Death — image of a bull, in white, red and ochre on a black ground, like a cave painting, rearing upright. His body is painted with various markings, including several “bullseye” rings of concentric circles. I realise that the other markings designate the cuts of beef that a butcher must know. He is marked for death. By his tragic expression, he knows it. The message seems to be of unavoidable fate and the individual’s protest in the face of it.

This card is often read as an indicator of change and transformation. One might read the marked bull as symbolising particularly the inevitability of change and the futility of protesting it. But I think the meaning here is a little sterner: the inevitability of real death. Death is the shadow over life, and one day the shadow will touch you. So, with that in mind, how will you conduct your life? It might also refer to the inevitability, during life’s course, of endings, failures, disappointments, wounds, mistakes that cannot be rectified and losses that cannot be recouped. The bull feels tragic and he wants to resist all this. He knows his own magnificence and it seems unfair to him that all his strength should be useless. Death is the price of life: necessary for the species, unfair to each individual. Perhaps unfairness is also a message here. What will you do when life pours a thoroughly undeserved shower of shit on you?

The Devil — image of a tiger wearing a jade-green silk robe and emerald rings. He is seated at a regal desk, writing a letter. Green is the colour of envy. Pride is the traditional sin of Lucifer, but here the sin must be envy, which comes from dissatisfaction. The tiger is splendid, but he isn’t satisfied. He is writing a letter to God. He says with a self-mocking air that it is a love letter. Whether he wants to be loved the best by God or to become God, he is not sure, or will not tell. Perhaps he does not distinguish between the two. One thing is for certain: nothing but the ultimate will do. Nothing less is good enough. I have always had sympathy for the devil, so that instead of wanting to chide him I find myself wishing him well. To say that there is something tender and touching here, a heart kicking in human pain, sounds soppy — but there it is. We all know what shame and disappointment feel like. Those emotions, at an existential level, seem to be at the root of his troubles. I have a hunch that if he were to take off his rings and robe and leave his desk, he might have more luck in his quest. He says I am missing the point. He wants to succeed as he is, to be loved as he is, vulgar tyrant though he may be.

This one is harder to interpret. If I had to take a stab at it, I would say that it is about identifying with our negative emotions and seeing them as part of our self, which we might call foolish behaviour; however, it is very close to the idea of asking to be loved for exactly and entirely who we are. Pema Chodron (American Tibetan Buddhist nun) points out that our best is often mixed up inextricably with our worst — think of Antony and Cleopatra, magnificent in their faults. A tricky one, as you would expect the Devil to be.

I tried drawing Gwynn with his hair brushed back like Bancoran’s, but that meant his eyes had to show, and somehow I’ve grown attached to the version where his hair covers them. Or maybe I just suck at drawing eyes and should practice more.

Looking at the Rev on this page, I seem drawn — no pun intended — towards eyeless representations. Even Raule has her eyes shut. Perhaps they will all end up in Gaza.

Oh, and he was meant to be holding a riding crop and biting the end, but I forgot to draw that — obviously my subconscious hold my hand it would be too difficult.

Gwynn guy is actually Cat Casino (aka Eric Bäckman), who plays guitar in metal band Deathstars. Here he is with fellow bandmember, Whiplasher Bernadotte (best monikers ever, no?). I’ve never really been the shipping kind, but it isn’t too late to start, is it? They claim not to be gay, just really into their feminine sides.
(P.S. He is 20. I am old enough to be his mother. Oh Christ noes! D=}* << old-lady hat with flower. Mr Bernadotte — wonder if they call him Pip for short? — is a lot closer to my age, and lists his favourite bands as “Johnny Cash, Darkthrone etc.” Johnny Cash. Man’s got class!)

He writes of tomboys: “We can understand their preference for manliness when we realise that the striving for superiority is more concerned with the meaning we attach to activities than with the activities themselves.” I think you could almost call it a commodity fetishisation of activity: The thought that “I will use this product and therefore become like the incredibly cool, happy, superior people in the advertisements for said product” is related, I think, to the thought that “I will do what the guys are doing and therefore I will become one of them and be entirely accepted into their world.” Of course, what the guys are doing may just be more fun, full stop, or more profitable; but I don’t think that’s the whole story in all cases.

The book in which Adler describes his theory is called Understanding Human Nature. From what I’ve read of it on Amazon, it’s a little dated (it was published in 1927), but I think the points it makes about the female condition are still valid. Let’s not pretend that our culture has started valuing women. It values pretty girls and women who operate efficiently in the male world. It does not value the mother role, which exists outside these categories, and this, to me, is the most blatant sign that it does not value women.

A woman has much the same brain and the same egotistical drives as a man. She, too, wants to be a success. She wants status. If her biological femaleness is an impediment to those things, no one should be surprised if she dislikes it and disdains — even fears — activities associated with femininity (which may, from the commodity fetish angle, “turn her into” a woman if she engages in them.) I think I will have to buy Adler’s book, or at least give it a good going over in Kino.

Most movies aren’t made for me. I accept that. I’m a 35 - no, bugger, 36 - year old woman with a childlike taste for fantasy coupled with an adult taste for psychological complexity - real complexity, not what passes for it in Hollywood. The last movie I saw that satisfied both was Pan’s Labyrinth. I didn’t know when I saw it that its director, Guillermo del Toro, was also the director of Hellboy. I found Hellboy enjoyable but forgettable, although Ron Perlman was great as always in the title role as the red son of Satan with a dark destiny and a flippant attitude.

With del Toro in the director’s chair again for Hellboy II, I went along expecting to at least enjoy the film, and I did. Points for hotness to Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), the would-be Che Guevara of the elves, who looks like Elric of Melnibone and fights like Jet Li. But the real stars were the creatures — the goblins, trolls and what have you. The designs were terrifically inventive and the troll market scene offered a look-see into a detailed fantasy world like that of The Neverending Story or Labyrinth. My imagination was turned on.

And then — well, there was a whole lot of fighting. There was a nod in the direction of moral shades of grey, with Nuada’s grievance against humans being portrayed as a legitimate one. There was a sad scene where a nature elemental, a unique creature, was called up by Nuada to fight — and killed (but if he cared so much, why did he use it in that way at all?), and a dark scene where a terrifically odd-looking angel of death saves Hellboy’s life with the reminder that he is destined to bring ruin to the world. But things didn’t get much deeper than that. The two romances, between Hellboy and Liz and Abraham Sapien and Nuada’s sister Nuala, were cardboard. As a reviewer pointed out, the film implies that Hellboy and Liz’s ongoing day to day difficulties were magically solved by a crisis situation where he was injured and she was afraid to lose him — and then really solved by her getting pregnant. Right. I am really sick of films telling whopping lies about the mechanics of relationships. If there isn’t room in the script to deal with the human issues properly, then think up some human issues to fit the script. Why does a female character’s major conflict always have to be a romantic one? Maybe Liz could have had a different kind of problem. Perhaps she could have sympathised with Nuada’s cause. Or something.

Then there was the fighting. I know that’s a large part of what Hellboy is about. You gots to have slugging matches. But I was disappointed that the intricate troll market served chiefly as a backdrop to violent mayhem, including one particularly nasty death that probably would have earned the film a stricter rating if the character had been human. I found myself wishing that the fairy world of Hellboy II had been saved for another movie.

As I said, despite my gripes, I did enjoy it. There was enough in it for me, and it wasn’t as if I went in expecting another Pan’s Labyrinth. Still, I hope Guillermo del Toro will find more complex and more grownup vehicles — or heck, even more childlike ones — for his imagination.  I don’t know whether it’s age or just surfeit, but violence doesn’t entertain me much anymore. I tend to find it either boring or distressing. Or perhaps it’s the way Hollywood does its violence nowadays.  There used to be a sense of pacing and buildup (didn’t there? Am I imagining things?) to catharsis. Now there seems a tendency to keep the level of violence high all the way through and make the final “cathartic” scene so long that one’s eyes glaze over and there is not a sense of tension being released so much as a towel being wrung out.

Most Hollywood films I don’t enjoy enough to bother reviewing. They don’t engage my imagination at all. They fill in time. I enjoyed Hellboy II enough that I would watch it again; I think I’m just kvetching so much because I know the standard del Toro is capable of and I want him to make more films of that quality. And I really do worry about the overload of violence on the big screen. It’s crass, and the time spent on it means that more interesting matters are given short shrift.

I suppose someone, somewhere, might want to teast their keyboard.

In other news, yesterday I found three pretty yet tasteful shirts, not pink (many clothes in T-land are pink), sans random bits of lace and ribbon (another common failing), with necklines that look fine left open (Thai shirts are often designed to be buttoned right up, notwithstanding the heat). MY CUP RUNNETH OVER.

I don’t know what it is about clothing designers here, but nearly everything is either girly or frumpy. If it’s formal enough for work — i.e. not a t-shirt — it’s usually either fucked up with frills and pin-tucked bodices or it’s made of stiff linen and cut like a cardboard box with bits of nasty lace around the sleeves. There’s a leap from infancy to mother-of-the-bride, leaving out most of adulthood — I know not why. So thank you to the label All About Clothes, whence came the shirts. Mind you, they had plenty of stuff with the lace and pin-tucks as well, ill-advisedly combined with batik patterns. But I am grateful for the offering of something wearable.

We survived the trip without a dunking and looked for transport to the palace district, which we found quickly in the form of a knot of tuk-tuk drivers. They tried to convince us to take a tour, which we declined; I said we just wanted to go to the palace. They said it was closed in the morning. The next day was an important religious holiday, so I thought maybe it might be closed for some special function–this is how stupid I have become. It was certainly in my mind that they were probably lying, and that this was some sort of scam, but I couldn’t for the life of me think why they would say the palace was closed when doing so would mean nothing but a lost fare. Bamboozled, I said all right, take us to Chinatown–yes, no worries, off we went, arrived without incident, and wandered the congested bazaar, heading in the general direction of the palace district, until I had to go.

Stu was incredulous when I told him what had happened. How had I ever taken it into my head to believe tuk-tuk drivers? The scam, as he reminded me, is to tell the tourist the palace is closed and to take them off to some gem shop instead. I had probably avoided the gem shop by speaking Thai and telling the driver which road to go to. In my defense I could only say feebly that I never take tuk-tuks and therefore my brain must have decided it didn’t need to remember what their drivers are like. There are a few standard scams in our area, but they are so much a part of the daily scenery that I hardly register them consciously anymore. The taxi drivers lurking outside the Ambassador trying to lure tourists into meterless tours of the city don’t call out to me anymore; they know I’m just cutting through the hotel on my way to work. The Indian fortune teller doesn’t hassle me; he knows I live here too. I had utterly forgotten that when I go to the old city I look like a tourist and can expect to be treated as one. I realised how complacent I’ve become. It was a timely reminder, since Thailand is not always safe for foreigners and one’s guard should be up–worse things can happen to you than missing out on a tourist attraction.

I was worried that Inger would miss out on the palace entirely, but she found it and returned to Sukhumvit safely. We talked about footnoting. She keeps in mind Stephen King’s advice to kill your darlings, and has found that footnoting is a gentle method of execution: first move the tangential thought into the footnotes, then delete without reading after a suitable time has elapsed. The Web provides a footnoting service for memory–how much bookmarked information does one ever return to and read thoroughly? There’s a magical sort of comfort in having it marked for reference, and in my case at least no sense of urgency to actually get around to reading the stuff.

We also talked about the personal voice in academic writing. Inger tends to use a personal voice, which is frowned on these days; it’s considered arrogant. However, we agreed that we think the opposite is true. It seems more humble and honest to present one’s subjective opinion as just that–an opinion arising from one’s being a particular individual with biased interests and ways of thinking–rather than claim a perfect objectivity and mask the traces of bias with the sort of writing that is like air freshener sprayed in a room where the odours of people were lingering.

I like robust subjective writing. I like Gaston Bachelard and Roland Barthes and Harold Bloom. They don’t preface their work with a squirming “this is only my opinion, but…” since there’s no need to. They do you the courtesy of assuming you will understand that these are the views of an individual–argued with conviction and perhaps unbudgeable, but there’s a big difference between convinced opinion and ex cathedra proclamation. In fact, with greatness one seems to earn the right to subjectivity–like getting pole position in a motor race. It’s the folk lower down the academic pecking order who earn frowns for speaking with a bit of personal bravura. The Catch-22 is that without that spark of the subjective, which gives the reader the sense of engagement with another person, your work is unlikely to win many converts–so that you really do have to put up a flight and flash your colours, and hope that in time people will get used to you and start engaging their subjectivity with yours.