A garbage collection crew in space receives an SOS signal. When they investigate, the signal is coming from what seems like a derelict, rose-shaped satellite.1 Within the satellite, though—however impossibly—is an opulent palace. Or maybe it’s an opulent mausoleum, dedicated to the memory of Eva, a once-famous opera singer who lost her beloved and her singing voice and retreated here to live out her past glories. But that was a while ago; even her costumes have decayed. So much time has gone by, in fact, that Eva must be dead. All that’s left are holographic expressions of her memories.

So… if Eva’s dead… who is sending out this SOS?

This is the story of “Magnetic Rose,” the first short in Memories, an anthology overseen by Katsuhiro Otomo (the creator of Akira) and adapted from one of his manga stories. As a creepy haunted house story, “Magnetic Rose” is worth watching. It’s directed by Koji Morimoto, who co-founded an animation studio but whose work isn’t well known in America. “Magnetic Rose” is probably the best-known thing he ever worked on over here, but it’s not because of him, and it’s not because of Otomo either. It’s because of the screenwriter, Satoshi Kon.

Kon’s body of work is slim. The work he himself directed, that’s really “his,” amounts to four feature films and one thirteen episode TV show. There’s never going to be any more of it: he died young, of pancreatic cancer, and in the middle of making a movie nobody seems willing or able to finish. That’s why a short film that is, in fact, not even directed by him has ended up making it to the list of movies under discussion here.2

However, even if Kon did not direct it, the influence of “Magnetic Rose” is all over his first feature film, Perfect Blue, and even more strongly felt in his second feature film, Millennium Actress.3 Whether Kon was drawn to the material because he was already interested in nostalgia, female celebrity, dreams, digital artifacts, parasocial love, technology, and ghosts—or whether he became interested in all of of that after working on “Magnetic Rose”—that, I don’t know. (Presumably somebody does.)

You’ve probably guessed the answer about that mysterious SOS: Eva might be dead but she’s also not dead. She lives on, as a ghost or a computer program (or both), and she has lured the garbage crew in for her own purposes. The two sent to check out the satellite, Heintz and Miguel, are very different people. Heintz is older; he’s a married man with a kid who keeps a picture of his family in his wallet. Miguel is a younger man, a player who is constantly chasing women—even if it’s just in his mind. When they enter the improbably ornate, almost enchanted palace, Miguel is the first to glimpse the holographic Eva, and the first to mistake a holograph for reality. And then he does something that even the most casual reader of folklore knows you should never, ever do: he eats the food. At this point you know Miguel is a goner. It doesn’t matter that the food is all fake stuff made to look and smell like real food. Eventually he is drawn into Eva’s world and he likes it there. He is more than happy to let himself be absorbed into her memories of her deceased and idealized lover Carlo.

What about Heintz, though? He’s on edge. The house extends its charms to Miguel, but its relationship to Heintz is more antagonistic. It continually baits him through images of his daughter, and eventually Heintz finds himself in an almost-perfect replica of his own home. Its falseness is given away only when he notices there’s something unnatural happening to the flowers on his lunch table—they are, one by one, transforming into roses.

In an interview with the NHK, Koji Morimoto mentions that he and Satoshi Kon had to develop a story for Heintz, who originally didn’t really have much going on. As Morimoto describes it, Otomo’s original story was about exploring the haunted space, with very little happening, but that turned out not to work very well in a screenplay. And there’s not really that much that happens with Miguel, because he puts up no resistance to Eva. When we meet him he’s a guy obsessed with women and when we leave him… he’s still that guy. Is this even a bad ending for Miguel?

It is, because it’s bad not to live in reality, even if reality is painful and ugly and nothing good is waiting for you there. Heintz’s daughter is dead; she climbed up onto their home’s roof, slipped, and fell. In the house, Heintz watches his daughter die at least four times, as Eva tries to get him to agree that it’s better to live in a dreamworld in which bad things never happened, time never passes, and things can remain forever at a peak of beauty without decay. Eva killed her lover when he tried to leave her, and when she lost her voice she tried to lip sync her own operas,4 and so what we see is her own elaborate, vicious form of denial. She can’t abide the idea of Heintz taking away Miguel, but she also simply can’t abide his disagreement. She needs him to admit he’d rather live in the dream.

But no dream can really be self-sustaining; that is part of why Eva needs them, just like she needed her earlier victims: in her fake palace with its fake food, its fake landscapes, and its fake people. She will consume them just as her ship will consume their technology, all to maintain a delusional world inimical to life.

“Magnetic Rose” is a fun, well-made horror story, but Kon’s subsequent takes on this kind of material would have more depth. In an Animation Obsessive (linked below), it’s mentioned that “Kon viewed the opera singer Eva as the true protagonist of the film.” Moving the woman caught between “reality” and “dream” into the center of the story is the change he would make in Perfect Blue. And it really would make all the difference.

• An Animation Obsessive post on “Magnetic Rose”:
  

  Animation Obsessive

  The Secrets of 'Magnetic Rose'

  Happy Sunday! We’re back…

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  3 years ago · 87 likes · 22 comments · Animation Obsessive Staff

  Plus:
  

  Animation Obsessive

  Oshii and Kon

  Certain directors stand apart in Japanese animation. Hayao Miyazaki, everyone knows. Isao Takahata’s name and impact are huge. A whole list extends from there: Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira), Osamu Dezaki (Ashita no Joe), Rintaro (a lot of things…

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  2 years ago · 23 likes · 4 comments · Animation Obsessive Staff

• Something that impresses me about Satoshi Kon is that he made all his work (starting with Perfect Blue) in essentially a ten year period. Like there isn’t much of it, but… he was really working a lot!

• Persistently through drafting this I had the weird creepy feeling I was writing stuff that had been written by somebody else and I kept searching things to see if I in fact was… thematically fitting? Maybe?

• The other two shorts in Memories are fine; the second short, “Stink Bomb,” has some more great anime Americans. “Cannon Fodder” is visually pretty interesting but had, to me, the weakest premise.

• The music in “Magnetic Rose” is composed by Yoko Kanno (who most Americans probably know from Cowboy Bebop or, if they’re a bit older, Vision of Escaflowne). I think that this is the only time her music will appear here, but it’s very effective.

• You can watch a short documentary on the making of Memories here.

• Do we think the crew behind Event Horizon saw “Magnetic Rose”? I didn’t turn up anything doing a brief web search but it wouldn’t shock me.5

• In some ways I wish “Magnetic Rose” had either been made a little earlier, when CGI would have been largely off the table, or a little later, when it was a bit more advanced. To my eye, the CGI has aged unevenly. Some of it’s aged just fine, but the big shot of the rose floating in space, for instance, looks very clunky now.

• If this story had been original to Satoshi Kon, I think the big “reveal” that Eva murdered her beloved because he was going to leave her would have been replaced by something weirder. Like she still might have killed him but it would have been weirder.

• Next up is Ghost in the Shell! June 27.

The other day I saw a bird that drifted so languidly through the air me that, for a moment, I truly believed it to be a fish. I thought, we’re really in it now. What I could have meant by that statement, I don’t know. As thoughts go it failed to rise to its imagined occasion. I blinked, a wing flapped, and the creature was a bird.

Everything’s a dead end. I read books but feel unable to say anything about them, I watch the first ten minutes of movies and then abandon them, I sit outside drinking my coffee and wait, I sit inside drinking my coffee and wait, but nothing comes together, it’s all just a haze. My drafts folder on here is littered with things that are three quarters done. One thing that just can’t get finished, that’s a problem with that thing; two, still the thing; but once we start reaching three or more stalled out pieces the problem shifts to me. I never saw the movie Village of the Damned, or for that matter, read the book The Midwich Cuckoos, but I’m aware that the climax involves a heroic schoolteacher keeping a group of evil psychic children from figuring out that they’re all about to die by envisioning a wall. Should the occasion arise, I could do a great job envisioning a wall, I think. I am all walls.

But at this point in my life, I also know these moments are cyclical, they will always come and they will always go, there are no epiphanies here to use to bring the moment to the close, there is just doing what you can and waiting it out. In lieu of a satisfying realization, therefore, I present, some lists.

Deeds I’ve done instead of finishing anything, not in chronological order:

• Researched “millet seed pillows.”

• Researched “buckwheat pillows.”

• Bought an expensive-ish shampoo and conditioner.

• Tried expensive-ish shampoo and conditioner.

• Gave up on expensive-ish shampoo and conditioner.

• Re-organized my playlists.

• Read twenty books about which I have nothing to say (apparently).

• Felt mad.

• Felt sad.

• Felt bad.

• Wore plaid.

• Deliberately sought out conversations about Taylor Swift that I knew would annoy me.

• Purchased a “buckwheat pillow.”

• Caught a mouse by scooping it up in a plastic cup.

• Watched a very stupid video in which a retired mathematician in California claims that the math tells him that it’s rare for consciousness to be embodied, and that embodiment is bad because it involves a necessary delay between thought and deed, and it’s unclear to me if by non-embodied consciousness he means “computer,” and if he is aware computers are also operating at a delay.

• Purchased one of those u-shaped French hair pins in order to learn at long last how to “put my hair up.”

• Did not “put my hair up.”

• Read more of Within a Budding Grove.

Thoughts I’ve thought instead of finishing anything, not in chronological order:

• Okay, let’s say a buckwheat pillow improves sleep and neck pain. Then what am I supposed to do when I travel? Bring my own pillow? Like some kind of asshole? On the other hand, if it doesn’t work, I will just have a really hard and also expensive bag of seed husks, like some kind of idiot. I just don’t see this venture ending well for me.

• Can I become an influencer for this one farm in upstate Michigan so that they give me free jars of cherry butter and I don’t have to pay for shipping whenever I order one? What would that entail?

• Sometimes I think it would be cute to sell shirts and mugs with Boswell’s face on them but then the idea feels weird and in fact kind of violating and also I have this deep sense that somebody would go out and do some kind of crime in a Boswell T-shirt. And not a cool crime like art forgery.

• Does my local librarian like me?

• Does my local librarian think I’m kind of awkward?

• Does my local librarian think I’m kind of stupid because I once got lost in the straight path between the door and the checkout desk?

• Maybe I’m just a little ol’ country Kantian but I don’t understand how people find it easy to imagine non-physical forms of existence in the future. I do not find this easy to imagine. I think I find it… impossible…?

Resolutions I’ve resolved instead of finishing anything, probably in chronological order:

• I will not buy any more books.

• I will not buy any more books except for research.

• I will not buy any more books except for research and pre-ordering books since that is after all just being a good literary citizen.

• I will wake up every day at the same time.

• I will wake up every day at the same time, which will be 7:00.

• I will wake up every day at the same time, which will be 7:30.

• I will wake up every day at the same time, which will be 7:45.

• I will not look at my phone after 10:00 at night.

• I will not look at my phone after 10:00 at night except to put on podcasts.

• I will not look at my phone after 10:00 at night except to put on podcasts and do crosswords.

• I will not buy any more books and I mean it this time.

• I will not buy any more books and I mean it this time—except for research.

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I would not have made an open thread if I thought the song was bad, but I like it.1 I was sort of expecting a sad ballad, and instead I was very happy to discover that, for me, it’s “I Think He Knows (Yee Haw Harmonica Version).” As maybe the world’s only “I Think He Knows” superfan, this pleases me. Furthermore, as one of the few and the proud who has never turned on Mr. Jack Antonoff, whose name is respected in this house,2 I am also vindicated by this song being 1) good 2) totally different 3) proving once and for all that the Swedes should have been left in the past.

Some other thoughts:

• I don’t know what the name is of the thing she does at the end of the verses (on “leaving those days behind” etc) but I love it.

• I feel like there’s a level of… chaos…? in this song that is actually new for her—a lot going on in the instrumental, the song itself moves fast without giving you much of a chance to breathe. I don’t think “chaos” is the right term. I would be psyched to get more of this sound on TS13.

• Love it when her voice gets a lil squeaky… one of my favorite features of her live acoustic performances and it’s nice to hear on a studio recording.

• Relistening, I think what I mean by “chaos” is actually “saxophones.”

• Really the main thing I wish is that it was like thirty seconds longer. That said, “I Think He Knows” is shorter and “Cruel Summer” is exactly this length… I’m just used to her songs being longer.

• Is this the first ever potentially good movie for which Taylor has written a song?3

• What’s up with that?

• Did like… her mom read Where the Crawdads Sing for a book club or something?

• These questions keep me up at night.

• This is a sort of unimportant thing but one day I would enjoy hearing Taylor record a studio track with her actual backup singers doing the backup instead of layering her own voice. They’re good and they’ve been with her such a long time… I just Think It Would Be Neat.

Anyway: have fun, play nice, I’ll pop in later! Also, what is even left to happen in Toy Story? I tapped out at movie number three.

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Another single I was looking forward to this Friday was Tinashe’s. I would enjoy a Taynashe collab, personally.… Anyway—this one is definitely too short.

It was my birthday month and in celebration my health insurance decided not to take my doctor away. Hooray, hooray. I kind of wish I knew any of the dirty details involved but I do not so I’ll just take the win. What else did I do this month? I got the Just Bento 2 cookbook and made a carrot salad from it that was really good. The recipe is not online but you can look at the cookbook on the Internet Archive. It’s one of the first recipes in there. I also tried making some chicken meatballs from the same cookbook but mine came out a little under-flavored. Better luck next time.

May in posts

You already know that the month started with abrupt opening lines, and that then that was followed by a statement of unclear purpose. But the Taylor Swift New York Times interview, the AI-generated metaphors, the vague wish that more things were in the public domain—what of those? Oh, you know about those too.

May in Japanimation

May in perfume

May in Weird Sisters

Once again I can’t really put research in here, so instead I will open up a question to the room.… I was reminded recently that Fritz Leiber has a story, “The Creature from Cleveland Depths” (1962), that is basically a satire about AI assistants. If you were putting together a list of sci-fi stories that were about AI before AI, what would you put on it?

• Definitely: Other than the Leiber story, I’d put E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1928) and John Sladek’s “The Happy Breed” (1967) on the list.

• Maybe: I thought about “Nobody’s Home” (1972) by Joanna Russ, but that story is more about a frictionless future of human superintelligence than a frictionless future of machine intelligence. Ted Cogswell’s “Limiting Factor” (1954) and R.A. Lafferty’s “Eurema’s Dam” (1972) are both about the relationship between machines and intelligence but I wonder if they’re too different in emphasis.

Next month: June, so soon?

Some June preorders

• Devotions (Lucy Caldwell)

• Light in the Canyon (Darren Cools)

• The End of Everything (M. John Harrison)

• Sublimation (Isabel J. Kim)

• Meeting New People (Daniel Lavery)

• The Typing Lady: And Other Fictions (Ruth Ozeki)

• Lovers XXX (Allie Rowbottom)

June in Japanimation

• “Magnetic Rose” from Memories, Satoshi Kon (June 13)

• Ghost in the Shell, Mamoru Oshii (June 27)

These got shoved back a week because I have to get Memories from the library and I don’t know how long interlibrary loan will take. It will be cool to “meet” Satoshi Kon at last. I guess I have to figure out how I’m handling Paranoia Agent sooner rather than later, huh.… For people who read the Japanimation posts, a brief poll. I do not bind myself to the results.

June in perfume

This will be a little bit different… I had a sample of Isabelle Larignon’s “Milky Dragon” for the milk post, but then I thought to myself that I really had no idea what “milky oolong” smells like. Then it turned out getting “real” milky oolong is sort of hard and most of the tea you get has milk flavoring added and I ended up ordering tea from Taiwan in my quest for knowledge and… anyway that will be next month’s perfume post.

But, to pick a similarly influential modern fantasist, you could not do that with Tolkien. You could not write and publish a story that was called “The Cats of Mirkwood,” because the Tolkien estate would not let you do that. You’d have to set your story in not-Mirkwood, where cats do battle with giant spiders which may or may not resemble other giant spiders but nobody owns spiders, right, so….

At that point your story might be good and it might be bad but the one thing it would not be is building on something else. Yet the protectiveness of the Tolkien estate has hardly prevented people from making terrible (if authorized) Tolkien adaptations or naming their companies “Palantir.” It means you have to come up with your own elves. Which is not a terrible thing, inherently. Still, I at least wonder what it would be like if Tolkien’s work was something people could use as a basis for something new rather than something they had to reproduce before they could get started.

Right now, copyright is the main legal protection artists have, in addition to being the way that they can, in theory, get paid for their work. (One of the first actions of SFWA, the Science Fiction Writer’s Association, was to help Tolkien fight pirated versions of his books were being sold in America.)3 But copyright also creates a situation where people have to maintain a legal version of what creation and inspiration “are” that, in my opinion, doesn’t really bear much resemblance to how these things actually work. In actual practice, it’s fine to read a short story and want to write your own version. (Gene Wolfe talks about doing this twice in The Best of Gene Wolfe.)

But if you’re gonna tell people you did that… you have to be careful.

Somebody who really gets screwed over in this talking-out-of-both-sides-of-your-mouth approach to inspiration is Olivia Rodrigo.4 I had written most of this post before her interview with Popcast dropped, in which they ask her about how she feels about being accused of beefing with Taylor over having to give Taylor credits on her song “deja vu.” Olivia gives a truly incredible PR non-answer (“it comes with the territory, it’s par for the course”) which indicates to me that the actual answer is “I feel pretty bad” but that she doesn’t want to talk about it.5

I don’t think there are villains in the Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo “Cruel Summer” credits scenario (previously), though I’d imagine there are or were some pretty hard feelings on Olivia’s side, and, watching that clip, it’s pretty obvious that there are. In a better world, though, it would not be a huge mistake to say in an interview that you set out to mimic the bridge of a song you admire when writing your own bridge in your own song, as Olivia did. However, that’s exactly what you’re not allowed to do.6 And while the fallout for Taylor has been that this credits situation follows her around as the thing people can always bring up to prove she’s a bully, the fallout for Olivia has been a lot worse, because people dissect everything she does to prove she’s a thief. And she doesn’t seem to know how to deal with this except by ignoring it, but ignoring it doesn’t work. She’s not big enough to get away with that move.

I am, personally, not a big fan of Olivia’s music (my thought whenever I hit play on a new single from her is “I am too old for this”), but that doesn’t really matter. If anything, I suspect that this constant narrative of theft makes it harder for her to digest her influences and make them her own.7 She’s too anxious to show her work. So I end up reading comments about how the font she’s using this album cycle is a ripoff of Hole’s Pretty on the Inside, which it is not, or comments about how people don’t understand why Olivia doesn’t have somebody who tells her every time she writes something that kind of sounds like something else. And the obvious answer to that second point is just that you can’t create anything that way.

But another answer is also just that Olivia Rodrigo is not making atonal symphonies, she is making pop music, and a lot of pop music sounds a little bit like something else and borrows widely from other sources. That’s fine… as long as you don’t say it, apparently. In any case, I end up feeling bad for her—not over the original credits scenario, but the way it’s dragged out and out around the rest of her work. It doesn’t really seem fair that she gets punished for being honest in a way everybody else was trained not to be. I would like to not care for her music in peace.

This post is willing me toward an ending that is about “the age of AI” but I don’t really want to think about AI all the time. What I want is a situation where people can be a little more real about inspiration and creativity without forfeiting the things copyright really should protect, like your ownership of your own work. I hate the kind of scarcity mindset that leads to things like authors publicly complaining about library usage, which I’ve seen happen a couple times. There must be a better way, you know? Maybe there isn’t. At any rate I’m not going to solve it here. Instead I am going to make another cup of coffee, a move I stole from Twin Peaks.

In the nineties, there were many children’s movies that conveyed the message that the worst thing you could do—not only as a caretaker of the Earth but perhaps as a human being period—was build something, particularly if “building something” involved (for instance) cutting down a tree. Even if that wasn’t the intended message, it was the message. Some of these stories were gratingly preachy (Ferngully), some of them were horrifying (Once Upon A Forest), and there were many whose names I can’t remember that were just about heroic children facing down evil building projects.1 In retrospect, maybe there could have been other environmental morals to hammer home, but we went all in on “don’t build anything.”

Pom Poko is this kind of movie, sort of. It is a much much better movie than the ones mentioned above. (Granted, it’s not very hard to be a better movie than Ferngully.2) The premise is simple: two clans of raccoon dogs (tanuki)3 that live outside of Tokyo are forced into an alliance as the city expands outward and human beings destroy the forests and hills in which they live. They decide they must stop the construction of new communities at any cost. Since tanuki, like cats and foxes, are creatures with supernatural powers, they can transform into other shapes and perform illusions. They plan to use these powers to disrupt the lives of human beings to such an extent that humans will be forced to abandon their projects and retreat.

How does that work out for them? They lose. I don’t consider that a spoiler. There’s no other possible way for things to go. Over and over, the movie uses a slapstick rhythm where tanuki try out a new plan, succeed in pulling off their stunts, and then celebrate the defeat of the land development prematurely. Then the announcer on the TV they’ve installed in their home says that despite everything, construction will continue. After enough of these moments, they stop being funny. Pom Poko is whimsical, but it’s also brutal, and as much as possible it takes place in the real world. (When the tanuki cause trucks to go off the road, for instance, people die.) The development that is destroying their habitat is Tama New Town, which is a real place. So there can’t be a happy ending to this story, in which they successfully repel land development, because that ending didn’t happen in real life.

The tanuki also don’t get some kind of noble loser ending, where they lose the battle but win the war. They eventually get the message across to human beings that they need to stop destroying the forest, but it’s much too late to save their own homes. Tanuki are left on the fringes of human society. Some of them manage to pretend to be humans, some of them can’t. Some of them just become roadkill. There is even what amounts to a mass cult suicide among the tanuki who can’t shapeshift.

If Pom Poko were just a cute but unusually downbeat children’s movie, I’m not sure there would be much to remember about it. However, it’s also wildly inventive. Until this series eventually reaches Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, I don’t think there will be another movie that takes advantage of animation’s total plasticity, its ability to show any reality, to the degree Pom Poko does. The tanuki’s transformations become more and more spectacular, and the movie’s highlight comes when the tanuki stage a “Goblin Parade”4 to awe and intimidate the people living in Tama New Town. The tanuki fluidly combine, recombine, and change from form to form. I can’t find a great clip of this sequence on YouTube, but this edited fan video can give you a taste:

However, this clip kind of diminishes the film’s achievement, because the movie itself doesn’t rely on rapid editing or cutting away. It’s the fluid change from one form to another that makes this sequence so incredible. The tanuki, too, are always changing forms in more mundane ways: when people are around, they look like normal animals. Around each other, they walk on their hind legs and look more like cartoon bears. They have a third, even simpler, even more cartoonish form that comes out when they’re really revved up or knocked unconscious. Though the natural world is depicted as attentively as it would be in any other Ghibli film, the tanuki are not wholly natural creatures, and thus they sometimes look like they belong to a different movie.

In some ways, Pom Poko is like an inverted My Neighbor Totoro. Instead of following people as they encounter a mysterious, alluring, and slightly frightening magical world, we live in the magical world as it attempts to negotiate a way forward in a frightening and mundane world. Even the allure of the “other side” is present: though the tanuki don’t form any relationships with human beings in the movie, they like aspects of modernity, like hamburgers. When one tanuki argues they should kill every human, another objects that without people there can be no tempura.

Ultimately, though, Pom Poko is not concerned with people, and that’s what makes it different from (and better than) all the anti-development stories I watched as a kid. There are no heroic humans with which to identify yourself and there are no villainous humans to oppose. There’s no clear lesson for children who want to start bullying their parents into being more ecologically conscious. People are not malicious or evil; like the tanuki, they want a place to live and raise their children. When the tanuki perform their final illusion, and briefly transform the countryside into what it was before the development came, the human beings realize that they need to accommodate wildlife. This realization simply comes too late to do any good.

If there is a message about people in this movie, it’s not really that people are terrible for building homes or suburbs, but that we will destroy things we don’t properly perceive or value until they’re gone. During the goblin parade, we watch two drunks reminisce about how they both once thought they saw something supernatural. Oblivious to the crazy things happening around them, both men sadly agree that these supernatural occurrences are nothing but a trick of the human mind. Then one of them turns around and tells the other: wait, it’s all real. The other guy keeps drinking. “They’re all in your mind,” he says. He doesn’t turn around. That’s how it’s always going to be: two kinds of people, those who see too late and those who never see at all.

• Yes, this is the movie where the tanuki attack the police by inflating their testicles. No, I don’t have a take on that, though it is another case of the movie using a slapstick moment to create a sense of false victory (the police have guns).

• There’s a lot of inventiveness in how information is presented throughout this movie: the video game image to demonstrate the tanuki’s population problem, an illustration of little steam shovels eating away at a leaf to show habitat destruction, and even one moment of live action television.

• I think I would have liked Pom Poko as a kid. I loved The Fox and the Hound and Bambi. I was a fully bought in member of the sad animal movies community.

• While I said that there is not a clear moral for children to adopt in terms of evangelizing to their parents, there is a moment at the end when a tanuki turns and speaks directly to the camera and says that you should stop pretending like they’re all dead. The practical takeaway of this message is unclear. But that is the lesson for children, I guess: the animals are still doing their best to live even though we’ve made it hard for them.

• I also love that creepy fox guy, particularly because the moment you see him you know he’s a fox and not a person. Until the mass suicide event I was hoping for an ending where the fox set things up such that the tanuki all moved into the theme park and did “special effects.” I guess that would be the Disney version of this movie—even while I was hoping for it the movie itself was so blunt about the constraints of space and need for food that I knew it wouldn’t work out.

• Aside from Grave of the Fireflies, all the Isao Takahata movies are first time watches for me, and so far they are all winners. I guess there are only two other ones left—My Neighbors the Yamadas and Princess Kaguya. Of the three I’ve seen (Grave of the Fireflies, Only Yesterday, Pom Poko), two are about starving to death. That may be part of why Takahata is not a Miyazaki-level household name.

• If you have dark undereyes, you might be a tanuki. Hm….

• Editing this post to add these two marvelous notes from , in which she pushes back a little on my own reading through a closer look at the tanuki folklore and also Takahata’s own words in interviews. They’re really great, read them!
  

  
  

“The Serpent in the Grove” is about a man who is unhappily married. He is ogling local beauty Zoongie when his wife sees him. She doesn’t say anything but he decides to murder her by making it easy for her to fall into a well. She divines his purpose but then falls into the well anyway. However, she is rescued by her neighbor and also her husband since he knows he’s been caught out. Their marriage gets better. Their child solemnly says, to nobody in particular: “People does change.… But grove does remember.” That’s the story.

I’m not super invested in whether or not this story is AI because it is bad. So whether it’s pure human badness, AI-composed badness, or AI-assisted badness, I mean, I don’t really care that much. People consider it to be LLM-composed because of passages like the following, as LLMs rely on metaphors that do not make a lot of sense when closely examined and this story is full of them:

Marsha was shelling pigeon peas and thinking about a letter she’d promised to write for a mother whose son had been held for cussing a policeman. She heard nothing. That was the thing. Midday should hold pot noise and scolding and a child’s quarrel. Silence in a village is smoke; it sneaks from something burning. She put down the pan and stood. She didn’t hurry, not at first. The hush had a tilt – a room shifted half an inch.

I do think the use of metaphor in this story is bad in a way that is like a blown-up, enlarged version of bad uses of metaphor more generally, and for that reason I would like to opine. Still, for the sake of this post, we will assume that this piece is pure human badness. Also, before I get started—I’m just talking about prose here. I think poetry’s relationship to metaphor and simile is different.1 Anyway.…

Back when I was an editor I would say cleaning up mixed metaphors was about a third of what I did. That was not because I was working with incompetent writers (they were great!) and certainly not because they were using AI. It was because you get used to certain figures of speech and lose sight of what they mean. Or, in short:

Words mean things.

Even words which have become so familiar that you forget they are metaphors—such as, for instance, “lose sight of,” above. One common way in which metaphors end up mixed is that you have something like “lose sight of” paired with something that you perceive through a different sense entirely, like a sound, a smell, a taste.

Crucially, you also are not doing that on purpose. For instance, a lot of perfume writing has to work through simile and metaphor because the vocabulary of smell is limited. So you might say, “this perfume smells green.” However, in the kinds of cases I was often cleaning up, the writer had usually just forgotten what “lose sight of” literally means.

In other cases a figure of speech refers to something the meaning of which is often forgotten—i.e. a “petard” is a kind of bomb, and so being hoist by your own petard means blowing yourself up with your own bomb. But, until I learned this fact, I assumed a petard was some sort of jacket and was imagining a kind of Looney Tunes scenario where a guy was lifted up into the air by a giant hook catching his jacket. So while I (correctly) assumed a kind of poetic justice was at play I thought it had more to do with an unanticipated weak spot instead of careless stupidity.2

Now, again, I’m not very interested in whether or not this story is AI generated, but I do think physicality, or the lack thereof, is why AI metaphors tend to be bizarre. To pick one line from “The Serpent in the Grove” that’s been singled out for derision:

Doing is a treacherous bridge: you step on and it carries you to a side you didn’t plan to reach.

The only scenario in which a bridge takes you to a side you didn’t plan to reach is if it breaks, i.e., fails to carry you, in which case you reach the third side, the bottom of whatever the bridge is spanning. Otherwise a bridge, however treacherous, can only carry you to one out of two sides.3 Unlike some of the other weird lines in this piece, it’s not too hard to parse what this line is meant to convey, but it does read as if written by somebody who doesn’t really know what a bridge is or even what sides are.

But then you have something like this line:

She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.

What does that mean? The hell if I know.4 Like yeah it’s saying she’s sexy and in that sense I know what it means. But actually I don’t. I have no idea what makes benches into men here.5

Certainly, I don’t wish for writing to be less lyrical or less weird or even less deliberately awkward. Yesterday I was reading Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Triton and hit this passage, which is describing what a person looking up at the actual night sky for the first time in his life sees:

Neptune, visibly spherical, mottled, milky, and much duller than the striated turquoise extravaganza on the sensory shield, was fairly high. The sun, low and perhaps half a dozen times brighter than Sirius, looked about the size of the bottom of the vlet’s dice cup. (On the sensory shield it would be a pinkish glow which, though its vermilion center was tiny, sent out pulsing waves across the entire sky.) The atmosphere above Tethys was only twenty-five hundred feet thick; a highly ionized, cold-plasma field cut it off sharply, just below the shield; with the shield extinguished, the stars were as ice-bright as from some naturally airless moon.

The dusty splatter of the Milky Way misted across the black. (On the shield, it was a band of green-shot silver.)

There are three separate metaphors in one sentence there (dust, splatter, mist). I found it to be a very awkward sentence and I actually stopped on that line for a bit. However, it’s not inappropriately awkward for two reasons—one being the precision of the descriptions of the paragraph above it, the other being that it would be a genuinely bewildering experience to see real stars in the sky for the first time and that you would pick up and discard different images in an attempt to convey what you’re seeing. So the awkwardness of the line is conveying meaning. Again.…

Awkwardness is a tool that is fine to use as long as you’re using it on purpose. In general, what matters more than any particular rule is that you’re doing what you’re doing on purpose. If you’re doing it on purpose it can be good or bad. When it’s not on purpose, it can only be bad.

Another book I thought of while writing this newsletter was D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and its beautiful descriptions of nature.6 So I went to look at my bookmarks from when I read it a couple years ago. An example from early in the book:

In convalescence everything was wonderful. The snowflakes, suddenly arriving on the window-pane, clung there a moment like swallows, then were gone, and a drop of water was crawling down the glass. The snowflakes whirled round the corner of the house, like pigeons dashing by. Away across the valley the little black train crawled doubtfully over the great whiteness.

While they were so poor, the children were delighted if they could do anything to help economically. Annie and Paul and Arthur went out early in the morning, in summer, looking for mushrooms, hunting through the wet grass, from which the larks were rising, for the white-skinned, wonderful naked bodies crouched secretly in the green. And if they got half a pound they felt exceedingly happy: there was the joy of finding something, the joy of accepting something straight from the hand of Nature, and the joy of contributing to the family exchequer.

I find myself, re-reading this passage, a little obsessed with the distinction between the snowflakes being like swallows on the glass and like pigeons in the air. It feels meaningful and yet my personal experience of pigeons in particular is that they are very fat, sometimes missing a foot, and they’re always scrounging around on the ground—I am not sure I have ever seen a pigeon “dash.” That is probably partly because I’m not English and partly because modern society has brought the pigeon to a sad state.7

In any case, I’m quoting these passages more as a way of saying that rejecting the meaningless metaphor does not mean one has to rely on one to one descriptive language. Knowing what your words literally mean is what allows you to get crazier and weirder, including working in moments of intentional dissonance—much as Ulysses (is it Ulysses month here? maybe) is very much rooted in things like the actual streets of Dublin and the exact amount of change in Bloom’s pockets.

The more writing relies on boilerplate language or prefabricated lines, the more attempts to build on top of those premade materials, to riff on them, or to play around with them, or even to diverge from them, will become meaningless if examined closely. You have to go back to the thing you’re trying to describe and the words you’re using and ask the kind of basic questions of “what am I saying” and “what does this actually mean.” As long as you know the answers to those questions, though, you can probably get away with whatever you want to do.

5

ETA: The answer, courtesy of Kevin Jared Hosein.

I do not like milk. I never have—when I was little I would try to thin out glasses of milk with water to create something more palatable, an approach that did not work—and probably never will. It’s fine in fancy little coffee drinks or baking or things of that sort. I like stuff made with milk (butter, yogurt). I’ll drink some of that super filtered high protein chocolate milk in the airport. But milk itself, I just don’t like.

The idea of “smelling like milk” also doesn’t attract me. (When I was told as a child that if you eat a lot of dairy you smell like milk to people whose diets are not dairy-centric, I felt this was deeply unfair.) In my life, if I’m sniffing milk, I’m usually trying to figure out if it’s gone bad. However, the reality of “smelling like milk” is that I’ve noticed that I tend to like perfumes with milk notes (also known as “lactonic”). I first observed this trying out Cirrus’s “Moon Bathing,” where “fruity” and “salty” both came together to work for me because of the milky aspects of the scent. When, more recently, I loved Eris’s “Mother’s Milk” I thought it might be fun to simply investigate milk, the category.

So I ordered Surrender to Chance’s milk sampler and got to testing. And then I thought, it’s kind of a pity not to have any of Hilde Soliani’s perfumes in here, and… well, things got a little out of hand.

Below, notes on Avatar (Hilde Soliani), Basilica (Milano Fragranze), Bianco Latte (Giardini Di Toscana), Blanche Bete (Liquides Imaginaires), Cream Tea (Sucreabeille), Crema di Latte (Hilde Soliani), Elephant (Zoologist), Hibiscus Palm (Aerin), Hot Milk (Hilde Soliani), Lait Concentré (Chabaud), Latte Freddo (Hilde Soliani), Moon Bathing (Cirrus Parfum), Mother’s Milk (Eris Parfums), Pipe Bomb Blue (Blackbird), Remember Me (Jovoy), La Stanza Delle Bambole (Nobile 1942), Yawahada (J-Scent).

What I loved

Basilica (Milano Fragranze)
(Fragrantica / Parfumo / Basenotes)

Head Notes: Thyme E.O., Rosemary E.O..
Heart Notes: Warm Milk accord, Labdanum Hyperessence, Incense Resinoid.
Base Notes: Cypriol E.O., Cedarwood Virginia E.O., SantamanolTM.

Incense and milk wasn’t a combination I had very high hopes for—I like incense, the actual thing, but incense perfumes tend to smell very similar to me and also just don’t seem to work on me. Plus, the idea of combining incense with milk felt bizarre.

In truth, the milk doesn’t stand out to me here as its own thing, but I think whatever makes up the “warm milk accord” does, I think, marry the savory herbal thyme and rosemary to the cedarwood in a way that means the perfume works. It doesn’t really smell much like incense to me—it smells more like opening a drawer in which someone has placed dried herbs for some reason.

This scent is also available as a candle. I think it would work pretty nicely as a candle.

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Anyway, I also thought, OK. Since I have, in theory, reached “the level” of people who like “what we do here,” can I give an account of what it is that we do here?

Maybe, maybe.

If you’ve ever taken a drawing class, the first thing that you will learn, even if you know it in advance, is that you don’t see things. You think you see things, but really, you are filling in gaps with what you assume to be there. To draw, you need to learn how to see what is really there. This experience, of realizing that you aren’t seeing things, is a cliche, but it doesn’t matter, because you will still need to learn how to see all ove…

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Taku, a college student, sees a woman at a Tokyo train station who looks like Rikako, a girl he knew in high school. He reminisces to himself about how he and his best friend met Rikako, how his best friend was in love with her, how everybody hated her, and so on. Over the course of this trip down memory lane, and with a little help from others, he figures out he himself is in love with Rikako and that she’s been in love with him for a long time. He sees her again at the train station and runs to catch her. He catches her. They smile at each other. Roll credits.

There’s nothing wrong with this movie but there’s nothing that right with it either. Ocean Waves is a movie you watch once and if anybody asks you about it afterward you say, vaguely: “it’s fine.” There…

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Opening lines. I was thinking about them because my next column for The Point will be about Vonda McIntyre’s “Aztecs” (1977) which has one of my favorite switch-ups:

She gave up her heart quite willingly.

After the operation.…

But also, as I’ve mentioned before (here), Joanna Russ’s sig…

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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 c…

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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 proce…

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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 …

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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.

…

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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. Al…

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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,…

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