Goods as Gifts, and Limitarianism

Originally published to my blog Short Thoughts

About a year ago, I started keeping a digital Commonplace Book: a place to collect quotes from and links to online articles that moved me for some reason. Most of what I’ve collected, I’ve found, tends to be about ethics and morality, ways of thinking and being. This wasn’t deliberate, but it is instructive—a window into what seems to concern me deeply, at an unconscious level.

Just recently, thanks to Andrew Belfield, I came across this interesting passage by Robin Wall Kimmerer, from her book Braiding Sweetgrass. She describes a dream about shopping in a market where the goods are all gifts, which you pay for with gratitude.

I looked in my basket: two zucchinis, an onion, tomatoes, bread, & a bunch of cilantro. It was still half empty, but it felt full. I had everything I needed. I glanced over at the cheese stall, thinking to get some, but knowing it would be given, not sold, I decided I could do without. It’s funny: Had all the things in the market merely been a very low price, I would have scooped up as much as I could. But when everything became a gift, I felt self-restraint. I didn’t want to take too much.

How true what she says seems to feel! I, too, think it would be harder to accept all goods as gifts, rather than paying for them. A purchase is a transactional exchange, an impersonal one. Giftgiving is personal: to accept a gift with gratitude is to acknowledge the giver.

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Darna, the Film (1951)

One last Darna post before I put this to bed!

If you were reading along with me, you probably noticed that about halfway through the run, announcements for a Darna movie started to appear. Soon, Darna will be a motion picture by Royal Productions! This tells you how popular this feature must have been, for the movie about the comic to start production before the story is even finished running!

Naturally, I got curious about this film, and wanted to watch it. Alas, that’s not to be.

Darna, directed by Fernando Poe, Sr., opened to the public at the Clover Theater in Manila on June 1, 1951 — just as the last episode of the Darna comic promised. It was apparently a huge hit, setting box-office records throughout the country when it opened nationwide.

But somehow, this blockbuster film disappeared, and was believed entirely lost, until 2005. That’s when some journalists discovered 40 minutes of the film, with no sound, in Thailand. And that’s all we’ve got, as far as I know.

Here’s 30 seconds of relatively good quality clips from the film (evidently, some sound got restored along the way). If you’ve read the comic, you’ll recognize the scenes portrayed. The movie seems to have followed the comic quite closely:

Here’s a longer clip, though not as good quality.

I think the coolest fact about the movie is that Cristina Aragon, the actress who played Valentina, wore a headdress of live snakes! Again, as promised in the comic book ads.

This is, of course, my translation of the original panel.

And I’ll just have to settle for that. You can read about that first production, and the people involved in it, at this article from the FilipiKnow site.

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Retrospective Thoughts on 1950s Darna

Cover of Pilipino Komiks #78, May 27, 1950. Art by Nestor Redondo.

Now that I’ve finished translating the entire 1950’s saga of Darna vs Valentina, I’ve collected all the episodes into a single, better quality CBZ-format1 compilation. You can find Darna vs. The Goddess of Snakes here, on Dropbox.

You DO NOT need to sign up to download it; just pop the “Log in or sign up” window and/or click the “Or continue with download only” link on that window, if it appears.

I redid the first five episodes, to get all the images more uniform in size (they still aren’t perfectly uniform – sorry), and to make some minor revisions in the translations. This was my first time working with a comic-book format, so you’ll see some unevenness in style, as I figured out the appropriate tools to use. It was a lot of work, but it was fun!

Now that I’ve finished, I want to share my comments on the story. My reflections have spoilers, so if you probably want to hold off reading this until after you’ve finished it, too.

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1950’s Darna – The Conclusion!

We’ve made it! Here’s episode 28, the final episode of the 1950’s saga of Filipina superhero Darna versus Valentina.

Last episode, we saw all our major players gathered in one place, inside Kobra’s cave. Then an earthquake hit! This episode, we finally discover how everything plays out.

Darna: Story by Mars Ravelo, Art by Nestor Redondo
Darna: Story by Mars Ravelo, Art by Nestor Redondo

Click on the image to go to the translated comic as a PDF.

If you want to see the (almost) complete run of the Darna vs Valentina story in Filipino, head over to the Video 48 blog.

Here are translation links to the PDFs, if you need to catch up.

After this, I’ll have one last post in the series, sharing my thoughts on the story now that it’s finished, along with the whole saga as a single CBZ file. Stay tuned!

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The Cat Who Saved Books

The Cat Who Saved Books
by Sosuke Natsukawa, translated by Louise Heal Kawai
Originally published 2017, English translation published 2021

Book Cover; tabby cat walking through books

I just finished Soskuke Natsukawa’s The Cat Who Saved Books, a delightful fantasy about a teenage boy who helps a magical cat rescue books. This was another random discovery from the Kinokuniya Bookstore in San Francisco Japantown, and it’s such a joy! I heartily recommend it.

I assume that the novel (novella, really) is aimed at the Young Adult market. Not only does it feature teenage characters, but it deals with that most favorite of YA themes: a protagonist who must learn to be independent and strike out on their own. However, like the best YA books, it’s a wonderful read for fantasy-loving adults, as well.

Rintaro Natsuki is a hikikomori, an extremely reclusive, orphaned high school junior who has been living with his grandfather, the proprietor of a secondhand bookshop. When the story opens, Rintaro’s grandfather has died; Rintaro has withdrawn into himself, and stopped going to school. Nothing can shake him out of his seclusion: not his aunt, not the book-loving high school senior Akiba, not his classmate and neighbor Sayo.

Then one day, a mysterious talking cat, Tiger the Tabby, appears to him from a magic portal that appears at the back of the bookshop. Tiger cajoles—hectors is a better word—Rintaro into joining the tabby on a mission to “rescue imprisoned books.” This is the first of several “labyrinths” that Rintaro must negotiate in the quest to save books from the various perils that they are in.

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1950’s Darna – Things Come to a Climax

We’re at episode 27 of the 1950’s saga of Filipina superhero Darna versus Valentina. Almost finished !

Last episode, we learned that Darna’s tougher than Valentina after all, and we watched Ding wander into Kobra’s cave to escape the snake that was stalking him. This episode, Ding and Edwardo must team up against Kobra, and Darna has to find Valentina.

Darna: Story by Mars Ravelo, Art by Nestor Redondo.
Darna: Story by Mars Ravelo, Art by Nestor Redondo.

Click on the image to go to the translated comic as a PDF.

If this issue looks a little blurrier than usual to you, it’s not your eyes! This scan is a bit soft, and loses some of the detail on page 2. I wonder if the original had some color to it that was not properly picked up by the scanning process? But I’m grateful that we have it at all.

If you want to see the (almost) complete run of the Darna vs Valentina story in Filipino, head over to the Video 48 blog.

Here are translation links to the PDFs, if you need to catch up.

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1950’s Darna – The Epic Battle

We’ve reached episode 25 of the 1950’s saga of Filipina superhero Darna versus Valentina ….

Last episode, Valentina and Darna finally met face to face, and rumbled! Things weren’t looking so good for Darna at the end. This episode, the battle continues, and we see what’s happening with Ding, too.

Darna: Story by Mars Ravelo, Art by Nestor Redondo.

Click on the image to go to the translated comic as a PDF. Episode 26 is missing, so I attached a summary to the end of this episode.

If you want to see the (almost) complete run of the Darna vs Valentina story in Filipino, head over to the Video 48 blog.

Here are translation links to the PDFs, if you need to catch up.

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Encourage the Beautiful

Art Nouveau style bookplate showing a seated woman writing on a piece of paper.
Illustration by Louis Rhead, from A collection of book plate designs (1907). Source: Old Book Illustrations

More quote research over at Dark Tales Sleuth, inspired by this lovely bookplate.

Encourage the Beautiful, for the Useful encourages itself.

As the bookplate indicates, this aphorism is commonly attributed to Goethe, and has been for over one hundred and fifty years. But there’s no real evidence that it is; in particular, in all that century and a half, no one (including Wikiquotes) has ever identified the original source text.

So it’s a good bet that it’s not Goethe. In my post, I trace the quote back to an 1850 periodical, and take a guess as to its originator.

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1950’s Darna – Darna and Valentina Face Off !

We’ve reached episode 24 out of 28 total of the 1950’s saga of Filipina superhero Darna versus Valentina. And at last, at last– Darna and Valentina face off !

Last episode, Valentina finally got sick of Edwardo’s fickle ways. Ding got lost and wandered right into the path of a hungry snake. This episode, Darna searches for Ding, and she and Valentina meet for the very first time.

Darna: Story by Mars Ravelo, Art by Nestor Redondo.

Click on the image to go to the translated comic as a PDF.

If you want to see the (almost) complete run of the Darna vs Valentina story in Filipino, head over to the Video 48 blog.

Here are translation links to the PDFs, if you need to catch up.

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A Literary Sleuthing Manifesto

It’s more than just puzzle-solving; it’s practicing one’s skill at intellectual skepticism and tracking down primary sources.

I’ve started a new “case” at my literary sleuthing blog, Dark Tales Sleuth, where I try to correctly attribute quotes that have been incorrectly or incompletely credited in popular usage. So far, I’ve only done one quote, the lovely “Talmud” quote that begins (in popular usage) with “Do not be daunted….” I have a couple more in the pipeline.

Woman seated in a chair, with a book on a table at her left side, and another on her lap. She is holding a magnifying glass in her right hand, and looking into the camera.
Image: From Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective, by Hugh C. Weir (1914). Source: Internet Archive

You might wonder why I bother; I wonder, myself. One immediate answer is that I honestly enjoy this kind of excavation, the way some people enjoy crossword puzzles, or Sudoku. As I said about literary sleuthing in general, it’s one of the less salacious form of recreational internet research.

Another answer is that these things just get under my skin. For reasons that probably have to do with my educational and professional background—a woman of color in a (largely white) male oriented field—I am far more sensitive to making mistakes in public than I ought to be. Even for something as trivial as quotes, I don’t like to get caught out, and so I tend to doublecheck. For the same reasons, I am easily irritated by the confident assertion by others, of things I know to be wrong.

Those are probably the real reasons, but there’s another reason, too. I’ve done enough reading that I can often smell when someone writes down a “fact” without verifying it. When a Spanish digital archive that meticulously documents the original publication venue for the short stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán, with either precise dates or exact periodical issue numbers, suddenly cites the provenance of a certain story as simply “La Ilustración Española y Americana, 1909”… well, my nose knows. Sure enough, going to primary sources failed to turn up the story.

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