A new niece; the “little house” books; the Hardy boys

The time has come to salute our new niece, Belladonna “Bella” Jean Louise. She was born to Brianna – who now goes by “Atticus” (“Atti”) – and to “Atti’s” partner, “Ike.”

Karin went to Michigan yesterday and visited the child and her parents.

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Samuel pulled Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books off the shelf and spread them out across the floor. Which of them do you think caught his attention? That’s right: Farmer Boy. The only one in the series about little Almanzo Wilder. The only one about a boy.

The only one I’ve read, as it happens.

Karin tells me that when she was a little girl, she read all of the series *except* Farmer Boy. “That one is dumb,” her mom advised her.

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I had the opposite limitation. I tried, when I was younger, to read some Nancy Drew books. I failed. But I succeeded in devouring dozens of Hardy Boys mysteries.

Now, after some thirty years, I’m rereading one of my old favorites: While the Clock Ticked (the eleventh novel in the series). Samuel and Daniel will be reading The Hardy Boys before long, I expect, and I’d like to be conversant in that literature.

The pacing is breakneck. There’s an amusing scene in which Frank and Joe attend a party with their girlfriends for all of five minutes before they rush off again to pursue a lead.

The police are implausibly nice. They’d like nothing better than to share information with the teenaged sleuths. Frank and Joe’s friend group ticks the important boxes, race-wise. In just a couple of pages, the Italian-American “chum,” the Jewish-American “chum,” and the Irish-American “chum” all are introduced. (Introduced, but never developed as characters.) Nowadays, other races than these are the beneficiaries of token inclusion; but a similar diversity principle seems to have guided the great mercenary children’s writings of 1932.

Then, of course, there’s Chet Morton, a rounder character in more ways than one. The chums go hiking in the woods, and Chet keeps pleading with them to stop so they can all eat their sandwiches. This is where the book provides character development and comical relief.

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Back to Laura Ingalls. I picked up Little House in the Big Woods, also published in 1932, and read the first chapter. Its prose is plain but descriptively exquisite; I wouldn’t be surprised if it were a direct influence upon that of Nobel winner Alice Munro. (I’m especially reminded of her story “Boys and Girls.”) A lot happens in the big woods, but it happens out of view. The children wake up to see dead deer hanging from the trees. Pa kills the family’s pig; Laura stays indoors and listens while it squeals. Predators lurk outside the house.

The taste for this more atmospheric sort of writing comes later in life, I think. First comes a hunger for stories like The Hardy Boys, stories for one-track-minded readers. Not all children, but many children, are like greyhounds chasing a mechanical rabbit.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 33: Ghost in the shell

This violent, disturbing cartoon for adults has the best soundtrack of 1996:

When I hear those drums, I think of a vast, hidden indoor swimming pool, or a great cistern in a derelict building. I visit such places in my dreams.

The main protagonist of Ghost in the Shell likes to go diving in a canal in the middle of a Japanese city. There are skyscrapers all around her, but hardly anyone is in sight. It’s a good place in which to introspect.

All movie long, this character philosophizes out loud, compulsively.

She works for a governmental agency that deals with cyber crime. Her assignment is to trace the source of a computer virus called the “Puppet Master.”

Indeed, she and her colleagues have been designed for this task. They are robot-human hybrids, or cyborgs (the year is 2029). They look like regular humans, except that they stare vacantly and are able to talk without moving their mouths.

And, sometimes, their limbs get torn off.

The limbs are artificial and can be replaced. Still, it’s unnerving to see humanoids conducting themselves matter-of-factly while they’re mutilated. They’re like sinewy, bloody china dolls.

I’ve watched movies with reanimated corpses, talking severed heads, and the like, but nothing else unsettles me just like Ghost in the Shell does.

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I won’t go into detail about the metaphysics of personhood that underlies the combining of a human with a robot. Yes, the movie’s title evokes “The Ghost in the Machine,” the philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s derisive phrase for Cartesian substance-dualism. But whether or not the cyborgs have Cartesian souls is beside the point (as it happens, the movie opts for a thoroughly physicalist ontology).

What matters is that these beings have embodied selves. What kind of self the protagonist has – and, consequently, what her life means – can’t be separated from a physicality that she doesn’t embrace. It troubles her that she’s neither fully human nor fully robotic.

Nor is she fully female – she lacks genitalia. This is evident from scenes in which she fights in the nude.

And this takes us to the interpretation that I find most compelling. The movie meditates on transgenderism, on what it’s like to have a body that feels not just dysfunctional, not just awkward, but wounded.

Here is an excellent review that explores this theme.

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I have little more to say. The movie’s dialog is sometimes flat, sometimes ponderous. This is not an artistic failing. It reflects how the characters struggle to come to terms with the strangeness of their existence.

The futuristic Japanese city is superbly conceived. Against this backdrop, the humanoid characters are drawn rather lifelessly, except when they seem most artificial. Then they become curiously expressive.

There is an extraordinary sequence near the end of the movie. Two cyborgs lie next to one another; below their chests, their bodies have been torn away. They communicate by thinking. One tries to persuade the other to join with himself (herself?) into a single being. When shown from a certain angle, their faces almost seem to merge. The scene could be an homage to Bergman’s Persona. One being combines with another; only, in Ghost in the Shell, it isn’t a nightmare or a colonization, it’s a longed-for realization. The movie isn’t pleasant, but it does plumb fascinating depths.