Leuconoe's Blog

Anime Relations: Muteki Choujin Zanbot 3

Halfway through Zambot 3. This is depressing even when it's being heartwarming. Rare to see this sustained a focus on refugee experiences. The animation's also a bit depressing, because the designs are nice and now and then you see something that might look good with a budget. The titular Zambot has what I imagine those who are hip and with-it would call some sweet moves, too, though its Ultimate Final Attack isn't one of them -- and it's hard to enjoy the robot-violence in any uncomplicated way with Killer the Butcher around.

Oh yeah, and Keiko's mother is a Spartan.

So I've been reading the epic (I do not use the word lightly) shoujo action-adventure series Basara lately. It's great fun, though (and I'll let you decide whether this is a value judgement or just a statement of the obvious) it's no Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

One thing I've noticed is the rapid oscillation in the number of people around the hero/ine -- one minute she's surrounded by her comitatus, the next she's travelling with one companion, or facing some kind of trial alone. This is partly necessitated by the plot, I suppose, in that she's gradually falling in love with her greatest enemy, and situations have to be contrived in which they can meet in private and without knowing each other's real identities.

So I've recently begun reading Ellul's Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes and, as with New Demons, often some of the finest bits are when he succinctly summarises something that's useful to the main thread of his argument, but not directly a part of it. (I'm not really good enough at reading '60s French intellectuals to unpick a lot of his main points, because their delivery method is so odd -- to me.)

One of these succinct little summaries describes the modern world's 'instinctive popular beliefs' (as distinguished from thought-out, concrete 'philosophical notions') which unite the proletariat and the bourgeois: 'that man's aim in life is happiness, that man is naturally good, that history develops in endless progress, and that everything is matter.'

Comparing our period to past ones, I suppose you could say that the medievals would reject all four of those and that the classical world was divided on the first, second and fourth, and would've rejected the third.

(Incidentally, by 'the modern world' Ellul meant both the Eastern and Western blocs. He remarks that the remainder of the world is headed this way. I'm not sure whether that progess has finished playing out yet.)

(As usual, this post won't have paragraphs if you read it in Google Reader. Blame MAL.)

As some of you may have gathered from a recent blog entry, I've been living in King's College, Cambridge for a month. It's been an interesting time. The university's a very nice place, though of course I have to add that it can afford to be nice because -- compared to other British universities, at least -- it's pretty rich. Being based in a specific, geographically limited college working environment with a relatively small number of other people does make a qualitative difference to life: the day is longer, because you spend less time travelling, and it's much easier to find interesting conversations at the bar. And of course the university's facilities, chief among them the (legal deposit) university library, are excellent.

While at King's I've spent a lot of time in the college Chapel, because its architecture and stained glass windows fall slap-bang into my period and literary interests. The stained glass is one late-medieval/early modern narrative set, with the exception of the west window, some odd restoration works and a light in the fourteenth window (and most of the glass in the side chapels). Because it took so long to put in, the art style of the glaziers changes as the sequence progresses -- and because the Reformation happened while the lights were being glazed, by the time you reach the second quarter of windows you find Mary being de-emphasised and little touches like the High Priest at Jesus's trial being a dead ringer for the Pope.

Thankfully (because we all need light relief) the Chapel can be pretty funny when it isn't being sublime. There's a hilariously ghastly organ screen, modelled on a triumphal arch, which Henry VIII had put in (it has 'HA', for Henry and Anne Boleyn, on it -- oops!). There's also the fact that it's far, far too big. I think Henry VI, who had the planning and initial building work done, imagined that King's College itself would be a bit bigger, and I also think he was a bit bonkers -- anyway, it rather dwarfs the rest of the College, and since it's supposedly a chapel rather than a full-blown church it doesn't have many architectural complications, like a cross-shaped floorplan; it's basically just a giant holy shed.

(I also attended Evensong at the chapel and climbed up one of its spiral staircases, through its roofspace and out onto the roof, but there's much less I can say about doing those things except that they were cool.)

Theory: the West, as we think of it here in the West, might best be considered a movement rather than a place. Not only does this remove the problem that nearly everywhere is west of somewhere, it also fits our (imagined -- I've no idea if this is historical, and I suspect it isn't) idea of the progress of civilisation's cockpit, from Mesopotamia to Asia Minor (and Troy, which is supposedly where our translatio imperii starts), to Greece and Rome, to the area that is now France, and the Holy Roman Empire, to the Netherlands, to Britain and then to North America. Weirdly, this still works if the cockpit moves to China in the next century or so.

(All of the above requires that we carefully forget a lot of things -- the Eastern Roman Empire and Russia, North Africa and the medieval Middle East, and so on. I'm not suggesting that this is good or accurate, just that it's amusing.)

I was passing near the Barbican yesterday, so I dropped in to St Giles Cripplegate, where Milton is buried. The memorials are relatively unostentatious: there's a bust on the wall, and a statue, but not a big or a prominent statue. London had lovely weather yesterday, so it was quite sunny inside the church, and an organist was practicing some kind of light, slightly jazzy tune. As a whole, it lacked the cold austerity you might associate with the man, and I thought that was nice.

The Lib Dems (Britain's third party) are keen on proportional representation. Cui bono? The Lib Dems, of course: at the moment, they don't have much of a hope of regularly affecting government policy, but PR would make coalition government much more likely.

Although they don't argue for it on those grounds: they argue that it's fairer. They have a point. The trouble is, I fear that coalition governments aren't as good at governing and, after thinking about it, I came to the surprising discovery that I think good governance is more important to me than fairness.

I went to the cinema to see this today. It was a good laugh, worth the price of admission. I may even acquire a DVD copy when it's cheap enough, as it feels like the Westminster-watcher's 'mates + beer' movie.

As satire, it was agreeably pessimistic. If anyone had redeemed themselves in some heartwarming climax it would've failed.

I always plan to read more than I actually do over the summer, but such is life. Anyway, while returning the books I used for my last essay I took out a few to start with (list incoming, which'll look weird in the RSS feed 'cos it strips out line breaks):

- Later Medieval Europe: 1250-1520 (Waley and Denley): this is about the most general of general surveys, but it's recent (2001 revision) and will give me a better grasp of the timeframe I'll be working in next year.

- Metamorphoses (Ovid, Innes's translation): One of the glaring gaps in my Classical background reading. I have to fill this in.

- The Second World War, volume 2 (Churchill): I'm not expecting a rigorously historical account, but Churchill's prose is a pleasure (maybe it was the bricklaying?). I doubt I'll read all of this but I may well read most if it, dipping in and out.

- Handbook of Electioneering (Cicero, Shackleton Bailey's Loeb CL translation): I'm mostly expecting some 'the more things change, the more they stay the same' lulz from this practical guide to image management (at least, I imagine it's a guide to image management).

- Spenser's Images of Life (Lewis, worked up after his death by Fowler): A favourite critic writing on a favourite poet.

So these are some passing thoughts that came to me while I was watching Simoun. Simoun's heroes are pilots but also religious figures; some of the military aviation elements of the plot reminded me of the First World War aviation fiction I read when I was younger, which led on to the thought that here in Britain the dead of the First World War are somehow holy, in an oddly secular way. Why?

The war itself has, more or less, passed out of living memory. That's beginning to happen to the Second World War too, but those who are on the upper edge of middle age now were brought up by people who lived through WW2, and even I have heard one or two eyewitness accounts of events from that war. WW1 is mostly symbols now: poppies, of course, and endless rows of white crosses. It's also the war that started the tradition of Remembrance Day, and it left less of a tangible impact on our landscape — it was bombing during WW2, not WW1, that determined my hometown's streetmap. Finally, the most memorable suffering of WW2 was civilian suffering. The dominant event of WW2 is the Holocaust; the dominant event, for Britons at least, of WW1 is the Somme. So the memory of the First World War is more the memory of its soldiers in particular.