1. I am shamefully behindhand when it comes to the work of Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki; so far Spirited Away is the only one I’d seen. A week or so ago, I took a step to remedying this by seeing Whisper of the Heart, an intensely charming, thoughtful little film about adolescent love blossoming amidst the oft-frustrating, discouraging, and frightening beginnings of artistic endeavor.

2. Among other things, it largely dispenses with a lot of the standard story beats for a family film, aiming instead for a realistically imperfect progression. The protagonist’s elder sister, for instance, is early on implied to have a secret boyfriend whom she writes letters to. He never shows up or is even directly referenced, and the sister moves out in the third act. Likewise the kindly old man who mentors her relates a story of romance in his youth with a German woman whom he wasn’t able to find after the war. In just about any other film, she would have appeared against all odds, or perhaps be revealed to be a minor character we met earlier. There’s no such resolution here, nor any reason to expect one; the story ends there.

These are part of a general atmosphere of romance that permeates the film, as young Shizuku begins her first ventures into the mystery of romantic love, she becomes aware of the real-life love stories around her and their bittersweet lack of fairy-tale certainty.

3. In any case, it’s an excellent little film, unsurprisingly, full of homey little details (like the cramped little apartment Shizuku and her family occupy) and gorgeously naturalistic animation, here almost entirely dedicated to recreating the real world (apart from a few dreams or fantasy sequences) with a loving sense of familiarity. Highly recommended!

4. On a very different piece Japanese media, I’ve been rather impressed by how successfully I’ve been able to predict the developments in the climactic chapters of My Hero Academia. Not because it’s trite or predictable, but because it’s doing a good job of following what seem to me to be suitable dramatic beats and developments. So when try to think what would be a satisfying way a predicament or plot-point could be resolved, it’s a fairly good chance that that’s what’s going to happen, or at least that it’ll be a factor. It’s an interesting experience to be able to do that (though I’m not predicting near everything, in case you were wondering).

5. Re-reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, my impression of Cassius is “The kind of joyless intellectual who looks down his nose at anyone deemed less egalitarian than himself.”

6. That play is something of a master class in political science, by the way, and without coming down definitely on any given side. On the one hand you have the conspirators who want to preserve the Republic (even though the Republic has been a dead-letter for a long time), most of whom are pretty dishonest and unscrupulous figures, with one token decent man whom they have to deceive into getting involved. On the other you have Caesar, who seems to be changing the rules and moving toward a Monarchy or Dictatorship and who is an honorable and noble figure, but is followed by the more dangerous and amoral Mark Antony. And, of course, the ‘people’ whom the conspirators act in the name of prove to be a fickle and irrational mob whose loyalties change on a dime depending on who managed to make a more persuasive case in the past five seconds…which, ironically enough, proves to be the forces of Dictatorship, not Republic (Brutus’s speech is rather pathetically pedantic compared to Mark Antony’s).

The brilliant part is, depending on how it’s played and your own perspective, you could use it to argue for either Republican or Monarchical government.

7. Read a pretty lame ‘Weird Stories’ tale called Tiger Cat, about your standard nameless rich American protagonist who buys an old house in primitive Europe and discovers something horrible in the cellar. Except there are gigantic plot holes, the writing is dull and lifeless (especially compared to someone like Lovecraft’s juicy, erudite prose), the reveal is staggeringly underwhelming, and there are stupidities galore that take you out of the story (e.g. one of the signs that something is wrong is, gasp! why isn’t there writing on the white-washed wall of the bedroom!? Anyone would scribble their thoughts on the wall of their bedroom, right, so the servants must hiding…oh, wait; that’s not something ordinary adults do, as I’m pretty sure they have paper in Italy).

It’s good to go back to these old pulp magazines when we can and read the stories that didn’t go anywhere. Best case scenario, you’ll find a forgotten gem. Worst case, you’ll find encouragement from being able to safely say that at least your own work isn’t that lame. And, of course, viewing the bad makes you appreciate the good all the more. That same issue contained Lovecraft’s The Shunned House, which is not one of his best, but that still leaves a lot of room to be great.