Author: Carolin Chao

As I understand it, Shaun Tan’s work is meant to be optimistic. “The Arrival” is a good example of this sort of mindset in which everything gets better eventually and “once you hit rock bottom the only way you can go is up” etcetera etcetera. So am I the only one who thinks that “The Lost Thing” was exactly the opposite of optimism for the future of humanity?

Let me explain. The short starts out optimistic enough, with the narrator actually noticing the lost thing that no one else notices, taking it in and trying to help it find the place where it belongs. But once he finds it a home the sad reality sets in. Despite his encounter with the strange thing that should have led him to question his life and perhaps the society he lives in -for instance, why is the government trying to get rid of these “lost things”? It’s honestly a bit sinister if you think about it- his life continues on as always. He even states that he has begun to see these odd things less and less, perhaps because he “has stopped noticing them.”

To put it bluntly, nothing has really changed. In fact things have probably gotten worse…

In summary, it seems to me that there are two messages here:

1. If you try to break away from the conforming masses, you will fail.
2. People have narrow focuses -they can see what is in front of them but do not understand the greater implications of what they are seeing.

Pretty pessimistic if you ask me… like something out of 1984…

“On his mother’s side he was more than mortal. He was the son of one of the Muses and a Thracian prince. His mother gave him the gift of music and Thrace where he grew up fostered it. The Thracians were the most musical of the peoples of Greece. But Orpheus had no rival there or anywhere except the gods alone. There was no limit to his power when he played and sang. No one and nothing could resist him.

“In the deep still woods upon the Thracian mountains
Orpheus with his singing lyre led the trees,
Led the wild beasts of the wilderness.

“Everything animate and inanimate followed him. He moved the rocks on the hillside and turned the courses of the rivers….

“When he first met and how he wooed the maiden he loved, Eurydice, we are not told, but it is clear that no maiden he wanted could have resisted the power of his song. They were married, but their joy was brief. Directly after the wedding, as the bride walked in a meadow with her bridesmaids, a viper stung her and she died. Orpheus’ grief was overwhelming. He could not endure it. He determined to go down to the world of death and try to bring Eurydice back. He said to himself,

“With my song
I will charm Demeter’s daughter,
I will charm the Lord of the Dead,
Moving their hearts with my melody.
I will bear her away from Hades.

“He dared more than any other man ever dared for his love. He took the fearsome journey to the underworld. There he struck his lyre, and at the sound all that vast multitude were charmed to stillness….

“O Gods who rule the dark and silent world,
To you all born of a woman needs must come.
All lovely things at last go down to you.
You are the debtor who is always paid.
A little while we tarry up on earth.
Then we are yours forever and forever.
But I seek one who came to you too soon.
The bud was plucked before the flower bloomed.
I tried to bear my loss. I could not bear it.
Love was too strong a god, O King, you know
If that old tale men tell is true, how once
The flowers saw the rape of Proserpine,
Then weave again for sweet Eurydice
Life’s pattern that was taken from the loom
Too quick. See, I ask a little thing,
Only that you will lend, not give, her to me.
She shall be yours when her years’ span is full.

“No one under the spell of his voice could refuse him anything. He drew iron tears down Pluto’s cheek,
and made Hell grant what Love did seek.

“They summoned Eurydice and gave her to him, but upon one condition: that he would not look back at her as she followed him, until they had reached the upper world. So the two passed through the great doors of Hades to the path which would take them out of the darkness, climbing up and up. He knew that she must be just behind him, but he longed unutterably to give one glance to make sure. But now they were almost there, the blackness was turning gray; now he had stepped out joyfully into the daylight. Then he turned to her. It was too soon; she was still in the cavern. He saw her in the dim light, and he held out his arms to clasp her; but on the instant she was gone. She had slipped back into the darkness. All he heard was one faint word, “Farewell.”

“Desperately he tried to rush after her and follow her down, but he was not allowed. The gods would not consent to his entering the world of the dead a second time, while he was still alive. He was forced to return to the earth alone, in utter desolation. Then he forsook the company of men. He wandered through the wild solitudes of Thrace, comfortless except for his lyre, playing, always playing, and the rocks and the rivers and the trees heard him gladly, his only companions. But at last a band of Maenads [women] came upon him….They slew the gentle musician, tearing him limb from limb, borne along past the river’s mouth on to the Lesbian shore; nor had it suffered any change from the sea when the Muses found it and buried it in the sanctuary of the island. His limbs they gathered and placed in a tomb at the foot of Mount Olympus, and there to this day the nightingales sing more sweetly than anywhere else.”

I apologize in advance if this post is an incoherent ramble, but this has been sitting in the back of my mind for a while and I just wanted to put it out there. So… what do you guys think of collage as an expression of a stream of consciousness? I think that skimming through magazines, cutting out whatever expresses your thoughts/feelings and arranging the clippings on a blank page is a good way of recording that stream of thoughts and feelings; however, I also wonder if the extra time taken to hunt down and cut out specific images/words to accurately express one’s inner dialogue means that the process is stymied and no longer a continuous “stream” of consciousness.

During our collage session I was cutting out whatever images and words caught my eye, with no particular result in mind -does this mean that my collage was the expression of a stream of unconsciousness?

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really understand why Edward Gorey’s works are considered inappropriate for children. Sure they’re dark and macabre, but the world isn’t a nice place to be and there’s no reason to fool kids into believing it is.

When I first read “The Bug Book” and “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” I read them as cautionary tales that teach important lessons. “The Bug Book” teaches children not to be “that person” -the party pooper, the downer, the one who “shout[s] personal remarks”- and to at least fake being pleasant, else they be rejected from social circles and eventually disposed of, while “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” warns children to be wary of dangerous things, such as stairs and bears, that could end up killing them.

But maybe my views are a product of my childhood experiences. Gorey’s short stories remind me of the rhymes my grandfather used to sing me to sleep with. One of my favorites was 小燕子 (Little Swallow), which went something like this:

… Looking back, I guess this was a little dark for a small child’s lullaby.

From what I understand, Ernst’s collages were made from images he cut out of other books. If I’m correct in assuming that books were made using traditional printing methods during his lifetime and that their images had to be etched into metal plates/blocks to be printed… does this mean that Ernst could be considered a printmaker as well as a collage artist? Thoughts are appreciated as I try to figure this out 🙂

While finishing up the illuminated page project, I started thinking about how illuminators of the past divvied up the work of illuminated pages. I seem to recall that the master illuminators and the apprentices from My Name is Red divided up work by complexity, with the easy sort of “filler” going to the apprentices and main subjects painted by the masters but I could be remembering the facts wrong.

Anyways, I was wondering if more “western” illuminators divided up the work any differently, or if they just worked on different pages altogether? Does anyone have an answer?

I had a lot of fun on Wednesday -it helped that the print workshop was a nice change of pace from regular class and the weather was really nice. Learning about the printing process was interesting. I wish we had gotten to use the clamshell press, since it looked really cool (mostly I wanted to see what happened if someone put a soda can between the plates of the press).

Anyways, once we got started with setting up the letters, Araseli and I found a good rhythm (apparently she had memorized the key that showed which letters were in which compartments by the end of the first sentence, which is a little scary if you ask me, and I discovered a trick in which I pressed my index finger into the grooves of letters to determine if they were the right way up, resulting in black lines all along my fingertip) and finished our two sentences fairly quickly. We originally planned to do two paragraphs, which was then reduced to one sentence and finally extended into two, but I really wish we could have done more and that we could go back again…

I meant to post this right after I watched the movie, but by the time I finished all 1 hour and 40 something minutes of it, it was already Wednesday (I started it Tuesday night) and time to sleep. Then I forgot all about it until now…

Anyways, before I say anything else let me say I love all of Goya’s work and his is progression from bright and cheerful subject material to dark and fantastical is absolutely fascinating.

However, what I didn’t love was this movie. I was constantly confused and annoyed as I paused and rewinded for the umpteenth time, having looked away for a fraction of a second and missed the subtitles as well as being worried for the state of Goya’s health -every few minutes my roommate would laugh as I made statements such as “whatever Goya’s smoking, he needs to stop” and “I’m not sure but I think Goya’s going on another acid trip”.

All in all, because of these complaints, I wasn’t able to appreciate the beauty of the art displayed in the movie or to contemplate it or Goya himself in any depth until I had gotten a good eight hours of sleep and dreams had washed the majority of this strange movie from my memory.

 

As we transition into Goya, once again I find myself wishing I had taken Spanish in elementary school rather than French. Living in California, it seemed natural to me at the time that I should learn Spanish, but my parents’ wish was that I take French. I complied and now remember none of it. The only phrases I know by heart are “where’s the toilet?” and “I’m a fruitcake.”

But I digress. Talking with my native Spanish speaking roommate over the past few days, I’ve grown increasingly confused. We’ve been discussing the intricacies of Spanish and the subtle nuances/implications behind certain phrases, an English dictionary in my hand as I feverishly try to find suitable English synonyms for difficult words. As all of this is happening, I wonder if I would still have this much trouble understanding if I had learned Spanish in elementary school. I still have trouble with Cantonese and Japanese, which I speak proficiently, but I can’t help but have a nagging feeling that it would be easier if I had.

Is anyone else having this much trouble and/or wishing they spoke Spanish?

On Wednesday I picked up watercolors for the first time since middle school, and once again I learned the importance of having watercolor paper to use with watercolors. Before the scriptorium, I had decided to illustrate a Celtic letter “U” with some spirals between the two posts of the “U”. All was going well with the sketching and coloring -I was pretty much done- until I decided to try my hand at gilding. Things swiftly went downhill as my once somewhat decent letter “U” turned into a mess of running felt-tip ink, sticky glue and flaky gold.

But, despite this post sounding overwhelmingly negative, I actually had a lot of fun. It was like I was back in carefree elementary school for an hour, trying to color between the lines, and the presence of food definitely helped.