VOLUME VIII - World's End Main Discussion Thread
This is the ordinary discussion thread for Sandman Volume VIII: World's End.
We'll be taking two weeks on this volume! That's to make time for the storytelling project over at http://mariancall.com/vanilla/discussion/57/special-volume-viii-world039s-end-story-session, as well as to give readers time to catch up. So jump in on previous weeks' discussions too!
The next discussion (on Vol. IX) will now begin on the weekend of April 25-26, and we'll wrap it up May 3-4!
We'll be taking two weeks on this volume! That's to make time for the storytelling project over at http://mariancall.com/vanilla/discussion/57/special-volume-viii-world039s-end-story-session, as well as to give readers time to catch up. So jump in on previous weeks' discussions too!
The next discussion (on Vol. IX) will now begin on the weekend of April 25-26, and we'll wrap it up May 3-4!
Comments
I'm adding up mileage for my annual business-related sojourns, and dear gods this issue of Sandman speaks to me.
The 'Soft Places' are everywhere. Like World's End, or the Sahara, or airports, or public restrooms where you have bizarrely emotional encounters with strangers sometimes -- I live my life in them, mostly. And because I'm just passing through, I hear bizarre confessionals like these on a regular basis. People feel very free to tell their strangest experiences to others when they're just passing through.
Once I had an airplane encounter with someone that was shockingly connected and intimate, and they told me a lot about their broken family and the daughters they missed (connecting me with those daughters), and it was a very memorable time we passed on the plane. Having such experiences almost daily, I walked away and counted it one of the thousands of special experiences to be had traveling among strangers. However, the other party felt it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and wanted to continue the (platonic) relationship as if we were dear friends, even while knowing almost nothing about me. I couldn't handle it. Once outside the World's End, that strange "traveling strangers" intimacy is all but impossible to rekindle. And attempts to recreate it later feel false and strange to me in the extreme. I still get anxious whenever I get a contact from this person because of the love they expect to share (since they have never much had these coincidences happen to them, I suspect). The way they want to wrench that experience out of its context and repeat it makes me almost angry.
Not sure why I shared that, except to say that the World's End Pub feels like home to me. Territory I would take up arms to defend.
Not against invaders, against people who don't understand what it is. It's the traveler's church, some kind of holy place. And when one is in that space, one bows one's head and respects the anonymity and weight of connecting with strangers like that.
Charlene's decision bothers me, but it's soothing, since she doesn't feel like she has a story of her own, or much agency -- and it should be just good, but still it bothers me. Maybe she'll learn what she needs to learn there. I suppose it's no different than changing professions to become an airport hotel bartender.
Those thoughts are not very well organized, but I can't quite get at what I mean, so perhaps I'll try later.
As for the stories and characters themselves...
This volume contains some of my favorite art and some of my least favorite. I don't like a lot of the distorted faces and bodies in the World's End scenes, they bother me. But the Tale of Two Cities is amazing, and Death in the procession is haunting.
The visit to the Necropolis is so amazing -- a companion to Hell, in a way, or maybe not -- I'm trying to decide whether/how those two realms are related, or if Hell is a realm of spirits only, while the Necropolis is what becomes of bodies. I love a place that's all about the rituals of death that terrify Americans so much but must be very normal in much of the world still. America has a death hangup. And I love that the story from the Necropolis precedes the procession we are about to see across the sky.
Gaiman has spent a lot of time across these volumes giving us chances to become comfortable with death, from its incarnation to the ridiculous frequency of character deaths. Now he's preparing us for a big death, and at the same time inviting us to be more at home than ever with even the mechanics of dying and burial. The process in this chapter of becoming at ease with these gothic zombie folk is so charming to me, as someone who hates zombies entirely. Sorry, zombies, I'm just not that into you.
So weirdly, Gaiman is sort of lowering the stakes on death -- he repeats that it's not that big a deal, it happens every day, it's a friend and not a foe, all we get is a lifetime. Yet his characters are so rich by the time they die (even the incidental ones) that my grief for them, such as it is, has not been lessened, just very richly colored by a different understanding of death in this universe of Gaiman's. Richly colored death.
The sea monster story is fun for me because my favorite book growing up was "The True Adventures of Charlotte Doyle." Any other fans of that book? Oh how I longed for adventure before growing up totally scared it out of me.
And I love the last page, the anonymous bartender as reader.
"I hope I didn't bore you."
"You didn't. Some nights are just Dead. Maybe it's the weather. I don't know. It was good to have company. So, drive safely, now."
..."Thanks for listening. I suppose you must think I'm crazy."
"No, I don't. Maybe I ought to, but I don't. You hear a lot of weird stories behind a bar."
"I suppose you must do. Well, good night."
"Good night."
I've had an exchange a little like that on most days of my life for the last several years.
I think twitter has very much changed how I experience places like the World's End. I realized as I set up the storytelling exercise that for it to work, we would have to pretend there's no internet -- otherwise everyone would be off in their own worlds.
Of course Twitter is like the World's End on its own. But it also enables me to sometimes duck out of the honesty of those stranger-encounters in real time, which are both much more risky and much more rewarding.
"I hope she comes back soon. I have a question for her."
I heard a great radio piece about "Consequential Strangers," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequential_strangers.
"Decades of research have shown the importance of primary relationships
in both psychological and physiological well being. Yet an analysis of
the broader social landscape suggests that consequential strangers
provide many of the same benefits as intimates as well as many distinct
and complementary functions."
"In some situations, consequential strangers may allow distinct facets of
identity to emerge. For example, women over fifty who join the Red Hat Society tend to express aspects of themselves in the company of other "Hatters" that would surprise members of their families."
The Wikipedia article is mainly about the research of a very few people, as interactions with strangers are (understandably) difficult to evaluate and research in the same manner as relationships. It describes them as people you see repeatedly, like your barista or banker. But on the radio one of the primary researchers also talked about these crucial and very very connected one-time encounters with strangers as falling under this category.
In my life experience...
Ten minutes talking to the right stranger at the right time can change your whole view of yourself.
And I remember a number of brief encounters with strangers who told me their life's story, in brief -- and I feel as if I will never forget all the details they told me. They are deeply impressed into my mind. I could write a novel about some of them, all speculative but very inspired, because they are so clear in my mind.
I have these interactions often with fans.
And I often see these interactions happen at my concerts, particularly the crowded ones where people are forced to sit with strangers. I'm frustrated that I have to work, because I want to be there to see that one-night bond forming.
At any rate, I love that Wikipedia article and what it represents -- the cast of significant recurring "extras" in our lives -- and I'm glad I remembered the name for that phenomenon.
"They're boys' fictions. That's what they are. I mean, sure they pass
the time. They entertain. But how do they help you make sense of
anything?" [-Charlene]
directly to Gaiman, but that was a very common criticism of comics in
the 90's as some were trying to elevate them to a new literary form.'
This book is sort of a bridge between Canterbury Tales and Crisis on Infinite Earths. Maybe the tales inside it stand in for comic books themselves, the "bubbles" of little worlds. And here they all meet and overlap in a reality storm -- the boundaries of the isolated little old worlds are breaking down, because something bigger is happening. And the Bigger Thing is the Endless, who infiltrate all stories.
I have been reading this volume, especially the artwork, and thinking about the artwork that comes next in Kindly Ones -- and here I see the old world of comics, the clean superheroes and the multiverses and the crazy costumes and plot holes -- I see that world stretching and breaking apart while we watch.
The art in some chapters is so "bad" in my eyes that it almost offends, but I think it's just in a style I don't appreciate. And it would look perfectly right and at home in a superhero DC or Marvel title. It just seems to feel too small here for the happenings. The classical comics style needs to give way.
But then in Tale of Two Cities, in Faerie, and in the processional across the sky, it feels like this book is bursting its bonds artistically. The portrait of Death when we last see her is haunting, stylized, almost kabuki.
And 'Kindly Ones' is about to shake up the boundaries art for any comic book I had ever seen before I read it.
And this is about to mess up my pronouns big time.
First of all, Jim probably wouldn't have the words to express transsexuality if it was his/her experience. Is Jim a someone who wants to *be* a man born in the wrong body, that is, a he -- or is she a woman in love with the sea who disguises herself to have access to it as long as she can?
There are so many historical instances of women playing at being men so they could do the things men could do. Which gives female-to-male performance a whole different context than male-to-female. A man might adopt a female identity, in play or in seriousness, to have access to the identity of being female, the right to dress and treat their body in a certain way, the right to like so-called feminine things. But a female adopting a male identity gains access more to activities, to independence, and to self-determination.
Jim couldn't be a sailor as a girl. So she's a boy.
If she could be a sailor as a girl, would she still choose to be seen as a boy? We'll never know.
Wanda couldn't identify with her body as Alvin, she couldn't dress how she wanted to, couldn't like the things she wanted, couldn't relate to people in the way she wanted to relate. It's more interior, more about the relationship to oneself, and a lot of the restricted taboo activities Wanda wants to engage in are not about professions -- they're about appearance, about how one is seen in the world.
Same with Hal -- Hal is transvestite, not transgender, and being Dolly is a way for him to be seen differently and treat his body differently, not to have a different job or engage in an activity. Well he does dance and sing differently -- but that's very much an activity oriented around appearance and the gaze.
So the masculine is culturally about actions and choices, the feminine about appearance and a certain way of relating to one's body, and the swap -- whether just performance or an actual gender switch -- is in some way about choosing the opposite role. (I'm thinking mostly of Jim's time and culture, when women's activities were very limited indeed.) And I mean to express that these masculine/feminine extreme definitions are
cultural constructs, not inherent realities. What interests me here is how Jim's relationship to his/her gender bending is very different from Hal's and Wanda's.
That didn't all come out right, I should let it incubate more overnight.
"Hob's Leviathan" is an inspired pun on (Thomas) Hobbes' "Leviathan." I'm sure Gaiman was proud of that one; I know I would be.
Heh, I just noticed this in that story, since apparently I have an eye for little details lately: about the Norwegian and Swede, "there was an old quarrel there, though I never knew the bones of it." Well, maybe it has something to do with their matching "Nancy
The Indian whom Jim encountered, in case it wasn't clear, was the king of his own story (hence, presumably, his being long-lived like Hob). His name is revealed in volume X: he's the Raja Bharthari, apparently a figure of Indian folklore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharthari). Given those circumstances, it's a bit more understandable that he'd take the wrong lesson from his own tale. Still, I'm thankful Hob was there to set him straight. After all, the captain was just as unfaithful as the wife.
Stories within stories within stories… so much of this volume seems like an excuse to indulge in some pure storytelling, before getting back to the thickness of plot in the next book. Not that I'm complaining.