Shiki's Strings & Small Things (Fall/Winter 2020)

SHIKIS STRINGS AND SMALL THINGS SMALLL THINGS. BIG EYES FALL/WINTER 2020

SMALL MEMORIES & SMALL BABIES FInding wonder in small ON JET PLANES places and high skies

MAD LIBS FOR MAD TIMES Get to know the truthiness of the Englishlanguage hearts...next issue!

Subscribe by emailing shikis_strings.smallthings@yahoo.com

IVE S U L EXC HOR AUT ILE F PRO

Dive into Katherine Rundell's wild child wonder

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CONTENTS 18 YONDER ONLINE (A WEB SERIAL WE FOLLW FOR THE WONDER)

13 REVIEW: SWEET BEAN

Andrew Kern and our editorin-chief pals counterpoint on the etymology of 'truth" in English. Solid stuff.. Story on p. 20

12 AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT KATHERINE RUNDELL

4 Editor's Note Q&A replaces the traditional letter from our editor-in-chief 7 HOW TO LISTEN TO A TREE

9 ESSAY: JOAN DIDION A new contributor's refletion on Didion's honesty creativity and impact on his heart 4 INDIE INSIDER: Boston Local Bookshops Hole in the wall bookshops are open again in Boston, & they're oases.

13 REVIEW: Sweet Bean A gem-of-a-film found during COVID, with Miyazaki-insight and visual beauty.

3 SHORT Essay: BABIES ON JETPLANES

by C.J. Williams

20 WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR HUMOR? (special issue in 2021) Get reaquainted with your sense of the incongruous, belly-laugh-breakdancing, and nonsense

16 POETRY adynaton

by JC Evers

COMICS CORNER: Insert Your Comic Here __ STAST MAGAZINE MAD LIBS FOR MAD TIMES

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3 SMALL MEMORIES OF BABIES ON JET PLANES We have many memories of sheer startled joy that we forget until we see a baby see

by C.J.Williams

A baby on a jet plane is a fact that can both keep the flight safely skyhigh, and ground it.

dad’s black-jacketed arm and mom’s reaching body, and poked then by big sister’s big sisterly fingers, which sitll hadn’t got their tuna.

I watched, probably impolitely, as the family squished and swished and muttered, and mom sang for a little while in quiet Yiddish while baby yowled in loud baby and the jet gallumphed and grated on, louder and more violently than any of them. When I caught the mother’s eye, I smiled too.

It means... I love you just as you are. But literally, it means healthy you should always be..

T

here were three babies in stairstep sizing packed into the seats on the small commuter jet to our left, and while my seat mates eyed the squirming array of small energetic humanity with doubt and dread, I grinned loopily at them in delight.

Off like a rocket, up like a head pain, we launched. The rumble and spit of jet engine and inner machinery marked the recycled air, low background, rattling against my ribcage. But the babies’ cries were loud; were piercing; were human.

They disturbed me less, and I wondered why they seemed to disturb the two guys in distressed jeans behind me, and the woman next to me, more. cause they were much less threatening than the grinding of air on steel that shrieked outside.

They were less offensive than the false, eye-plastering ceiling lighting.

The oldest, a girl with pigtails almost as long as her dad’s sidelocks, though she wasn’t much longer, climbed continually over her mom, dad, bald baby sister and smudge-nosed, skull-capped baby brother, asking in untranslatable singsong for food.

She was speaking Yiddish, with breadcrumb stops of English dropped here and there. Tuna!

Tuna! TUNA, she finally bellowed.

A stewardess appeared, hovering nervously.

The mother shooed her away, and climbed almost as limberly over her husband to dig in a stuffed cooler. Tuna? she asked him, hanging over his shoulder.

He shrugged, juggling baby brother, who let a an almighty yawp of inexplicable glee.

Oh God,” said my seatmate.

“Oh goodness,” I said, grinning again at the little guy’s roundcheeked face squashed under

Who needed a screen in the back of the seat, when one could watch the look of frustration, wonder, challenge in a baby’s eyes, seeing this world for the first time from the bullet insides of a jet plane?

Gznt zolta zin, I thought I heard mom sigh, when we finally touched down, and -- cabin full of baby cooes, and the waft of tunafish -- we prepared to deboard. I later looked up the Yiddish online. After heaps of searching, I found a list of terms of thanks and endearment. Near the end, I read:“Gezunt zolstu zein,” It means, never change, or I love you just as you are. But literally, it means healthy you should always be..

I took it to heart. To be healthily alive, bellowing, and squirming, and seeing -- even in the belly of a capsule of steel shot through the high sky. But that’s the summary of a portrait that would have contained that family: healthy you should always be, healthily, disturbingly, delightfully human.

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TRIDENT

Looking for brain food, body food, and a comfortable quirky places to digest both? Trident, on Newbury Street, dedicates two-tight-storeys to packed shelves and diner-style tables and booths. A longtime favorite of the local population, Trident deserves its reputation. The food--from eggs and toast and crispy sandwiches to smoothies and barista-style sips--is solid, if not spectacular. But the ambience is everything. And if you can eat beside Camus, Dostoyevsky, Emerson and Thoreau, what else could you ask for? Trident also showcases a wide array of local artists and craftspeople (handmade socks, greeting cards, knicknacks), and ‘zines. Its front windows give diners or browsers a view of the passing crowds and cobbled streets.n.

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BOOKSMITH

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We have the Booksmith. He’s a bundled up fellow-you wouldn’t be likely to guess he packs in such a pandemonium of books by his small glass storefront facing Harvard Ave. just past the Coolidge Corner T-stop. But once you step in, you find bookcases crawling back a good block and half into the interior; and if you turn, you’ll realize you’ve got books underfoot too. The side-stairway leads into a basement, complementing the spiffy new volumes upstairs with a wealth of used tomes neatly shelved or stacked below.A curious place to browse, a beautiful stop for discovering local authors (as well as local artisans, jewelers, and some unique Boston souvenirs, like the mugs that state we’re from Bahs-ston, B---.) Always a good stack of bargains; lots of autographed copies -- and regular author events -- shelves marked with artistic construction paper notes, scrawled with bookseller recs -- if the Booksmith does not literally smith books, they smith a solid appreciation for them, and a great arena in which to discover something new, old, or Boston-strong.

EDITOR'S Q&A IN LIEU OF LETTER

F AVOURITE QUOTE THIS INSTANT? "Like all good artists, Cezánne did more than mirror the spirit of the time; he sought to heal. it".

THIS ISSUE? Someone recently told me how vital it was to notice where your gaze settled. "What you behold, holds you; you are seen but what you see." I wonder, when I write poetry, if the point is to put a mirror to wonder -- when we gaze into it, we are surprised to see our faces, or the world around us, as they really are. And how are they? Strange?

Incredible! Small and lovely, if smudged and weatherwhipped sometimes.

FAVOURITE WORD THIS INSTANT?

Komorebi: sunlight filtering through evening or autumn leaves (Japanese)

WHAT IS THE REASON FOR SHIKI'S STRINGS?

To make space. I wrote a few years ago, at the end of a reflection on what good word-ing does: "Most of all though, as I come to the end of my list and meandering wonders, good writing is made up of attentive silences. It is the one characteristic I pick out from each author, each creator, I adore. A good wordsmith and storyteller, whether in film or inked fiction, writes with attention to the empty spaces."

You can only open up empty spaces if you trust. So, as 4 | STA ST M A G A Z closer, INE Kate9DiCamillo says, "Come dear listener, I'm telling you a story."

HARVARD Large, thorough and actually small for all its heft, Harvard is piled top-heavy with the latest in academic discourse, local authors, and well, all the books.

If you're looking for a place to meander, the windows are fun -- but people watching is as interesting as book-browsing here, for students from around the globe come to pick through its shelves with their families, standing shoulder to shoulder (before COVID at least) with 8th generation Massachusetts citizens This littlelarge store also boasts a non-stop and impressive agenda of author events. Not nosiest for hunkering down, but one of thebest for bookseller greccomenddations and conversation stop in here if you're near...and then come back., .

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ROOTS / RECEIVE

GIVE / LEAF returns generously

a tree mostly receives

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if you listen to a tree

STEEP sits and lets be

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Once heard, tree words have a tendency to echo,

A 5 YEAR OLD TELLS WHAT THE TREE TELLS

Our editor also teaches kindergarten. In this issue, we've included what she gathered from one of the children.

ON WHAT LEAVES SAY They tell me to pick them up, because they're letters the tree has dropped and I have to get them all to make the words.

ON TWIGS For pretending to be a tree. See? I have branches! And ten fingers!

HER FAVOURITE TREE IN BIRGHTON The one that looks like Nana when she falls alseep. It snores too! but only in thunderstorms.

ON HOW TO LISTEN TO TREES You open your ears. Silly.

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PLAY! 3 Games personified as clerihews 2

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HIDE 'N' SEEK

CARDS

JACKS

Hide 'n' seek is a game where you can't peak; but if you do and win you just caught a sin.

My uncle's a card but he isn't a bard So when we sit down to the table he just never is able

Abby next door says Fr. Fitz is a bore but least he can fix that kind of glitch.

To sing a day sunny while dealing Gin Rummy and that makes me sad so I play rather bad.

Jack is the name of an author I don't think he ever did offer to throw things at the ground and bounce them around But that is the game that's named Jack all the same maybe its name would be Clive if it had different lines.

What happened to you eyes, man? And your heart? They're precious, don't you know. Pull them out every now and then. Dust them off.

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QUOTATION ELATION THE SPOT FOR SPURTS OF SMALL WORDS FROM OLD FRIENDS

ON...

"I do not know where I am going. But I know that I am being led." --Edith Stein

ON WONDER...

"I can't just sit at my desk. Beauty and ideas come from the unexpected. " -Miyazaki

ON LIFE AND DEATH...

"The trouble is, you see, that if you do know Right from Wrong, you can't choose Wrong. You just can't do it and live." --Granny Weatherwax

ON LOVE Children are tthe most effective educators. They keep us sane. They do this by almost driving us insane." -Peter Kreeft 6 | STAST MAGAZINE

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mad libs for mad times LOVE IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC

When Elbero was_______, he _____ that life was only worth ______ if you were ________ to a married _________. Because Antonina was a ______, _______, he chose her. Antonina was_____, and _____, and also tested positive for ___________. This made his ________extra difficult. It also made his mad decision to ________ Antonina ______times more _____. But since choosing a _________ woman in the first place and calling it ________ was insane, he didn't have anything more to _______. The neighbors ________ he ________ a great big __________. And since a(n)_________ never ________ they mixed that up with being ___________. It all ended with ________ and that was that and I'm ___________to it.

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Number (Past tense) Verb (Present Progressive) Verb (Past Tense) Verb Noun Adjective Noun Adjective Adjective Infectious Disease Noun (thing, object) (Prsent Tense) Verb Number Adjective Adjective (state of life) (Abstract) Noun (Past Participle) Verb (Past Tense) Verb Noin Animal (Present Tense) Verb adjective Noun Preposition

9. Cold and Unforgettable: Joan Didion’s Peculiarly Inspiring Writing

by John Whitehead

I remember a warm, sunny day one early spring that might be taken as a day on which I fell in (literary) love. That day I read the following passage: Perhaps because I grew up in California, Hawaii figured large in my fantasies. I sat as a child on California beaches and imagined that I saw Hawaii, a certain shimmer in the sunset, a barely perceptible irregularity glimpsed intermittently through squinted eyes. The curious void in this fantasy was that I had not the slightest idea what Hawaii would look like if I did see it…

“There was, to begin with, the Hawaii first shown to me in an atlas on December 7, 1941, the pastel pinpoints that meant war and my father going away and makeshift Christmases in rented rooms near Air Corps bases and nothing the same ever again. Later, when the war was over, there was another Hawaii, a big rock candy mountain in the Pacific which presented itself to me in newspaper photographs of well-fed Lincoln-Mercury dealers relaxing beside an outrigger at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel or disembarking en famille from the Lurline, a Hawaii where older cousins might spend winter vacations learning to surfboard… I do remember that I made no connection between that Hawaii and the Hawaii of December 7, 1941…

“In so doing I misapprehended Hawaii completely, for if there is a single aura which pervades Honolulu, one mood which lends the lights a feverish luster and the pink catamarans a heartbreaking absurdity and which engages the imagination as mere paradise never could, that mood is, inescapably, one of war.”

The subsequent recounting of a visit to the islands includes a visit to the remains of the USS Arizona, and then the following experience: "[There is] a place in Honolulu that is quieter still than the Arizona: the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. They all seem to be twenty years old, the boys buried up there in the crater of an extinct volcano named Punchbowl, twenty and nineteen and eighteen and sometimes not that old.“SAMUEL FOSTER HARMON,” one stone reads. “PENNSYLVANIA. PVT 27 REPL DRAFT 5 MARINE DIV. WORLD WAR II. APRIL 10 1928—MARCH 25 1945.”

"Samuel Foster Harmon died, at Iwo Jima, fifteen days short of his seventeenth birthday. Some of them died December 7 and some of them died after the Enola Gay had already bombed Hiroshima and some of them died on the dates of the landings at Okinawa and Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal and one whole long row of them, I am told, died on the beach of an island we no longer remember. There are 19,000 graves in the vast sunken crater above Honolulu.

“I would go up there quite a bit. If I walked to the rim of the crater I could see the city, look down over Waikiki and the harbor and the jammed arterials, but up there it was quiet, and high enough into the rain forest so that a soft mist falls most of the day. One afternoon a couple came and left three plumeria leis on the grave of a California boy who had been killed, at nineteen, in 1945. The leis were already wilting by the time the woman finally placed them on the grave, because for a long time she only stood there and twisted them in her hands…

“I saw no one else there but the men who cut the grass and the men who dig new graves, for they are bringing in bodies now from Vietnam. The graves filled last week and the week before that and even last month do not yet have stones, only plastic identification cards, streaked by the mist and splattered with mud. The earth is raw and trampled in that part of the crater, but the grass grows fast, up there in the rain cloud.”

These passages are from “Letter from Paradise 21° 19’ N., 157° 52’ W” (1966) one of the many essays penned by Joan Didion, which was published in her collection Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968) and remains one of my favorite pieces of hers.

The essay is striking in many ways. It ranges widely across Hawaii’s history and society. Didion touches not only on the Pearl Harbor attack but on the archipelago’s pre-war history as a colonial fiefdom run by a handful of families and its post-war history as a hub of global American military might. Regarding the latter, she observes, “Perhaps nowhere else in the United States is the prospect of war regarded with so much equanimity.”

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She describes the dissolute, desperate behavior of sailors on leave, and Hawaii’s complex race relations, including the growing racial diversity of the prestigious Punahou school. (Didion was writing a few years before the matriculation of Punahou’s most famous student, who decades later would present her with a National Humanities Medal—a twist she probably appreciated.) Without being academic, the essay provides much information and insight, offering a glimpse into the hard, often dark, political and economies realities beneath the kitschy, tourist-friendly Hawaiian image that often prevails.

The essay also skillfully changes and balances tones. At times cool, distant, and clinical as she describes the society under observation, she is also capable of piercing sincerity, as in the passage about the Punchbowl Cemetery. Above all, though, the piece is beautifully written, thanks to Didion’s mastery of prose and finding of telling details (the wilted lei, Harmon’s age).

Reading that essay and others in the Slouching towards Bethlehem collection began a literary love for Didion’s work that has yet to end over two years later. To date, I have only scratched the surface of her work. A prolific writer of journalism and fiction, Didion has published five essay collections; five novels; two works of reportage; several screenplays in collaboration with her husband, John Gregory Dunne; and two memoirs. I have so far read her first two essay collections, Slouching and The White Album (1979)—which gained her fame in the 1960s and 1970s and are probably still her most beloved works—as well as a later collection, After Henry (1992).

Doubtless as I read more my impressions of her will evolve, but at present I can identify reasons she has meant so much to me and even inspired me.

First and most important, she is a great essayist. Although her essays cover many topics, from contemporary politics to profiles of notable people, what Didion excels at is the description and analysis of a place: a state, a city, a neighborhood, or even a specific building or structure. She is best known for writing on her home state of California and is probably most eloquent on this topic. Yet she writes with similar skill on many other locales, including New York City, the Hoover Dam, Gilded Age mansions in Newport, and, of course, Hawaii.

The “Letter from Paradise” essay includes basic features that tend to appear in these essays on places. Didion provides a detailed, near-lyrical description of how the location looks and feels to a visitor. She writes of the Hoover Dam’s “pristine concave face gleaming white against the harsh rusts and taupes and mauves of that rock canyon,” while the nearby construction town, Boulder City, “retains the ambiance of a model city, a new town, a toy triangular grid of green lawns and trim bungalows, all fanning out from the Reclamation building” (“At the Dam,” 1970). An isolated stretch of road in southern California “suggests something curious and unnatural. The lemon groves are sunken…so that one looks directly into their dense foliage, too lush, unsettlingly glossy, the greenery of nightmare; the fallen eucalyptus bark is too dusty, a place for snakes to breed” (“Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” 1966).

Going beyond the surface level, she analyzes the political, economic, or environmental realities underlying the life of this part of world. In addition to the Second World War’s transformation of Hawaiian society, the reader learns variously about California’s own process of wartime change, as well as its desperate dependence on adequate water supplies and vulnerability to natural forces such as earthquakes, wildfires, and the Santa Ana wind. One learns about the complications and absurdities of New York life created by the urban political machine; and about how the Newport mansions’ ugliness reflected their owners’ harsh, acquisitive livelihoods.

Last, she often includes an element of personal anecdote or reflection. We learn of how she cried at the submerged remains of the USS Utah and USS Arizona, her odd sense of peace at Alcatraz’s abandoned remains, or how California’s evolution meant the loss of the society and way of life she had known from childhood. This subjective, autobiographical dimension to Didion’s essays, which some doubtless find self-absorbed, adds something to them for me. Didion’s frequent discussion of how these places affected her makes what otherwise could have been informative but flavorless, textbook-like “reports” into something relatable. Her approach resembles how George Orwell evoked the plight of coal miners in The Road to Wigan Pier, by taking the time to describe how it felt to him to descend into a mine, to encounter the dust and noise, and to endure the physical toll of walking the mine’s tunnels.

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Reading these kinds of essays provides the thrill of reading good prose and learning about places and dimensions of life that I was scarcely aware of before. California’s environmental problems, New York’s byzantine regulations, or the engineering of the Hoover Dam are not topics I would necessarily have made the effort to read about on my own. Joan Didion made them fascinating and sometimes even beautiful subjects, though them fascinating and sometimes even beautiful subjects, though. Indeed, having read her on these topics, I realize that it makes perfect sense that I would enjoy such essays. She goes beneath the superficial level of a travelogue to show how the geography of a place both shapes and reflects the live of the people who inhabit it. That kind of analysis is central to my perennial interests in peace, war, and international relations—it is the very essence of the discipline of “geopolitics.” To make me see how unfamiliar topics connect to what has already fascinated me for so long, to make the previously obscure become relevant—that is truly the mark of a great writer.

Yet there is more to what Didion’s work has meant to me than that. Her own character and sensibility, which is so present in her writing even when it is not the main subject, inspires me.

To those familiar with her work, this might seem an odd statement, as “inspiring” is the probably among the last adjectives most people would apply to Joan Didion. The tone of her essays tends to vary from the cool and ironic to the pessimistic, melancholy, and even nihilistic. Her analyses of particular places reflect this perspective, as they present the hard, ugly, bleak politics or economics or ecology beneath a community’s appealing surface. (Apparently this tendency grew even stronger in her later work.) While one might take creative inspiration from Didion’s skill, what could be inspiring about her personality?

Perhaps simply the fact that she attained such success as a writer at all offers inspiration. Didion’s most striking characteristic in interviews is her painful shyness and even inarticulateness in person. The writer Caitlin Flanagan, who recalled meeting Didion at a party when Flanagan was a teenager, described Didion as seeming “like a young woman who had never been to a dinner party without her parents” and surmised she had a “profound—crippling—socialanxiety disorder” (“The Autumn of Joan Didion,” Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2012). Attempts at conversation went nowhere.

Flanagan was meeting Didion as a complete stranger, but even relatives do not seem to elicit much more from her. In the biographical documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017), where Didion is interviewed by her own nephew, director Griffin Dunne, she is similarly sphinx-like. Her own self-characterization in Slouching Towards Bethlehem is as being “so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate.”

The contrast between Didion’s wallflower temperament and the elegant, supremely assured essays she produced is extraordinary. As she once told Tom Brokaw in an interview, writing is “the only way I can be aggressive.” That someone so reticent and seemingly insecure could become a skilled, successful writer and even something of a celebrity should be encouraging to many—certainly it is so to me.

Didion’s unique appeal for me goes beyond either her skill as a writer or her success despite extreme social uncertainty, however. Something deeper and (perhaps appropriately) hard to express is at work. The key might be another favorite essay, a famous one called “On Self-Respect” (1961), in which Didion tries to explain part of her personal philosophy.

She describes, in an impressionistic way, characteristics that mark a self-respecting person.

One is a willingness to accept hardship and sacrifice in the pursuit of a goal: “one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.” As she later puts it, “it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price.” Another characteristic is accepting one’s inevitable failures in life. Yet another is not being dependent on other people for our sense of self-worth and therefore being willing sometimes to forgo others’ approval and affection.

The alternative is to be “peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.” What links these characteristics, what is at the heart of self-respect, is to stick to one’s own code or goal (whatever that might be) even when it is difficult or means going your own way.

Didion touches on something powerful here, not only in the essay “On Self-Respect” but in the way she pursued a career as writer and reporter (crippling shyness notwithstanding) and shared her idiosyncratic, haunting, sometimes cold analyses and reflections with her readers. In keeping with her California background and concerns, Didion’s life and work fit into an appropriately western mold: stoic, laconic, drawn towards solitude. She is hardly a heart-warming writer, but, for a certain kind of kindred spirit, her work is unforgettable.

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STAST FEATURE

12 AUTHOR PROFILE: RUNDELL

Cartwheeling in thunderstorms, dancing on roofs, and falling headlong through the Amazon...Rundell's characters have as startling adventurous insides as they do out

A woman who writes the wildness of the heart for children needs to be read by adults who have forgotten

by C.J.Williams

An interviewer in The Financial Times recently asked if she's fearless. “I used to be fearless. " I’m not fearless any more. Fear is a fact, but in things like this it’s not useful information. It’s just our human animal reaction. But you can say, ‘Good, you’re afraid, that makes sense. Do it anyway. Do it scared.’”.

“I used to be fearless. I’m not fearless any more. Fear is a fact, But you can say, ‘Good, you’re afraid, that makes sense. Do it anyway. Do it scared.’”

R

undell is 33, the author of multiple novels, a fellow of All Soul's College -- but perhaps above all else, what makes her herself... she is a writer who lives and writes with wonder, wildly.

“I didn’t have to learn trapeze for the book,” she says. “I could just watch other people doing it. But those moments when you do things that are connected to your work have always given me some understanding I didn’t expect. And I love the idea of learning something as an adult.

“I think it’s so easy to go quite a long time without really learning anything new. I once read that if you want your life to feel like it’s not zipping by out of your control, just learn something new — that’s the way to slow down time.”

She grew up in Africa, and Belgium “We’d go on holiday to Nyanga and we’d go out by ourselves and walk through fields of cows, climb the trees, swim in the lake and build a raft, and the fact that our parents weren’t there checking we were OK was the thing that made us feel like we were warriors.”

“I think we have yet to imagine children’s interior lives as being as interesting and valuable as those of adults. But they are. They are as rich and strange as adults.”

She thinks The Little Prince and Eva Ibbotson's book, Journey to the River Sea, great antidotes for the poison of anxiety during these times of slight upet. .

“This is a moment in which we need to remember the core truths, and I think children’s books are often about the core truths. We need children’s books which urge us to acknowledge our fear and, nonetheless, not fold.”As our earlier essay points out about babies: "I took it to heart. To be healthily alive, bellowing, and squirming, and seeing -- even in the belly of a capsule of steel shot through the high sky. [...] healthy you should always be, healthily, disturbingly, delightfully human."

Not fearless, but shot with wonder, and willing like Rundell to delve deeply intoadventure of living.

As to why she writes for children?

“I’d say that those who raise a sceptical eyebrow at children’s books are the exact people who need them most: because although scepticism is an important skill, too much of it is destructive and paralysing, and the best children’s books can be an antidote to scepticism — an assertion of the reality of bold, unapologetic truths about love, and vulnerability and the galvanic power of hope.” S T A S T M A G A Z I N E

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13 FILM REVIEW: SWEET BEAN A Quiet Film with Resounding Power: SWEET BEAN

by Lisa Williams

W

hat wonderful film! If you like what film does best (tell a story through visuals), you will love SWEET BEAN, based on the novel

by Durian Sukegawa with screenplay by Naomi Kawase who also directed the film. The film draws the viewer in through lingering shots of the features of a neighborhood: trees and rain and sky and Sentaro, a dorayaki (pancake) maker, working in his corner stall, selling this classic japanese streetfood. This shop is where the middle-aged Sentaro works, and lives (rather unhappily); and where he is approached by Tokue, an elderly woman who wants a job. Sentaro is abrupt with her, but Tokue is persistent. She is seeking a place to belong and to share her love for making the sweet bean paste, which is used on the dorayaki.

Sentaro is not happy to be troubled by this odd elderly woman whose gnarled hands

don’t seem competent for everyday tasks, let alone cooking.

But since one of his troubles is making money at his dorayaki stand, and it turns out Tokue makes delicious sweet bean paste, he is persuaded to hire her to help him. He is a reluctant student as the sweet bean preparation becomes a lesson in how to live life. Tokue’s example and the patience it takes to make good sweet bean paste begins to challenge Sentaro’s toughness and roughness. The interaction between these two is observed by Wakana, a young student who comes everyday to receive the unsalable dorayaki, which Sentaro saves for her. They become a trio, connected by their need for sustenance, both material and emotional. I love how the balance of the elements in the recipe for sweet bean paste is paralleled by the characters’ development.

Cartwheeling in thunderstorms, dancing on roofs, and falling headlong through the Amazon...Rundell's characters have as startling adventurous insides as they do out

The character dynamic also looks quite a lot like a dorayaki pancake: The on- edge Sentaro is sandwiched between the tentative, yet persistent Tokue, his elderly helper/teacher, and the sad and wide-eyed, Wakana. The thread of their hurts that might otherwise thrust them apart ends up being the bond that grows their tentative friendship. The two younger characters need Tokue’s age and experience, the patience she has learned in her suffering, to discover hope. This perspective allows them to see the possibility that caring for others might just give them the meaning they haven’t been able to find for themselves alone. Tokue is annoying at first; but she charms them (and annoys Sentaro) with her appreciation of all the details that go into making sweet bean paste. She knows how to give her full attention to all the beauty of the moment. The filmmaker also reflects this love for all the small things in the way her screenplay, and her camera, attend with a contemplative slowness, to all the details in her characters and the setting. She lets these images, and her characters, tell the story through gestures, facial expressions, attitudes. Just as she lingers on the trees and the natural elements, she exposes the inner world of the human experience by lingering on faces and hands and spaces. The actors are so obliging to their devoted director that I could genuinely believe at times that I was simply watching these characters living out their lives.

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MAGAZINE | 8

I was mesmerized watching realizations and emotions come to Masatoshe Nagase (Sentaro) in the last scenes of the movie. All of the actors give superb performances.

There is no rush in the visual storytelling here, which is not to say there is no conflict. The filmmaker paces the narrative with attention to both the internal and external conflicts. She does this by doing what all good storytellers do: showing not telling. The film itself reflects its internal elements in its external presentation, for it moves as carefully and gently as Tokue's hands stirring the sweet bean paste.

This care gives us, the audience, the deeply nourishing and satisfying experience of being drawn both out and into ourselves through an encounter that can only be had through character, image, and a creator who trusts her audience with some mystery. She is careful and gentle in allowing the stories to unfold and be contained in the wider natural world that surrounds them.

It is the attention to detail-- in the filmmaking, in the sweet bean pastemaking, and in the quiet growth of the characters that ultimately creates the deep sweet connections we really crave: relationship and stillness. These are ingredients in a recipe that brings us transformation and lasting satisfaction. SWEET BEAN'S themes of deep suffering, rejection, friendship, loss and love, are given the setting they deserve in this beautiful film by Naomi Kawase.

POEM: wildness saved One needs a wild heart!to be loved (and to love)but a will that will say Stay.

See. We meet.

And wildness escapescalamityin an embrace.

UNKNOWN Virgin Mary

Sweet Bean can currently be viewed for free via your Hoopla library account.

Sweet Bean can also be purchased on Amazon.

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MAGAZINE | 8

13 Web Serial Adventure: GO YONDER “Come with me. It’s time I showed you why so many believe this city to be cursed.”

We strode after her down several flights of stairs and into a tangle of darker corridors.

“Be patient,” she said. “Even I get mixed up when I have to come through here.”

She did in fact take several wrong turns along the way. This section of the building was dusty and in considerably worse shape than the others we’d seen, with sizable cracks in some of the walls and floors.

At a certain point in the final stretch the light tubes just gave up, leaving us to walk in darkness before stopping at an arch with a cold breeze flowing through it.My unease jumped five notches up the scale when I stepped through the arch. I felt a similar resistance to when I’d followed Esther through the maintenance door at Newcastle Plaza, an age ago.

We entered one last downward-sloping corridor that took us out into the open, where Kir and I stood dumbstruck on a stone porch that was more like a pier, protruding out from the side of a huge pit.

Above us, the eroded walls sloped up to ground level at an angle that looked climbable, interrupted here and there around the circumference by jagged fissures. Below us, the walls descended a short distance in a sheer drop before they vanished into the slowly swirling mist that filled the abyss. It was lit up sporadically from within by pulses of subtly color-changing light, the same light I’d seen from a distance when we were lost in the city streets.Behind and on either side of us, the walls of the Institute Holistic had collapsed.

YONDER is currently accessible for free online at [https://yonderserial.com]

POEM: oceans in oceans touchstonestrawling bluesea waves windtruetruth blowswind hoves-oceansmotiontrawling deepinsidetoo

EMILY WILLIAMS "sacred geometry"

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MAGAZINE | 8

Web Serial Adventure: GO YONDER A few other portions of the building hung over the pit like our porch; the rest was like a messy cross-section. In front of us, a crumbling stone staircase with wrought metal railings stretched improbably outward and downward.

Sem started down it, Kir followed, and I held out as long as I could before my don’t-look-like-a-sissy instinct fully kicked in.

After descending a few of the steps I began to feel them bob slightly under my weight, kind of like walking across those floating foam blocks at a water park.

“Uh, Sem? Is this safe?"

Kir gave me a look. “As safe as anything else we’ve done today.”

“You may have to reconsider your definition of safety from now on,” Sem called back. “But we’re all right for now. I’ve had bigger visitors than you two down here. Hold the railing if it helps you.”I t didn’t help my nerves, or my creeping sense of unreality. We get used to solid surfaces pushing back on us in a very particular way, and it threw my brain for a loop that the metal felt inconsistent in how hard and how soon it pushed back. Almost immediately I noticed it in the ground as well. It was worse than the tricks a fever can play on the sense of touch.Gaps appeared between the steps, and they grew wider as we descended. By the time we reached a landing, the staircase was a chain of blocks strung together by the railings alone.

POEM: adynaton i am myself reach until

adynaton--dead woman living highlying truths to they build; and i can tie my bootstrings to the sky. and swing. i’ll swing from here to heaven’s looms and tie my boots strings into those, to sign my name ---adynaton--(that which is beyond hyperbole)--impossibility--into god’s weaving room.

C.J. WILLIAMS ents still roam

YONDER is currently accessible for free online at [https://yonderserial.com]

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MAGAZINE | 8

Web Serial Adventure: GO YONDER Sem hopped over one more gap to the last block of the landing, from which a few more steps hung down before the whole thing ended in midair.

“Damn,” I breathed, craning my neck out as far over the edge as I dared.“I certainly hope not.”

“No, I mean…never mind. What are we looking at?”

“I call it a rent. There used to be a whole wing of the Institute here, and a section of the neighboring community.”

“What’s at the bottom?”

“You’re assuming there is one.”

“Has anyone gone down and tried to find it?”

“If this was the kind of hole one could simply climb into and out of, I wouldn’t have the Institute and the city all to myself. What caused this cut deeper than just moving some matter out of the way.”

“You hear that, Kir? Don’t get any ideas.” He nodded, but I could tell he’d already gotten them.

I let go of the railing to cross the landing for a different view.

“So you’re saying — HAA! WHOA!” My right foot slipped out from under me and I staggered, losing my footing on the left as well and falling close to the edge. I flung an arm out and wrapped it around the nearest railing post before I could slide much farther.

I ran a shaky hand over the stone. It wasn’t wet.

Kir gave me a hand up, making sure to keep a tight grip on the railing himself.

“I’m sorry,” said Sem once I was back on my feet and compulsively scuffing my shoe to make sure friction was still on duty. “I meant to tell you sooner that things may not behave quite as they should when you get close to an anomaly like this. I think that’s enough of a demonstration for today.”

“So what happened here?” I asked when we were back on terra firma, though I thought I could guess.“ To be blunt, someone like you happened.”I sat down at the edge of the gaping hole in the world and let that sink in.

“You’re saying I could do something like this? That’s why people are scared of me?”

“No. I’m saying no one knows what you or your sister could do. Least of all you.”

In April of 2000, four young people disappeared from a now forgotten California suburb. One was lured by an invitation from beyond this world promising freedom, greatness, a fresh start. One was determined not to be left behind. One was searching for a world he could call home, and one wanted nothing more than to get back to the home she had. Twenty years later, Reid Emberley has resolved to publish his version of their story, including higher-dimensional conspiracies, sibling rivalry, mind shenanigans, overpowered school supplies, unreliable architecture, weaponized vocabulary, dangerously forgettable people, and snakes.

New chapters release on Thursdays at yonderserial.com.

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MAGAZINE | 8

Comics Corner

Draw it and submit to win 1 year of Shiki's Strings and Small Things

WHAT WE'RE READING books | blogs | blurbs

The Ickabod by J.K. Rowling The Long Patrol by Brian Jacques All Hallows Eve by Charles Williams Manalive by J.K.Rowling Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms by Katherine Rundell

J. Castrillo Art

Book Blurts [blog] by our editor Utopian Idiots [blog] by John Jalsvac & Will Pemberton