Category Archives: Blog

The United States of Cowardice

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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Stephen Glain’s State vs. Defense is a chronicle of America’s post-World War II militarization of foreign policy. Which is to say, it’s a long, depressing slog through stupidity, stubbornness, waste and blood. From Joe McCarthy’s bone-headed, politicized assault on civilian China experts in the State Department to Jesse Helms’ bone-headed, politicized assault on civilian foreign experts of all sorts; from the fictitious Gulf of Tonkin incident to the fictitious WMD’s in Iraq; from the groundless characterization of the Soviets as an aggressive threat during the Cold War to the groundless characterization of China as an aggressive threat today, the United States has for six decades picked up bucket after bucket of bullshit, buried its collective head in the offal and gone staggering blindly off towards empire. At some points in the accounting, you’re forced to wonder why Washington even bothers to invest in weapons. Why not, after all, simply cut out all the middlemen and just physically bury our foes, real and imaginary, in trillions of dollar bills? At least it’s a more effective strategy than SDI.

SDI is still under development, of course, at least as far as I could figure out from the Internet. We also, as Glain notes, continue to have troops in South Korea, “defending…one of the world’s most prosperous countries from its famine-stricken neighbor,” as well as troops wandering around the Sinai Desert “as they had since 1982 as part of a multinational peace-keeping force.” When the Cold War ended and we didn’t have any reason to gratuitously and provocatively violate Soviet airspace with spy planes, the military brass, reluctant to end a program just because it was useless and dangerous, decided to start gratuitously and provocatively violating Chinese airspace. This has resulted in a heightening of tensions that could conceivably, Glain notes rather helplessly, lead to a catastrophic Sino-American war.

Indeed, the overwhelming takeaway from Glain’s book is helplessness. No matter the cost in American lives (to say nothing, of course, of those poor bastards overseas), no matter the cost to our standard of living, no matter the catastrophic foreign policy failures, the empire, it seems, only expands. Even Commanders-in-Chief, in Glain’s account, can do little to stem the inevitable American march towards war. Glain, for example, points out that president after president has been horrified by SIOP, the Pentagon’s Single Integrated Operational Plan for “winning” a nuclear war. In the first incarnation of the plan during the 1950s, “Casualty estimates ranged between 175 million and 285 million Russian and Chinese dead, regardless of whether or not China was party to a Soviet attack [Glain’s emphasis]”. Counting dead in Eastern Europe and resulting fires, the death toll would probably have topped one billion. Eisenhower said the plan “frightene(ed) the devil out of me,”—yet he signed off on it. Kennedy wanted to get rid of it too, but didn’t. Reagan—not a man noted for his soft stand on Communism or, indeed, for his rationality—called SIOP “crazy.” Yet, despite the fact that president after president has condemned it, and despite the fact that the Cold War has been over for more than two decades, SIOP still exists, a sign of America’s apparently insatiable nostalgia for apocalypse.

Glain is excellent at explaining bureaucratic infighting. In one passage he discusses how a supine Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State failed to back her wonks, with the result that the invasion went ahead without any input from anyone who had any clue about Iraq before the invasion. In another he describes how the oleaginous Richard Perle helped undermine massive arms reduction at the end of the Cold War by encouraging Reagan’s woozy fantasies about the viability of SDI.

Still, Glain’s focus on the upper echelons of policy tends to leave a few questions unanswered. Kennedy and Johnson, Glain shows fairly clearly, didn’t want to escalate in Vietnam, but they did, in large part because they feared political backlash. Obama and Biden made some vague gestures towards attempting a drawdown in Afghanistan, but they were, according to Glain, politically outmaneuvered by their military officers. “For Obama,” Glain says, “there was no alternative to expanding the war, particularly if he wanted to win at least some Republican support for his domestic agenda.”

The question, then, becomes not so much why do presidents want to engage in endless military overseas adventures, but rather, why do we? Despite war after war; despite a humiliating, catastrophic failure in Iraq; despite what appears to be an endless slog in Afghanistan; the American people just can’t say no. Sure, there have been occasional protests; Glain points in particular to the nuclear freeze movement in the 1980s which arguably had a real impact on Reagan’s foreign policy. But in general, and especially since 9/11, we seem as a whole in love with our empire. What is our problem?

I don’t have a definite answer, but I have a guess. Our problem is that we are cowardly, craven shitheads, who spend our lives in desperate fear for our measly, worthless lives. We drop bombs on the innocent and guilty alike, kidnap, torture, and assassinate, and plan to wipe all human life off the earth because we are terrified that somebody might try to kill us.

Don’t get me wrong. I really don’t want to die in a terrorist attack. I am even less eager to have my loved ones die in a terrorist attack. But at some point, you really do need to buck the fuck up. The chances of me or anyone I know getting killed by murderous strangers is infinitely smaller than the chance that I’ll die in a car accident. And it is dishonorable to allow my government to drop bombs on Afghan wedding parties on the off chance that I might possibly be slightly safer. How many people, exactly, need to be reduced to jelly to make up for Americans’ collective spinelessness?

The Right likes to wail about the culture of dependency fostered when you provide some minimal resources to prevent people starving in the street. But nobody wants to talk about the real culture of dependency; the trillions of dollars we spend on our defensive nanny state, assuaging our knee-jerk timidity by swaddling ourselves in weapons of death. Our leaders like to talk about American virtue, but there is no virtue without personal courage. Until we realize that, our terror will continue to be a scourge, and the only question will be whether it will destroy us before, or along with, the rest of the earth.

Monthly Stumblings # 12: Shannon Gerard

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Unspent Love or, Things I Wish I Told You by Shannon Gerard

Shannon Gerard is a Canadian multimedia artist (aren’t they all these days?) based in Toronto. She presented her book / webcomic Unspent Love as follows:

Originally drawn and written as a series of online vignettes for the comics publisher Top Shelf Productions, Unspent Love addresses themes such as hope, fear, and human frailty. The project was later produced as a multi-media bookwork with the support of Open Studio’s Nick Novak Fellowship (2010).

A third iteration at YYZ Artist’s Outlet in Toronto will evolve the project in a series of narrative images, unfolding between November 2010 and October 2011. The experimental space of the wall allows imaginative storytelling possibilities to develop through layering, time-lapsed animation and wheat pasting.

The Open Studio hand-bound artist’s book that Shannon mentions above is gorgeous, as you can see below:

Unspent Love, or Things I Wish I Told You, Open Studio, 2010.

In an interview Shannon Gerard said;

I am just telling pretty simple stories from my life — anyone can do that. And I am using materials and methods that a lot of people can understand and recognize. Also the stories are personal, so I want the books to have definite evidence of the hand of the artist all over them [in the lettering, for instance].

[M]ost of my books so far have been about all of the love and fear and losses and hope and fragility of relationships either beginning, ending or never totally materializing.

In another interview Shannon Gerard quotes Lynda Barry saying that what she does is “autobifictionalography.” This means that her autobiography has some fiction mixed just like every fictional narrative has some autobiographical subtext.

Shannon Gerard’s drawing method relies exclusively on photos of family and friends acting. This has some advantages, but also some disadvantages. As she puts it in her Inkstuds interview (she disclaimed correctly that she’s not one – a stud, I mean):

In a lot of cases I trace right over top of photographs. That is really limiting in terms of like line quality an’ there’s definitely limitations to it in that way.

Watch also Women in Comics.

The characters in Unspent Love have an individuality that is rarely seen in comics, but the drawings have something of a mechanical feel to them. The regularity of the lines, the absence of shading, remind me of the clear line. Even so during the last half decade a progress can be detected in Shannon Gerard’s drawing abilities: the tracing look vanished replaced by a more fluid naturalism:

Hung # 2, Drawn Onward, Self-Published, 2006.

Unspent Love, or Things I Wish I Told You, Open Studio, 2010.

If I understood correctly (and I really don’t know if I did), Shannon Gerard, says in her Inkstuds interview that she compensates the lack of spontaneity of her drawings with a creative approach to page layout. In fact one of her trademarks is the depiction of the same character in various positions in fictional and reading time and fictional and page space. This is the same effect that gave Italian comics artist Gianni de Luca his place in the pantheon:

“Romeo e Giulietta”‘s first page (Romeo and Juliet) by William Shakespeare and Gianni de Luca, Epipress, 1977.

Unspent Love, or Things I Wish I Told You, Open Studio, 2010.

One of the most interesting aspects in Unspent Love are the image-text relations. Mostly the image shows a character and the words describe a situation. This leads to the problem of focalization. Being autobiographical (or, you know… autobifictionalographical…) the narrator is a fictional character (s/he always is) somewhat related to the artist-writer, but that’s not what I read-see in other instances: what I read is an interior monologue uttered by the character that I’m seeing. There’s a complex creative system at play because the actors play Shannon Gerard’s own stories: her interior voice mixes with their bodies in an oblique relation. In one particular case (my favorite section of the book, the wedding) the images and the words don’t describe the same point in time creating a lapse that is quite jarring.  

An interior voice and an exterior image of the world in one of Shannon Gerard’s (and mine) favorite cartoonists’ stories.

Panel from “The most Obvious Question” by Lynda Barry, Raw, High Culture For Lowbrows, Vol. 2 # 3.

Reading Unspent Love we may think that the text leads the narration (if we can call it that) while the images are just illos. Nothing is further from the truth: if we know how to decode them the drawings give us crucial information about the characters (did I mention already that the characterization in Unspent Love is exquisite?): I’m talking about their mood: dreamy, absent minded, loving, joyful, etc… but also their taste in clothes, mannerisms… etc… In her Inkstuds interview Shannon Gerard says that the drawings interpret the narrative. I say that the drawings are part of the narrative.

A disjunction between image and text, or is it?

Unspent Love, or Things I Wish I Told You, Open Studio, 2010.

As part of trash culture comics in the restrict field have been poorly written, with some exceptions, of course, throughout their history. Words fail me to express how much I admire Shannon Gerard for bringing adult themes and great writing to comics (and I don’t mean the usual adolescent tripe that passes for adult in the comicsverse). Unspent Love has strengths precisely where your average comic fails miserably. Shannon Gerard’s writing is not only beautifully poetic (she doesn’t like the word because it’s too pretentious; what kind of a world is this, in which an artist feels embarrassed for being a poet?), it’s also full of great ideas. Discover those ideas yourselves, if you didn’t already, because revealing them here would mean spoiling your fun…

I don’t want to finish this post without mentioning Sword of My Mouth, a Post-Rapture Graphic Novel (a post-apocalyptic story written by Jim Munroe and drawn by Shannon Gerard, No Media Kings / IDW, 2010) and Hung (a self-published comic book miniseries to go along with her thesis – see below – the cover of issue number two is reproduced above: Hung # 1, Never Odd Or Even, 2005; Hung # 2, Drawn Onward, 2006; Hung # 3, Lonely Tylenol, 2007).

Shannon Gerard wrote a thesis about autobiography in comics (Drawn Onward, Representing the Autobiographical Self In the Field of Comic Book Production, York University, 2006). Here’s how she presents her book:

The recent proliferation of once underground comic books in the popular media has spawned a vibrant body of critical work about the form and its cultural meanings. Perhaps owing to its relative infancy, the field of comics 1 scholarship, while enthusiastic, has been inconsistent. The current debate seems to be over exactly which analytical approach to take. The search for a suitable critical template has led some scholars to consider comics from the perspective of literary criticism. Other academics use the lexicon of the art critic to focus on the formal design concerns of cartoonists, or attempt to locate the format 2 within an art historical context. Due to the sequential narrative element of comics, many film studies majors have embraced the genre. Given that the reading of comics bears much in common with other fan-based and emotionally resonant sub-cultures like alternative music, a cultural studies perspective seems to provide another piece to the puzzle. However, as comic books represent a unique hybrid of various literary traditions, visual art movements and cultural perspectives, not one of these approaches works in isolation.

Since comics are resistant to conventional analysis, the resulting limited academic work can be frustrating, but I believe the inherent tensions in the field of comic book production are its greatest strength. As with any field of study, these intersections provide dynamic places for various existing ideas to pool together and for new ideas to crystallize. The pronounced interdisciplinary anxieties of comics scholarship make it one of the most exciting areas of inquiry to recently emerge in the academy. Broadly, my thesis attempts to highlight some of the frictions between these varied fields so that a better vocabulary for talking and writing about comic books can develop.

More specifically, my interest is in considering comic books as a form of life writing. I am focused on the autobiographical work of several artists currently working in North America, namely Lynda Barry, Chester Brown, Seth, Matt Blackett, and Shary Boyle. As this paper shall set out, the work of these five artists further demonstrates the complex narrative possibilities presented by the particular conventions of comic book design.

In the context of examining the life writing practices of other comic book artists, I aim not only to expand my academic engagement with comic books but also to develop my own visual art practice. Together with this paper, my thesis takes the shape of three short autobiographical comic books. The union of creative and academic work represented by my thesis is meant to echo the various cultural discourses which meet in the comic book format.

1 A letter S is used at the end of the word “comics” in terms such as “comics history” or “comics scholarship” to specify that a field of study is being discussed. The singular word “comic” sounds too much like an adjective. The term “comic history” might be misread to indicate a historical account of something quite hilarious.

2 Where possible, I have tried to avoid the use of the word “format” as it implies a limited view of comic books as a series of design choices. On the other hand, the word “genre” does not indicate the wide range of creative sub-categories within the field of production. In some ways, the inclusion of such flattening terms is problematic to my aims, but in others, it highlights the basic tension of my struggle for a suitable vocabulary.

To read the book’s first thirteen pages: click on “Preview” on the right.

The World With Roaches

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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For reasons which remain largely a mystery to me, I’ve been obsessively watching episodes of the godawful Heroes television series. You’d think I’d have known to stop right away when first episode, opening scene is of some earnest scientist nattering away about how cockroaches, not humans, are the pinnacle of evolution, and how these nasty little crawling critters are deterred by neither sleet nor snow nor nuclear fallout, like some sort of post-apocalyptic six-legged egg-laying postmen.

Sci-fi writers love the cockroach, and the cockroach loves them back. In fact, the cockroach loves us all, because the fact is that the roach will not survive long after we’re gone. On the contrary, the truth is that the cockroach will flip over on its back, put its legs in the air and expire a week or two after we turn off the central heat. Roaches are human parasites; they thrive in such numbers because we kill their predators and provide them with food and climate control. They’re not even resistant to radiation; we’d survive a nuclear holocaust far better than they would. It’s true they’re a triumph of evolution, but that triumph isn’t durability. That triumph is us.

I learned about the roach’s limitations in Alan Weisman’s 2007 ecological thought-experiment The World Without Us. The book imagines what would happen if humans suddenly disappeared, examining how long it would take for the sea to reclaim Manhattan, or for elephants to repopulate Africa, or for cats, dogs, and roaches to go the way of the dodo.

Weisman’s title is, coincidentally, a central concept in Eugene Thacker’s In The Dust of This Planet. For Thacker, the “world without us” is still thought experiment, though one of a different kind than Weisman’s. In Weisman’s book, the world without us is a future in which human beings are extinct. In Thacker’s, the world without us is a “spectral and speculative world,” a way of trying to think the non-thinking of human non-existence.

Thacker defines the world without us in contrast to the world for us (which is the world that we “interpret or give meaning to”) and also in distinction to the world in itself (which is “the world in some inaccessible, already given state.”) For Thacker, the world in itself can never be thought or reached; as soon as it is conceived (through geology, or theology, or cosmology, or other forms of human thought) it becomes part of the world for us. The world without us, on the other hand, is the world that we cannot conceive. It is not opposed to us, it is not neutral to us; it is “somewhere in between, in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific.” If you think of a cockroach as an irritating pest, you’re thinking about the world for us. If you think about a cockroach that isn’t being thought about, you’re imagining the world in itself. But if you think about the cockroach as the cockroach failing to think about itself, you’re thinking about the world without us — which, Thacker argues, is creepy.

The subtitle of Thacker’s book is, in fact, The Horror of Philosophy, Part 1, and what he is trying to do in part is to use ideas from horror to construct a philosophical vision of the “world without us.” He references a dizzying array of texts, from pulp horror to black metal to medieval mysticism, to approach these ideas, but one writer he returns to repeatedly is H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft is infamous for his lumbering prose and cosmic pessimism; his conceptualization of a universe in which heavy, nameless adjectives slither across vast, hideous paragraphs in pursuit of nameless and inhuman dooms. Lovecraft’s also particularly interested in a kind of world without us — his stories focus on vast forces with unknowable motivations and unspeakable corporalities, great cyclopean blanknesses that humans cannot see without going completely mad.

As the above suggests, it’s very difficult to talk about Lovecraft without putting your tongue at least a little in your cheek. Thacker manages it, though, which is both impressive and somewhat off-putting. Indeed, Thacker’s tone throughout is hard to parse. With his welter of eclectic sources (Marlowe’s Faust, Keiji Haino, J.G. Ballard, anonymous internet poetry) he’s clearly being an eccentric philosophical genius in the Slavoj Zizek mode. But where Zizek makes his personal investments very obvious (Lacan, Marx, Hitchcock, St. Paul), Thacker’s are considerably less evident. He doesn’t seem to want a revolution, and though he raises ecological issues, he doesn’t exactly have an ecological program. Nor is he interested in a Freudian reading of horror to understand human beings — he doesn’t even reference Kristeva or abjection. So if we’re not changing society and we’re not changing the plaent and we’re not changing ourselves, what exactly is the point?

The point is, somewhat disappointingly, no point. In his summation, Thacker insists that he is making mysticism “relevant”. He then goes on:

But the differences between this contemporary mysticism and historical mysticism are all-important. If mysticism historically speaking aims for a total union of the division between self and world, then mysticism today would have to devolve upon the radical disjunction and indifference of self and world. If historical mysticism still had as its aim the subject’s experience, and as its highest principle that of God, then mysticism today — after the death of God —would be about the impossibility of experience, it would be about that which in shadows withdraws from any possible experience, and yet still makes its presence felt, through the periodic upheavals of weather, land and matter. If historical mysticism is, in the last instance, theological, then mysticism today, a mysticism of the unhuman, would have to be, in the last instance, climatological. It is a kind of mysticism that can only be expressed in the dust of this planet.

There are echoes of Nietzsche here in the death of God, and of paganism in the gesture towards the climatological, and of Lovecraft in the unhuman, and even of Zen in the paradox of the experience which is no experience. But despite Thacker’s insistence, it’s not really clear to me why mixing together all these different nihilisms adds up to a different, more contemporary zero. Nor does this amalgamation of nothing seem particularly terrifying.

The truth is that a nothing, even if (especially if?) it references multiple philosophical traditions, just is not especially scary. This is why Weisman’s World Without Us isn’t horrible at all. While Weisman’s world from which humans vanish is certainly inspired by apocalyptic and doomsday narratives, his book ends up devoid of anything like terror precisely because he refuses to talk about people. The world without us, as a world actually, truly, without us, is a peaceful, even beautiful place. There’s nothing worrisome about the rainforests regenerating. There’s nothing frightening about roaches dying out. Nuclear reactors melting down kind of sucks for the biosphere, and you certainly feel bad for the animals stuck with our waste, but it doesn’t give you a sense of cosmic dread.

Which is why the thing in Lovecraft that is The Thing, the terror that has no name, is not a world without us. Rather, it’s a world without us that is still us. As Roethke says, “something is amiss or out of place/When mice with wings can wear a human face.” The vampire, the ghost, the zombie, the crawling thing that says our name…. When you’re here, you’re here and that’s okay; when you’re gone, you’re gone and you don’t care; but if you’re stuck halfway in between, you’ve got a campfire tale to keep the kids awake.

Erasing God does not leave a world without us. It leaves a world in which there is nothing but us, in forms we can neither entirely recognize nor entirely disavow — our arbitrary cruelty, our indifference, our amorphous fluids leaking out to stain the stars. We say the roach is our alien successor, but in fact it’s our familiar image, scuttling out across the planet in its numberless hordes. In Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” the human narrator sloughs off his mortality and wades into the ocean to join his monstrous, alien kin. “We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.” That’s the horror; not that the depths of the world don’t care about us, but that they do; not that someday, somehow, somewhere, the planet may be free of us, but that it never will — that we, and the roaches, will be here intertwined forever.

Overthinking Things 10/03/2011

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This article began its life as an answer to  a question on Quora, where I answer a lot of random questions about things. Publishing is one of those things. The question was, “Are Small Indie Presses Taking the Place of Literary Agents?”

TL;DR Answer – Yes.

Here’s the longer answer:

While so many people write about the death of publishing, there has been a very quiet revolution going on in the publishing industry. Webcomics, Print On Demand and other creator-driven technologies are changing the face of comics publishing. While webcomics have not yet developed into a sustainable business model for comics as a whole, they have radically altered distribution, fundraising and relationship-building for many independent comic artists.

For manga artists in Japan, printing one’s own work, or developing other’s work as a small press, is a well-established subculture and farm league for mainstream comics publishing. Larger publishers comb the halls of the major Comic Market events in Japan to discover talent already nurtured and trained by these doujinshi (which my mechanical translation tool delightfully translates  as “literary coterie magazine”) circles.

In the book publishing world, as large publishing companies pull their resources tighter and tighter, focusing on proven names and mass media tie-ins, small presses are stepping into the space willfully abandoned by literary agents; finding, nurturing and publishing young talent.

I can think of a dozen or more writers and artists I know that have had success dealing directly with small presses where agents wouldn’t give them the time of day.  It’s almost unbelievable when you see how poorly some agents do their job.

The other side of this, of course, is that many young/new writers are woefully, horribly, inconceivably ill-prepared for approaching any agent or publisher. I do my very best to write gentle, sensitive rejection letters when I have to. This does not help. People get angry and often tank any chance of ever working with me by writing enraged, irrational, sometimes incoherent replies, explaining how much I suck for not seeing their brilliance.  I’m glad to provide guidance and advice for creators, but it’s still up to a creator to get their part of the process right.

The advantage for a writer with some few publishing credits (this would be things like magazines and anthology credits, not “I have a blog” credits) under their belt is that a contract with a smaller publisher can, over time, become an entree’ to a larger audience. (Presuming one doesn’t burn bridges, which is easy in a niche field with only a few potential publishers.) The money and the promotional support is going to be minimal, so basically all a writer is getting is editorial and printing assistance – which is worth a great deal. Unfortunately most authors don’t realize that. They just see the small advance and small sales and get pissed that the company isn’t doing more. In reality, a first-time contract with a larger publisher is also unlikely to include much in the way of promotional support. The reality for first-time authors is that they are going to be almost completely responsible for their own book promotion.

Literary agents rarely have any energy or ability to take risks. Driven by market pressures, they have  to produce best sellers as quickly as possible. In the meantime, indie publishers, driven primarily by passion, have interest in and ability to develop new talent. Small indie publishers have fewer resources, but can take more risks.

Small presses, like creator-driven publishing, are definitely changing the publishing landscape.

And, no matter how I look at it, I think it’s about time that was changed.

Utilitarian Review 10/1/11

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On HU

Caroline Small talks about SPX and expanding the audience for comics.

Ng Suat Tong discusses Anders Nilsens’ Big Questions.

Robert Stanley Martin on D.B. Echo’s Paul Krugman joke.

Anne Ishii on continues her Elfquest re-read.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I discuss the sublime irrelevance of the Bangles.

Also at the Atlantic I talk about superhero sexism and a bunch of non-superhero comics that you should read instead of DC and Marvel.

At Splice Today I review the assassin movie Killer Elite.

Other Links

Alyssia Rosenberg on whether feminists should give up on comics.

Deb Aoki on DC’s sexism.

A 7-year-old reviews the new Starfire.

A review of Michael Kupperman’s Mark Twain.

Women in Marvel Comics.

Alyssa Rosenberg on Frank Miller’s Holy Terror.

Is the Bamboo Curtain More Treacherous Than the Glass Ceiling?

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I read an odd entry in my Twitter feed the other morning. Not unusual for a forum dedicated to misinformed celebrity rants and the beekeepers that idolize them, but what struck me about this tweet was that it came from the account of Hayao Miyazaki, He that is Deus in the Machina at Ghibli Studios, and dare I say… a generally uplifting and motivational Twitterer. Bear in mind the Japanese language is composed of ideographs, so 140 characters can read like an American paragraph. Nonetheless, this morning I read this:

@Miyasan_bot:
They say it’s over for animation in Japan. When we look for new hires only women respond, and I get the feeling that we’re done for. In our last hurrah we borrow from outside staff (i.e. outsource), but soon we won’t be able to do that forever.

OK, now mind you, Miyazaki’s been talking a lot about the end of anime on Twitter lately. Sort of the same way people are decrying the end of print publishing. He’s not giving up on animation but suggesting it might be best to face up to the fleeting nature of all things. Yes, his micro-wisdoms border on sermonic.

So what I found interesting in this tweet was the casual observation that a sign of decline was that only women are responding to job solicits. He wasn’t trying to say anything about women. He was saying it’s over for Japanese animation. The bit about women was just a bit, but the mumble was deafening.

So I mustered some courage and replied to him.

@ill_iterate:
Really, @miyasan_bot?

I didn’t get a response per se… A few hours later, I saw this in my feed:

A five-part transcript of the whole statement from which he’d excerpted the top line earlier in the morning. The full statement is from a lengthy interview in Eiga pia (Movie Peer) magazine

@miyasan_bot:
Part 1:
They say it’s over for animation in Japan. When we look for new hires only women respond, and I get the feeling that we’re done for. In our last hurrah we’ll borrow from outside staff, to lend a hand but we can’t do that forever.

Part 2:
These are not reasons for me to take production to China. I don’t want to deplete Japan in that way. So, what do we do?

Part 3:
(Ghibli Studios) has been resolved to rowing the boat altogether as a team and giving it our all, while everyone around us is jet-propelled with new technology and running at full-speed. We still illustrate with pen and paper. I say we continue to give this our all, together.

Part 4:
I counter the point some make that we’re in an age where you’ll find women driving buses by asking if it’s ok to have women all over cotton mills. (LOL)

Part 5:
I think it would be great to see a female animation director, but as far as Ghibli’s concerned, I can’t think of a single one for us. So what about newcomers? Well, I believe women are incredibly fast-learners and self-starters. If you look at men, even today, they develop much slower.

I’ll cut to the chase: What do I see in the full statement? More obfuscation of the glass ceiling, but a genuine interest in seeing it shattered.

The first part of his quintweet is sort of unfortunate as there’s not doubt about it. He just said: women in the employment queue bum me out. Chauvnism is colorblind, deaf, and a little obnoxious, but well, let’s see what else he’s saying.

In Part 2 of the quintweet, Miyazaki calls out the harsh realities of competing with China for animators and technology. It’s a problem in just about every industry outside of the People’s Republic. From textile manufacturing to bootlegging Apple retail, we the people of everywhere else is kung-fucked. I empathize as my bootleg Apple store doesn’t stand a chance against theirs.

In Part 3 Miyazaki explains how Ghibli’s work is a labor of love. As much a labor as the biggest animation production company in Japan whose American distributor is Disney (one of the biggest media companies in the world) can be. Though it is really beautiful that they work in analog. I mean that. No one watches Pixar to see peach-shaped marhsmallow humanoids. No, we fell with the kid from Up because he was part of a good story.

Part 4 is as baffling as it is evocative to me. Miyazaki’s recapitulating his point about evening the status by playing devil’s advocate to some truism that “women are even driving buses now.” I’ve never thought of it that way, but (thinking…) yeah I guess it’s sort of a man’s world behind that huge steering wheel in Japan. In New York City I think every third bus driver I’ve encountered has been female but it just goes to show… Strange where we engender jobs, isn’t it?

Moreover, to counter the observation on female bus drivers by suggesting labor-equality can turn be flipped and end us up with sweatshops full of women begs the question… has Miyazaki picked up a newspaper in the last decade? These cotton mills ARE populated by women. This statement is what baffled me most particularly. Cotton mills? I’m hoping it’s
lost in translation. Hoping cotton mills is Japanese for Dick Shop. And yet…
there is no mistaking “LOL” which I’m positive is the correct translation of (laughter):

My conclusion from Part 4 of the Quintweet is that for Miyazaki, status quo is an issue that starts with the basic tenet that women do work at all. Amazing to think the studio responsible for so many phenomenal heroins doesn’t think women actually earn their keep in modern professions. Actually I take that back. Nausicaa is an animist warrior; Chihiro and Ponyo are both children, as are Totoro’s neighbors. The closest thing to a working professional woman in Ghibli films is a witch who delivers packages from a bakery. [Note: I LOVE all these films and still think primary, secondary and all tertiary female characters could categorically kick every female animated Disney character in the proverbial “Pocahontas”.]

And finally, Part 5. “Show me the women!” he says. Damn straight. And this is the variable that changes my perspective on the entire argument against his seeming indifference to the glass ceiling. Women are fast learners. Men are comparatively late-bloomers. Get a leg up, women! Get out of the cotton mills, stop driving all those buses and start rowing this boat to nowhere.