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About the awards

Honoring East And Southeast Asian Titles for Children and Young Adults

National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA), the Committee on Teaching about Asia (CTA) of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), and Asia for Educators (AFE) at Columbia University sponsor the annual Freeman Book Awards for new young adult and children's literature. The awards recognize quality books for children and young adults that contribute meaningfully to an understanding of East and Southeast Asia. Awards are given in two categories: Children's and Young Adult on the several countries of East and Southeast Asia.

Learn More Submission Guidelines

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About the awards National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA), the Committee on Teaching about Asia (CTA) of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), and Asia for Educators (AFE) at Columbia University sponsor the annual Freeman Book Awards for new young adult and children's literature.

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Original title: Hadashi no Gen

Barefoot Gen is the autobiographical story of manga artist, Keiji Nakazawa and his experience during the times of the Hiroshima bombings in 1942. What ensues is something so unbelievable, so gritty, so real, it will change your life forever.

The film is adapted as an anime from Keiji's short manga series depicting all that he experienced just at the age of six when the bombings hit. His story truly is one of the most amazing things you will ever hear. Nothing else in film has ever captured the effects of the bombings in such a real and emotional way. It shows the viewers what really did happen and what we were never told. It shows us how real the bombings really were as we follow Gen through his struggle for survival during Japan's darkest hours.

If you haven't seen this film, you are missing out. While the film does not hold back on the gritty details, and what happens to the people of Japan throughout the whole of the film is very horrifying, you cannot miss this film due to these aspects. It's these things that make it so real and it would be a tragedy to ignore this film. It opened my eyes to what really went down in Hiroshima and I almost felt personally affected. During my whole time watching this film, I kept finding myself in disbelief that something like this actually occurred in our history, and recently at that. I mean, a whole society was rebuilt on the effects of the bombings and once again shows us how very, very wrong war is. One of the best films I have ever seen.

9.5/10 Hamish Kearvell A.K.A Screaming Japan Productions - www.myspace.com/screamingjapanproductions

Answer

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Barefoot Gen: Directed by Mori Masaki. With Issei Miyazaki, Catherine Battistone, Yoshie Shimamura, Iona Morris. A powerful statement against war, Barefoot Gen is a disturbing story about the effect of the atomic bomb on a boy's life and the lives of the Japanese people.

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Directed by Yimou Zhang. With You Ge, Li Gong, Ben Niu, Wu Jiang. After Fugui and Jiazhen lose their personal fortunes, they raise a family and survive difficult cultural changes during 1940s to 1970s China.

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Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2014

I enjoyed this film more than my friend from Taiwan. She and I saw a few episodes of a Chinese soap opera years ago, and I understand why she considered this too heavy: there is almost no humor; the chain of misfortunes is unbroken. This was an important and interesting period in Chinese history, which resonates with me partly since I recall the passion in the voice of a fellow PhD student who told me how she was forced to work in the fields, and ordered to hate her parents. Another student whose family had a lower profile told me that the Cultural Revolution was like a 4-year vacation for him.
The quality of the film is generally good, while it maintains a style of cinematography compatible with its everyman point of view. The acting is excellent. Its greatest strength is its evocation of the feeling of living during the Cultural Revolution, and the abuses that fell on both good and bad, while opportunists sided with the Party in order to get ahead and to pull down those who used to have more than they did. A few more touches of the humanity and humor that I have known from PRC emigrees would have made this film more realistic - but I've seen no other film like this one.

Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2015

For those who have come to believe that the virtues of communism are to be spread throughout the world, you may be disappointed that this film gives a very accurate detail of what happens when ideology trumps reason.

Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2013

A dramatic portrayal of the insidious nature of communism where people lived in fear of retribution if they stepped outside the restrictions thus imposed. The breakdown of neighbourly relations where freedom of expression was curtailed and replaced by fear leaving people cautious to even start a conversation.

Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2017

I watched this film several years ago and to this day it still runs though my mind. The passion the film maker created in scene with each look in the eyes of the actors brings to life the painful interaction between lived ones this simply amazing. The story had me searching my heart wonder how people and communities allow this to happen. I look at my own life and found similarities happening in the last 20 years. The film takes you though days, month and years as you watch people slowly lose their rights, loved ones and the lay back pretending it doesn't effect them. A country is never over thrown in a night that would calls rebellion it was over thrown though small changes this group of people thought didn't effect them but their neighbors.
What happened in this movie should be a reminder of what could happen anywhere at any time.
I can't put into words how amazing this film is. My husband had to watch it for class and to this day I am beyond grateful I watched it with him.

Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2006

"The Blue Kite" is a realistic film about the lives of Chinese families in the hutong, or traditional neighborhoods in Beijing between 1953 and 1968. We get fairly good impressions as to what life was like for children and adults living in courtyard homes that are increasingly being dismantled in Beijing, replaced by modern apartments and stores. We see how families gather around in their courtyard homes to celebrate the Chinese New Year. We also see how Chinese families then, as now, are very close, gathering together during family meals, and how grandparents often helped raise their grandchildren.
This film also realistically portrays some of the terrible effects of Mao's policies on ordinary human beings in China. I highly recommend this film and "To Live" as being the two best and most realistic films as to how Mao's misguided, perverse policies affected many ordinary, completely innocent human beings, who were working hard to raise their families, enjoying relatively simple lifestyles.

The movie is primarily told from the perspective of a child, Tietou. Shujuan, his mother, in the course of the events shown in the film has three husbands. Shalong, Her first husband is falsely accused of being a Rightist in the so-called anti-Rightist campaign, instigated by Mao, during the late 1950's. People in workplaces were pressured to come up with a quota of so-called rightists, who were usually sent to labor camps in the countryside. Shaolong, during a meeting with his colleagues to decide who will be labelled a rightist to placate Communist party bosses, briefly leaves the meeting to go to the bathroom. When he returns, he discovers he has been chosen by the others as being a rightist, to be punished. Shalong is completely innocent and tragically dies from an accident in the labor camp.

Tietou has a very difficult time during his childhood, often teased by other boys and he does not get along with his mother's third husband, a high level official who lives in a large, comfortable home. This stepfather is also cruelly tormented by mobs of Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.

"The Blue Kite" is a relatively slow film, but I highly recommend this film because of its realistic portrayal of the daily lives of Chinese people in the hutong during the 1950's and 1960's, as well as being a courageous film by Zhuangzhuang Tian, the director, in exposing how many innocent people greatly suffered because of Mao's cruel, inhumane policies. This is one of the best films ever made about social life in modern China.

Top reviews from other countries

3.0 out of 5 stars Drama set against the backdrop of The Cultural Revolution

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 19, 2013

This film was banned by the Chinese authorities for many years because of its finale depicting frankly the violence and brutality of the mob during the Cultural Revolution. Other films exploring similar issues - such as Farewell my Concubine - imho pack a greater punch and linger in the mind longer. Blue Kite however is still worth a watch.

5.0 out of 5 stars Blue Kite

Reviewed in Canada on April 30, 2014

After viewing the movie, you will ask yourself
how can that be. This is life, you will enjoy it.
marcus welby

5.0 out of 5 stars ras

Reviewed in France on October 14, 2020

5.0 out of 5 stars Tès bon film

Reviewed in France on July 2, 2016

bonne reconstitution de l'époque maoïste pour situer l'intrigue avec un bon scénario; film intéressant à regarder, en V.O.. les couleurs sont agréables, et les dialogues bien écrits.

5.0 out of 5 stars Chine et communisme

Reviewed in France on January 22, 2019

Très beau film sur la vie des chinois pendant les années Mao

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Preview: Ep1 | 30s

Premieres April 29th, 2019

Shedding new light on a geopolitical hot spot, narrated by actor John Cho. More More

Shedding new light on a geopolitical hot spot, the film - written and produced by John Maggio and narrated by Korean-American actor John Cho - confronts the myth of the "Forgotten War," documenting the post-1953 conflict and global consequences.

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Skip to Main Content Preview: Ep1 | 30s Premieres April 29th, 2019 Shedding new light on a geopolitical hot spot, narrated by actor John Cho. More More Shedding new light on a geopolitical hot spot, the film - written and produced by John Maggio and narrated by Korean-American actor John Cho - confronts the myth of the "Forgotten War," documenting the post-1953 conflict and global consequences.

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I had the fortune of being able to see Hotaru no Haka on the big-screen in Seattle a couple of years ago. It was truly the high-point of my film festival excursions. At the end of the movie, there was silence, absolute and total silence in the theater - and then, only an occasional sniffle until the end credits had finished rolling and the house lights came up. It would've seemed almost disrespectful to profane the silence with words.

Seeing a movie like this really changes attitudes about war - about who really suffers, and that the honor and glory is shallow comfort when you contemplate what has been lost in the struggle.

I've made the comment to my friends that if you ever see someone who isn't moved (usually to tears) by this movie, you've found someone without a soul. As difficult as it is to watch, turn off the phone, dim the lights, and immerse yourself in the film with ones you love - you will be a better person for it in the end.

There are many other reviews of this movie, and most of them are probably far more comprehensive than my own - I'll conclude by saying that this movie should required viewing at some point (as should the peace museums at Hiroshima and Nagasaki) for everyone.

When you see war and conflict in the news or read about it in the paper, think back to this movie - your perspective will probably be broadened, and your eyes opened a bit more.

I've only watched this movie about 4 times - it usually takes a year or so to "decompress" after watching it. To see it too often would lessen the impact, and that would be the worst possible thing to do to this movie.

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I had the fortune of being able to see Hotaru no Haka on the big-screen in Seattle a couple of years ago. It was truly the high-point of my film festival excursions. At the end of the movie, there was silence, absolute and total silence in the theater - and then, only an occasional sniffle until the end credits had finished rolling and the house lights came up.

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Kimba the white lion is his name...

Although I remember Kimba from the early 1970s, it says here that the show began in 1966. This show was very popular in its day. Kimba wanted to turn all the jungle predators into vegetarians so everyone could live in peace and harmony. Actually it does sound like a show from the 60s. This show was based on a Japanese mangra (comic book)called Jungle Emperor. While there are some differences from Disney's The Lion King, there are enough similarities that somebody somewhere could have made a few bucks had they decided to protest. Kimba got into lots of fights with everything from mutant grasshoppers to saber-tooth tigers.

By what name was Kimba the White Lion (1965) officially released in India in English?

Answer

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Kimba the White Lion (TV Series 1965-1967) - IMDb

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Kimba the white lion is his name... Although I remember Kimba from the early 1970s, it says here that the show began in 1966. This show was very popular in its day. Kimba wanted to turn all the jungle predators into vegetarians so everyone could live in peace and harmony.

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Through classroom and museum experiences, elementary students will be able to describe how East Asian artists used various materials and symbols to tell a story using the work of art.

Image: Bojagi, mid to late 20th century, Korean; silk, cloth.

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Through classroom and museum experiences, elementary students will be able to describe how East Asian artists used various materials and symbols to tell a story using the work of art. Image: Bojagi, mid to late 20th century, Korean; silk, cloth.

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PBS Airdate: September 23, 2020

NARRATOR: It's our most important tool, one we all take for granted: writing. There are dozens of ways to do it, in hundreds of languages, symbols and alphabets to capture human thought and history...

DR. LYDIA WILSON (Historian): Oh, wow!

NARRATOR: ...with more in common than we think.

DR. YONGSHENG CHEN (Philologist): Egyptian and Chinese writing are very comparable. When I started to learn Egyptian hieroglyphs, I could feel that: so many similarities.

NARRATOR: And yet, writing hasn't always existed. It had to be invented.

DR. IRVING FINKEL (Assyriologist): When you scrutinize what happened, it is actually very dramatic, the giant leap for mankind.

NARRATOR: What were the first records to record human history?

DR. YASMIN EL SHAZLY (Egyptologist): Writing always starts with pictures.

IRVING FINKEL: It's drawn, quite recognizably, as a pictographic sign. So, anybody who saw that in ancient Mesopotamia would say, "Ah, barley."

NARRATOR: The incredible story of writing can finally be told.

DR. PIERRE TALLET (Egyptologist): You have, in front of you, one of the first A of history, followed by one of the first Bs of history, also.

LYDIA WILSON: Literally, "alpha" "bet."

PIERRE TALLET: Literally, "alpha" "bet."

NARRATOR: A to Z: The First Alphabet, right now, on NOVA.

The Sinai Desert: Thirteen-hundred feet above the sand dunes rises the plateau of Serabit El-Khadim. And at the edge of the plateau lie the ruins of an Ancient Egyptian temple. This site may not be as famous as the pyramids, but it holds far greater significance for our history.

PIERRE TALLET: (Translated from French) This place is somewhat magical, not only probably one of the most beautiful sites in Egypt, it is also a place that is of fundamental importance to us all.

NARRATOR: Four-thousand years ago, a group of migrant workers were led here by a man riding on a donkey. What they did in this place would transform the most important technology human beings have ever invented, one we all use every single day. This technology allows us to teleport our thoughts into another person's brain, across space and time. It makes smartphones and computers possible, and yet it is thousands of years old. It is the ancient technology of writing, and its story is the story of civilization itself.

Egypt: the Saqqara funerary complex near Cairo. In 2300 B.C., what today looks like a hill of sand was the pyramid tomb of Pharaoh Teti. Inside the tomb, Egyptologist Yasmin El Shazly brings historian Lydia Wilson to see something extraordinary.

LYDIA WILSON: Oh, wow!

YASMIN EL SHAZLY: Yeah, they are pretty impressive aren't they?

LYDIA WILSON: They really are.

YASMIN EL SHAZLY: Yeah.

NARRATOR: The walls of Teti's tomb are carved with thousands of stylized pictures. But this is not decoration.

YASMIN EL SHAZLY: This is the earliest known complete text, ancient Egyptian text.

LYDIA WILSON: Just beautiful.

NARRATOR: These pictures are hieroglyphs, a writing system older than the pyramids themselves.

LYDIA WILSON: And what do they say?

YASMIN EL SHAZLY: They are spells that help resurrect the king in the afterlife.

NARRATOR: The king's name is repeated, again and again, in every incantation.
VOICE OF EGYPTIAN PRIEST:
(Dramatization) Oh! Oh! Rise up, oh Teti!

Take your head, collect your bones,

Gather your limbs, shake the earth from your flesh!

Take your bread that rots not, your beer that sours not,

Stand at the gates that bar the common people!

Rise up, oh Teti, you shall not die!

LYDIA WILSON: Wow! Oh, there's so much writing!

YASMIN EL SHAZLY: Yes, these are all magic spells, designed to resurrect the king so he could live forever in the afterlife. The fact that his name is still there made him, in a sense, immortal. We are speaking about him right now. And the ancient Egyptians realized that; they realized that the written word had so much power and that by writing your name you became immortal, you immortalized yourself.

NARRATOR: Hieroglyphs are indeed magic. They may not raise the dead, but, like all writing, they allow them to speak.

DR. BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER (Calligrapher): Writing is one of the few things all societies do. Everybody uses a pen, or a brush, and with that we can express all of our thoughts, record all of our information, study the stars, and compose poems and write letters to each other. So, writing binds humanity together, practically more than any other activity.

NARRATOR: Today, we take it for granted, but writing is arguably the most powerful idea we humans have ever come up with.

IRVING FINKEL: When you scrutinize what happened, it is actually very dramatic in one important sense, what we like to call in our department the "giant leap for mankind."

DR. GÜNTER DREYER (Egyptologist): (Translated from German) In the beginning, there was the desire to capture the world in concepts and pictures. This is the basis of thought.

YASMIN EL SHAZLY: Writing always starts with pictures, and then it becomes a little bit more complicated. And that's how you develop into a purely alphabetic system later on.

NARRATOR: How did our ancestors conceive of writing? How did they learn to make pictures speak? And how did those pictures eventually become the letters we use today? The answers to those questions can only be found in an archaeology of the human mind.

Writing is a recent innovation. Our species has existed for about 300,000 years, and for all but the last 5,000 of them, people had to record and transmit vital knowledge without the aid of writing. Some cultures still do.

In the Northern Territory of Australia, Yidumduma Bill Harney, an elder of the Wardaman people, is singing an ancient song about the creation of the world.

YIDUMDUMA BILL HARNEY (Wardaman Elder): All these song line trails that were made, happening all the way right back from the beginning of everything, to people, to people, to people, all the way right back, billion years ago, to million years, come down to hundred years, and now, now come back, right up to us. And we know all the songs now. That's why we will never throw that creation song away. We've still got it there today.

In a song line trail, there is the knowledge that is given to you from the old people, in what they call "song line trails," for naming all the different sites, the plants, trees, mountains, water hole and all of that, like a map, it is a map, in your mind. It all links up.

NARRATOR: Aboriginal culture has been handed down orally, through poetry and song, for tens of thousands of years, without the need to write anything down. So, the first question about writing is, why did our ancestors feel the need for it? What prompted them to start recording things, not for the ear but for the eye? Images, of course, are part of all human cultures.

BILL HARNEY: In the site now, where we are sitting down, it's called the "moon dreaming" site. That's the moon that you can see there. That's the half moon, and the Aboriginal name is called Jabali. And that's the headdress he used.

NARRATOR: In the Wardaman creation story, all the plants and animals of the world were once people, the Wardaman's ancestors, wandering across a formless muddy land, until the creation dog let out a mighty howl.

BILL HARNEY: When he sang out "koooooo" like this, the dog is the one whose sound made everything change, he changed the whole world. And this country now, from the soft high mound became a rock, and all these people become a tree and changed all the different animals, kangaroos, dingoes, whatever you can make it, lizards, snakes and all.

NARRATOR: As the mud hardened, some of the ancestors passed into the rock, leaving traces of that moment of creation.

BILL HARNEY: That was the mud, and people come along and put their foot there. See? And that's what it is there. He was in the mud, now he's in the rock. Human footprints. Human there. There is a dog there. Then there is all human footprints, all over, you can see it. Then the shadow of the old moon, he went into all the rock, as well, during the creation time.

NARRATOR: At the moon dreaming site, Bill can sing to his ancestors, for these are not representations of them, these are the ancestors, gone into the rock. But Bill sings from memory. These images, powerful as they are, cannot tell him which words to use. For images to do that, they would have to gain a new power, the power to represent something else.

Cairo's Egyptian Museum is crammed with thousands of objects, excavated from the tombs of ancient Egypt. One of the very oldest was discovered by Günter Dreyer in the 1990s, at a dig in the city of Abydos. It's a clay vase which predates the first pharaoh by many centuries. It was made 5,700 years ago, and it seems to use imagery in a new way.

GÜNTER DREYER: (Translated from German) When cleaning it, we found that it is decorated in a very interesting way. It shows a big rectangle in the middle, which is separated into small rectangles; on the left and right of it there are zig zag lines. And I believe that this is a representation of Egypt.

NARRATOR: Günter believes that the vase is decorated with a stylized representation of the distinctive geography of the Nile Valley. Egyptians have always lived on the land immediately adjacent to the Nile, where irrigation ditches can bring river water to the fields. Ancient Egyptian life was largely confined to this narrow strip of green; the desert highlands on either side were where the dead were buried.

GÜNTER DREYER: (Translated from German) The big rectangle divided into small panels shows the irrigated land, and left and right of the Nile Valley are the mountains.

NARRATOR: So, these lines represent something, something that is not present. It's a conceptual revolution in the meaning of a picture. And if a picture can represent a thing, it can represent a word.

GÜNTER DREYER: (Translated from German) It's a long way to go until writing, but the simplified, iconic pictures that were used in such depictions will later be used as characters.

NARRATOR: But what was it that made people want to represent words in visual form? Five-thousand years ago, Egypt lay at one end of a zone of cultivation called the "Fertile Crescent." At the other end lay Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq. In both places, people had learnt how to irrigate the land to increase food production. That meant that not everyone had to work the land, and a more complex society could develop. Irving Finkel from the British Museum is an expert on Mesopotamia and the region's first civilization, Sumer.

IRVING FINKEL: To set the scene, it's important to understand that in Mesopotamia the Sumerians had what we call "city states," independent walled entities with a large population, farmers all around, administrators, a central temple and so forth. And it is in those enclaves of so-called civilization that the need was, I think, first felt for some kind of record keeping. And of course the thing about human ingenuity is that when there's a sharp need for something, it tends to crystallize in discovery.

NARRATOR: The need was to tally up food production, so that it could be taxed and distributed to the cities. The means of doing so were handy clay tablets on which the Sumerians could easily make marks, some of which would be familiar to any bookkeeper today.

IRVING FINKEL: This material goes from near the beginning of writing, so this is what we call a "pictographic" tablet from 3000 B.C. It's very slim, and it's ruled into columns with boxes of information that go together. These round and semi-round elements are numerals. And in each of the boxes, they have these things, which are added up at the end.

NARRATOR: This clay tablet is the distant ancestor of today's spreadsheet: a grid of boxes with symbols that represent numbers and pictures that represent commodities.

IRVING FINKEL: And this is the sign for barley, which is drawn quite recognizably as a pictographic sign. So, anybody who saw that in ancient Mesopotamia would say, "Ah, barley."

NARRATOR: Such pictograms would be the basic building blocks of the first writing systems. And thousands of tablets like this one suggest that the reason for moving beyond a purely oral culture was something utterly prosaic: the need to keep ledgers. As far as we can tell from the evidence, for several centuries, the use of pictograms was limited to primitive accountancy. But then, sometime around 3000 B.C. there was the crucial conceptual leap.

IRVING FINKEL: The giant leap came when somebody conceived of this matter: that you could draw a picture which represented something that someone could recognize, but at the same time that sign could be used just for the sound of the thing it looked like. So, on this tablet here, there is an ear of barley. Now the word for barley in Sumerian is, is pronounced like "sheh." So your Sumerian sees this and says "ah, "sheh," "barley." But at the same time, this scribe or a fellow scribe, in writing a totally different kind of document, could use this sign not to mean barley, but just to write the sound of "sheh." And this giant leap is something rather simple, and it's something which could have occurred to a child, but nevertheless it is of great lasting significance.

NARRATOR: Using a picture to represent a sound in this way is called the "rebus principle," and it allows pictures to spell out words.

IRVING FINKEL: To give a really clear example. There's a word "shega" in Sumerian, which means "beautiful" or "pretty" or "nice" or something like that. And so a scribe would write it syllabically, "she" "ga." So, he would use this sign, the barley sign, for the "she" bit, and then he'd have to write "ga" for the second bit. As it happens, "ga" means milk. So, he would draw the picture which represented milk. And barley and milk together would spell "shega," which had nothing to do with either barley or milk. So, this is a kind of rebus writing. Rebus is a smart word for it. It is really a pun in some sense. It is a kind of pun that you get another meaning out of the sign.

NARRATOR: But what about the Egyptians? It seems that they made the same giant leap at about the same time. The evidence comes from an extraordinary object in Cairo's Egyptian Museum: the Narmer Palette, carved in 3000 B.C.

GÜNTER DREYER: (Translated from German) The palette conveys a historical event, the victory of King Narmer over Lower Egypt, the Delta people.

NARRATOR: By conquering the Nile Delta, Narmer took control of the river, all the way to the sea, becoming the first pharaoh of a unified Egyptian state. The palette tells the story entirely through pictures.

GÜNTER DREYER: (Translated from German) It shows King Narmer defeating an enemy. After the victory, there was apparently a big victory celebration. The king appears with his entourage. They are looking at the line of slayed enemies. Those enemies were shackled. They were beheaded. Their heads were put between their legs, and even their penises were cut off and, in some instances, put on their heads. Those enemies were completely destroyed.

NARRATOR: But, next to the main characters in this grisly tale are seemingly random pairs of images, such as a catfish and a chisel. They only make sense in light of the rebus principle.

GÜNTER DREYER: (Translated from German) The catfish and the chisel stand as sound values for the king's name.

NARRATOR: The Egyptian word for catfish is "nar." A chisel is "mer." When combined they sound out "Nar-mer," the name of the first of the pharaohs. Next to his defeated enemy is the symbol for a harpoon, "war" in Egyptian. Below it is a rectangle, similar to the ones on the Abydos vase.

GÜNTER DREYER: (Translated from German) And this little panel of "irrigated land," which we already know from the pre-dynastic clay vessel, stands for the sound value "sh." So, you read his name as "War-sh." Here are new possibilities of script being seized. What was, at first, only used in accounting, is now being used to clarify pictures, to help viewers read them.

NARRATOR: The next step was to extend the rebus principle, which on the Palette is used to spell names, to the full vocabulary of the Egyptian language. In doing so, the Egyptians created what was possibly the world's first true writing system, a complex and beautiful script: hieroglyphs. Orly Goldwasser has made them a lifetime's study.

DR. ORLY GOLDWASSER (Egyptologist): This is the greatest experiment ever conducted to write language in pictures only, only pictures. It's an enormous cognitive effort to read it or to write it, but it's fantastic!

NARRATOR: What makes hieroglyphs difficult is that Egyptian scribes used thousands of different symbols, and the rebus means that many of them have at least two different meanings.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: If we are talking about a duck, as you see it here, it can be a representation of a duck. And this is fine, this is easy. But, in many other cases he is not a duck at all. He is just the sound of the duck, "soh." For example, the word "daughter" is "soht," or something like that. We don't know exactly how to pronounce that. So, for the "soh," we have our dear duck. And afterwards we put another sign, something that looks like a small half French bread, you see it? Cut French bread, which gives the meaning "tuh," so, "soh-t."

NARRATOR: The rebus principle was the key that unlocked writing for the peoples of the Fertile Crescent. With pictures that spoke, rulers could write the history of their reigns, draw up legal codes, administer far-flung empires and build monuments that still impress us today. The rebus is arguably the most consequential intellectual innovation of all time. So, who invented it?

GÜNTER DREYER: True writing starts when the sounds of a language are represented. And that, I think, was first developed in Egypt.

IRVING FINKEL: And of course, there's a bit of a squabble between Egyptologists and Assyriologists about who invented writing, and of course, we did. Important thing to clarify!

NARRATOR: Squabbling aside, where was the rebus born? In Egypt or Mesopotamia or somewhere else entirely? In the Beijing Huijia Private School, Sofia is teaching her six-year-old pupils to read and write. The Chinese script is ancient. The earliest recognizably Chinese characters are found incised on bones and turtle shells, which date back more than 3,000 years. This so-called "oracle bone script" can help the children understand the origin of the characters they are learning.

ZAI YUHONG (English name "Sophia," Chinese for "Teacher,"): (Translated from Chinese) I am going to draw a picture. What do you think it is? Do you think I am drawing a picture or a character?

CHINESE PUPILS: (Translated from Chinese) Character. Character. It's a character. It's a character. It's oracle bone script.

ZAI YUHONG: (Translated from Chinese) Which character do you think it is?

CHINESE PUPILS: (Translated from Chinese) A fish!

ZAI YUHONG: (Translated from Chinese) It is "fish." How do you know it is fish?

CHINESE BOY: (Translated from Chinese) The fish has scales; the two crosses look like scales.

ZAI YUHONG: (Translated from Chinese) He saw the scales. Great. Sit down please. This is how to write fish in the ancient oracle bone script.

NARRATOR: At root, like hieroglyphs, Chinese characters are stylized pictures. But, the similarities with ancient Egyptian writing do not end there. Professor Yongsheng Chen is a philologist who studies both writing systems.

YONGSHENG CHEN: Egyptian and Chinese writing are very comparable. When I started to learn Egyptian hieroglyphs, I could feel that there were so many similarities. Firstly, the ancient people think to use pictures, but they found pictograms are not enough, because there are many abstract concepts and abstract words in language. If you want to record the language fully, pictograms will never succeed. So, they think of the method of rebus, rebus principle.

NARRATOR: The rebus principle is particularly useful in Chinese, because the spoken language has many homophones, words that sound the same, but have different meanings. For example, "mu" means "tree," but it also means "to wash oneself." And so, the stylized picture of a tree can represent the word "tree," and it can also be used as a so-called phonogram to represent the sound "mu," "to wash." But, that of course, could be confusing.

YONGSHENG CHEN: Sometimes, we don't know what the phonograms indicate, the meaning or the sound? So, we use a "determinative."

NARRATOR: A determinative is a symbol that classifies words into categories and so, gives a clue as to the correct way to read a character. These three strokes indicate that the character being written has something to do with water. They can be used to distinguish "mu," "tree," from "mu," "to wash" and so clarify the ambiguity inherent in rebus writing. There are 214 classifier signs and the majority of Chinese characters are formed using one. Egyptian scribes too, divided words into categories, and as well as representing words or sounds, many hieroglyphs can also be used as classifiers.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: For example, you will have a duck after all the names of birds. You can say a falcon and then you will have a duck, which means that the falcon belongs to the category of birds.

YONGSHENG CHEN: The phonogram-classifier combination is a very good way to represent a word. Both Egyptian people and Chinese people believe that it is the perfect method.

NARRATOR: Cuneiform, the writing system of Mesopotamia, also made use of classifiers, as did the last great picture-based writing system to be developed, in the New World, around 600 B.C.

Mayan glyphs also depend on the rebus principle to spell out sounds and use classifiers to sort out the consequent ambiguities. With so many different writing systems, can we ever hope to trace the common origin of them all?

IRVING FINKEL: If you know a bit about cuneiform and Mayan script and Egyptian script and Chinese script, for example, the main four, you have an inescapable feeling that even though they look completely unrelated, nevertheless they have many things in common, and this forces you to consider the whole question of origin and spread.

NARRATOR: But is there, in fact, a common origin of all writing, a single time and place where the secret of turning pictures into words was first discovered?

IRVING FINKEL: The way I look at it is this: these writing systems have in common the rebus principle. Rebus writing is the written version of the pun in speech. And everybody makes puns, and puns are a natural human form of humor. And once you start with the idea of reducing speech to any kind of symbol from which language can be retrieved, then the rebus thing hits you in the face, because when you're casting around for the way to do it, it's obvious. It's just obvious.

NARRATOR: So, the similarities between ancient writing systems reflect not a common origin, but what all people throughout history have always had in common, the human mind.

IRVING FINKEL: In other words, any load of human beings, in any context, who have to invent writing will come up with rebus writings. It's inevitable.

NARRATOR: At the medieval Round Church in Cambridge, England, calligraphic artist Brody Neuenschwander is mounting an event which celebrates the diversity of the scripts in use by people around the world.

BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER: "Brush with Silence" brings calligraphers from about 20 different cultures together. They sit in silence, and they write their own scripts. It is a meditation in ink.

NARRATOR: But A Brush with Silence presents its audience with a puzzle. While the Japanese and Chinese calligraphers draw Chinese characters that clearly connect to the origin of writing, at every other table the calligraphers are using scripts which look very different. Instead of thousands of pictographic characters they employ just a few dozen simple shapes. These are the world's alphabets. Alphabets don't seem to have anything to do with the rebus principle, so what is the connection between the way writing began, and the way most people write today?

The Sinai Peninsula, Egypt: Archaeologist Pierre Tallet returns with old friends back to the plateau of Serabit El-Khadim. With his guide Salem, Pierre sets off to climb 1,300 feet from the desert floor. They are following in the footsteps of a famous pair of archaeologists.

PIERRE TALLET: (Translated from French) The first person to really work on the site was the great English archaeologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie, whose first dig here in Serabit El-Khadim, was in 1905.

NARRATOR: At the edge of the plateau, Flinders Petrie and his wife Hilda came across the ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple, dominated by dozens of stone markers, or "stelae."

PIERRE TALLET: (Translated from French) These commemorative stelae are one of the features of the temple at Serabit El-Khadim. Every mission left one inside the temple precincts. This stela is a biographical account by an expedition leader who came to mine here. So the word "turquoise" appears here. It reads "mefkat."

NARRATOR: Turquoise was part of the magic that helped the dead rise to eternal life. It was rich deposits of the gemstone that brought regular mining expeditions to Serabit. The temple was dedicated to the goddess of turquoise, Hathor, and here the miners could make offerings in the hope of enlisting her aid. And it was in the mine workings that the Petries made another discovery.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: Hilda stepped on a stone, and she picked up this stone and told Petrie "there is something here." And this stone in the mine was the first inscription in something very strange, nobody saw ever before. And Petrie looked on it and he said, "This is not Egyptian. It looks like ugly, very ugly hieroglyphs, but it's not Egyptian. There are too few signs here. This should be an alphabet." And this was the "boom."

NARRATOR: If Petrie was right, these would be, by far, the oldest alphabetic inscriptions ever found. Could this be the first alphabet? And if so, who was responsible for it?

PIERRE TALLET: (Translated from French) What appears at the bottom of this stela is really very interesting, since one finds here an engraving of someone riding a donkey. You can see very, very clearly the head, the ears. The reins are being held by someone leading the way. And this image is not at all the image of an Egyptian. Egyptians are never pictured riding donkeys. This is a typical representation of someone from the Negev, someone who is an Asiatic, as defined by the Egyptians.

NARRATOR: This individual clearly participated in more than one expedition, because he's pictured on another stela, where the hieroglyphs give us his name.

PIERRE TALLET: (Translated from French) The brother of the Prince of Retenu, a certain Khebded, who joins the expedition to help the Egyptians.

NARRATOR: Retenu was an Egyptian name for the Biblical land of Canaan. And Canaanite migrant workers may have been a familiar sight in Egypt. These wall paintings decorate a tomb above the Nile in Upper Egypt. They date from the same period as the stelae at Serabit. And one panel shows travelers, in the distinctive patterned robes of Canaan, which contrast with the simple white loincloths of the Egyptians. The hieroglyphic inscription explains that 37 foreigners came to make offerings to the local ruler, perhaps hoping to be given work. Something similar happened at Serabit, but on the plateau the cultural exchange between Canaanites and Egyptians seems to have had momentous consequences.

PIERRE TALLET: (Translated from French) The circumstances on the plateau of Serabit El-Khadim are very particular. It was around 1850 B.C., and there was regular coexistence between two different communities. On the one hand, the Egyptians, and on the other side we have this small troupe of people who come from the other side of the Sinai, the Asiatics, who live with the Egyptians for a prolonged period. And it is probably during this time that this group had the idea to develop a new writing system by imitating the Egyptians, but adapting the writing to their own language.

NARRATOR: It seemed that the inscriptions in the mines were related to the hieroglyphs in the temple, but how? Then, another Egyptologist examined an object that Petrie had brought back from Serabit to the British Museum.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: Thank you, Mark, really, thank you. Last time that I saw him he was in a box, he moved now into a basket.

BRITISH MUSEUM EMPLOYEE: Into a basket, yeah.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: For me it's worth all the gold of Egypt, this little piece that stays here in the basket. He has a small inscription in Egyptian and a parallel inscription in the strange signs below. So, here you have an option to break the code. This is why I call him the Rosetta Stone of the alphabet!

NARRATOR: The code breaker was Sir Alan Gardiner.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: Gardiner looks on it, and it's very easy for him to read the Egyptian part. It's a repetitive formula, hundreds of times in Serabit El-Khadim, says "the beloved of the goddess Hathor." And then he looks on the strange signs below.

NARRATOR: Gardiner guessed that they must spell out a similar dedication in the Canaanite language to a Canaanite goddess.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: A Canaanite wouldn't call this goddess Hathor. So, he wants the name. He wants the name of the goddess, because if his theory is correct, he has "the beloved of...." The beloved of whom?

NARRATOR: On the other side of the Sphinx was what looked like a complete inscription, and Gardiner was struck by the last symbol. It looked like the letter "t" in the ancient paleo-Hebrew alphabet, and that reminded him of a Canaanite goddess known from scripture.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: In the Bible, we know the god Baal, and he had a consort. The consort in Canaanite is always with a "t" ending of the female and she is Ba'alat.

NARRATOR: So, Gardiner guessed that this was what the last four symbols spelled out.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: The complete name of the Canaanite goddess that he presumes should play the role of Hathor here: Ba'alat.

NARRATOR: The name of the goddess was the key to understanding the mysterious Serabit script. The first letter, this rectangle, was clearly based on the Egyptian hieroglyph for house, "per." Egyptian scribes used this symbol in three ways: to write the word house, to represent the sound "per" and, finally, as a classifier, attached to any word to do with buildings in general. But the Canaanites ignored all these complexities.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: The great trick, the genius trick was to take a picture, to read it in its Canaanite name: the house is beït in a Canaanite dialect. And then you take only the first sound, the "ba," and whenever you will need the "ba," you draw this house.

NARRATOR: This is the familiar rebus principle, but applied in a radically new way. The characters do not stand for the sound of the whole word, but only for the sound at the beginning of the word.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: And this is the great invention: this is the alphabet. In around 30 pictures, 25 to 30 pictures, you can write everything, because you are after single sounds that you need. And to write something in this Canaanite dialect, you needed around 30 sounds, that's all. And this was the huge, the fantastic invention.

PIERRE TALLET: (Translated from French) The basic principle of the alphabet, which is, in the end, a much simpler writing system, made writing much more accessible to a larger number of people. We are at the very beginning of democratization of writing, which began right here, at Serabit El-Khadim, in about 1850 B.C.

NARRATOR: The turquoise mine workings are still dotted with inscriptions carved nearly 4,000 years ago, which mark the moment hieroglyphs became letters.

PIERRE TALLET: (Translated from French) What we see here with this bull's head, which is crowned by two horns, is probably the first prototype of our letter A. Just below you can see the sign of the house that is being used for the sound value B in this script. It is the ground plan of a house clearly drawn, which will through a process of graphic evolution become the letter B that we use today.

NARRATOR: It seems that Khebded and his followers took their new script back to Canaan, where it was adopted by another Canaanite people, the Phoenicians. Traders and seafarers, they spread the alphabet across the Middle East and the Mediterranean, where it was taken up by Greeks and then Romans. We asked Orly Goldwasser to join calligrapher Brody Neuenschwander to explore the steps that gradually transformed hieroglyphs at Serabit into the letters we use today.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: The Canaanites took the hieroglyphs that were meaningful for them and then they saw the head of the bull. They could immediately relate to it because this was the head of their own god Baal.

BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER: Ah ha, okay.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: But in in their Semitic dialect the animal was called "aluf" or "alf" or "alif."

BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER: So, they looked at this bull, but they would say "aluf" instead of the Egyptian word.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: Yeah, they said it in their own language; what do they care? And then they decided this will stand for "ah."

BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER: They would make it much simpler than that, I suppose, just a couple of strokes of the brush, really.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: Many hundreds of years later, scribes in Phoenicia adopt this drawing of the bull. They just turn it around, because they don't care about the image. And then the Romans just change the direction, and you reach your A in English and in Latin. And what you have here is actually the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph of the bull, sleeping forever in the letter A, because this is just the bull turned on his horns. Do you see?

NARRATOR: Almost all the letters of the Latin alphabet are ultimately derived from the hieroglyphs that the Canaanites of Serabit chose to represent the sounds of their tongue. The broken rectangle that was the Egyptian sign for house, was abbreviated by the Greeks and flipped by the Romans to create the Latin B. The Egyptian hieroglyph for water, "mayim" in the Canaanite tongue, became the Greek "mu" and the Latin M. There were two Egyptian signs which represented snakes. These became the Greek "nu" and our N.

BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER: So, what was the Egyptian word for head?

ORLY GOLDWASSER: We don't know exactly, but it was something like "tapt" or "topt," but it's of no interest for the Canaanites.

BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER: What is their word for head?

ORLY GOLDWASSER: Very different: "rosh."

BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER: "Rosh," with an R?

ORLY GOLDWASSER: Yes, with an R at the beginning, and here they will reach the R.

BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER: So, this is the Canaanite head.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: Yeah. Then the Greeks make, again, rather more abstract representation of the head. Even though you can see the general idea of head.

BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER: The Romans turned everything the other way, systematically. Everything is in the leading direction. But it's been centuries and centuries since we've seen any kind of image in this, and I don't think anybody would know that behind that letter is actually a profile of a head.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: Yes. Again, the Egyptian hieroglyph is hiding in the R.

BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER: Right.

ORLY GOLDWASSER: They're always hiding.

NARRATOR: But it's not just Latin and Greek letters that derive from Serabit. Almost all the world's alphabets share this same root. Scripts like Hebrew, Armenian, Cyrillic, Tibetan, Devanagari, Gujarati. Sometimes the connection is far from obvious, but it's still there.

DR. AHMAD AL-JALLAD (Philologist): This document is a leaf from a seventh century Koran, dated to 675 C.E., the first Islamic century. It represents one of the earliest examples of writing Arabic in a calligraphic style. But, when I look at it, I see, in these archaic letter shapes, the echoes of the alphabet at Serabit.

So, for example, if you see this letter here looks like a line with a small tail. This is the Alif, the first letter, the A. It originally looked a little like a bull, like this. And it gets stylized in Phoenician, simplified to simply this. Now the connection between that and our A in English is quite obvious. Now, one more step takes us to Nabataean Aramaic. Another simplification, it looks simply like a six. And then in the Koran fragment that we looked at, we can see that the loop has almost completely disappeared, and we simply have this little tail, and in the modern Arabic script, a straight line. So, that straight line through these stages goes all the way back to that bull, even though, at different ends, they look nothing alike. So, the modern Arabic alphabet and the Latin alphabet that we use to write English are, are cousins. They belong to the same family. All the alphabets of Arabia, of the Mediterranean, of the Middle East, all of the alphabetic scripts seem to go back to one original prototype. It seems that the alphabet, the concept of writing each phoneme with a separate glyph, that idea, as simple as it is, was only invented once.

NARRATOR: What Khebded and his followers did in the mines of Serabit changed the world. They were not scribes or scholars, but when they adapted the rebus principle, which was the basis of all ancient scripts, to make the first letters, they created a form of communication which would eventually sweep the globe. We owe to those migrant workers the invention of the alphabet, a script which spread and evolved to give the gift of writing to countless cultures across the world.

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PBS Airdate: September 23, 2020 NARRATOR: It's our most important tool, one we all take for granted: writing. There are dozens of ways to do it, in hundreds of languages, symbols and alphabets to capture human thought and history... DR. LYDIA WILSON (Historian): Oh, wow! NARRATOR: ...with more in common than we think.

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Xu Bing (Chinese, born 1955). Square Word Calligraphy: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Walt Whitman, 2018. Ink on paper, 89³/₈ x 48¹³/₁₆ in. (227 x 124 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Xu Bing to the Brooklyn Museum in honor of his father, 2018.24a–b. (Photo: Courtesy of the artist)

October 25, 2019–March 12, 2020

Focusing on a major new gift to our world-renowned collection of Chinese art, One: Xu Bing highlights the painting Square Word Calligraphy: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Walt Whitman (2018), by one of China’s most important living artists. Created specifically for the Brooklyn Museum in consultation with curator Susan L. Beningson, the work celebrates Xu Bing’s close relationship with Brooklyn, where he lived in the 1990s and maintains a studio today. Square Word Calligraphy: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Walt Whitman pays homage to Walt Whitman and is on display in 2019 in honor of the poet's 200th birthday. Whitman served as an early librarian at the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library Association (the Brooklyn Museum’s predecessor), and this exhibition also includes material from our Archives that explores his relationship to the Museum. Known as the American poet of democracy, Whitman's poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” portrays our interconnectedness and asks an important question: “What is then between us?”

Xu Bing developed “square word calligraphy” as a system for writing English in the early 1990s after he came to New York. Although the rectangular units of writing resemble Chinese characters, each one is actually a word in English. The overall work spells out the first section of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” reflecting Xu Bing’s experience living between two cultures while in New York. Xu Bing has said that “If I had continued living in China, this work never would have arisen; it was a result of my living in New York. But I never would have known about Walt Whitman if I hadn’t lived in Brooklyn.”

One: Xu Bing is curated by Susan L. Beningson, Assistant Curator, Asian Art, Brooklyn Museum.

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The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum is New York City’s second largest in physical size and holds an art collection with roughly 1.5 million works.

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Welcome to The Tale of Genji site, aimed at promoting a wider understanding and appreciation of the 11th Century classic Japanese novel written by a Heian court lady known as Murasaki Shikibu. It also serves as a kind of travel guide to the world of Genji.

Ishiyamadera Temple - where Murasaki Shikibu may have written The Tale of Genji.

Written 1,000 years ago, The Tale of Genji has 54 chapters and over 1,000 pages of text in its English translation. It is generally considered to be the world's first true novel, and was certainly the first psychological novel ever written.

If you are planning a trip to Japan, visiting some of the places featured in Genji Monogatari is a good way to start. These pages contain photographs of many of those places, and others mentioned in other literature of the time.

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A photographic guide to the temples, shrines and locations mentioned in Murasaki Shikibu's classic Japanese novel, The Tale of Genji.

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FICTION A Loose Collection of Works Thought to Be LA or Driving Poems Dictated to a Small Digital Recorder While Driving from San Diego to Los Angeles at Dusk "[. . .] the bare fact of movement [. . .] is rarely just about getting from A to B." - Tim Cresswell The day's temperature was hitting 46.2 degrees according to my mercury-in-glass thermometer, and Boulevard Bourdon was all but deserted. M and I lived on Rue Arthur, between Paris' tenth and eleventh arrondissements. It hadn't been long since we arrived in Paris when M, drunk and overly excited, insisted on running along the Canal Saint-Martin. M didn't seem to mind the overbearing heat; the few Europeans scattered about on the other hand looked dazed and lost. The fountain in front of Palais de Chaillot had turned into a swimming pool. Meanwhile, I was dreaming up a story-slash-essay on the flâneur, or the idly strolling observer, not that writing the essay was my only reason for coming to Paris. But I was behaving as if it were the primary reason I came to Paris, which was why I could often be found blathering on and on about Louis Aragon in the company of others. Because I had no real affection for Louis Aragon, however, I was making zero progress in my writing. 1. Runtime Error The reason I don't like fiction is because the medium fails to properly describe the act of walking. So does poetry. Poetry tends to characterize the act of walking as a timeless activity, one that goes on forever. Either that, or the walk is over as soon as it has begun. The act of walking must exist together with the act of running. Most of the problems in contemporary civilization stem from the original sin of having separated these two activities. For instance, we're not allowed to run where we should be walking, and we cannot walk where we should only run. We cannot go jogging in walking attire, and we cannot stroll in runner's clothes. Should we make the mistake of doing so, the violation would be tantamount to a crime or intense public humiliation; it would be a pronouncement of inefficiency and ineptitude. Here is a scene involving a stroll. In Flaubert's Sentimental Education, the protagonist Frédéric engages in a duel to win the heart of a woman. Duels were not uncommon in nineteenth-century Europe. Historically, many foolish men have gone to their deaths after an ill-fated duel. These included Pushkin, Galois, and others. In the novel, Frédéric and his rival Cisy agree to duel in the forest of Boulogne. When M and I arrived at the forest, we surveyed a crowd of people in various stages of undress, suntanning or jogging, and between the trees we caught a glimpse of the silver Louis Vuitton Foundation shuttle bus plodding by. M and I spread a striped beach towel on a spot near the lake and began discussing Robert Bresson's The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne. "Have you seen it?" "No." "Neither have I." With the following paragraph, Flaubert describes the scene with Frédéric and Cisy walking to their intended dueling ground: Occasional wayfarers crossed their path. The sky was blue, and from time to time they heard rabbits skipping about. At the turn of a path, a woman in a Madras neckerchief was chatting with a man in a blouse; and in the large avenue under the chestnut-trees some grooms in vests of linen-cloth were walking horses up and down. Cisy recalled the happy days when, mounted on his own chestnut horse, and with his glass stuck in his eye, he rode up to carriage-doors. These recollections intensified his wretchedness. An intolerable thirst parched his throat. The buzzing of flies mingled with the throbbing of his arteries. His feet sank into the sand. It seemed to him as if he had been walking during a period which had neither beginning nor end. Director Lee Man-hee's film A Day Off was completed in 1968 but the military dictatorship at the time banned it, purportedly for being too indecent for society. The film was soon forgotten-or more accurately, it was never properly remembered-until August 2008, when the reel was discovered and re-introduced to the world. Its plot was simple. While his beloved girlfriend Ji-yeon is getting an abortion, Huh Wook, the main character, leaves the hospital and fraternizes with a woman he meets at a hostess bar. They end up having sex at a construction site until the church bells toll, whereupon Huh realizes what he's done and runs back to the hospital. On his way, he crosses paths with a friend he owes money to, who proceeds to beat him to a bloody pulp. Huh manages to make his way to the hospital where he learns that Ji-yeon died during the surgery. He leaves the hospital and runs into the night. Seoul's neon signboards blink and buzz around his face as happier memories of Ji-yeon float to the surface. The act of running as committed by incompetent, immoral men is romanticized in the steel gray streets of the contemporary city. What's interesting is that the camera doesn't pan down to show the rest of Huh's body but remains focused on his face. His act of running is one brought upon by the grief that is clearly etched onto his face. The term "running time" refers to the duration of a movie. "Runtime" refers to the period of time when a computer program is running. Movies are by definition mobile and always moving-hence, the term "movie." The word "cinema" and the German word for films, Kino, both come from the Greek word kī́nēsis/kinētikós, which describe movement. Motion pictures. In fiction, a book's running time hinges on its readability. This means that the running time of a work of fiction is variable and subject to the reader-but not entirely. Those who construe this phenomenon as a means for liberation are old-fashioned elitists, while those who take it as a chance for participation are old-fashioned market capitalists. Political engineering is targeted at multiple people, while artistic planning is marketed to the few; this is fated to be "academicized" or oxidized. Art as a political plan and politics as an artistic plan will reach the destinations of their relevant genres, regardless of the intent. Can art as a political project survive on its own merits without catering to capitalist or populist notions? Can art be free from the shackles of readability and running time, while also managing to avoid the pitfalls of academia and obsolescence? Consider a theater screening of a sixteen-hour-long film, or a stage performance of an eight-hour-long play. Lev Dodin's works were nothing more than brazen classics. M said there were tons of movies on Netflix that were ten hours or longer, and that viewers had no problem binge-watching eight straight episodes of the new season of Stranger Things. Meanwhile, to watch a ten-hour-long film in a theater in Berlin, we must buy four tickets that cost twelve euros each. And the idiot artists who exhibit those ridiculously long films in art museums are nothing more than hucksters. Their work is simply a grand façade of gestures put on by famous contemporary artists. The concept of running time is therefore nothing more than a hostage to a goal-oriented linear movement. The Stockholm Syndrome of narrative. 2. Zeno's Paradox The most decisive film in Phase Two of Marvel's Cinematic Universe is the 2014 hit Captain America: Winter Soldier. Netflix describes the movie with this tagline: "He is always prepared to fight in the name of justice. But the world has changed. The lines between justice and injustice have become blurred. In such a world, who is he to trust?" From that description, it's impossible to tell what the movie's about, M complained. M once said that they didn't care for Marvel films, and that they couldn't understand why anyone would choose to go see an MCU movie while in Paris. Couldn't they go see a film by Xavier Dolan instead? M asked, and I retorted that I'd rather gouge both my eyes out than watch a Xavier Dolan film. As a studio, Marvel is consciously making the effort to reshape the audiences' general attitude toward movies, which largely centers on heterosexual males. This was what led to the release of Captain Marvel. M didn't much care for Captain Marvel either. But I persuaded M that watching Winter Soldier would change their mind. Blonde, white, and clad in Star-Spangled spandex (and a soldier to boot!), the original character of Captain America was a perennial headache for Marvel, given the conservatism he represented. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely agreed that the Captain was an issue. No one's going to wax nostalgic about Captain America's days, except for the neocons. Captain America makes Clint Eastwood look progressive, lamented the Russo brothers, who had taken the helm of the franchise. We need a spy film, goddammit, a good old-fashioned 1970s spy flick! A few months later, producer Kevin Feige reached a decision. We were sitting at a café in a museum in Philadelphia. We could see a statue of Rocky from where we sat. As if speaking from one mind, Markus and McFeely took turns rapidly finishing each other's thoughts. Then we got a call from Kevin. We knew this was the call. Okay. I think I'm ready to take down S.H.I.E.L.D! They ultimately decided to pit America against America itself and have a blonde white man (Chris Evans) attack another blonde white man (Robert Redford). What followed was an inevitable conflict between the Captain and the Avengers' primary agency, S.H.I.E.L.D. In the movie, America turns out to be a police state. But America can also overcome its problems through the sheer force of its free will. It was a dazzling resurgence of liberal humanism, or rather, a weak attempt to mask what was going on in the real world (George W. Bush Barack Obama Donald Trump). So basically, the theme in Captain America is the act of running, I explained. M and I were strolling down the Marais district. The weather was proving to be highly unpredictable; the formerly oppressive heat had given way to a cool breeze. A man in Satisfy running shorts jogged past. His long curls tossed in the wind and a musty aroma, whether from sweat or cologne, hit our senses. He winked at M and, without giving them time to react, dashed past. "This may sound crazy, but I think everything in life is connected. Just as with Markus and McFeely, and with Anthony and Joe Russo, I believe that running and humanism are connected, and that liberalism and realism are connected, to create liberal humanism, and ultimately Captain America. Walter Benjamin obsessed over strolling because he was a Communist, so any blanket statements that try to connect walks to the idea of humanism are plain wrong. My story is going to conclude with ideas about the posthuman and the human body, racial discrimination and misogyny, entropy and singularity. That's my big picture idea, anyway," I concluded. "Do you ever think you might be a little too old-fashioned?" M asked. "That's rude." "Look around you," M said, gesturing broadly. "Paris has been taken over by Lime scooters. We're up to our necks in the shared economy, and you're sitting here going on and on about the flâneur?" M was right; Paris was overridden with electric scooters. Gone were the bicycles with loaves of freshly baked baguettes tucked into their baskets. Parisians no longer had to pump pedals or own cars or even walk on their own legs. Bus stations, parking lots, and arcades had all become unnecessary. When the British newspaper covered the story of Lime arriving on its shores, its headline read: "Anarchists of the Streets!" Transportation is a political system. Representative democracy and the nation state will be destroyed by the shared economy. And big corporations will bring the world together? Elon Musk declared that, by 2020, Robotaxis would be servicing our streets. Level 5 autonomous vehicles will soon become commercially available. We won't even have to touch the steering wheels anymore. It would be crazy to buy any car other than a Tesla. That would be like buying a horse when you can buy a car! Of course, come 2020, Elon Musk will declare that 2021 will be the year for commercial self-driving vehicles. And in 2021, he will pronounce that 2022 would be the year. The singularity is the turtle. We are Achilles. A few months ago, a man who was riding in a Tesla using its auto-pilot function died in a car crash. The auto-pilot remained operational even after the driver had died; the Tesla continued spinning down the freeway with the dead body strapped inside. How could this happen, you ask? How horrible, you might say. Well, actually it isn't. The issue is simple. The driver being dead has no bearing on the car's ability to drive, so it keeps driving on. The important thing is not why it drives-it's whether or not it can. If it can drive, it will continue to drive, even if it has no reason to. As William James once wrote, "A man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries." Or, take Vseveled Meyerhold, "We do not run out of fear, we are afraid because we run." Question: Are the thirteen children in Yi Sang's "Crow's Eye View" afraid because they are running? Or are they running because they are afraid? Captain America: Winter Soldier opens with a jogging scene. Running is one of the actions that define Captain America. When he runs, he seems at once distinct and different among the other superheroes, who are seen soaring through the skies on telekinetic wings or teleporting to distant worlds. Compared to that, the act of running is humble, dynamic, physical. In contrast, his antagonist in the film, the Siberian-made cyborg Winter Soldier never runs. The main character in A Day Off is seen running, but the camera never shows his body in the act. Audiences are therefore made to believe that this self-deprecating misogynist doesn't have a physical form, and therefore can never be completely free. A thoroughly modernist take. On the other hand, the character of Captain America is grounded in realism, while the Winter Soldier, in social realism. Body 1. Sound body and sound mind: Captain America Body 2. Weak body and unsound mind: Huh Wook Body 3. Weird body and insane mind: Winter Soldier Ever the brooding walker, the Winter Soldier is nothing more than a puppet,1 devoid of free will that was forcefully taken away from him through hypnosis. Russia = fascism. To this formula, Marvel adds the element of machinery. The anti-humanist idea of the machine is combined with fascism. It is not too difficult to see the shadows of fascism across Iron Man and the Helicarrier (S.H.I.E.L.D/Hydra), which insist they are working for the sake of the common good while depending on extensive algorithms and the use of AI. Iron Man leaves his suit behind to start a family with Pepper Potts. Humanism taking off the Iron Man suit family. The moment Iron Man is seen at his most humane and vulnerable, he dies. Captain American returns as an old man. The strongest basis for free will and humanism is that all humans eventually die, and that humans can make the choice to die of their own free will. (Christianity also clings to the belief of free will because of the concept of judgment after death./Literature's greatest obsession has always been death.) The reason many of us are uncomfortable at the thought of transhumanism and life beyond death is that the idea seems to imply the end of free will. (Incidentally, all dictators hope to live forever, as history and narratives have repeatedly told us is the case.) The end of free will = the loss of all meaning. Two questions: 1. Can masculinity ever manage to overcome self-hatred and misogyny without leaning on human free will? 2. Can the dynamism of the human body be recreated without coming into the fold of liberal humanism? Additionally: All meaning has the ability to withstand contradiction . . . Contradiction is represented by the moment when meaning complies with its self-conformity. Because meaning, by definition, also includes the possibility of its own denial. Additionally: Method acting and biomechanics During his stay in Moscow, Walter Benjamin sat through no fewer than fifteen plays. Of these, some had an anti-revolutionary message. One of the most well-known of these plays was Konstantin Stanislavsky's production of The Days of the Turbins (December 14, 1926). After watching Stanislavsky's performance, Benjamin wrote: The audience was noticeably different from the ones I had seen in the other two theaters. It was as if there were not a single Communist present, not a black or blue tunic in sight. [. . .] A waft of perfume greeted me as I entered the theater. [. . .] The entire production was done in the style of a dusty court theater. Stanislavsky's theater and acting concepts were introduced to the American Laboratory Theatre by his protégée Maria Ouspenskaya. At the Theatre, actors such as Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler developed the concept of method acting and applied it to Hollywood productions. This anti-revolutionary acting style caused a revolution in film acting and became the prototype for contemporary acting. Meyerhold, for his part, refused to comply with Stanislavsky's realistic portrayals of characters' inner psyches, and instead created a new method influenced by the notion of biomechanics proposed by Aleksei Gastev. What he refused above all was realism, or the embrace of reality. He believed that theater shouldn't present a literal representation of reality but rather its highly sophisticated stylization. To him, the actor's body was a biomechanical device used to express emotions and ideas. Consider it an inversion of acting as media. What is a theater actor? She is, after all, an artistic engineer who uses her body in keeping with the scientific principles of time and movement. What about the most physically well-trained, disciplined actors? They are actors who have achieved a near-perfect unity between the mechanisms of stimuli and response-that is, those who have cut the time it takes for a stimulus to produce a relevant response down to the barest minimum, so that any stimulus produces a nearly instantaneous response. So it was only natural for the Turkish immigrant Elia Kazan, who studied method acting from Stella Adler, to go from being a Communist to becoming a proponent of McCarthyism. The anti-revolutionary body becomes a revolution; the star of capitalism and the affected humanist leads anti-Communist Fascism. The revolutionary body influenced by Taylorism becomes a machine and is branded as an elitist and Soviet counter-revolutionary, before ultimately disappearing in the Great Purge. 3. Running is a Question of Class M decided to make a movie. They had majored in English literature and dabbled in poetry for a while until they learned they couldn't write poetry forever. To write poetry was to punish themselves-and others-continuously. In a different time zone or a different country, perhaps it might have been possible to write a different kind of poem. But not in Korea. The bigger concern was that M loved to run. M boasted that they had come in first place in long-distance running and in the two-hundred-meter dash while in junior high. It may be hard to believe, but it's true. "That's why I can never write poetry. Because poets don't run. Only novelists run." I had to agree. I'm not much of a runner, but I admit that novelists are the real runners. In school, they probably came in last in all the relay races. But the act of writing fiction and the act of running are all a lonely race. Running requires much physical stamina, more so than walking. Likewise, writing a novel is a physical struggle. Philip Roth once stated, "Work is important. Only amateurs are waiting for inspiration." "That's why I hate Philip Roth." M said they couldn't get through The Human Stain, neither the film version nor the novel. "Why do people even read American novels, anyway?" We were in Paris, the city of racial discrimination. Paris is also the city of misogyny. Paris is also the city of walkers. Therefore, it stands to reason that all walkers are misogynists. Samuel Beckett liked to frequent the brothels on the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. One day, a woman-probably a sex worker-approached Beckett and asked if he wanted her services. When he refused, the woman sneered, "Of course you do. So, who are you waiting for then? Godot?" M looked shocked. "Wait, so that's how Beckett got the inspiration for Waiting for Godot? Wrapped in the arms of a hooker?" Well, we couldn't jump to any conclusions. Beckett may have gone to a brothel but decided not to have sex. Maybe he felt a certain blissful irony at the thought of seeing God in his conversations with prostitutes. "Your problem is that you consider that ironic." M's favorite place in Paris was the Louvre and their favorite movie scene was from Bande à part where the three main characters race across the Louvre in record time, finishing at nine minutes and forty-three seconds, only to have this record broken, at nine minutes and twenty-eight seconds, by a similar scene in The Dreamers. Another was the recreation of this scene by Agnès Varda who strolls across the Louvre in a wheelchair. I recalled reading a post on an online community site for people interested in traveling across Europe. The author of the post had written that he wanted to pay homage to both Bande à part and The Dreamers by breaking their record of running across the Louvre. Seeking two companions who want to join me at the Louvre tomorrow morning. Contact me if you're a dreamer! My KakaoTalk ID is XXXX lol "I thought it was awful! He wanted to run across the Louvre with complete strangers. Why would anyone want to do that?" M told me to stop visiting those travel community pages. "The focus should be on Agnès Varda. Ignore those washed-up losers living out their 1968 revolution dreams." The Louvre race was noteworthy for the fact that Agnès Varda didn't run. While the male artists, Godard and Bertolucci, were busy setting records, Agnès Varda is seen strolling leisurely through the space with the aid of a machine. "That's where Varda and Donna Haraway meet," said M. "Running is a tool of the oppressors! Machines are the tool of liberation! Therefore, cars are to our freedom what the typewriter was to women's liberation!" "But you like to run. And you don't even have a driver's license." "So? I can still be an oppressor, can't I?" M argued. "And I'm going to name my movie Running is a Question of Class." That night I thought of Jack London. Specifically, of Jack London and his short story "To Build a Fire." Of the seaman Jack who wrote a thousand words a day. M had only a cursory knowledge of Jack London, but knew he had overdosed and died. They also knew that the protagonist in "To Build a Fire" had frozen to death while crossing Alaska. "There's something strange about that," M said. We discussed other works that were set in Alaska. I brought up Park Min-gyu's "Rudy," while M spoke of Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska. "Whoa!" M shouted, while reading "Rudy." "Rudy" is about a fear of things that never stop moving. A Kind of Alaska is about the chaos one feels at having stopped all movement. "As a well for ideas, the theme of movement is basically bottomless." M and I fell into the delusion that we would soon create a masterpiece. I would write a novel much like an essay film, while M declared they would use the filmmaking styles of the Laputan people from Gulliver's Travels. In the book, the people on Laputa island believed language to be unnecessary, and that everyone could communicate using real objects. With bags slung over their shoulders, they would take out objects from the bags and point to them every time they needed to discuss what was on their minds. M announced that their movie would be the film version of that ever-important bag. I had no idea what M meant, not having read Gulliver's Travels, but I was struck by their idea. Exhilarated, we rushed out into the street. It was past eleven o'clock, and Paris was gripped by a sudden, bitterly cold wind. Sang-woo, who lived in Berlin, said he had put on his HEATTECH shirt. How's the weather in Paris? It was scorching hot yesterday . . . "Europe's crazy. It's the craziest continent in human history." We were afraid of possible attacks by people of other ethniticies but still decided to run in the face of the cold and discrimination. Our goal was to pass the fountain and enter Villette, then cross Belleville and run straight to the Père Lachaise Cemetery. M struck out first. Their pale legs gleamed in the dark, and thinking I could easily overtake them, I started out slow. The streets were empty, save for an Arab man in a black leather jacket sitting on the railing of a café with his dog, slowly eyeing us. I had already crossed the intersection but hadn't caught up to M yet. I speeded up. M glanced back at me then raced ahead. The distance between us grew. I ran faster, and so did M. We were growing farther and farther apart, and I was getting out of breath. By the time we reached Chinatown, I was about to faint. Except it only felt like we'd been running for five minutes at most. "I think I'm going to die!" I yelled. At that, two young men in nylon tracksuits turned to stare. Panicking, I kept running. M looked to be at the end of the road. They seemed to be merging with the vanishing point on the horizon, and my heart was beating so loudly it was drowning out all other sounds. But I couldn't stop. If I stopped now, I would be easy prey for the city's pickpockets. Besides, M would be in danger too, alone in the streets at night. We're going to dream about running and images and movement and stopping . . . I thought. Let's just power through to Père Lachaise . . . There we'll collapse and be buried . . . Hopefully next to Balzac . . . Running is peculiar for its ability to reduce the sensation of time. By shortening the time it takes to cross a certain distance, our experience of that distance is also cut short. Time is experience. Running is goal-oriented. There is an event, and it is to solve the event that we engage in running. The runner is oblivious to everything else, and therefore, experience is limited to the event itself. On the other hand, walking lengthens the sensation of time. Walking doesn't seek a clear purpose; nor is the act particularly desperate. The walker can change direction at any time, or even come to a full stop. Walking is by nature a scattered, distracted act. "To Build a Fire" is about the struggle between humans and nature. What's interesting is not the inner conflicts as depicted in the story, but rather the clash between form and content. "To Build a Fire" is critical of something the story itself is guilty of in its form. The story is critical of the goal-oriented, aggressively direct tendencies of humans, but its own style is goal-oriented and direct. This conflict is due to Jack London's own contradictions, himself a Communist who wanted to be rich. London's 1909 novel Martin Eden, a spin-off of The Great Gatsby, describes the distorted views of women held by men riddled with contradictory ideologies. They mythologize love and/or women. From there, death is born. In his anthology of world literature, Yi Mun-yol selected "To Build a Fire" as a work that deals with the "aesthetics of death." According to Yi, some civilizations invested too heavily in death and therefore collapsed, while others focused only on living pleasures and withered away. Neither civilizations could be free from death. This is why literature, particularly fiction, is so gripped by the subject of death. Since ancient times, death has been both the gravest of literary themes and the most emotionally resonant device. 4. I May Not be Happy Forever but Tonight I am Satisfied We were sitting across from each other on the bed, each staring into our own laptops. M was drinking wine, while I drank coffee. M liked Bordeaux wine, and I had no problem falling asleep while caffeinated. The reason I drink coffee at night is not because I like it, but because I can still go to sleep even after I've had some, I said. M said that made sense somehow, oddly enough. "Want to watch this?" M turned their laptop over so I could see the screen. It was set to a YouTube channel. "Bonnie Bremser?" "Yeah." M said that they had come to know about Bonnie Bremser only recently, and that they were unsure of how to make sense of that fact. I for one had never heard the name before. M of said that was normal. In Korea, when people talk about the Beat Generation, they mostly mention male authors like Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac, so it was only natural. In fact, there were tons of women who were part of the movement. "Bonnie Bremser was a Beatnik and a poet. And female." Bonnie was the wife of the Beatnik poet Ray Bremser; her maiden name was Brenda Frazer. As with all members of the Beat generation, Bonnie had become disillusioned with college life and society in general when she first met Ray and decided to go on the run with him. Ray was being chased by the police for armed robbery, though he claimed he had been framed. Bonnie didn't seem to care. No matter if it was true, that would be so cool, a real criminal, a revolutionary, a terrorist, the Jean Genet of North America. But life is a treacherous journey. It's sickening, and trite, and sentimental, but it's true. With their infant daughter Rachel, Ray and Bonnie crossed the border into Mexico, where, having no other means to make a living, Ray forced Bonnie to turn tricks. Bonnie wandered the streets of Mexico City and Veracruz prostituting herself, and used that money to take care of Ray and Rachel. Ray was her pimp, her lover, her teacher, and a father. Disgusting piece of shit. Vile human. Total asshole. People spat on Ray, but Bonnie believed she had made her own choice. No, Bonnie, that wasn't your choice. You were being used. Yes, Bonnie later came to realize that she may have been used by Ray, that she was being cleverly manipulated by him somehow. So it was true. But what could she do? Ray was arrested by the Mexican police and thrown in jail. Bonnie and Rachel were cast out onto the streets of Mexico City in the 1960s. Bonnie put her daughter up for adoption and continued working as a prostitute. In the mornings, she smoked a joint, then sat before a typewriter where she wrote a letter to Ray. At night, she donned a short corduroy skirt and headed out to the street. Troia: Mexican Memoirs is a collection of the letters Bonnie wrote while wandering around Mexico City. It begins with this paragraph: . . . First off I want to tell a few really important things about me. I know that continuity is necessary [. . .] but I believe in distortion-I believe that if you get to a place where something is taking shape and want badly to comprehend the thing that you have created [. . .] then any old thing to fill the gap will do [. . .] what's important is not the technique or lack of it, but those few minutes when you overcome the frustration, bridge the gap, and hold something incredibly beautiful to you [. . .] The book, though published in 1969, was completely forgotten until it was reissued in 2007, whereupon it created a small sensation. Theorists and artists who had lived through the Third Wave of feminism were unsure what to do with this woman, who was both a whore and an artist, a provider and a lover, who dreamed of monogamy but had no qualms about sexual deviation and prostitution. She was too problematic to be touted as a hero, but too independent to be cast as a victim. "Have you read the book?" I asked. M said that they had, a little. But her life was much too difficult for M to comprehend. M didn't want to paint her as an Other and put her on a great remove from themselves, but that's how M felt. The YouTube video M wanted to show me was shot in 1997. It was filmed by Jerome Poynton, a Beat researcher and amateur filmmaker, who meets Bonnie, who is living in Alpena, Michigan, and has a conversation with her. The video had only 350 views so far. "He's not going to make any money off this," I said. "I heard you only get paid after four thousand views." "Thieves," M said. It was the dead of winter when Jerome went to Alpena, Michigan to meet with Bonnie Bremser. The entire village was covered in snow and the streets were empty. Cars crawled along slower than horse-drawn carriages. Sunlight, when it could peek out from between the thick clouds, shone feebly down on the rooftops. Poynton, who lived in Athens, was used to bleak weather, but he says even he was surprised by the bleakness of this Michigan winter, where the atmosphere was foggy and chilly, and where no one came and nothing existed due to the cold, with the train stations empty of vacationers and full of nothing but drunks. Bonnie doesn't respond. Although she was living in a city that was the polar opposite of Mexico, which is where she spent her youth, she didn't seem to think that her life had turned upside down, or that her life was a pile of shit. She didn't seem to like others commentating on her life. You've heard this before, haven't you? Jerome asked. And what about you? What made you crawl here all the way from the Mediterranean, you sucker? She seemed to want to say, but to speak requires energy, which she didn't want to waste. Jerome and Bonnie go for a walk towards Lake Huron. A walk in this weather? Bonnie thinks but Jerome looks so excited at having met the legendary poet Bonnie Bremser that she keeps it to herself and guides him to the lake while doing her best to talk about things unrelated to poetry. It's approaching dusk, and the sun can be seen setting beyond Lake Huron. The orange sun is hanging on the horizon, and to their left and right lay thick piles of snow, hardened and firm and looking as if they'd been there for decades. A lone, skinny dog appears in front of them. Jerome seems to like dogs. Excitedly, he waves the camcorder around and runs toward the animal. The dog prances around the snow then disappears in the forest nearby. Great place, huh? Jerome laughs. Bonnie mutters, Fool, what a great place this is, hah! But Jerome, lost in his reverie, doesn't hear her. The last of the Beat generation ends here . . . Jerome murmurs, as he stares across the Huron, as expansive as the sea. You're the Beat generation's true lost poet, aren't you? he asks. Bonnie responds that she hasn't lost anything. I don't want to be cynical towards life, but if people say this attitude is cynical, then I guess that's what I am. She says that all words, evaluations, and values seemed empty and ridiculous. If the people on my side are disappointed to hear this, well then, there's nothing I can do. If the people on the other side are emboldened by this, well then, that's too bad but there's nothing I can do about those hopeless people. I am not on the side of any words, and I am not on the side of any meaning. I am on the side of all existence. After walking along Lake Huron for a long time, they climb into a car. They drive past a snowy village, warehouses, and factories during a time of day that isn't quite nighttime or daytime, in a place that looked as if things that were neither fully human nor beast might rush out at them, but their conversation, along with the sounds of the wind rushing past, seem normal enough. The video ends at a parking lot in a 7-Eleven. At one point, Bonnie throws back her head and laughs, and it looks like she is missing all her teeth. Maybe we're exaggerating things, I said. Like Bonnie said, there was no meaning to words. The words themselves don't give meaning; only the fact that the words exist give meaning. Bonnie seems to be at peace, and not at all like the last remaining Beat generation poet who used to sell her body for sex while on the run from the law. "It's better that way," M said. 1To run, one must demonstrate the will to run. Meanwhile, walking has always been an activity characterizing people who have lost their minds, or are confused and unsure of their surroundings. This is also why Fascists were compared to zombies, who were seen to have lost all free will. But then, the zombies began to run. Contemporary Fascists are no longer devoid of free will or subject to others' control (or at least, they don't believe they are). This crossover between walking and running points to a confusion in the concept of free will. Translated by Amber Hyun Jung Kim Illustration ©OMSCIC COMICS

COLUMNS The Connection Between Hibiscus Flowers and Rum The Connection Between Hibiscus Flowers and Rum By Petra Ben-Ari I started translating Korean literature roughly a decade ago and continued to translate and interpret Korean while pregnant with my three children and throughout their early years. Sometimes I wonder what relationship they might have one day with the Korean language and literature that they have been absorbing even before birth. Well, the answer life brings is often much less poetic than our imagination. My two older boys came back from kindergarten the other day humming a rhyme which my philologist's ear identified as Mugunghwakkochi piotseumnida (i.e. "The hibiscus flower has bloomed"), popularized by the notorious Squid Game series. My portrait, "photo Ⓒ Andrea Černá" I was shocked that this content had become so ubiquitous as to reach the kindergarten playground. I seriously considered having a talk with the teachers. Eventually, it turned out that an older sibling(already in his teens) had taught the rhyme to the younger kids as a cool thing, after having been inspired by the series to play "Red Light, Green Light" using the Korean rather than the Czech words. Luckily, nobody saw the original scene. If I'm being perfectly honest, however, I was more concerned about the kids picking up an incoherent Korean pronunciation from a hearsay version of the rhyme rather than the slim chance of their being exposed to graphic violence at school. I must admit once again that I have never seen anything like the kind of attention aroused by Korean shows and dramas. Increasingly, I meet young people who have been inspired to study Korean by watching Korean content. Intrigued by the peculiar charm of these shows, they plunge into a sea of dazzling cultural otherness and become thirsty to know more. In my mind, this would be the opportune moment to introduce them to Korean literature. The leap from watching visual content to reading books is a big one to take, however, a gap that lacks a solid bridge. Perhaps this is one bridge that we translators might help to build. The Loneliness of Others by Jeong Yi Hyun, dramatic reading, Czech translation by Marek Zemánek, Avoid Gallery, 23. 7. 2020, "photo Ⓒ Tereza Čechová, Skandinávský dům" "Red Light, Green Light," for instance, plays a substantial role in the closing chapter of Seven Years of Darkness by Jeong You Jeong, which was published in Czech as Sedmlet temnoty a few months ago. While translating this novel, I was struggling to bring the Korean version of this children's game closer to its Czech cousin. Yes, the rules are more or less the same. But the rhyme was the problem. Korean kids jabber about blooming hibiscus, whereas the Czech ones shout out "Sugar, coffee, lemonade, tea, rum, boom!" In times before Squid Game, it was unthinkable to keep Korean words in a translation. No readers would relate. But today, after what I have seen with my kids, I would probably consider incorporating the phonetic transcription of the original, given the chance that some readers would be able to fill in the robot doll's intonation. In the Czech Republic, as in other European countries, Korean literature remained largely undiscovered by the general public until the 2010s. Only recently-and owing mainly to the efforts of LTI Korea-numerous translations of modern and contemporary literature are being published. Readership is increasing steadily, although it may still fall short of Netflix's figures. Out of two dozen titles published in the last twenty years, two have won domestic literary awards: Human Acts (Kde kvete trávain Czech) by internationally acclaimed author Han Kang, and graphic novel The Grass (Tráva in Czech) by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim. The former was nominated for the Magnesia Litera Award in the category of best translated book, the latter was awarded the Muriel Comics Award in the category of best translation. The White Book, theatre play based on Han Kang's novel, Czech translation by Petra Ben-Ari, Meet Factory, 20. 6. 2021, "photo Ⓒ Kristýna Šaarová" In Han Kang's case, it has been interesting to see Human Acts receive much more attention than her first international success, The Vegetarian. The fight for democracy, portrayed in the painful search for the human stories behind the Gwangju massacre, has seemingly good potential to resonate in our post-socialist country, where (during socialism) dissenters of the totalitarian regime used to be harshly repressed. This is not to forget the female voice in contemporary Korean literature, however, which has also found a responsive audience. Long before The Grass, world literature magazine PLAV dedicated a special volume to Korean literature, issued under the title Illusions of Korean Women. In my opening essay, I tried to emphasize the common source of female activism and literature written by women in contemporary Korean history. Later, at the launch party for this special issue, selected translations were presented as short dramatic pieces (see attached photos). One featured short story, "The Loneliness of Others" by Jeong Yi Hyun, was so successful that, following the event, a radio programmer decided to create a radio session made up of Korean short stories. Han Kang's books, for their part, are popular with Czech theatre directors -The Vegetarian and The White Book have been adapted as theatre plays. I like to interpret these adaptations as pillars of the bridge between literature and series like Squid Game, as mentioned in the beginning of this essay. A show happens at the present moment and entertains in real time. Literature lasts and requires good timing. A translator's insight facilitates smooth engineering. The bridge can eventually serve to help in both directions. When the kids were torturing me with their distorted Korean syllables, I tried to offer them examples of the proper accent by showing them children's videos of the actual game. I can't say they showed much enthusiasm. At least I can hope that one day, picking up a copy of Seven Years of Darkness (translated by their dearest mom), they will remember "Red Light, Green Light" as the exotic tune they used to tease me with as preschoolers. Petra Ben-Ari Petra Ben-Ari (1983) is a Czech orientalist and translator. She majored in Sinology at Charles University in Prague. During her studies, she spent three academic years abroad, first in Italy (Venice), later in China (Jinan and Shanghai). Between 2011-2015, she studied Comparative Literature at Seoul National University in the Republic of Korea. Besides translating Korean literature, she also publishes articles, reviews and essays. Edited by Yoonna Cho

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FICTION A Loose Collection of Works Thought to Be LA or Driving Poems Dictated to a Small Digital Recorder While Driving from San Diego to Los Angeles at Dusk "[. . .] the bare fact of movement [. . .] is rarely just about getting from A to B."

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China possesses one of the world's major literary traditions. Its texts have been preserved for over 3,000 years. Reverence for the past has influenced the preservation of these cultural sources, and may have influenced the invention of woodblock printing in the 9th century and moveable type printing in the 12th century. The practice of collecting and reproducing libraries has also played a major role in the transmission of literary tradition. Most important, China can boast an unbroken cultural tradition based on the Chinese script as a language - a written medium - independent of spoken dialectic difference. As literary language became increasingly removed from spoken language, it became less vital and literature took a natural turn toward imitation. Indeed, after the formative classical period that began with Confucius, the literary history of China becomes one of imitation-with-variations of different models. Literature also thus becomes more elitist, for an understanding or appreciation of a text may require familiarity with the models being alluded to.

The principal genre of Chinese literature is poetry; early folk songs established the shi ( shih) form that crystallized during the Han dynasty and dominated for the next 1,200 years. Beginning with the simple complaints and longings expressed in rhymed couplets of folk songs, this form gradually became more and more complex, or "regulated," until it took years of study to master its formal rules of composition.

The short story, which began to develop during the Tang dynasty, at first emphasized either historical events or supernatural happenings which could not be related in a formal historical work. The notion of fiction as connected to history persisted, yet more imaginative and rationally inexplicable, culminating in China's greatest novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber or The Story of the Stone, which is at once autobiographical and realistic, and at the same time imaginative and mystical.

Drama, one of China's least well-developed genres, had its origins also in popular entertainment. The high point of elite drama was during the Yuan dynasty, when intellectuals dispossessed by the Mongol invaders turned to the composition of drama both to productively employ their taste and erudition and also to covertly criticize the foreign government. During the following centuries, dramas tended to become longer, and the opera dominated. Spoken drama was not generally conspicuous until the 20th century.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the movement to modernize and westernize China's literature became very popular. The formal classical language, which by then survived only in written texts, was replaced by the vernacular spoken language as a literary medium. Experiments with free verse and sonnet forms, short autobiographical stories and interior monologues, spoken drama and radio or film scripts were influenced by western models rather than by classical Chinese tradition. However, the theme of China's plight dominated 20th-century Chinese literature, and for the past six decades the pendulum has frequently swung back and forth between western imitation and modernized styles versus Chinese foundation and conservative techniques. Whereas classical Chinese literature was often valued for its craft and erudition, post-1919 Chinese literature has been evaluated largely in terms of its social and political relevance.

Much Chinese literature of the 1920s and 1930s both exposed national social problems and also expressed writers' doubts about finding viable solutions to these problems.

In 1942 Mao Zedong, in his "Talks at Yenan on Literature and Art," emphasized to his fellow communist revolutionaries that the goal of literature was neither to reflect the dark side of society nor to express the author's own private feelings or artistic inspirations. Instead, he said, literature and art should inspire the masses by presenting positive examples of heroism and socialist idealism. It should also be written in the public voice and style of the workers, peasants, and soldiers, not of the elite intellectuals.

During the Cultural Revolution period (1966-76), Mao's principle that literature and art should serve the people and promote socialism was most rigidly adhered to. The fiction of Hao Ran (Hao Jan) constitutes an excellent example of this tendency.
Literature After 1976
With the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 came the official end of the Cultural Revolution period, and with it increased freedom for writers. During the subsequent decade, Chinese fiction tended to fall into the following five (necessarily overlapping) categories:
1. Literature of the Wounded
The initial impulse of writers was to begin, tentatively at first, to express the profound suffering of the previous decades. Chen Roxi's stories in The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories offer an example of very well-crafted fiction which reveals the physical, psychological and spiritual pain the Chinese people endured under Mao. But finally, Chen Roxi must be considered a foreigner, though she is Chinese and she lived in China during the Cultural Revolution era.

Within China, the "literature of the wounded" movement began in the summer of 1977 when Lu Xinhua, a 23-year-old student at Fudan University, presented a story entitled "The Wounded" as a big-character poster on the walls of the campus. The story was soon published, and it inspired hundreds of others. Another one which became equally famous was Liu Xinwu's "Class Counselor," published in November 1977. In Liu's story, the young girl fails to achieve a reconciliation with her mother, whom she had been forced to denounce during the Cultural Revolution. An open-minded class advisor recognizes that there is still hope for the generation of youth who suffered at the hands of the Gang of Four. For several years, story after story poured out the guilt, regret, and pain over lost lives and ruined careers, betrayal of friends and family members, and the need to seek restitution. Within the "wounded" tradition, though not literature per se, a number of Chinese have written accounts of this tragic period for Western audiences.
2. Humanistic Literature
A related literary trend which began in the late 1970s and early 1980s was fiction which treated the problems of recreating the whole person after the constricting movements of the Cultural Revolution. A large number of women writers predominate in this category.

Since personal feelings were supposed to be subordinate to political action during the Cultural Revolution, writers who reacted in the opposite direction after the death of Mao used the rally cry, "Love Must Not Be Forgotten" - the title of one of Zhang Jie's short stories advocating marriage based only on love and private desire.
3. Social Criticism
Finally allowed once again to treat in fiction the darker side of Chinese society, many writers composed works which addressed post-Cultural Revolution social problems: alienated youth, the loneliness of the elderly and the divorced, the housing shortage, government corruption, dissatisfaction with the system of job assignments, etc. In a bold social indictment, Bai Hua in his screenplay, "Unrequited Love," has the protagonist's daughter ask the fundamental question: "Dad, you love our country. Through bitter frustration you go on loving her . . . But, Dad, does this country love you?" This script first appeared in 1979, and by 1980 it was banned.
4. Seeking Roots
Some writers, especially those who live outside the main cities, have turned to local themes and subject matter in their recent fiction. For example, Lu Wenfu describes the customs of the Suzhou region and Gao Xiaosheng depicts agricultural life in his native Hunan province. These people are seeking a meaning in life separate from political movements and urban upward mobility.
5. Reportage
Some writers feel that the most important contribution they can make is to record the facts of Chinese life in a way that illuminates both the problems and strengths of the Chinese people. The most famous journalist who exposes corruption in his sophisticated reporting style is Liu Binyan, whose "People or Monsters?" was acclaimed for its unflinching honesty in confronting deeply rooted government corruption.

In a different tone, Chinese Profiles, compiled by Zhang Xinxin and Sang Ye, presents interviews with 100 Chinese citizens who tell about their lives in a way similar to people interviewed by Studs Terkel. Their stories are poignant and surprising as individual accounts. They illuminate the rich social fabric of China and indirectly point out major social and political issues implicit in the individual accounts.

Acknowledgment: The consultant for this unit was Dr. Marsha Wagner, Columbia University.

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Introduction to Chinese Literature | Asia for Educators | Columbia University

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China possesses one of the world's major literary traditions. Its texts have been preserved for over 3,000 years. Reverence for the past has influenced the preservation of these cultural sources, and may have influenced the invention of woodblock printing in the 9th century and moveable type printing in the 12th century.

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The Future of . . . with Owen Bennett-Jones July 12, 2022

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There is a review of this book in EAGLE as well.  A great insight into the terra cotta warriors and other key objects.

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Early China is best known for the dazzling material artifacts it has left behind. These terracotta figures, gilt-bronze lamps, and other material remnants of...

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A Comparison of Sijo and Haiku, Tracy Imamura, Columbus 04 A Little Chinese Seamstress, KaSandra Emler, Columbus 11 A Single Shard, Edith Swank, Wooster 07 Animal Farm and No One to Envy, Carolyn Willis, Columbus 16

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Graphic Novels/Manga | East Asian Studies Center

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Graphic Novels: Lesson Plan & Graphic Organizer Graphic novel outline GRAPHIC NOVELS/MANGA (Please support your local bookseller, but the Amazon link was the quickest search for the following titles . . . )

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5.0 out of 5 stars Great book...Amazon's packing has gotten worse
Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2021

Awesome book. My 3rd time ordering this to give to friends. However, the book was shipped in the box with zero packing material. Plenty of room for book to shift and move around and it resulted in a rip to the jacket. Amazon's packing process has gotten worse over time.

Reviews with images

Top reviews from the United States

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Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2022

An amazing graphic novel. So powerful and an important teaching tool for children so they can learn history. The fact that school boards have banned this book in backwards states is horrifying.

Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2022

Unlike the idiots running schools in Tennessee, teachers know this book is not only brilliant, but a perfect intro for teaching The Holocaust. Trying to ban any book is dangerous and egregious—-but banning this one? On the 77th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz? They’re not even being subtle. This book is incredibly valuable and important. Everyone should read it.

Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2018

I am reviewing the paperback set, which includes both volumes I and II. That's important. You really need to read both volumes. While they were published separately and years apart, only by reading both will you read the entire story.
First, shame on me for not having read this years ago. I recall having heard the words, "You have to read Maus!" but I never acted on it. Perhaps that was during my "contempt for graphic novels" phase, before I understood that there is some information that can best be conveyed using a graphic novel format. (The book that converted me was a graphic novel adaptation of the 9/11 commission's report.)

These two books are a must read for any educated person. You will come away from the reading experience not so much with new insights on the Holocaust but with a deeper understanding. What more is there to say about the Holocaust? Plenty. Personalizing it, putting a face on it, always drives home what happened a good deal more than just hearing the numbers; that's the reason The Diary of Anne Frank remains so widely read. And the images, disturbing yet "graphic", will expand your understanding. This is the first place I have encountered a diagram of the infamous gas chambers and how they operated.

There are actually two stories in Maus, The first story is the tale of the author's father Vladek as he navigates the years before, during, and immediately after WWII. The second story is the tale of the author's challenging relationship with his father, who is a manipulative hustler. The very quality which enabled him to survive WWII also makes him a somewhat contemptible human being. At one point, the author's wife suggests that perhaps not all of Vladek survived the war, but I rather think that Vladek's character was very much in existence from the start.

For example, early on when Vladek decides to get married, he callously throws aside his girlfriend of 4 years, blaming her for the relationship's very existence because she threw herself at him in the beginning. But his reason for not marrying her is simple: she has no money. Instead, he marries Anja, the author's mother, whose father is a millionaire. This works out for him immediately, when his new father-in-law asks about his career plans. Vladek says he will go back to selling textiles, but his father-in-law gives him a textile factory instead.

As the war begins and Jews start to find themselves increasingly ostracized and bereft of jobs and professions, Vladek takes to the black market. Over and over throughout the two books, we see him find a way, less resourceful than hustler, no doubt frequently at the expense of others, even of others' lives. For example, in a cattle car in which he has physically found a way to elevate himself above the others (enabling him to become one of the only survivors), he is able to reach snow (read: water). When others ask him for some, he tells them that he can only reach enough for himself.

Even towards the end of his life, Vladek retains his hustler personality. He sneaks into the local hotel to make use of their spa and workout facilities. He plays bingo there for free. He seeks to return half-eaten food to the local grocery store and when the manager understandably refuses, plays the Holocaust card and earns himself a $5 credit. He even fakes heart problems TWICE, both times to get the author to drop everything and travel miles to come to his side; the second time involves a plane ride to an ambulance to a hospital - where tests are run and Vladek is then sent home!

No wonder the author's relationship with his father was difficult. Vladek himself was a difficult man. And yet, he was his father.

At first I wondered at the inclusion of the modern-day events in Maus, but they do add a great deal to the story and enable us to really get a handle on who Vladek is. The same man who tries to game the system by getting something for nothing at the nearby hotel is the man who gamed the system and survived the Holocaust, repeatedly skirting death.

Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2021

Awesome book. My 3rd time ordering this to give to friends. However, the book was shipped in the box with zero packing material. Plenty of room for book to shift and move around and it resulted in a rip to the jacket. Amazon's packing process has gotten worse over time.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book...Amazon's packing has gotten worse
Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2021

Awesome book. My 3rd time ordering this to give to friends. However, the book was shipped in the box with zero packing material. Plenty of room for book to shift and move around and it resulted in a rip to the jacket. Amazon's packing process has gotten worse over time.

Images in this review

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2020

The Complete Maus is a graphic novel that tells two stories, one set in 1930s and 1940s Europe, and the other in roughly present day 1980s America, when and where the book was being written.
The first story is one that breaks the fourth wall in that it’s the story of the author, Art Spiegelman, and his father, the elderly Vladek Spiegelman. Art is a cartoonist interviewing his father about what it was like to be a Polish Jew during the buildup to WWII. He tells the story of his (as well as his wife Anja’s) trials and ultimate survival of the war and the Holocaust. As the story progresses, we discover that Vladek has remarried to another survivor named Mala in the years since Anja passed away in 1968. But that relationship is a complicated one (to say the least) as Vladek is a deeply flawed man in his old age. These flaws cause rifts between Art and Vladek as well. This first story zeroes in on these complications between Vladek, Art, and Mala.

The second story is a love story between Vladek and Anja as a young couple facing the dangerous and genocidal landscape of WWII Europe. Throughout the late 1930s until the war ended in 1945, the two relied on each other for the strength to survive. Even when things were at their most bleak, while both were imprisoned in Auschwitz, they managed to get messages back-and-forth to each other, and Vladek even managed to get his wife some food here and there. Once the war ended and they both escaped with their lives, Vladek found Anja again back in their hometown and they made a life together, eventually having a son named Art in 1950. The book is full of details about what many Jewish people experienced during the war. Anja came from a wealthy family, and Vladek was a successful business owner himself. But they all started losing their businesses and money as the landscape started to change. Vladek and Anja survived being sent to the ghettos in large part due to Vladek’s determined, clever, resourceful fortitude. They hid in bunkers with dirt and mice. In Auschwitz, Anja nearly died of starvation, and Vladek nearly of typhus. They were both tortured and beaten by Nazis, and Vladek was nearly murdered by Nazis on several occasions. They both lost nearly their entire families to the Nazis, including their first son Richieu, their parents, siblings, cousins and friends.

The two stories come together near the end as the timelines merge. That’s when the point is really driven home about how Vladek’s experiences in the war affected his psychology in later years. Although Vladek is a sympathetic character in his youth (smart, clever, resourceful and someone the reader really roots for), he is not depicted that way as an elderly man. This is a big part of the struggle for Art, attempting to reconcile the cheap, stubborn, argumentative (and sometimes racist) elderly man with the man he was in his youth.

Vladek wasn’t the only one who suffered as a result of the trauma experienced during the war. Anja had suffered from some sort of affliction that saw her hospitalized before the war, but she committed suicide in 1968. And Art battled the ghost of his dead brother Richieu, whom he had never met. When it seemed that a being sent to a work or death camp was imminent, Anja’s sister thought she could get her kids to safety in the countryside, so Anja and Vladek sent their very young son Richieu with her, hoping he’d have a better chance of surviving. Ultimately when she and the kids were hunted by the Nazis, she killed herself and all the kids to prevent them from suffering a more painful death upon capture. And even though Richieu was dead before Art was ever born, he lived with his dead brother’s ghost ever-present as he grew up in Richieu’s shadow.

In the book, people are drawn as animals. For example, Jews are drawn as mice and the Nazis are cats. I don’t know whether it makes the work more or less impressive as a result, but I almost completely forgot that they were mice and cats within a couple of pages. What makes this book great for me is the storytelling, not the metaphor.

This is the story of two lovers who survived one of the most terrible times in human history. They relied on each other, and even under the worst of circumstances, they persevered together. And it was also the story of the aftermath, the damage done and the trauma inflicted upon those who did manage to survive and the generations that followed.

I’ve never been a big graphic novel fan, but this is a fine piece of work.

This book made me think of a poem written by Leonard Cohen poem from his book “Let Us Compare Mythologies” –

'Lovers'

During the first pogrom they
Met behind the ruins of their homes –
Sweet merchants trading: her love
For a history full of poems.

And at the hot ovens they
Cunningly managed a brief
Kiss before the soldier came
To knock out her golden teeth.

And in the furnace itself
As the flames flamed higher.
He tried to kiss her burning breasts
As she burned in the fire.

Later he often wondered:
Was their barter completed?
While men around him plundered.
And knew he had been cheated.

Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2022

As an educator, I bought these books and kept them in my classrooms for years. I never said anything, just put them in my bookshelf. My inquisitive students would always pull it out and start reading and then ask me questions. It was a great way to start the conversation about the Holocaust. Now, I see they are starting to ban books here. They just pulled this one in one district in Tennessee. That is why I just bought it again! A banned book will always get more students reading than ever before!

Top reviews from other countries

Ella @ The Story Collector

5.0 out of 5 stars Must-read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 4, 2019

Containing both volumes 1 and 2 of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, The Complete Maus tells the complete story of Vladek Spiegelman’s experience of surviving in Hitler’s Europe.
The first and most important thing to make note of is that this is a completely true story. It isn’t a piece of fiction based in the truth of Auschwitz, it is a true account of Art Spiegelman’s father’s life during World War II. It is a heavy and intense read, but completely incredible.

The second important thing you need to know about this book is that it is a graphic novel. It is masterfully drawn, with plenty of narration which makes it easy to read even if you’re not a regular graphic novel reader. The metaphorical representation of people is a massive part of this book. Jews are drawn as mice, Nazis as cats, the Allies as dogs, and Poles as pigs. This is an incredibly effective commentary on stereotypes, and highlights the absurdity of dividing people by nationality.

The brutal honesty about life as a Jew during the Nazi occupation is shocking and horrific, but truly, truly fascinating. On another level, the relationship between Art and Vladek is also explored, and it really shows how the children of survivors can be so affected by the experience of their parents.

Maus isn’t an easy or pleasant read by any means, but it is powerful and it’s essential. If you’re into graphic novels, you MUST read this book. If you’re into historical accounts and memoirs, you MUST read this book. If you read anything at all, you MUST read this book.

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply one of the most important pieces of media about the Holocaust

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 29, 2022

This was the first graphic novel I ever read when I was young, from a library. Years later it was the first graphic novel I ever bought.
I've got nothing to add that hasn't been said already but just do yourself a favour and read it.

Ashleigh @ A frolic through fiction

4.0 out of 5 stars Amazing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 28, 2017

Originally posted on A Frolic Through Fiction
As someone who loves learning about history, I was always going to like this graphic memoir. And while I’m on a bid to introduce myself to more non fiction, a graphic memoir was the perfect way to start that.

So this is the story of Vladek Spiegelman, drawn through his son, Art Spiegelman. And that one point alone – how it was done – was the main crux of my enjoyment. Because it wasn’t just the story of war. Oh no. Instead of simply drawing what his father said, Art Spiegelman actually drew the entire process. He drew himself visiting his dad, coaxing him into telling more of his story. He drew what he was like in later life, a small snapshot into how all this affected him long-term. And through that, I found myself feeling like I was sat right in front of Vladek Spiegelman – him in a chair, myself cross legged on the floor – while he told his story. How a graphic memoir can do that, with so little words in comparison to novels, is beyond me. But I loved it.

And then we have the art. Completely black and white with quite a sketchy look, each page is packed with drawings. It can look a bit overwhelming at first, but I personally think it suits the story really well. There’s the metaphor too – the Nazis are drawn as cats, terrorising the mice (ding ding ding, we have the title: Maus). Such a simple way to explain things, in a time when things weren’t simple at all. Suitable for a graphic memoir though, since there’s not really much leverage in explaining who each person on the page is and which “side” they belong to.

I expected to get emotional. But… I didn’t. I have a feeling that’s partly to do with the fact it’s a graphic memoir, and not as much time is spent describing how horrendous everything is. But also because of Vladek Spiegelman himself. It’s his story, yet as he tells it, he doesn’t seem to reveal many emotions. He just…tells the story. Here are the facts. This is what happened.

Though I might have felt more had a bit more been revealed about Art Spiegelman’s mother. In the beginning, it’s mentioned that she committed suicide after the war, and while it does go into it a little bit, nothing about that is really explained. Granted, that may be because they don’t know much themselves. But still. She’s mentioned so often throughout the memoir – as you would expect – but she herself doesn’t seem to be in it much. I’d have liked to see more of her.

As hard as they try, books will never be able to portray these events accurately. Nothing will. There’s a nod to that even in this book. But with things like these, though I (luckily) may not be able to imagine such ongoing hunger, such heartbreak, the pain and suffering…I might be able to understand a bit more. I can read books like this and know that at least their story isn’t going untold. At least I’ll be here, remembering for them. And that is the least I can do.

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful graphic novel telling one man's struggle to survive the Holocaust

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 21, 2018

This was an excellent graphic novel that captures the fear, the barbaric cruelty and nihilism of the Holocaust more poignantly than many a text-only book could. The story is set half in present day USA where the main protagonist, Vladek Spiegelman, and his son, Art, are now living, and half in Poland and Germany from the mid 1930s to the end of WWII. Art wants to document the experiences of his parents before and during WWII, and painstakingly draws out his father’s memories.
There are no human faces in this book. The Jews are depicted as mice, the Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs etc.
There is a split perception of mice as animals. On one side they are portrayed in much of children’s literature are cute and non-threatening, and on the other as vermin to be exterminated. Above all, they are powerless in the presence of larger, more predatory animals (such as cats). Mice being slaughtered evokes sympathy in a way that the extermination of other ‘vermin’, such as rats, never could.
When the story begins, Vladek is a successful businessman in Poland, courting Anja. Slowly the rumours of anti-Jewish attacks by Nazis in Germany and Czechoslovakia reach them. At first it is seen as a problem elsewhere, but bit by bit, the danger that the Polish Jewish community is in becomes apparent – but it is too late. The story deals with the attempts at hiding and sending of children to supposedly safer places, and then the rounding up of the Jews and the deportations to Auschwitz. Vladek’s life in Auschwitz and then later in Dachau is told, along with the luck and ingenuity that enabled Vladek to stay alive, when so many around him perished.
Vladek is not a sympathetic character. While he may have physically survived the Holocaust, his personality has been forever damaged by his experiences. He is unable to have a close relationship with his son or his second wife. Instincts that enabled him to survive, form a barrier between himself and everyone around him. In some ways, his mind seems to have never left Dachau. Because of this, the trauma of the Holocaust lasts well beyond the 1940s, and impacts directly on the offspring – and further generations – of the survivors. Art wants to understand the difficult man who is his father, and writing/drawing this book is his way of doing that.
This is not a book to enjoy reading. It is an important witness account, that needs to be documented and read. The black and white drawings (colour only on the cover) underline the seriousness of the content and the desperation of the world at that time, and have a visceral impact on the reader.
I highly recommend this book – to everyone.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Masterpiece!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 10, 2017

This is a masterpiece.
They say that a picture paints a thousand words, but master cartoonist and artist Art Spiegelman has drawn a lifetime. Tracing his father's experiences of the Holocaust, Spiegelman delivers something intensely powerful and emotional.

It may seem insensitive to portray the horrors of the Holocaust in a cartoon form, but there's actually something deeply immersive about this format. Like all good art should, the medium of this story pulls you into the experience; opening up the pores of our soul to receive the full potency of this stories message. With each frame of this cartoon you sense the foreboding danger, the growing dehumanisation, and the shock of what transpired.

The gas chambers and incinerators of Auschwitz, the forced labour, the street hangings, the disenfranchisement of homes and businesses and basic human dignity; the demonisation, scapegoating, and media-induced prejudice; the public beatings; the survivalist-led betrayal from neighbour and friends and countrymen; the slow and corrosive stripping away of personal identity which culminated in being reduced to a number...maybe if we could go back and witness these things we would turn ourselves away and refuse to reflect on the horror. But we need to see, and we need to learn, and *Maus*, alongside the stories of other survivors, helps us to do this.

The Holocaust is something we should never forget. Especially in today's world, where we find ourselves once more giving our ears and voices to the growing tide of stigmatisation, fear-mongering, nationalism and the dehumanisation of certain people groups. We may feel our words and opinions have no effect, that they're 'innocent' or 'harmless', but history shows how dangerously ignorant such thinking can be and how catastrophic the consequences are.

--Tristan Sherwin, author of *Love: Expressed*.

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The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale (Pantheon Graphic Library)

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The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale (Pantheon Graphic Library) [Spiegelman, Art] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale (Pantheon Graphic Library)

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Novels from Japan listed below, others from the rest of East Asia to be added soon. General Information:

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Travel Writing from Imperial China

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Agreement for Authorization of Individual Work

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