, and reconstructing its architecture while a bypass machine keeps him alive, can only be performed at a single hospital in the entire state; the University of Michigan.

And Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan wants to push that hospital out of its network.

Unlike myself, Bashi doesn’t have the luxury of being in a relatively stable situation. His child is sick now and requires surgery now. Bashi also can’t go somewhere else in the state. The kind of care his child needs is only available at Michigan Medicine.3

This email is not a request for advice in dealing with this situation or in managing EPI or whatever else. In fact, I would like to actively not request advice. (I hate advice.) (Don’t give me advice.) If you live in Michigan there are steps it is possible to take (see here), but most of you don’t. That’s fine. One of those steps is “express your concerns through the media by submitting an opinion or a letter to the editor.” That’s what I’m doing. I am the media. (In this instance.) And the media says: pay my damn doctor.

Despite featuring multiple dogfights, a fascist government, pirates, pursuit by the secret police, an economic depression, and what is surely cinema’s longest fist fight, Porco Rosso might be the Miyazaki movie in which the least happens. If I try to distill this movie into “a plot,” I come up with the following series of events:

• Porco is a bounty hunter who thwarts air pirates. We witness him rescue some school girls being held for ransom (though it’s clear the girls were never in any serious danger).

• The air pirates hire a hotshot American named Donald Curtis to defeat him.

• Donald Curtis defeats him.

• Porco fixes his plane and comes back for round two.

• This time, he wins.

• The end.

Now I am doing this summary partly to demonstrate what I mean when I say not much happens. What’s at stake in the on-screen conflicts in this movie is pretty low, because everybody’s broke, except for the American. All the planes are held together with a wish and a prayer. The appearances of the air pirates, as they threaten to kidnap and steal, are greeted by their victims as entertainment. Porco and Curtis like each other fine; they are friends by the end of the movie. The face of the fascist government is an old friend of Porco’s, a guy who goes along to get along, and who helps out his friend in a pinch without being asked.

But I’m also doing it because the most basic thing about this movie, the thing that anybody will tell you about the movie, is not in there, because it is not directly related to any of the movie’s events. That is: Porco has a pig’s head.1 He didn’t always have one. He used to have a normal human head and went by “Marco.” Now it is a pig’s and he goes by “Porco.” Despite being asked, explicitly, how he came to have a pig’s head, Porco doesn’t answer. He tells a story that we can infer has something to do with it, about how he almost died in World War I and witnessed other pilots, including a friend, being taken up toward an afterlife that might have been heaven and might have been hell. It would be in keeping with the tone of the movie, though, for his story to be entirely unrelated. Porco Rosso is the story of how he regains his human face, but this regaining is done in an almost by-the-way fashion and we do not see it happen.2

This non-relationship between the movie’s most salient qualities (pig head) and the events it contains is part of the magic of Porco Rosso. Actually, “non-relationship” isn’t quite right. There is a relationship. It’s just not causal. Situated as it is between the World Wars, the movie takes place in a slightly unreal Italy in which the conditions for disaster are in place but the ultimate disaster hasn’t occurred. Things are going to get worse; for now, people are getting by. The conflicts that are put front and center aren’t serious because everybody knows they are living between cataclysms. The serious thing is coming. When, who, what—nobody knows that part.

Porco already knows he doesn’t want to be in the next war. He doesn’t want to be in the future, so he doesn’t fit into the present. What he does want to do is fly—even though skills like his, and planes like his, are meant for war. So the thing he loves the most is linked in a way he can’t undo with what he does not want to do again. Porco has lost his place in the world.

As a rule I’m not a big fan of narrative ambiguity, particularly in movies. Movies that end by asking you what really happened, if it was all just a dream—annoying. Movies that end the split second before resolution—annoying. Of course, not every movie that chooses ambiguity is annoying; but when it is, I experience such ambiguity as a refusal to make an artistic decision, rather than making one.

On the other hand, I like stories that offer you “givens,” such as: this guy has a pig head. Why, how—that’s not our business. He just has a pig head. If you want to go any further you’ll just have to accept it. Porco Rosso has both the given of Porco’s condition and an “ambiguous” ending where what has happened can be put together (Porco has become human and is now with Gina) but will not be depicted on screen. Both work.

Part of what it means for Porco’s pig-headedness to be a given rather than ambiguously caused is that there is no obvious “answer” you can arrive at about what is going on. There are different ways to understand it—including a refusal to assign it any meaning at all. Is Porco a pig, spiritually speaking? Is that what his transformation means? He’s selfish, so sure, that could be part of it.3 On the other hand, it’s strongly implied his last “human” action was offering to die in the place of a friend. His quip “better a pig than a fascist” also implies there’s something noble about his status. Another possibility: maybe he looks like a pig because he’s not a pig (spiritually speaking). He’s a man with a conscience in an amoral time; nobody’s shocked by his appearance, but he can’t disguise himself as a normal person or hide in a crowd.4

I prefer to understand Porco’s curse as the kind of thing that happens to people who unexpectedly trespass on divinity. Your hand withers, you go blind, your face ceases to be a human face. Having briefly seen beyond the veil, Porco exiles himself from humanity, and lives on an island where he spends his days drinking and napping until he has a job to do. A question for him is if he wants to stay this way or not: other people (well, women) wish for him to be restored to full humanity, but does he? Is he resigned to being a pig-headed man or is this in some weird way how he’s happiest?

All of these possible ways of understanding Porco Rosso seem plausible to me, even if I have my own preferences, and even if they contradict each other. Miyazaki has made Porco a pig out of an artistic intuition that has meaning and creates meaning but which does not need to be explained. What he has created is a story about a guy who thinks it’s impossible for him to live a human life anymore. Then he asks: what would convince somebody who felt that way, and felt that way for good reasons, that he might be wrong? And if he changed his mind, because somebody forced him to see things he was refusing to see, would it matter?

• In 1998, Miyazaki released the first part of Tigers Covered With Mud, a manga adaptation of a memoir by Otto Carius. Who was Otto Carius? Well, he was a Nazi. The line among fans, as far as I can tell, is that he did this because he’s a “military otaku,” i.e., obsessed with things like tanks and planes. (Miyazaki even traveled to visit Carius and show him the comic.) I find that easy to believe. I’m not bringing this up to be like #HayaoMiyazakiIsOverParty.
  
  No, I’m mentioning this here because the characters in Tigers Covered With Mud are all pigs (example on this page). This decision must be some private joke or commentary about Porco Rosso, particularly given the images in the credits in which all the soldiers are pigs. But I have no idea what that comment could be.

• In this post I just had to assume that anybody reading it has seen the movie. Apologies if you haven’t seen the movie. Go see it.

• The afterlife scene reminded me a lot of End of Evangelion.

• The scene where the schoolgirls are escaping from the air pirates and one tells the pirates not to worry because they’re all on the swim team is so funny. The whole sequence is funny, but that bit in particular… just perfect.

• Also love the sequence when all the women come to work on the plane. Honestly there is so much in this movie! I love it!

• The poster for Curtis’s movie is amazing.

• Gina is an interesting type for Miyazaki—the clearly adult woman who also isn’t a matron (or a crone). Fujiko is an earlier version. Kushana is close. The fashion designer in Kiki is another one, though we don’t really get to know her.… I tend to like these characters of his because there’s something a little bit uncomfortable about them. They don’t quite fit into his systems and they provide some interesting friction.

• On that note: Gina has three dead husbands… awful lot of dead husbands.

• There is one aspect of this movie that doesn’t really work for me—during the unending fist fight Curtis says to Porco that he has to choose Fio or Gina, he can’t have both. Is there any point at which Fio feels like an actual romantic prospect? Maybe she envisions herself as such. In any case this bit felt like the movie’s one false note to me.

The Passenger Seat (Vijay Khurana, 2025)

Two people who might otherwise go through life without ever causing trouble meet each other. Then, the magic of chemistry: trouble is there. Sometimes you see another person and you feel everything click into place. Sometimes it would have been better if it hadn’t ever clicked. Or maybe it was always going to happen; it was just your fate, which you would have met sooner or later, in a different moment, a different person, a different click, the same ending.

In Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat, two teenage boys, Adam and Teddy, living in a dead end Canadian town, decide to take a summer road trip in the summer between their junior and senior years. Adam, whose mother has left him, is raised his depressed and broken father. He listens to podcasts, reads books on how to dominate the conversation, plays a game called “Patriot,” and drives his own car, a truck. Teddy’s family consists of a passive dad, a cheating mom, and an older sister who can’t wait to get out of this town. He can’t drive but he has a girlfriend. Adam doesn’t have a girlfriend and he never will. We meet them playing a game where they jump from a bridge into a river at the one precise place it’s deep enough not to break your neck:

A country road, a steel truss bridge, the sun heating stanchion and tarmac, river and soil, and the skin of two near-naked boys, or men. Dry air carries a hint of something burning far off; alders and cottonwoods, just past their greenest, are vivid against the grey water. The boys-or-men are friends, they balance barefoot on the safety railing, they hold tight, they look at each other and down. There is nervous laughter, a preparatory flexing of knees. Fun and games, says Adam, and they step out.

It’s the kind of idyllic boyhood summertime1 mix of one-upmanship and daredevilry you associate with movies like Stand by Me.2 Also, much like Stand by Me, Adam and Teddy will see a dead body in this book. More than one. With the crucial distinction, vis-a-vis other stories of boyhood, that Adam and Teddy will have killed these people.

When we meet them, the boys have no place they want to end up—not on the trip, not in life. (“How can he avoid being left behind?” Teddy frets. “They are all on their way somewhere: his friend, his girlfriend, his sister, even his mother. Teddy is not thrilled by the prospect of manhood, but he has not yet settled on an alternative.”) No, they don’t want to go anywhere, they just need to get out. They will drive up toward the Arctic, instead of toward the US–Canada border, because Adam, who listens to a lot of podcasts, believes the United States is falling into racial anarchy.3 That is not your first hint that there’s something wrong with Adam. At that point in the book, you’ve already read him casually inform a classmate he could strangle her and hide her body so she would never be found.

Yet it’s not really Adam that is the problem. It’s not Teddy either. It’s Adam-and-Teddy, the third thing born of their friendship. Adam’s podcasts could be a teenage edgelord phase, but Teddy gives Adam’s beliefs reality. Teddy wants to be a passenger on Adam’s nihilistic journey, but he’s not really as passive as he seems. The push–pull of who can and can’t drive, who has and has not made out with a girl, who does and doesn’t have a gun license, of a thousand constant tiny competitions, are essential to the creation of Adam-and-Teddy.4 Who’s in the passenger seat of this friendship? Both of them, that is: Adam and Teddy are going along. Who is driving? Neither of them, that is: Adam-and-Teddy is driving.

Khurana draws this friendship through alternating chapters that are told in a tight third person present tense, mostly from Adam or Teddy’s perspective. Every now and then there is a flicker of omniscience—“Adam, who will die a virgin, stands in the forest surrounded by dumb, indifferent organisms”—that gives the book a sense of cold predestination. You know that this trip will go badly. It does. You know they won’t come back. They don’t. It was that moment, though, the assertion that Adam will die a virgin, that rang a little bell for me: Muriel Spark. Was The Passenger Seat’s title a nod to one of Spark’s weirdest books, The Driver’s Seat?5

In The Driver’s Seat, a woman named Lise goes to Italy to seek out her own murderer. We are reminded throughout The Driver’s Seat that Lise will die a violent death: “Lise’s eyes are widely spaced, blue-grey and dull.… Her nose is short and wider than it will look in the likeness constructed partly by the method of identikit, partly by actual photography, soon to be published in the newspapers of four languages.” Spark depicts this baffling, off-putting situation in her usual way: aloof but intimate, knowing and cruel. What, exactly, causes Lise to seek her death is left a mystery, other than she understands she must meet her fate. The possibility that she is insane and a fool is never quite denied. At the moment she dies, you wonder if she’s ever been in control. Maybe she was in the grip of something that, in the last second, deserts her.

Perhaps because the characters of The Passenger Seat are worse, Khurana’s book is warmer. Even after they’ve crossed the line into murder, Adam and Teddy are familiar teenage boys. Their games could exist in an entirely benign way, in some other Canada and some other story. But the moment they buy a gun for their trip, you know what will happen. Yet somehow the inevitability of their murders makes their violence feel avoidable, right up until the last second. It always feel possible for them to do something else.

Adam, at least, is conscious that they must make the effort to create their own mythology so that people will continue to seek to understand them long after this trip is over. He deliberately creates meaninglessness as a way to make sure people will keep talking about them. It’s juvenile; it reveals an outsized sense of his own importance. He will ruin some people’s lives, but he has not created a puzzle that will guarantee his own immortality. At one point he leaves a playing card as a deliberate clue for people to debate later, but we’re told that in fact this clue will never be found:

When he gets back to the car he opens his wallet once more, takes out the playing card, and leaves it neatly on top of the pump, for the girl or somebody else to find. He imagines her trying to scramble her memories of him back once it becomes clear who he was, regretting not having paid more attention. But nobody finds the card. Sometime later the wind takes it, and it ends up in a puddle by the propane canisters, where it remains until the year’s first snow and long after that, as the boys’ names and faces fade from newspapers, from news sites, television, and radio, retreating into fissures of the internet where men, mostly men, divine and debate their motives, defend and damn them, or use them as evidence while arguing a crucial point.

But Adam is not the one with the gun license—that’s Teddy. Adam doesn’t buy the gun—that’s Teddy, too. It’s easy to say what’s wrong with Adam: podcasts, rabbit holes, radicalizing algorithms, “disinformation,” the entire laundry list of talking points. It’s called The Passenger Seat because what Teddy wants is to be taken for a ride, to give and to be given an excuse for violence.

***

I don’t think I heard a peep about this book once last year—which doesn’t tell you anything about its reception. (Every year the novels on the shortlists for prizes appear and every year I go: what are these.) I picked it up because it was the runner up in this year’s Tournament of Books and, after the first round, it kept winning even though it seemed like almost none of the people surrounding the ToB—not the official match commentators or the regulars in the comments—wanted it to advance.6 This dynamic tickled me and I thought: it’s a short book, why not give it a go?

The antagonistic commentary can, I think, be accurately summarized as “resenting being asked to think about violent young men.”7 There’s no arguing with what somebody does or does not what to spend time reading. In that sense: fair enough. Novels these days are often treated as preludes to a think piece; who needs yet another think piece that recites the various modes of online radicalization available to teenage boys? We already know the list. I get it.

For me, though, one of the major virtues of The Passenger Seat was that while it is clearly a book about alienated and violent young men, it’s not really concerned with explaining their world to me. That is its context, but not its content, much as Heavenly Creatures is not an anthropological study of New Zealand girlhood in the 1950s. Two people locked in a mutual fantasy and mutual complicity who are driving until they run out of road: that’s The Getaway Car, that’s Black Wings Has My Angel, that’s noir, that’s the Western. It is one of the great modern story structures and I doubt I’ll ever get tired of it. It’s the existential problem of where to go when you need to leave but have nothing to want and no place to aim. I read this book in two sittings; I finished it yesterday; I felt like I was vibrating. I needed to write about it as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to sit with it, I just wanted to discharge the energy.

Regardless of what happens between then and now—even if wins awards and moves copies—in twenty years The Passenger Seat will probably be reprinted and marketed as an underappreciated classic. However, you don’t have to wait twenty years. You can just appreciate it now.

6

For instance, here is the first comment on the post where it was clear The Passenger Seat was advancing to the final round:

I was aware of this litigation when it was happening but, to be completely honest, did not care about it (and thus forgot about it).1 Google Books was obviously useful. I used it. I didn’t understand why I’d be mad about it and I didn’t see that anything was at stake. One vociferous critic of Google Books, though, was Ursula K. Le Guin, which is why I was reminded of it recently. When the Authors Guild attempted to settle with Google, Le Guin resigned. She also wrote two posts (one, two) on her personal blog discussing her issues with the settlement.2 I was reading these posts yesterday and found this passage, from her first blog post on the matter, familiar:

All the time the Settlement has been in the courts, Google has been blithely going ahead digitalizing any book it wanted without obtaining permission, let alone contractual terms. (I can attest to this, since they have thus pirated several of my books, with no attempt whatever to contact the publishers, my agent, or myself — none of whom are exactly hard to locate.)

First time as farce… second time, also as farce? Anyway, it sparked some thoughts. They are below.

As a practical matter, I do use Google Books—as well as its much more legally dubious cousin, the Internet Archive. However, Le Guin’s resistance here is not explicitly anti-digital. Her position is that instead of a private company scanning materials, there should be an internet equivalent of the public library. Such a library could only be formed through patient political work and—probably—copyright reform that would involve rolling back the Mickey Mouse copyright extension and coming up with a practical approach to orphaned works. You’re no doubt shocked to learn that nobody wanted to undertake that task… so… it did not happen.

At the present time, in the States, there is a legal form of the digital library: it’s called Libby. Libby is very convenient if you are an ereader user (as I am) or read on your phone (I do not do this except under duress because it hurts my eyes). It’s also, for libraries, incredibly expensive: one library estimated in 2025 that Libby costs them $8,000 a week. Unlike authors in the United Kingdom, Canada, and (I think?) Australia, authors in the United States do not receive royalties from library checkouts. While authors do receive a small cut whenever a library is forced to repurchase a license—just as they do when libraries repurchase physical books that have worn out—the steep cost of Libby does not benefit authors.

Libby’s cost to libraries, much like credit card transaction fees, exists for me in the category “real problems that are not exactly reasonable to expect people to care about on a day-to-day level.” That is: people should not agonize over whether or not they really need a Libby book. They should not feel bad if they check one out and return it unread. People shouldn’t feel bad for paying with a credit card at a small business either. However, credit card fees are bad for the business and will either be passed back to the consumer or eat away at the business’s profit margin. The system that exists is not sustainable. Sooner or later, something will give.

Thus a question the Google Books contretemps raises for me now is: where would writers be if the idea that creating a free digital public library was a necessary project had really been taken up? If that had been built, rather than passively anticipating that a private company would eventually do something, what would have happened? How much of the sheer stuff that trains LLMs would actually not exist in the same way if Google had not scanned thousands and thousands of books? How would the entire LLM project be different? I don’t know the answers to these questions. The answer might be: we’d be in exactly the same place we are now.

To pivot slightly. As I see it, there are four main types of objections to LLMs. These are:

1. Environmental: they use too much water and they are bad for the local ecosystem.

2. Practical: they are bad at what people want them to do.

3. Copyright-based: they have been trained on an enormous amount of stolen material.

4. Moral (“Butlerian Jihad”): even if they were clean, effective, and licensed all their training material, it would be wrong to use them for almost all purposes.

I think it would be fair to say most people I know occupy positions one or four. While they might be bothered by copyright issues, if those were solved, it wouldn’t change their negative view of the technology. Personally, as I have said before, I think that LLMs can be useful assistants for people who know what they’re doing but they seem to be lethal to developing skills and knowledge if you don’t know what you’re doing.3 I would, as it were, caucus with the Butlerian Jihadists on issues of LLM usage, but it’s not exactly where I stand.

The details of my own position are irrelevant most of the time, though, because there are also not many applications of LLMs that would be useful to me in my own work. They don’t pose some huge temptation that I am virtuously resisting.4 Recently, however, I read about VLMs, which absolutely could be useful to me:

Traditional OCR tools work through pattern recognition: detect where text appears on a page and then identify individual characters and words. VLMs take a different approach. Rather than processing characters and words in isolation, they integrate visual perception alongside a sophisticated understanding of language and the relationships between words. This allows VLMs to recognize that the above source is a table of cities organized alphabetically by state, that lontpeller falls under the Vermont heading, and that the intended city is therefore likely to be Montpelier.

Apple’s native OCR has become pretty good—good enough that it’s been unclear to me if there’s any reason to purchase a dedicated OCR program. Still, it’s not perfect. There are blocks of clear and typewritten text it can’t read. It is very bad at handwriting. A computer program that could reliably read, transcribe, and search handwritten material would be extremely helpful to me. Obviously I would still be the person reading and annotating and analyzing and so on. But, to pick an example that has really happened, one time I had written down a paraphrase of a fact without carefully noting where the source text was. I have been doing my citations in chunks as I go, and when I got to the paraphrase I realized I needed the exact letter. However, the letters in question were written in awful handwriting—I couldn’t even skim the pages myself, much less use Apple to search them—and I had to reread a lot, very slowly, before I could find it.

One takeaway from that story is that I made a costly mistake and I won’t make it again. (True! Except for the times preceding this event when I had already made it.) Still, using a VLM would be great… except that I can’t. If I wanted to use a VLM, I would, as far as I can tell, have to put my material into something like Google Gemini. And that is something that, ethically and legally speaking, I cannot do with the handwritten material I have, which is not only under copyright but private. (And wouldn’t do, to be very clear!) It would both violate the trust of the archives that have let me make copies and the rights of the copyright holders. And frankly, even if Google promised security and privacy, I would not really believe them (or any company developing LLMs) and so I would not entrust them with sensitive material.5

So again I wonder where we might be if people had taken the Google Books lawsuit as a wake-up call for more ambitious ways of thinking about how to preserve both public access to knowledge and private claims. As I said above, maybe we’d be nowhere. In retrospect, though, what happened with Google Books looks like a lost opportunity.

Also, should I buy a dedicated OCR program? I’m still thinking no.

March (and February) in posts

As far as posts go, this was a low-key month, mostly because I keep noodling on the same couple drafts whenever I log on. One of them is very stupid.1 In February I wrote something about self-beautification. This month, I had something about fandom and something about the New York Times and AI.

March in reviews

• Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)

• Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Samuel Delany, 1984)

• Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025)

• Earth Abides (George Stewart, 1949)

• The Ax (Donald Westlake, 1997)

March (and February) (actually, only February) in writing abroad

March in perfume

March (and February) in Japanimation

March in an album I liked

I don’t remember why I added this album, Favorite Bell by Davia, to my “albums to-listen” playlist, but I really liked it. I’m not sure what genre I’d call it… I would say folk, but there is electric guitar.

Anyway, the non-zero possibility one of you recommended this album to me, plus the fact that as of this writing the artist is pretty small on Spotify, makes me want to mention it on here. So I have. The link above is Spotify. but if you don’t use Spotify, there’s always Bandcamp. (Is there a JustWatch equivalent for music streaming?) Davia does not seem to have an artist website beyond her Bandcamp profile but she does have an Instagram.

March in research

A funny thing about a lot of the writers whose papers I’m reading: being science fiction writers, they were all early to the potential of the internet. But since they were also print media people, they printed everything out. And so this means that at a certain point you open up a box and it’s hundreds of pages of listserv arguments. It feels bizarre, because nobody prints out all their emails or forum posts now. On the other hand, in fact, if they hadn’t printed it out, all this stuff would be gone—so the instinct was basically right, it just feels very strange.

Anyway, I think the only interesting thing I actually read in these listserv arguments was the argument that led to the in-joke “secret feminist cabal,” the context of which was (as you can surmise through the “see also”-s on that page), David Brin feeling he was shut out from getting a Tiptree award for Glory Season (have not read).2

April preview!

Some things I have pre-ordered in April:

• American Spirits (Anna Dorn)

• On Eating (Alicia Kennedy)

• Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (Laura McGrath)

• The Witch (Marie NDiaye)

• Superstars (Ann Scott, trans. Jonathan Woollen)

• Ultranatural (Candice Wuehle)

The books pre-ordered for March I guess are doomed to be uncommemorated, but one that I quite like so far is Aisla Ross’s Hovel. However, I only got about a quarter into it before deciding I really needed to read it as a print book—Ross incorporates photographs in ways that wreck the formatting on my ereader. Still, wanted to make a note of it here, since I don’t know when I’ll get around to picking up a physical copy and writing about it. The part I read reminded me both of Pond and of Mild Vertigo.

April in perfume:

I’m not actually sure what the perfume will be for next month! I have Fumerie’s Spring 2026 sampler waiting for me at home, along with a sample of the new Eris perfume, but I don’t have anything usable drafted so… we’ll see.3

April in Japanimation:

• Porco Rosso (April 11)

• Angel’s Egg (April 25)

Most of the films under discussion in this series involve elements of the fantastic—or, at the very least, the unrealistic. A flying witch on a broomstick, a giant robot: these are natural choices for cartoons. (Even Grave of the Fireflies is narrated through ghosts.) But what about Only Yesterday, a film in which Taeko Okajima, an unremarkable woman in her late twenties, takes a trip to the countryside and remembers being ten years old? Why should this movie be a cartoon? In a previous post about Mamoru Oshii’s Beautiful Dreamer (1984), I commented that “the strength animation will always have over live action film making is that everything in an animated film is exactly as real as everything else.” It’s easy to see how that’s true when we’re watching a movie in which things are depicted that are not real and do not happen. Trips to the countryside, on the other hand, do happen. You could take one right now, unless you already live in the countryside. Even then, you…

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Strange at Ecbatan

The Good Stuff: 2025

Just for kicks, here are my Hugo nominees for works published in 2025. I’ll note in advance that while until about 2022, I could consider myself plausibly an authority on the best short science fiction and fantasy published each year, thanks to my position as a short fiction review for…

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a month ago · 7 likes · Rich Horton

Also, I don’t have enough to say about this for a capsule review, but I finished Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry recently and find myself surprised nobody has adapted it for the screen. There’s a whole story about a vampire going to therapy in there! What gives? (There is a play.)

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I have not been to the ballet in a long time—maybe over ten years?—but I enjoy it. I mean, I’m very much a casual fan. I couldn’t tell you a favorite ballerina. But ballet is great and if I ever live in a place where I can “go to the ballet” again I will do so instead of telling myself I can’t afford it.1 My affection for ballet and my affection for perfume have some overlap; both ballet and perfume are art without language, both involve great effort to create something that only lives a moment, and both are ultra feminine in ways that are both “classically beautiful” and “vaguely frightening.”

As far as scent goes, ballet has three aspects which I think a perfume can set out to capture. One is the elegant, pink-toe-shoe-and-white-stocking iconography that most says ballet to other people; this is also the aesthetic people refer(red) to as “balletcore.” It is deliberately girlish but it’s not immature. The fabrics you think of here are soft (workout tights) or smooth (shiny toe shoes). The second is complexly feminine and adult. In addition to the soft and smooth, the scent wants us to think of a performing ballerina, so there is also the stiff and the rough (tulle). Perfumes trying to capture this aspect may want to gesture toward the physical space in which ballet happens as well as the image of the dancer herself. “Balletcore” is cozy. “Ballet” is big.

The third is blood and sweat. I have yet to run across a blood and sweat ballet perfume but feel confident some indie brand somewhere has made at least one.

This is not a review of every ballet scent in the world. Some perfumes not represented here include ELDO’s “The Afternoon of a Faun,” Gritti’s “Tutù” and “Tutù Blanc,” Simimi’s “Esprit De Candela,” and Moresque’s “Ballerina.” I’m sure there are more beyond these.… In any case, not comprehensive. Also, in a stroke of brilliance, I didn’t bring any of these with me to Oregon, so if you’re like you’re totally wrong I’ll get back to you in um… a month… I guess.

The number one “balletcore” perfume brand is Odette (named for its owner/perfumer, Odette Fontaine). It’s not a contest. It’s Odette. And “Pas de Chat” from Odette was sort of the perfume that launched my writing up how things smell on here, because I couldn’t figure out how to describe how it smelled. I still in fact am not sure how to describe how it smells. It has a cozy, warm, sort of creamy–nutty scent to me. It is sweet but not in a foodie way. It smells like wearing an old cashmere sweater over an old silk nightgown. Is this helpful? No.

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Kiki’s Delivery Service is a movie about growing up, which means it is also about what to do when things stop working. People understand and navigate the world through tradition, magic, technology, and art, but these practices will break down. Your electric stove stops working. Your paintings don’t come out right. Your broom won’t behave. Your dirigible crashes into your clock tower. These are the kind of failures all of us deal with every day as we try to fulfill our responsibilities toward others.

Plus, there will be times when you can’t turn to your family or friends for help, but have to face it on your own. Maybe your beloved granddaughter has turned into a snotty tween or your best friend has stopped talking to you. There will also be times you are doing something nobody around you understands. For instance: you might be a thirteen year old witch who is on her own for a year—because that’s how witches come of age—in a world where other thirteen year olds are de…

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Ursula Le Guin’s “A Wizard of Earthsea.” It was the first book I read. It’s a book where magic comes from knowing the true name of things, and it’s also a meditation on hubris—in this case, of a person thinking they can push magic very far.

To the best of my knowledge I’ve never actually listened to an episode of the Ezra Klein podcast. I listen to podcasts almost exclusively for falling asleep purposes and thus mostly listen to old radio shows or true crime. So I did not hear this comment on the podcast. Rather, I became aware of this comment because Le Guin’s son, Theo Downes-Le Guin posted about it on Instagram with the comment:

I am gratified to learn than Jack Clark of Anthropic loves ‘A Wizard of Earthsea,’ and that he sees in it a means for recognizing one’s own hubris. His fellow archma…

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A proposal: Machines are great. We love machines. Software is creepy. We hate software.1 At this point in time, though, the distinction between machine and software has mostly disappeared into the vague world of “tech.” Even if you don’t work a desk job because you’re a farmer and you refuse to allow a “smart” device in your home, if you rely on John Deere products, well, they’re computerized. Software rules your life and the domains in which it does not intrude at all, or can be prevented from doing so, keep on shrinking. For instance: do you want to buy a car with no—or at least minimal—computer? Good luck.2

The introduction of software, of more computer-driven machines, does two things. First, it increases the user’s range of abilities. (For instance, you no longer have to turn around when putting your car in reverse, because there is a camera.) You are no longer limited to what you can see with your eyes; you can use cameras. You can perform more delicate maneuvers.…

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Well, not quite, no. In fact, he crosses the line between “lovable pervert ghost” (if there is such a thing) and “hateful sex criminal ghost” more than once.2 Arno knows he should not be doing what he does, which is why he’s constantly arguing, mostly with himself, that what he does is really fine. At the same time, because we as reade…

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