Wednesday
Art History again, and then...
Foundation Drawing: Figure. My Life Drawing class, which runs from 1-6 PM. We started off by heading down to the Art Basement (the on-campus store) to buy pads of newsprint half as tall as I am, masonite boards to match, and charcoal. We then spent the next few hours drawing from a live model; our teacher told us that by the end of the night, we had completed over 100 drawings. I felt it. It’s been a while since I worked from an standing easel, and my back and right arm were sore by the end of it. Still, it’s nice to plunge back into continuous drawing that way. My teacher looks exactly like Giles from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer;” I kept expecting a British accent. Our homework over the weekend is to draw a “crowd scene” of quick figures, filling the page.

Thursday
Writing for the Arts again. We wrote an in-class composition about ourselves, beginning with the sentence “I was born in...” As we wrote, the teacher kept writing topics or sentences every few minutes that we had to incorporate into what we were writing as we went. She said it was meant to force us to “think at odd angles,” to think about our topics and approach them in ways that we normally wouldn’t, instead of following our thought train through to their logical conclusions. It was an interesting experience...I ended up talking about sci-fi/fantasy fandom, feeling disconnected from other kids over topics like cars, and befriending Michael Slusser. Huh.

I realized yesterday that while we really have no money to do anything with (since I’m still out of work, after we pay bills with Marilyn’s paycheck there isn’t a whole lot to get us through to the next one), I can still get videos from the school library - for free. They’ve got a decent-sized library of videos (and a smaller one of DVDs), filled with all of those movies that you feel you should really watch someday but have never gotten around to renting out. I took home “To Kill A Mockingbird” last night for Marilyn to see, and I realized that I had completely forgotten the ending. So that’s what Robert Duvall looked like as a young man...

After dropping Marilyn off at work this morning, I headed back to the school library to drop off the video and pick up the next collection of Sandman comics in the series, House of Dolls. I read it while doing my laundry. While the artwork is a little bit improved over the first one, it’s not by much. The artists have an inability to make any character look like themselves for more than six panels. There’s a young boy who looks completely different every time you see him; same goes for the protagonist’s mother and grandmother. There’s also a fair amount of weirdness for the sake of weirdness, but then, it’s a comic book about dreams and a realm called The Dreaming, so there you go, I guess.

More spoilers for Sandman Book 2 to commence, in case you were thinking otherwise...

As for the writing, I can’t say I’m terribly impressed yet. There are good parts, certainly - the introduction, with the Yoruban tribesman sharing an ancient tale of a queen of a city of glass was intriguing (and ties into the first collection of stories), but then we switch to an entirely different story. There are threads that tie into each other here and there, things both earlier in the series and, I assume, things that will show up again later - I like that. There’s also a bit of goofiness - there’s a serial killer convention, for example that just annoys and disgusts and, as far as I can tell, has little role in the story but to annoy and disgust. On the other hand, there’s a digressional story about a guy who decides that he doesn’t want to die, and Death gives him his wish. I liked that story.

I guess that, overall, the series is about stories which get told and re-told - which seems to be a Gaiman theme, from what I’ve seen of his stuff thus far - which is neat and all, but the underlying chaos inherent in the stories bugs me. I’ll quote two statements from the comic that basically sum it up:

“If there is a moral to this part of the story, and I distrust morals in the same way that I distrust beginnings, it is simply this: know that with which you deal.” - Destiny, the opening narrative

“If my dream was true, then everything we know, everything we think we know is a lie. It means the world’s about as solid and as reliable as a layer of scum on the top of a well of black water which goes down forever, and there are things in the depths that I don’t even want to think about. It means that we’re just dolls. We don’t have a clue what’s really going down, we just kid ourselves that we’re in control of our lives while a paper’s thickness away things that would drive us mad if we thought about them for too long play with us, and move us around from room to room, and put us away at night when they’re tired, or bored.” - Rose Walker (protagonist, speaking about her experiences at the end of the story)

Combined with this...

“Remember this. We of the endless are the servants of the living -- we are NOT their masters. WE exist because they know, deep in their hearts, that we exist. When the last living thing has left this universe, then our task will be done. And we do not manipulate them. If anything, they manipulate us. We are their toys. Their dolls, if you will.” - Morpheus, Lord of Dreams

...you get a picture of a cosmology where no one has any idea what’s going on, only a vague knowledge that there are Rules which exist, but they seem to be different depending upon whom you ask, and anyone is free to threaten anyone else if someone crosses them. In this cosmology, it’s still mentioned that there is a Heaven and a Hell, but no mention has yet been made of Who reigns in Heaven, and how said Entity reigns. When people die, any number of fates can befall them, and elements in the story suggest that the Endless have considerable power over that fate, despite Morpheus’s claim here.

Hmmm...now that I think about it...

Considering that the Endless are personifications of things “within” humanity...I suppose that there is some truth to that, now that I think about it. It just twists things a little to see it externalized that way. Taking the story as Symbolism...Humanity seems to be contending with Endless passions (Desire, Dream, Delerium, etc.) which determine their experiences in life and their ultimate fate. These passions can easily dominate a person, convincing them to take certain actions or live a certain way...but they’re not “supposed” to - ultimately, these passions are supposed to be servants of humanity.

Interesting. Still, how is Gaiman casting Heaven and Hell in this? In the first book, Morpheus stipulates that Hell would have no hold over humanity if the damned had no thoughts of Heaven. While I’m not certain that this is true, there is a seed of validity there: in Real Life, Hell is ultimately chosen by humans, and there will be a great amount of people who, after Judgement, will be forever haunted by the fact that they could have had Heaven. We know from that story and the one in Book 2 that Morpheus has, indeed, imprisoned someone in Hell. We’ve only been told one version of the story and been given reason to believe that it may not necessarily be the true version, but thus far we’ve been led to believe that Morpheus imprisoned someone in Hell for completely selfish reasons. I’m not terribly optimistic about what’s ultimately being said about life in this cosmology; thus far I think Morpheus is quite a rotten selfish bastard. Yet each Endless has thus far been shown to be absolute personifications of their domain - Desire isn’t only the master/mistress of desire, he/she/it’s also subject to it and defined by it (“Desire smiles, and forgets, for Desire is a creature of the moment.”). So...Dreams are selfish rotten bastards? Hmmm...maybe.

Well, I’ll give Gaiman this: he’s making me think about what he’s saying, and he’s convincing me to keep reading the series. Maybe he is a pretty good writer.