Comiket Report

I couldn't go as far as San Diego Comic Con this year but I did go to Comiket, Japan's version of a Comic Con, and it's actually a much bigger event, in fact the biggest of its kind in the world, typically drawing more than 720,000 people. It's held twice a year, for two days in summer and two days in winter. The number of attendees was down this year because, in view of the covid pandemic, tickets were sold instead of entry being open to everyone. I think they were limited to 55,000 per day. I only went for one day, Saturday, August 13. I wish I'd bought a ticket for Sunday, I'm not sure why I didn't. I did have a nice time.

I didn't take many pictures of cosplayers for the same reason I don't usually at Comic Con anymore. There are too many web sites with exhaustive photo catalogues of cosplayers (like this one). I limited myself to a few characters I actually recognised.

Like Lum from Urusei Yatsura.

But actually, the best cosplay picture I took I can't even show you because the young lady, although she posed and gave me permission to take a picture, asked me not to share it on social media. I refrained from asking what I'm supposed to do with it then. Maybe I'll frame it and put it on my desk one day, I don't know. But for the record, she was cosplaying as the title character from Revolutionary Girl Utena. I chatted with her briefly in my terrible Japanese about what a great show it is.

It's a good thing I didn't decide to dedicate my time to photographing cosplayers because the protocol seems to be a bit different to Comic Con due to the manners Japan is famous for. I walked through a large hall where photographers were lined up in single file to take photos, one at a time, of beautiful cosplayers who posed for each in turn. It's nice everyone's asking for permission but surely it would save everyone a lot of time if they all just took their pictures at the same time? Some of the guys at the back of the queue had expensive telephoto lenses but they were waiting patiently to take photos from a few feet away. There seems to be a kind of ritual aspect to it.

I was truly more interested in seeing some comics, though. Comiket was an event founded to facilitate the sales of independent, or doujin, comics. Unlike Comic Con, I saw no big studios present (and, incidentally, though I've seen plenty of Japanese cosplay characters at Comic Con, I saw absolutely no western characters at Comiket).

There weren't just comics, though. It was a vast sea of self-published music, crafts, guide books, porn, and even gadgets. Walking through a section of music booths, I talked to Robot Head Girl:

I really liked her style. Here's one of her videos:

Most of the music booths were for Vocaloids, the new phenomenon of artificial singers that's very popular in Japan.

There were many booths for military aficionados and for train aficionados. Many of the latter had one or two older guys with self-published books of photos of trains. I do fairly often see guys at train stations just taking pictures of the normal trains. That such a hobby even exists shows how much more hobbies are honoured in Japanese society compared to American society.

In the crafts section, I saw a lot of amazing jewellery but this is the thing I bought:

It's a tiny Nursery Alice! I mean, it's the whole book with full illustrations!

This is the creation of book binder Hataori Dori. She was selling The Nursery Alice and The Call of Cthulu. It was a really tough choice for me but I went for the one with colour illustrations. Also, I'd never seen a copy of The Nursery Alice for sale anywhere before.

Lewis Carroll, author of the original Alice books, wrote The Nursery Alice in 1889--around 23 years after the original was published--as a version for kids under five years old. It contained updated and newly coloured versions of the original John Tenniel illustrations, updated by Tenniel himself, which you can see in my teeny tiny copy.

It was the end of the day so she threw in a free tiny pillow.

So, all in all, a similar but also different experience to Comic Con. The food was certainly better.

I didn't have time to eat there but, unlike the sad little pizza cafe at Comic Con, Comiket has several full restaurants and a convenience store. I saw curry and ramen.

So that's Comiket.

Who is Alice and What is She to You?

The rub is that any work of nonsense abounds with so many inviting symbols that you can start with any assumption you please about the author and easily build up an impressive case for it. - Martin Gardner from The Annotated Alice

That's something quite a few people need to be told nowadays. In college, I heard it said that interpretive theories applied to works of fiction are not meant to be absolute claims about the works or their creators but a separate creative exercise in themselves. Most people don't seem to hold this view, though, particularly students who quickly turned their analytic fervour into grist for the internet mill. Most infamously. these interpretive frameworks have been used to justify calling authors or directors racist or sexist or homophobic. But this thing can take many forms, like the saddeningly popular YouTube video where a man "explains" Twin Peaks is entirely about Lynch's deconstruction of popular television.

The quote from The Annotated Alice continues:

Consider, for example, the scene in which Alice seizes the end of the White King's pencil and begins scribbling for him. In five minutes one can invent six different interpretations.

Alice is invisible to the White Chess King but so much bigger than him that she can easily lift him in the air between her thumb and forefinger. What could one say? Let's see. Patriarchs are controlled by invisible women. A childish instinct ultimately controls the hands of absolute rulers. A king's subconscious preoccupation with children influences his decisions. If we take the pencil as phallic, we could say the libido is too gigantic and invisible for a king to resist when crafting legislation. We could say that any Royal position is in reality no more than a figurative game piece operated by an arbitrary power. It could simply be an indication of how all the creatures Alice encounters in her dream are extensions of her own will, or we might say that all administrative figures in life are reflections of the common will.

That's seven interpretations in four minutes, Gardner! Booya!

I got a new copy of The Annotated Alice on Sunday. I was so happy to see it. My old copy is in a box back in San Diego but I could justify the new purchase because this is the updated and expanded 150th anniversary edition. I really wanted it to show to teachers and students here in Japan where Alice is mainly known for the Disney films. Most people don't seem to be aware of the original books.

This new edition was expanded and updated by Mark Burnstein who's taken up the torch since Gardner passed away in 2010. It features many more colour illustrations from various editions of the Alice books from the past 150 years.

Above images by Iassn Ghiuselev, Peter Blake, Arthur Rackham.

Ichabod Rides Again

I showed the Sleepy Hollow part of Ichabod and Mr. Toad to two classes of first year students to-day. One class was pretty quiet for it but I was really pleased with some big laughs and gasps from the second class. I already knew they were a particularly congenial, rowdy bunch of kids and maybe it shouldn't surprise me they were more receptive to old fashioned, zany American cartoon humour than some other classes.

It does get me thinking what a strange thing American cartoons were. The kids were saying, "Sugoi" and "sugei" (amazing) when Ichabod was stuffing whole pies in his mouth or swiftly avoiding Brom Bones' punches. Yeah, I realised, these are superhuman feats. It's weird how we tend not to think of it.

I took the opportunity to explain some western superstitions before the film so they understood when Ichabod avoided walking under the ladder and guided the black cat out of his path.

I showed part of Alice in Wonderland to second year students last week, the part where Alice grows big in the White Rabbit's house. Having shown it to a few silent student audiences, I was pleased to hear a group of girls really get into it. One girl laughed at just the right moment when Alice opens the shutters to peer out the window in giant form. I've discovered this girl's English is very strong.

"Why are you so good at English?" I asked her.

She shrugged, "I don't know!"

I followed up with one of my standard questions; "What did you eat for breakfast this morning?"

"Yoghurt, a chocolate doughnut, and hot cocoa!"

I'm used to kids just saying, "Rice," or, "Bread". The more I talk to her, the more I think she's the right audience for Alice in Wonderland. She's also a natural leader, like River Phoenix in Stand by Me. The other girls look up to her and I saw her comforting a girl who was crying after a difficult test. I'm continually amazed by the students I meet on this job.

Rule 42

I'm forty-two years old to-day. That's the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything, according to Douglas Adams. As much as I love his work, I prefer to think of the trial scene from Alice in Wonderland to-day, and the "Rule 42".

At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in his note-book, cackled out “Silence!” and read out from his book, “Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court.”

Everybody looked at Alice.

“I'm not a mile high,” said Alice.

“You are,” said the King.

“Nearly two miles high,” added the Queen.

“Well, I shan’t go, at any rate,” said Alice: “besides, that’s not a regular rule: you invented it just now.”

“It’s the oldest rule in the book,” said the King.

“Then it ought to be Number One,” said Alice.

The King turned pale, and shut his note-book hastily.

Twitter Sonnet #1441

A friendly puppet cooked a felt souffle.
The kitchen grease could feed a tile gut.
We bought the bread to soak the whole cafe.
The dozen prawns had left the wat'ry rut.
The speckled sky reports on cookie sheets.
The crowded oven spilled lasagne sauce.
The healthy shapes adopt the forms of meats.
A question posed creates the query boss.
The face of stone became a shiny ham.
The triple suit approved a jolly sight.
The syrup stacked the cake before the jam.
A fluffy egg completes the pan delight.
Another pastry graced the gooey hill.
The talking stomach eats with happy will.

World's Biggest Rabbit

Last night I dreamt I was trying to google "The largest rabbit ever recorded." Trying to find the right words to get what I wanted, my first attempt for some reason yielded a video from an old Unsolved Mysteries style news magazine show. It was a segment about a woman discussing a paranormal experience she'd had. As usual, they had footage of the real woman being interviewed and a "dramatic reconstruction", an actress portraying the events described. The real woman was saying something about how she'd walked into a particular corner of a room and had this strange sensation of connecting with multiple potential versions of herself. Whoever made the dramatic reconstruction didn't, I felt, interpret her accurately and showed the actress in a queue of copies of herself with different facial expressions.

At that moment, I very distinctly heard a voice behind me say, "I see everything you do." And I woke up.

Here's what came up when I googled "The largest rabbit ever recorded" to-day:

And I think this also calls for a viewing of David Lynch's "RABBITS".

Suggestions Worse than Bullets

The new Sirenia Digest, which I read this morning, features a cool Sci-Fi noir by Caitlin R. Kiernan called "CHERRY STREET TANGO, SWEATBOX WALTZ." Like a lot of Caitlin's stories for the Digest lately, it features a protagonist being interviewed or interrogated by someone demanding they tell a story that's evidently been told several times before, a someone who implicitly denies any guilt for pointing out inconsistencies in the latest telling of the story. I love the manifold quality of the idea--the same concept presented again and again of a same story being told again and again. One who reads the Digest regularly thereby over time gets a feeling of a continuum, an inexorable trap set by the universe. In this case, the protagonist is a sniper assassin being questioned by a voice coming from a radio. Along with questions relating to a botched hit, the voice also insists the protagonist recite "The Lobster Quadrille" from Alice in Wonderland, another frequent reference for Caitlin.

I found myself thinking about George Orwell's essay on a pamphlet Leo Tolstoy wrote about King Lear. It was referred to in some article I read recently, I can't remember where. But the article was interested in Orwell's point that Tolstoy's hatred for King Lear didn't prompt him to advocate censoring it but prompted him to attempt poisoning the ways in which people enjoy it. Tolstoy synopsises the play in an unflattering manner and deliberately omits or downplays its virtues, as Orwell talks about at length. Orwell ascribes this to a difference between Tolstoy's puritanical and Shakespeare's worldly philosophies. I really love this bit from Orwell:

There are people who are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances. They will not say to somebody else, ‘Do this, that and the other or you will go to prison’, but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars. Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics — a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage — surely that proves that you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise.

This fits nicely with the plot of "CHERRY STREET TANGO, SWEATBOX WALTZ" about an assassin who cannot explain her inability to hit her target beyond noticing her own unreliable perceptions. The more she's supposed to repeat "The Lobster Quadrille", the more doubtful her impressions of it or anything else subjected to gratuitous scrutiny. As Orwell says, "Artistic theories such as Tolstoy's are quite worthless, because they not only start out with arbitrary assumptions, but depend on vague terms (‘sincere’, ‘important’ and so forth) which can be interpreted in any way one chooses. Properly speaking one cannot answer Tolstoy's attack."

Caitlin's story also features nice references to David Bowie and, of course, film noir. The main concept kind of reminded me of Branded to Kill in a very good way. The story was originally meant to be included in an anthology of noir tales but the editor couldn't understand its meaning. Which would lead me to think on the diminishing interpretive powers of people working in publishing but, then again, even Leo Tolstoy thought King Lear was meaningless.

Invocations of Rule 42

It's hard to believe Disney's 1951 version of Alice in Wonderland is only an hour and fifteen minutes long. Not merely because it had more songs written for it than any other Disney film to date--over thirty songs!--but because it doesn't feel like a single film but like a series of short films. This is part of what's generally considered its greatest flaw, by its critics and by Walt Disney himself, that there were too many cooks in the kitchen so the film lacks a cohesive narrative. Yet it remains perhaps the most influential adaptation of Alice in Wonderland ever made and easily overshadows Tim Burton's big budget adaptation from a few years ago (and its swiftly forgotten sequel). Both Burton's and the 1951 version miss crucial aspects of Lewis Carroll's books but Burton's film goes a step further to carry a message of empowerment in direct opposition to the attitude of the original work. Frequently considered a parody of Oxford scholars and faculty of his time, Carroll's Alice books lampoon the self-seriousness and absurdity of the adult world while Burton's film ends with Alice taking a place of prominence firmly within that world. The 1951 film, for presenting a series of effective shorts, falls closer to Carroll's work by default except in scenes where an attempt is made to force some kind of arc on Alice. The "Very Good Advice" sequence, with a song that expands on a line from the book, is very good and sweet in isolation, but in the context of the film as a whole comes off as somewhat bizarre. Nothing in the Dee and Dum sequence or the Made Tea Party sequence had led us to believe that Alice was on the kind of devastating track of tragic hubris that would seem to justify a bitterly self-reflective song like that.

Alice growing in the Queen's court later on seems to have been changed in the 1951 film for a similar purpose. She eats the mushroom to grow large in an effort to escape her absurd persecutors but once she finds herself in a position of dominance she can't help but heap petty insults on the Queen: "And as for you, 'Your Majesty'--Your Majesty indeed! Why, you're not a Queen! You're just a fat, pompous, bad tempered old tyrant!" With each invective, Alice shrinks until she finishes up smaller than everyone else in the court. It's an amusing moment that clearly says something about the importance of remaining gracious when one is in a position of power but the book's version of the scene comes from a more effective idea.

Just at this moment Alice felt a very curious sensation, which puzzled her a good deal until she made out what it was: she was beginning to grow larger again, and she thought at first she would get up and leave the court; but on second thoughts she decided to remain where she was as long as there was room for her.

‘I wish you wouldn’t squeeze so.’ said the Dormouse, who was sitting next to her. ‘I can hardly breathe.’

‘I can’t help it,’ said Alice very meekly: ‘I’m growing.’

‘You’ve no right to grow here,’ said the Dormouse.

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said Alice more boldly: ‘you know you’re growing too.’

‘Yes, but I grow at a reasonable pace,’ said the Dormouse: ‘not in that ridiculous fashion.’ And he got up very sulkily and crossed over to the other side of the court.

Alice becomes more confident in how she speaks to the court but she remains essentially polite. The transition is more subtle and the effect resolves into Alice finding herself at her natural size in relation to a pack of cards at the moment she wakes up, the impression being similar to the nonsense of a dream slowly resolving itself into reality. At the same time, though, the idea that Alice can't help but naturally be larger than a court contrived of abstract rules and senseless rhetorical manoeuvres has a very effective subtext. It's not that Alice is trying to make herself bigger, she simply can't help it--and, of course, the idea that a young girl might be more reasonable than a card Queen obsessed with who stole the tarts directly in front of her seems inevitable.

I've written about the Alice books a lot in my blog over the years and I've sought as many film adaptations as I could. None of them really get it totally right--my favourites are the Jonathan Miller version and the Jan Svankmajer version, the former because of how much dialogue it directly imports from the books to be delivered by great actors, and the latter because of how Svankmajor digests the themes of the books to create something very much his own. But I'll always love the 1951 Disney version, mainly as an example of what a great animation studio Disney used to be. It's a kind of 2D animated storytelling you don't see anymore and watching it makes Disney's recent Forces of Destiny shorts even more depressing.

This is all kind of on my mind to-day because of the Wrinkle in Time movie which I don't plan on seeing. The trailers look like Skittles commercials and many of the reviews remind me of exactly the problem I had with Burton's Alice in Wonderland--a lot of people are saying the film has almost the opposite message to the books. I read the Wrinkle in Time books when I was a kid, but not since then, so I only dimly remember them. What I mainly remember is that, compared to other books I read at the time, they had a remarkably cold quality, and I remember a lot of impressions of the lead character alone in some kind of dark and hostile realm. Nothing like the unremarkable candy riot trailers I've seen.