There’s this funny game I’ve been playing for the past few months. Imagine this: a supervillain wraps a hapless woman in chains, balances a set of spinning plates on a stick perched on the tip of her nose, sets her on a unicycle, and tells her to make her way across a tightrope.
Or else — she dies. She dies, but more importantly, she proves herself incapable of functioning at a high enough level to keep herself alive.
The reward, naturally, anticlimactically, is to live another day. Or perhaps, in this case, there’s the satisfaction of proving my inner villain wrong, too. At least for the meantime.
Resolutions, Resolutions, Resolutions
In retrospect, I spent most of 2018 leaping into ever bigger fires (pyres?) and daring myself not to burn out. I’ve discussed the absurdity of this personal litmus test with several friends: the idea that you only qualify as “capable” if you do the impossible is a draconian standard that you shouldn’t wish on anybody, including yourself.
Easier said than done. But 2019 presents the opportunity for a fresh start, the burning world notwithstanding. I’ve stumbled into January a bit hollowed out and charred around the edges, but still alive. There might never be an ideal time to slow down, but this year might be as good a moment as any.
Slowing down ought to give me the chance to take more photos, which is another habit I’d like to cultivate this year. I don’t take nearly enough photos of my friends. Considering my memory problems, the fact that my past pretty much exists as shattered glass crunched into finer dust with every remembrance, I figured I should put more effort into storing memories through more reliable methods.
The Sounds of 2018
A couple of years ago, I started “recording” my year through a Spotify playlist. There was never an aesthetic motive for it — there was no “curation” going on beyond the gut-feel belief that a song belonged on the list, and that persists for this, the playlist’s second iteration.
This habit began as a practical answer to depression robbing me of words. As it turns out, the project works just as well even if work and perfectionism do the thieving.
So, here. 2018 took many things away from me, enough that I thought nothing of gambling my time, my energy, and on some days my sanity, just to see if I was “good enough” to keep them. That’s the part of my year that the playlist reflects best, I think.
But there were also many brilliant parts to this year, unexpected friends and life-saving constants. No Choir might be the only song here that acknowledges this, but at least it encapsulates these moments perfectly. To borrow from the luminous Florence Welch, the loneliness never left me — I always took it with me — but there were many people who helped me put it down with the pleasure of their company.
I’ve been spending my after-work hours browsing NPR’s rich and varied library of Tiny Desk Concerts. There have been many gems, but even in such fantastic company, the winners of last year’s Tiny Desk Contest stand out:
Tank and the Bangas hail from New Orleans, Louisiana, and they play a luminous mix of rock, folk, soul, funk, spoken word, and—as its own members put it—Disney and anime. I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of description that grabs my interest before I even hear a single note.
Luckily, I listened to their Tiny Desk before I read anything about their influences, so I can tell you from experience that they will move you even if you come in knowing absolutely nothing about who they are or what they’re about. That obliviousness vanishes quickly, too, since Tank and the Bangas are the kind of group you just have to know more about.
There’s plenty of material out there, starting with their debut album ThinkTank, released in 2013. Tiny Desk was obviously just another step in what’s already been a long and celebrated journey, and I’m glad that performance put them on my radar. Time to follow these amazing people and see what else they’ve got in store.
While we’re looking to the future, I’d like to join the chorus of voices dreaming about a collaboration with another artist:
Noname comes from Chicago, and like Tank, she’s an accomplished rapper and slam poet. She released her debut album, Telefone, in 2016. Before that, she captured audiences’ attention with her contribution to Chance the Rapper’s “Lost,” from the 2013 mixtape Acid Rap. Her set for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts demonstrates a gentle, enthralling power that reminds you of how much weight music can hold.
About halfway through Noname’s set, she says, “Let’s heal the world through vulnerability.” What a proposition! It illustrates the kind of earnest, soulful intention that runs through both of the Tiny Desk Concerts I’ve linked here.
I came to this title cold (pun unintended but appreciated). The most I knew about the book was that (1) it dealt with a murder of some kind and (2) it’s indisputably Capote’s magnum opus.
Capote begins by tracing the final days of the Clutter family, but I got the sense that the book wasn’t concerned so much with who the Clutters were as it was with what they represented. The Clutters, in death if not in life, came to embody the stability, security, and trust that their murders ripped from the community of Holcomb; Capote’s careful tracing of the crime’s aftermath strikes me as an attempt to probe what else, beyond the simple fact of brutal and unexpected death, constituted the void that the Clutters left behind.
And then, of course, there’s the other question: what kind of people would do such a thing, i.e., murder a family of strangers in cold blood? I knew nothing of the speculation about Capote’s relationship with the perpetrators, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith; I only learned about those theories while entering a new entry for the book in my Goodreads library. Whether he was friends (or more) with the two is irrelevant, I think; either way, Capote’s depiction of the two comes out a sharply observed, uncompromising dive into these murderers’ psyches and the fraught dynamic between them. Ultimately, it didn’t strike me as a sympathetic portrait; pitying, maybe, in some parts, but even then, Hickock and Smith’s grotesque histories—and their equally twisted responses to those histories—coalesce into a firm, if quiet, indictment.
#3: A classic of genre fiction
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
The Boswell, the Watson, the sidekick or companion—whatever you call the role, the detective’s trusty number two plays an indispensable role in the typical mystery novel. In the Sherlock Holmes canon, Dr. John H. Watson is the reader-surrogate: the regular guy (compared to Holmes; Dr. Watson isn’t without remarkable talents) who puzzles over the unfolding mystery alongside us; the figure who brings in the story’s “human” element to complement the cold, stark brilliance of Holmes; and so on.
So what do you do when the story’s designated Boswell is utterly unlikable?
I never read (or even knew of) the Hercule Poirot books growing up, so my sense of the mystery novel is shaped almost exclusively by the Holmes canon. Going into The Mysterious Affair at Styles, then, I couldn’t help viewing the story through Conan Doyle-tinted glasses. The story itself struck me as having some similarities to Hound of the Baskervilles, both in tone and in the surface details (Hastings off to visit someone in the country, a mystery arising, the detective factoring into the resolution somewhat unexpectedly, etc.). So I couldn’t help comparing Watson’s conduct in that story with Captain Hastings’.
Suffice it to say that Captain Hastings doesn’t fare very well in the comparison. He’s a much coarser character than Watson, and though both have their moments of feeling (wrongly) arrogant about their opinions on the case at hand, Hastings’ petulance and smugness come bundled with a mean streak that makes him nowhere near as endearing as Watson.
My opinion on Hastings aside, there’s something else that makes him a less desirable reader-surrogate than Dr. Watson: Captain Hastings is far less integral to the mystery than Watson was. He feels distinctly more like a sidekick to Poirot than a companion, and that means the reader gets stuck alongside him in the periphery. Hastings, rather than facilitating a reader’s entry into the narrative, becomes an impediment that feels better off discarded.
(Poirot himself, I don’t have much of an opinion about, at least not yet. I like him, but I feel like I need a couple more titles to get a better sense of him—and to have my mind changed about Hastings, I hope.)
#19: A book of genre fiction in translation
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu
I’d been meaning to read this book for years, and having finally read it—I’m underwhelmed. Not by much! The book had an impressive, enthralling start. It’s just that the payoff, and the second half of the book in general, delivered less than what the first half led me to expect. The tight, suspenseful events and intriguing world-building of the first half spiral out into a messier tangle of loose threads and nondescript settings (one big exception aside) later on; the hook loses momentum in the telling.
Maybe the delay between hearing about the book and actually reading it exacerbated the problem; I might have built the novel up too much in my head. Reading various gushing reviews in the intervening months probably didn’t help either.
I’m not sure what I can say without spoiling the novel, so I’ll refrain from talking plot. What I will say, though, is that this book is hard sci-fi: it’s unafraid to incorporate so many theoretical physics concepts into its narrative engine. But it never feels overwhelming.
I’m also inclined to disagree with Liu’s somewhat triumphalist take on science. Liu holds STEM above all other fields, and theoretical science above all STEM pursuits: thematically in the novel itself, and then explicitly in the author’s afterword. Even if my humanities degree didn’t make me feel obligated to object, I still would. Science delivers many wonderful insights, but I wouldn’t say it’s objectively above any other pursuit humanity’s undertaken. Still, Liu’s perspective does make for an intriguing yarn, precisely because it’s based on a belief that’s strange to me.
The novel leaves the door wide open for the sequel, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the series pans out.
Or so the relentless news cycle would have us believe. Every hour comes with a litany of scandals, disappointments, and threats to life as we know it. All of us, the headlines scream, are doomed to wail, gnash our teeth, and scrabble at the edge of sanity with the tips of our fingers. With thousands of concurrent dumpster fires, pushing back is imperative—sometimes to the point that stopping for a breather seems irresponsible, if not unforgivable.
But burning ourselves out by refusing any respite from the punishing frontlines of resistance would be a different kind of defeat.
Or so Natalie Prass says. The singer-songwriter scrapped her original plans for her second album after the 2016 elections, opting instead to craft a direct response to what she called the election’s “devastating” results. In Paste Music, she elaborates on her decision:
It [the 2016 election results] made me question what it means to be a woman in America, whether any of the things I thought were getting better were actually improving, who I am and what I believe in. I knew I would be so upset with myself if I didn’t take the opportunity to say some of the things that meant so much to me, so I decided to rewrite the record. I needed to make an album that was going to get me out of my funk, one that would hopefully lift people out of theirs, too, because that’s what music’s all about.
The resulting album’s first cut, “Short Court Style,”is the kind of track that you can imagine drifting in through your window with the soft afternoon sun. Prass layers rich, hushed vocals over equally lush synths and jaunty guitars, somehow capturing that slow warmth that settles in your belly with the first long draught of your late-day mug of weekend tea. The sampled whoops and sharp drumming inject just enough upbeat kick to get your legs swinging under the dining table. It’s joyful and celebratory, but not in the boisterous, bordering-on-hysteric way that doomsday parties tend to be.
Embedded in the track is an assertion at once simple and powerful: In a world where every minute dares us to succumb to bitterness and rage, welcoming happiness—and taking the chance to relish it and dance (awkwardly) along—can be another form of defiance.
Natalie Prass dissects “Short Court Style” in another excellent episode of the Song Exploder podcast. If you’d like to know what the Bee Gees and “Le Freak” have to do with the track, or whose lightbulb moment gave us the song’s standout “whoops,” be sure to give that interview a listen.
Towards the end of January, the 99% Invisible podcast ran an episode with eminent comics creator and scholar Scott McCloud about the design features of comics. It’s a great episode that provides a good thumbnail sketch of some of comics’ most important formal elements.
When pressed to give a full definition, McCloud explains that comics are a distinct art form of “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence.”
But in everyday usage, there’s no need to get that formal or technical. McCloud believes calling them “comics” is fine, as long as people realize the medium has the potential to do more than just funny strips in the Sunday paper or action-packed graphic novels.
I first read comics in grocery checkout lines. My grandmother used to do every month’s shopping at the big Makati Supermarket all the way in Alabang1(Why she did this still baffles me to this day), and when the wait got long, she would buy me an Archie digest from the racks by the cashier. I was around 5 or 6 at the time.
My grandma herself, and my grand-aunt, her older sister, read the strips that appeared alongside their favorite section (the crossword, natch) of the daily newspaper. I’d wedge myself in the circle of their broadsheet-lifting arms and read with them: Pugad Baboy, Loveknots, Dilbert, The Phantom. Eventually, I discovered that local newsstands carried floppies of popular titles like Spider-Man, and some indulgent relatives gifted me with trades of Asterix and Tintin.
I say “floppies” and “trades” now, but that’s the retroactive application of grown-up vocabulary. As a kid, I didn’t think of content having a medium, let alone of comics being a distinct one with its own terms and structures and conventions. That consciousness came later and in spurts.
First, there was high school. I discovered comics’ capacity for ambition, lyricism, and pathos all at once with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. The surreal visuals resisted the careless way I’d used to fling all reading matter into the same imagined pile. This, each page seemed to say, is something else. So too were the manga I picked up from my classmates, the offbeat limited-runs and obscure titles I’d learned to scrounge up myself, the opulent collected editions (that seven-volume boxed set of Calvin and Hobbes!) I stared at in the bookstores.
(Oddly enough, I never got into the flagship superhero titles. I first came to know Superman through the alternate-universe Red Son; I learned about Batman obliquely, through Robin, Batgirl, Nightwing. Instead, I read Runaways, Chew, Fables, Transmetropolitan, 100 Bullets; and then I followed Immonen and Ellis over to Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., found other titles like Ex Machina, Letter 44, and Persepolis,stumbled upon the work of Jeff Lemire, Art Spiegelman, Guy Delisle, Michel Rabagliati, Alison Bechdel, Julie Doucet, Chris Ware, and on, and on, down various branching rabbit holes that brushed against superheroes rarely.)
But I stayed at the level of vague recognition. I read comics, I discussed and praised and lambasted titles I came across, but I never thought much about comics itself. Not, at least, until I thought to write a “mini-thesis” on comic-book autobiographies.
Something beautiful happens when you learn to view two seemingly disparate domains as a single, coherent unit. It’s a bit like the magic of a comics page itself: how juxtaposing panels changes their context and how they’re read, one illuminating the other. In this case, the rigor and depth of analysis required by academic study revealed new dimensions of comics to me. (At the same time, seeing the lofty notions and abstractions of theory applied to something as “current” and, in some ways, casual as comics—and seeing that approach work!—completely changed how I view literary studies.)
I started learning about form, visual and narrative theory, comics as a genre and as literature. Scott McCloud seems to be the universal entry point for this stage, thanks to the lucid and approachable Understanding Comics. But neither annotated bibliographies nor theoretical frameworks stop at one title, so I read the work of Thierry Groensteen, Neil Cohn, Hilary Chute, and others. Suffice it to say that by then I had a better idea of comics’ depth as a category, a field of study.
It felt like crossing a line, at least in terms of being a comics reader. I’d developed an eye for the minutiae that added up to an effective page, issue, volume; I’d learned vocabulary that helped me discuss what I saw in clear, precise terms.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a better way of reading. Everyone reads in their own way, and comics don’t need to be taken as thesis subjects to be appreciated. It’s a different approach, one of an endless possible number—that’s all.
Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou offers similar lenses to viewers of his YouTube channel, Strip Panel Naked.I only found the series from a link in the 99% Invisible episode with Scott McCloud, but Otsmane-Elhaou has been making videos for more than a year now. (Prior to YouTube, he published Strip Panel Naked articles over on Comics Alliance.)
While there are other podcasts and article series covering comics’ formal dimensions, Strip Panel Naked is the only one I’ve seen so far that zeroes in on specific examples and dissects them in extensive detail. The videos themselves are clear, well-crafted, deeply researched, and never boring. Best of all, they fall well below the 10-minute mark. Strip Panel Naked’s video library is a fantastic resource for “comics people,” whether new, enthusiast, professional or somewhere in between.
Here’s my favorite video so far, tackling a brilliant section from one of my favorite titles, Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye:
As a kid, I saw all my history lessons at a remove: upheavals, struggle, significance occupied a different plane of existence, and they had no place in my humdrum life, as I had no place in theirs. An ignorant belief to have harbored, for sure, and one that can render whole sectors of society inert (cough middle class apathy cough). It’s also a view that finds an eloquent refutation in Emiliana Kampilan’s Dead Balagtas Vol. 1: Mga Sayaw ng Dagat at Lupa, a gorgeous book that combines a virtuosic command of the comics medium with a tremendous and remarkably empathetic vision of history.
In geology, as in comics, space is time: the movements of tectonic plates mark centuries, just as the procession of panels parcels out moments. Dead Balagtas seizes this similarity and runs with it, marshaling comics’ unique register to chart the evolution of the Philippines.
The book starts with a babaylan suspended in the total blankness of indeterminate time; Tungkung Langit and Laon Sina, emerging before the beginning of history, move through a full-bleed spread and large swaths of darkness, unbound by the panels, borders, and gutters that divide a page into discrete instances. Once they begin weaving the cosmos into existence, then the lines appear. And yet the ritual patterns of the babaylan’s narration differ from the sweeping curves of primordial time; from the expansive spaces that accommodate geology’s immense, ambling processes; from the smaller, rigid boxes that come with people and the deliberate measurements we use for our lives.
Dead Balagtas goes beyond simply fitting its stories into the structure of comics, though. Juxtaposition is the heart of comics’ syntax, but part of Dead Balagtas’ formal brilliance stems from how much it leans on juxtaposition as a semantic engine.
Each page brings history in direct contact with present-day stories. In “Ang Daigdig,” eroding friendships track the natural drift of continents and find melancholic weight in their shared inevitability. Plate subductions and deepening trenches echo personal ruptures in “Ang Karagatan” and “Lupang Hinirang,” even as these processes seed the hope of new ground arising from the tumult.
Juxtaposition eliminates the temporal—and subsequently, conceptual—divide between these narrative threads. Dead Balagtas then takes those threads and weaves them into a far-reaching dialogue about how one comes to build and occupy a place in the world, on scales massive or otherwise.
This isn’t to say that the vignettes interwoven with the country’s geologic timeline are themselves inconsequential. They’re small only in the sense that they are personal. But Dead Balagtas has chosen to tell the kinds of personal stories that are momentous in the mere act of their being told.
How often do we read stories that probe the intersections of gender, sexuality, class, religion, and so on, with unflinching, compassionate nuance? Dead Balagtas gives us queer romances between a Muslim stockbroker and a Christian contractual worker, an upper-middle-class student activist chafing under her mother’s expectations and a young laborer struggling to support her family. But the big-ticket issues never swallow up the characters or even get discussed as capital-I Issues, with all the heavy-handedness and tokenism that implies. Instead, Dead Balagtas ventures into the personal landscapes that most popular media rarely explore, taking these characters’ stories and their place in the country’s unfolding story as a matter of course.
What’s brilliant is that the book does something similar to its readers. Comics, after all, work as much through the spaces between panels as through the images and text within them. As we readers fill in the gaps, we string these drawn moments into a cohesive narrative. We are, in other words, participants in these histories ourselves. In choosing a medium built on such necessary engagement, Dead Balagtas takes our participation, our own place in the writing and sense-making of various histories, as a given. For how, the book seems to ask, could it be otherwise?
At the book’s launch, the creator, Emiliana Kampilan, spoke about each of us forming the essence of the land we live in.
“Tayo ay lupa (We are the land),” she says. “Tayo ay dagat (We are the sea).”
In retrospect, the opening tale of Laon Sina and Tungkung Langit reads like a waymark: the very cosmos springing forth from personal connection, from souls in love and in conflict. Consider Dead Balagtas the manifesto for Kampilan’s vision of a living, vibrant history: a history that encompasses us; a history that we embody.
